eligious impulses," but his fundamental decency (perhaps a species of tenderness) makes him diffident with any woman he likes. Thus it makes a kind of sense for Tom to marry Lydia, the resident alien of the village, who brings to the Brangwen family a foreign but nurturant strain.
In describing Tom's early relationship with Lydia, Lawrence refers to his anger, rage, and fury at her standoffishness (40), but it is a mistake to imagine that these emotions find expression as physical abuse. What really seems to be going on with such diction is that it expresses Tom's most private and closely held instincts and emotions, of which he is scarcely aware and which have everything to do with the cosmic anxieties of personality that Freud (346) describes as preconscious or unconscious and nothing to do with manifestly brutish behavior. Indeed, the manifest line of action is one of rather diffident, plodding, mildly decorous courtship, which is what explains Tom's reflection on "an inner reality, a logic of the soul, which connected her with him" (Lawrence 41). It explains, too, Tom's attitude toward Lydia as wife and mother.
Verbal expression of emotion is continually subverted by the power of the emotion itself. Tom's sense that he must "subdue himself" when approaching Anna physically hints that he feels obliged to apologize for violating her yet feels his attraction so intensely that no mere verbal expression can contain his feeling. The effect is to suggest that the physical and verbal elaborations of feeling are in constant tension with each other and that any attempt to verbally express feeling must fall before the limits of language and the awesome incomprehensibility of the beloved's physical presence.
The tension creates a kind of strangeness in the Brangwen household--"a curious family, a law to themselves, separate from the world, isolated" (103). In that environment, Lydia is comfortable, secure, and serene in a way that she ...