A Study of The Captain’s Doll論

文

A Study of The Captain’s Doll:
A Life of “a Hard Destiny”

YAMADA Akiko

要旨

英語題名を和訳すると，「『大尉の人形』研究──「厳しい宿命」の人
生──」になる。1923 年に出版された『大尉の人形』は『恋する女たち』，『狐』及び『アルヴァイナの堕落』等の小説や中編小説と同じ頃に執筆された D. H. ロレンスの中編小説である。これらの作品群は多かれ少なかれ
類似したテーマを持っている。
時代背景は第一次世界大戦直後であり，作品の前半の場所はイギリス軍
占領下のドイツである。主人公であるヘプバーン大尉はイギリス軍に所属しておりドイツに来たが，そこでハンネレという女性と恋愛関係になる。しかし彼にはイギリスに妻子がいて，二人の情事を噂で聞きつけた妻は，ドイツへやってきて二人の仲を阻止しようとする。妻は，生計を立てるために人形を作って売っていたハンネレが，愛する大尉をモデルにして作った人形を見て，それを購入したいと言うのだが，彼女の手に渡ることはなかった。
妻は事故で死に，ヘプバーンは新しい人生をハンネレと始めようと思う
が，それはこれまでの愛し愛される関係ではなくて，女性に自分を敬愛し従うことを求める関係である。筆者は，本論において，この関係を男性優位の関係と捉えるのではなくて，ロレンスが「星の均衡」の関係を求めていることを論じる。

キーワード：人形的人間，月と星々，敬愛と従順，魔力，太陽と氷河

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No. 38Introduction
The Captain’s Doll by D. H. Lawrence was published in 1923, and The Fox (1922) and
The Ladybird (1923) were published almost at the same time. A few years before Womenin Love (1920) and The Lost Girl (1921) had been published, too. These novellas andnovels have more or less a common theme which is the new relationship between man
and woman.
The doll is modeled on a captain in the British army occupying Germany afterWorld War I. The maker of the doll is a refugee aristocrat named Countess Johanna zu
Rassentlow, also called Hannele, a single woman. She is Captain Hepburn’s mistress.
His wife and children live in England. Hannele and Mitchka who is Hannele’s friend
and roommate, make and sell dolls and other beautiful things for a living. Mitchka has aworking house. But the captain’s doll was not made to sell but because of Hannele’s love
for him.
The doll has a symbolic meaning in that he is a puppet of both women, his wife andhis mistress. This suggests that he is controlled by them. He must conquer his unmanly
situation and struggle for his real being. He seeks honour and obedience. He writes “andso, I won’t be loved. And I won’t love. I won’t have nobody loving me. It is an insult. I
feel I’ve been insulted for forty years: by love, and the women who’ve loved me. I won’t
be loved. And I won’t love.—I’ll be honoured and I’ll be obeyed: or nothing” (CD 151).
Scholars have different comments on Hepburn’s idea of his “honour and obey,” especially“obey.” I think it doesn’t mean the ordinary obey, but Lawrence’s unique idea, thatis, the essence of the relationship between man and woman. He advocated this “starequilibrium” idea in Women in Love using Birkin’s words. Hepburn’s “obey” thought
seems the same as that. I also argue that his “puppetness” comes from his belonging
to the army. He is an officer and so the army handles him like a puppet. The symbolic
meaning of a doll is, thus, varied in the novella.

I Captain Hepburn’s characterization
In Henrik Ibsen’s play Et Dukkehjem (A Doll’s House in English), the heroine is awife who is treated like a doll by her husband and in the end she leaves her home andliberates herself. In The Captain’s Doll the hero is a man whose portrait doll is made by2

A Study of The Captain’s Doll

his mistress Hannelle. In Lawrence’s works the protagonists are suffering from theirwives’ or girlfriends’ dominant desire for them and they want to free themselves fromit. Hannelle loves Captain Alexander Hepburn who is married to an English woman. His
suffering between his mistress and his wife is not written down though he learns of it
through the way that he is handled by his wife and his mistress. When he sees his doll, hespeaks to Hannelle as follows:“You’ve got me,” he said at last, in his amused, melodious voice.
“What?” she said.
“You’ve got me,” he repeated.
“I don’t care,” she said.
“What?—You don’t care?”—His face broke into a smile. He had an odd way ofanswering, as if he were only half attending, as if he were thinking of somethingelse.

