Women in Love By DH Lawrence

Women & Love: Two Complexities together!

Women in Love by DH Lawrence is a mature drama, where four characters live and love, debate and denounce, hate and revere each other. The Bragwen sisters (also starring in Rainbow:)) represent two remarkably different women: Ursula is a small town, reserved, schoolteacher kinds; Gudrun the artsy one who hops from city to city. Both are complex characters, as I guess all women are, and the masterful Lawrence explores their love and passion for Rupert Birkin and Gerald Grich respectively.

Like any other Lawrence novel, the beauty is not the story, but how it is told. The heroes are human, feeling the whole array of emotions we feel. The relationship of Birkin and Grich is a relationship of two friends, tied together not only by the women they love, but an essential urge for find the meanings of their lifes. Birkin shuns materialism, Grich revels in it. Their exchanges, their conversations are beautifully captured.

As always, Lawrence gets beneath the skin of his characters, divulging their thoughts, hopes and dreams, echoing their fears and faults to the readers, echoing them through the words and deeds of characters, through sort of trifles and commonplace conversations and combines the disparities and eccentricities of human beings.

While the essential play is between four characters, Lawrence has conjured well developed group of support cast: Hermoine, the enchantress who is rhapsodical in her words, but shallow in self; Gerald's father, whose presence provides remarkable pretext for father son relationship; Loerke, an artist whose appearance in novel makes it multi-dimensional (read to find out why) and Winifried, Possum and so on.

The novel is very different from other Lawrence novels I have read so far. Sons and Lovers is most easily readable, and his autobiographical piece; Rainbow is Lawrence at his best, and so the novel is very rich and complex reading; Lady Chatterley's Lover (as its infamous for) explores human sensuality in a very poetic and honest way. Women in Love does not enchant, does not embellish facts or emotions, does not rely on suspense or sensuality of romance, does not attack moral fiber; what it really does is, it gives us a video camera and constant feed about thoughts of people that we are watching and we see, hear and enjoy according to our own perception! Women in love is sort of heavy read, one needs to labor through the labyrinth's of "words, philosophies, thoughts and ideas", and hence perhaps should not be first Lawrence you read. Start with Sons and Lovers or Lady Chatterley's Lover or his short stories! If you know women, if you think you know love, if you really know Women in Love, you will figure why this novel must be so!:)!