Summary:
VII - "The Cathedral"
Baron Skrebensky is reintroduced. Following the death of his first wife, he married a young Englishwoman named Millicent Maud Pearse, a noblewoman. Will and Anna visit the couple and Will grows infatuated with Millicent. Later, Will and Anna are invited for another visit. During the visit, Anna frustratedly watches her husband and Millicent flirt together and wonders “how different her own lot might have been” (185).
After the visit, Will takes Anna to visit the nearby Lincoln Cathedral. He is passionate about cathedral architecture and hopes to show Anna all the great cathedrals in England. Although Anna is skeptical and prepared to be underwhelmed, both she and Will have a transcendent experience while marveling at the beauty of the cathedral. Will contemplates the meaning of his life and concludes that “this was all, this was everything” (188). Anna too finds beauty in the cathedral but not in an overtly religious sense.
Walking through the cathedral, Anna begins to joke about the carvings. Her jokes upset Will remarkably, to the extent that he feels “that his cathedrals would never again be the same to him as they had been” (190). The couple returns home and Will proceeds to get more involved at his local church while Anna enjoys motherhood.
VIII - "The Child"
Will and Ursula develop an intense connection to one another. He and Anna have another daughter, Gudrun, yet “Ursula became the child of her father’s heart” (198). They spend much of their time together and she helps him in the garden. Ursula feels little fondness for her mother.
By the time he is twenty-six, Will has two more daughters with Anna named Theresa and Catherine. One day, Ursula helps Will plant potatoes in the garden. The following morning, he discovers that someone has walked all over the garden beds. He becomes enraged with Ursula, though she continues to love him deeply.
Anna and Will’s marriage continues to be distant. One night when is twenty-eight, he goes to a dancehall alone and meets two women. He feels attracted to one, and they begin to talk. He implores her to grab tea with him and she relents. Her friend leaves and they walk in the rain. After tea, Will kisses her in a park. He tries to advance the encounter further, but she rebukes him and leaves.
When he returns home, Anna notices that Will seems different, and realizes that she likes “him better than the ordinary mutte, half-effaced, half-subdued man she usually knew him to be” (217). This brings back a spark into their marriage and they become passionately intimate with one another like never before. They have a fifth child, a son, and Will begins to engage with the world in a more outward, confident way. When he is thirty years old, he begins teaching wood-working classes to young boys.
IX - "The Marsh and the Flood"
The lives of Tom and Lydia’s sons, Tom and Fred, are recounted. Tom goes off to London to study as an engineer and his physical attractiveness is repeatedly emphasized. Fred is more like his father and he stays at the Marsh to tend to the farm. When Tom is twenty-three, he sets off for travels in Italy, America and Germany before returning to England.
One rainy Sunday, the elder Tom sets off for the market in Nottingham. After finishing work at the market, he spends the afternoon drinking at a bar in Nottingham. The rain worsens as he leaves to return home late at night. The carriage ride home is treacherous and he passes out from drunkenness.
When he gets home and is returning the horse to the stable, he notices a heavy stream of water flowing from the nearby pond. On his way to inspect the source of the flooding, he trips and is drowned in the water. Lydia awakes to the intuition that Tom is in trouble and discovers that the bottom floor of the house has flooded. Fred and Tilly awake, and Fred tries to search for his father in the floodwater. It becomes apparent that the flood has been caused by the collapse of the canal banks. Fred spots his father’s body.
The following morning, Tom’s body is taken to Anna’s cottage where she undresses him and prepares him for the funeral. His funeral takes place shortly thereafter and Fred works furiously to fix the damage caused by the flood.
Lydia spends much of her time in bed and is often kept company by Ursula. Lydia tells the young girl about her life, and her previous marriage to Paul, and concludes that “she loved both her husbands” (240). When Ursula inquires about love and marriage, Lydia empoweringly advises her that “we have a right to what we want” (241).
Analysis:
The cathedral scene is one of the novel's most climatic moments. Lawrence's prose soars as he tries to describe Will's transcendent experience, followed by his immense disappointment. Anna has recently realized that she and Will "were opposites, not compliments” to one another, and there is no better proof than their different responses at the cathedral. Indeed, it is difficult to fathom the cruelty displayed by Anna—but again, Lawrence does not shy away from depicting the less favorable aspects of his character's personalities.
In the cathedral scene, Lawrence questions the very essence of what a church is. This is an important question, as churches and cathedrals appear frequently throughout the novel. When Will enters the cathedral, he believes that churches are the very embodiment of divinity and the place where God and humans commune. In other words, "he had thought them absolute" (190). Yet, after Anna mocks the stone carvings, Will is forced to realize that "there was much that the church did not include" (190). He emerges with a fair more practical understanding of the church "as a symbol" rather than an "absolute" (191).
This transformation in Will's beliefs can be read as a form of demystification. Throughout the novel, Lawrence traces the ways in which modernity has brought about an increased sense of rationality and a diminished sense of wonder. Thus, the church becomes not a mystical place but a physical place of refuge and serenity. The desacralization of the church is made evident when Ursula and Anton '"make love in a cathedral'" (276).
In this section, the parallels between the first and second Brangwen generation become obvious. Like Tom and Lydia before them, Will and Anna fight relentlessly, to the point of despising one another. Will takes Ursula as his favourite child. In this way, Lawrence portrays familial generations as cycles which repeat themselves with slight variations but a large degree of similarity.
As scholar Christine M. Connell perceptively notes, the Brangwens are connected to and through the land which they pass down through the generation. As she writes, "the land that they are a part of constructs not only their individual lives and their shifting degrees of attachment to one another, but also inter-generational proliferation" (78). That is to say, the lives of the Brangwen generation are so similar because they participate in the same activity—agricultural on the same plot of land.
Seen this way, it will require a Brangwen to leave the land to break free from the cycles of agriculture and family as Ursula soon does.
In this section, the religious imagery rises to its most catastrophic level with the flood that drowns Tom and ravages Marsh Farm. Obviously, this is an illusion to the flood in Genesis which God sent to purify Earth in the book of Genesis. That Tom dies after drinking too much in a pod called the "Angel" is not a coincidence but instead it could be read as a form of punishment for his sinful behaviour. Coming almost exactly at the mid-point in the novel, the flood can be read as a form of purification or renewal that paves the way for the remainder of the novel. Put simply, a storm is necessary for the formation of a rainbow.
