RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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other kind of intimacy save for the meeting of the flesh.
The
marriage has only advantages for the male because he is in a
superior position.
He comes from heaven, Kate from the
underworld, since she is the earth.
Cipriano puts his hand on
the earth which implies his strength against the passive and
receptive 'earth.
The submissive and powerless wife kneels and
kisses 'the feet and heels' of the almighty husband which
implies her blind obedience (and inferiority) to him.
Again
Cipriano's superior position stresses his authority and
protectiveness when he only kisses her 'brow and breast'.
In
this marriage Kate is giving up all her rights as a female to
the dark powerful male.
However, this marriage is only
thoroughly complete when Kate and Cipriano have sex and he
denies her her sexual satisfaction:
[Kate] realised, almost with wonder, the death
in her of the Aphrodite of the foam. By a swift
dark instinct, Cipriano drew away from this In
her. When, in their love, it came back on her,
the seething electric female ecstasy, which knows
such spasms of delirium, he recoiled from her. It
was what she used to call her "satisfaction". She
had loved Joachim for this, that again, and again,
he could give her this orgiastic "satisfaction",
in spasms that made her cry aloucL
But Cipriano would not. By a dark and powerful
instinct he drew away from her as soon as this
desire rose again in her, for the white ecstasy of
frictional satisfaction, the throes of Aphrodite
of the foam. She could see that to him, it was
repulsive. He just removed himself, dark and
unchangeable, away from her (p.463 - My
underlining).
Cipriano is the sadistic male who, as Kate Millet points out,
only feels complete in this denial of Kate's orgasm.
Lawrence
has put the female under the worst conditions of submission and,
furthermore, he makes her become a masochist accepting this
violation of her potential as a female. Kate is forced to realize
that "when this sort of "satisfaction" was denied her, came the
knowledge that she did not really want it, that it was really