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PROSE AND POETRY 
IT IS SUBMITTED TO FULFILL PSIKOPEND DAN BIMPESDIK ASSIGNMENTS 
Lecturer: 
Eri Rahmawati, S.S, M.A. 
Submitted by : 
Maratus Solihah : 2223120743 Syifa Khairunnisa : 2223120163 
Nurul Hidayah Santika : 2223120196 Aprilia Purwanti : 2223120330 
Rosid Ikbal Setiadi : 2223120613 Desvina Eka W : 2223120611 
Mega Widyaningsih : 2223120111 
Novy Yuliyanti : 2223120520 
Ulfathul Mardiah : 2223120105 
4A 
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT 
TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY
SULTAN AGENG TIRTAYASA UNIVERSITY 
2014 
INTRODUCTION 
Bismillahirrohmanirrohim 
Assalamualaikum wr. Wb 
Praise be to Allah God Almighty has given us the opportunity to be able to complete the task 
groups of subjects is Prose and Poetry . 
Salawat be glorified together with regards to major prophet Muhammad. He cover prophets and 
messengers , also of mercy for the faithful followers hold teachings .this paper we make with 
confidence and all our efforts to understand and also understand about the materials related to the 
paper that we made . For resolution of this matter with the realization that I am the author would 
like to thank the thousands of friends groups that have been working on this material are compact 
and work hard . Especially in our lecturers who have given us direction and also the material so 
that we can finish this paper in a timely manner . 
But we also understand that there is no perfect world it . Then we would expect an improvement 
and constructive criticism so that we can do better in the preparation of the next paper . 
With this we thank you for your attention on our paper if there is a shortage that is our self. 
Because the real truth belongs only to Allah SWT . 
End of the word. 
Wassalamu`alaikum wr. Wb
Cilegon, 2 Juni 2014 
Kelompok 2 
CHAPTER I 
Background 
Basically , we as a student majoring in education and literature English language understand that 
we will not only explore the science teacher but also science literature . therefore we begin to 
understand the need for reviewing the contents of a novel , short story , or a variety of papers 
which of course requires the art of writing and literature in order to analyze secars correct and on 
target . because the literature does not have the same meaning for some people . therefore , we 
are here trying to find a common view of the novel . novels we studied may be many who find 
controversial opinion because the theme is presented is a more mature romance theme is not 
worth reading for minors especially for eastern nations such as Indonesia . but here we are trying 
to assess from the literature that explores the submission of the author's thoughts and expertly 
embodied in a paper which eventually can be enjoyed by the general public . for that we present 
assessment of this book and the literary scientific as possible in order to achieve our goal of 
literary analysis for this book from the controversial novel after this . 
Problem Formulation 
What are the intrinsic elements that exist in this novel ??? 
Purpose 
The purpose of writing this paper we present are : 
• In order for students to know the intrinsic elements in the novel 
• In order for students to understand a novel of literary elements 
• In order for students to know the relevance of the concept of writing and intrinsic element of a 
novel
CHAPTER II 
SUMMARY 
 Section IV: Chapter 10 
Summary 
Wragby is virtually abandoned now. Clifford has withdrawn into his mining plans, listening to 
the radio, and talking with Mrs. Bolton. He maintains a sort of fearful worship of Connie, who 
increasingly despises him. With springtime, and the resurrection of the forest, Connie's misery 
seems all the harsher. She goes more and more to the hut in the woods where Mellors, the 
gamekeeper, is breeding pheasants to hunt. One day, in a spasm of hopeless tenderness for the 
young chicks, she has a breakdown at the hut. Mellors is there to comfort her; as he does so, his 
physical desire for her grows. She is mute and unresisting as he takes her into the hut and sleeps 
with her, but she stays separate from him in her mind, receiving no pleasure from the sex. They 
leave each other, and Mellors--now torn from his solitude--muses about the importance of desire 
and tenderness, and the evils of the mechanized industrial world. For her part, Connie is 
confused: she knows that she does not love Mellors, but is happy that he has been kind not to her 
personality--to her mind and intellect, which she is coming to believe are meaningless--but to 
"the female in her." 
