Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her
schooldays were over. She had passed the matriculation
examination. Now she came home to face that empty period between
school and possible marriage.
At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the
time, she would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded
suffering, maimed. She had no will left to think about herself.
For a time she must just lapse.
But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her
mother had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the
girl continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs.
Brangwen was again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had
died of diphtheria in infancy.
Even this fact of her mother's pregnancy enraged the eldest
girl. Mrs. Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in
her breeding. She would not have the existence at all of
anything but the immediate, physical, common things. Ursula
inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth's
reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can't grasp, can't
even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the
darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her
mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of
physical considerations, and complacently to reject the reality
of anything else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen
care about, but the children, the house, and a little local
gossip. And she would not be touched, she would let
nothing else live near her. She went about, big with child,
slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own
time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the
children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of
womanhood.
This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her
young and undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when
Gudrun was born. All these years nothing had happened save the
coming of the children, nothing had mattered but the bodies of
her babies. As her children came into consciousness, as they
began to suffer their own fulfilment, she cast them off. But she
remained dominant in the house. Brangwen continued in a kind of
rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with his wife. They
were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as
individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of
breeding and rearing their young.
How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close,
physical, limited life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid,
unshakeable as ever, Mrs. Brangwen went about in her dominance
of physical maternity.
There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that
mattered to her. She would have the children less rude and
tyrannical, she would have a place in the house. But her
mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the cunning
instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen ridiculed and held
cheap Ursula's passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula
would try to insist, in her own home, on the right of women to
take equal place with men in the field of action and work.