T H E S I S

them in towards him in a frenzy, quivering motionless in
the rain. Then suddenly he tipped her up and fell with her
on the path, in the roaring silence of the rain, and short
and sharp, he took her, short and sharp and finished, like
an animal®“ (LCL 231)
Of course the passage is ambiguous but I am not forcing on
it any conclusion to which critics like Dale ski, Ford, and Pritchard
have not already come»
Daleski has several objections to the way in which Lawrence
presents this sort of buggery in LCL, but he also argues that
“the experience is overtly presented as a necessary purifications
the ’sensual fire*, and we note how fire images recur
throughout the passage, burns out ’false shames’ and
smelts out ’the heaviest ore of the body into purity’«”
(TFF 305)
But where is Connie’s participation in the '•purification’*?
Mellors is only interested in her Mposteriors11 and finishes “like
an animal” «■ Odd enough, because given a choice, animals prefer
the other opening, I do not see how this passage helps Lawrence
in his attempt to purify human relationships through the sex relation.
This time Mellors seems to be one of those persons Law~
rence so vehemently denounces as a case of nsex in the head”.
And it is generally agreed that Mellors stands for Lawrence in
LCL.
A second passage presents anality less ambiguously though
it too is often obscures
”It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a
little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again
with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper,
more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the
moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she
let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensua-