RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

7
female reader will remember herself that Lawrence, having purged
his blood of murder, would now go on to write Lady Chatterley"
(ibid).
Mailer continues destroying his rival critic saying
that Millet is interested in hiding the dialectic in which
authors progress.
He adds that what Millet wants is "to distort
the complexity of [Lawrence's] brains into snarling maxims, take
him at his worst and make him even worse..." (ibid). Millet, he
says, belongs to a 'literary mafia' who "works always for points
and the shading of points.
If she can't steal a full point,
she'll cop a half" (ibid).
A good example which supports Mailer's above argument
is Millet's analysis of Sons and Lovers.
She evaluates the
mother and the father according to a criterion which favors her
interests in defending women against men.
According to Millet
Mrs Morel "is a woman tied by poverty to a man she despises,
'done out of her sights' as a human being" (p.247).
The mother,
Millet says, is
compelled, despite her education and earlier
aspirations, to accept the tedium of poverty
and child bearing in cohabitation with a man
for whom she no longer feels any sympathy and
whose alcoholic brutality repels and enslaves
her (ibid) .
In Millet's analysis everything favors the mother against the
drunkard father.
What fails in her analysis is the fact that
she presents all possible arguments to evoke in the reader a
feeling of hatred against the man but she intentionally does not
present the reasons why the father started to drink and mistreat
the mother.
Millet, as Mailer claims, is an oportunist. I agree
with Mailer's notion that Millet has 'malignant literary habits’
which show little and ignore too much so as to steal the verdict.
Millet also thinks that Mrs Morel is not a possessive