Lawrence's male-dominated marriage ideal

Lawrence's male-dominated marriage ideal is a model of monogamous, reciprocal marriage whose promised mutuality rests on male authority. In Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis, the man supplies the couple’s purpose and direction, while the woman is asked to surrender her independent aims and understand herself through his. The ideal therefore makes devotion appear reciprocal while preserving the woman’s subordinate position.

Definition and Structure

Lawrence rejects a marriage based merely on bodily availability or on one partner’s pursuit of pleasure. The couple must give themselves to one another, body and soul, and remain faithful. Since each person is understood as unique, the relationship is imagined as a permanent, self-contained circuit: once established, it leaves no place for a desire for variety. This model promises mutual recognition, but its reciprocal language does not establish equal authority.

The asymmetry appears in the ideal’s account of what connects the partners and carries them toward the future. The man is not simply one participant in the relationship; he is assigned its active principle and its transcendence. Woman, by contrast, is described as emotional and inward, and is expected to subordinate her existence to his. The couple’s unity thus depends on unequal roles: he embodies the purpose to which she is to submit.

Devotion and the Husband’s Purpose

A woman’s proper role, in the formulation de Beauvoir examines, is to believe in the man and in the larger purpose he represents. In return, he is to feel tenderness and gratitude toward the woman who loves and submits to that purpose. This exchange appears to honor her devotion, but makes her justification depend on the authority and significance of his project.

That dependence has a qualification: the man must be genuinely committed to a higher purpose. If his project is only a sham, the couple’s arrangement becomes a mutual deception. De Beauvoir contrasts such falsity with relationships in which the partners are enclosed in a cycle of love and death; even that enclosure is preferable, in this account, to lying to one another. The condition does not undo the hierarchy, however. When the man’s purpose is treated as authentic, the woman is still expected to derive meaning from it rather than establish an independent one.

Illustrations in Lawrence’s Fiction

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lady Chatterley finds peace by relinquishing her own power and yielding to her lover. The narrative ideal de Beauvoir describes associates this surrender with a harmonious relation to the surrounding natural world. Fulfillment comes not from asserting a separate sexual or personal aim, but from obedience and incorporation into the couple’s unity.

Ursula’s relationship with Birkin offers another image of the ideal: she renounces her individuality in his hands, and the pair reach what the text calls a “star-equilibrium.” Yet this language of balance can obscure who is expected to yield. The man remains the bearer of the relationship’s direction, while the woman’s achievement is framed as accepting and joining his orientation.

The model is most fully realized in The Plumed Serpent. Kate initially resists dependence, attached to her personality and limited individual existence. Before agreeing to remain with Don Cipriano, she insists that he acknowledge his need for her. He does so; only then does she consent to become his companion and adopt his goals, values, and universe. That insistence gives her decision a measure of agency, and makes the relationship more than a simple account of unilateral surrender. But the final terms remain unequal: her place is defined through his mission, and the ideal does not envision an independent purpose for her alongside it.

De Beauvoir’s Critique and Significance

De Beauvoir distinguishes Lawrence’s ideal from a merely deceptive marriage: the man’s project must be real for his authority to carry the meaning Lawrence assigns it. Still, even a worthy purpose does not make the arrangement equal. Woman is not represented as evil, but she is subordinated; the model asks her to assent without hesitation to being defined as the Other. Its language of devotion and cosmic harmony therefore turns inequality into the condition of a supposedly complete union.

This critique connects the marriage ideal to de Beauvoir’s broader account of freedom and social dependence. A subject realizes freedom by moving beyond the given toward projects, but woman is placed in a world where men demand that she accept an inessential status and have her own transcendence surpassed. The marital ideal gives that demand an intimate and affirmative form: instead of appearing only as an imposed restriction, subordination is presented as the woman’s meaningful choice and as the source of harmony. Its decisive contradiction is that the couple is called reciprocal while the man supplies the purpose and the woman is required to live through it.