D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love: themes and analysis

DH Lawrence - Women in Love

Annotated Bibliography of Women in Love

Ben-Ephraim, Gaviel. "The Teller Reasserted: Exercisings of the Will in Women in Love." In the Moon's Dominion: Narrative Dichotomy and Female Dominance

In Lawrence's Earlier Novels. Ed. Gavriel Ben-Ephraim. East Brunswick, New

Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1981, 179-232. Ben-Ephraim insists in his essay that the mood in Women in Love is "harsh and pessimistic, mostly despairing, with humanity written off as 'dry rotten.'" Basically the author takes

Lawrence to task for the bizarre behaviors of his characters, including Gerald, whose violence and aggressive behaviors typify the male obsession for power in the new Industrial Age.

Drain, Richard. "Women in Love," in DH Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major

Novels and Other Writings. Ed. a.H. Gomme. New York: The Harvester Press, 1978, 70-91. This essay by Richard Drain digs into the "deeper questioning" the book requires of readers. Lawrence's novel allows the reader to see through the eyes of the characters, Drain writes, explaining that Lawrence's narrative takes on qualities of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. Indeed the novel is, according to Drain, a "social critique" which pinpoints the "sense of alienation" modern civilization brings to the fore.

Knight, G. Wilson. "Through...Degradation to a New Health' - a Comment on Women in Love (1961)." In DH Lawrence: The Rainbow and Women in Love. Ed. Colin Clarke. London: MacMillan, 1969, 135-141. Wilson uses his

Essay to make comparisons between Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love, and he uses passages from critic Middleton Murray to help his own scholarship vis-a-vis relating to Women in Love. Clearly Wilson is fascinated by Murray's shock at the sexual scenes in Women in Love. Wilson quotes

Murray saying Lawrence used the "crudest sexuality" and that the characters in Women in Love "...grope in their own slime... [and] man and woman are Indistinguishable as octopods in an aquarium tank."

Tague, Gregory F. "DH Lawrence: The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and the Metaphysics of Consciousness." In Character and Consciousness: George

Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, DH Lawrence (Phenomenological,

Ecological, and Ethical Readings). Bethesda: Academica Press, LLC, 2005, 169-

This essay, like many essays about Lawrence's work, relies on the words and ideas of other scholars. Things in Women in Love just seem to happen arbitrarily, randomly, or spontaneously" according to David Lodge, one of the critics Tague reviews. The essay delves into a discussion of whether or not Lawrence allows his characters to speak for themselves, or, is the narrator somehow manipulating the scenes so Lawrence can have the last word?

Report on textural crux (an unclear matter): In this novel, as in other works by Lawrence, sexual relationships abound, but there are psychological themes pushing the relationships into animalistic behaviors. When it comes to sensual attractions that at one time were completed between certain lovers, or individuals otherwise acquainted, if those attractions don't become fulfilled again, they may become portrayed as life and death moments. Lawrence has a way of brilliantly building up to a moment - sometimes just a normal moment - in which there are expectations on the part of one of the characters, and then the hopes or aspirations come crashing down in brutal ways. For example Hermione Roddice, one of the bridesmaids, the "most remarkable women in the Midlands" (Lawrence, 28). Readers know that this is a cultural creature because her father was a Derbyshire Baronet, and she was "full of intellectuality... [and] passionately interested in reform" because her soul had been given up "to the public cause" (Lawrence, 28). All those brains and ambition to help the community notwithstanding, Hermione was a "man's woman" and the manly world "held her" (p. 28). Hermione was indeed the "social equal" - if not "far the superior" - of anyone she might meet. Still, with all that cultural and social buildup by Lawrence, Hermione's soul "was tortured" because she felt vulnerable...there was a secret chink in her armor" (p. 29).

And part of her torture was that she was obsessed with Rupert Birkin, whom she passionately longed for and hoped he would be at the wedding. They had been lovers for years so she knew what to expect from him and yet he tried to get away from her. So readers have this sense of a woman's strong social and sensual desire to lay eyes on a man, but wait, after Hermione became so obsessed with the hope that he would be at the wedding she even suffered a "little convulsion" and indeed her "slender body convulsed with agitation" (p. 31). And when she realized that Birkin wasn't in the church, "A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness" that was "beyond death, so utterly null, desert" (p. 31). One can imagine an intelligent person being disappointed, even emotionally drained, at the possibility that the one person she [Hermione] wanted desperately to see was not there. But "beyond death" is about as severe a description as possible, yet Lawrence pulls these off throughout the novel. The author is sadistic in this regard, but it is done for a purpose.

Indeed, Lawrence's book is overflowing with "physical and mental violence" and the characters exhibit "both masochistic and sadistic qualities" (Howe, 2002). The author in fact goes beyond creating characters that are extreme in their thoughts and actions, according to a scholarly article in Papers on Language & Literature ("Beastly Desire: Human/Animal Interactions in Lawrence's Women in Love") by Andrew Howe. Thanks to Lawrence the characters' mechanism for sexual arousal and dominance morphs into "animal proxies" (Howe p. 1).