(CD 79)Shown above, he understands that a part of him is possessed by Hannele, but he issmiling, and so he seems gentle, but “only half attending” and his real self seems not tobe there. Prichard argues that Hannele made “a miniaturizing, satiric art, like Gudrun’s”
and by making a doll-portrait of Hepburn, “she had effectively diminished him as muchas his wife had done” (Prichard 142). Hepburn is not confident in himself at this stage ofthe story. He cannot be entirely firm and substantial partly because Hannele and his wife
are dominating him. Harris points out that he is in a kind of a prison.
Like Hepburn’s other early scenes with Hannele and with his wife, this first scenedemonstrates that he is at a closed end; he is sewn up and going nowhere. Like thedoll, his expression is characteristically blank; according to the narrator, most of his
actions are “staged” and directed by others. Loving Hepburn, Hannele has literally
made a puppet of him; and his wife, in the same loving spirit, has implicitly done so.
(Harris 158)
F. R. Leavis describes Hepburn’s miserable situation like this, “The essential tendencyof the doll-presentation gets strong explicit emphasis at the very start: the ‘poor little
gentleman’, as the curtain lifts, is revealed in a position and a posture of ludicrous

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No. 38indignity” (Leavis 199) and “she has made the doll, and at the same time she has
represented the Captain in those tight-fitting trews which are not his normal wear”(Leavis 201). Furthermore it is just after the war. He is tired doing his duty in the army. In
the army human beings were treated as if they were part of a machine. This is describedin Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford got injured in World War I, and must move in awheeled chair. He has become, as it were, a part of that machine. Lawrence criticizeswars so bitterly in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Captain’s Doll and other works. Hepburn
is like a puppet, which comes as a result of the War. So the doll made by Hannele is acaptain in a military uniform, not Hepburn. The doll handled by Hannele seems comic
and ridiculous.
Hannele did not lift her head from her work. She sat in a low chair under areading-lamp, a basket of coloured silk pieces beside her, and in her hands a doll,or manikin, which she was dressing. She was doing something to the knee of the
manikin, so that the poor little gentleman flourished head downwards with arms
wildly tossed out. And it was not at all seemly, because the doll was a Scotch soldierin tight-fitting tartan trews.

(CD 75)

Hepburn as a doll soldier looks tense in a uniform and it is upside-down in Hannele’s
hands.
This is the symbolic scene in which the real Hepburn is suffering from his situation
as a man and husband. Hepburn is not in his natural condition. He is tense and possessedby a woman. He should escape from this miserable situation, Lawrence hints.
But he attracts Hannele because he is a kind of dark man who is an outsider and istherefore capable of changing himself and his woman, rebelling against the old morals of
the society. He has “darkness” which Lawrence makes much of.
He had a curious, very melodious Scottish voice. But it was the incomprehensible
smile on his face that convinced and frightened her. It was almost a gargoyle smile,a strange, lurking, changeless-seeming grin.
She was frightened, and turned aside her face. When she looked him again, hisface was like a mask, with strange, deep-graven lines and a glossy dark skin and
fixed look—as if carved half grotesque in some glossy stone. His black hair on his

4A Study of The Captain’s Dollsmooth, beautifully-shaped head seemed changeless.

