He suddenly drew her to him and whipped his hand under her dress again, feeling her warm body with his wet, chill hand. ‘I could die for the touch of a woman like thee,’ he said in his throat. ‘If tha’ would stop another minute.’
Warning: this review contains swear words, including the c word, as well as explicit descriptions of sexual anatomy and sex.
Forget its lingering reputation for sex and rude words, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a masterly novel, packed with powerful themes and ideas, strong characterisation and wonderful nature descriptions – and at its core is a storyline of fabular simplicity. It is arguably Lawrence’s best, certainly his most crafted, conventional and accessible work. Every page springs new issues and symbols on the reader, as well as nature descriptions which are worth rereading and savouring for their startling vividness.
It was a grey, still afternoon, with the dark-green dogs’-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flamey oak-leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.
After the dense impressionistic epics ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, after the ramshackle picaresque of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the strange and incoherent ‘Kangaroo’, and the delirious nonsense of The Plumed Serpent’, Lady C feels like a wonderfully calm, sensible return to planet earth. Lawrence reveals himself as an author who can write something like a conventional novel, with normal characters having normal feelings and normal conversations. Their feelings last for more than a page i.e. they aren’t a bewildering kaleidoscope of everchanging moods, as in ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Women’. All the characters are easy to understand and sympathise with in a way not really true of any other Lawrence novel.
Brief plot
Presumably everyone knows the plot. Constance ‘Connie’ Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917 while he’s on leave from the war. But he returns a year later paralysed from the waist down and in a wheelchair. They live at the family estate of Wragby Hall beyond which is the grim coal mining community of Tevershall, the noise of the clanking trams, the lights and the sulphur smell permanently wafting over the house and grounds and what remains of the old woods.
Clifford hires a new gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Mellors is separated from his wife, Bertha Coutts, who ran off with a miner, and now tries to live a quiet, isolated life, just him and his dog, Flossie, living in the small cottage in the woods.
So we have these two damaged people, hurt in love and life, frustrated and unfulfilled. And the point of the novel is to show how they slowly fall in love and discover a new fire and meaning in life. A big part of this is their joint rediscovering the ecstatic side of sex. Neither were virgins but had only experienced partial or emotionally stunted forms of sex. Lawrence wrote the novel to showcase the supremely healing qualities of loving sex.
Arty families
But there’s a lot more circumstantial detail about the characters than I remember. For a start how arty they all are. Connie is the younger of two daughters of the noted painter and Royal Academician Sir Malcolm Reid (Hilda Reid and Constance Reid). The daughters are raised in a Bohemian arty set and are sent to Dresden to study art and music. Here the young ladies have passionate affairs with their fellow students, both of them loving their virginities.
Next, I’d forgotten that Clifford is himself a writer. He writes curious, very personal stories about people he had known, clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless. They appeared in the most modern magazines and he gains a reputation and Connie, for a while, finds new enthusiasm for their marriage, by helping him with them. Clifford eventually wins real fame and is hailed as one of Britain’s finest young writers etc.
His photograph appeared everywhere. There was a bust of him in one of the galleries, and a portrait of him in two galleries. He seemed the most modern of modern voices. With his uncanny lame instinct for publicity, he had become in four or five years one of the best known of the young “intellectuals. (p.54)
Connie’s affair with Michaelis
This arty milieu explains why Clifford invites the Irish playwright Michaelis to stay at Wragby. Michaelis has been fabulously successful and makes a fortune from the States but has recently been dropped by English ‘society’ when they realised he was mocking them. Connie realises behind his cynical charm there’s a damaged boy, Michaelis plays the adorer and seduces her in her boudoir on the third floor. There being no risk that Clifford will suddenly walk in.
It is the first indication that the novel is going to be about the mechanics of sex for Lawrence describes Michaelis as climaxing quite quickly and Connie being disappointed until she realises a way to keep him hard inside her and wriggling about in order to achieve her own orgasm.
The physical desire he did not satisfy in her; he was always come and finished so quickly, then shrinking down on her breast, and recovering somewhat his effrontery while she lay dazed, disappointed, lost. But then she soon learnt to hold him, to keep him there inside her when his crisis was over. And there he was generous and curiously potent; he stayed firm inside her, given to her, while she was active… wildly, passionately active, coming to her own crisis. And as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction. (p.31)
I get the point that she has to please herself but does it seem likely to you that he could remain hard and erect after climaxing, hard and erect long enough for her to pleasure herself against him? Lawrence was not only breaking taboos on the subject of sex and with his deliberate use of swearwords (see below), he was also writing at a time when there was little or no sociological study of sex. Only after the Second World War would begin the kinds of studies which are still ongoing and suggest that a very large percentage of women, perhaps as high as 75% of women, can’t climax from penile penetration alone, but need some other stimulation as well.
Anyway the affair with Michaelis happily continues for a while, carried on during her trips to London, and she is in high spirits which, in turn, inspire Clifford to some of his best writing.
The cronies
Friends of his from Cambridge come to stay, all so-called intellectuals, namely:
- Tommy Dukes, a brigadier general in the British army
- Charles May, an Irishman, who wrote scientifically about stars
- Arnold Hammond
- Berry, a brown shy young man
Connie nicknames them ‘the cronies’. We are shown Clifford and these pals engaging in empty, pontificating, after-dinner discussions about sex, regarded purely as an intellectual talking point, reduced to the idea that sex is not much more than a conversation between a man and a woman, in actions instead of words.
TOMMY DUKE: Let any woman start a sex conversation with me, and it’s natural for me to go to bed with her to finish it.
This entire scene is to demonstrate how cold-bloodedly cerebral these British intellectuals are, how they lack the root of the matter. Also how they simply ignore the woman’s role in any of this, for Connie sits there silent as a mouse while they drone on.
