Women in Love Through a Man's Eyes

In the past centuries it was very popular for male writer to write the women literature. They wrote about female characters, whether they knew how to or not, as there were so little women writers.

At the time when D.H. Lawrence wrote this novel, general assumptions about the nature of women were beginning to change. Lawrence was aware of great social changes, and even though he may not have understood them completely, his work is fully charged with love, emotion, sexuality, gender, identity and feminism.

Women in Love is a philosophical novel and a journey through the intellectual lives of its characters. It is based wholly on human relationships, and the most interesting type of bonding is the bonding between the women. As the novel opens, we see Ursula and Gudrun in their everyday settings, musing about marriage, although they both feel a strong inclination not to. Through the conversation, Ursula begins to feel a sense of suppression from Gudrun, while Gudrun is hostile towards her sensitive sister. They feel united only over their fear of the stagnant life they lead in the town of Beldover.

Being an artist, Gudrun is able to know and categorize people in her mind. She lusts for power and control, which is seen in her art: tiny figures that fit in the palm of her hand. In her relationship with Gerald Crich, she begins to bond with his younger sister Winifred. Just like Gudrun, Winifred only pays attention to people who are wort her while and obtains a feeling of power over those beings that are physically smaller than her.

Ursula, on the other hand, develops an interest in Gerald's friend Birkin and his former lover Hermione. Unlike Gudrun, she is unable to categorize the nature of human beings. On the contrary, she knows them through their emotions and her own. She is a sharp contrast to the character of Hermione, who holds an insecure superficiality. Hermione possesses qualities similar to Gudrun; she wants to know everything intelectually and control everything.

Throughout the novel, we see an intellectual depiction of each character's relationship with others. These relationships include womanly bonding between the characters of Ursula, Gudrun, Hermione and Winifred. However, they soon become detached from each other reminding us of the separate individualities of the women in the novel.

If we take in consideration Paul Jung's concepts of animus and anima, animus being the masculine principle in the feminine psyche and anima the feminine principle in the masculine psyche, it becomes evident that Lawrence's work includes more of the anima. For example, Gudrun in the chapter Diver envied men for being able to swim naked:
'What it is to be a man: the freedom, the liberty, the mobility – no obstacles.'

However, she holds the same qualities as the characters of Hermione and Winifred: lust for power and control, usually taken as masculine qualities. Ursula, on the other hand, is naive and innocent on the surface, but holds a strong power in her unconscious.

These similarities between women and their bonding in this novel make the reader feel that Lawrence had somehow worked more on his male characters and their anima, and left the female characters incomplete. This makes Lawrence still today one of the most challenging writers, whose provocative and sometimes simplistic ideas polarize critics and feminists.