The next day, they meet once again at the hut. Reverting to his Derbyshire dialect, he asks her 
whether she is not worried that people will find out about her affair with a commoner, but she 
throws caution to the wind; they have sex again. Mellors deeply and sensually appreciates her 
body, but again she remains distant; during sex, she notices only how ridiculous his thrusting 
buttocks look.
For several days after, Connie does not go to meet Mellors in the cabin. Instead, one afternoon 
she takes tea with a friend of hers, Mrs. Flint, who has a newborn baby. Leaving tea, she runs 
into Mellors in the woods. Although she says she does not want to have sex, he lays her down on 
the forest floor, and she complies. This time, she has an orgasm simultaneous with his second 
orgasm, and the impact on her is profound. She feels that her body has awakened to him, that she 
adores him with all of her physical being. She spends that night in the company of Clifford, but 
the bond between them has been irrevocably broken. She is in a dreamworld, truly conscious 
only of the warmth inside of her. Clifford, on the other hand, is empty inside, beginning now to 
resent the distance between them. 
That night, Mellors cannot sleep; he replays his life in his mind. On a late-night walk through the 
woods, he recalls his years as a soldier in India, and his unhappy marriage to Bertha Coutts. He 
reflects on the difficulty of his position: entanglement with Connie will be emotionally taxing, 
and will create any number of logistical difficulties. Where will they go? How will they live? He 
reflects also on his own loneliness, and realizes that loneliness is fundamental to the human 
condition. Standing outside Wragby in the darkness, thinking of Connie, he is seen by Mrs. 
Bolton, who--having guessed earlier by Connie's actions that she was having an affair--realizes 
that Mellors must be the man. 
Commentary 
This is the--no pun intended--climactic chapter in Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is here that 
Connie's sexual awakening begins, catalyzed by her powerful and revelatory orgasm on the 
forest floor. It is worth spending some time discussing the nature of her revelation, and the way 
in which this becomes the basis of the relationship between her and Mellors. 
What should be noted first is that the novel's approach to the significance of sex and sexual 
relationships is quite vague. At times, it is almost opaque. This owes something to Lawrence's 
difficulty or reticence in clearly describing sexual scenes. In its time, Lady Chatterley's Lover 
was considered radically graphic; the difficulty with Lawrence's depiction of sex scenes is not 
quite a failure of graphic description, but rather a tendency towards the obscure and mystical.
Thus, during the first sex scene between Mellors and Connie, Lawrence refers to Mellors 
entering "the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body." In a novel that appears to flaunt its bold 
contempt for euphemisms, this is a strange euphemism, to say the least. The reader will also 
recall Lawrence's contortions when trying to describe Connie's naked body at the beginning of 
chapter seven; I, at least, have no idea what "glimpsey" thighs or "meaningful" breasts look like. 
What seems evident is that Lawrence believes some mystical power to reshuide in the human 
body, and in the sex act, which cannot precisely be described. There is no real distinction, for the 
reader, between the three sex scenes depicted in this chapter, and yet the third scene, on the 
forest floor, proves orgasmic and profoundly meaningful. Lawrence gives the reader very little 
idea why this might be. It is simply taken for granted: Mellors brings Connie to orgasm 
simultaneous with his orgasm, and what results is the deepest of human connections. She begins 
to adore Mellors. Her increased passion even seems to guarantee her pregnancy: the physical 
stimulus of orgasm triggers a reaction of such psychological importance that it, in turns, 
stimulates her physically to pregnancy. "It feels like a child in me," Connie thinks. Surely, this is 
not a scientific but a mystical--a pseudo-pagan, even--explanation for her pregnancy. 
