This thesis examines D. H. Lawrence’s discourse of love in his major work, Women in Love. Lawrence deals with the issue of love in a social perspective. By doing so, he attempts a powerful literary criticism against industrial capitalism. The work reveals that western modernity acts repressively at the individual level. Gerald and Gudrun consider that marriage has nothing to do with love, but is a social agreement. The mechanism of dominance and subordination operates in their relationship. Their egos are trapped in the normative sense. They don’t recognize each other as others but just try to make a unified state. They become self-destructive under their love relationship. Hermione lacks sensuality and can’t keep balance between her inner and outer self. The work also indicates the limits of modernism faced by Loerke. London bohemian seems to offer an alternative prospect to western civilization, but ironically, it takes only a form of social reaction to the action. So it is ultimately dependent on the dominant social discourse and could not be free from it.
Lawrence conveys the truth that is love, which enriches the human resources repressed under modernity. To do that, he reveals the area of emotion and sensuality of human beings which is blinded by western modernity. Lawrence imposes that we can be reborn as an alter ego through a relationship of love. Lawrence’s ideal couple, Birkin and Ursula, are reborn with ‘alter ego’ through their love. They exist as two single equal individuals balanced in conjuction, like the terms of ‘star-polarity’. Lawrence redoubles his critique that love can manage to free human beings of the normative influences that have turned conformity.
Lawrence’s discourse of love agrees with Alan Badiou’s in large part of its meaning. Both consider love as the space that each of two changes in progress rather than the two meet in conjunction to complete one. Also, love creates not one of the other world but a new world that is created via the ''two of us'' as the only individuals. But it seems the two discourses have crucial differences in terms of the relationship with the community, which acts as a limit of Lawrence. Badiou’s love is resistance to the society and the ongoing fight therein. However, the love of Lawrence is a refuge from the old British social space to find a new space. Lawrence’s personal aversion to contemporary British society is associated with chaotic situation at the time, so he takes love as a personal refuse.
Unfortunately, Lawrence stops trying more constant confrontation with society in his later work. His works tend to primitivism and they flow into the monotonous narrative of sex. It is an undeniable limit. Lawrence should be appreciated due to his attempts to seek an alternative possibility of love in the middle of the industrial society. His argument is still valid in today''s society that lies under the shadow of modernity.