“After us, not out of us”: Wrestling with the Future in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Abstract

I argue that Women in Love , despite its air of apocalyptic defeatism, offers D. H. Lawrence’s most intense engagement with the problem of how to imagine the future. Lawrence’s tenuous hope for a world that does not repeat the oppressive patterns of normativity is communicated, surprisingly, through the figure of the couple—often a site of stinging critique for Lawrence—and ultimately hinges upon an unresolved tension between heterosexual and same-sex coupling. Far from being extinguished in the novel’s pages, the project of creating a new future for the couple is passed along to the reader to pursue.