Nancy L. Paxton
Northern Arizona University, USA
Seeing is Believing: Yvette, the Gipsy, and the Afterlife of Mourning
Like other short fiction that D. H. Lawrence wrote after his visit to Eastwood in 1923-24, The Virgin and the Gipsy incorporates his critique of modernity especially in his treatment of both Yvette and her formidable grandmother, but the novella also suggests how Lawrence's psychodynamics changed after his father's death in September 1924 and his own serious illness in 1925. Drawing on details from recent biographies, as well as on Judith Butler's analysis of melancholy and mourning, I will argue that the waters that redeem the former and drown the latter express not only the pagan flood of female desire as John Turner and Carol Siegel have argued, they also represent a tide of loss that Yvette recognizes when, feeling abandoned by her gipsy, she surrenders to a "grief over him that kept her prostrate" (77). As I hope to show, this novel thus marks Lawrence's turn from melancholy to mourning, a change which prepared him to enter the deeper waters that he explored in his final works.