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RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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36<br />

struggle for domination between the couples in the author's early,<br />

middle and late works.<br />

I am going to concentrate this analysis in the following<br />

way:<br />

a. To show how the pattern of conflict varies and extends<br />

prototypes found in the autobiographical novel Sons and<br />

Lovers;<br />

b. to show if this fiction of successive phases reveals<br />

shifts in the author's sympathy towards his mother or<br />

his father;<br />

c. to show that such shifts of sympathy or identification<br />

occur in individual works, where they characteristically<br />

are reflected in X-shaped plots and the pattern of<br />

characters exchanging roles in respect to dominance and<br />

submission.<br />

The line I intend to follow is an independent form of<br />

contextual criticism.<br />

Priority will be given to the text in an<br />

attempt to avoid theoretical preconceptions (including those of<br />

the author himself).<br />

I will examine plot structure,<br />

characterization, imagery, authorial comment — in short, all<br />

those areas that cast light on the problem of conflict defined<br />

above.<br />

Works will be examined both in terms of their individual<br />

integrity and in terms of the way they fit into the opus as a<br />

whole and reflect the author's total evolution.<br />

The works examined in this dissertation will be drawn from<br />

the commonly discriminated phases in Lawrence's works.<br />

The<br />

first one, the early pattern, covers his first phase, and The<br />

Trespasser, Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow are the most<br />

representative of. this part.<br />

In them there is a tendency to<br />

present women as the strongest characters.<br />

They are maternal,

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