RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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And the next day, Gerald follows her like a shadow.
They both
think of quitting, but it is Gerald who seems to have no option
in life apart from this exploitative relation:
'I can be free of her,' he said to himself
in paroxysms of suffering...
'Where shall I go?'...
'Can you be self-sufficient?'...
'Self-sufficient'' he repeated... (p.436).
Gerald in fact has no way out in his inner conflict.
That old
'bubble of darkness' is returning to him ready to pop out of his
eyes. He must stick to Gudrun. Or he must destroy her to be
free of her.
Besides this battle Loerke intermediates their
relation.
He is always there, haunting Gudrun, stimulating her
to come and join him.
Gerald realizes this sordid alliance and
he and Gudrun fight: "She was afraid of Gerald, that he might
kill her. But she did not intend to be killed" (p.443). It is
a battle of wills, violence, perverse love-making in which they
exchange their sado-masochistic roles.
They finally break off
the affair, but they still have a strong connection with each
other.
Gudrun feels her thoughts crowded with a tic-tac beating
that resembles the night Gerald's father died.
After having sex
with Gerald, Gudrun feels as if she were becoming a machine. She
feels that "Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne,
turning not into a tree but a machine" (p.108).
In the Alps,
during her conflict, she feels that
Indeed, she was like a little, twelve-hour clock,
vis-a-vis with the enormous clock of eternity -
there she was, like Dignity and Impudence, or
Impudence and Dignity... She would have got up
to look in the mirror, but the thought of the
sight of her own face, that was like a twelve-hour
clock dial, filled her with such deep terror,that
she hastened to think of something else (p.457).
The problem with Gudrun is that she feels she has not a creative
life and to realize this is to assert to herself that she is