The four men smoked. And Connie sat there and put another stitch in her sewing…. Yes, she sat there! She had to sit mum. She had to be quiet as a mouse, not to interfere with the immensely important speculations of these highly-mental gentlemen.
Satire. Mockery. On a different evening the cronies get into a ‘discussion’ of Bolshevism which is disappointingly superficial. But maybe this is how people discussed things like this at the time. Maybe most people’s discussions of politics are superficial, anecdotal.
‘The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent.’
‘Of course not. But sometimes it’s intelligent to be half-witted: if you want to make your end. Personally, I consider Bolshevism half-witted; but so do I consider our social life in the west half-witted…’ etc
Presumably this is Lawrence mocking the intellectual inanity of the pseudo-intellectuals of his day; but having struggled through the ‘political’ discussion bits of ‘Kangaroo’ I’m more inclined to think it’s Lawrence revealing his own shortcomings. But the most notable thing about this male banter is the swearing. The cronies freely say ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’, unprintable words in 1928.
People who encourage Connie to have an affair
As I mentioned at the start the novel contains a lot of information to process. Instead of the endless shapeshifting emotions described with such weird power in ‘The Rainbow’ et al, Lawrence gives his characters fixed and understandable positions. In fact there are quite a few secondary characters, and Lawrence worked hard to give each of them histories, characters and opinions.
Father One of the threads that emerges from this is the sympathetic voices who suggest Connie has an affair. Her father, the louche old painter, directly tells her he hopes her situation won’t lead to her becoming a ‘demi-vierge’ which, as far as I can make out, means a woman who flirts and behaves suggestively but doesn’t actually have sex with anyone. This is a bit obscure but indicates that her father is worried about the impact having no sex will have on a healthy woman in her 20s.
Sister Her sister, Hilda, comes to stay and says she needs taking away from Wragby, to life and sun and physical restoration.
Husband And then Clifford himself, on a walk with Connie into the old woods on the estate, himself says he would love to have an heir to the estate, someone to hand it on to. He spends some time distinguishing between the closeness and psychological intimacy of marriage and the casual, transient nature of all sexual connections. It’s worth quoting at length because it makes it quite clear that Connie isn’t some sex-mad hussy
‘What do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections specially! If people don’t exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the life-long companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing… that’s what we live by… not the occasional spasm of any sort. Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That’s the real secret of marriage, not sex; at least not the simple function of sex. You and I are interwoven in a marriage. If we stick to that we ought to be able to arrange this sex thing, as we arrange going to the dentist; since fate has given us a checkmate physically there.’ (p.47)
So all this leads up to Clifford’s surprising proposal that Connie should make herself pregnant by another man. Obviously a man of the right sort but he doesn’t specify who or where. In order to bear a son which they can raise as an heir to the estate.
‘If lack of sex is going to disintegrate you, then go out and have a love affair. If lack of a child is going to disintegrate you, then have a child if you possibly can. But only do these things so that you have an integrated life, that makes a long harmonious thing. And you and I can do that together … don’t you think?’
It’s an eminently rational and sensible position. You can see how Lawrence goes out of his way to make Clifford sympathetic, given the terrible hand he’s been dealt. But in the end this position falls short: Connie is dismayed by the way Clifford talks about the child as ‘it, it, it’, like a business proposition.
Anyway, it’s at this precise moment in their conversation that with timing that is heavily symbolic, almost comical, that Mellors the gamekeeper makes his first appearance in the narrative, emerging so unexpectedly from a side path that she alarms Connie. Clifford hails him and asks him to help guide Clifford’s bath-chair down the track through the woods and back towards the house.
Oliver Mellors
Mellors was gamekeeper at Wragby before the war (and so before Connie married Clifford). He fought in the war, Clifford thinks somewhere in India. On his return to Tevershall, Clifford was delighted to rehire him and he’s been in post 8 months before this, Connie’s first encounter with him.
He is moderately tall and lean, with light brown, almost fair hair, and blue impersonal eyes. (Incidentally, Clifford also has blue eyes. Connie has blue eyes. Her father has blue eyes. Improbably, the two gondolieri they meet in Venice had blue eyes. I realised a while ago that a disproportionate number of Lawrence characters have blue eyes.)
Mellors’ distinguishing features are his aura of aloneness and independence, and the hint of impudence or sarcasm in his polite responses. Connie thinks he must be 37 or 38. She herself is now 27 (p.73).
The impact of the war
In her memoir Frieda says after the Great War Lawrence was never the same again. But this was true of hundreds of millions of people and entire societies. The feeling of vast loss and the febrile partying of the young post-war generation are something he describes in numerous fictions. ‘Aaron’s Rod’ refers continually to the great changes wrought by the war. The callowness of jazz-mad youth is a thread in ‘The Virgin and The Gypsy’.
Meanwhile you just lived on and there was nothing to it. She understood perfectly well why people had cocktail parties, and jazzed, and Charlestoned till they were ready to drop. You had to take it out some way or other, your youth, or it ate you up. But what a ghastly thing, this youth! you felt as old as Methuselah, and yet the thing fizzed somehow, and didn’t let you be comfortable. A mean sort of life! And no prospect! She almost wished she had gone off with Mick, and made her life one long cocktail party, and jazz evening. Anyhow that was better than just mooning yourself into the grave.
And this critique broadens out or is connected to Connie’s feeling that not just Clifford but all the men of her generation are somehow neutered and ineffectual.
Poor Clifford, he was not to blame. His was the greater misfortune. It was all part of the general catastrophe.
She listens to the Cronies crapping on with their clever-clever theories and thinks how shallow they are. Her husband and Michaelis are rivals for literary success and yet she is just impressed by how hollow and dead their works are.
Connie felt again the tightness, niggardliness of the men of her generation. They were so tight, so scared of life! (p.72)
And this spills over into their general uselessness at sex. She laments the fresh sensuality of the German lover she lost her virginity to before the war. Now that freshness seems to have gone.
