RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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Clara.
The idea is that through Paul's impressions about the
woman, the mother seems to guess that what her son is looking
for in Clara is totally different from what he was looking for
in Miriam-Clara does not belong to the 'deep sort' type.
She is
perhaps like Gypsy, though Clara has more brains than that. Clara
is simply a woman to whom her son may have a love affair without
any serious consequence.
That is why she does not fear Clara as
she fears Miriam.
Paul begins to meet Clara for a while.
But Miriam still
intermediates between them.
Paul has different tones for the two
women:
Miriam did not satisfy him. His old mad desire to
be with her grew weaker. Sometimes he met Clara in
Nottingham, sometimes he went to meetings with her,
sometimes he saw her at Willey Farm. But on these
last occasions the situation became strained. There
was a triangle of antagonism between Paul and Clara
and Miriam. With Clara he took on a smart, worldly,
mocking tone very antagonistic to Miriam. It did
not matter what went before. She might be intimate
and sit with him. Then as soon as Clara appeared,
it all vanished, and he played to the newcomer (p.
305) .
It seems clear that the antagonism between the three people refers
to Paul's split consciousness: Clara stands for the appeal to the
body and Miriam's appeal is the mind. Yet Paul is still a virgin.
Clara awakens in him the desire for sex.
That is the point of
Paul and Miriam's breaking up:
This was the end of the first phase of Paul's love
affair. He was now about twenty-three years old,
and, though still virgin, the sex instinct that
Miriam had over-refined for so long now grew
particularly strong. Often, as he talked to Clara
Dawes, came that thickening quickening of his
blood, that peculiar concentration in his breast,
as if something were alive there, a new self or a
new centre of consciousness, warning him that
sooner or later, he would have to ask one woman or
another. But he belonged to Miriam. Of that she
was so fixedly sure that he allowed her right (pp.
308-9).