"A Woman Has to Live Her Life, or Live to Repent Not Having Lived it" : Female Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Abstract

D.H. Lawrence wrote about women in a way that was relatively unknown in the beginning of the twentieth century. This essay explores the female characters of Lawrence’s novels The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the importance of sexual experience in their development and presentation. From the publication of The Rainbow in 1915 and Women in Love in 1920 until the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, society, as well as Lawrence himself, had advanced significantly in regards to women and their sexual freedom. However, Lawrence’s female characters in these novels all had one thing in common; they were unaffected by social constructions of female behaviour and sexuality. Ursula Brangwen, Gudrun Brangwen and Connie Chatterley all experienced love and sex before marriage and their sexual experiences had a great impact on their character development. Lawrence emphasised the importance of young women experiencing sex in order to find themselves and become happy. Lawrence’s characters also express feelings of all kinds of love, as siblings and in friendship, as well as exploring love between two individuals of the same sex. Lawrence approached the characters in the three respective novels in different ways, which were dependent on his own personal development and advances in his writing style. Many of the characters in Lawrence’s novels are believed to echo his personal beliefs, though in various different ways. His approach towards female sexuality was unique and ground breaking while also enraging and shocking to some of his readers. Lawrence’s novels faced much criticism due to his way of writing about women, as well as the language he used to do so. Lawrence’s language also developed, from being relatively discreet and modest in The Rainbow and Women in Love to having crude words and explicit sexual descriptions in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s writing was the first of its kind and impacted the approach to female sexuality in British fiction of the later twentieth century.