T H E S I S

85
11ty shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very
last, and made a different •woman of her. It was not really
love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp
and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.
Burning out the shames, the deepest,oldest shames, in
the most secret places* It cost her an effort to let him
have his way and his will of her, She had to be a passive,
consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. let the
passion licked round her, consuming, and tthen the sensual
flame of it pressed to her bowels and breast, she really
thought she was dying; yet a poignant, marvellous death,r*
(LCL 258)
I think that here there is ambiguity of expression but not of
action® G.VJilson Knight
for this passage when he says;
brings another form of justification
1Lawrence is trying to blast through.., degradation to a
new health,.. So the deathly is found to be the source of
some higher order of being; contact with a basic materiality
liberates the person.” (TFF 305)
After this sort of sexual practices Connie is musing on
"all the stages and refinements of passion... ten thousand years
ago! The same thing on the Greek vases..crt(LCL 258)
“The allusions to Abelard and the Greek vases... Clifford*s
reference (in a letter to Connie) to Hellors * apparent
liking for using his wife(Bertha), ‘as Benvenuto Cellini
says*, *in the Italian way1...1(TFF 30^)
Such evidence, Daleski says, is all inconclusive but certainly
points to Mellors* sexual practices with his wife Bertha and, in
particular, to anal intercourse with Connie.
What happened ”ten thousand years ago”? Presumably the
destruction of Sodom, whence the term "sodomy” , which means lun-
(IQ)
natural connection through the anus or between male persons.1*
This is the theme that likewise can be seen in ancient Greek