Virginity in D. H.

Lawrences The Virgin and the Gipsy

In D. H. Lawrences The Virgin and the Gipsy, the character of the gipsy is much easier to define than that of the virgin. Virginity, in this novella, is something very different, and much more comprehensive, than simply lack of sexual experience. We usually associate virginity with purity, but Lawrence associates it much more closely with innocenceinnocence and purity being mutually exclusive. Virginity is a state of primary selfishness and absence of control over ones will. Losing ones virginity is a process that must be gone through that does not involve an actual sex act, but sexual feeling can empower the will. The common ideas of feminine virginity revolve around a personality that is generally guileless, unmanipulative (at least consciously so), and honest. There is an absence of knowledge and wisdom. Yet, Yvette does seem to be dishonest, manipulative, to have some kind of worldly knowledge, and even is described as always wayward, always perverse. It goes against common reason to think of a virgin as perverse because perversion involves consciousness of normalcy and a decision to act abnormally. To make this distinction and decision involves knowledge. Sexually speaking, a virgin cannot be perverted not only because of lack of opportunity to commit a perverted act, but also because of lack of experience and understanding of a normal sexual encounter. One cannot pervert what is not known. During her first visit to the gipsies (24-29), Yvette comes to understand that she has something in her that the gipsy woman responds to. She knows she is different from the other young people and senses that her difference is powerful. When she perceives the mental penetration of the gipsy woman, she is scared and initially backs away from exposing this difference to those around her and to herself. Yet, her curiosity is piqued and she agrees to hear her fortune in private. This decision seems quite unvirginal because it involves a knowledge of normalcy and difference and a decision to act upon difference. It is wayward, perverse (27). Not only does she seek wisdom, but she makes a decision to hide this wisdom from those around her. This is not innocence or honesty. When Yvette emerges from the caravan she is twice referred to as witch-like. A witch has supernatural and evil powers that she uses to manipulate people. What makes such a girl, who is witch-like and wayward, virginal? It is the vagueness that Lawrence constantly refers to that keeps Yvette from being defiled. It seems that, to Lawrence, lack of intention is the core of virginity. Yvette does not try to be witch-like or perverse. She does not suggest a private fortune-telling, but responds to the suggestion of it. She can respond to the will of someone else, but cannot yet will her own perversity. She can respond to a feeling of desire (she does want a private meeting with the gipsy) but does not understand it enough to assert it herself. Her decision to keep her fortune secret to the others, her act of lying and concealment, is the first step of her deflowering. Another aspect of virginity is innocent selfishness. Yvette is selfish in the same way a child is selfish: it simply does not dawn on her to take other people into consideration. This is what

Aunt Cissie cannot stand about Yvette. When Yvette takes the money from Cissies Window Fund she does not steal it because she does not see her action as involving anyone else. Lucille accuses her of stupidity for not taking care to better conceal her crime: Where youre so silly, Yvetteis that you give yourself away to them all. You might know theyd find outBut you never will think before hand where your actions are going to land you! (32). If Yvette thought about the consequence of taking the money then she would be stealing because this indicates a realization that it belongs to someone else and her action is wrong. But Yvette does not think this way. She just sees money that she needs and takes it, not heeding anyone elses interest. Yvette shows the same lack of understanding of her sense of entitlement when Lucille asserts her selfless generosity in helping Yvette on her day off. She says to Lucille that she didnt ask her to sew the dress for her. Lucille replies, As if I didnt know what you meant, when you started sighing and flouncing about (36). Yvette is surprised at that description of her behavior. Her demands for attention are unconscious. The loss of virginity entails the appropriating of ones will in interest of a conscious selfishness or in combat of selfishness. For Lawrence, selfishness is not badit is merely natural. One begins life with an innocent unconscious selfishness. The loss of virginity is the bringing to consciousness of ones own selfishness and finding ones power in it. The denial of this selfishness, the belief that it is immoral, and the hypocrisy involved in hiding it from society is what Lawrence finds to be truly immoral. The Rector sees She-who-was-Cynthias crime as stemming from a horrid selfishness, and he hates her because he knows this selfishness is in him. The Maters selfishness is in its purest and most depraved formit is simply desire for power. Both the Rector and the Mater exert their wills over the family and try to prevent the sisters from developing a healthy self-will. The Rector does this because he has allowed the Mater and bourgeois society to dictate denial of will to him and he believes that he is helping his daughters. The Mater is manipulating the family because she is just plain greedy. The only characters who combat selfishness are Cissie and Lucille. In a way, they are both virgins, because they have not been through an experience that has allowed them to appropriate their self-wills. They have both lived in the shadow of someone elses strong selfishness and have been too weak to rebel against it. Because of their inability to exert their power combined with the common morality of society, they have instead devoted their wills to promoting the power of someone stronger than themselves, their sisters. Aunt Cissie cannot be consciously angry with the Maters power because her definition of self is too entwined with the Maters power. Instead, she develops green rages in response to Yvette, who is a substitute for the Mater because she is also intensely selfish and demanding. Yvettes total inattention to the needs or desires of anyone else makes Cissie angry and her power makes her intensely jealous. We can see Lucille developing this jealousy and anger: "Lucille at this time was very irritable. She seemed as if she simply went a little unbalanced, when she entered the rectory. Poor Lucille, she was so thoughtful and responsible. She did all the extra troubling, thought about doctors, medicines, servants, and all that sort of thing. She slaved conscientiously at her job all day in town... And she came home to have her nerves rubbed almost to frenzy by Grannys horrible and persistent inquisitiveness and