Lawrence's mysticism makes it difficult for the reader to trace the evolution of love in Connie 
and Mellors; it is difficult to identify with them or understand their emotions, because their 
response is sensual, with sensory stimuli triggering deep emotion. In this sense, this is a very 
difficult chapter for the reader. Lady Chatterley's Lover refuses to act like a typical novel, 
familiarizing the reader with its protagonists. 
I have observed that in many ways Lady Chatterley's Lover is a conservative novel. What 
information one can glean from the sex scenes between Mellors and Connie seems to support 
this assertion. The reader will notice that Connie is purely passive in all three of these sex scenes. 
It is in the third scene--the one where she successfully reaches orgasm with Mellors--that her 
passivity, even docility, is most explicit. She does not want to have sex with Mellors, but she 
yields to the force of his passion: "She was giving way. She was giving up." It is only through 
utterly surrendering herself to Mellors that she arrives at her sexual awakening. The reader will 
remember that the great sin of Mellors' wife, Bertha Coutts, is that she was sexually aggressive. 
Lawrence seems to exalt female passivity; women in his system become merely receptors. It is
through passivity, through yielding to the male urge, he indicates, that women can be fulfilled. 
The reader will remember that on the night before Connie leaves for Venice (in chapter 16), 
when she is transported by sensual pleasure, she needs first to subject herself: "she had to be a 
passive, consenting thing, like. . .a physical slave." The contemporary reader may find this 
troubling; I certainly do. What must be said, I think, is that, however radical are Lawrence's 
graphic depictions of sex, his approach to the sex-act itself, and the roles of the sexes within it, is 
hardly progressive.
 Section V: Chapters 11 & 12 
Summary 
While sorting through a storage room with Mrs. Bolton, Connie finds the Chatterley's family 
cradle, and tells Mrs. Bolton that she is thinking of having a child. Mrs. Bolton is surprised, as 
Clifford Chatterley is impotent because of his paralysis. Still, she spreads the rumor throughout 
the village. Even Squire Winter hears the rumor. Clifford himself begins to speak of 
technological advances that will enable him to impregnate Connie. Connie, of course, has no 
intention of having a child with Clifford. She will soon travel to Venice to spend a month, and 
she plans to give birth to Mellors' child and tell Clifford--who has permitted her to have a child 
by another man--that she had an affair with a nobleman in Venice. 
Connie travels to the coal-mining village of Uthwaite, and is deeply disturbed by what she sees: 
a landscape corrupted by the mines, men twisted and dehumanized by the work. The new 
industrial England is eclipsing the old England of countryside and manor-houses. All seems 
grim, gritty, hopeless. On her return, she has a conversation with Mrs. Bolton about the nurse's 
dead husband, killed in a mining accident. Mrs. Bolton reveals her bitterness towards the mining 
bosses and owners whom she holds responsible for her husband's death, and she speaks 
movingly of the memory of her husband's touch, the way that his physical love has stayed with 
her for the years since his death. 
Connie goes to visit Mellors at his house. He seems uncomfortable to have her visit him there, 
reminded of the class-difference between them. As usual, he speaks to her curtly, and drops 
quickly into a bad mood. She tells him that she would like to bear his child, and he acts as if she 
had been using him for her needs. He will not touch her in the house. Instead he insists that they 
first go to the cabin, where they have sex. As in the beginning of their relationship, she keeps 
him at an emotional distance. She is a little bit afraid of sensual abandon, and she sees them as if 
from above, as if she were separate from the ridiculous act of lovemaking. She begins to sob,
lamenting, "I can't love you." Yet when he gets up to go, she finds herself clinging to him, and in 
her need for him she receives him again. They once again have sex, and this time she comes to 
orgasm. The sex that from an emotional distance seemed ridiculous now seems warm and 
wonderful. Afterwards, she asks if he loves her, and he says that he loves her in that she opens 
herself to him. This satisfies her. Playfully, they speak to each other in his Derbyshire dialect, 
which she cannot quite master. 
