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American Reference Books Annual 1988

Masterplots II, British Fiction Series, Rev. Ed.
Lady Chatterley's Lover

Author: D. H. Lawrence
Born: September 11, 1885; Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England
Died: March 2, 1930; Vence, France
Type of Work: Romantic tragedy
Time of Work: The early 1920's
Locale: Towns named Wragby and Tevershall, in the Midlands of England,
and European cities, notably Venice
First Published: 1928

Principal Characters
SIR CLIFFORD CHATTERLY, the owner of an estate at Wragby
CONSTANCE CHATTERLEY, his wife
MICHAELIS, a playwright and family friend of the Chatterleys
ARNOLD HAMMOND, a friend of Sir Clifford, a writer
TOMMY DUKES, a brigadier general in the army
CHARLES MAY, another of Sir Clifford's friends, a writer on astronomy
OLIVER MELLORS, the gamekeeper at Wragby
CONNIE MELLORS, his young daughter
HILDA, Constance's sister
SIR MALCOLM REID, the father of Hilda and Constance
DUNCAN FORBES, a modern artist, who is unmarried

The Novel
The quest for fulfillment in a broken world is the central concern of this work, which became controversial for its frank and explicit depiction of sexual relations. The plot, which is relatively uncomplicated, deals with the travails of a loveless marriage and the attempt of the woman to find gratification elsewhere. At the outset, the events that join Sir Clifford and Constance Chatterley in marriage and their life together at his estate in Wragby are traced in a summary of the issues that later are to affect their separate destinies. When she was a girl, Constance studied music abroad and engaged in a brief liaison with a German lover in Dresden. Clifford, from an old aristocratic family, conducted research in the engineering of coal mining. His sexual fires evidently were stoked rather low all along; he had no experience of women before he married, and matters became much more difficult shortly thereafter. During World War I, he became a first lieutenant; his brother Herbert was killed in action in 1916, and early in 1918, not long after his wedding, he was wounded in Flanders. He was left partially paralyzed and impotent as well. He became permanently confined to a wheelchair. The family's hopes that his marriage with Constance might produce children, and thus ensure successors, seem doomed to frustration.

Vaguely chafing at her husband's incapacity, Constance initially falls prey to the charms of Michaelis, a waggish popular playwright who seduces her gently, leads her to climax, and then in a subsequent encounter complains that she has become too demanding. Under Clifford's watchful and occasionally suspicious eyes, other men come to Wragby Hall. Old acquaintances such as Arnold Hammond, Tommy Dukes, and Charles May, who had known Clifford during his university days or from the army, discuss the propriety of open discourse about sexual practices; they seem to believe that erotic urges impede the development of the mind. Constance, still perturbed by her affair with Michaelis, at times feels possessed by the need to conceive a child; in passing, she again considers taking a lover. She comes upon Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper at Wragby, quite by chance, when he is scolding his younger daughter. Later, when he washes himself in the open air, she becomes fascinated with his firm, smooth, white skin and his air of unassuming naturalness. She is drawn to him even more when she encounters him at his hut; she asks him to have a separate key made for her.

Sir Clifford now sends for his friends more rarely, and he seems more distant than ever from Constance. He maintains that they may have a child—there are intermittent hopes that medical treatment may restore some of the functions of his lower body—but only if she is certain that she wants one. On a fine clear day, Constance goes out on the grounds; she comes upon Mellors helping a pheasant hen bring a brood of baby chicks into the world. She is captivated by the raw natural beauty of their surroundings. Quite impulsively, she yields to his advances and they make love in his hut, in a tranquil, unhurried fashion that elicits from her the expressed desire for a later meeting.

Thereafter, Constance's continuing relations with Mellors become yet more vital, while her marriage with Clifford degenerates into open antagonism. Her intercourse with the gamekeeper reaches new levels of intensity: They reach simultaneous orgasm, and she feels enveloped in flame, as though she had become filled with molten lava. On another occasion, after his initial efforts prove unsatisfactory, he makes another spirited attempt and she feels as though she were caught up in surging waves of the sea. There is much graphic physical description: Constance's belly and buttocks and Mellors' loins and haunches are rendered in some detail in notable passages. On another front, bitter conflict erupts when the Chatterleys go for a drive in the country. Clifford's motorcar breaks down, and when Mellors tries to assist them the two men argue vehemently; Constance subsequently reproaches her husband for an attitude that, she maintains, is all too typical of the ruling classes. On a rainy day, when Constance meets Mellors again, they undress together and promenade about in the open air, with flowers nestled in their body hair. When Constance returns to Wragby Hall, the wary Clifford quarrels with her yet again. Her sister Hilda has arrived, and when they are alone Constance openly acknowledges that she has been having an affair and that she is carrying Mellors' child.

