Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lady Chatterly’s Lover-DH Lawrence

How I found this book: It was given to me by a former co-worker as a Christmas gift. Her reason…it was supposed to be a classic and scandalous! Can’t turn down good literature about sex, I suppose.

Setting: Post World War I Derbyshire, England, an area known for its coal mines. Much of it centers on the estate of Lord Clifford Chatterly, a typical 19th century manor house, one of the few left in a time when many of the British peerage have either abandoned or lost the grand homes of the Gilded Age.

Main Characters:
Constance, Lady Chatterly: An intelligent and modern-thinking upper-class woman, she is sexually and intellectually bored in her marriage to her paralytic husband.

Clifford, Lord Chatterly: Constance’s paralyzed husband, he lives a life dependent on Constance’s presence, living in a world of books and intellect.

Oliver Mellors:  the gamekeeper for the Chatterly estate, he is a dark, brooding figure, very masculine, who lives a life independent, and is a stark contract to Clifford.

Plot: Constance Chatterly spends her youth caring for a paralytic husband, who she loves her in his own distant and self-absorbed way. She feels confined by the circumstances brought on by his war injuries. Though Clifford has suggested she take lovers, which Constance does, she finds little satisfaction in her gilded cage until Oliver Mellors enters her life. Brooding and dark, he is escaping a marriage from a woman who uses sex to try and control him, and though he tried to run away during the war, he’s returned, and finds solace in Constance’s honesty and desire. Though the liaison is scandalous for many reasons, (both of them are married and of different social standings), Constance finds in Mellors the physical as well as mental completion that she could never find with Clifford. When she realizes she is pregnant with Mellors child, she sets about creating a new life for herself, one in which she can be truly happy.

Themes:

Mental/Physical love: well, as much as we would love to say “well I MENTALLY love someone and find their mind stimulating”, let’s face it, we are horny sort. We like sex, we love the feeling of physically being with someone else, the stimulation of having that attraction for someone. If we didn’t, the San Fernando Valley would be without an industry, and hundreds of internet websites would be out of business. So it boils down to this…you got to be attracted to someone physically as well as mentally to be happy in a relationship.

Even more than that, physical love leads to well being. Well, any angst-ridden 16-year-old can tell you that, but it’s occasionally hard when you get a bit older to remember that life is better when you aren’t reduced to "once-a-month and on birthdays" sexual schedules. What’s more, sex isn’t something we need to keep secret behind the bedroom door…we should celebrate it, acknowledge it for all its embarrassments and shortcomings, laughter and occasionally disappointments. But most important, we need to accept it and not frown on it as ‘sinful’ or ‘tawdry’.

Class: While the story of the noble person/servant person getting their groove on is as old as there has been a concept of wealth and status, Lady Chatterly’s Lover purposely brought it up in this light. Why? Couldn’t Constance find a hot, independent sort of fellow in her class? I think DH Lawrence was saying…mmm, not so much. And perhaps in the waning romantic light of the Edwardian Era, and the harsh reality of the Roaring 20’s, this might be true. Much like the 60’s, everyone was questioning everything, and why in the world should one stick to one's class in matters of love and sex? After all if the rich set was making Constance happy in the first place, she might not have been eyeing the gamekeeper.

SCANDAL: I’m not just talking in terms of Constance and Mellor’s love-fest, I’m talking in real life scandal in terms of the book. Written in 1928, the idea of a book discussing sex and using the ‘f’ word to describe it was unheard of, and sort of titillating to the Old Empire crowd. It was banned in most countries until the 1960’s, and perhaps it paved the way for the swear-word laced, graphic-sex world of entertainment we enjoy today!

So every book has got to suck somewhere: Personally, while the book might have broke new ground in 1928, in 2008 the book only elicits a mild ‘eh’. Compared to half of the cheesy romance novels I’ve read in my lifetime, I’ve read much more titillating stuff, and I've heard worse language while driving the Los Angeles freeways. After you get past that, the story is almost prosaic, bored housewife gets groove on with virile working man and ditches intellectual hubby. It’s the plot of countless stories before and since, and not exactly exciting in its own right either anymore. The story of Lady Chatterly’s Lover perhaps then suffers from being stuck in its own time in a way. While the themes and story itself are timeless, the initial ‘shock’ value of it isn’t. None of this is new or even remotely interesting to us anymore, and that probably isn’t DH Lawrence’s fault. Chock it up to Hollywood, but the story is old and boring, and after a while you stop caring for the characters and wonder to yourself “am I this self-centered in a relationship?”

On top of this, the characterization of the main players seems almost flat and chariactured. I find that we are stuck with the 'stereotypical' players in a story of inter-class romance, the bored, rich wife, the boring, stuck up husband, the mysterious, attractive, and usually angry poor man, and the bit players who are all amoral as long as it concerns hank-panky within the class, but outside, we can't have THAT now! Now, this could be in part because this formula has been copied more times than the answer key for a high school math test, but it really, really seems stale here. The characters felt so wooden and so self-absorbed that you really just hoped something awful would happen to them to liven the party up. Perhaps a huge flaming spear through Mellors shoulder during the war, or Clifford falling off a pier and drowning, just to make the party more fun. The characters aren't really nice, hell, they aren't even likeable. But I could forgive it if they were at least interesting, which in this case they aren't.

Rate this wormy book: I'll give this a 'little worm'. While the story is indeed groundbreaking in its own time, I find that it is just that, stuck in its own time. Some of its themes, while not really irrelevant, aren't as new, shocking, or fresh for us anymore. We find them in so many places now that Lady Chatterly really suffers for it in modern eyes. On top of that, the characters are rather flat and hard to empathize with, and you really just find yourself hoping a huge, flaming rock will fall on someones head.