RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

379
the earth but with ice-destruction.
His feelings are not
creative. They would rather destroy. Henry in "The Fox" is the
one who most approximates the dark lover because he is almost
exclusively a man of body, who smells like an animal and who is
emotionally dependent on an older woman. Thus, Lawrence's second
phase shows the decay of the soulful woman and the ascendence of
the dark male, although it is counterbalanced by the woman's
still powerful and questioning mind.
In Lawrence's third phase
represented by The Plumed Serpent there is a complete reversal
of the woman's importance as the strongest element in the
relation.
Here, the dark male replaces her and has his most
important function: to defeat the soulful woman.Cipriano is the
Pan-god, the dark lover, the potent 'macho',
who defeats Kate
mainly in terms of her sexuality.
The soulful woman is seen as
denying her previous assertive and independent self to submit
and be sacrificed to the power of her dark lover.
However, this
phase is one of Lawrence's most controversial since his male
hero is seen in inferior terms.
He is the executioner, the
sadist and he cannot be placed as the real and superior being
who is seen in the character of Ramon, the soulful man.
The
heroine is also in a doubtful position since Kate questions her
two selves: it is a conflict between the old independent self and
the new submissive self.
There is no real 'ascendence' of the
male, as there was for the woman in Lawrence's early phase. But,
in fact, in all these stories there is a progressive shift of
sympathy from mother to father, especially in the case of The
Plumed Serpent because the dark male is not overtly criticized
except in the unconscious of the author who still puts him as an
inferior being, as I have just said.
Critics generally agree that Lawrence's second phase is