RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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though Siegmund wants her, she rejects his sensual proximity
and decides they must go into the moonlight outside the house.
Consider the fire as proximity and warmth, and the moon as
symbolizing distance and coldness.
Of course Helena feels much
more confident under the moonlight, which is cold as she. There
she can direct what they do.
The fireplace is dangerous. It is
linked with instinct and she does not want to lose herself in
passion.
After all, if this happens she will become frustrated
since she is a woman to whom passion is only an idea, not a thing
of the senses.
The moon draws Helena into isolation:
The moon was wading deliciously through shallows
of white cloud. Beyond the trees and the few
houses was the great concave of darkness, the sea,
and the moonlight. The moon was there to put a
cool hand of absolution on her brow (p.36).
Under the moonlight Siegmund identifies Helena with the moon:
moonlike are her qualities of possessiveness and selfsufficiency.
He tells Helena: "'the darkness is a sort of mother,
and the moon a sister, and the stars children, and sometimes the
sea is a brother: and there's a family in one house, you see'"(p.
37). On top of the same page he said that "'The sea seems to be
poured out of the moon, and rocking in the hands of the coast.
They are all one, just as your eyes, and hands and what you say,
are all you'".
What .1 claim here is that there is perhaps a
sense of incest in their affair: Helena is compared to the moon,
Siegmund to the sea and Siegmund refers to the moon as 'sister',
the sea as 'brother*.
It can also be said that there is a feeling
of guilt under the surface of the statement.
As further
corroboration, their affair may be considered in terms of the
mother goddess myth.
The goddess is Helena, the devouring
mother, and her consort is Siegmund, the son who dies at the end