Where would she find it now? It was gone out of men. They had their pathetic, two-second spasms like Michaelis; but no healthy human sensuality, that warms the blood and freshens the whole being. (p.74)
The great words are dead
In a passage which immediately draws comparison a similar passage in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell To Arms’, Lawrence writes of Connie going ‘home’ to Wragby.
Connie went slowly home to Wragby. ‘Home!’ … it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. (p.65)
Events
Connie comes across Mellors washing himself in his garden and the warm white flame of his life, his living being, strikes her in the womb. Events lead to her bumping into him increasingly. On another occasion she’s walking in the woods when she hears voices and comes across Mellors and a little girl in floods of tears. It’s his daughter and she’s just seen him shoot a cat dead. He is being rough with the child and Connie, disgusted, calms the girl by giving her a sixpence and then offers to talk her home to her grandma’s cottage.
Mrs Bolton
Connie becomes so depressed she writes her sister, Hilda, to come and visit, and Hilda, sizing up the situation, insists on some changes. First and foremost she decides Connie must stop being Clifford’s slavey and arranges for a woman from the village, capable, 40-something and district nurse Mrs Bolton to move into Wragby Hall and to undertake Clifford’s physical needs.
(It is characteristic of this book that Mrs Bolton is given a lot of back story, a detailed account of how her husband died in a pit accident 22 years earlier, how hard she had to fight to get compensation, her struggles bringing up two children as a single mum and her determination to get an education and qualification to win herself the post of district nurse. It is easy to let the sensational aspects of the novel blind you to the sheer effort Lawrence made to pack it with very well-developed characters.)
A lot is made of Mrs Bolton shaving Clifford but even Lawrence can’t bring himself to describe the blunt realities of Clifford having to be helped to the toilet, having his bottom wiped etc by such an assistant. If you’re paralysed from the waist down how does your bladder work? Can you control it like an adult or do you need a nappy?
Clifford resents this ‘desertion’ by his wife but slowly falls into a voluptuous closeness with Mrs Bolton. It’s reassuring to be nursed. He teachers her the card games he used to play with Connie and even chess. And Lawrence is acute on how all this feeds Mrs Bolton’s desire to raise herself above the ruck of the mining class, to discover the cultural ‘secrets’ of the upper classes.
Her arrival has the unintended consequence of interesting Clifford in his own coal mines. Mrs Bolton is a source of endless gossip and stories about the villagers and this revives Clifford’s interest in the village, the colliers and then the mines themselves. Before the war he had been studying mine engineering, and now his interest revives. He asks to be taken down the mines and shown the coalface and becomes interested in the new idea of chemical works to exploit the by-products of mining.
All this leaves Connie increasingly to her own devices. One of her pastimes is walking in the old woods in the grounds. Here she comes across Mellors at the gamekeeper’s hut. It’s a convenient place, with a porch and eaves, to sit out of the rain if it’s raining. There’s a bit of bickering about providing her a key to the hut, which Mellors eventually offers up. He’s built a chicken coop there for brooding hens and Connie likes to come and feed them.
Chapter 10
Clifford becomes more and more interested in mine management. Connie sometimes feels like she might die. She feels constantly on the verge of fainting. Only visiting the hens and their chicks at the roost in the woods gives her any pleasure.
It is on page 121 of the Penguin edition, chapter 10, a little over a third into the text, that she comes to see the chickens one evening, and he shows her how to gently extract the tiny helpless chick from under its mother’s ruffled feathers, and she holds the helpless little mite in her hand, that she suddenly starts crying, for herself, for Clifford, for her entire forlorn generation.
And the sight of her tears makes Mellors reach out and touch then stroke her shoulders and he feels the old flame in his loins and he takes her silently into the hut, moves the furniture out of the way, gets a blanket out of a box and lays it on the floor, lays her on it, pulls down her pants and makes love to her, while she lies silent and numb.
Unlike with Michaelis, she doesn’t then do her wriggling thing. She has no climax. She is not really fully conscious. He helps her up and they adjust their clothes and he walks her down to the gate between the woods and the formal grounds of the house, and she asks if it’ll be OK for her to come again.
Walking back alone, Mellors is bitter. She has dragged him back into life. He had hoped to live utterly free and private, but now she’s dragged him back into ‘the world’. Why can he never free himself?
It was not woman’s fault, nor even love’s fault, nor the fault of sex. The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.
Oh, if only there were other men to be with, to fight that sparkling electric Thing outside there, to preserve the tenderness of life, the tenderness of women, and the natural riches of desire. If only there were men to fight side by side with!
Incidentally, if Connie has voiced quite a few criticisms of how useless modern men are, Mellors has parallel, mirror thoughts about modern young women.
Poor forlorn thing, she was nicer than she knew, and oh! so much too nice for the tough lot she was in contact with. Poor thing, she … wasn’t all tough rubber-goods and platinum, like the modern girl… Somewhere she was tender, tender with a tenderness of the growing hyacinths, something that has gone out of the celluloid women of today.
(Some academic must have done a study of Lawrence’s use of modern materials in his prose. Here we have platinum and celluloid. I was very struck by his use, in ‘Kangaroo’, of radium in his descriptions of the ocean.)
She goes back to the hut next day, in the drizzle, and waits, but Mellors doesn’t come. She goes back to the house, has dinner with Clifford, but that evening has to sneak out the house and out to the hut again. Eventually Mellors shows up and they make love again. He warns her about the dreadful risk, about the inevitability that everyone will find out, Clifford will find out, but she doesn’t care.
Clifford has got a big strong man as a chauffeur and next day has him drive the couple out to Shipley Hall at Uthwaite, the estate of his godfather, Leslie Winter.
