T H E S I S

38
anticipates the kind of problems his later, open references to
sex would cause the author. Of course, he met a public quite
unprepared at this time. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(I89D was still branded “immoral and obscene1'. For generations
sex in English Literature (in contrast to say, French) had been
represented by a "faded symbolism" according to Aldington.(PGB105)
I have already referred to a separate episode in The White
Peacock? a story inside another story, that of the gamekeeper
Annable, who is "an embodiment of the suppressed natural violence
in the world of the novel", as Pritchard remarks.(BOD 27) With
his brutal, direct voice, that of a natural man who is set against
the evils of civilization^ Annable is just the opposite of Cyril,
the "alternative to euphemism", the "dark figure" that comes "to
fascinate Cyril", as G.H.Ford points out.(DDM 51) But most of
all, he is the anti-puritanical prototype for Kellors, the gamekeeper
in Lady Chatterley's Lover. "Be a good animal, true to
your animal instinct, was his motto."(TWP 173) So Annable also
anticipates the importance of the physical being over the spiritual
being that Lawrence makes Mellors stand for in Lady Chatterley's
Lover.
However, it seems to me that Lawrence could not handle
Annable very well, and he is suppressed (he dies in a not very
clear accident in a quarry), because he could not live in the
new structure of civilization which he did not accept, as Mellors
could in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Furthermore, his death is representative
of father-killing and male rejection in opposition
to mother-favouring, a strong element of the Oedipus complex,
which appears not only in The White Peacock but also in Sons and
Lovers.