RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

15 9
"Why must she start the journey? She stood safely on the
Pisgah mountain" (p.195). Soon she is with child again. Each
of the nine pregnancies takes the woman to fulfilment.
The
older child is left behind.
The new one takes all the mother's
love.
She feels the power of the future in her hands:
All the future rang to her out of the sound of the
baby's crying and cooing, she balanced the coming
years of life in her hands, as she nursed the child.
The passionate sense of fulfilment, of the future
germinated in her, in the hands of the woman. And
before this baby was ten month's old, she was again
with child. She seemed to be in the storm of
fecund life, every moment was full and busy with
productiveness to her. She felt like the earth,
the mother of everything (pp.207-8).
In fact Anna has gone through a personality change.
From being
sceptical, mental and indifferent she has become the Magna Mater
- unconscious, unconcerned with ideas.
Will at this stage of his life is completely annulled.
Anna has played with his feelings, his inner beliefs; she has
destroyed his faith in the absolute beauty of the church.
She
has reduced him to a breeder and a 'housewife'.
All his
creativeness is dead.
He no longer thinks or walks by himself.
He has asserted himself as a parasite, a predatory creature who
has nothing to offer to the world, except to give his semen to
Anna.
One of the most depressing views of the destruction of
Will's faith is reported in the chapter "Cathedral" in which Anna
mocks at everything he says.
When Will enters the cathedral his
ecstasy strikes Anna as absurd.
Will refers to the church as
'she'.
This irritates Anna because she sees the church as a
thing, not as a human being.
Her husband's ecstasy is almost
like being born out of the womb of the great mother, the
absolute owner of creation: the church.
For him 'she' contains