D. H. Lawrence is a famous name; Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a more famous one. More than half a century ago, when D. H. Lawrence rewrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover two times and paid for its private publication, the whole literary world was radically stirred up. Not recognized as his best book, it is nevertheless the one for which Lawrence is best known. And although Lawrence had always been a controversial figure for most of his literary career, the publication of this novel added to his notoriety.
I came across Lady Chatterley’s Lover one day in a bookstore where a big sale was going on. Having read only a very small part of D. H. Lawrence, say, several short stories and some poems, I paid for this notoriously attractive book and started reading it with a completely open mind, quickly and without close study, as one would read any novel chosen for light reading.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is, briefly speaking, a story depicting the relationship between the wife of a crippled baronet and a gamekeeper.
Constance Reid (Connie) marries Sir Clifford Chatterley who gets wounded in the war to an extent that he must be confined to a wheelchair permanently. After two years of living with Clifford out of a blind compassion, Connie realizes that “a growing restlessness is taking possession of her like madness”. She then has a brief affair of little meaning with Michaelis the playwright. Soon after that she meets with Oliver Mellors the gamekeeper on their estate and enjoys an extremely passionate relationship with him. Meanwhile, Clifford develops a fascinating relationship with Mrs. Bolton the nurse who gradually becomes his sole companion and caretaker. The later stages of the novel move onto the issue of Lady Chatterley’s pregnancy by Mellors and her trip to Venice to disguise the true parentage of the child. However, the truth is eventually and inevitably uncovered and the novel ends with a sense of fulfillment for both Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors although the situation is never fully resolved.
Lawrence is known to be superb when writing about relationships. He seems to be endowed with the ability to capture the mixed emotions and delicately conflicting feelings between men and women. I was, from head to toe, seized by the observant and smart depiction of human psychology through the whole process of reading.
However, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not a mere love story. Like many other modernist postwar writers, D. H. Lawrence believed that the First World War was a tragedy which had thrown Europe into chaos and cast doubt on all that civilization had previously believed meaningful. The very beginning of the novel is rather shocking, something like an apocalypse:
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruin, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how man skies have fallen.
From this paragraph we can safely conclude that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel with profound social, political and cultural concerns. It interests itself not just in the love affair between Connie and Mellors in particular, and not just in personal relationships in general, but in the structure and survival of Western society.
Clifford Chatterley is one of the typical representatives under such circumstances. In the novel he is portrayed as a figure for the aristocracy and intelligentsia of postwar England. He is a man with a potent mind to counteract the uselessness of his legs but, spiritually, he is impotent. His hold on life was marvelous; he remains in the doctor’s hands for two years and pronounced a cure from the severe wounds of the war. But he sacrifices something more important for the recovery of his physical health; a mind of emptiness, or vacancy, is the only thing left in his body. “Something inside him had perished; some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.” No wonder when he receives Connie’s letter telling him she wants a divorce, he has no words to articulate a particular feeling.
He takes writing as his profession and makes himself known in the literary circle by producing ‘personal, clever, spiteful but meaningless’ stories, but in these successful stories “there was no touch, no actual contact”; “It was as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum”. Connie his wife is temporarily entranced by the world of letters, but soon she finds that intellectual life is nothing but letters without substance. He is, very much like Michaelis, the outcast playwright, going on a frantic pursuit of fame, “prostituting himself for success.”
He leads a life in the void; in the house there is “mechanical order”, “mechanical cleanliness”, “strict anarchy” and “strict punctuality”. No warmth of feeling unites the house organically; “everything not really existing”. Connie has tried to do something but fails; the only thing one could do is to “leave it alone.”
Besides, he treats the coal-miners who work for him with a stone heart; he cares little about the common people who live on his land and work for him: “He saw them as objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him.” Ironically, Clifford himself becomes part of the machinery when he tries all the means to gain success either economically or culturally.
Clifford in this novel functions as an allegorical figure as much as he does as a real character. His physical emasculation reflects an internal weakness and emptiness. He is incapable of breeding his own heir. And his art proves devoid of meaning; he lives a kind of aloof life out of contact of people; he dehumanizes those who work for him… It is obvious that Clifford serves as a symbol of the postwar England society. In such a tragic age, upon the ruins of the war, with such impotence, Lawrence is concerned that without a radical re-conception of personal relationships and social order, England will not be able to survive, to perpetuate itself. That’s the reason why he wrote this novel and put forward a somewhat romantic cure for the society—–to rebuild our world with warmth and true love instead of the cold machines and strict orders.
This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of modern civilization—–exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the soulless and emasculated Clifford Chatterley, and it suggests an alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. Characters are obvious allegorical types: Clifford as the impotent nobleman, Mellors as the Noble Savage,.
Oliver Mellors the other protagonist belongs to the category of “idealized man” in Lawrence’s mind. Mellors is a rather complex figure who was born into a working-class family and worked for years as a blacksmith. After years of service in the army, he went back to Derbyshire and took the job of a gamekeeper on the Chatterley land. But on several occasions Mellors seems to have innate nobility that makes him the equal of any aristocrat. He is also capable of shifting between the high English accent used by Connie and the coarse Derbyshire accent used by the coal miners; this particular position outside the class structure makes him more like an idea rather than a real character—– he is graceful and noble enough for philosophizing, and savage enough to appreciate sensuality.
Throughout their affair, Connie has asked Mellors whether or not he loves her. He always responds with a qualified answer: he loves that he can touch her; he loves sex with her; he loves her for her physicality. Readers may realize, like Connie, that “it is not really love; it is only sensuality”. The entire relationship between Connie and Mellors is shaped not around their personalities or interaction of minds, but around a kind of wild, depersonalized physicality—– this novel and Lawrence believe that the social order will be improved when people learn to trust and appreciate their bodies and their sensual urges.
He certainly believed that his writing had an evangelical purpose: “I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what they fancy they want”. Much of this “want” was sexual: “And I am so sure that only through a readjustment between men and women, and a making free and healthy of the sex, will [England] get out of her present atrophy”.
Lawrence believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important recognition in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the extent to which the modern relationship between men and women comes to resemble the relationship between men and machines. Lawrence also believes that not only do men and women require an appreciation of the sexual and sensual in order to relate to other properly; they require it even to live happily in the world, as beings able to maintain human dignity and individuality in the dehumanizing atmosphere created by modern greed and the injustices of the class system. In Lawrence’s eye, mind and body are equally valued.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is formally conservative when one consider that it was written towards the end of the 1920s when important innovations in literary art such as stream-of-consciousness took shape. Lady Chatterley’s Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s, and the entire modernist literary movement had never happened: in terms of structure; in terms of narrative force; in terms of diction, with the exception of a very few “profane” words. The structure of the novel is conventional, tracing a small group of characters over an extended period of time in a single place; the rather preachy narrator usually speaks with the familiar third-person omniscience of the Victorian novel; and the characters tend towards flatness, towards representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and developing real three-dimensional personalities.
But it can well be said that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is methodologically radical. It is a novel that liberally describes sex, and it is a book whose central idea is that sexual freedom and sensuality are far more important, more authentic and meaningful than we have thought. By no means could we say it is a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has exerted a profound impact on the later writers and literature.