RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

5
The views of these above mentioned critics relate to the
novels referred to in the St&teirent of Purpose.
I have tried to
select the ideas which seem to ire to be a support to my topic and
the ones which seem to me to be not faithful to Lawrence's texts.
Kate Millet (1971) and Norman Mailer (1971) form a pair of
critics whose ideas are completely opposed.
In their analysis
of Lawrence they present a radical view of his novels.
Millet
is the one who thinks that Lawrence is a male chauvinist whose
sexuality expresses the idea that "sex is for the man" (p.240).
She thinks that Lawrence is an astute politician in relation to
the sexual revolution.
Lawrence, according to Millet, saw two
possibilities in terms of sexual revolution:
it would grant women an autonomy and independence
he feared and hated, or it could be manipulated to
create a new order of dependence and subordination,
another form of compliance to masculine direction
and prerogative (p.241).
Millet adds to this idea that the Freudian school has promulgated
a doctrine in which feminine fulfilment means "'receptive'
passivity", and orgasm comes only through the vagina. Lawrence,
says Millet, if aware of these notions would use them "for the
perfect subjection of women" (ibid).
However, I do not think
that this is true in Lawrence. Sex for him has another .
connotation.
Mailer, despite his chauvinist thoughts, has an
idea approximate to my own.
He criticizes Millet saying that
she
will accuse lLawrence] endlessly of patriarchal
male-dominated sex. But the domination of men
over women was only a way station on the line of
Lawrence's ideas — What he started to say early
and ended saying late was that sex could heal,
all other medicines were part of the lungscarring
smoke of factories and healed nothing,
were poison, but sex could heal only when one
was without "reserves or defenses" (p.107).