Commentary 
In describing Connie's trip to Uthwaite, Lawrence issues one of the strongest indictments of the 
English industrial economy since Dickens. It is a portrait of a village filled with "half-corpses," 
whose "living intuitive faculty was dead." This section is one of the few places in the novel 
where Lawrence's emotion so overpowers him that he directly addresses the reader, and in which 
his explicit political stance comes out: "England my England! but which is my England?" 
Lawrence--for here there is no separation, one senses, between Lawrence himself and the 
narrator of the novel, and one might argue that this is one of the novel's failings--bemoans the 
transformation of old England, with its cottages and its stately manors, into the new England, 
choked by soot. 
This hatred for the mining economy should not, however, be mistaken for a particular concern 
for the plight of the working man; Lawrence was not Dickens. Lady Chatterley's Lover certainly 
detests the coal mines, but it has curiously little sympathy for the men whose lives are degraded 
by working in the mines. (Just as, incidentally, it seems to have little sympathy for Clifford, a 
war-hero who was paralyzed in combat; human sympathy for victims is unusual here.) These 
men have been dehumanized, and as such Lawrence extends to them very little human sympathy. 
Critics of Lawrence's work have often noticed a kind of self-hatred in Lawrence's unsympathetic 
approach to the coal miners. There is a certain poignant force to Connie's horror at the coal-miners, 
as she imagines bearing a coal-miner's child: "Children from such men! Oh God, oh 
God!" Lawrence himself, of course, was the child of a coal-miner. 
In an introduction to the novel, the American poet Archibald MacLeish points that, in Lady 
Chatterley's Lover, "One is never left in doubt as to what Lawrence is against in the modern,
industrialized world, but it is less clear what he is advocating in its stead." Lawrence is no 
socialist, spending time in this novel mocking socialism. Indeed, he lays the blame for the coal-miners' 
dehumanization squarely on their own shoulders. And yet he seems to propose no 
alternative social ordering. What he evidences is a profound nostalgia for England's past, without 
real concern for the past's social and political imperfections. When Connie goes to Uthwaite, the 
reader will notice that one of the novel's chief complaints is the destruction of the old, 
aristocratic manor houses. The new King, Lawrence comments bitterly--for this is no longer the 
voice of Connie or of the narrator--occupies himself chiefly with opening soup-kitchens, not with 
preserving England's past. Lady Chatterley's Lover seems to advocate a return to an English 
heyday with a King concerned for the health of the aristocracy rather than the feeding of the 
poor, a heyday in which the aristocracy--with its lovely manors and perfect manners--reigned 
supreme. 
Lady Chatterley's Lover does, it should be noted, make some provision for the health and 
sustenance of the coal-miners, who would be jobless in a return to pre-industrial England. This 
provision comes in the form of a plan by Mellors to restore the humanity and the dignity of the 
coal-miners, given in chapter 15. If Mellors had his way, he says, he would tell the coal-miners 
to stop working so hard: "no need to work that much." He would dress them in red pants and 
white jackets. Within a month, women--inflamed, presumably, by these outfits--would begin to 
act like women, and men would be real men. They could pull down the mining village and erect 
a "few beautiful buildings" to house everybody. What is remarkable about this plan is that 
Mellors seems quite passionate about it; Connie takes it seriously; and it is actually repeated in 
Mellors' letter to Connie which comprises the final pages of the novel. It is, indeed, one of the 
thoughts on which the novel ends. It may be understood, it seems, as a proposal that this novel 
takes seriously as an ideal vision for the future of the working classes. The reader must 
determine whether the serious proposal of this plan is a failing or strength in this novel; it should 
be evident, however, that this the novel is one which draws its power as a social critique not from 
its vision of a better future, but rather from its condemnation of a corrupted present. Still, the 
reader should not confuse baby with bathwater; at heart--however impractical and even 
ridiculous the specific plan might be--this novel and Lawrence believe that the social order will 
be improved when people learn to trust and appreciate their bodies and their sensual urges.
