osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2016-05-22 09:25 am
osprey_archer) wrote2016-05-22 09:25 am
Book Review: Lady Chatterly's Lover
I finished Lady Chatterly's Lover, and I have such mixed feelings about this book, you guys.
The writing is beautiful; the nature descriptions, in particular, are gorgeous. D. H. Lawrence was also a poet, and you can tell.
When I was in high school we read one of his poems in poetry class, the one about the snake, and my poetry teacher had to explain to us that the snake was totally a metaphorical penis. At the time I sort of thought that was reaching, but now that I've read Lady Chatterly's Lover I think it's probably accurate. Everything is penises with Lawrence.
In fact, I think he was more or less serious when he talks about "the phallus as a bridge to the future" (for all that he gives that line to a blowhard): sexual pleasure is the path to the future, the way out of the sterile and ugly industrialized present that has alienated us from our true instinctual selves, and the penis is the only instrument of sexual pleasure that Lawrence recognizes. It does not once occur to anyone, for instance, that Connie's husband Sir Clifford might try using any of his other appendages to rekindle their sex life.
Sir Clifford became impotent following a war wound that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and now he puffs around the estate in a little motorized wheelchair.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
evelyn_b and I were both so taken by the chair that we ended up plotting a picture book of its future life, after the scene where Sir Clifford breaks the chair by trying to force it up an incline to steep for it. (The chair gets taken in by a collier whose daughter needs a wheelchair, and she learns how to repair it herself, and at last the chair is loved and appreciated as it deserves. We thought someone in the book ought to have a happy ending.)
But now that I've finished the book, I don't think Lawrence ever noticed that the chair had any adorable qualities. I think he sees it as rather sinister, an avatar of industrialization, this little chair with its little engine that puffs along where Sir Clifford's legs should be. Sir Clifford physically embodies what Lawrence considers the modern spiritual condition, an unholy grafting of man and machine created by industrialization that makes us all metaphorically impotent, alienated from our instincts, and sensually dead.
But at least Lawrence shows some interest in Sir Clifford; that's more than Connie's lover Mellors' wife ever gets. She shows up like a bad penny at the end of the book to either get her husband back or ruin his life by spreading stories about the grotesque sexual practices he forced upon her during their marriage.
We never actually meet the woman, but Connie hears about her accusations thirdhand from Clifford's nurse, who is of the opinion that 1) Mellors' wife is a known hussy who is obviously lying, and 2) even if she's not lying, she was his wife, wasn't she, and what's it to anyone else if a man takes his pleasure from his wife?
Holy rape culture, Batman.
And as if I hadn't already had plenty of misgivings about Connie's plan to marry this man. Sure, it's all fun and games now when she barely ever sees him, but what's it going to be like when she lives with his moroseness all the time and must constantly cope with all his many issues with women, which he has outlined for her already in some detail?
This all is sounding less and less like mixed feelings and more like a condemnation of the book. I suppose the writing rather blinded me while I was reading?
And I think this is also very much a case where Lawrence was writing something daring and avant garde for his time - it wasn't published in full until thirty years later - and, as often happens when people try to shuck off the old morality and cut a new one from whole cloth, Lawrence sometimes ends up standing there in the emperor's new clothes.
The writing is beautiful; the nature descriptions, in particular, are gorgeous. D. H. Lawrence was also a poet, and you can tell.
When I was in high school we read one of his poems in poetry class, the one about the snake, and my poetry teacher had to explain to us that the snake was totally a metaphorical penis. At the time I sort of thought that was reaching, but now that I've read Lady Chatterly's Lover I think it's probably accurate. Everything is penises with Lawrence.
In fact, I think he was more or less serious when he talks about "the phallus as a bridge to the future" (for all that he gives that line to a blowhard): sexual pleasure is the path to the future, the way out of the sterile and ugly industrialized present that has alienated us from our true instinctual selves, and the penis is the only instrument of sexual pleasure that Lawrence recognizes. It does not once occur to anyone, for instance, that Connie's husband Sir Clifford might try using any of his other appendages to rekindle their sex life.
