What did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick male dog outside the house where the bitch is? Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs. Bolton like a shot. He was Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!
I read Lady Chatterley's Lover as a teenager (and all I truly remembered about it was her Ladyship twining daisies into her lover's chest hair, which I was surprised to learn I had remembered wrong; it was forget-me-nots woven in further south), so it seemed fitting to pick it up again as a Valentine's reread. Unsurprisingly, all of the social commentary went over my head the first time (not necessarily because I was young, but just because I was me), and now knowing a bit more about the moment D. H. Lawrence was writing in, I can see why characters were sitting around talking about industrialisation and Bolshevism and noblesse oblige. There are several different tacks I could take in trying to review this book from my now older perspective (the evolution of what we consider “pornography”; shifting norms regarding marriage, adultery, and gender roles; the blurring of class), but all I really want to talk about is what I twigged on to this time as Lawrence's major theme: that shame-free, tender-hearted sex is the sole way for a man and woman to truly connect, and moreover, that it's the only route back to the Garden of Eden. I will proceed as though there is no such thing as a spoiler in a book which is now nearly a century (!) old.
Constance Chatterley married her baronet because they enjoyed a mutual mental stimulation (sex not being that fulfilling to either of them), yet when Clifford returned paralysed (and impotent) from WWI and the couple inherited the gloomy family manse in the Midlands, it didn't take long for Connie to realise that a purely intellectual relationship (and especially with a man of dubious intellectual gifts) is not quite a marriage. Items of note overheard among Clifford's highbrow friends during these years: I liked when one visiting lady told about a futurist book she read that predicted babies would eventually be bred in bottles, that women would be “immunised” (against conception), and she suggested that in place of being tied down with the whole procreation thing, humanity might enjoy regular morphine exposure (which sounds a lot like Brave New World to me, which came a decade later). Some male visitors disdain sex, some think it no more intimate than having a conversation with a woman (so why would a man object to someone sleeping with his wife if he didn't object to him talking with her?), and some think sex is a base function that doesn't bear discussion, “We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman?” Connie's father, among others, suggested that she take a lover, and even Clifford states that if his wife remained emotionally unattached and it produced an heir for Wragby Hall, he'd be behind the scheme. The bottom line is that all of these characters take it as accepted that there's no natural correlation between sex and some particularly human sublime experience. Bored and lonely, Lady Chatterley takes to walking in the woods on Wragby's grounds, and she is seduced by the beauty of nature:
The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness.Alas, the nearby coalmines that provide for the Chatterleys' wealth – with their belching stacks and 24-hour mechanical noises and grubby housing with their insolent workers – are never far from her awareness, and when she eventually runs into the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, Lady Chatterley is unsettled by the wild in him as well. When they eventually start their affair and Mellors (who is educated and army-disciplined and seems to be in a class of his own) is free to speak his mind, he mainly decries the “modern condition” of people working in pursuit of money, instead of just enough to sustain themselves and filling the rest of their time being “real men” and “real women” taking delight in each other; all of modern life is the collieries encroaching on the forest; the mechanical displacing the natural. For the first time with Mellors, Connie experiences more than just release with sex:
She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.And eventually, the pair are dancing naked in the rain, weaving buds into each other's body hair, and as Mellors “cups her tail” with his hand, stroking “the two secret openings to her body” (which referred, in my mind, back to the man who didn't want knowledge of another's experience in the w.c.), it's the ability to appear open and without shame in front of one another – in a way that Mellors explains is beyond the base rutting that animals engage in – that marks a return to Paradise:
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.Having had her husband's permission (and for the sake of an heir, her husband's tacit encouragement) to have herself an affair, it would seem that Lady Chatterley's only crime was to not remain emotionally unattached (and, I suppose also, for mixing with a commoner), but as seems to be the point, once we have stood wholly naked and unashamed in front of another, we are open to the sublime and forge true and transcendent bonds. And as for Sir Clifford and the flipside to that particular coin: he has his own shame-free scenes – engaging a matronly nurse to care for his body – and when he realises he has lost his wife, Clifford turns to the nurse “like a baby” (which Lawrence frequently suggests here that most men are at heart): “He would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation, the exultation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.” The book ends without resolution, with Mellors learning the art of farming so as to prepare for when Connie and their baby can join him in a life that returns to nature; one without need for excessive labour in the pursuit of money and overspending; no bowing before the "bitch-goddess Success" or "the Mammon of mechanised greed".
I might have quibbles with anachronistic prejudices and stylistic choices – I wouldn't call this a novel that truly stands the test of time – but I do admire what Lawrence was trying to put down on the page. Perhaps I'll pick it up again a few decades hence and see what I glean anew.