A few days later Connie walks towards Marehay to pay a visit to Mrs Flint who shows her her pretty little baby daughter. On the walk back she bumps into Mellors and he is seized with lust and leads her through trees into a dense part of woodland, lays her down and has sex with her. This is described in purple prose for over a page indicating for the first time the depths of Connie’s physical response to his sex, and she manages to climax at more or less the same time as him. Mellors comments that it’s very rare, simultaneous orgasms.
Back at the hall Clifford senses a new life in her but when she describes Mrs Flint’s baby, ascribes it to the general female glow around babies. He reads to her from Racine (the French playwright) but she doesn’t hear a word and goes to bed without kissing him goodnight.
Clifford occasionally has night terrors and can’t sleep this night, so he calls Mrs Bolton to come and play cards with him. She, as always, is flattered to be invited into the upper class ambience, but she also has noticed a change in Connie and, with feminine sympathy, thinks she must have a lover.
Meanwhile, Mellors also cannot sleep, sitting by the fire thinking back on his army career, when he was promoted to lieutenant and might have made captain. But then nearly died of illness and was happy to make it back to England and to disappear back into the anonymity of the working class.
He frets about the future of this affair, knows it can only end badly and in exactly the kind of misery he was enmeshed in with his first, unfaithful, wife. To staunch these thoughts he goes out and does his gamekeeper rounds, beating the bounds of the property, 5 miles in total. But his still can’t sleep and finds himself drawn to the hall, as the first light is showing stands in front of it. He doesn’t even know which room she sleeps in.
But, as explained, Mrs Bolton has stayed up late as well, and as she finally leaves a sleeping Clifford, looks out the window, she sees the figure of the gamekeeper standing on the grass watching the house and in a flash realises it’s him! He is Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She is pleased. She, herself, was a little in love with him, years ago, when he was a lad of 16 and she was a married woman of 26. He was always handsome and had a way with the ladies. She isn’t scandalised at all. She is pleased for her ladyship.
Chapter 11
Connie is sorting out the lumber of accumulated possessions at the house. She happily gives a massive old Victorian to Mrs Bolton.
Somehow rumour starts to go around that Clifford might be able to father a child after all. His seed may be extracted and implanted in Connie. Other people don’t know these details but the godfather, other visitors, even the vicar get to hear of it, so many people ask Clifford about it that he starts to believe it himself.
Field (the chauffeur) drives Connie across country to Uthwaite. This allows Lawrence to deliver an extended eulogy for the death of old rural England and its grand old houses which are being demolished one by one, drowned in a sea of mines and machines, and immediately built over as rude red-bricked housing estates, a tidal wave of ugliness.
She felt again in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all. (p.159)
A year after Connie’s visit, old Leslie Sharp died, his heirs immediately demolished the hall, cut down the beautiful avenue of yews. Connie is so alienated she wonders whether the colliers are even human or some kind of elemental sprites thrown off by the minerals they excavate.
A few days later Connie asks Mrs Bolton to help her plant out spring bulbs, and Mrs B tells her more about her love for her husband, killed in a mine explosion twenty years ago, describing love and fidelity in ways which make Connie think.
Chapter 12
On a beautiful spring afternoon she visits Mellor at his cottage. He’s just finishing lunch. It is a prickly encounter. She explains she’s accepted an invitation from Sir Alexander Cooper to stay at the Villa Esmeralda in Venice in July so she’ll be going away. She also explains that Clifford has accepted the idea of her getting pregnant by another man. Mellors jumps to the conclusion that she’s been using him and sarcastically says he’s flattered to have been of service. She’s offended and pleads she doesn’t mean it like that. She wants to be able to touch him as freely as he touches her, so (in a voice strangled with desire) he invites her upstairs but like squeamish, careful, cautious women everywhere she says no, not here, at his cottage. But she will at the hut.
So she leaves and goes back to the house for tea, loiters a bit, then leaves by a side door and walks to the hut. Finds him tending the hens and chicks. After a short exchange he asks if she wants to ‘go in the hut’, and she agrees. but even as he hoiks up her dress and kisses her breasts and then enters and ruts her, she feels completely detached oppressed by the absurdity of sex. Lawrence was and is condemned for being sex mad but really he was interested in the many and ever-changing moods we have about love and sensuality, and he’s an example of him very much not being pornographic.
This time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love! After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the performance; for it was a performance. It was quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humour, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. Even a Maupassant found it a humiliating anticlimax. Men despised the intercourse act, and yet did it. (p.179)
She starts crying and he says don’t cry, it happens sometimes, that you’re not in the zone together. But her crying rouses him, makes him hard again, and he enters her again, and this time she is swept away as by a storm, described at some length. In fact they do it twice more, each time with a different feeling. At the end comes one of the passages which caused its prosecution for obscenity, so is worth quoting at length. She’s copying his dialect speech back to him and getting it comically wrong, when he suddenly says:
“Tha’rt good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When tha’rt willin’!’
‘What is cunt?’ she said.
‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.’
‘All on’t,’ she teased. ‘Cunt! It’s like fuck then.’
‘Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot beside an animal, aren’t ter? even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’
She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful. (p.185)
Chapter 13
Connie accompanies Clifford on one of his rare outings to the woods. En route he explains his social theories i.e. the masses are always with us and need to be ruled with a form hand for their own benefit. This develops into the idea that if he is given a baby, a hair, it’s not the ‘blood’ or ‘class’ of his father that counts, it’s how he’s raised. Give Clifford any baby and he’ll mould him into a Chatterley.