 Section VI: Chapters 13 & 14 
Summary 
One Sunday morning, Clifford and Connie go into the woods, which are beautiful in early 
summer. They discuss the plight of the coal-miners, with Connie complaining about the 
hideousness and hopelessness of the miners' lives, and Clifford taking the position that he, as a 
capitalist, is doing his responsibility to provide work for the common people. Clifford theorizes 
that it is environment that makes people noble or common, that unstoppable and systematic 
forces are what shape aristocrats and workers; "the individual hardly matters." 
Clifford's motorized wheelchair becomes stuck on a sharp incline, and he calls Mellors to come 
fix it. There is a tense scene in which Clifford insists on getting the chair up the incline on its 
own power, while Mellors and Connie realize that only pushing will get it up. Connie inwardly 
scoffs at the powerlessness of Clifford, the man who so recently bragged about the strength and 
responsibility of the aristocracy. The chair slips, and Mellors--already weakened by pneumonia-- 
lunges to catch it, in the process exhausting himself. Connie is furious at Clifford for his 
stubbornness, which she holds responsible for the situation. 
That night, Connie slips out of the house and meets Mellors; they have planned for her to spend 
the night at his cottage. She sees that he still has a picture of his wife, Bertha Coutts, and 
convinces him to burn it and to initiate divorce proceedings. He explains why he married Bertha, 
in the process telling her about his sexual and emotional history, and initiating their first real 
conversation. He began his professional career as a clerk, and during his clerkship he had two 
lovers before Bertha, both women who loved him deeply but who were uninterested in sex. He 
felt that they were robbing him of his masculinity (they had "nearly taken all the balls out of 
me"). Taking a more manly job as a blacksmith, he married Bertha because he saw a deep 
sensuality in her. As it turns out, he was right: they had deep sexual desire for each other. But she 
began to assert herself too aggressively, holding out when he wanted sex, refusing to have
orgasms with him, seizing sexual control. They began to sleep separately, and to hate each other. 
He went off to the army in India, and she moved in with another man. 
After recounting his history of sexual woes, Mellors begins a heated discussion of the purpose of 
sex, and the nature of sexual satisfaction. He explains his personal credo--"I believe in being 
warm-hearted. . .in fucking with a warm heart"--and talks about how a proper relationship with a 
woman involves mutual and simultaneous orgasm. Connie senses a deep despair in him, a belief 
that true passion and tenderness are dying, that "there's black days coming for us all and for 
everybody." They begin to quarrel, accusing each other of excessive self-involvement; he 
accuses her of an inability to open herself tenderly to him. But they resolve their quarrel in a 
moment of longing and tenderness, after which they have sex on the rug. They fall asleep, and 
when they wake up in the morning they once again make love. For the first time, she appreciates 
his penis closely: "so proud! And so lordly!" He begins their tradition of referring to their sex 
organs as separate from them, John Thomas and Lady Jane. She asks if he really loves her, and 
he responds as he did earlier in the novel: he loves her "womanness." 
Commentary 
In his long discourse on his sexual history and his theory of sexuality, Mellors reveals himself 
for the first time to the reader. For the first time, the reader has an extended look into Mellors' 
head, and develops a picture of his past and his personality. It should hardly be taken for granted, 
I think, that it is an attractive personality. Mellors is a complex character, and the question of 
whether he is sympathetic is debatable. The English author Lawrence Durrell, writing about 
Lady Chatterley's Lover, complains, "I find that Lawrence has failed to secure the reader's 
sympathy for this strange, self-satisfied little boor, so complacent about his 'flamy' body and 
hard-worked 'prick'. . .Mellors just sits around waiting to be fished out of holes by poor Connie. . 
