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The Virgin and the Gipsy is D. H. Lawrence's novel about a young woman discovering herself, and in so doing, overcoming the middle-class Christian values that Lawrence so despised. The family central to the plot is that of righteous Rector Saywell. Prominent in the household is his elderly Victorian mother, a spinster sister, and his two daughters who have just returned from schooling and a year of finishing in Lausanne. Rector Saywell also has a brother in residence, and although not present, his ex-wife "she-who-was-Cynthia", cannot be ignored for her part in these lives.
The reader learns in the first sentence that Saywell's wife ran off with another man leaving behind her two daughters when they were seven and nine.
The ill wind that blows nobody any
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gipsy on the road and go to his camp to have their fortunes told, black and white becomes color. There is not only color in the gipsy camp, but life is more exciting, dramatic, even dangerous. All of Yvette's further encounters with the gipsy break the novel's black and white tone with colorful contrast. She is drawn to this older, married man, unable to get him out of her thought and his presence in her life effects a change in her thinking, her perceptions. As Yvette's nonconformity to the household morality develops, so her self-realization and autonomy begins to take shape.
The climax comes when a great flood sweeps the rectory. The gipsy had delivered a message to Yvette several days earlier in a chance encounter. The message was from the old gipsy woman. "Be braver in your body, or your luck will leave you." She also said, "Listen for the voice of water." (p.123)
As chance would have it, the gipsy is on his way to say goodbye to Yvette because his family is leaving the area, and it is he who saves her life. During the hours of the flood and its aftermath, Yvette recalls the old gipsy woman's words, and by the time the ordeal is over she has discovered not only the intensity of being in love, but also has gained the ability to "be braver in the body."
Although there is eroticism and sexual tension in the novel, The Virgin and the Gipsy does not cross some of the more graphic lines crossed in other Lawrence novels. It does offer a medium for Lawrence to express his disgust with middle-class values-- religious, social, and industrial, even as his principal character gains self-knowledge and bravery.
See GIPSY, page 8
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good swept away the vicarage family
on its blast. Then lo and behold! the vicar, who was somewhat distinguished
as an essayist and a controversialist, and whose case had aroused sympathy
among the bookish men, received the living of Papplewick. The Lord had
tempered the wind of misfortune with a rectorate in the north country. (p.4)
With these sort of editorial statements Lawrence sets the religious tone of the story as well as the avenue for the antagonism that will erupt between his youngest daughter and the rest of the family.
At this point in the introductory pages of the novel Lawrence begins to describe both the rectory and the family. It is like watching an austere black and white movie. Descriptive passages such as "stingy and grey-faced," "physically vulgar," "dank air," and "hard stone house" pepper the paragraphs. The only character associated with any color, any brightness, is "she-who-was-Cynthia." "She had made a great glow, a flow of life, like a swift and dangerous sun in the home…" (p.7)
Against this backdrop the story begins to unfold of the two sisters, Lucille, nearly twenty-one and Yvette nineteen as they try to make lives for themselves out of the pious and unpleasant circumstances in the rectory. As it turns out, Yvette has more of her mother's spunk and the novel becomes her story. When Yvette and her friends come upon a
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