CLASSIC: "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence

 STORYTELLING: 4/5

WRITING STYLE: 5/5

THEMES/MESSAGE: 4/5

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT: 5/5

IMPACT/ENGAGEMENT: 5/5

Total Grade: A- (92%)

“It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening,” (111). 

Due to restrictive publishing laws in the United Kingdom and the United States, D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous and “obscene” novel was first published in Italy in 1928, and in France a year later, all the while being smuggled back into England, the setting in which the story takes place. Supposedly inspired by the affair between D.H. Lawrence’s German wife and an Italian peasant, Lady Chatterley’s Lover follows an affair between Constantine (Connie) Chatterley and her aristocratic husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The first world war left Clifford Chatterley paralyzed and impotent, and his ideas about him and his “ruling class” ultimately usher Connie into the arms of Mellors, former lieutenant and lonely man of the working class that, to Connie, seems to be set apart for his “courage of tenderness.” 

It’s a shame that D.H. Lawrence and a lot of his work went by the wayside while the feminist movement started gaining traction, particularly because there isn’t much in this book to suggest any abnormal display of sexism (it’s certainly less sexist than The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose intended audience was very, very obvious), but I might be biased. Scandal, class divides, nature imagery; it’s my bread and butter, so I guess I’m a little more lenient to let a few things go. Does that make me a bad feminist? I don’t care. I like what I like, and you should like what I like, too, so let’s get into it!

“She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an excuse, to see the daffodils. And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as they turned them away from the wind. They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing,” (71).

The setting is essential to this book’s character and creation, not simply because we’re talking about England’s working class and the slow dying aristocracy, but the abundance of nature in which we discover these characters. Wragby and the land belonging to Sir Clifford is set somewhere in the Midlands of England, where a variety of flowers and trees are always being brought to life through Lawrence’s weaving and stitching and sewing into this beautiful quilt of flora and verdure. Part of this, I believe, is done for the sake of pure enjoyment, which is something lacking in a lot of contemporary literature. It was often taken for granted in old books like these, expected, rather, so it’s nice to enter the forest through words once again. But there’s a great deal of symbolism that needs to be discussed, too. 

First, we have this statement: “Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees. He felt they were his own through generations. He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world,” (45). 

Then there’s also this: “From the old wood came the ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world…They seemed a very power of silence and yet a vital presence. They, too, were waiting: obstinately, stoically waiting, and giving off a potency of silence. Perhaps they were only waiting for the end; to be cut down, cleared away, the end of the forest, for them the end of all things. But perhaps their strong and aristocratic silence, the silence of strong trees, meant something else,” (71). 

The first quote seems to symbolize Clifford’s own image of himself, his way of life and his place in society. The old oak trees harken back to tradition, the old way of doing things i.e. the oppressive hierarchical structure of Victorian society, a system having originated as far back as the medieval era, probably even farther. He’s clinging to his existence, bolstering its so called importance that was in harsh decline following the war. This pairs nicely with his pompous, classist monologues scattered throughout the novel. He doesn’t regard the working class as human, which reminds me of a scene when he indelicately pushes his wheelchair over a patch of beautiful wildflowers, which, of course, aggravates and hurts Connie. The end of this first quote also suggests this is the way Clifford sees Connie and his future with her. Connie is from the upper middle class, her father a wild, bohemian painter, and her sister Hilda, devoutly loyal to the Scottish upper middle class. She’s hardly a “lady,” which is something Clifford has done his best to brush off, paint over. And by keeping Connie at Wragby, isolated and away from the wild world she knew before him, he can accomplish just that (or so he had hoped). 

The second quote says a lot about both Clifford and Oliver, but it’s hard to sparse out at first because we’re talking about the wood again. Connie finds Oliver to be stoic in all his loneliness, beautifully lonely, and she loves him for it, or at least, that was the initial draw toward him. There was also a great deal of silence at the start of their relationship; Connie simply enjoyed watching him work in the woods near the cottage where the pheasants are kept. The word potency seems to be obviously targeted. Oliver is sexually competent, Clifford is not. (Do I need to talk about the word “wood,” too?) 

Both Connie and Clifford are looking at the same thing but seeing it differently, much the way they view their marriage as well as the affair. 

It’s the latter part of the quote that intrigues me the most, though. “Waiting for the end” could mean a few things, but, to me, it instantly harks back to how Oliver sees the world. He doesn’t have any hope for the future, believing industry, machinery, “progress,” to announce the end’s beginning. He’s entirely apathetic to the future, unenthused even to hear he may have sired a child by Connie. But, returning to the first quote, the end of these stoic, aristocratic trees could simultaneously suggest the end of Clifford's precious genteel class. The end of the quote signals Connie’s own ambiguous interpretation of these trees, this land. She’s trying to find meaning, trying to find a truth to hang her hat on. 

