RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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other people to love you as well. You do try to
bully them to love you. And even when you don't
want their love.'
His face was full of perplexity.
'Don't I?' he said. 'It's the problem I can't
solve. I know I want a perfect and complete
relationship with you: and we've nearly got it -
we nearly have. But beyond that. Do I want a
final, almost extra-human relationship with him -
a relationship in the ultimate me and him - or
don't I?1 (p.355).
At that time Ursula did not answer him.
Now, after Gerald's
death, and feeling Birkin's distance, Ursula returns to that
suspended question:
'Did you really need Gerald?' she asked.
'No,' he said. 'You are enough for me, as far
as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me.
But I wanted a man-friend, as eternal as you and I
are eternal' (p.472).
Birkin in fact does not really answer Ursula's question.
He
does not say that he needed Gerald, he says he wanted a manfriend
which is quite a different answer.
His 'want' for a manfriend
is ambiguous, as he tries to justify his thirst for a
different love between himself and another man: "'Having you, I
can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer
intimacy.
But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted
eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,' he said"
(ibid). Birkin's answer is viewed by Ursula as 'an obstinacy, a
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theory, a perversity': she cannot believe in this kind of love.
For her there is only one kind of love - that which she devotes
to him.
It seems here that Birkin's obstinacy for another kind
of love is merely an attempt to escape from a relation of
•meeting and mingling' with Ursula because he cannot face it. He
Ursula's disbelief in Birkin's wish for a man-friend might be
accounted for by her frustrated homosexual affair with Winifred
Inqer in The Rainbow. It proved to be a failure. Ursula might
be thinking that if it had been a failure with her, Birkin's
'obstinacy' may also lead him to a frustration.