Sexuality In Peter Moest's New Eve And Old Adam

This discussion is interested in the way Lawrence presents the breakdown of these principles when they are not equally balanced by each partner in a sexual relationship. With a primary focus on Peter Moest from “New Eve and Old Adam”, this lack of attainment of unity will be shown to result in a psychological and physical dependence of the males upon the females. The former strive for possession and knowledge of the women bodies which have a stable sense of being, according to Lawrence metaphor of the woman as the root of a plant; having a will-to-Inertia‟ and growing downwards towards the origin. This is in opposition to the man’s stalk-like Will-to-Motion, which grows upwards towards discovery, yet in these texts the polarities are disrupted …show more content…
Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. Lawrence emphasis here in the short story ‘New Eve and old Adam’ that of the phenomenon of physical and spiritual love, relationship between body and mind and both New Eve and old Adam standing apart, they are the victim of self distorted and truncated sexual problem. Old Adam wants to escape as he becomes physically and sexually weak after the marriage of one year. Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means. Moest escapes from his wife Poula and spends a night in a hotel where he takes a