RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

87
'Let's make a sacrifice of Arabella,' he said.
'Let's burn her.'
[Annie] was horrified, yet rather fascinated.
She wanted to see what the boy would do. He made
an altar of bricks, pulled some of the shavings
out of Arabella's body, put the waxen fragments
into the hollow face, poured on a little paraffin,
and set the whole thing alight. He watched with
wicked satisfaction the drops of wax melt off the
broken forehead of Arabella, and drop like sweat
into flame.
'That's the sacrifice of Missis Arabella,' he
said. 'An'I'm glad there's nothing left of her’
(pp.75-6).
The same idea is brought out when Paul is mad with torment with
his mother's suffering.
He tells Annie he will give an overdose
of morphine to their mother so that she will cease suffering and
die peacefully, freeing them of the hard task to take care of an
invalid mother whom they love.
Annie is horrified and fascinated
at the same time, but she agrees.
Paul smashes all the morphine
pills and puts the powder in a glass of milk.
After taking this
decision Paul and Annie "laughed together like two conspiring
children.
On the top of all horror flickered this little
sanity" (p.47 9).
The mother, even after having drunk her potion of death,
resists till the next day. Finally she dies. One may be horrified
with Paul and Annie's attitude because they do not feel guilty.
It has been for the sake of freeing both mother and family.
It
was simply a sacrifice like Arabella's.
Is the family really free now that the mother is dead?
Walter Morel is more humble and pure than ever, as he tells
Gertrude's 'superior' people:
He had striven all his life to do what he could
for her, and he'd nothing to reproach himself
with. She was gone, but he'd done his best for
her... He'd nothing to reproach himself for, he
repeated. All his life he'd done his best for
her (p.488).