War is abject because of its propensity to break down meaning; in one of Kristeva's more potent definitions, abjection is, "a weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes [one]," (2). .
War is a horror precisely because those involved in it risk undergoing an abjection of the self, an experience in which the subject, unable to identify with anything in the outside world, locates the site of meaninglessness and impossibility within itself (Kristeva 5). Nothing could threaten sanity or wholeness more than this. By extension, the identification of the self with the abject would seem to necessitate the final, "throwing away," through suicide, which of course brings up the question of Gerald's death in the novel. Is his death the textbook case of abjection or something else? Is his life worse or better than the soulless lives around him? In fact, how do characters compare on an axis of abjectivity? Can abjection be compared? Or does it proceed in all of our lives as the, "flux and reflux," pattern that Lawrence used to describe both writing and, "every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding," (WL 486)?.
Although Lawrence's novels, stories and essays are rife with abjection, Women in Love contains the most instances. In the state of rigor mortis, the corpse of Diana Crich appears to strangle the corpse of the young doctor. The rabbit's scratch on Gudrun's arm "lets through the obscene beyond" (242). Pussum cuts the Jew on his hand for mocking her lisp. At Thomas Crich's death, Gerald watches "the dark blood and mess pumping up" (333). During her boat ride on the Thames, Gudrun reviles the begging urchins. Lawrence casts out his Prologue, because it admits Birkin's desire to possess male bodies. Loerke, Halliday, Hermione, and Pussum explore the sewers of degradation.