RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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to 'create' anything but to deny creativity as a whole.
This
is perhaps why they do not use their minds, only their bodies
as a way to obstruct real creation.
Thinking is too much. They
would rather stick to their partners in mutual sexual
perversities, as in Halliday and Minette1s case.
What seems
worth noticing is that in spite of their destructive
» characteristics, they keep on having sex and, through Minette,
proliferating their nasty vices to the future generations. That
seems why Lawrence has made Minette pregnant in the story. Thus,
she resembles one of Halliday's African carvings: "[a] carved
figure of the savage woman in labour.
Her nude, protuberant
body crouched in a strange, clutching posture, her hands
gripping the ends of the band, above her breast" (p.71). Gerald
sees an analogy to Minette in the carving: it has struck.him
this way due to its physical appeal, its "terrible face, void,
peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of
sensation in it" (ibid).
The carving although showing the woman
in childbirth posture, seems not to be a creative thing but a
"meaningless" thing.
Gerald apparently finds it 'obscene': he
is a puritan who condemns what attracts him, and refuses to know
it further. Birkin, on the other hand, finds it 'art'. These
opposite reactions may imply that Gerald unconsciously
identifies his 'bubble'-like personality with that of Minette
and the carving. Birkin, however, thinks of the carving as
art because it represents in his mind the idea of 'blood-
consciousness'.
complete truth.
That is why he thinks of it as conveying a
It is the culture of the senses: "'Pure culture
in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really
ultimate physical
consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual.
It is as to be final,supreme'" (p.72).
Such an affirmation of