D.H. Lawrence's Death Eaters in Women in Love

Abstract

This paper offers a Derridian reading of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, with excerpts from the novel’s prequel The Rainbow. Through Derrida’s ideas of difference and the imaginary origin, I explore the relationship between female reproductive potential and representation as means to a female sexual power, which Lawrence’s men attempt to destroy and subvert. By attacking realms of representation, like art, the novel’s male characters seek to dominate female reproductive power to assert patriarchal visions of modernity and modernism. These violent sexual dichotomies are found in the male characters’ relations to modern capitalism/colonialism and the modernist artistic project to “make it new.” Their masculine worldviews are perpetuated by consuming the death of representation, but they can never destroy the feminine cycle of reproductive potential and life.