RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

started crying may be seen as a way she found to blame both men
for her recently taken decision.
Ramon is forced to leave the
room because Cipriano seems to have perceived Kate's joke: "Then
Cipriano's voice said, with a hot softness of persuasion: 'You
are not his! He would not tell you'" (p.487). Ramon goes away
and Kate suddenly stops crying.
She has not any reason to cry
anymore because Ramon is not present in the room.
Her alternative
is now to plead with her husband not to let her go away. The last
page of the book is then transformed into a mess of language
devices to imply Cipriano's mesmeric strength.
He uses (and
abuses) his snake-like voice to make Kate stay. It seems that
in doing so he is putting Kate to sleep (perhaps the sense of
Cipriano's mesmeric voice has the same connotation of Henry's
soft, manipulative voice when he was hunting March): "Then came
his soft-tongued Indian speech, as if all his mouth were soft,
saying in Spanish, but with the 'r' sound almost lost... [his
voice] £ounded so soft, so £oft-tongued, of the £oft, wet, hot
blood, that she shivered a little" (ibid - My underlining).
The
use of so many alliterations allows us to see Cipriano as a
snake mesmerizing his prey.
Kate is the prey, of course.
However, in her first speech as well as in her last, Kate uses
negative statements which positively express her continuous
doubt.
The point is perhaps that here Lawrence's indecisiveness
may represent a double standard: he wants her to stay, but he
does not want to commit himself in the decision and, in letting
her speak, he wants her to decide to stay.
When Kate says "'You
won't let me go!'"she does not imply she has already taken the
decision. The discussion will go on indefinitely. But, in this
novel, the very fact of the two men together at the end of the
story marks Lawrence's thumb in the scale pressing heavily on