parasitic agedness" (35). If Lucille does not assert herself soon, her irritability will turn into green rages. When Lucille devotes her day off to sewing a dress for Yvette. she asserts herself enough to reprimand Yvette, but she does not stop sewing the dress for her even though she feels slighted. Like Aunt Cissie to the Mater, she is unable to resist Yvettes selfishness, but her anger flares up at one who is not really the subject of that anger. Directly after the argument about the dress, Yvette drops a mirror which culminates in Granny calling the sisters depraved because of their mothers blood. Lucille bursts into rage and tells Granny to shut up. Yvette, confident in her self, is largely unbothered by this insult, but Lucille, angry in her self-denial, allows this to throw her into a rage. There seem to be two impetuses for the galvanization of will: desire and hate. Yvette can either use her will to initiate a sexual act with the gipsyan act which would be based on a mutual spirit and thus an act of love (Lawrence tells us later that this act of love is really an act of self-love)or she can use her will to protest against all that her family representsan act of hatred. Yvette shrinks from making this decision. What she responds to in the gipsy is his ability to make her lose her will. She wants to be dominated, but dominated by someone who desires her and believes in her, as opposed to her father who does not believe in her and who sometimes express fear of her, and her grandmother who tries to subvert her will. In her virginity, Yvette is too afraid of asserting the power of her rebellion which an acceptance of the gipsy would represent. Her unconscious compromise is to allow her will to submit to the rebellious direction of the gipsys will. This is a way to preserve her virginity by not taking responsibility for her actions. Yvettes affair with the gipsy is terminated before begun. It seems the key to the eventual union with the gipsy is being in a situation which forces her to assert her will, when she is not paralyzed by the gipsys presence. If it is an appropriation of will to be deflowered, then to defile is to give a virgin access to power only through hatred and fear. Yvettes sexuality is essentially the same force as her will. It is through sexual awakening that she will gain access to her will, for the will stems from the same secret core that sexuality does. In this novella, it certainly seems that sexuality is at least representative of positively productive power, if not the source of it. Denial of sexuality is a control of self which is destructive, which breeds only greed, hypocrisy, and hate. Yvettes first deflowering is not by the gipsy, but by her father. He accuses her of deceit: You would do the large with somebody elses money wouldnt you? (30). With this accusation he attributes to her an intention of selfishnessnot the innocent selfishness with which the act was committed, but with a premeditated, manipulative selfishness which is an act of negative intention towards another person. He accuses her of lust. She feels deflowered because a man has given her a will. This deflowering is degrading because it is a will of hatred, not a will of love. In her innocence, she is tempted to believe him and thus is scared of his unbelief in her goodness. Her fathers accusation is another step in the process of Yvette's loss of virginity. It not only begins to give her access to her will, but it also disrupts her innocence. She has knowledge

