RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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be a complete human being in the man's world, she has to go
through several disillusionments.
The man's world includes
ordeals that Ursula was not used to facing before. Winifred
Inger is one of these disillusionments.
Her meeting with this woman may be seen as, first of all,
Ursula's search for a model to follow in life.
Winifred is
described,in Ursula's viewpoint, as a woman who has won her
independence. •Thus, Ursula seems to take her as her model.
Second, on the surface of the attraction Ursula feels for her
schoolteacher, there is a crisis of identity which implies
Ursula's latent tendency for homosexuality.
One may say that
this tendency has been present in Ursula's character since she
started her affair with Skrebensky.
Two important scenes recall
this feature of her character.
The fixst one, already mentioned,
refers to the first love scene between Ursula and Skrebensky in
which each one exerts his/her 'maximum' self against the other
to prove his/her male/female power.
The other scene occurs in
the moonlight night in which Ursula 'destroys' her lover and in
which she seems to be making love to herself through the moon.
When she meets Winifred her homosexuality is awakened at once,
and the women have an affair.
It is the projection of Ursula's
self-love onto the female image she finds in the older and
independent woman.
Another important aspect of the women's affair lies in the
fact that Winifred, older than the adolescent Ursula, brings her
a view of the outside world.
This view is no longer the craving
for the 'unknown' Ursula wants to meet.
Winifred opens a view
of the dirty side of society, the putrified side of human beings
which is implied in the schoolteacher's past experiences: the
friend who died in childbirth, the prostitute and her own