The Story

When the smooth married life of a rather ordinary young couple is disrupted by the intrusion

of a third person, the couple find themselves swept into an explosive situation that is

beyond their capacity to control. There is certainly nothing remarkable about the

protagonists, Ted and Elsie Whiston. They have been married two years, and live in a small,

homey dwelling, their first house. She is a former factory worker, small and pretty, but also

coquettish and superficial (“she seemed witty, although, when her sayings were repeated,

they were entirely trivial”). He is a traveling sales representative, slow but solid, totally

confident in the love of his wife, in whom he seems to find his whole being enriched and

made whole. She has grown bored, however, and now tends to take him for granted, even

mocking and jeering at him, although in spite of this she feels a deep attachment to him. It

is the tension between these two contradictory attitudes that propels the story along its

course.

The story begins on the morning of Valentine's Day. Elsie is excited to find in the mail a

package addressed to her. She discovers that it contains a long white stocking, in which a

pair of pearl earrings has been placed. She puts them on immediately, and her vain pleasure

at the sight of herself in the mirror sets an ominous tone for the remainder of the story.

Hiding the earrings, Elsie pretends to her husband that the white stocking is only a sample,

but at breakfast she feels compelled to admit that this was a lie. Throughout the story, her

naïveté, her insensitivity to the subtlety and delicacy of the feelings with which she is

dealing, and her vacillation and duplicity contribute to the story's violent climax.

It transpires that the stocking was a gift from her former employer and admirer, Sam Adams,

and she unconsciously goads her husband more by telling him that earlier in the year Adams

sent her another stocking, but she concealed it from him. Concealment followed by later

confession is her regular pattern of behavior. Worse is to follow (at least from Ted's point of

view). She has been seeing Sam Adams, but only, she says, for coffee at the Royal. As Ted

goes to work, they part in a state of unresolved tension, caught in a situation that neither of

them has the maturity to grasp fully or to resolve. Cut adrift from their stable, day-to-day

moorings, they are now at the mercy of powerful subconscious forces.

The middle section of the story is an extended flashback, revealing the significance of the

friendship that Elsie had with Sam Adams and the uneasy triangle it formed with Ted. The

flamboyance of Adams, the factory owner, is in sharp contrast to the dour steadiness of Ted.

Adams, a forty-year-old bachelor, is a ladies’ man, fashionably dressed and possessed of

considerable charm. He is at home on the dance floor, in contrast to Ted, who does not

dance. This is one of the critical points of the story and is highlighted by an incident, recalled

in a flashback, that leads directly to the gift of the white stocking. Ted and Elsie attend a

Christmas party given by Adams. Adams invites Elsie to dance, and she finds the experience

completely exhilarating. Something about Adams, “some male warmth of attraction,” ignites

her; the rhythm of the dance and the close physical presence of her partner seem to

transport her away from herself, into the deepest recesses of her partner's being. It is a new

state of consciousness for her, and a pure physical pleasure. Adams has touched a vein of

feeling, sensuality, and physical response in her that is quite beyond the reach of dull Ted,

moodily playing cribbage in another room, and Elsie becomes momentarily aware of a

grudge against Ted for failing to satisfy this aspect of her being. However, she is also

disturbed by Adams. Even as she dances with him, she cannot quiet the voice of conscience.

The intoxication of the dance is not free of tension. On the contrary, it strains her, and some

part of her remains closed to Adams and will not be opened. That part belongs to Ted. What

she loves about him is his permanence and his solidity, yet part of her being is closed to

him. She will not allow him to penetrate her feelings. Although the situation is temporarily

resolved in a flood of tenderness and compassion as they return from the dance, she is

nevertheless caught between the attractions she feels toward both men. The seeds of the

story's climax have been sown.