.One pities the poor lady when one thinks of the future she promises herself with a man like 
this--listening to his half-baked twaddle about putting miners into pinafores in order to save their 
souls." Well, that's Lawrence Durrell's opinion. It need not be taken as absolute truth. It is hardly 
arguable, though, that Oliver Mellors is a difficult person: he picks fights (his treatment of 
Connie's sister Hilda is particularly brutal); he is disdainful and condescending, even to Connie; 
he pleases nobody unless it is in his own interest. Durrell seems right that he has a curious lack
of initiative, needing Connie to tell him to divorce his wife and burn her picture. His use of 
Derbyshire dialect is almost impossibly irritating for both the reader and, at times, for Connie. 
It is in his approach to sex that Mellors can be most difficult to appreciate. Difficulty 
sympathizing with Mellors can amount to a difficult sympathizing with Connie, without which 
sympathy this novel fails. If Mellors is a braggart and a buffoon, or at least a jerk, it becomes 
hard to understand why Connie would risk everything to spend her life with him. And it makes 
the reader reevaluate Connie as protagonist. 
Mellors is frustrated because his first two lovers are not really interested in sex with him. He is 
frustrated by his wife, Bertha Coutts, because she is too sexually aggressive. The reader will note 
that the crime of which Mellors accuses Bertha--restraining her orgasm until after Mellors', and 
then using Mellors' penis to come to her own orgasm through her own exertions--is precisely 
what Connie does to Michaelis. And Michaelis loses the reader's sympathy for his resentment of 
this behavior. However open Mellors is in his broad sensuality, he seems to have an antagonistic 
approach to women in this section, especially in referring to Bertha's vagina as a "beak," and 
speaking of it tearing into him. He resents women who want to be the "active party." In a trope 
that has become familiar from puerile boys' locker-room talk, he complains that a huge number 
of women who don't satisfy him, or who are not satisfied by him, are really just lesbians. It may 
be difficult for the modern reader to sympathize with this man, who brags about the amount of 
sex that he has had and considers himself a victim because so few of his companions have had 
orgasms. 
It should be remembered that Mellors' ultimate goal, of course, is mutuality, love and tenderness 
through the bonding experience of simultaneous orgasm. And that what Mellors conveys, more 
than anything--and despite his failings as a sympathetic character--is an attitude towards 
sensuality and towards the body, an appreciation of the physical. He is perhaps hyperbolically 
oversexed; in this, he better serves his propagandistic or idealistic purpose. It might be argued 
that he is a kind of laboratory creation, an abstracted man with enough experience in sex to be 
licensed to evaluate human sexual failings. This does not absolve his failings as a character, but 
merely points out that Mellors is more than a character in a novel; he is an allegorical figure
representing sensual, savage man. The relationship between Mellors as allegory and Mellors as 
personality is complex, and tortured 
 Section VII: Chapters 15 & 16 
Summary 
Connie learns that she will be leaving for Venice soon; Clifford makes her promise that she will 
come back to him, but she is secretly planning her final escape. She meets with Mellors in the 
cabin during a rainstorm, and they discuss running away to the British colonies. He also tells her 
about his time in the army, and about the colonel who became his surrogate father. He explains 
his theory of social decline: English society is faltering because technology and industry have 
emasculated English men. Eventually, men will be drawn in their despair to wipe each other out. 
It would be a shame, he says, to bring a child into this world. Connie--planning to bear his 
child--begs him for a sign of hope, and he talks about the way society can be repaired. The 
working classes will have to stop subjugating themselves to the industrial machine, and recover 
the life of the body. Machines will have to be destroyed, and manhood restored. 
Connie suddenly leaves the cabin, and runs outside. He joins her, and they dance naked in the 
rain, and have sex on the ground. They go back into the hut and warm themselves before the fire. 
Running his hand over her "secret places," he tells her she has a beautiful body, that he adores 
her in all of her base physicality. They discuss the future, planning to run away together and have 
a child; they will both pursue divorces. They agree that she will spend the night before she leaves 
for Venice with him in his cottage. They fall into a lover's game, intertwining flowers in each-others' 
pubic hair, playfully referring to the wedding of their genitals, Lady Jane marrying John 
Thomas. 
