T H E S I S

67
The real theme, which recurs in many of Lawrence’s works,
is that of a woman of higher class who has sexual intercourse
with a man of lower class. In LCL we have the case of the aristocratic
lady, dissatisfied with her husband and her big old
house, going to copulate in a hut in the woods with her husband’s
\
servant, who happens to be a civilized , polite, and tender man,
in spite of his outward rudeness. One wonders whether there is
not a special pleasure for Constance Chatterley in making love
with a man in one moment and in being called by him “my Lady” in
the following moment,
Lawrence began to use the keeper motif early in The White
Peacock, as I have already said« Here and there the man is a
gamekeeper, a natural man, almost a primitive, but the only one
able to protect the natural world against the destruction of civilization,
He is primitive in the good sense that he is still
pure, living apart from the mechanical structure, and his sexuality
can still be pure, conscious, and tender. In The White Peacock
there is Kellors? precursor, Annable, the natural man whose
motto is: “Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct,“(TWP
173) Both Annable and Mellors cannot accept the mechanization
of the world and the "mechanical greed“ because
“soon it would destroy the wood, - ... he(Kellors) knew
that the seclusion of the wood was illusory. The industrial
noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though
unseen, mocked it, A man could no longer be private and
withdrawn. The world allows no hermits." (LCL 123)
Annable is unhappy and cannot accept civilization. He is symbolically
killed because he could not stand industrialism which by
the time of The White Peacock was already beginning to destroy