Now, however, the couple have married and Adams appears to have been forgotten. The

narrative resumes as Ted returns home from work tired and depressed. The love Elsie

undoubtedly feels for him is masked by her awareness of his inability to give her everything

she needs, and her behavior becomes outrageously provocative. Putting on the stockings,

she cruelly and deliberately taunts him, dancing around the room, lifting her skirt to her

knees and kicking her legs up at him. They exchange bitter words, and the situation

becomes full of barely suppressed hatred. His anger becomes uncontrollable. She is

frightened but insists that she will not return the stockings. As the language becomes

abusive, Ted threatens his wife with physical violence, which finally erupts as she tells him

the truth about Adams's earlier gifts of earrings and a brooch. Striking her across the mouth,

Ted is filled with the desire to destroy her utterly. A final catastrophe is avoided, however, as

he is overcome with weariness and disgust at the whole situation. Slowly and deliberately,

he locates the offending jewelry, packs it up, and sends it back to Adams. Returning to the

sight of his wife's tear-stained face, he is moved to remorse and compassion. As she sobs a

half-completed retraction and apology, “I never meant—,” a flood of tenderness envelops

them both, and the story ends on a note of anguished reconciliation.

Themes and Meanings

At the time of writing “The White Stocking,” D. H. Lawrence was immersed in a reading of

Arthur Schopenhauer's works, particularly “The Metaphysics of Love” in Die Welt als Wille

und Vorstellung (1819; The World as Will and Idea, 1883-1886). He double-underlined a

passage that referred to the falsity of the harmony that lovers suppose themselves to feel

because this “frequently turns out to be violent discord shortly after marriage.” This is

exactly what happens in the “The White Stocking”; the story reveals how hard it is for a man

and a woman to attain stability and wholeness in a close relationship, and the destructive

and irrational behavior that results when the attempt fails. It suggests that sexual love

carries an undercurrent of hostility, even hatred. The sexual overtones of the story are clear

from the outset. The reader is made aware of Elsie's “delightful limbs” and how the sight of

her bare flesh excites and disturbs Ted. Elsie's dance with Adams is described in highly

erotic terms, and unbridled sexual taunting immediately precedes the story's climax.

The basic issue is one that Lawrence was to address throughout his writing career: How was

an individual to preserve his or her integrity, freedom, and separate identity when intensely

involved in a union with another human being? Ted and Elsie Whiston can be seen as

Lawrentian pioneers—even though they are largely unaware of it—in the attempt to attain

the “star equilibrium” that Lawrence described in Women in Love (1920): “a pure balance of

two single beings,” like “two single equal stars balanced in conjunction.” This ideal state of

perfect union and perfect separateness is glimpsed momentarily by Elsie. In the enhanced

sensuality of the dance, which anticipates the mystic sexual unions of Lawrence's later

novels, Elsie finds that “the movements of his [Adams’] body and limbs were her own

movements, yet not her own movements.” However, she cannot maintain this union, either

with Adams or with Ted, because she has found no stable center within herself. She

oscillates wildly between two poles of her being, both of which she needs: the rich vitality

and dynamism of the dance, but also the “enduring form,” the sense of permanence, that

Ted gives her. Because she can find no way of synthesizing the two within herself, the

couple seem doomed to a series of temporary reconciliations, each followed by another

outburst of hostility and mutual incomprehension.

Style and Technique

“The White Stocking” is one of Lawrence's earliest stories. It was originally entered in a

competition offered by the Nottinghamshire Guardian in 1907, when Lawrence was twenty-

two. It did not win, and the judges commented that it was “lacking finish.” Like most of

Lawrence's early stories, it is marked by a down-to-earth realism, and this makes an

important contribution to its effectiveness. The commonplace setting, for example, the

Whistons’ small, “seven and sixpenny” dwelling, and the homeyness and simplicity of their

daily routine, is disturbingly limited and ordinary. This is reinforced by the effect of the

diction. The predominance of short sentences containing a high proportion of monosyllabic

words has a simple, almost childlike effect, suggesting that the characters are undeveloped

in their understanding of life; they lack sophistication and self-knowledge. (This changes

only in the rich, flowing prose used to describe the dance, which ably conveys the new

reality that Elsie has discovered.) The presence of an omniscient narrator, who sees so much

more thaan any individual character is able to see, tends to emphasize for the reader the

smallness and inadequacy of the Whistons’ own perspective.

These stylistic elements effectively highlight, by contrast, the surging, primeval forces that

the characters unleash in themselves and in one another, for which they are totally

unprepared. It is as if they are living only on the surface of life. The bewilderment expressed

in Elsie's final reconciling words, “I never meant—,” is highly significant. The rational,

everyday world that they inhabit makes them helpless before the dark and irrational psychic

forces that they unwittingly arouse. They might well echo the cry of St. Paul in Romans 7:15:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I

hate.”