Lady Chatterly
Lawrence began writing Lady Chatterley's Lover immediately after the 1926 General Strike in Great Britain. Clifford Chatterley represents the forces of modernity, industrial capitalism and dehumanization that ruthlessly exploit nature and human beings. He is a cold, cynical, soulless character who treats people like machines, and indeed is half-machine himself, moving around in a mechanical wheelchair. In addition to promoting and advertising himself, his main interest is using the principles of scientific management to extract greater profits and efficiency from his mines. Although he is sexually impotent, he treats sexuality like a commodity, while his wife Connie feels like a domestic slave surrounded by mechanical conveniences. She does not even regard her own life as real or authentic, but only like something she read about and her affairs with men are ultimately empty and unfulfilling, at least until she meets the groundkeeper Mellors. Lawrence represents this character as a child of nature and protector on the environment, who was emotionally damaged by his experiences in World War I and his marriage to an abusive and inhuman wife. At first, neither Connie nor Mellors believe that there is any hope for them, although over time their sexual relationship develops into one of real love and tenderness that ends up redeeming them. When Connie becomes pregnant, Clifford decides to use the child as his heir, even though he is completely incapable of reproducing. Connie and Mellors make the free choice to reject him and everything he represents, however, and escape to Canada. They both find greatness, humanity and nobility at the end of the story, in contrast to the mechanical, utilitarian industrial world that Clifford rules, where individual humans no longer even exist except as factors of production are spare parts for the machinery.
Lady Chatterley's Lover was the last novel Lawrence wrote before his death from tuberculosis in 1930 at the age of 44. Like Clifford Chatterley, he was also impotent, not as a result of a war wound but because of his illness, but much of his writing referred back to his youth as the "son of a coalminer and of a mother with pretensions of gentility," and of his own romantic and sexual attraction to her (Gordon 364). Originally, he intended to call the novel "Tenderness" as a reflection of the deep relationship experienced by Connie and Mellors, although James Joyce snidely named it "Lady Chatterbox's Lover." Lawrence had many agendas in his writing, including the intention of eliminating the "dirty little secret" of sex, and his novel was very difficult to obtain in the U.S. For many years because of its graphic language and description of sexual acts (Balbert 68). He had an obsession that became a "quest to discover through sex a world beyond or below worlds" (Gordon 363).
Lawrence celebrated primitivism and animism that depicted all material and inanimate objects as being alive and even having a soul. He regarded this as an ancient mode of thought that had once been universal among Native Americans and the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, whose mentality was very different from that of the modern, scientific world. They believed that "everything was alive, not superficially alive, but naturally alive, including rocks, mountains, clouds and air (Gutierez 179). Their knowledge of the cosmos was based on instinct and intuition, not reason, and their minds were full of images rather than thoughts, which Lawrence regarded as a "repressed and forgotten mode of a fulfilled being" that the modern world desperately needed to recapture, along with the faith that the environment was a living being rather than just a thing (Gutierrez 180). All of his novels regarded nature in this way, and in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tevershall and Wragby Wood represent a "world brutally raped" by modern industry (Gutierrez 193). He rejected "the inhuman mechanical disciplines of modern industrialism" and called for a cultural rebirth that was pre-Christian and pre-capitalist (Koh 190).
Today there is hardly any room for belief in earth...
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