(CD 81)

As mentioned above, Hepburn is described “curious,” “incomprehensible,” “frightened,”“gargoyle,” “strange,” “grotesque,” but “beautifully-shaped.” It is his beauty that attracts
Hannele basically, but he exists in another world from her in a sense. Widmer points outthat “Hepburn reveals the demonic-heroic qualities” (Widmer 159). Birkin in Women in
Love is a demon lover and Don Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent is the same. Hannele
cannot understand him perfectly. He is also hairy. He is usually silent as written “there
he was, a continual blank silence in front of her” (CD 83). His strangeness holds her
spellbound.
She had a battle with herself. When he put his hand again on her cheek, softly,
with the most extraordinary soft-touch, as a kitten’s paw sometimes touches one,like a fluff of living air, then, if it had not been for the magic of that almost
indiscernible caress of his hand, she would have stiffened herself and drawn away
and told him she could have nothing to do with him, while he was so half-hearted
and unsatisfactory.

(CD 83)

As written above, Hepburn’s fascination comes from his animalness. His darkness meansthat he makes more of instinct than correctness of machinery in the world of lightness.
His silence means that he likes intuition more than the rationalism of our civilized world.
So his being seems like a “gargoyle” and frightens Hannele. His dark being is mostimportant to Lawrence like Romero in The Princess, Annable in The White Peacock,
Birkin in Women in Love, Don Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent, Henry in The Fox, thegipsy in The Virgin and the Gipsy, Lewis in St. Mawr and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s
Lover and so on. Hepburn likes observing the stars and the moon, which shows that his
existance is connected with the cosmos.
The sky outside was full of moonlight. He was squatted like a great cat peering
up his telescope, sitting on a stool, his knees wide apart. Quite motionless he sat inthat attitude, like some leaden figure on the roof. The moonlight glistened with agleam of plumbago on the great slope of black tiles. She stood still in the window,
watching. And he remained fixed and motionless at the end of the telescope.

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No. 38She tapped softly on the window-pane. He looked around, like some tom-cat
staring round with wide night-eyes. Then he reached down his hand and pulled thewindow open.

(CD 92)

Hepburn is like a great cat, and his eyes are opened wide as if they were cat’s. The pictureof a big tom cat peering up the telescope is interesting and humorous. McDowell notesthat the “telescope is life-enhancing, a phallic emblem” (McDowell 316) and that “themoon signifies for the Captain the sacredness of his individuality” (McDowell 316). In St.
Mawr the groom Lewis is depicted like an animal having thick black hair. He also likes
the stars and moon, not believing in a Christian God. The woman in “The Woman Who
Rode Away” hears the songs of the stars and the moon when she rides up high among theRocky Mountains. Thus, Lawrence’s heroes and heroines love cosmic and natural things.
“Perfectly amazing,” he said, murmuring. She waited for some time, bewitchedlikewise by the great October moon and the sky full of resplendent white-green
light.
It seemed like another sort of daytime. And there he straddled on the roof likesome cat. It was exactly like day in some other planet.

(CD 92)

Hepburn loves another world that is different from the ordinary world and so he can be
flexible and can survive, which charms Hannele. Leavis argues that “we can now tellourselves more about the significance of the telescope and Alexander’s interest in themoon. They point, we see here, to that impersonal purpose (if ‘purpose’ is the word)
which an individual human being must have while he has his integrity and his raisond’être; that ‘purpose’ which cannot, without disaster, be abdicated in favour of anythingelse” (Leavis 212–13). Hannele also has a different nature from ordinary women like
Hepburn’s wife. She can be his true mate.

II

Hannele and Hepburn’s wife

Though Hepburn connotes a shoot of rebirth as a new man, his old self suffers fromhis present situation after the great War. He belongs to the English occupation army inGermany. Hannele wonders why she is entangled with Hepburn because he seems so

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A Study of The Captain’s Dollunreal.
She felt that he was already putting some influence towards her. But what? And
was he real? Why had she made his doll? Why had his doll been so important, if he
was nothing? Why had she shown it to that funny little woman this afternoon? Why
was she herself such a fool, getting herself into tangles in this place where it was so
unpleasant to be entangled? Why was she entangled, after all? It was so unreal. And
particularly he was unreal: as unreal as a person in a dream, whom one has neverheard of in actual life.