that she did not possess before which is exampled in the passage: "She never confessed to anybody that two of the ill-starred Window Fund pounds had gone to the gipsy woman. What if Daddy and Aunt Cissie new that! Yvette stirred luxuriously in the bed. The thought of the gipsy had released the life of her limbs, and crystallized in her heart the hate of the rectory: so that now she felt potent, instead of impotent (35). Yvettes transfer of money from Cissies Window Fund to the gipsy woman is a symbolic act of rebellion. She is taking money from a bourgeois cause that is part of the hypocritical tendency to deny selfishness by acting generously. She is giving money to a group that defies this bourgeois denial of self and opposes it actively by staying outside the bourgeois law. Yvette does not realize the significance of what she does before her fathers accusation, but she does begin to realize what it signifies afterwards. Yvettes father triggers a process of empowerment: he makes her feel shameful and she feels hatred; she then thinks of the gipsies who represent everything opposite to her fathers dirty morality and she realizes she is not shameful and hates her father for making her feel so; she then thinks of the gipsy man who makes her feel desirable; she realizes her sexual desire is in opposition to her fathers rank morality and she feels powerful in her hatred. It is interesting that the thought of the gipsys desire makes her lie prone and powerless, yet it also released the life of her limbsso that now she felt potent, instead of impotent (35). However potent Yvette feels at this moment, though, she does not harness the energy and her her will blows over as easily as the affair of the Window Fund does. Yvettes father again expresses his unbelief in her goodness, but this time he accuses her of criminal lunacy. Yvette goes through a similar procession of feelings as she does the first time she is deflowered, but this time her feeling of potency, her hatred, does not blow over. This is, I think, where she really begins to lose her virginity (Lawrence never again refers to her virginity) because this is when the last remnants of innocence are killed and she develops intention. Her acts are no longer vague and ununderstood. She now understands the baseness of the world, she decides to focus and nourish her hate, and her actions have a deliberate intent. She realizes that her hate is a source of power, but she does not yet use it, which is why her deflowering is not complete. Granny becomes the focus of her hatred as the representative of the baseness of her family and humanity. Because Yvettes will has been awakened by hatred, she no longer needs the gipsys desire to spur her to the intention of rebellion and he stops figuring in her thoughts. No longer does Yvette want to be overpowered, but she wants to be overpowering. However, despite Yvettes acceptance of her will, she does not use it. She is beginning to form the basis of her power, but not to exercise it. "She had a curious reluctance, always, towards taking action, or making any real move of her own. She always wanted someone else to make a move for her, as if she did not want to play her own game of life" (77). When the world-end scene takes place, Yvette is no longer under the spell of the gipsys desire. She does not love him. His desire only functioned to serve her sense of pride and affirm the hidden part of herself. She is now able to do this for herself. When the water

comes rushing at her, it is a powerful force and she is once again paralyzed in the power of an opposing will. Though she has learned wisdom, she has not learned to control her will. After a while, her basic will to live asserts itself and she manages to get herself blindly to the bedroom. What finally allows Yvette and the gipsy to come together is just this will to life. Her will to direct her life has been paralyzed, but now she must assert will to preserve her life. The gipsy can keep her alive and, for the first time, she asserts herself and asks of him she does not wait for him to take over. When they finally come together, it is not sexual, but vital. It is a sharing and preserving of life-force, something beyond all the sexual desires they have had for each other. The gipsys heroism is an act of love and this love that is so powerful as to preserve life will counteract the strength of hatred that Yvette has until now based her sense of power. Yvette does not tell anyone the real story, the physical nakedness and embrace that she shares with the gipsy, because she is now wise to how the so-called moral world would interpret it as depravity. The book ends with Yvettes realization that the gipsy has a name. The worlds-end day finally awakens Yvette to the power of love and she once again languishes in prostration at the idea of a force stronger than herself. It seems that, to Lawrence, experience follows from three things: a knowledge of the real baseness of people, an acknowledgement of ones own self-will and a directing of it towards all that threatens self, and the ability to also love, to share with someone (of the opposite sex) something that is beyond self-will, something that is vital to the life of both. The final step once this love is achieved is to move away from the selfishness of self-will and to recognize the person one loves as not just an object to help appropriate will, but as someone with a will of his own. When Yvette receives the letter from Joe she realizes that he is not just a symbol of her own need for rebellion, but a person with a unique identity. We are left to assume that this realization will allow Yvette to liberate her will from the contemplation of her love for Joe and find a love that is possible for her to sustain; one that is built on the sharing of will, not the domination and subjection of it. Yvette, at the end of the novella, is not a virgin anymore, though she never did have sex with the gipsy. The Role of Men in D.H. Lawrence's Virgin and the Gypsy

The role of the male characters in The Virgin and the Gypsy by D.H. Lawrence can best be summed up by Yvette's reaction to her sister's philosophy of marriage: 'I'm not sure one shouldn't have one's fling till one is twenty-six , and then give in and marry!' This was Lucille's philosophy, learned from older women. Yvette was twenty-one. It meant she had five years to have this precious fling. And the fling meant, at the moment, the gypsy. The marriage, at the age of twenty-six, meant Leo or Gerry. So, a woman could eat her cake and have her bread and butter (Lawrence, 99).

All of the male characters fall into one of three categories: bread and butter, cake or servants. None of the servants have names, they are all non-entities that are there only to serve a certain function. For example: tending the garden and warning of the approaching flood, or rescuing Yvette from the flood damaged house. Yvette might like talking to them, "...They had such fine, hard heads (Lawrence 11)," but they can never really have mor...

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... and work. It is the theme that permeates all of his work and it is the punchline of this, his last book. Be braver in your body. In this sense Yvette's world is turned around. Her strength, physical and emotional is now her power, not her vulnerability. Joe has taught her where her real power lies and shown her how to be a woman. He has also taught her to see herself and others as human beings, showing once again where the true power of women lies.