RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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incoherence? Or could it be that he did not want to impose his
personal opinion? I believe that the question implies far more
than this simple assumption.
The second possibility may be that
Lawrence's conflicting impulses in deciding the way to end his
books may have led him to decide for ambiguity.
For instance,
in The Trespasser, we have the ending in a dialogue and,
although we may take it as implying a repetition of Helena's
past now with a new Siegmund in Cecyl Byrne, we see that the
ending provokes in the reader a feeling of ambiguity: is the
'fatal female' going to submit? After all, she has taken off her
hat with pins (such an attitude was not taken in Siegmund's time).
On the other hand, we still feel that she has the last word since
she is the one who says what she wants in her future: affection,
rest and warmth.
The man with her only acquiesces and says 'all
right'. Even so, the ambiguity is still present. In the case of
the two novels which end in Lawrence's voice, Sons and Lovers and
The Rainbow, we see the ambiguity in terms of the too-optimistic
view the author puts in his characters' mouths.
Their past has
been a terrible experience with, most of the time, negative
outcomes.
The 'positive' ending sounds false, imposed and
arbitrary. The author's imposition of a 'happy-ending' does
not convince.
The other stories analysed in the course of this dissertation
mark a different path taken by the author's attempt to define the
endings of his novels.
Some critics (Moore, for example) point
out that Lawrence has struggled a lot to define the endings of
Women in Love., "The Fox" and The Plumed Serpent.
I will take the
example of Women in Love because of its importance in Lawrence's
career as a writer.
Moore (1981) points out that Lawrence wrote
at least two endings for this novel, besides the definitive one: