The Blind Man

English writer D.H. Lawrence’s short story "The Blind Man," published in his 1922 collection, England, My England, concerns a war veteran who returns home to his wife after being blinded in combat.

Isabel Pervin is waiting for two sounds at her farmhouse, the Grange. One is the sound of the carriage announcing the arrival of her old friend and distant cousin, Bertie Reid. The other is the sound of her husband, Maurice Pervin, coming into the farmhouse from the stables. Maurice is blind, having lost his sight in a combat injury while fighting on Flanders Fields in World War I. He has been home from the war for a year now, and Isabel is pregnant for the second time. Her first child is deceased, having passed away as an infant. Their life together contains a strange richness unique to their situation that they did not feel before his injury and blindness. In spite of this, Maurice is often gripped by bleak periods of depression, during which Isabel struggles in her resolve not to succumb to the same depression. Isabel fights it by inviting friends to visit, but both she and her husband find they prefer being by themselves.

Isabel is surprised when Maurice agrees to have Bertie for a visit. Before Maurice lost his sight, he and Bertie did not get along at all. So deep was Maurice's seemingly inexplicable resentment of Bertie that before Maurice's second tour fighting in France, Isabel broke off her friendship with Bertie entirely. It has been two years since they last spoke or wrote to one another. However, this period of silence ends when Isabel receives a note from Bertie unexpectedly. In the note, he asks Isabel if he should put up a "tombstone to their dead friendship," expressing his genuine sorrow over her husband's malady. After mentioning the note to Maurice in a relatively off-hand manner and without expecting a positive reply from her husband, Maurice raises the idea that Bertie should come to visit. Therefore, Bertie will arrive that night.



When Isabel leaves the house to find her husband, she encounters her head-servant, Mrs. Wernham, as she serves dinner to the rest of the staff in the farm kitchen. They talk about how depressing it is in the autumn and winter months when it gets dark before 6 p.m. Mrs. Wernham offers to have a member of her staff go to fetch Maurice from the stables, but Isabel insists on going herself. She walks through the wind and rain to find Maurice in the dark stables. For a time, he is as invisible to her as she is to him. They walk back to the main house, sharing a moment of anxiety as they mutually try to ease each other's nerves—a nervousness whose source neither can quite identify.

Maurice goes upstairs to change his clothes in anticipation of their guest. Lawrence describes Maurice's experience as a blind man. In some ways, he enjoys being blind. When he touches objects, for example, he feels a certain communion with and understanding of that object which goes deeper than the mere recognition offered by visual stimulus. Sometimes, this "wave" of understanding ebbs back inward, and Maurice feels crushed by its suffocating nature. These are the moments of darkness and depression that both he and his wife dread so terribly.

Finally, Bertie arrives. Isabel greets him. He asks about Maurice's condition, and Isabel responds that her husband is coping with the blindness surprisingly well. Soon after, the three of them share a somewhat awkward dinner. Bertie picks up a flower from the table and smells it, remarking on its sweet scent. Isabel suggests that Maurice smell the flower as well, and so Bertie hands it to him. However, in the course of handing him the flower, Maurice's fingers rest on Bertie's and Bertie feels an odd sense of revulsion. Maurice excuses himself from the table before the other two, and Bertie talks about how difficult it would be to lose his sight, saying that something would always be "lacking." Isabel responds: "Yes, I know. And yet—and yet—Maurice is right. There is something else, something there, which you never knew was there, and which you can't express."



Bertie excuses himself to retrieve Maurice. Once alone with Bertie, Maurice says he wants to touch his face. Bertie reluctantly allows this. However, after Maurice is finished, Bertie, suffering an obvious and visible revulsion, is perturbed by the event, almost as if he's become infected by Maurice's ennui. Watching Bertie, Isabel understands “he had one desire—to escape from this intimacy, this friendship, which had been thrust upon him."

"The Blind Man" is a beautifully written story expressing the post-war ennui and malaise experienced by so many Britons in the wake of the terrible nationwide trauma caused by World War I.