two men". He compared Ramón to Rupert Birkin, a character of Women in Love, maintaining that they had similar "sexual philosophies". The critics F. R. Leavis and Harold Bloom have seen The Plumed Serpent as inferior to Women in Love, as well as to Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915). Bloom compared The Plumed Serpent to the novelist Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings (1983), suggesting that it had a similar underlying motive. He has argued that Lawrence was writing as a political theorist in The Plumed Serpent, which he described as a "Fascist fiction". The poet Richard Aldington described The Plumed Serpent as "curious and original". He compared it to Frederick Rolfe's novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904), arguing that "in both books the author imagines himself raised to a position of power which he never had the faintest chance of attaining in fact on this earth." He suggested that the novel shows Lawrence's "dissenting horror from the very things he is supposed to be preaching." He interpreted Cipriano and Ramón as projections of D. H. Lawrence. The writer Anthony Burgess maintained that The Plumed Serpent is the least liked of Lawrence's novels due to its lack of humour and its exploration of a theme of little interest to readers "with no knowledge of the ancient Aztec gods and what they could mean to a revitalized or Laurentianised Mexico." He called its ending unconvincing. Leavis and Burgess have compared The Plumed Serpent to Kangaroo, Burgess finding the similarity to be their shared emphasis on bloodshed. Leavis maintained that unlike The Rainbow and Women in Love, but like Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent was "exploratory and experimental." Though appreciating features such as its bullfight scene, he dismissed it as a bad book and the least complex of Lawrence's novels, arguing that it suffered from his single-minded concern with imagining a "revival of the ancient Mexican religion." Critics have offered differing interpretations of Kate Leslie. Aldington and Burgess saw the character as a representation of Frieda Lawrence, but Leavis maintained that Leslie was not a representation of Frieda Lawrence. The critic Frederick Crews argued that the character was simply an opportunity for Lawrence to present "Lawrentian doctrine." The Plumed Serpent has been criticised by feminist authors such as the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the activist Kate Millett. De Beauvoir compared Lawrence's view of female sexuality to that of the physician Gregorio Marañón.