It is late, and raining. On her way home, Connie runs into Mrs. Bolton, who has been sent to look 
for her. They return to Wragby, where Clifford scolds Connie for impetuously running around
outside in the rain. That night, Clifford reads to her from a book that predicts the spiritual rise of 
man, and his physical decline. But Connie has been converted to the worship of the sensual and 
physical. She decries the spiritual life, the life of the mind, and valorizes instead the human body, 
predicting a future blessed by the realization of the body's preeminence. Clifford is taken aback. 
After a conversation with Mrs. Bolton--who sometimes serves as her expert on male 
psychology--Connie realizes that Mellors was probably depressed in the hut because he was 
angry with her for going to Venice. 
Hilda arrives to pick up Connie for the trip. Connie explains her plan: they will leave Wragby, 
acting as if they are departing for Venice, but Connie will spend the night at Mellors' house. The 
next day Hilda will pick her up and they will make good their departure. Hilda is appalled to 
learn that Connie is having an affair with a common gamekeeper; nevertheless, she agrees to abet 
Connie in her subterfuge. That night, Hilda drops Connie off at Mellors' cottage, and Mellors and 
Hilda confront each other. She treats him with contempt and condescension; he responds by 
reverting to his Derbyshire dialect--asserting himself as a common, earthy man--and accusing 
her of sexual frigidity. They do not get along. Connie spends a night of pure sensual passion with 
Mellors, in which she reaches new heights of sexual pleasure through passivity before his 
masculine will, learning in the process to discard shame and convention. In the morning she 
leaves for Venice. 
Commentary 
In his essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence explained at length the mentality 
he was trying to combat with his frank sexuality and worship of the body. "The mind," he writes, 
"has an old groveling fear of the body and the body's potencies." He observes that even the likes 
of the great poet and satirist Jonathan Swift seemed afflicted by a terror of the body: "The 
insanity of a great mind like Swift's is at least partly traceable to this cause. In the poem to his 
mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain, "But--Celia, Celia, Celia s---s" (the word rhymes 
with spits), we see what can happen to a great mind when it falls into panic." According to 
Lawrence, even a great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made himself. "Of course 
Celia s---s! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't. And then think of poor Celia, made 
to feel iniquitous about her proper natural function, by her "lover." It is monstrous." Lawrence
was appalled at the idea of people feeling shame about their bodies. Shame, for Lawrence, was 
simply a manifestation of fear. Chapters 15 and 16 in Lady Chatterley's Lover are, to a great 
extent, the chronicle of Connie's loss of shame, which disappears during her passionate night 
with Mellors before her departure for Venice. And these chapters contain what almost seems a 
direct response to Swift's unhappiness at acknowledging physicality in his lover: "An' if tha shits 
an' if tha pisses, I'm glad," says Mellors. 
It is during that night between Connie and Mellors that the reader gets the clearest picture of 
their relationship. Throughout their affair, Connie has asked him whether or not he loves her. He 
always responds with a qualified answer: he loves that he can touch her; he loves sex with her; 
her loves her for her physicality. And here it is confirmed with crystal clarity: "It was not really 
love. . .It was sensuality." 
Love, it seems, requires the interaction of minds. Connie and Mellors rarely speak, and when 
they do it is rarely real, intimate conversation; either Mellors fulminates, losing his individuality 
in acting as a spokesperson for Lawrence, or they engage in a kind of meaningless love-prattle. 
Their attraction instead grows out of sex and sensuality, an attraction more bestial than personal; 
she is a "bitch," he is a "wild animal." The entire point of the relationship between Connie and 
Mellors is that it is shaped not around their personalities, but around a kind of wild, 
depersonalized, primordial sex-force. It is telling that, as Connie reveals to Hilda, the paramours 
never refer to each other by name: they only call each other John Thomas and Lady Jane, pet-names 
for genitalia. Indeed, Lawrence called the penultimate draft of this novel "John Thomas 
and Lady Jane." And in Mellors' letter to Connie with which the novel ends, the final sentence is 
a salutation not from one person in love with another, but from John Thomas to Lady Jane. In the 
language of the book, he has become a "phallus," she a "cunt": and this is--for this novel--the 
highest, and the purest, human aspiration.
