RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

109
Siegmund, usually a bad swimmer, swims well the morning
after the night of passion.
Helena is compared to a maiden bay
with cold lips— a vampire in other words.
Helena looks like a
predatory creature and he is as the victim which feeds her. Here
the narrative is again an allegory for sex.
Siegmund in the sea,
makes love to it as if making love to the virgin bay which stands
for Helena.
He feels proud "at having conquered also this small,
inaccessible sea-cave, creeping into it like a white bee into a
white virgin blossom that had waited, how long, for its bee" (pp.
57-8). The man 'hugs' the sea, laughs, and feels pleased as in
a real intercourse with Helena.
He says: "'Surely... it is like
Helena" (p.58).
What is rather strange to the reader, but common
to the narrative as a whole, is the fact that everything that
relates to the woman is cold.
After Siegmund has compared the
symbolic scene with the sea with his lover,
he laid his hands again on the warm body of the
shore, let them wander, discovering, gathering
all the warmth, the softness, the strange wonder
of smooth warm pebbles, then shrinking from the
deep weight of cold his hand encountered as he
burrowed under the surface wrist deep... He
pushed in his hands again and deeper, enjoying
the almost hurt of the dark, heavy coldness...
Yet, under all, was this deep mass of cold that
the softness and warmth merely floated upon (ibid).
One may infer in this passage that below Helena's kind and warm
appearance she is sexually frigid and Siegmund achieves pleasure
in this painful discovery.
Then, the narcissist replaces the abstract lover. Siegmund
feels he must purify himself of the 'dirt' he has been playing
wi th:
Siegmund looked at himself with disapproval,
though his body was full of delight and his hands
glad with the touch of himself. He wanted himself
clean... Then he soused himself, and shook his
head in the water, and splashed and rubbed himself
with his hands assiduously. He must feel perfectly
clean and free — fresh, as if he had washed away
all the years of soilure in this morning's sea and
sun and sand. It was the purification (pp.58-9).