RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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destruction in herself.
She looks for help in her lover but he
is too distant from the image of him she has dreamed:
She suffered the agony of disillusion. Was this
the real Siegmund, and her own projection of her
soul? She took her breath sharply. Was he the
real clay, and that other, her beloved, only the
breathing of her soul upon this. There was an
awful blank before her (p.100).
Helena will continue destroying because she is unable to unite
what is real and what she dreams.
The real Siegmund is miles
away from her mind: "The secret thud, thud of his heart, the
very self of that animal in him she feared and hated, repulsed
her. She struggled to escape" (ibid).
The way Lawrence describes
this passage lacks the skillful hand of the late writer. He is too
melodramatic in his presentation of Helena's feelings. He
expresses her tragic conflict as if he wanted to pluck out the
reader's heart.
However, all he achieves is the boredom of an
adolescent magazine one reads just for the sake of reading
something:
She began to sob, dry wild sobs, feeling as if
she would go mad. He tried to look at her face,
for which she hated him. And all the time he held
her fast, all the time she was imprisoned in the
embrace or this brute, blind creature, whose heart
confessed itself in the thud, thud, thud (ibid).
Siegmund asks her what is going on, and seems generally dumbfounded.
Then he wants to die, unable to do anything to save his beloved *
from her oppressive sobs. After all this conflict Siegmund
detaches his soul from his real being and realizes more sharply
the fault they are committing against life.
He accepts his
damnation:
'My fate is finely wrought out,' he thought
to himself. 'Even damnation may be finely
imagined for me in the night. I have come so
far. Now I must get clarity and courage to
follow out the theme. I don't want to botch and
bungle even damnation'... Staring in the darkness,
he seemed to feel his course, though he could