RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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her suffering. She is now depending on other people. But the
woman's strong personality makes of her an actress, for she
disguises her pains with smiles. She will not give in. She is
not fit for others to pity her.
complete failure of her strength.
If she felt it, it would be the
She, in her strong will, seems
to grasp life.
She will not give death the chance to take hold
of her. That is why she does not die quickly. Her family cannot
stand her alive anymore.
They feel her intense suffering and,
besides this, her strong will not to die. Death means defeat for
her. Death means freedom for her family. She will not give in.
She belongs to that group of people who grasps life as if it meant
everything.
Death means the total darkness, seeing nobody,
controlling nobody. It is chaos. Hence, even dying, she will
take hold of the last breath as a way to remain alive torturing
her family:
'And she won't die. She can't. Mrs Renshaw, the
parson, was in the other day. "Think!" he said to
her; "you will have your mother and father, and
your sisters, and your son, in the Other Land."
And she said: "I have done without them for a long
time, and can do without them now. It is the
living I want, not the dead."She wants to live even
now1 (p.471 - My underlining).
So says Paul to Clara.
Paul is the one who most suffers from his mother's illness.
The fact that she is gradually getting worse and worse, ceasing
to exist, makes him want feverishly her death.
It is as if she
were broken into pieces, like Annie's doll which Paul broke when
he was a child.
At that time Paul felt guilty: he hated and
suffered seeing Arabella in pieces.
He felt impotent to restore
it. Thus he proposed to burn it as if it were a sacrifice: a
sacrifice because it could not be mended.
Arabella could then
be safe from her mutilation: