Culture, Art and Language: Women in Love

Abstract

In Women in Love the structures of the self, its conditions of growth and disintegration, are essentially the same as those found in Studies and in the earlier novels. However the sources of disintegration in culture and society are identified differently and the novel has an altogether more contemporary conception of the problems of being human. (Indeed those ideals designated by the word ‘human’ are themselves called in question as adequate aims for the aspiring self in a way which recalls the title of Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human.) Dangers to the self only hinted at in the earlier novels are fully explored here. For example that condition represented by the cultured mistress of Alfred Brangwen, that ‘inhuman being who used up human life for cold, unliving purposes’,1 is much more fully investigated in the person of Hermione Roddice, just as the industrial magnate, first seen in Ursula’s uncle Tom, is expanded and deepened in the person of Gerald Crich.KeywordsHuman NatureRational PrincipleTraditional MoralityOpen TextureOpen RoadThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.