(CD 90)In spite of Hannele’s uneasiness she tries to find something in Hepburn. While he wasaway she thinks he is unreal, but when he comes back, she knows there is somethingimportant to her in him. It cannot be said. He says to her that he doesn’t consider hecounts, and then she feels that he is a sort of psychic phenomenon “like a grasshopper or
tadpole or an ammonite” (CD 94). These descriptions of him are comical but he seems tolive outside of ordinary life. It is not normal. It is because of the war’s effect on an honest
man. The time is just after the war. Because of the war he is unsure and not confident in
himself. He says, “I count very rarely. That’s how life appears to me. One matters so very
little” (CD 94).
In Germany he loves his mistress Hannele, but his wife named Evangeline inEngland gets a rumor about his affair. She comes to Germany and visits Hannele’s and
Mitchka’s working shop. The wife takes Mitchka for her husband’s mistress and whenshe visits the shop and finds only Hannele there. The wife tells her about her husband’s
vow when they got married. The wife loves ornaments and jewelry.
Entered the little lady in her finery and her crumpled prettiness. She would not bevery old: perhaps younger than fifty. And odd that her face had gone so crumpled,
because her figure was very trim, her eyes were bright, and she had pretty teeth
when she laughed. She was very fine in her clothes: a dress of thick knitted whitesilk, a large ermine scarf with the tails only at the ends, and a black hat over which
dripped a trail of green feathers of the osprey sort. She wore rather a lot of jewellery,
and two bangles tinkled over her white kid gloves as she put her fingers to touch herhair, whilst she stood complacently and looked round.

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No. 38The quotation describes the wife’s bright ornaments, which express her vanity andemptiness of her real state. She belongs to the same world as Lettie in The White Peacockand Hermione in Women in Love. They love to wear showy dresses. The many crumplesof her face is emphasized and she is older than her husband. Hepburn is forty-one andshe is forty-nine. Considering her dryness and tastelessness, it is natural that he should
want another woman when he is alone in a foreign land. As a husband he vowed that hewould serve his wife all his life. When Mrs Hepburn visits Germany she tells this toHannele. Mrs Hepburn is talkative, and also in appearance she looks ridiculous. “Mrs
Hepburn was looking extraordinarily like one of Hannele’s dolls, in a funny little capeof odd striped skins, and a little dark-green skirt, and a rather fuzzy sort of hat” (CD 95).
She is often described as “a nice little woman,” (CD 93) or “the little lady” (CD 98). The
adjective “little” indicates a triviality in Mrs Hepburn.
“Oh but he’s been perfect to me, perfect. Hardly a cross word. Why, on ourwedding night, he kneeled down in front of me and promised, with God’s help, tomake my life happy. And I must say, as far as possible he’s kept his word. It has been
his one aim in life, to make my life happy.”(CD 99)Hannele imagines the picture of Hepburn on his knees with his heels up, saying “withGod’s help, I will make your life happy. I will live for that and for nothing else” (CD 105).
In her imagination, he seems like a servant of his wife. Lawrence objects to the husband’s
aim in life being make his wife happy. In The Lost Girl and The Fox he advocates it.
Human beings don’t live just to make others happy, but to do things for themselves.
Leavis argues that “a man’s raison d’être cannot be a woman, or to make her, or anyone
else, happy (an illusory aim)” (Leavis 221). When Hepburn says that he counts rarely, it
seems to be because of both the war and his wife. Hannele struggles between love forhim and aversion to him since his wife appeared and said “my husband has always been
perfectly sweet to me” (CD 105). He seems to her “a limited, rather vulgar person,” “Alimited, inferior, slightly pretentious individual! The husband of the little lady!” (CD106). She considers why he attracts her and she knows there is a strangeness about him.
She begins to think of his charm.
His room—the big whitewashed walls, the faint scent of tobacco, the silence, the8

A Study of The Captain’s Dollsense of the stars being near, the telescopes, the cactus with fine scarlet flowers:
and above all the strange, remote, insidious silence of his presence, that was socongenial to her also. The curious way he had of turning his head to listen—to listen
to what?—as if he heard something in the stars. The strange look, like destiny, in
his wide-open, almost staring dark eyes. The beautiful line of his brow, that seemedalways to have a certain cloud on it. The slow elegance of his straight beautiful legs
as he walked, and the exquisiteness of his dark, slender chest! Ah, she could feel thecharm mounting over her again.

