Influence Of Nietzsche In D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love

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Influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy manifested in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love
Friedrich Nietzsche the German philosopher exerted his influence in many fields. It is said that in England his influence was mainly on the Novelists and poets. It is true and a proof of it is D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love in which Nietzsche’s ideology is reflected. Lawrence used four Nietzschean concepts in his novel. They are the Revaluation of all values, the Overman, the Will to Power and the Last Man – the Blond Beast. This research paper aims at showing how Lawrence having been influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy used four aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy throughout his novel and portrayed his characters in the light of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
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Gerald was reading a newspaper. He comes across a cant and lets Birkin know about it (Bianco 42). “ there must arise a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin” (Lawrence 59). Later Gerald asked him whether a new gospel was necessary and whether there was a need to destroy the present life to which Birkin replies that it is necessary to bust life totally. Birkin is proposing the revaluation of all values and it does not mean creating new values but rather destroying the old ones. He tells Gerald that he does not want any reforms of the society. He tells that it will be of no use establishing new values unless people destroy the old ones (Bianco …show more content…

. . consciously turn away from a desire for a humane, gentle, and just epoch, because they perceive in such a desire the expression of a profound debility and failing strength. These homeless ones, if they rightly understand their task, must not only feel themselves to be rich and free spirits, but conquerors also. For only they whose desire is for “the strengthening and exaltation of the type man” have a right to regard themselves as homeless ones, and no longer as inhabitants of the humanitarian world (45).
This is how Birkin is shown in the novel. He is rich and free in spirit and not bound by anything. His inner strength does not fail. He is a conqueror as he surpasses himself and becomes better. He is described the way Nietzsche described Ubermensch. Birkin is an indefinite being, a godly being which is shown throughout the novel by the use of language.
His nature was clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common idea, travestied himself. He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvelously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of his surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarm them from attacking his singleness (Lawrence

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