Summary:
XIII - "The Man’s World"
Ursula, now seventeen, returns home to her parents’ house, where Will and Anna now have seven children and are expecting an eighth. Ursula begins to fight with her mother and comes to resent the “enforced domestic life” her mother has accepted for herself (329). Will tries to avoid the fighting and keeps himself busy with a number of hobbies including metal-working and painting. After her experience with Winifred, Ursula concludes that “the vividest little flame of desire was extinct in her forever” (332).
Ursula desires a bigger life for herself and applies for work as a teacher in several schools. She is rejected for all but one, in Kingston-on-Thames near London in southeast England. When Ursula tells her father that she must travel there for an interview, he responds, “‘If you think you’re going dancing off to th’ other side of London, you’re mistaken’” (339). After a bitter fight, Will says that he will find another job for Ursula, and returns with a job for Ursula at the Brinsley Street school in Ilkeston.
Ursula’s dreams about life as a teacher quickly evaporate when she first visits the dark, dingy school. There, she meets Miss Violet Harby, the daughter of the headmaster, Mr. Harby, a harsh and unfriendly man who is hated by the majority of the teachers at the school. Ursula meets Mr. Brunt, another teacher, who advises her to discipline her class more firmly.
Ursula quickly loses control of her class. The children mock her and Mr. Harby intervenes to discipline them, embarrassing Ursula. Ursula begins to loathe her work at the school but is proud to receive her first paycheque, “four pounds two shilling and one penny” (362).
Ursula’s relationship worsens both with her class and with Mr. Harby. One student, Vernon Williams, causes particular trouble for Ursula. Realizing that she must regain control of her class, Ursula beats Vernon harshly one day. The move is successful, but his mother comes to the school the following day to complain and explains that Vernon has a heart disease and the beating made him sick. Ursula does not regret her actions and continues to beat students who misbehave.
Ursula befriends Maggie Schofield, another teacher, and the two share dinners at the school together. Schofield is a committed suffragist who has big aspirations for her life. Ursula and Maggie develop a close bond and attend suffrage meetings and cultural events together, and discuss matters like marriage and love. Convinced that she wants to “take her place in the world,” signs up for college beginning in the next year (381).
XIV - "The Widening Circle"
During her final semester teaching, Ursula becomes acquainted with Maggie’s brother, Anthony, a twenty-six-year-old gardener. Anthony is attentive to Ursula and shows her around the property which the Schofields tend. One snowy day, Maggie and Ursula walk near the ponds of the property. When Maggie wanders off to read some poetry, Anthony approaches Ursula and proposes to her. Although she wants to accept his offer, she rejects him as she concludes that “she was a traveler on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses” (387).
Anna and Will decide to move away from Cossethay, and Will is hired as an “Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham” (388). The position is prestigious and Anna and Will buy a large home in the fictional town of Beldover. The new house upsets Ursula, who considers it to be “red-brick suburbia in a grimy, small town” (391).
Ursula has her last day teaching at the school, and receives a present and kind words from Mr. Harby. The Brangwens pack up and move from Cossethay and begin setting up the house in Beldover.
Analysis:
The time has come for Ursula to actualize her desire to make a life for herself. In titling a chapter, "The Man's World," Lawrence makes it clear that is not going to be a simple task. The chapter begins with a troubling, even misogynistic treatment of Ursula's mother, Anna. Ursula considers her mother trapped in a "long trace of complacent child-bearing" and suggests that her mother cares about nothing "but the children, the house, and a little local gossip" (328). Thus, in striving to liberate herself, Ursula outright rejects her mother for failing to liberate herself.
In this way, Anna serves as an image for Ursula to create a life in opposition to. The most important aspect of this new life, is professional employment, thus leading to Ursula taking a job as a teacher. When describing the school, Lawrence appears to draw on the work of Charles Dickens, the 19th-century novelist famous for his descriptions of bleak, grimy industrial city spaces. Indeed, the lines "the building was grimy, and horrible, dry plants were shadowily looking through the windows" could well have appeared in one of Dicken's own novels.
The appearance of the school corresponds to a general sense of bleakness and decrepitude that dominates in these chapters. For example, on Ursula's commute to work, Lawrence writes how "wet cloaked people mounted and sat mute and gray" and how Ursula was surrounded by "unliving, spectral people" (342). Here, the transition has fully been made from the Eden of the early novel to the disenchanted, alienated urban space. Soon after, Will and Anna decide to relocate the family to a suburb of Nottingham, thus bringing them in line with the homogeneity of industrialized modernity.
In keeping with his commitment to realism, Lawrence does not depict Ursula's entrance into the professional world as an immediate, monumental success. In fact, quite the opposite. Her desires to teach with kindness are met with cruelty from both Mr. Harby and her class. This is a reflection of the broader world to which Ursula desires access—one in which kindness is not rewarded in the same way as strictness. Thus, as scholar Evelyn J. Hinz notes in a comprehensive analysis of Ursula's character, Ursula "must follow the demands of the system; she must become an instrument and abnegate her personality" (38).
Through violence, Ursula succeeds in controlling her class and gaining the respect of Mr. Harby; however, she soon realizes that something is still missing in her life. While still a teenager, she is already navigating the same existential questions that plague her father and grandfather. Quitting the job she once so desperately wanted, Ursula sets out to find purpose and belonging elsewhere.
