The Virgin and the Gipsy by D. H. Lawrence

First published: 1930

Type of work: Psychological romance

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: A rural rectory in the Midlands of England

Principal Characters:

• Yvette Saywell, the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old woman, just returned home from school
• Lucille, her older sister
• The Rector, the father of the two women
• The Mater (Granny), the rector’s elderly mother
• Aunt Cissie, his middle-aged sister
• Uncle Fred, his middle-aged brother
• The Gipsy, a mysterious man who fascinates Yvette
• The Eastwoods, two lovers who befriend Yvette

The Novella

The primary conflict in this posthumously published short novel, as suggested by the title, is between the virginal and therefore unlived life of the young protagonist Yvette and the sensual and therefore vital world of the gipsy. This tension is heightened by the stifling nature of Yvette’s rectory home. Presided over by the domineering, toadlike grandmother, intolerably crowded by the presence of the repressed and always angry Aunt Cissie and the pinched and stingy Uncle Fred, the rectory is a squalid place that threatens to engulf the rector’s two daughters when they return home from school. To make the place even more cold and inhospitable, it seems haunted by the ghost of the rector’s wife, who left him for a penniless young man when the girls were only seven and nine. Although she exists in the rector’s mind as the “pure white snowflower” of a young bride, for the family, she exists only as “She-who-was-Cynthia,” a “foul nettle of lust” who would contaminate all with whom she comes in contact.

The house is filled not only with the rector’s perennial grief and anger for the loss of his wife but also with the grandmother’s hatred for Lucille and Yvette, who remind her of their mother and who challenge her position as the center of attention. Aunt Cissie’s hatred also dominates the house because she has sacrificed her life and her sex to care for her mother. The narrator of the story seems primarily sympathetic with the plight of Yvette: He continually describes the house as ugly and sordid and the grandmother as some “awful idol of old flesh.” Yvette is described as a creature mesmerized and suffocated by the stifling atmosphere of the rectory.

Yvette, who has already told her sister that she would like to fall violently in love, is thus emotionally and physically ready for the appearance of the gipsy, a handsome man, somewhat more than thirty years old, who lives with his wife and children in a wagon nearby. In contrast to the middle-aged rectory and the childish banality of her friends, the gipsy has a mysterious allure for Yvette. Her fascination with gipsy life becomes even more intense when she takes money that Aunt Cissie has been saving for a memorial church window and thus must bear the brunt of her aunt’s hatred and her father’s scorn when her casual theft is discovered.

Yvette wishes she could be a gipsy and thus escape what she sees as the stagnant life of the rectory. She envies the gipsy’s wife, a fortune-teller who has told her that people are treading on her heart and that a dark man will blow a spark into her again. She likes the woman’s immoral, unyielding sex and her hard, defiant pride, for she knows that the fortune-teller would despise the rectory and its morality. The gipsy man, who has looked at her with naked desire, knowing the “dark, tremulous, potent secret of her virginity,” makes Yvette feel as if a drug has cast her into a new mold.

At the very point of giving in to the desire of the gipsy, Yvette is momentarily distracted from him by the arrival of Major Eastwood and his lover, described as a bourgeois Jewess, who has left her husband to marry the major. When the couple takes a small cottage to wait for the divorce decree, Yvette begins to visit them, fascinated by their relationship, or, as the narrator calls it, their “connection,” for it is sexual connection that so puzzles and intrigues Yvette. When the rector hears of her friendship with the Eastwoods, however, he forbids Yvette to see them again, and she is therefore thrown back on her one hope for a “fling” before she must give in and marry: the gipsy.

The story comes to a climax with a literal bursting of the dammed-up desires of Yvette. When she and Granny are left alone in the house, the river overflows its banks and inundates the house. The gipsy arrives in time to carry Yvette upstairs to safety, but Granny is swept under and drowned. The final consummation of Yvette’s need comes when she and the gipsy strip off their clothes and huddle together in the bed to stay warm. As his body wraps around her, the vicelike grip of his arms seems “the only stable point in her consciousness.” There is no sexual consummation, however, for the two fall asleep, and when Yvette awakes, the gipsy is gone and rescuers have arrived to remove her from the flooded house.

