RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

175
It may be fair here to draw a parallel between Ursula and
her mother.
Anna has annihilated Will when she danced naked and
pregnant (with Ursula!) as a way to assert herself over her
husband. All her dance was a conscious process. She wanted to
destroy Will.
Ursula, in her communion with the moon and her
subsequent 'kiss of destruction' in her lover, is not at all
conscious.
Everything happens in the sphere of unconsciousness.
It is the unconscious power of self-assertion that makes her
destroy her man.
Hence, she feels guilty for What she has been
during the destruction: "Where Was she?... Had she been mad:
what horrible thing possessed her? She was filled with
overpowering fear of herself..." (ibid).
Anna, on the Other
hand, feels no guilt.
Thus, in this scene Ursula seals her
destiny: Skrebensky is no man for her.
A man like him can never
walk side by side with her.
For some time they are separate: he
goes to the Boer War in South Africa and Ursula proceeds to
close one of the several doors of her quest.
Her next door is
the affair with Winifred Inger.
By the time Ursula is to meet Winifred Inger, her
schoolteacher, she is already dissatisfied with her inner life.
Her main conflict is over the difficulty in becoming something
in life.
This 'something' does not refer to personal fulfilment
in terms of marriage as it has always been in her family.
Her
inner self demands a bigger quest.
It is the quest of a highest
form of being.
The old self of her previous generations no
longer matches with her own.
She wants more than mere satisfaction
of her female being.
She craves for independence and in order
to achieve this she must adventure into the world of studies so
that later on she can attempt to find a space in the man's world.
What she seems not aware of is that for her to get 'there', to