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.”