The novel ends with Yvette moaning in her heart that she loves the gipsy but at the same time knowing the wisdom of his disappearance. After Granny’s funeral, she receives a brief and banal letter from him indicating that he hopes he will see her again and signing it, “Your obdt. servant Joe Boswell.” The last line of the story ironically notes, “And only then she realised that he had a name.”

The Characters

The fact that the gipsy had no name for Yvette until the last line of the story is sufficient indication that he is not a real person to her but rather a symbolic embodiment of a life of vitality and freedom as opposed to the deathly world of the rectory and its stagnant sense of middle-class morality and middle-aged death-in-life. Moreover, the inhabitants of the rectory—her father, her aunt, her uncle, and especially old Granny—are more symbolic embodiments than they are real. Her father embodies narrow middle-class morality, whereas her aunt and uncle represent the repressed and meaningless life of middle age. Granny is the central representative of the decayed life of the rectory, the “pivot” of the family, which she covers and controls with her power.

Yvette is the central figure in the battle between the forces of gipsy vitality and the sterility of the deathly world of the rectory. Her older sister Lucille primarily seems to serve the contrasting function of one who is more resigned than Yvette to slip into the harness of bourgeois morality and thus marry and settle down. Yvette’s mother, “She-who-was-Cynthia,” although not physically present in the novella, is an embodiment of one who has escaped these mundane devotions to strike out on her own.

Yvette is a reincarnation of her mother’s yearning for freedom as well as her carelessness and immaturity. Although she elicits the reader’s sympathy because of her entrapment within the stifling world of the rectory, at the same time she alienates the reader with her selfishness. At least at first glance, however, there seems little doubt that the narrator, perhaps the most important “character” in the story, is fully in sympathy with her plight and completely scornful of the world of the rectory. Although the narrator remains an unnamed, omniscient figure throughout, it is his judgmental voice that dominates the action. It is thus by the narrator’s point of view and his possibly ironic tone that the complexity of the novella’s value system is communicated.

Critical Context

Critical comment on The Virgin and the Gipsy seems to reflect this unresolved reaction to the work. On the one hand, the respected critic F. R. Leavis has called it one of Lawrence’s finest works, sufficient in itself to establish Lawrence as a major genius of the novel form. On the other hand, a more recent critic such as F. B. Pinion accuses the work of being blatantly sensational and unconvincing. This disagreement, however, results primarily from Leavis’ perception of the work as realistic and Pinion’s understanding of it as symbolic.

The Virgin and the Gipsy seems typical of many of Lawrence’s novellas and short stories in that it presents the familiar Lawrentian tension between sexual vitality and social repression in stark symbolic terms. Part of this similarity is a result of the generic nature of short fiction as opposed to the novel. Because of the necessary economy of the form, the conflict must be symbolically communicated in a short story (for example, Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”), whereas it can be developed in a psychologically realistic way in his full-length novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It seems that in the novella form, which shares some of the characteristics of both short stories and novels in being simultaneously realistic and symbolic, Lawrence has difficulty in resolving this problem and making his work believable either as realism or symbolism.

To read The Virgin and the Gipsy, one must either be willing to accept fully the Lawrentian values of the vital life of sensuality and its superiority to the life of social restraints, or else one must look more closely at the structuring intelligence that controls the story and judges its characters and actions. Either the work is a straightforward symbolic romance in which the values are clearly, if simplistically, delineated, or else it is an ironic novel in which the very values apparently propounded are ultimately undercut by the destructive selfishness and immaturity of the protagonist, which is only suggested at by the ironic narrator. If, as the narrator says, the flood in the story is within Yvette’s soul, it is surely a destructive rather than a creative one, and it certainly seems more than a little ironic that a few lines after Yvette is moaning about her love for the gipsy, she realizes that he has a name. Because the novel ends before the reader can see what this personalizing of the gipsy does to her “love” for him, the story seems finally indeterminate rather than resolved.

Bibliography

Draper, Ronald P. D. H. Lawrence, 1964.

Leavis, Frank Raymond. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, 1955.

Moynahan, Julian. The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence, 1963.

Pinion, Francis Bertram. A D. H. Lawrence Companion: Life, Thought, and Works, 1978.

Tedlock, Ernest Warnock, Jr. D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel, 1963.