D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s
Lover: That was strange.
Everyone knows the story. Lady
Chatterley’s husband, Clifford, is paralyzed from the waist down
due to blast in the Great War. Though she doesn’t seem to miss the
sex, having seen what all the fuss was about in her youth, and she was never that keen on it anyway, she starts looking for
someone or something to connect with physically, and after a brief
and unsatisfying few romps with a family friend, she catches sight of
her estate’s gamekeeper stripped to the waist and splashed with
water, and after that, the lady just can’t help herself. Though the
story is often remembered as an attraction of opposites or a
scandalous bridging of the gap in social class, that’s more in the
perception of others than in the facts; in truth, Mellors, though
born in the working class, is educated (Mellors often speaks "broad," slipping into his lower-class accent, but he's slumming, doing it partly for effect and partly to comfort himself) and has been an officer, and
Lady Chatterley, though of the landed classes, doesn’t wear easily
the mantle of her husband’s title and expresses strong sympathy for
the workers.
It’s a love story, replete with
scenes of explicit sexuality and largely inexplicit sex, but larger crises
are at work in the novel than the crisis caused by the affair. WWI
has physically and emotionally damaged everyone involved, but
Clifford’s inability to either stand or produce children is
Lawrence’s way of saying that the entire class structure is hobbled
and impotent. Intellectual discussions take place in the Chatterley’s
Wragley Hall, but they’re weightless, modern in the worst possible
ways (and strangely reminiscent of Brave New World, as these
colorless upper-class twits discuss making children in bottles). As
for the outer world, industrialization is stripping away whatever was
beautiful in England. It’s also causing encroachment on the estates
of old, which can no longer survive, and though the loss of these
estates is painted in morbid tones, it’s clear that Lawrence
doesn’t truly bemoan that world's demise. Sterile, out of step, and
inward, the old England has nothing to recommend it, but neither does
Lawrence find anything to recommend the world to come, nor the lower
classes bound to inhabit it. They have babies, and they’re not a
bad sort, but they’ve become unmannered, their lives governed by
money (a foul word in this novel) and gossip.
I was often reminded of Orwell’s
1984, which, for all its interest in the politics and
psychology of fascism, also has some of Lawrence’s concerns and
solutions. Life too sterile? Go off to the woods for a romp among the
flowers. Worried about the future? Eventually, this present structure
will fade. But Orwell’s characters are all in the Party, making it
easy to forget, for much of that novel, that most people are leading
rather different lives than the protagonists. “Salvation will come
from the proles,” Winston Smith thinks, but Orwell doesn’t tell
us much about them, keeping them at arm’s length. Lawrence shows us
something of working-class life, and the ability (and marked
tendency) of the working classes to reproduce is pushed in the face
of Lady Chatterley, who does want a child. And though salvation won’t
come from “the proles,” we’re given to understand, in the
novel’s strangely melancholy ending, that a return to honest work,
and an embrace of some sort of honest relations between the sexes,
will at least make life feel meaningful.
As most know, what got the novel in
trouble was all the sex. Three pages in, Lawrence is waxing about the
female orgasm. You have to sympathize with Lawrence, who wants to
write about sex but doesn’t have any literary model to follow. In
the early going, he seems to struggle with how to talk about it, even
saying “orgasm” and “crisis” in the same sentence as if they
were two different things. He often says that Lady Chatterley is
moved “in her womb” or “in her bowels” when she feels sexual
stirrings. There’s an odd vacillation between bluntness and
euphemism. I think, though, that what Lawrence wants to have happen
is for the language to become more direct as Lady Chatterley herself
comes to embrace a more vivid sexuality than she’s previously
known. Thus, though sex enters the story early, the scenes gradually
become more explicit and the characters grow more comfortable with
the language and with their own bodies. It often reads goofily, but
it works better than I initially thought it did.
Further, the book is tonally ragged. It's funnier than I expected.
There are sharp exchanges and clever observations, but there are also
just silly moments in which you feel Lawrence’s revealing honesty.
The characters are hard to picture, as Lawrence’s descriptions seem
inconsistent. Characters speak inconsistently, too, allowing Lawrence
to vent his spleen about some subject and then, moments later, take
it all back. And the book ends without completing what would appear
to be its climax, leaving the characters suspended between the
choices they’ve just made and the consequences. That follows 40
pages of jumping about in a rushed way that doesn’t fit with the
rest of the novel. Perhaps he just wanted to be done, having put
everyone though quite enough hell.
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