All this is prelude to an almighty scene. It’s to do with Clifford’s bath chair. It chugs through the woods but on the return journey has to motor up a steep rise and it can’t quite make it. Clifford obstinately refuses Connie’s help and only finally gives in to her suggestion of calling for Mellors. When Mellors comes he turns out to be useless with engines and despite wriggling under the car and getting dirty, can’t figure out what’s wrong, as Clifford becomes more furious. He insists on making the poor knackered engine power itself but Mellors and then Connie both end up having to push to get it up the hill to Clifford’s rage. In his obsession to make it work he seems to have burned out the engine and Mellors and Connie end up pushing it all the way back to the house. Connie disgusted by Clifford’s behaviour, lets fly her contempt at him – ridiculing all his talk of being a lord and master and member of the ruling class when he can’t even get one little motor to work – and storms off to her bedroom.
At 9pm that night she changes into light tennis dress and shoes and slips out the side door of the house with the aim of spending the night with Mellors.
Chapter 14
She goes to Mellors’ cottage and he lets her in. Things get off to a bad start when she notices a wedding photo of himself and his separated wife, a very young looking couple, and asks why he ever married her. The answer is simple. He was an attractive lad and a number of women fell in love with him and acquiesced in having sex with him but he discovered the hard way that many women will agree to have sex with their man but don’t enjoy it, regard it as a trial they have to undergo to keep ‘their man’. After several women like this he wanted a woman who wanted to have sex and Bertha Coutts was common enough and randy enough to want to. So he married her.
Now he overshares a bit when he explains that Bertha was vexing in her own way because she never climaxed at the same time as him, but always had to make a big fuss and climax ten or fifteen minutes later. Once again I was a bit astounded. As I mentioned when this issue came up with Michaelis, it is a well-known fact (and has been known for generations, surely: I knew it in the late 1970s and ’80s) that the large majority of women cannot climax from penile penetration alone, but need some other form of stimulation, most obviously masturbation but these days including everything from cunnilingus to umpteen mechanical gadgets.
In the fiction Mellors is depicted as the knowledgeable one but his supposed knowledge is dire. He thinks Bertha deliberately didn’t come at the same time as him, and makes her representative of women as a whole. Here’s his overview of different types of women:
‘Only to my experience the mass of women are like this: most of them want a man, but don’t want the sex, but they put up with it, as part of the bargain. 1) The more old-fashioned sort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don’t mind afterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothing to them, a bit distasteful. And most men like it that way. I hate it. But 2) the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they’re not. They pretend they’re passionate and have thrills. But it’s all cockaloopy. They make it up. — 3) Then there’s the ones that love everything, every kind of feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the natural one. They always make you go off when you’re not in the only place you should be, when you go off. — 4) Then there’s the hard sort, that are the devil to bring off at all, and bring themselves off, like my wife. They want to be the active party. — 5) Then there’s the sort that’s just dead inside: but dead: and they know it. 6) Then there’s the sort that puts you out before you really ‘come,’ and go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs. But they’re mostly the Lesbian sort. It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they’re nearly all Lesbian.’
Presumably Lawrence prided himself on his knowledge of this subject, so this speech given to Mellors indicates a dire combination of ignorance and bigotry.
This cold-blooded bad temper leads to something like an argument and he goes to get dressed and go out for a walk but she calls him back and they have sex in front of the fireplace then go to bed and fall straight asleep. Next morning they wake in bed and make love again. He goes to his clothes but she makes him turn and show her his nakedness and described his cock and falls and light pubic hair as he get another erection and they make love again. Then she closely observes it a limp and shy after sex. There is no mention of one of the basic facts of straight sex which is what to do with the semen which tends to uncomfortably leak back out of a woman’s vagina, nor of any little hand washbowl which they could use to wash and clean their parts.
Instead he entertains her by speaking in the dialect and calling his pecker John Thomas and her lady parts, Lady Jane. She is now hopelessly smitten. She asks if she can come and stay with him, but he is realistic about the world and delivers a little speech which, I imagine, still offends feminists.
‘Dunna ax me nowt now,’ he said. ‘Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when ‘er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee… Ah luv thee wi’ my ba’s an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me nowt. Dunna ma’e me say nowt. Let me stop as I am while I can. Tha can ax me ivrything after. Now let me be, let me be!’ (p.220)
They get dressed and it kills her to have to go back to the big house, whose doors have now been unlocked so she slips inside and goes to her bedroom with no issue.
Chapter 15
Her sister, Hilda, writes to say she’ll become coming to collect her on 17 June to take her off for this holiday in Venice. Clifford isn’t happy, he is frightened by her going. Even though they don’t spend much time together, her presence in the house gives him the faith to carry on researching mine improvements etc.
Connie spends almost every day at the cottage or hut. She listens to Morrell’s long diatribe on how mankind is being dehumanised and neutered, every spark of real life being sucked out. While he describes how he would try to reform the miners, to sweep away all traces of industry and clean the planet and make men walk tall and proud again, she listens while she kisses his navel and cups his soft balls and plaits forget-me-nots in his pubic hair.
She is genuinely worried that, if he sees the future as the collapse of civilisation, he won’t want her to be pregnant, won’t welcome the child she so wants, and he refuses to commit himself unequivocally.
Throughout his gloomy stormy predictions of the end of humanity it’s been raining hard outside and suddenly she can’t stand it any long, strips off and goes running outside in the rain. Perplexed for a moment, Mellors quickly does the same and goes running down the path in the rain till he catches her and they dance with glee then he lays her on the ground and takes her hard and fast like an animal.
Back in the house they dry themselves on sheets and sit naked before the fire and he plaits flowers in her pubic hair while she talks about going away. She asks if he doesn’t want her to go but he merely mocks. Will she tell Clifford about them when she gets back? He, for his part, has spoken to a solicitor about getting a divorce from his estranged wife. Obviously he should have done it years ago.
After more bantz, he walks her back towards the house when they are both surprised to bump into Mrs Bolton come to look for them.
