RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

23
kind of bridge for her search.
However, he fails her because he
is weak and can give Ursula nothing.
She discovers this in a
moonlight night in which Skrebensky "is called on to produce a
'man-being' to match the 'woman-being' of Ursula, a sun rival to
her moon" (p.112).
But, as the critic points out, Skrebensky is
'annihilated' because" he has no genuine male self to oppose to
her; he is no sun but a 'shadow', a 'darkness' which the
moonlight destroys" (ibid).
Ursula then has a lesbian affair with her school-teacher
Winifred Inger.
This affair, Daleski says, means Ursula's
"unconscious retreat to a 'minimum' self after her frightening
expansion with Skrebensky" (p.113).
The affair also fails
because of the 'perverted life of the elder woman', and Ursula
"escapes from her by contriving to marry her off to her uncle,
Tom Brangwen, to whom, in his 'own dark corruption', Winifred is
akin" (ibid).
The impressive thing about the analysis in The
Rainbow is that it links the psychological (i.e., the growth of
the Oedipus Complex and its complications, such as homosexuality)
to social developments in industrial technology.
One kind of
mechanism produces another.
The end of the novel in Dalesky's view is as follows:
Ursula's painful approach to a consumated self is
convincingly established, and the rainbow, we see
is a fitting emblem of her personal achievement.
What must be adjudged a weakness in the book,
however, is the form given to her vision of the
rainbow; being made new herself, it is her facile
assumption that she will find the world changed
to measure... As F.R. Leavis has remarked, this
'confident note of prophetic hope' is 'wholly
unprepared [for] and unsupported, defying the
preceding pages' (p.125).
Here, once more, Daleski proves to be a skillful reader because
he has grasped the flaw in the end of the book.
Such a flaw is