RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

ut he "never loved his own son as he loved his step child
Anna" (p.82).
A reasonable idea to explain this may be that
Anna, the step-daughter, belongs exclusively to the foreign
Lydia.
Anna is the embodiement of the external unknown world
Tom wants to meet.
His own son, on the other hand, belongs
both to him and his wife.
The child has both components of
foreignness of the mother and Englishness of the father.
The
child, therefore, is much more important to the mother because
it was born of Tom's seed and has his English blood*
Lydia
becomes "now really English, really Mrs Brangwen" (ibid).
Lydia, after giving birth, returns to Tom again.
But for
him her return is brief.
He is sure that she is all he wants
from life but somehow there is still something missing.
Tom
thinks that the reason may be that "She could only want him in
her own way, and to her own measure" (p.83).
And he rebels,
although he knows that "he must control himself, measure himself
to her" (ibid).
While they do not meet, Tom clings to Anna, doing
everything she wants him to do. Besides, he tries to search for
another source of living.
In his search, he unconsciously takes
an apparently wrong path: he meets another woman on the excuse
that he can transform his Anna into a lady, but, in fact, it seems
that he wants to have an extra-marital affair like his brother
Alfred did:
His brother Alfred, in Nottingham, had caused a
great.scandal by becoming the lover of an educated
woman, a lady, widow of a doctor.
Tom Brangwen was so curious about the woman that
the next time he was in .Wirksworth he asked for
her house (pp.89-90).
As in the beginning, Tom is attracted to sophisticated, outerdirected
women: at first it was Lydia, then the mistress of
Alfred.
Tom goes to the lady's house but he gives up the idea