RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

110
This self adoration seems, when it comes to the surface of
Siegmund's conscience, to become a kind of sin which must be
cleaned.
However, the attitude he takes in rubbing his body,
touching his flesh, instead of diminishing his sense of sin,
amplifies it because he expands his self-love in the touch.
After Helena actually becomes Siegmund's lover (the night
in which she offers herself as a sacrifice) the idea of their
separateness still persists.
Helena still thinks that love is
better when Siegmund is not near her, touching her.
has her 'purification' after the night of passion.
She also
In bathing in
the sea, she compares her lover with sea: "... the sea was a great
lover, like Siegmund, but more impersonal, who would receive her
when Siegmund could not.
She rejoiced momentarily in the fact"
(p.63).
The momentariness of this joy means that she cannot live
thoroughly in her dreaming world.
He exists and is present near her.
Siegmund is a living creature.
Therefore, she must wake up
and turn to him if only to explore the surroundings of their
island.
I said previously that this couple does not exist for
the outside world.
They exist in their shell, abstracted from
the rest.
Even in relation to one another, they hardly matter.
Each one has his/her own sphere of self-love which seems much
more important than the union of them both.
The moonlight nights which follow their first real sexual
intercourse imply love making.
On one of these nights Helena
seems possessed by strange desires and recites poetry in German.
This is the first of a series of demonic love-scenes in Lawrence
where the moon symbolizes the destructive power of the woman. She
kisses her lover in the throat, like a vampire, leaving him
somehow "afraid of the strange ecstasy she concentrated on him"
(p.73). The moon is up in the sky and the woman lays on Siegmund
as if possessing him and, at the same time, being possessed by