RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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which no one can escape from.
He feels uneasy facing the icy
cold mountains.
separateness.
His uneasiness is strengthened by Gudrun1s
This makes him feel more isolated and eager to
destroy her because of her cold awareness of him: "He would
rather destroy her than be destroyed" (p.392).
When Loerke
appears, the eagerness for violence between the couple seems to
grow and Gudrun more than ever needs to feel free.
She also
feels a deep assurance within herself that she must
combat him. One of them must triumph over the
other. Which should it be? Her soul steeled
itself with strength. Almost she laughed within
herself, at her confidence. It woke a certain
keen, half contemptuous pity, tenderness for
him: she was so ruthless (p.403).
Her confidence may perhaps be due to the fact that she
unconsciously has found an ally in Loerke.
Gerald must then be
replaced by a more powerful symbol of depravity.
A fearful
battle between the lovers begins only to end with the defeat of
the weakest.
not feel weak.
As the above quotation shows, Gudrun certainly does
But Gerald also does not feel he is about to
lose any battle.
He will fight till death to prove he is the
strongest.
There is a whole set of violent love scenes between
the two in which Gerald is sometimes a passive lover and Gudrun
is the active one or Gerald is domineering and she is submissive:
or
She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph
of pity. And her pity for him was as cold as
cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of
him, and fear of his power over her, which she
must always counterfoil (p.434).
She was as if crushed, powerless in him. His
brain seemed hard and invincible nowllike a
jewel, there was no resisting him.
His passion was awful to her, tense and
ghastly, and impersonal, like a destruction,
ultimate. She felt it would kill her. She
was being killed (p.435).