RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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because he thinks that people, humanity as a whole, have become
rotten.
The only way to free himself from this rottenness is
to be in a close contact with nature.
and sits down trying to purify himself.
He takes off his clothes
The interesting thing
in this communion is that nature also hurts Birkin and he,
instead of feeling hurt, thinks that the sharp-needles of the
bough touching him are better than the touch of any woman.
Of
course, in his mind, Hermione is the model for any other woman
he may meet in his life.
His experience with her has been too
harsh to be forgotten so soon.
After his 'purification* he becomes sick.
It is as if
Hermione has passed to his body a kind of low energy which
diminishes his strength.
When he recovers he sticks to his
hatred for humanity and it is Ursula who becomes his impertinent
critic.
She sees in Birkin someone whom one cannot trust, but
she feels impelled towards him perhaps because he represents for
her everything her previous experiences in love, mainly
Skrebensky, have failed to represent.
Birkin's theory of a new social and emotional order does
not comprise love in the ordinary sense.
In fact he denies the
old way of praising love.
What he wants is something different,
something 'beyond* the commonplace old-fashioned way of love.
And he sees two alternatives:
either to find an equilibrium
with a woman, which he calls a relation of 'star-polarity', or a
relation of friendship with a man, which he defines as
Blutbrttderscha:ft and which is in fact a disguise for homosexuality.
These two kinds of relation are proposed to Ursula and Gerald
respectively.
And as they occur at the same time, it is useful
here to define them gradually, one and another, chiefly because
one is seen as an alternative to the other (or as additional).