RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

139
day and night, absorbedly, of a voluptuous
woman and of the meeting with a small, withered
foreigner of ancient breeding. No sooner was his
mind free, no sooner had he left his own
companions, than he began to imagine an intimacy
with a fine-textured, subtle-mannered people such
as the foreigner at Matlock, and amidst this
subtle intimacy was always the satisfaction of a
voluptuous woman (ibid).
The foreigner and his companion bring to Tom the
desire to
search for the unknown.
The unknown meaning a new life
different from the one of his ancestors.
The life of the land
is already part of his consciousness.
He needs, therefore, to
search for what is hidden in the unconscious.
The unknown
presumes newness, a new world which is far away from the ordinary
life of the Brangwens.
craving for marriage.
It is in this mood that Tom starts
Not the ordinary marriages of his family,
but one with a 'voluptuous' woman coming from the outside. As he
cannot go and search for her, she comes to him.
This woman is Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow who arrives at
Cossethay with her three-year-old daughter.
When Tom first sees
her he says involuntarily "'That's her"1 (p.29). This 'that's
her' is all he has been dreaming.
He knows unconsciously that
the woman is his link with the unknown. She is his fate. He
did not have to search outside anymore.
She has come directly
from the outside world to meet him and to make the decisive union
between Tom's two realities: nature and the unknown beyond.
That
is why he "felt that here was the unreality established at last.
He felt also a curious certainty about her, as if she were
destined to him.
It was to him a profound satisfaction that she
was a foreigner" (p.32).
Thus, without exercising his mind much
he decides he must marry her. There is no escape for him. The
old Tom must die to be reborn through the womb of the foreign
woman.
This is the strong feeling Lawrence shows us the night