Chapter 16
Turns out hours have passed of violent storm and, for once, Clifford has noticed her absence and has been going berserk with concern about Connie lost somewhere out in the wild storm. He was all for sending the male servants (Betts and Field) to find her but Mrs Bolton, strongly suspecting Connie is with her fancy man, does everything she can to put him off, insisting Connie’s probably sheltering in the hut and calmly saying she’ll go to find her.
On the walk back to the house, Connie is cross with Mrs Bolton but knows she covered for her. Back at the house Connie outfaces Clifford’s angry concern by falling in with the story that she sheltered from the storm in the hut, lit a fire and lost track of time but goes one further by saying she stripped off and ran round naked in the rain. This seems so outlandish a confession that it overshadows Clifford’s doubts and he calls her mad, eccentric etc, and the scene moves on.
That night he reads her excerpts from the latest work by some great scientific-religious ‘intellectual’. The key passage is:
The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending.
Which Clifford literally believes but Connie fiercely mocks. It suits him to think the body is wasting away and giving rise to some spiritual nirvana, but Connie (like her creator) believes reality is rooted in the physical. Clifford patronisingly says, well a woman couldn’t be expected to understand ‘the life of the mind’, to which Connie replies ‘life of the mind’?
‘No thank you! Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind-machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses.’ (p.244)
The life of the body was appreciated by the ancient Greeks but then was closed down by the over-cerebral Socrates and Plato, and then completely shut down by the Jewish Jesus. Only now, in Connie (and Lawrence’s) view, is it maybe reawakening.
(All this kind of thing is, as I’ve written so many times, just well-read tripe. It is wrong on two accounts: 1) in that it is so pathetically western-centric, treating the accidents of the European canon as if they represented ‘all mankind’, ignoring the traditions of India, China, Japan, all of Africa, all the non-western traditions; and 2) all generalisations about the development or evolution of ‘humanity’ are tripe. The technology changes but humans remain resolutely the same, in their fear, desperation, tribalism and violence. To anybody who talks or writes about the spiritual evolution of humanity, just mention Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump Islamic State, Reform UK, the Janjaweed. What spiritual evolution? Talk like that can only exist due to a wilful bourgeois blindness to the world as it actually is.)
Mrs Bolton helps her pack her things ready to go to Venice. On Thursday morning Hilda arrives in her two-seater car, as arranged. Connie promptly tells her sister all about Mellors. (Close female friendships or sisterhoods feature in many of Lawrence’s stories:
- Ursula and Gudrun (Women in Love)
- March and Banford (The Fox)
- Yvette and Lucille (The Virgin and the Gypsy)
- Hannele and Mitchka (The Captain’s Doll)
Hilda listens, understands but warns Connie she’ll regret it. As is typical with the novel, Lawrence goes out of his way to give more backstory and depth to Hilda by explaining that her attitude is coloured by the fact she’s getting divorced from her husband and so has a jaundiced view on the whole man-woman thing.
Hilda wanted no more of that sex business, where men became nasty, selfish little horrors. Connie really had less to put up with than many women, if she did but know it. (p.249)
(All these elements – Clifford’s ludicrous religio-scientific author and now Hilda’s sex aversion – are carefully, carefully placed so as to create foils for the novel’s pedagogical lesson, demonstrate ways to fail at securing a proper sexual-physical relationship designed to offset Connie and Mellor’s ideal way of doing it.)
Anyway, Hilda agrees to Connie’s ludicrous plan for spending a last night with Mellors i.e. the girls wave goodbye to Clifford and motor off to stay overnight at a hotel in Mansfield. But after dinner, Hilda drives Connie back to the entrance of a lane leading into Wragby woods and Mellors is waiting for them. He shows Hilda how to park the car so it’s concealed by bushes then walks the two sisters to his cottage.
Here he is, maybe, unnecessarily belligerent, for example insisting on talking in dialect when Hilda can’t really understand it, and calls Hilda dry and boney and undesirable, which isn’t tactful, while she says men like him ought to be ‘segregated’. He makes some supper (haven’t they eaten dinner) then escorts her back to the car and she drives back to her hotel and Connie and Mellors have their last night together. What is it like?
It was a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.
Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.
In particular Lawrence deploys a telling phrase:
She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died.
Instead of which the shame died. I know what he’s describing: the burning beyond shame to realise it is alright, it is OK not to be embarrassed or ashamed of each others’ bodies and desires but to celebrate them for what they are and to revel in them.
Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.
The tremendous liberation in rising above self consciousness and shame: this is still the kind of thing you see being described and advocated by agony aunts in sex advice columns (to be honest, the main one I’m thinking about is the Guardian’s sex advice column, and it’s always about being at peace with your body, with what it tells you, how to give and take pleasure).
As to what exactly might be triggering the deepest oldest shames, we are not told. Sodomy? Fellatio? We are not told, in fact the text strongly implies against any form of sexual activity except the phallic. Lawrence here and in loads of other writings makes a cult of the phallus and here says how it was ‘the phallic hunt of the man’ which brought Connie to ‘the very heart of the jungle of herself’.
Anyway, all this burning beyond shame into self realisation emphasises another of Lawrence’s hobby horses, which is how wretched, shallow, mechanical and sordid most modern men are. In Connie’s view:
Ah God, how rare a thing a man is! They are all dogs that trot and sniff and copulate. To have found a man who was not afraid and not ashamed! She looked at him now, sleeping so like a wild animal asleep, gone, gone in the remoteness of it. She nestled down, not to be away from him.
Next morning they’re getting dressed when he’s startled by a knock at the cottage door. It’s the postman with a registered delivery. He cycles off but Mellors is paranoid that someone will see them and tell, and so takes her by a circuitous route to the end of the lane where Hilda, reliable, is waiting for them. He pushes her through a holly bush, stumbles down into and up the other side of a ditch and Hilda’s opening the car door and she’s in and they’re driving away before she’s really had time to say goodbye.
