摘  要

劳伦斯是20世纪英国最杰出、最具创造力，也是最富想象力的作家之一，其作品多以描写男性与女性的关系为主题。《恋爱中的女人》是他的名篇，小说主要通过对文中主人公伯金和厄秀拉、杰拉德和戈珍两对恋人的爱情故事描写揭示出工业文明压迫下异化的人类灵魂已经无法正常去爱的社会现况。尤其是杰拉德和戈珍这对恋人的悲惨结局印证了工业文明下的残酷与黑暗。本文将从男女主人公性格上的比较，男女主人公爱情观与婚姻观的差异以及社会环境和家庭环境对他们的影响这三方面对这段悲惨爱情进行分析, 从而揭露出这一恋情在这样的社会背景下加上他们俩自身的缺陷是必然走向衰亡的。

关键词：性格比较；爱情观；婚姻观；社会环境；家庭背景
 
Abstract

Lawrence is one of the most outstanding, creative and imaginative writers in the 20th century. Most of his works are about the relationship between man and woman. Women in Love is his masterpiece. The novel showed that people were not able to love under the industrial civilization by describing the story of two pairs of lovers. Particularly the tragic love between Gerald and Gudrun, their love failure was the evidence of the cruelty and darkness of that age. This paper tries to analyze the love tragedy through the three aspects: the character comparison between Gerald and Gudrun, the different point of views towards love and marriage among them as well as environmental and family influence on them. Thus, it reveals the fact that their love is doomed to be dying out because of certain social background and their own defects.

Key words: Character comparison; view of love; view of marriage; social environment;  family background

1 Introduction
   This paper explores the reasons of love failure between Gerald and Gudrun in Women in Love from the perspective of their different views of love and marriage, their character comparison and the influence of social environment on them.
1.1 The purpose and significance of the paper
Women in Love is one of Lawrence’s masterpieces, a “potential sequel” to The Rainbow. The novel was written under the background of industrial civilization, mainly describes two couple of lovers, Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun and the subordinate masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. There is a clear contrast between the two pairs of lovers. Birkin and Ursula finally got together and reached a fruitful relationship while Gerald and Gudrun broke up in the end. There are too many contradictions and antagonism between these two couples. Lawrence showed clearly that there was such a contradiction between man and woman. Because man has an instinctive desire to control woman, and they always try to stop the woman’s uprising from happening.