Suggestions of divorce come from various quarters; there is also some question about what Constance will do with her baby. The advice Constance receives from Hilda and from Sir Malcolm Reid, their father, is not particularly apt. They enlarge upon an earlier proposal of Sir Clifford, that Constance should travel abroad before reaching any lasting decisions. Although they get as far as Venice, nothing avails; Constance will have nothing of efforts, pending her separation from Sir Clifford, to arrange a union with Duncan Forbes. She finds this family acquaintance, a dissolute and self-important practitioner of modern art, actually somewhat repellent. Clifford, meanwhile, has finally grasped the full import of her relations with Mellors; he castigates her as perverted and sullied but will not hear of a divorce. He declares that he cares nothing about a prospective heir to the estate. Constance packs her most valued possessions and goes with Hilda to Scotland. The novel closes with a letter to Constance from Mellors, who has moved on to other work in the coal country; he expresses his yearning to be reunited with her when the next spring comes.

The Characters
This work has essentially to do with a love triangle that accentuates the diverse qualities and dispositions of those involved; other characters by their very shallowness heighten the contrasts that are developed in the novel's major encounters and confrontations. The romantic and sexual concerns of Constance Chatterley determine much of the action; it is a sense of self-discovery that impels her to pursue affairs that to many would be unthinkable for a woman of her social position. In the beginning, she is described as "full of unused energy" and not quite certain of what she wants. Nor does she realize immediately how stifling her marriage with Clifford will become. At the age of twenty-seven, she takes on extramarital lovers. After the affair with Michaelis, her sexual wants become identified with her longing for a child; with Mellors there are more openly sensual stirrings. Much of the narrative, albeit written in the third person, conveys Constance's point of view; her thoughts and impressions at many junctures are shared with the reader. Her reactions to sexual climax, as much as those of the men, are evoked in bright metaphorical language. More than the others, she is torn between the older ties of family, social class, and the life of the mind, on the one side, and on the other her own felt needs for affection and sexual gratification. The initial disharmony of the two spheres is great, and the realignment of her physical and moral selves is correspondingly painful.

In contrast to his wife, Clifford Chatterley seems to exist in a kind of unfeeling void, which is, in a sense, much broader than his disability: "[H]e was not in touch." His impotence and his restricted physical mobility in some ways seem to antedate his injury; while it is possible to ascribe some meanness to the author in rendering Clifford crippled as well as emotionally obtuse, from the novel's standpoint his condition seems to serve several purposes. The devastating effects of World War I are brought home most visibly in this way.

Furthermore, Constance's infidelity is the more readily accepted in view of her husband's manifest inability to satisfy her or, indeed, to provide the heir his family seeks. Although by fits and starts he attempts some fiction writing, his consuming passion remains, as it was before the war, the effort to apply modern engineering processes to the production of coal. With his wife he is remote, pedantic, and given to oblique and rather ponderous locutions on the life of the mind. While in some places it is remarked that his scientific pursuits have "made a man of him," during his quarrels with Constance there are suggestions that he has regressed into a childlike state. He is not notably percipient, and though he is sporadically suspicious of his wife, he does not quite comprehend the nature or extent of her infidelity until rather late in the work.

Mellors is very much the opposite of Constance's husband. He is thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old; at one time he worked as a blacksmith. He was married for five or six years before his wife left him with their little girl, Connie, and went away. Like Clifford, he performed military service: For a time, he was in Egypt and India and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the cavalry. He is forthright and unassuming; his only affectation, if it is that, is a tendency to shift from the King's English into local dialect depending on whether he is speaking with his social betters or with those from similar walks of life. With Constance, he uses both forms of speech. Before he met Lady Chatterley, his experiences with women had brought him to regard them as cold and insensate. Yet he is capable of tenderness and a depth of feeling that are positively enthralling to her. His familiarity with natural surroundings and his gentleness in handling baby chicks and wild flowers belie the gruff, blunt manner he adopts when they meet for the first time. Although it is he who initiates their lovemaking, her gratification is a source of some satisfaction to him. In some passages, he pays tribute to the visible charms of her body in his quaint workman's language. Although ultimately he must go away, his concluding message to Constance makes clear his continuing affection for her.

Other characters make brief or intermittent appearances to espouse their own views of love and sex, and to consider other intellectual topics; some offer Constance advice. Some of Clifford's friends, such as Arnold Hammond and Tommy Dukes, consider sexuality beyond the pale of serious dignified discussion. Duncan Forbes, the aspiring artist whose modernistic renditions of nudes have the value of a religious cult for him, is alternately serious and sophomoric about Constance's chances for remarriage. Although they do not entirely comprehend her problems, Hilda and Sir Malcolm Reid provide some support, as well as a place of refuge, when Constance's marriage finally comes undone. That the fates of the leading and minor characters remain unresolved at the end suggests the significance of thematic concerns in the author's conception of his work.