(CD 106–107)“Stars being near” gives readers the sense that Hepburn lives in another world different
from our world. “The cactus with fine scarlet flowers” shows that he likes warm places.
And his strangeness expresses the authenticity which real characters in Lawrence’s works
have, who want to change ordinary and dull life. He is a dark man in his nature and has
dark eyes and a dark, slender chest. Hannele thinks that his lover has magic. McDowellwrites that “there is something extraordinary about the Captain, a preternatural orsupernatural aspect, a suggestion that outside powers centered in the heavenly bodies
operate through him, a hint of the demonic (as Widmer maintains) that gives him
reserves of authority and makes him indifferent at many times to the women in his life”(McDowell 310–11). Widmer also points out that this Hepburn’s power is Satanic “as she
identifies him and her passion for him with the serpent” (McDowell 311) quoting from
Apocalypse “the symbol of the fluid, rapid, startling movement of life within us” that canbe “half-divine, half-demonish” Apocalypse 123 ). Though she thinks at first magic is aswindle, magic is worth having. People can’t catch magic in their hands and in a sense
they cannot believe it. But Hannele concludes Hepburn’s magic is real.
And yet—let us not to be too hasty. If the magic had really been there, on thoseevenings in that great lofty attic—Had it?—Yes. Yes, she was bound to admit it.
There had been magic. If there had been magic in his presence and in his contact,
the husband of the little lady—But the distaste was in her mouth again.

(CD 107)

Hannele conquers her doubt of Hepburn’s magic being a swindle. She comes to theconclusion that “perhaps all this disillusion of the little lady and the husband of the little
lady was falser than the illusion and magic of those few evenings” and “perhaps the

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No. 38long disillusion of life is falser than the brief moments of real illusion” and “the things
she had to fight was the vulgarity of disillusion” (CD 107). Hannele’s conclusion shows
Lawrence’s view of life. Hannele decides not to sell her doll of the Captain to his wife
though she wants to buy it. “No, she was not going to send her the doll. The little ladyshould never have the doll.” (CD 108). The doll has Hannele’s illusion of him in a sense
and the illusion is so important.

III

Hepburn’s passional changes
Hepburn’s wife was killed because she fell out of the open window of a hotel where

she stayed while in Germany. It was an accident. After his wife’s death Hepburn’s life
begins to change. The change appears on his face. When he comes back to his attic, whichis in the same building as Hannele lives, she meets him and notices his countenance haschanged.
She found him sitting quite still, not even smoking, in his quiet attic. He did not
rise, but just glanced round with a faint smile. And she thought his face seemed
different, more flexible. But in the half light she could not tell. She sat at some little
distance from him.

(CD 110)Lawrence expresses Hannele’s description so subtly, but readers can feel Hepburn ischanging, which can be his salvation. The difference and flexibility is what Lawrence
thinks to be the most valuable in life. Difference is what makes Man individual separating
him from machinery, and flexibility is also a ground which distinguishes Him frommachinery. Hepburn is going to be saved from life in death. He says that he is happy
about his wife’s death. Here is Lawrence’s unique idea of life.
“But now,” he said, “I feel very strangely about it. I feel happy about it. I feel
happy for her sake, if you can understand that. I feel she has got out of some great
tension. I feel She’s free now for the first time in her life. She was a gentle soul, andan original soul, but she was like a fairy who is condemned to live in houses and sit
on furniture and all that, don’t you know. It was never her nature.”10(CD 110)

