How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"We must lay him out," the wife said. She put on the kettle, then returning knelt at the feet, and began to unfasten the knotted leather laces. (2.116)
Oddly, Lawrence refers to Elizabeth here not as "Elizabeth" or even "Walter's wife," but simply "the wife." We wonder why Lawrence chooses to depersonalize her so much at this particular moment. Does it work, or is it just weird?
Quote #8
They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man's dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her. (2.122)
Elizabeth and her mother-in-law contemplate their roles as mothers in the wake of Walter's death. Unsurprisingly, the impact of this event has not been positive . . .
Quote #9
He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother—but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife. And he, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. (2.130)
Elizabeth is mulling the wife-husband relationship that has just ended with Walter's death. As noted elsewhere (see "Marriage"), the death has brought her into some kind of crisis and caused her to reevaluate her whole relationship with her husband.