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RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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27<br />

a position Lawrence could not defend "neither as thinker or as<br />

artist" (p.256).<br />

This is what made him return to the pacific<br />

love between man and woman as represented by Lady Chatterley's<br />

Lover, his final novel.<br />

Within three years Lawrence's attitude<br />

towards The Plumed Serpent was one of dislike because he could<br />

not believe in the leader of men whom he now saw as "a back<br />

number", as he told in a letter to Witter Bynner in March 1928.<br />

Lawrence could not believe in a successful relationship between<br />

the strong male and the submissive female.<br />

Thus, Lady Chatterley<br />

attempts to be (as Millet pointed out) Lawrence's 'peace with the<br />

female'.<br />

Conflict in Lawrence's novels, as Daleski sees it, can be<br />

defined in terms of his duality, of the opposition of the female<br />

and male principles.<br />

This duality leads to a permanent struggle<br />

for domination between the couples.<br />

Pritchard's analysis of Lawrence does not differ in the<br />

long run from Daleski's.<br />

It would be merely repetitive to state<br />

all his ideas here, since the main topics have already been<br />

discussed.<br />

Hence, I have chosen just a few passages in which<br />

Pritchard's ideas do not match with those presented by other<br />

critics, especially by Daleski.<br />

The passages I have chosen<br />

relate strictly to the sexual tones of Lawrence's main novels.<br />

The critic sees Paul Morel's conflict in love in the light<br />

of Freud's essay "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in<br />

Erotic Life".<br />

Pritchard says that in this essay<br />

Freud discusses, what he terms 'psychical<br />

impotence', the inability to achieve satisfaction<br />

in normal heterosexual relations, which he claims<br />

is caused by the son's early fixation of desire<br />

on the mother (p.33).<br />

Therefore, Paul's inability to love Miriam and Clara is due to

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