Desire, Repression and Multiple Sexualities in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Abstract

This thesis deals with the exploration of repressed desires from the perspective of Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender in Women in Love by D.H.Lawrence. This research questions in the thesis about how the gender is undone in the society and how gender is constructed. This thesis shows the homosexual men and the breakdown of the conventional rules and regulation made by the society. Maincharacters of the novel shows their struggle for the sexual drive, while they are not fully satisfied with their sex partners. While, Rupert and Birkin are homosexual, they fall in love for each other but they could not express feelings freely just because of the fear of the abandonment by the society. And Lawrence raisesthe question of visible alliances between the sexes, where the position of power and dominance often is not fixed but is negotiable and constantly in the process of revision. My thesis examines Lawrence’s experimentation with definitions and boundaries of public and private gender roles. It investigatesthe struggle of the Birkin and Gerald in their life by overcoming against all the homosexual’s problems in a traditional society. They did not want to show their feelings in front of the society, instead they hide their homosexual personality. Keywords: Homosexuality, gender, desires, sex, suffering, emotion.