Chapter 17
On the drive to London, Connie continues to justify herself to Hilda. Once in London they are treated by their man-of-the-world father, Sir Malcolm, who takes them to fine restaurants and the opera. But predictably London seems full of dead people and, when they move on to Paris, it is no better, Paris:
weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig! (p.265)
They drive across France, through Switzerland and into Italy and on to Venice but the spectacular scenery doesn’t touch Connie. They garage the car and take a boat to Venice then a gondola to the Villa Esmerelda where they’re staying.
Lawrence gives a bitingly satirical portrait of Venice, a pleasure city overflowing with half-drugged sensation seekers, the Lido packed with pink, half-naked bodies, the evenings full of jazz dancers pressing their stomachs against each other.
With all the cocktails, all the lying in warmish water and sunbathing on hot sand in hot sun, jazzing with your stomach up against some fellow in the warm nights, cooling off with ices, it was a complete narcotic. And that was what they all wanted, a drug: the slow water, a drug; the sun, a drug; jazz, a drug; cigarettes, cocktails, ices, vermouth. To be drugged! Enjoyment! Enjoyment! (p.270)
This is completely of a piece with all his other withering criticism of the younger generation, the post-war generation and its addiction to jazz and partying, the opposite of the isolated search for the self which Lawrence, of course, espoused.
Connie realises she’s pregnant, though this causes her surprisingly little upset. Lawrence doesn’t dwell on it, surprisingly. Instead he gives us the long well-written letters Clifford sends her. This informs her that Mellors’ wife has turned up (presumably triggered by his solicitor’s letter requesting a divorce) and broke into his cottage and installed herself there, so Mellors has fled to his mother’s place in Tevershall. Connie is desperate to know Mellors’ side of the story but they had agreed not to write during her Venetian trip.
Instead Mrs Bolton writes with a lot more detail of how his wife goes about telling everybody he’s been having fancy women at the cottage, she found a perfume bottle and gold-tipped cigarettes, a rumour confirmed by the postman who, on the occasion when he brought the registered letter, had heard voices coming from the bedroom window. All this is to show how you can’t escape the world which is made of other people, and how awful they are, how intrusive, prying and judgemental.
Worst of all, Bertha is telling everyone what a beast Mellors was to her in bed. This triggers Connie’s memories of his animal behaviour on their last night together (what does this mean? Does it mean sodomy? Or just sex ‘doggy style’?) and the thought that Mellors had done those things to Bertha before he did them to her, makes her feel degraded and dirty. It makes her want to break her connection with him, it almost makes her want to abort the baby.
An artist named Duncan Forbes has joined the house party at the Villa. He is sensitive, with integrity. Connie shares some of her secret with him and he is very forthright, declaring society always drags down anyone who is true to their sex. Society does dirt on sex. Society revels in the ‘hyena instinct of the mob against sex’ (p.276). This gives her the resolve to stick by her experiences and cherish what Mellors has given her, which is worth describing at length.
Connie had a revulsion in the opposite direction now. What had he done, after all? what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite pleasure, and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down.
No, no, it should not be. She saw the image of him, naked white with tanned face and hands, looking down and addressing his erect penis as if it were another being, the odd grin flickering on his face. And she heard his voice again: ‘Tha’s got the nicest woman’s arse of anybody!’ And she felt his hand warmly and softly closing over her tail again, over her secret places, like a benediction. And the warmth ran through her womb, and the little flames flickered in her knees, and she said: Oh no! I mustn’t go back on it! I must not go back on him. I must stick to him and to what I had of him, through everything. I had no warm, flamy life till he gave it to me. And I won’t go back on it. (p.277)
Tenderness is worth defending, love is worth sticking up for.
Clifford writes a long letter describing how this Bertha Coutts has gone supernova, destroying the gamekeeper’s life, laying siege to him in his mother’s home, broadcasting their sex secrets to the entire village. Clifford has the educated aristocrats’ disdain for all this, saying the secrets of the marriage bed should remain secrets (‘it is a matter of their own personal squalor, and nothing to do with anybody else’) but he uses a high-falutin’ phrase which finally confirms my hunch:
Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, ‘in the Italian way,’ well that is a matter of taste.
When I Googled this it does appear to be sodomy. So Mellors had a penchant for sodomising his wife and this is the ‘shameful’ activity referred to on his and Connie’s last night together. (A bit more Googling informs me that this particular passage of cultural dressing-up proved beneficial in the 1960 obscenity trial, because the judge in the case simply didn’t understand the reference, as I didn’t, without the benefit of the internet.)
Clifford writes that he had to interview Mellors as his wife is in effect trespassing on Clifford’s land and there are questions whether Mellors can do the job any more. In fact things progressed to the stage where Mellors more or less quit and has trained up a fellow called Joe Chambers to replace him. When Clifford asks him whether rumours about women at the cottage are true, Mellors tells him to mind his own business; when he offers to pay him a month’s parting salary, Mellors tells him to keep his conscience money. He really is a difficult man. Meanwhile some kind of warrant has been taken out to arrest Bertha (for libel?) and so she’s disappeared.
A letter arrives from Mellors explaining that Bertha had identified Connie as Mellors’ lover, partly due to books of hers she found in the hut, and was broadcasting it to everyone. It was this that caused Sir Clifford to bring in the police and take legal steps against Bertha who promptly disappeared. Mellors is clearer that he and Clifford argued. Clifford said he was a disreputable character walking round with his breeches unbuttoned and Mellors replied well at least he had something between his legs worth unbuttoning them for. No surprise that he was sacked. He’s going to move to London and gives Connie the address.
What upsets Connie is that Mellors didn’t take advantage of the interview to proudly proclaim his affair with Connie, to announce it and defend it. Instead he shied away. But she realises this is to leave her free to chose, to go back to Clifford if she wants to. But she’s disappointed.
