Sexual Politics

Writing in the early 20th century, D.H. Lawrence attempted to challenge the prudish attitudes of the period by addressing “the noble and necessary task of freeing sexual behavior of perverse inhibitions” (238). In many respects, however, he is a reactionary figure, responding to the liberated woman of the sexual revolution with fear and outrage. Earlier works such as The Rainbow underscore this fear. Throughout the book, Lawrence is in awe of “the power of the womb” (258) and terrified of women’s “fecundity, serenity, their magical correspondence with the earth and the moon” (260). More pressing than his awe and terror of this archetypal woman, however, is his fear of women being liberated from their traditional sex role and entering “the male’s own lesser sphere of intellect and social action” (260). He shows this in “Ursula’s invasion of the ‘mysteriously man’s world’” (260) in The Rainbow and even more clearly in the book’s sequel, Women in Love in which “the new man arrive[s] in time to give Ursula her comeuppance and demote her back to wifely submission” (262). Similar themes are apparent in Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which Lawrence, convinced that “modern man is ineffectual, modern woman a lost creature” (242), offers the tale “the salvation of one modern women […] through the offices of the author’s personal cult, ‘the mystery of the phallus’” (238).