RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

112
She does not even notice that Siegmund is feeling sick.
For her
the world is resumed in her self-sufficiency which has been
entirely restored after she has 'predominated1 under the
moonlight.
Siegmund, on the other hand, is sick within himself,
as if he had lost his soul to the moon through Helena.
He feels
lost twice. First, he and Helena have lost the trail. He feels
insecure and leaves his lover to find the way home.
He simply
follows her like a little child follows his strong mother who
always knows the best way to go.
Finally, he feels lost within
himself and seems to go into a strong crisis which leads him to
question his situation with Helena.
Siegmund feels as if he had
dissolved within the limits of his soul.
The trouble is that he
is not aware that the woman is causing him to feel like this. She
is the male in the relation: the one who is active and directs
the intercourse.
What is left for him is a deep sensation of
almost disintegration.
His role becomes the one of the passive
female. This is perhaps why he diagnoses his sickness as follows:
‘Surely,' he told himself, *1 have drunk life too
hot, and it has hurt my cup. My soul seems to leak
out — I am half here, half gone away...1
Then be came to the hour of Helena's strange
ecstasy over him. That, somehow, had filled him
with passionate grief. It was happiness
concentrated one drop too keen, so that what
should have been vivid wine was like a pure poison
scathing him (p.77).
Notice here that Helena is the one who has 'strange ecstasy' which
'fills him' with passionate grief.
Is this, the female role in a
sexual intercourse? Siegmund is transformed into a 'cup' which
is the container of passion. There is also the sensation
of guilt for the sexual act since he feels hurt by what is
supposed to give him pleasure.
Instead, it becomes like 'pure
poison scathing him'.
Helena is the castrating woman hurting
him. This thought makes Siegmund unconsciously condemn the
relation.
Not because it is adulterous but because he feels hurt
for being an agent of sin (the sexual relation may have, this