" Kristeva builds on these standard definitions, adding Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical concepts, and making abjection a distinct category of mental disorder, but one that she illustrates exclusively with examples from literature. She begins with the most easily recognizable signifiers of the abject, or that which the self throws away in order to exist: rotten food, feces, urine, vomit, sweat, blood and other effluvia. A second classic signifier of the abject is the corpse, since it is the ultimate refuse of life. A third category is the social outcast, especially the cold-blooded criminal, because s/he represents that which "disturbs identity, system, [and] order" (Kristeva 4). A fourth category of signifiers of the abject contains women, the feminine, and the maternal body. Although this appears to be from an exclusively male viewpoint, it is not. A person tends to internalize the values of the dominant culture, so that, in patriarchy, a woman becomes abject to herself by definition. We will return to this problem later. A final category, that may not be abject, but that definitely deals directly with the abject, is that of artists (including writers), particularly those working during and after World War II. According to the Frankfurt School, artists must contemplate the horror of holocaust, genocide, and mass destruction; they must work through the abject that the twentieth century has made them witness. To Kristeva, literature is the prime signifier of the abject self, and modern literature's signified is the experience of primal want, absence, and loss (5). .
"Women in Love," contains all of these signifiers of the abject-outcasts, corpses, artists, women, and effluvia--but the greatest one of all is the unspoken backdrop of the war. Writing his magnum opus in the very intense middle year of World War I (1916), Lawrence said he left out any direct reference to it, "so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters," (WL 485).