Chapter 18
Connie shares the train back to London with her father and tells him she is pregnant. He’s not shocked to learn it’s by another man, of course, as Clifford is impotent. And he’s secretly pleased his little girl has found a real man. But he advises her to go back to Wragby, specially if Clifford gave her permission. Then he will provide Clifford with the heir he wants, do the decent thing, but retain her freedom to love where she pleases. The traditional upper class solution.
In London there’s a letter waiting at her hotel and she goes to meet him at a rendezvous. Finally, after four weeks they are together. They painfully discuss the future. She tells him she’s pregnant but he is not pleased. He asks if she’ll go back to Wragby and give Clifford the heir he needs but she says no, she wants to be with him. But he has nothing, she’s the one with the private income, he doesn’t want to just be her concubine. But she defines the thing he has that makes him unique: he has the courage of his own tenderness.
She makes him take her back to his hotel, a small attic room where they strip and she asks him to take her and keep her, forever. He kisses her pregnant belly and mons Veneris and then slips inside her. Then more talk. He has to get divorced from Bertha. But that means 6 months of pure living or he will legally become the guilty party, guilty of adultery. Connie is appalled that this means they won’t be able to see each other during her entire pregnancy. The world is screwed up. Then again, he should have divorced Bertha years and years ago. He has mismanaged the situation.
Connie persuades her father to have lunch with Mellors at his club. A private room. Mellors dresses smartly. They talk about India (the role the colonies played in cementing class identity.) Sir Malcolm gets drunk and lecherous. He ends up talking dirty, hoping his daughter was a good fuck and betting Mellors has got a good cock on him. This is all pretty disgusting and there’s no practical outcome.
Next day he has lunch with Connie and Hilda. This is getting boring. To live in peace in the world as it is, they need to marry. In order to marry they both need to be divorced. Mellors must get his divorce from Bertha. More tricky is how Connie gets a divorce from Clifford. With her father and Hilda Connie has developed the idea of asking Duncan Forbes to agree to be cited as co-respondent: she could spend a night with him in a hotel or at his place, enough to work for legal purposes. Mellors asks why they can’t be honest and cite him? Because then he will never get his divorce from Bertha.
So there’s yet another meal, this time a dinner with Duncan Forbes, Mellors and the Reid sisters. Mellors manages to insult Forbes’ modernist painting, thus casting a pall. With angry self control, Forbes agrees to the plan on condition Connie will pose for her. Seems cheap at the price.
Chapter 19
Connie writes Clifford a brief letter saying she’s met another man, her old friend Duncan Forbes, the artist, and fallen in love and won’t be coming back to Wragby. Clifford has a kind of nervous breakdown and has to be nursed by Mrs Bolton. He becomes a man-baby, loving to be washed and cleaned and kissed by her and he, in a naughty boy way, slips his hand in her bosom to feel her boobs. And, with typically Lawrentian ambivalence, Mrs Bolton thrills to all this and yet despises it as well.
Surprisingly, out in the real world, Clifford becomes much more effective, an effective cut throat businessman.
And in this spirit he writes a tough letter to Connie saying she promised to come back to Wragby so come back she must and face him, or he will regard them as married till their deaths. Mellors says he’s getting his revenge, but he holds the legal whip hand, so…
She goes with Hilda. Clifford ignores Hilda who he blames. Connie hates every second inside Wragby Hall. She used to be its mistress and now she feels like its victim. Formal dinner. Only after Hilda retires does Clifford say he doesn’t believe all this nonsense about her being in love with Duncan Forbes.
So she comes clean, admits it’s not Forbes – she is in love with and pregnant by his gamekeeper, Mellors. Clifford is absolutely flabbergasted, shocked, and enraged.
‘My God, you ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!’ (p.308)
And Clifford simply refuses to divorce her for such a cad, such a scoundrel. Refuses. Connie tries everything but he won’t budge. Even if the child is legally his and legally becomes heir to Wragby. He refuses to budge.
Connie goes up to see Hilda who tells her to pack so she does and sends her stuff first thing to the station. She says goodbye to Mrs Bolton (who in many ways emerges as the most sympathetic character in the book) and drives off with Hilda.
And then the novel ends hurriedly like a damp squib. Connie goes back with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors gets a job on a farm. And the final pages amount to a long letter from Mellors to Connie. This last-minute swerve, this avoidance of a neat happy ending, is very characteristic of ‘modern’ novels of the 1910s and ’20s. There’s stuff about Mellors pursuing his divorce against Bertha and his encouragement that Clifford will eventually divorce her…
But what makes this concluding letter interesting is Lawrence uses it to preach against modern capitalist society. He has Mellors say his farm is in a mining district and the mines are experiencing a recession. And the trouble with modern society is the young are trained up to spend money, to live for shopping and jazzing, but what happens when the money dries up? They have no resources to fall back on. If only they had been trained to live they could get by with very little money, make their own clothes and furniture and entertain themselves. He sees a bad time coming:
I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out. There’s a bad time coming. There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses.
And, of course, the year after the book was published came the Wall Street Crash, leading to a decade of mass poverty, leading up to the unfathomable catastrophe of the Second World War.
Against all this he sets the little forked flame between him and Connie, the little forked flame to set against the great global catastrophe. Mellors is enjoying their chaste separation now, he feels clean and pure. In the spring (the letter is written in September) he will get his divorce and he and Connie will be able to reunite, in body and mind, as the new warmth revives the spring flowers.
So the novel ends on this tiny affirmation of life and defiance of the coming darkness. It is a profoundly moving and humanitarian conclusion and, in my opinion, mistaken.
Credit
‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1928 by Martin Secker. References are to the 1981 Penguin Classics paperback edition.
Related links
Related reviews
BERRY: But you do believe in something?
TOMMY DUKES: Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say ‘shit!’ in front of a lady. (p.42)
Books & Boots 