RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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general.
And furthermore, if Kate is fully convinced that she
must submit to the dark male, why does she avoid his eyes? Poor
Lawrence, although he has tried hard to convince Kate (and us)
of Cipriano's giant sensuality and authority, he cannot help
showing his own lack of belief in what he is doing.
Kate
submits to Cipriano and, with her eyes closed, she sees instead
of her husband, the man she loves: and this man is Ramon.
I said that the bloodbrotherhood theme of Women in Love is
developed with some success in The Plumed Serpent.
It is
prominent in the ritual of Cipriano's initiation as the God
Huitzilopochtli. Ramon is the initiator. Before this ritual is
celebrated there are, as I have pointed out, several suggestions
that only between men it is possible to achieve a perfect
communion.
This idea is worked out throughout the book in terms
of Ramon and Cipriano's attraction towards each other.
More than
simple friendship, the idea of this attraction is essentially
homosexual.
Through these two men Lawrence divides soul and
body.
Ramon is the thinker, the priest of ideas, the soulful
bird of Quetzalcoatl.
Cipriano is the bloody general, small in
stature and in mind, he is the snake,
attached to the earth, to
the sensuous underworld.
It is in the meeting and mingling of
the bird with the snake that Lawrence wants to achieve the
perfect union between soul and body.
The Plumed Serpent enacts
through Ramon and Cipriano the theme of the perfect marriage of
opposites.
Bird and snake are the symbols of the
bloodbrotherhood.
The strange thing is that if it is a marriage
of 'opposites' why does Lawrence conceive it in the soul and
body of two men? The problem is that Ramon, as the soul, seems
to be a 'pacifist' and Cipriano, as the body, is a sadist as
seen in the human sacrifices he performs and in his sexual