RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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fit his own personality.
More must be said about Lawrence's 'intentions' because
they reflect what he is, or what he is not. In the just quoted
essay his ideas about morality contradict his authoritarian
attitudes when he wrote The Plumed Serpent.
Lawrence argues that
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability
of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in
the scale, to pull down the balance to his own
predilection, that is immorality...
The novel is not, as a rule, immoral because
the novelist has any dominant -idea, or purpose.
The immorality lies in the novelist's helpless,
unconscious predilection... If the novelist puts
his thumb in the pan, for love, tenderness, sweetness,
peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents
the possibility of a pure relationship, a pure
relatedness, the only thing that matters: and he
makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he
lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality,
cruelty and destruction (Beal, p.1 1 0 ).2
I conclude that when Lawrence tried to 'force' the woman in Kate
to fall at the feet of the man in little Cipriano, he simply
imposed his own 'unconscious predilection' for the man as the
master of the woman.
He pressed his thumb down hard in the
scale. Indeed this is 'immoral', by his own definition. Also
in the predilection for a man-to-man relationship between Ramon
and Cipriano, Lawrence was forcing the balance of the scale,
mainly because he put into Kate's mind the sense that she as a
woman was inferior to men and that they (men) form the 'ideal'
pair.
But Lawrence, although pressing his thumb heavily in the
scale, could not help feeling ill with his own 'intentions'.
That is one reason why he became so ill after completing the
novel.
He may have felt he was forcing a theory he could not
The interesting thing about "Morality and the Novel" and The
Plumed Serpent is that the essay was first published in
December, 1925 and the novel in January, 1926, only a month
after the publishing of the essay! Probably Lawrence wrote both
the essay and the novel at the same time.