D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis as a thinker who seeks to ground human life in sexuality and a cosmic force of Life, yet whose ideal of mutual communion leaves men in command. His work rejects the treatment of women as mere prey, but assigns them a subordinate role: they are expected to yield their individuality, desires, and purposes to a masculine principle that claims to carry life forward. The contradiction between reciprocal language and unequal authority makes Lawrence a central case in the book’s critique of male supremacy dressed as spiritual union.

Identity and Intellectual Ideal

Lawrence is introduced as the antipode of Henry de Montherlant. Rather than defining a special relation between the sexes, he seeks to place both within the truth of Life, understood as an animal force from which thought and action should arise. He rejects a division between sexuality and intellect: sexual life is not sufficient on its own, since it returns to immanence, but existence severed from bodily life is sterile. On this account, sexuality gives human life its grounding, while a fuller existence must exceed the sexual cycle.

In Lawrence’s ideal, a man does not treat a woman as prey or as a mere object opposite a subject. The two are described as necessary poles, and erotic relations should not be instruments of personal pride or self-assertion. Each partner is to give body and soul, and their union is to be enduringly faithful. Lawrence believed in monogamous marriage; once the circuit between virility and femininity is established, he considers it complete rather than open to change. The promise is one of mutual recognition, but the book asks whether such reciprocity survives the hierarchy built into the ideal.

Reciprocity and Male Supremacy

The answer is that Lawrence’s account privileges the masculine pole. The very idea of “phallic marriage,” and the way he equates sexuality with the phallic, makes the imbalance visible. In his imagery, the phallus links two streams and serves as a bridge toward the future. Man is therefore not merely one partner among two: he is cast as the relation that joins them and as the force that carries them beyond themselves. Lawrence replaces the cult of the Mother Goddess with a cosmic vision organized around male virility.

That ordering shapes the roles assigned to women and men. Lawrence repeatedly depicts women as moved by the compelling vitality of male animals, while male animals embody the powerful mystery of Life. Social privilege follows the same direction: the man reaches for goals and incarnates transcendence; the woman is absorbed in sentiment and confined to interiority. He is active in sexual life and, through himself, transcends it; she remains enclosed within it. Lawrence allows that a woman may perform the man’s role brilliantly, but treats this as a performance without truth. His scheme thus presents male initiative as a cosmic necessity, not simply a social arrangement.

The Woman Who Must Yield

Lawrence’s fictional couples make the cost of this ideal concrete. His heroes require more than a woman’s body: they demand that she give herself fully. Paul will not accept Myriam’s self-sacrifice as a substitute for mutual giving, and Birkin rejects Ursula if she seeks only pleasure rather than a deeper union. Yet the apparent demand for an equal surrender is not symmetrical in practice. The man’s submission to the cosmic order is represented as already complete and grounded in his own certainty; the woman, by contrast, must submit through the mediation of the male. The hero’s assurance can appear arrogant, as though Lawrence himself speaks with divine authority, while the woman is required to bow to the hero’s divinity.

The Plumed Serpent offers the fullest account of this pattern through Don Cipriano and Kate. Cipriano is a man with a mission, devoted to it until his virility is elevated toward divinity. Kate initially resists dependence, holding to her personality and limited existence. Before agreeing to stay, she insists that Cipriano acknowledge his need for her. He does so, affirming that woman is necessary to man; Kate then accepts a life as his companion and adopts his goals, values, and universe. The acknowledgment of need gives her a condition for consenting, but it does not produce an independent sphere of purpose: her final place is within his mission.

The novel also makes this subordination part of erotic life. Lawrence does not want the woman to pursue pleasure as an autonomous end, and Cipriano withdraws when Kate approaches a form of sexual pleasure he regards as too separate from the male. Kate relinquishes that autonomy in keeping with the relationship’s larger demand for surrender. The book therefore distinguishes this arrangement from simple enslavement while still identifying its outcome as subordination. Lawrence’s ideal woman is “real” precisely insofar as she assents without hesitation to being defined as the Other.

Frieda Lawrence and Domestic Conflict

The discussion of Frieda Lawrence presents a sharply different struggle over authority. Simone de Beauvoir describes women who, unable to assert themselves as essential subjects through independent projects, try instead to diminish a man’s transcendence. Frieda is given as an example: because she could not deny Lawrence’s intellectual superiority, she sought to impose a view of life centered on sexual values. Her approach made sexuality the standard by which experience was approved or rejected, and it treated her influence over Lawrence as a means of directing his outlook.

This conflict is connected to a wider pattern in which a woman seeks to make a man appear as a bodily, dependent presence rather than a subject engaged in projects beyond the home. In the account of Frieda, Lawrence told Mabel Dodge that he found her care oppressive when he was sick, describing the weight of her attention as a reminder that he too was flesh. The episode illustrates the book’s argument that care can become a form of power when it reduces the other person to dependence. It also complicates Lawrence’s own ideal: the man who writes of mutual surrender experiences a woman’s authority over his vulnerable body as an encroachment.

Creative Dependence and Mabel Dodge

Mabel Dodge’s relationship with Lawrence supplies another version of the struggle over agency. In her own account, she wanted to influence his spirit and have him carry out projects. She sought his will, creative imagination, and vision as instruments through which her purposes could be realized, explaining that she often wanted to act through delegates rather than undertake work herself. She also wanted Lawrence to understand her experience, use her material and her Taos, and shape them into a major creation.

The book distinguishes this wish to appropriate another person’s creative power from the use of a partner to pursue a defined public aim. Mabel Dodge’s ambition is described instead as a desire to acquire importance by attaching herself to someone who possesses recognized creative force. Her testimony makes the relation more than a simple account of male domination: she, too, seeks influence over the terms and products of the partnership. But the route she describes is vicarious, relying on Lawrence’s creative agency to give form to her experience. Together, the accounts of Frieda and Mabel reveal different contests over who directs, interprets, and benefits from Lawrence’s work.

Narrative Role and Critical Significance

Lawrence’s relationships also expose the fragility of an ideal based on a woman’s absolute devotion. The example of Natasha and Pierre serves as a test of the vision of harmonious marriage associated with Tolstoy and, by comparison, Lawrence’s belief in enduring love. A wife’s life organized around her husband becomes precarious if his love changes or his desire turns elsewhere; the children, too, do not automatically compensate for a broken partnership. What is offered as a stable union rests on a husband’s constancy, although a woman has little control over whether that constancy lasts.

The critique does not treat Lawrence’s appeal to reciprocal fidelity as meaningless. It identifies the distinction between a genuine meeting of two people and a union in which the woman’s surrender is the condition of harmony. Lawrence’s version asks the woman to adopt the man’s values and purposes, while the man retains authority as the bearer of transcendence. This is why his ideals can sound like mutual communion and still reproduce the conventional hierarchy they appear to overcome. A reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover sharpens the point: through Mellors, Lawrence expresses horror at women who turn a man into a tool of pleasure. The concern for reciprocal relation remains, but the terms of reciprocity are governed by a masculine standard.