“There will be a new embodiment, in a new way”: Alternative Posthumanisms in Women in Love

This essay places Women in Love in dialogue with posthumanism in order to understand what kind of a nonhuman world the novel might be imagining when Rupert Birkin declares that “ humanity is a dead letter,” and when characters alternately degrade and idealize what they identify as the inhuman, superhuman, or extra-human. I argue that Lawrence’s array of prefixes does not graft easily onto the “post” of posthumanism, and that Women in Love constantly invokes, but never settles on a definitive answer to Katherine Hayles’s question: “What kind of posthumans will we be?” Instead, the novel enacts a series of alternative posthumanisms that, through their vexed encodings of the human and humanist, direct us to reflect on the merits and limitations of our own contemporary theorizations.