The only other thing I have to say about all the nature stuff is that there’s a scene that depicts Oliver and Connie placing wildflowers in each other’s hair (and I do mean body hair). Oh, the obscenity! How ghastly!

“He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up,” (147). 

The affair! That’s where the drama’s at! I love how Lawrence was able to get into the head of each character (very Tolstoy). But we have to get into the inevitable compare and contrast between the two men, pushing past simple impotence and potency.  

There’s lots of reasons why I think Connie is attracted to Oliver and vice versa. One thing that needs to be mentioned, though, is that Oliver was the one to make the first move, contrary to what the Netflix adaptation suggests, and I think they may have made this change because 1) they felt compelled to put a more feminist spin on things, and 2) Connie retained a sort of passive submission during their first “passionate encounter.” It would’ve read as “rapey” to many modern audiences, but Connie, herself, didn’t recognize it as that, so I think we should just leave it alone. (Yes, a man wrote this book. I understand, but Lawrence is able to be honest about Oliver’s character, especially toward the end of the book. Just read it for yourself). To Connie, Oliver is very earthly, as lonely as she is, masculine but allows himself to contain enough femininity to keep himself as human as possible. Connie doesn’t care about class, status, and reputation, so much as she cares about feeling content as a woman, and her counterpart content as a man. She seeks fulfillment in mutual enjoyment, freedom, and balanced power dynamics. She’s not the same as Oliver, and she doesn’t want to be. She just wants to be allowed to be herself, fully, and to be admired for it. 

Oliver loves her because she is free, her freedom frees him, too. She brought life back to his lonely existence. She listens to him and she enjoys sex. She doesn’t ask more of him than he is able to give, and he gives freely. He’s moody, at times, but I think Connie enjoys that about him. They’re able to be human with one another. They don’t expect more than what they’re naturally capable of providing. Oliver is well read, he was successful during the war, and picked up a couple mannerisms from the upper class because of this, but he still chooses his own, earthly, flawed humanity over the “dead” society to which Clifford belongs. He’s smart, and that’s very important. He’s made smart by experience, and that’s what Connie values. She doesn’t care much for being smart from higher education. She is drawn in by how much life Oliver has lived and what he’s able to teach her. He likes Connie for her receptivity, and her mind. They make each other laugh. It’s simple, and complicated, but they respect each other. That’s the core of it all; he respects her, and she him, and they don’t want to change each other. 

Clifford doesn’t respect Connie, not really. Anytime she makes a democratic statement, one that likens the upper class to the working class, Clifford doesn’t ever take her seriously. He just calls her his “little Evangelist” and seems to spiritually pat her on the top of the head as if she were a silly little child. The conversations held between him and the other men of his class were highly convoluted and nonsensical, with the majority of them not caring a wit about “the sex thing.” Clifford sort of considers sex as a habit belonging to those without brains–he intellectualizes his impotence, or rather, his involuntary vow of chastity. He sees himself as a modern, aristocratic saint because he isn’t, and has no chance, to be undone by something so animalistic as sex. 

“‘The life of the body,’ he (Clifford) said, ‘is just the life of animals.’

‘And that’s better than the life of professional corpses…And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body,’ (262).”

And yet, when Connie asks Oliver about his view of it, he seems to view the relationship built by men and women through sex as being “the very core of [his] life. 

So, in short…

QUESTION: What do women really want?

ANSWER: The freedom to be human! (And a hot bf)

(Also, when Clifford found out about the affair, I laughed! He is a buffoon, completely, and I didn’t feel sorry for him). 

“‘They don’t!’ he replied. ‘And don’t fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don’t understand and never could. Don’t thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science,’ (204).” 

It’s fascinating that Clifford chose to reference Nero (the final emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty known for his cruelty) as an example in his argument, as well as Henry Ford, and while he is no emperor, he was also known for being a hard-ass. He doesn’t see anyone outside of his own class or higher as being human, something which Connie is disgusted by and proves to be the undercurrent for the entire story. 

This is just as much a story about class as it is about an affair. And the honesty with which it is being spoken about is so shocking and so admirable. Lawrence is brave in his directness, to state how the classes thought of one another, the disparity of wealth that exists within his country, and the social and moral effects of class. Empathy, or sanity, even, is always on some sort of life support in a place where class is of greater importance than shared humanity. Which is why I love Connie, as a heroine and character. She places common human feelings and sensations above appearances. She cares about the internal and disregards the superficial. She is selfish but only to the point that she is able to reflect our own selfishness. This book is perfect in its devotion to imperfection, recklessness, fearlessness, passion, bravery, humanness, and humility. Lawrence put a heartbeat into his words, and that’s what makes it eternal, wonderful.