RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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In their 'peace'Birkin and Ursula discover strange and
secret sources of pleasure in themselves. These sources give
them the 'dark knowledge' of each other.
It starts with Ursula,
who seems to have finally found the 'son of God' she has
searched for throughout her life in The Rainbow, discovering
Birkin's body with her 'finger-tips':
Unconsciously, with her sensitive finger-tips,
she was tracing the back of his thighs, following
some mysterious life-flow there. She has
discovered something, something more than
wonderful, more wonderful than life itself. It
was the strange mystery of his life motion, there
at the back of the thighs, down the flanks... It
was here that she discovered him one of the sons
of God such as were in the beginning of the world,
not a man, something other, something more (p.305).
Needless to say this is completely contradictory: first she
denounces Birkin's "corruption", then a minute later she seems
to embrace it.
This strange and mysterious discovery is
described by Pritchard (1971) as the culminating moment in the
novel:
Ursula makes one last violent denunciation of
[Birkin's] 'perversity', particularly as
associated with Hermione, where sensuality was
solely perverse. Having purged the sensual
body of that unnaturalness, she is ready to
accept him, to pluck the jewel of individual
being from the muddy flux. Her embrace of
Birkin is a culminating moment in the novel.
Kneeling before him, like Lydia before Tom
Brangwen, she puts her hands round his buttocks,
sensing his anus, 'the dark river of corruption',
'the real reality' (pp.100-1).
One may add to Pritchard's interpretation that this 'dark
knowledge' with Ursula kneeling before Birkin is a symptom of
her apparent submission to the man.
And that this knowledge is
also mutual because Birkin also takes his 'dark knowledge' of
Ursula.
They both meet in the new discovery which is far better
than the phallic touch as Ursula realizes.
The phallus thus
becomes, one may say, obsolete.
It has been replaced by the