This essay will examine feminine and matriarchal power in Women in Love. It will discuss how this sort of power is illustrated in the novel, while aiming to locate a suitable channel for feminine power within the work. Lawrence undoubtedly portrays a very complicated and arguably sometimes paradoxical account of women in many of his works. He was involved of the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century and campaigned for women’s rights, with this movement featuring …show more content…
It is what turned man into a broken half of a couple" (128). When Ursula and Birken have sex for the first time in the novel, it is depicted as tampering with their equilibrium and thus there is contention between these two characters in the next chapters of the work. The knowledge they gained through the act as turned out to be destructive, which links back to Lawrence’s abhorrent attitude toward the renewed thirst for knowledge that industrialisation had brought with it. Birken illuminates further that his hated of sex stems from his view of it being a physical manifestation of Ursula’s "lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love" (129). Sex affords Ursula the opportunity to gain a position of power with his making Birken inevitably uncomfortable "Ursula was the perfect womb of birth to which all men must come" (120). He saw sex as biologically presenting Ursula the advantage and this is something he abhorred to facilitate. We see a similar discomfort in his aversion to Hermione’s thirst for knowledge, to whom knowledge meant power. To Birken knowledge was finite and subjective and can never fully be known, Hermione’s quest to master this seemingly unknowable force is a cause of deep frustration to Birken, with Mike Spika noting that "Hermione depends too heavily upon one or two elements of being: will, spirit, and intellect are fused together within this woman into a single passion for final abstract knowledge" (79). This is representative of Lawrence’s own attitudes towards modernity and the renewed thirst for knowledge it brought with