I feel like Connie and Mellors will have a good six weeks or so at the beginning where everything goes swimmingly because they're having sex three times a day. Then they'll have to buckle down to the whole business of farming and they'll only have energy to have sex once a day if that, and then the cracks will start to show. Surely it will eventually bother Connie that he's rude to all their friends? He's horribly rude to her sister in the book; he can tell just by looking at her that she hasn't been having Mellors Method sex.
It's probably a good thing that Mellors lives in an age before infomercials, or you know he would have one. "Buy my book and learn the Mellors Method of sex! Also how to recognize a lesbian before she knows it herself!"
And it is too bad Bertha and Connie never met, because you're right that it would have forced Lawrence to round her out more. But he would have had to rethink quite a lot of his ending if he included that scene; it would have been a very different book.
I think it's avant garde in an artistic sense and politically... well, it's not avant garde in the sense of being progressive, but I think that Lawrence sees himself as being part of the advance guard of a movement of sensualists reclaiming their instinctive natural sexuality, or something like that. He's not just writing a novel, he's writing a manifesto for something.
But it's not a progressive manifesto. I'm not quite sure where it would fall on the political spectrum. He's not conservative, because there's nothing about the world as it is that he wants to conserve. In fact I think he's sort of looking forward to the apocalypse he sees coming, because maybe it will kick us back into a state of nature again. A utopian agrarian/pastoralist, maybe? Is that a thing?
And now I'm heading back into genuinely mixed feelings territory again. There are a lot of things in the book that I disagree with, but at the same time, it's very thought-provoking, and that's valuable too. And of course the prose is so lovely. I certainly don't regret reading it.
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It's probably a good thing that Mellors lives in an age before infomercials, or you know he would have one. "Buy my book and learn the Mellors Method of sex! Also how to recognize a lesbian before she knows it herself!"
And it is too bad Bertha and Connie never met, because you're right that it would have forced Lawrence to round her out more. But he would have had to rethink quite a lot of his ending if he included that scene; it would have been a very different book.
I think it's avant garde in an artistic sense and politically... well, it's not avant garde in the sense of being progressive, but I think that Lawrence sees himself as being part of the advance guard of a movement of sensualists reclaiming their instinctive natural sexuality, or something like that. He's not just writing a novel, he's writing a manifesto for something.
But it's not a progressive manifesto. I'm not quite sure where it would fall on the political spectrum. He's not conservative, because there's nothing about the world as it is that he wants to conserve. In fact I think he's sort of looking forward to the apocalypse he sees coming, because maybe it will kick us back into a state of nature again. A utopian agrarian/pastoralist, maybe? Is that a thing?
And now I'm heading back into genuinely mixed feelings territory again. There are a lot of things in the book that I disagree with, but at the same time, it's very thought-provoking, and that's valuable too. And of course the prose is so lovely. I certainly don't regret reading it.