RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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ultimate choice, Kate is not given any chance to reject him.
Lawrence pushes Kate into Cipriano's arms as if he were saying:
"Here you have everything you deserve".
It is a 'prize' for her
soulful character, which has always thought in terms of a
balanced relation with a man.
Cipriano, Lawrence's new-born
dark male, is the master; Kate must be his servant.
The worst
of all is the idea that Lawrence puts them together and
stresses all the time the couple's strangeness.
The problem
seems to be that even being strangers,
Lawrence forces Kate to
be with this man whom she does not love and who denies her the
right to have sexual pleasure in their intercourse..
Their
marriage is decided because the man, Cipriano, decides it.
The
man -looks as if he had mesmerized Kate (like Henry's dream of
happiness with a mesmerized March) and she feels impotent to
answer him.
He decides everything:
His desire seemed curiously impersonal, physical,
and yet not personal at all. She felt as if for
him, she had some other name, she moved within
another species...
Yet surely, surely he was only putting his
will over her?... he had made her see the
physical possibility of marrying him ... But
surely, surely it would not be herself who could
marry him. It would be some curious female within
her, whom she did not know and did not own...
Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost
repellent. Yet she hated to think that she merely
was afraid: that she had not the courage...
'Well!' he said suddenly. 'When shall it be?'
'What?' she said, glancing up into his black
eyes with real fear.
'The marriage.'
She looked at him, almost hypnotised with
amazement that he would have gone so far. And
even now, she had not the power to make him
retreat.
'I don't know,' she said.
'Will you say in August? On the first of
August?'
'I won't say any time,' she said (pp.259-60).
Although Kate does not answer Cipriano, it is clear that she has
fallen under the man's spell and will not contradict him.
And