A Certain Slant of Light

Lady Chatterley's Lover is such a different book than I expected. Not that I walked into it with very firm expectations, but I had the vague idea that it was like 80% sex scenes with perhaps some linking descriptions of English wildflowers.

In fact, it's more like one part sex scenes and one part wildflowers to three parts EXISTENTIAL DESPAIR. Industrialization has ruined the world and almost all of the people in it and probably within a hundred years humanity will have lost the last vestiges of its goodness and slaughter each other to extinction in an orgy of industrialized violence.

(Lawrence wrote this in 1929. We have twelve years left to go to before we can say he was wrong.)

Really I just want Connie to be happy, but that's looking less and less likely as the book goes on. Connie and Clifford have grown ever farther apart, and the more we know about Mellors the less he seems like an antidote. The main thing he and Connie seem to have in common is their despair, and I have become increasingly convinced that if Mellors and Connie run away together, they'll sink into an abyss of utter misery as soon as the first flush of honeymoon sex wears off.

I mentioned to evelyn_b last week that what these characters really need is a visit from Flora Poste, of Cold Comfort Farm, who would set them all right with firm good sense and cheerfulness. She could give Sir Clifford a pamphlet about ways to sexually satisfy his wife despite his impotence, whisk Connie off for a refreshing vacation in Venice, and... Well, I'm not sure how she could help Mellors. He doesn't like his dog! What kind of human being dislikes his own dog?

Flora could bring up Mellors' hang-ups about mutual orgasms, perhaps. Until Connie, Mellors has never managed to have a mutual orgasm with any of his partners, and he thinks that this is a sign that womanliness has been utterly undermined by the industrialization that is crushing the human spirit and slowly killing us all.

Like, dude. Maybe you're just not that good at sex, Mellors, did you ever think of that? Maybe women are a diverse population with different desires and physical sensitivities and you could try to make your peace with that instead of obsessing about how your lack of mutual orgasms is a sign that the world is in a ghastly state of degradation and decay.

I think if Flora tried to suggest any of this to Mellors, he'd probably just dismiss her as a meddling female, though. He might prove too tough a nut for even Flora Poster to crack.