RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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prepares the path to the other.
As time goes by the search
becomes more difficult.
It is as if one generation had opened
a final door to the next but the door is never really the last
one.
It is just one door followed by an infinity of other doors
so that the search does not seem to finish, even in the third
generation where the story ends.
It is characteristic of the Brangwen family that the men
and women face life differently.
The Brangwen men have their
sights turned to the earth.
They are men linked with the
unconscious. We can say that they are somehow conformists ...
because they do not question life.
Life is what it is and they
do not manage to change it.
They are lovers of the land and
take from it what it can offer them.
They do not look for more
than they deserve:
It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved
and opened its furrows to them, that the wind blew
to dry the wet wheat and set the young ears of corn
wheeling freshly round about; it was enough that
they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats
from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit
with a sharp knock of the hand. So much warmth and
generating and pain and death did they know in their
blood, earth and sky and beasts and green plants, so
much exchange and interchange they had with these,
that they lived full and surcharged, their senses
full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of
the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking
towards the source of generation, unable to turn
round (pp.8-9).
Nature and the Brangwen men live in perfect communion.
The
women, however, are completely different.
Whereas men are
'inward-facing', women are 'outward-facing'.
They are not
conformists.
For them the 'blood-intimacy' either with their
men or with nature is not enough.
They look "to the spoken world
beyond" and want "to enlarge their own scopes and range and
freedom".
They want to take from the world more than simple
communion with the earth.
Therefore, it seems that they are