RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

309
line.
On this side there was youth and spontaneity and
"happiness".
On the other side something different: reserve,
responsibility, a certain standing back from "fun" (p.50).
For
Kate, she has lived half a life, a "bright page with its flowers
and its love" which ended with the death of her second husband
Joachim.
The future for her is a new page and it seems that her
prospects are not good because she feels the future as a 'dark
page'.
The point is perhaps her fear of Mexico and the sense of
doom it evokes in her.
It is as if she were on a "high plateau
of death".
Her conflict derives from this sensation of doom,
and from having to decide whether to stay or to go away from
Mexico.
She knows that somehow she wants a new self because her
old one lies behind her in Europe, associated with her dead
husband:
Joachim Leslie, her dead husband, she had loved
as much as a woman can love a man: that is, to the
bounds of human love. Then she had realised that
human love has its limits, that there is a beyond.
And Joachim dead, willy nilly her spirit had passed
the bounds. She was no longer in love with love.
She no longer yearned for the love of a man, or the
love even of her children. Joachim had gone into
eternity in death, and she had crossed with him a
certain eternity in life. There, the yearning for
companionship and sympathy and human love had left
her (pp.61-2).
Kate apparently knows that she does not want 'human love' or
'companionship'.
This she has already shared with Joachim. Now
she wants other feelings to fulfil her inner yearnings: "the
flower of her soul was opening" (p.62).
One may think that what
she indeed wants is a communion of her soul with another soul
for "she must preserve herself from worldly contacts" (ibid). If
Kate is really eager to 'open her soul', one wonders again why
she has submitted herself to the dark male in Cipriano who has
no connection with soul.
Everything about him refers to his body