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GIPSY, from page 4
It should be noted, however, that she gains it through the direction of the dark gipsy figure, that is through male domination.
The apparent success of Yvette at freeing herself from certain morality constraints in The Virgin and the Gipsy is in contrast to a similar character in The Fox. The emotional triangle between the lesbian couple and a young soldier returned from war is much darker and much more pessimistic. When Henry enters the lives of Nellie March and Jill Banford, his determination to control the women, taking Nellie for his wife and destroying the more willful Jill, is characteristic of Lawrence's belief in male dominance and superiority. Henry voices it throughout the novel. For example in the scene where Henry first expresses his love for and desire to marry Jill, he compares her to prey stalked by a hunter.
…He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. …it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly. …You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting…
He was a huntsman in spirit…. And it was as a young hunter that he
wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife. (p29-30)
As the story reaches its climatic peak, Lawrence employs the hunter analogy again when Henry is about to eliminate his antagonist. "And as he looked into the sky, like a huntsman who is watching a flying bird, he thought to himself: 'If the tree falls in just such a way, and spins just so much as it falls, then the branch there will strike her exactly as she stands on top of that bank.' " (p.94-95)
If The Virgin and the Gipsy and The Fox are similar in Lawrence's use of male dominance to move women
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