RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

84
doll without will.
And this same man does not know what he wants
from love.
Their love affair declines, but they do not break definitely,
though they still meet sometimes, they do not share the same
bed anymore. The relation is worn out; nothing is left. It is
time then to compensate Clara somehow for this failure.
Paul
arranges to return his lover to her husband.
It looks as if he
were 'gifting' his rival with the same object he (Paul) used and
then returns it to its proper owner, i.e., Baxter Dawes.
It seems
disgusting to understand a man like Paul.
Still more difficult
to understand is how the author values Paul's character.
To what
extent does Lawrence criticize Paul's cowardly withdrawal both
from Clara and Miriam or sympathize with Paul? I think that Paul
is like a child, as Miriam pointed out to him previously, who
gets a toy, a new one and plays with it till he loses interest.
Then he places it somewhere where he cannot see it, nor play again.
He wants another toy.
The old one means nothing. Most strange
also is the fact that Clara accepts being presented as a gift to
Baxter. She does not complain but, instead, she reasons about
what sort of man Paul is:
... Yet Clara realized that Morel was withdrawing
from the circle, leaving her the option to stay
with her husband. It angered her. He was a mean
fellow after all, to take what he wanted and then
give her back. She did not remember that she
herself had had what she wanted, and really, in
the bottom of her heart, wished to be given back
(p.495 - My underlining).
The last sentence seems to be Lawrence's own evaluation of Clara,
but it does not entirely reflect the truth.
Lawrence is being
hard on her because of her evaluation of Paul's mean character.
While Paul returns Clara to Baxter, Mrs Morel's thread of
life is dwindling.
She has gotten cancer and doctors cannot