Sir Clifford became impotent following a war wound that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and now he puffs around the estate in a little motorized wheelchair.
evelyn_b and I were both so taken by the chair that we ended up plotting a picture book of its future life, after the scene where Sir Clifford breaks the chair by trying to force it up an incline to steep for it. (The chair gets taken in by a collier whose daughter needs a wheelchair, and she learns how to repair it herself, and at last the chair is loved and appreciated as it deserves. We thought someone in the book ought to have a happy ending.)But now that I've finished the book, I don't think Lawrence ever noticed that the chair had any adorable qualities. I think he sees it as rather sinister, an avatar of industrialization, this little chair with its little engine that puffs along where Sir Clifford's legs should be. Sir Clifford physically embodies what Lawrence considers the modern spiritual condition, an unholy grafting of man and machine created by industrialization that makes us all metaphorically impotent, alienated from our instincts, and sensually dead.
But at least Lawrence shows some interest in Sir Clifford; that's more than Connie's lover Mellors' wife ever gets. She shows up like a bad penny at the end of the book to either get her husband back or ruin his life by spreading stories about the grotesque sexual practices he forced upon her during their marriage.
We never actually meet the woman, but Connie hears about her accusations thirdhand from Clifford's nurse, who is of the opinion that 1) Mellors' wife is a known hussy who is obviously lying, and 2) even if she's not lying, she was his wife, wasn't she, and what's it to anyone else if a man takes his pleasure from his wife?
Holy rape culture, Batman.
And as if I hadn't already had plenty of misgivings about Connie's plan to marry this man. Sure, it's all fun and games now when she barely ever sees him, but what's it going to be like when she lives with his moroseness all the time and must constantly cope with all his many issues with women, which he has outlined for her already in some detail?
This all is sounding less and less like mixed feelings and more like a condemnation of the book. I suppose the writing rather blinded me while I was reading?
And I think this is also very much a case where Lawrence was writing something daring and avant garde for his time - it wasn't published in full until thirty years later - and, as often happens when people try to shuck off the old morality and cut a new one from whole cloth, Lawrence sometimes ends up standing there in the emperor's new clothes.
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Mellors is such an annoying crank. Connie seems to like it, though? I don't know. Maybe it's exciting now, but once they've been a week together without the thrill of the forbidden, it'll be just as bad as listening to Clifford talk about Racine. Or maybe they'll be annoying cranks together, if he'll condescend to let her get a word in edgewise, which. . . maybe not).
Mellors calls his wife a bully, and Connie accepts that idea of her pretty readily, but before she shows up, iirc, most of the "evidence" we hear of her bullying ways is about how she wanted to keep going after Mellors had "come off." He describes this in almost apocalyptic terms, but . . . some people like it that way? Did he ever try to talk to her about it? Probably he just lectured her about The Mellors Method and the general death of manhood (or maybe he didn't even bother to bring out the lecture notes, given her "commonness").
I'm sorry that Bertha and Connie never met. That would have been an interesting (awkward) conversation, and I feel like if DHL had written that scene, his storytelling insticts would take over and we would get a more complex and sympathetic Bertha -- maybe that's why he keeps her offstage as much as possible. I'm not actually sure what her function is here, except to make Mellors' "escape" more difficult and to give him a reason to have Issues With Women.
Is it avant-garde? I mean, it's avant-garde in the sense of being an anti-censorship test case, and of course the phallus is the poorly-engineered bridge to the future and all that, but it feels like a lot of nostalgia -- for the days when Men Were Men and wore tight trousers and short jackets, and Women Were Women, whatever that's supposed to entail. The character who thinks he's the Man of Tomorrow is Clifford, who is soullness and repellent and also pathetic. And Connie's other model for Correct Manhood is her dad; there's that passage where she judges the legs of her generation and is grateful to see her father's genuine man legs, aging though they are.
My feelings are genuinely mixed, I think.
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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.
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By the end I felt like Mellors was actually the weakest character in the book, in some ways? Clifford is an understandably bitter caricature and Bertha is a careless one, but Mellors has all the narrative space and sympathy in the world, and what does he do with it?
This book was a really interesting mix of things. I'm still figuring out what I want to say about it.
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And I agree with you about Mellors, although I wonder what readers who are less alienated by the Mellors Method think about him. Probably I'd just have to read a few lit crit essays to find out, though.
I do think he's less interesting/less fully realized than Connie, though. Maybe partly just because she gets more narrative space, but I also think that she's less intertwined with some of Lawrence's philosophizing and gets more space to breathe that way.
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