The Virgin and the Gipsy, by D. H. Lawrence

One night when I was a child of about eleven years old, I crept downstairs in the late night darkness to find out what my parents were watching on television. Standing in the unlit hall by the door next to the stairs, I peered at the television through the crack between the door and the doorframe, and watched, mesmerised and dry-mouthed, heart pounding in fear that my parents might discover me.

It was not long before I was aching from standing half on the stairs and holding my head at an unnatural angle, but I could not tear myself away. Eventually, it became altogether too steamy for me and I quietly went up to bed, my cheeks burning.

What was it I had watched? I had to know! I needed to know. Luckily, where I lived at the time, we only had a few television channels, so the next morning, with the help of the previous night's TV listings, I was able to determine that what my parents had been watching was a film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's short novel, The Virgin and the Gipsy. At least, I was pretty sure it wasn't the listed Open University programme on statistical mechanics or the sports roundup.

The following Saturday, I went to a local bookshop and bought a copy of The Virgin and the Gipsy, took it to my room, and read it from cover to cover without stopping. Then I read it again. The power of D.H. Lawrence's prose pulled me in and gripped me intensely. I was the virgin, Yvette. I felt her inner strength, her disgust, her desire; I identified with her attraction to psychological power and strength, and with her rejection of her father's harsh and cruel “rectory morality”. I admired her ability to keep her inner life private from those to whom she did not care to reveal herself.

Evidently this short, sharp, exquisite novel does not speak to everyone. Some readers seem to find it boring and annoying. Many readers discussing the book on this page seem to me to have missed the very soul of the book. In fact, it was because I stumbled upon that discussion that I re-read the book, interested to know whether it would still speak to me. It does. It is taut with masochistic intensity. Perhaps you have to have a touch of psychological sadomasochism in you to appreciate The Virgin and the Gipsy. What I mean by this is that Yvette lives with and survives what Lyn Cowan calls “oppositional extremity”:

Masochism is an art of holding oneself in oppositional extremity. The masochist sees himself living – appears to live – in extremis, at the very edge of danger, madness, death. . . . Often opposite feelings like pride and humiliation are present simultaneously, both torturous, both pleasurable. . . . There is pride in this cliff-hanging extremity, in maintaining these impossible oppositions without plunging over the edge. It is an extreme pride, a pride of extremity, of going to extremes and surviving.

Here are a few quotes from The Virgin and the Gipsy to give you a taste of its atmosphere. But if you haven't read it, why not read the whole thing instead?

[The gipsy] looked at Yvette as he passed, staring her full in the eyes, with his pariah’s bold yet dishonest stare. Something hard inside her met his stare. But the surface of her body seemed to turn to water. Nevertheless, something hard in her registered the peculiar pure lines of his face, of his straight, pure nose, of his cheeks and temples. The curious dark, suave purity of all his body, outlined in the green jersey: a purity like a living sneer.

And as he loped slowly past her, on his flexible hips, it seemed to her still that he was stronger than she was. Of all the men she had ever seen, this one was the only one who was stronger than she was, in her own kind of strength, her own kind of understanding.

[...]

Yvette felt there was some duplicity somewhere. But she didn’t mind. She hated with the cold, acrid hatred of a child the rectory interior, the sort of putridity in the life. She liked that big, swarthy, wolf-like gipsy-woman, with the big gold rings in her ears, the pink scarf over her wavy black hair, the tight bodice of brown velvet, the green, fan-like skirt. She liked her dusky, strong, relentless hands, that had pressed so firm, like wolf’s paws, in Yvette’s own soft palm. She liked her. She liked the danger and the covert fearlessness of her. She liked her covert, unyielding sex, that was immoral, but with a hard, defiant pride of its own. Nothing would ever get that woman under. She would despise the rectory and the rectory morality, utterly! She would strangle Granny with one hand. And she would have the same contempt for Daddy and for Uncle Fred, as men, as she would have for fat old slobbery Rover, the Newfoundland dog. A great, sardonic female contempt, for such domesticated dogs, calling themselves men.

And the gipsy man himself! Yvette quivered suddenly, as if she had seen his big, bold eyes upon her, with the naked insinuation of desire in them. The absolutely naked insinuation of desire made her life prone and powerless in the bed, as if a drug had cast her in a new molten mould.

[...]

The gipsy stood at the back door, under the steep dark bank where the larches grew. The long brooms flourished from one hand, and from the other hung various objects of shining copper and brass: a saucepan, a candlestick, plates of beaten copper. The man himself was neat and dapper, almost rakish, in his dark green cap and double-breasted green check coat. But his manner was subdued, very quiet: and at the same time proud, with a touch of condescension and aloofness.

“Anything today, lady?” he said, looking at Aunt Cissie with dark, shrewd, searching eyes, but putting a very quiet tenderness into his voice.

Aunt Cissie saw how handsome he was, saw the flexible curve of his lips under the line of black moustache, and she was fluttered. The merest hint of roughness or aggression on the man’s part would have made her shut the door contemptuously in his face. But he managed to insinuate such a subtle suggestion of submission into his male bearing, that she began to hesitate.

“The candlestick is lovely!” said Yvette. “Did you make it?”

And she looked up at the man with her naïve, childlike eyes, that were as capable of double meanings as his own.

“Yes lady!” He looked back into her eyes for a second, with that naked suggestion of desire which acted on her like a spell, and robbed her of her will. Her tender face seemed to go into a sleep.

“It’s awfully nice!” she murmured vaguely.

Aunt Cissie began to bargain for the candlestick: which was a low, thick stem of copper, rising from a double bowl. With patient aloofness the man attended to her, without ever looking at Yvette, who leaned against the doorway and watched in a muse.

“How is your wife?” she asked him suddenly, when Aunt Cissie had gone indoors to show the candlestick to the rector, and ask him if he thought it was worth it.

The man looked fully at Yvette, and a scarcely discernible smile curled his lips. His eyes did not smile: the insinuation in them only hardened to a glare.

“She’s all right. When are you coming that way again?” he murmured, in a low, caressive, intimate voice.

“Oh, I don't know,” said Yvette vaguely.

“You come Fridays, when I’m there,” he said. Yvette gazed over his shoulder as if she had not heard him. Aunt Cissie returned, with the candlestick and the money to pay for it. Yvette turned nonchalant away, trilling one of her broken tunes, abandoning the whole affair with a certain rudeness.

Nevertheless, hiding this time at the landing window, she stood to watch the man go. What she wanted to know, was whether he really had any power over her. She did not intend him to see her this time.

She saw him go down to the gate, with his brooms and pans, and out to the cart. He carefully stowed away his pans and his brooms, and fixed down the tarpaulin over the cart. Then with a slow, effortless spring of his flexible loins, he was on the cart again, and touching the horse with the reins. The roan horse was away at once, the cart-wheels grinding uphill, and soon the man was gone, without looking round. Gone like a dream which was only a dream, yet which she could not shake off.

“No, he hasn’t any power over me!” she said to herself: rather disappointed really, because she wanted somebody, or something to have power over her.

the boss

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