The Man's World

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.

"Ay," said the mother, "there's a good crop of stockings
lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action."

Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened
her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of
enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The
commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it
all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas, she
corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in
silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with
supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child
not to be taken seriously.