“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.” Examining the sexual mode and reception of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence.

Authored by Violet Moffat

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel that examines the relationship between Constance ‘Connie’ Chatterley and her husband’s gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Set in the Post-World War One English Midlands, it blends the realities of the Upper-Class domain and Working-class Britain. As the relationship with her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, breaks down, Connie embarks on a narrative of sexual fulfilment, leaving questions regarding morality that still penetrate our literary and moral culture today. 

How can we define Lady Chatterley’s Lover and its disappearance?

First published privately in Italy in 1928, D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover reimagined society, class, and the female function in the cataclysmic wake of World War One. It was perhaps recognised as one of the most controversial pieces of literature of the twentieth century, reforming the function of the novel and female-class narratives in modernity.

Banned for over thirty years, the obscenity trial that followed the condemnation of the novel in 1959 (R v Penguin Books Ltd), marked a landmark shift in the freedom of literary expression in the United Kingdom. When the leader of the prosecution, Mervyn Griffith-Jones asked the defence, ‘Would you leave it lying about your house? Is it a book you would even wish your wives or servants to read?’ in 1960, it reflected the anxieties of British society towards the female body, to pleasure, and transgression that was entering the canon of English Literature. It was only in the two previous centuries that women came to the forefront of the bildungsroman genre in the canon of literature. And even then, how could Jane Austen’s ‘obstinate, headstrong’ Lizzy Bennet compare to Connie Reid, the ‘half-virgin’ and her crudely named genitalia, ‘Lady Jane’? 

Reaching its entrance into the public domain, the novel was considered to be a cold slate of pornography, akin to the raunchy pamphlets that proliferated the streets of Victorian England. The representation of female sensibilities and the body in media in this era was something grotesque. A woman caught in flagrante was a measure by which class, Christian values, and appropriate femininity could be measured and judged. So then came a novel, and indeed a literary culture that directly addressed that.  

 

 

What is the plot? 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover depicts Connie Reid, the daughter of the socially progressive aristocrat who marries the shell-shocked Clifford Chatterley, and resides in his ancient family seat, Wragby Hall. And if we are to understand the importance of symbols in the modernist genre and in D.H. Lawrence’s writing, from the very introduction of these characters, there is a sense of fragility in this world. A representation of a traditional English sphere of good old chaps and polite young fillies, guarded within the dusty grandeur of the country pile. This perfected balance of aristocratic piety is thrown off course through the lens of masculinity and femininity. Following the battle fields of the Great War, the ‘lamed’ Sir Clifford grows ‘tremulous’, masked behind his ‘Bond Street neckties’, tended to by his ‘ruddy’ and ‘provincial’ wife. All tucked away within the ‘spectral’ non-existent Wragby. Jolly good show. 

As the narrative develops, Lawrence makes a purposefully self-conscious comparison between the dusty libraries of the house and the rugged, fecund, chokingly physical landscape of the estate in which the affair between Connie and the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, shall unfold. The chugging smoke of the mines shapes this dangerous mode of sensuality, something that not only challenged sexual conformity, but represented some kind of Edenic encounter, marking a shift in the ‘natural’ order of society, redirecting the place in which sex could take place. This shift to a ‘mental life’ results for Lawrence in the plucking of the ‘apple’, a transition from ‘deadness’ to life. 

How may we place the novel in its different contexts? 

In this struggle of the 1920s existence, Lawrence echoes the effect of a changing Britain. How may a cult of sexual morality exist amongst the quivering hands of the blood-stained lieutenant, Sir Clifford Chatterley? In ‘The Radicalism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Calvin Bedient names the ‘Lawrencian explosiveness’ uncovered in the novel as an eradication of morality. An abstraction of the individual and personal desire seems averse to a story of a woman’s intimate sexual affair, but the novel represented a reconstruction of not only social orders and sexual agency, but of morality and existence itself.  

The prosecution at the 1960 trial reduced Lady Chatterley’s Lover to a trite and dangerous concoction of female desire. This desire represented change, and we see that as Connie analyses herself in the mirror. She watched as her ‘body was going meaningless’, decaying in Lawrence’s ‘tragic’ age. The transition from the ‘delicate porcelain’ Victorian body to an expressed sexual female freedom was still a threat still in the context of Post-war Britain. However, it seems important to highlight Lawrence’s awareness of aliveness, experience, and encounters as opposed to a story of complete female sexual transgression, materialised in a raunchy love affair. In ‘D.H. Lawrence and Eroticism: Concerning Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, critics André Malraux and Melvin Friedman argue that ‘of little import is the manner of this awakening’. That is to say that the content of the novel, the sexual mode is not necessarily the chief message of change for which Lawrence advocates. Ultimately, Lawrence leaves us with an ambiguous ending, not a manifesto for the future, but a comic letter from Mellors describing his penis ‘John Thomas’ who ‘droopingly’ speaks to Connie’s ‘Lady Jane’. The sentient individual, society, and even the voice of the person is removed.  

Final thoughts from the author: 

There is no doubt that a kind of seminal utopia surrounds the legacy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and its ambiguity and absurd nature continues to baffle and intrigue readers in our modern age. The novel expresses the need for connection and reaction, to transform from the decaying passive is to act.  

The symbol of the sexual act, removed from the walls of Wragby as a representation of an old Britain to the woods, to a kind of folkloric, pagan setting becomes a catalyst for movement in place of stagnancy in an uncertain future. The sex isn’t beautiful, nor a performance, its awkward and slightly grotesque. That sobering reality of connection is one of the most powerful messages within the novel, in both the wake and brink of ‘death and destruction’, union, communication, and the expression of language is paramount.  

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is as relevant today as it was almost one hundred years ago because within its radicalism, it beckons us to question our reality, an urgent call to acknowledge something that Lawrence communicates from the very first page of the novel, that this age was something that we ‘refused to take…tragically’. The novel lures us in, with a promise of a transgressive love story, and leaves us with the necessity for creativity, change, and rebirth.