Kate

Kate is the central woman in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of Lawrence’s ideal of womanhood. Her arc moves from attachment to her independent personality toward devotion to Don Cipriano’s mission: she chooses to remain with him, but the relationship asks her to make his values and world her own. The choice gives her a place beside him while also exemplifying the subordination Beauvoir identifies in Lawrence’s ideal of the “real woman.”

Identity and Introduction

Kate begins from what Beauvoir describes as Western prejudices: she resists dependence because she is attached to her personality and to the limited life she already possesses. Don Cipriano, by contrast, is presented as a man devoted to a larger mission, one that Lawrence’s novel associates with the force of life itself. Their relationship therefore concerns more than personal affection; it tests whether Kate will accept a universe organized around his purpose.

Choice and Relationship with Don Cipriano

Kate does not consent to stay with Don Cipriano without first insisting that he recognize his need for her. He does so, acknowledging that woman is necessary to man. Only then does she agree to remain his companion. This sequence matters to Beauvoir’s account: Kate’s decision includes an assertion of her importance, even as the life she accepts is defined in relation to his mission.

Her eventual commitment reaches beyond companionship in name. She adopts Don Cipriano’s goals, values, and universe, yielding the independent identity she initially sought to preserve. Beauvoir presents this as a model for Lawrence’s preferred union, in which a woman gives herself to a man understood to embody a cosmic order. Kate’s consent is not framed as an uncomplicated escape from subordination: the terms of the partnership still place her beneath his authority.

Sexual Autonomy and Surrender

The surrender Beauvoir describes extends into the couple’s erotic life. Lawrence, in her reading, rejects a model of female pleasure pursued as an independent end. Don Cipriano withdraws from Kate when he senses that she is nearing a form of nervous pleasure, and Kate relinquishes this dimension of sexual autonomy as part of her acceptance of the relationship. The episode makes the book’s ideal especially stark: harmony is imagined not through equal, separately asserted desires, but through the woman’s yielding to the man’s pattern of life.

Narrative Role and Significance

Among the novels discussed, The Plumed Serpent most fully expresses Lawrence’s ideal, and Kate is its clearest example. Beauvoir calls such novels guidebooks for women because their men seem already assured of their submission to a cosmic order, while women are asked to reach that order through the mediation of male consciousness and will. Kate’s decision to stay gives this asymmetry a concrete form: Don Cipriano’s mission becomes the organizing principle of their shared life, and her fulfillment is made dependent on accepting it.

Beauvoir therefore treats Kate’s apparent choice as both meaningful and constrained. She asks for recognition before committing herself, but the conclusion is that she will be Don Cipriano’s companion and define herself through his universe. Kate embodies the “real woman” offered by Lawrence’s ideal—not an evil figure, and even a good one, in Beauvoir’s formulation, but a subordinated woman who assents to being the Other.