Women in Love and Education: D. H. Lawrence's Epistemological Critique

Abstract

On a plot level, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love rejects the conformity of the classroom and the narrowness of intellectual knowledge, celebrating instead the realm of instincts and the senses. Like its teacher-author, though, the novel retains a pedagogic design; to lead the reader through the experience of the text's narrative confusions into an epistemological critique of the rationalised intellect and the male teachers who embody it. Attention to the poems and textbooks Lawrence was writing during the novel's gestation show that Lawrence's developing modernist style was an an alternative form of teaching ‘sense’ to his readers, in line with his wider conception of the educational qualities of art.