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His wife did not live a true life. Fairies are believed usually to live in woods or rivers or
air. She was like a fairy shut into houses, because “she was born in the wrong period—oron the wrong planet” (CD 110–111). She “was cooped up inside her all her life, tombedin” (CD 111). In this stage of the story, the Irish people’s tragedy is expressed throughhis wife. Irish people now speak English but English is not their real language. Theirlanguage was lost.
They think in English, and just put Irish words on top.—But English was never
her language. It bubbled off her lips, so to speak. And she had no other language.
Like a starling that you’ve made talk from the beginning, and so it can only shoutthese talking noises, don’t you know. It can’t whistle its own whistling to save its life.
Couldn’t do it. It’s lost it. All its own natural mode of expressing itself has collapsed,
and it can only be artificial.

(CD 111)

Hepburn’s sorrow is Lawrence’s. He shows his deep sympathy for peoples who have losttheir own language. His great interest in European history and Etruscan places means his
condolence for conquered peoples. When Hepburn says “I feel happy about it” when his
wife was killed, the words mean also his deep sympathy for her race. And after losing
their original language they collapsed. Hepburn says “she loved the cage. She loved her
clothes and her jewels. She must have loved her house and her furniture and all that with aperfect frenzy” (CD 112). But his wife’s “perfect frenzy” also tells of our modern people’s
craziness. But Hepburn notices his duty to make his wife happy was wrong.
“And perhaps I was to blame. Perhaps I ought to have made some sort of a move.
But I didn’t know what to do. For my life, I didn’t know what to do, except try to
make her happy. She had enough money—and I didn’t think it mattered if she shared
it with me. I always had a garden—and the astronomy. It’s been an immense relief
to me, watching the moon. It’s been wonderful. Instead of looking inside the cage,as I did at my bird, or at her—I look right out—into freedom—into freedom—”(CD 113)Thus, Hepburn’s salvation lies in seeing the moon and the stars or growing flowers, trees
and green things. This pleasure in natural things is Lawrence’s worship for the cosmic

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No. 38world. The same way of survival is often described in other protagonists of Lawrence’s
works, for example, Mellers, Connie, Lewis, Cyril, Ursula, Birkin, Paul and so on.
Now Hepburn decides to be alone, and disappears from Germany without telling
anything even to Hannele who says later to him that she felt she was sold by him. He
himself didn’t know why he abondoned all connections with others.
The chief thing that the captain knew, at this juncture, was that a hatchet had gone
through the ligatures and veins that connected him with the people of his affection,and that he was left with the bleeding ends of all his vital human relationship. Why
it should be so, he did not know. But then one never can know the whys and thewherefores of one’s passional changes.

(CD 113)

He didn’t want to see anybody. He felt a feeling of disgust when he thought of sharing
emotions with others and he wanted to be alone. He was in a kind of inertia at that time.
Lawrence writes of the importance of “inertia” in A Study of Thomas Hardy that “thevery adherence to rhyme and regular rhythm is a concession to the body, to the being
and requirements of the body. They are an admission of the living, positive inertia whichis the other half of life, other than the pure will-to-motion” (STH 91). McDowell also
argues quoting Fantasia of the Unconscious “the modern individual, discouraged bylifeless tradition and materialism, often lacks the courage ‘to withdraw at last into his
own soul’s stillness and aloneness, and then, passionately and faithfully, to strive for theliving nature’ (PUFU 150)” (McDowell 314). When people approached him to entangle
him in their activities “a helpless disgust came upon him, and until he could get away,
he felt sick, even physically” (CD 114). His condition of inertia is necessary for his new
start, Lawrence thinks. And then after the time of inertia had passed, he could feel thenecessity to start a new relationship.
We must be able to be alone, otherwise we are just victims. But when we are able
to be alone, then we realise that the only thing to do is to start a new relationshipwith another—or even the same—human being. That people should all be stuck up
apart, like so many telegraph poles, is nonsense.

