RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

37
spiritual, or aggressive women associated with the sky, (the
logos) who dominate weaker males
who are often associated with
the earth or the blood.
We might call this the period- of the
'femme fatale'.
The second, or the middle pattern, is represented
by Women in Love and the novella "The Fox".
Critics generally
have found in this area the greatest element of balance both in
terms of authorial style and in the relations of the sexes. Yet,
I will argue that there is no true balance in the latter sense,
only a special complexity in the 'one up one down' discriminated
by Daleski (1965).
The third pattern, the late, will be
represented by the novel The Plumed Serpent.
Here, in an attempt
to assert values associated with his 'blood conscious1 father,
Lawrence portrays men as the dominant figures.
Women who show
traits originally associated with Gertrude Morel (the mother)
are shown to submit or are 'sacrificed' to patriarchal authority.
The 'fatal male' dominates this period.
The fourth pattern, the
last one, represents Lawrence's return to 'tenderness'.
In Lady
Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence rejects the problem of power
developed in his leadership phase to return to the peaceful love
between man and woman.
This last phase we will not examine,since
it is only a reformulation of the author's initial phases.
As a final point, the endings of these works will be
compared so as to show the inner division of the author in
presenting the conflict between liberated, critical heroines and
the male ethic asserted by their mates.
This inner division
occurs mainly due to the author's own conflict between his
intention and his feelings.
Conscious, prophetic intention is
contradicted most of the time by the less conscious, artistic
feelings.
The endings of the stories show quite clearly that
the author may have, for instance, intended to make his characters