Themes and Meanings
The outlook for English society at large, as depicted in this novel, is bleak and desolate. World War I, with its immense human sacrifices, has brought suffering and despair; neither gentry nor commoners have been spared. The German lovers of Hilda and Constance were both killed during the first year of hostilities; Clifford's brother fell later on, and Clifford himself came so close to death, and was so severely maimed, that he could never again seem lighthearted or flippant. Most of the men in the novel knew someone who was killed or wounded in action; some years after the armistice, ugly wounds remain in the nation's psyche from the "false inhuman war."

An older but equally insidious destructive force is the transformation of the countryside by industry, which has left sooty, blackened villages and towns to mark the passing of the old England. The pollution of the landscape imparts a darker tone to all that takes place in the nation's heartland: "The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life" accompany the onward march of industrial growth. Human relations in some ways are still transfixed by the old bonds of class and property. The Reids and the Chatterleys continue to regard themselves as scions of the aristocracy; Sir Clifford's family ranks somewhat higher among the well-bred families of the kingdom, and he seeks further to advance his position by combining his inherited estate with the new wealth which industry and engineering have generated. Class prejudice appears to be as deeply rooted at the upper end of the scale as among the workmen. Clifford's contempt for those beneath him turns to vague, impotent hatred when he learns of Mellors' affair with his wife; what matters to him is the lowly common origins of his wife's lover rather than the actual fact of her infidelity.

In a world ravaged by industrial blight, class divisions, and dark brooding memories of the Great War, the author points to the life forces of love and sexuality as means of redemption. They are not inseparable: Desire may anticipate or exceed affection at times. Nor are such stirrings necessarily limited or confined by the ties of marriage. The author would seem to suggest that direct sexual gratification is an integral part of the love experience and must be taken independently of social conventions or traditional mores. This work neither advocates promiscuity as such nor promotes experimentation or novelty for their own sake. Nevertheless, to the same extent as romantic love, sexual intercourse legitimately may be portrayed, and the sensations aroused may be evoked, not merely in their indirect manifestations or as subjective drives but as essential events that must be taken as part of human experience. The insistence that explicit, unswerving depictions of sexual activities could be achieved in serious fiction brought this novel much notoriety upon its appearance in print and attached a scandalous reputation to it well after the bulk of D. H. Lawrence's work had been accepted as literature.

Critical Context
In his choice of a rural English setting for this, his last full-length novel, Lawrence returned to themes he had developed in his earlier work, but with some differences. While other efforts, notably Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), were set in exotic locations such as Mexico and Australia, Lady Chatterley's Lover deals with issues and places that had also been featured in Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915). The gloomy shadows cast by rampant industrial growth have been darkened in this last work by lingering memories of World War I; the characters are older and have become more deeply involved in marriage. The sexual relations that matter here are all extramarital. Initiation in romantic experience is not at issue as it was in Lawrence's first novels, but the quest for a union of the love experience with mature sexuality is a central concern. During his later years, Lawrence wrote extensively about pornography and obscenity and developed his own theories of the standards by which literature could be judged to be moral or improper. The checkered publishing history of Lady Chatterley's Lover was, in large part, a result of the comparatively graphic nature of the novel and the earthy language employed at certain points. In many ways, the work became a landmark: Its final acceptance marked the adoption of new conventions that expanded the boundaries of serious literary activity. At the same time, such controversies made it more difficult to assess the novel's position, on its own merits, within the overall body of Lawrence's work, or indeed within modern fiction.

In addition to unflinching descriptions of the physical act of sexual consummation, Lawrence allowed his characters, chiefly Mellors, to use a certain number of venerable four-letter, Anglo-Saxon words. In other writings, Lawrence suggested that such terms had become corrupted by generations of high-minded censors and low-minded pornographers. He contended that "the so-called obscene words" in and of themselves are inoffensive. Once society's moral guardians had driven sex underground and out of the serious novel, however, purveyors of lowly forms of entertainment and humor could "do dirt on sex" with impunity. On another level, and whatever the aesthetic issues, Lawrence's novel contains dialogue that has the ring of authenticity, however salty it may be in places. As was pointed out in later legal proceedings, the working classes, and many others as well, are often enough given to inelegant and repetitive expressions.

Although it was originally published in Italy in 1928, the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover could not legally be distributed in the United States until 1959; in Great Britain it was successfully defended in a celebrated trial in 1960. The modern reader, once the question of obscenity has been set aside, may consider rather whether the novel succeeds in depicting the dynamics of mature sexual relations, even with its inconclusive plot; it may be considered as well whether Lawrence has accomplished his purpose in his experiments with language and with sexual imagery.

J. R. Broadus

Bibliography
Hewitt, Cecil Rolph, ed. The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited, 1961.

Nehls, Edward, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 1959.

Squires, Michael. The Creation of Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1983.

Squires, Michael, and Dennis Jackson, eds. D. H. Lawrence's "Lady": A New Look at Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1985.