(CD 115)

Hepburn wants Hannele again when he wants to start a new life with someone. She is the12

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only one he wants, he realizes. He doesn’t want to adore his woman this time as he did
his dead wife.
To him, Hannele did not exactly represent rosy love. Rather a hard destiny. He
did not feel one bit of adoration for her. As a matter of fact, not all the beauties andvirtues of woman put together with all the gold in Indies would have tempted him
into the business of adoration any more. He had gone on his knees once, vowing
with faltering tones to try and make the adored one happy. And now—never again.
Never.

(CD 116)

Hepburn feels intuitively that Hannele also doesn’t want to be adored. In Mr Noon
Johanna elopes with Mr Noon because she hates her former husband who adores his wife
as if she were a snow flower. Johanna thinks she is a sunflower. Her husband treated her
as if she were a pure and abstract thing, and she couldn’t stand it any more. Mr Noon,on the other hand, treats her as a flesh and blood thing. Hannele’s real name is Johanna.
Readers notice here the similar characterization of Hannele and Johanna in Mr Noon.
So Hepburn goes to Munich where he knows that the doll modeled on him was boughtby someone. Hannele ran a shop in Munich, selling dolls for a living. He found a picture
which was a still-life of group of the captain’s doll, a poached egg and two sun-flowers.
Hepburn bought the picture and went to the Austrian Tirol seeking her. Hannele’s friend
Mitchka died while involved in a riot. When he finds Hannele she is engaged to themayor of the city.

IVthe quest for a hard destiny

When Hepburn and Hannele make an excursion to the glacier they quarrel with eachother over many things. Hannele is a strong woman and she is the only woman Hepburn
wants. The descriptions of the white mountain is very impressive.
The whiteness of the mountain symbolizes the womanhood in a sense. Though theglacier is white, Hepburn feels darkness lying over the scene. “To Hepburn it was always
as if a dark wing were stretched in the sky, over these mountains, like a doom” (CD126). And “dark and chill and heavy lay the shadow in the black-and-white town, like asediment” (CD 126). Hepburn and Hannele are “like lost souls” (CD 126), “in a lost land”

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No. 38(CD 127). The expressions “a dark wing were stretched in the sky,” “sediment,” “lostsouls,” and “in a lost land” show Hepburn’s feelings and impression toward the ruined
world after World War I. There is “the stony, furious, lion-like river” (CD 128). Lightness
and blackness are mixed in the mountain.
So the two climbed slowly up the steep ledge of a road. This valley was justa mountain cleft, cleft sheer in the hard, living rock, with black trees like hairflourishing in this secret, naked place of the earth. At the bottom of the open wedge
forever roared the rampant, insatiable water. The sky from above was like a sharp
wedge forcing its way into the earth’s cleavage, and that eternal ferocious water was
like the steel edge of the wedge, the terrible tip biting in its rock’s intensity. Whowould have thought that the soft sky of light, and the soft foam of water could thrustand penetrate into the dark strong earth?—But so it was.

(CD 129)

In the above quotation readers notice the ambivalent nature of the mountain, that is,
softness and roughness. This ambivalence shows the nature of human beings and theircontradiction. And the difference between men and women. Hepburn sees women’s
defects in the mountain. Other tourists are gay and they don’t think and feel about
the glacier as Hepburn does. “In his heart of hearts Hepburn hated it. He hated it, heloathed it, it seemed almost obscene, this livid naked slide of rock, unthinkably hugeand massive, sliding down to this gulf where bushes grew like hair in the darkness, andwater roared” (CD 130). The words “hair,” “those awful flanks of livid rock” (CD 130)
give the impression that the glacier is like a woman’s body in Hepburn’s feelings and “heand Hannele also were not in good company together. There was a sort of silent hostility
between them” (CD 130). They quarrel about the mountain. Hannele cries seeing theglacier, “Wonderful.” Then he says “It is wonderful. But very detestable. I want to live
near the sea-level. I am no mountain-topper” (CD 131). Hepburn says that he doesn’t likethe loftiness and their uplift. And Hannele retorts it.
She looked in wonder on his dark flame burning in the daylight and in the icerain: very ineffectual and unnecessary.
“You must be a little mad,” she said superbly, “to talk like that about themountains. They are so much bigger than you.”

