RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

Ursula:
'... I think that a new world is a development
from this world, and to isolate oneself with one
other person, isn't to find a new world at all,
but only to secure oneself in one's illusions'
(p. 428) .
After the accident with Gerald's sister, Ursula is
passionately in love with Birkin, but as time goes by, the
passion seems to enter into a kind of disillusionment and she
starts to deny Birkin.
She feels depressed and Lawrence almost
suggests suicide as a way to escape from this state of mind.
But Ursula does not want suicide: the problem with her is that
she is lost in her own ideas.
She does not know where to go and
how to go.
As her mind is sick, her body becomes the instrument
of her sickness.
When Birkin comes to see her on a Sunday
evening, Ursula rejects him.
She feels a horrible repulsion and
hatred against the man. Unable to cope with this low energy
Ursula passes to him, Birkin gets sick too.
And here he turns
to Gerald.
It is now that his mind seems perverse in relation
to the idea of sex.
Birkin becomes the prophet of celibacy
because in sex he could not find satisfaction.
This is what
Lawrence tells us:
On the whole, [Birkin] hated sex, it was such
a limitation. It was sex.that turned a man into
a broken half of a couple, the woman into the
other broken half. And he wanted to be single
in himself, the woman single in herself. He
wanted sex to revert the level of the other
appetites, to be regarded as a functional
process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in
sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a
further conjunction, where man had being and
woman had being, two pure beings, each
constituting the freedom of the other, balancing
each other like two poles of one force, like two
angels, or two demons (p.191).
Although the idea of 'balance' recurs to Birkin's (or to
Lawrence's) mind, this is not what he really wants.
This above