Summary
The story begins with the Pervin siblings sitting around the breakfast table in their childhood home. The eldest brother, Joe, flippantly demands an answer from his sister Mabel as to where she plans to live in a few days once the home no longer belongs to them. Their father’s death and the subsequent mismanagement of the family fortune has left them penniless, and as a single woman in her twenties, Mabel is the most vulnerable of her siblings. The rest of them are either male, married, or both.
Mabel refuses to respond to Joe’s questions, which are both aggressive and dismissive. Her two other brothers are no better. Lawrence devotes much of the first third of the story to describing Mabel and her brothers. Mabel is regarded by her brothers as cold and unfeeling. They find her joyless and describe her face as resembling a bull-dog. She is twenty-seven years old and described by Lawrence as someone who “would have been good-looking, save for the impressive fixity of her face” (199). She fell into a depression after the death of her father and in the midst of the rapid draining of their family fortune.
The most outspoken of the brothers is Joe, who Lawrence describes as broad, red-faced, mustached, and despite the brutishness of his general appearance, strangely sensual. Joe is married to a woman near his own age, and her father owns a company which will provide Joe with employment and save him from poverty. Yet, by accepting the job at his father-in-law’s company, Joe feels as if he is being fitted with a harness. He will no longer be free to do whatever he pleases and will be beholden to his wife’s family.
Lawrence describes the middle brother, Fred Henry, as rigid, clean-cut, and composed. He is an experienced horse handler, unlike Joe, and watches with confidence as the few horses left in their care gallop around outside the window. The youngest brother Malcolm appears the most carefree and lighthearted of them all. He suggests that if he were in Mabel’s position, he would train to be a nurse.
The family conference goes nowhere, and the brothers (particularly Fred Henry) grow exasperated with Mabel’s refusal to answer the question of where she will live. Mabel finally admits to Fred Henry that she received a letter from their sister Lucy inviting her to live there in the interim, while she figures out her situation, but Mabel says she will not go.
Just as Fred Henry reaches the height of his frustration, a young doctor named Jack Ferguson appears outside their window. Jack is a friend of all the brothers and comes inside to say hello. He tells the Pervin boys that he will miss their company when they move away, and asks Mabel if she plans to move in with her sister. When Mabel says no, it briefly reignites the argument that ended when Jack walked in, but only briefly, before the brothers and Jack clear out of the house, leaving Mabel alone to continue tidying up.
Analysis
Lawrence is obviously attempting to critically engage with the prevailing ideas of masculinity and gender roles of his time; though now, over a century later, the jury is still out on just what kind of light the story sheds on its characters. In the opening scene, he clearly demonizes Mabel’s brothers by characterizing them as dismissive in various ways, whether it be in Joe’s ham-fisted blathering, Fred Henry’s harsh tone, or Malcolm’s naivety.
In the first line, Lawrence characterizes the way in which Joe asks Mabel what she will do with herself as “foolishly flippant,” following up a few sentences later with the observation that “he [Joe] did not care about anything, since he felt safe himself” (198). This phrase, “felt safe himself,” is repeated twice within the first four sentences of the story, and its repetition emphasizes the idea that men could be more secure in their livelihood simply by virtue of being men.
While Lawrence wrote this story in 1916 and continued to edit it until 1922, he saw more women entering the workforce because of World War I. As a result, traditional gender roles were being challenged in the places with which Lawrence was most familiar—America and England—and he was engaging these social changes in his fiction. In the first third of the story, the Pervin siblings exemplify the idea that men not more hardworking than women, but simply had easier access to steady incomes.
There is a significant interplay between the way Lawrence describes humans and animals, particularly dogs and horses, in this story. The Pervins made their fortune raising horses, and in raising horses, they have had to train them. So there is an established family tradition of dominating animals (which is especially exemplified in Fred Henry’s character). However, Lawrence often describes the human characters in animal terms to show how they, themselves, are dominated by their social situation.
Joe, particularly, is described numerous times in terms befitting of a horse. Several times Lawrence refers to Joe moving in a “horsey fashion” (200). Describing Joe's appearance, Lawrence writes that “He had a sensual way of uncovering his teeth when he laughed,” and a few paragraphs later, when describing his anxieties about working for his wife’s father, “He would marry and go into harness. His life was over, he would be a subject animal now” (199).
Later in the first third of the story, Joe is described as seeming “to have his tail between his legs,” like an ashamed dog. Mabel is also compared to a bulldog because of the “impressive fixity of her face” (199). The fact that these characters are likened to dogs heightens the significance of Joe’s interaction with the family dog early in the story. Joe feeds the family dog bacon and then mocks it for wanting more bacon. He says, “You won’t get much more bacon, shall you, you little bitch?” (200).
Joe gives the dog bacon in order to immediately humiliate it for wanting more. He suggests that it will not have much more bacon because the family’s fortune is gone. In this moment, Joe projects his own anxieties about losing their comfortable standard of living onto the dog. He exerts his dominance on this helpless creature in order to make himself feel powerful in a situation where he is utterly powerless.
