I’ve been rereading D.H. Lawrence‘s Women in Love. It’s not the simplest novel to read, set in the early nineteenth century and filled with detailed settings and characters and their differing views on politics, art, economics, education, society, industrialization, sexuality, and the like. So it’s not abnormal for me to skip back and reread a passage to pick apart the arguments made or to make sense of the motivations involved.
Yesterday morning, though, I had to reread a paragraph because of the way it was punctuated, and I think it’s a great example of one of the uses of the semicolon.
To set the scene a bit, Gudrun and Ursula have arrived this morning at Hermione Roddice’s Breadalby estate, “a Georgian house with Corinthian pillars, standing among the softer, greener hills of Derbyshire, not far from Cromford” (85). And at this point, lunch was being served “under the great tree, whose thick, blackish boughs came down close to the grass” (87).
“There were present a young Italian woman, slight and fashionable, a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley, a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartedly in a harsh, horse-laugh, there was Rupert Birkin, and then a woman secretary, a Fraulein Marz, young and slim and pretty.” (87)
How many people were present at Hermione’s characteristically epic luncheon? Well, it’s difficult to decipher because of all those commas. I count eleven. Some of those commas, however, are separating not the characters, but the characters from their descriptions.
The “young Italian woman” is obviously the “slight and fashionable” one. That’s easy enough. We’ll label her character number one. But her name is not mentioned, so is she the “athletic-looking Miss Bradley”? It doesn’t seem so because their descriptions differ (and Bradley doesn’t seem an Italian name to me). No, Miss Bradley must be character number two.
So is Miss Bradley a “dry baronet of fifty”? No, baronet is a masculine title, the diminutive of baron but very different in its social and political status. So the baronet must be character number three. He is the one who makes laughs at his own jokes in a not too pleasing manner, we know, because the who clause follows his “name.”
Rupert Birkin is clear enough here, though overall he is debatably the most enigmatic of all: character number four.
And the woman secretary is next. Is she unnamed, or is her name Fraulein Marz, who is “young and slim and pretty”? Or are they two separate characters? Because Lawrence writes “a Fraulein Marz,” we can assume that the two are one in the same.
So we have:
“There were present
- a young Italian woman, slight and fashionable,
- a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley,
- a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartedly in a harsh, horse-laugh,
- there was Rupert Birkin,
- and then a woman secretary, a Fraulein Marz, young and slim and pretty.”
Well, whenever we use three or more items (nouns, which are people, places, things, or ideas) in a row with a conjunction (and, but, or, nor, so, for, or yet) before the last item, we call it items in a series (or in a row). Above, we have five items in a series.
The general rule is to separate the items in a series with commas. For three items, we would need two commas; for ten items, we would need nine. The last comma always goes before the conjunction. So we would need four commas in our sentence, one between each of the items and the final one just before the “and then.”
The problem arises when, as in Lawrence’s sentence, we have more than simple items listed. All but one of the five separate items in our list include commas; one of them (about Fraulein Marz) has two commas; and one of them (about the baronet) has three commas within.
In this case, we have to make the separation between items stronger by using semicolons rather than commas.
So the comma at the end of each item will need to be replaced by a semicolon so readers can better understand the meaning of the sentence, which would leave us with:
“There were present a young Italian woman, slight and fashionable; a young, athletic-looking Miss Bradley; a learned, dry Baronet of fifty, who was always making witticisms and laughing at them heartedly in a harsh, horse-laugh; there was Rupert Birkin; and then a woman secretary, a Fraulein Marz, young and slim and pretty.” (87)
Much easier, I believe. Reading on would have answered all of these questions, of course, but I really like to know (*wink* @ Hermione) right upfront.
As to why Lawrence chose to punctuate his sentence this way, I have no idea. It could be that punctuation rules have changed in the past 80 years or so. Maybe he had a hard time finding an editor back then, since he was hard-pressed in the beginning to get published; everyone thought his writing a bit too racy for the era.
I like to think that it was Lawrence’s plan that the reader’s confusion here would emulate the guests’ about who was who. I know when I’m introduced to a roomful of new people, I smile and say hello, but I don’t usually retain any of the names unless I spend a few minutes getting to know them.
What do you think?
Work Cited
Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. New York: Bantam, 1996.
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