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“No,” he said. “No! They are not.”“What!” she laughed aloud. “The Mountains are not bigger than you? But you are
extraordinary.”(CD 137)

Hepburn makes the mountains’ loftiness overlap Hannele’s or women’s dominating desire
over men. Gilbert argues the glacier is the symbol of the “Terrible Mother” (Gilbert 152).
They went on their way in the rain in silence. He was filled with a passionate
silence and imperiousness, a curious dark, masterful force that supplanted thoughtin him. And she, who always pondered, went pondering: “Is he mad? What does
he mean? Is he a madman?—He wants to bully me. He wants to bully me into
something. What does he want to bully me into? Does he want me to love him?”(CD 138)
Hepburn decided not to worship his woman any longer when his wife died, but he wants
his woman to obey and honour him from now on. This is not love, he thinks. This is
Lawrence’s idea of a new form of the relationship between man and woman. The word“obey” doesn’t have a common meaning. He doesn’t mean women are inferior to men. In
Women in Love which was published around the same time as The Captain’s Doll Birkin
who is a spokesman for Lawrence advocates the idea of the star-equilibrium which keeps
the balance between man and woman like two stars keep in balance, in which the twostars never clash and keep their distance1. In the chapter “Mino,” in Women in Love, a
tom cat Mino appears and he gains a she-cat over which is homeless. Birkin says to his
sweetheart Ursual the tomcat is not bullying a she-cat2. Hepburn is depicted like a tom
cat and Hannele is depicted like a she-cat in the quarrel between them in The Captain’s
Doll. In the novella Lawrence expresses his idea of the star-equilibrium again. So
Hepburn’s word “obey and honour” doesn’t mean men holding a dominant position over
women. Hanelle can’t understand his words clearly but she will be going to East Africawith Hepburn. Their complications as a man and a woman will continue after marriage
but they need each other. L. D. Clark argues that “it is a battle he never quite wins, though
there is a promise of equilibrium in the tension between them. One of the chief symbolic
representations of the battle is that the man, Captain Hepburn, must climb a glacier,must face himself in the awful frigid regions that spelled doom for Gerald Crich. But

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No. 38the captain overcomes that frightful spirit of place” (L. D. Clark 246). Hannele agrees to
go to East Africa with Hepburn and she burns the painting in which the doll of Hepburn
is drawn. It is a ritual performance for them two to be reborn. Lawrence desires that
Hannele is not going to dominate Hepburn and he is going to be honoured and obeyed byher. The star-equilibrium relationship means that man and woman attain their singleness3
which connotes human beings’ wholeness.
Notes
1.
2.
3.

See Akiko Yamada, The Novels of D. H. Lawrence (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 2009), pp. 216–17.
See D. H. Lawrence. “Chapter VIII Mino” in Women in Love (Ed. D. Farmer, L. Vasey and J.
Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
See Akiko Yamada, The Novels of D. H. Lawrence (Tokyo: Kindai Bungeisha, 2009), pp. 216.

Works Cited
Clark, L. D. The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence. Tuscon: The
University of Arizona Press, 1980.
Harris, J. H. The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1984.
Gilbert, S. M. “Potent Griselda: “The Ladybird” and the Great Mother” in Eds. P. Balbert and P. L.
Marcus. D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 1985.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. M. Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980. (A). The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird. Ed. D. Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992. (CD). Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. B. Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985. (STH)
Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.
McDowell, F. P. W. “The Individual in His Pure Singleness: Theme and Symbol in The Captain’s
Doll” in Eds. D. Ellis and O. De Zordo. D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments Volume III. East
Sussex: Helm Information, 1992.
Prichard, R. E. D. H. Lawrence: Body of Darkness. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1971.
Widmer, K. Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fictions. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1962.

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No. 38Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. USA: The
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