T H E S I S

25
And about Cyril (himself) he said:
"If you think it worth the trouble, I will write the thing
again (the novel), and stop up the mouth of Cyril - I will
kick him out - I hate the fellow. " (SP3 63)
He probably hated Cyril because, as the critics say, Cyril is too
much Lawrence himself* Certainly this is one of the many early
hints :of Lawrence’s contradictory nature.
As I have already said, Cyril and Lettie are frustrated because
of their sexual unfulfilment, and according to J*Chambers
they "are each aspects of Lawrence", Lettie*s representation,
based on Lawrence's favourite sister Ada, is the embodiment of the
intellectualized woman who makes the wrong choice and remains as
an inaccessible love-object, frigid but dominating, the magna mater,
"reigning supreme" as Pritchard says. Undoubtedly she is
the peacock symbol of the book, looking like the white peacock
that "perched on an angel" of the churchyard, "as if it were a
pedestal for vanity."(TWP 17*+) Cyril is too timid, passive,
"merely childish, mentally clever but emotionally undeveloped",
as G,Hough says.(IDS 28) As a watcher and narrator he seems to
be more a woman than a man, which is what caused Lawrence to have
the novel reviewed as if the author were a woman. As G.H.Ford
points out, "Lawrence ought to have been entitled to a high rank
in Mrs. Woolf’s hierarchy" (DDM 58), for Virginia Woolf argued
that the most satisfactory writers are neither masculine nor feminine,
but androgynous. Indeed, in Woolf’s sense of the word,
the early Lawrence of The White Peacock is androgynous, as I will
presently argue.
The critics could never separate Cyril from Lawrence, both
as narrator and watcher. G.Hough comments that "he(Cyril - or