Section VIII: Chapters 17-19 
Summary 
Connie travels to Venice by way of London, Paris, and the overland route through the Alps. She 
finds herself awakened to sensuality in peoples' bodies, noticing how few people have truly alert 
bodies, and how few places have any appreciation of sensuality. She longs to be back in Wragby, 
away from the cloud of tourists bent single-mindedly on enjoying themselves. In Venice, she and 
Hilda join her father, Sir Malcolm and several others, including Duncan Forbes, as guests in the 
home of a rich Scotsman, Sir Alexander. Connie has a pleasant but not fabulous time in Venice, 
bathing with Hilda on remote beaches across the lagoon, ferried by the gondoliers Daniele and 
Giovanni. 
Soon, however, she gets letters from Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, telling her that Bertha Coutts, 
Mellors' wife, has come back to him. He expelled her from the house, but she broke in again, and 
he has gone to live with his mother, abandoning the house to Bertha. Bertha apparently found 
perfume in the house, and the postman also recalls hearing a woman with Mellors one morning; 
they do not, of course, know that this woman was Connie, but Mellors is suspected of adultery, 
and Bertha is spreading rumors accusing him of sexual deviancy. Connie's first reaction is a 
revulsion against Mellors. She feels humiliated to be associated with a commoner like him, with 
somebody who would marry Bertha Coutts. But she comes around, remembering his tenderness 
to her and how he awakened her sexually. She sends a note of support to Mellors through Mrs. 
Bolton. With a second letter from Clifford, and one from Mellors, Connie learns that the 
situation has gotten worse. Bertha Coutts has begun to spread the rumor that Connie herself was 
Mellors' paramour. Coutts has been silenced by an injunction from Clifford. When Clifford 
confronted Mellors with questions about his sexual conduct, Mellors responded disrespectfully;
Clifford then fired Mellors, who went to London. Meanwhile, Connie is now certain that she is 
going to bear Mellors' child. 
Connie and her family return to London, where she meets up with a dejected Mellors. Mellors 
says that they should call their relationship off: he has nothing to offer her, and he is too proud to 
live on her money, as a consort to an aristocrat. But they go back to her room and make love, and 
she tells him that she admires the courage of his tenderness, his ability to ignore shame and 
appreciate the physical. She urges him to trust the tenderness between them, and to disregard the 
worldly differences. He agrees to stay with her, and even to love their child, despite his fears 
about the future of society. 
Connie discusses her situation with her father, who, despite his happiness that she has found 
sexual satisfaction, is outraged that her lover is a commoner. But Sir Malcolm agrees to meet 
Mellors, and they get along well, discussing sex earthily: they have a common ground in 
sensuality. Between Hilda--who still hates Mellors--Connie, Sir Malcolm, and Mellors, they 
develop a plan. Mellors will lay low and pursue his divorce with Bertha. Connie will pretend that 
she is having an affair with Duncan Forbes, who will be named as the father of the child and the 
co-respondent in the divorce (if Mellors is named as father, his admission of adultery will 
complicate his own divorce). Clifford is more likely to accept Connie's having an affair with 
Duncan, a member of the leisured class, than with Mellors, a gamekeeper. Duncan agrees to pose 
as the father, despite Mellors' insulting his art by calling it soulless and self-indulgent. 
Connie sends Clifford a letter, telling him that she loves Duncan, and asking for a divorce. 
Clifford, despite having inwardly anticipated this, goes into shock. Mrs. Bolton comforts him 
and tends to hi; more than ever, he becomes like a child in her arms. They enter into a perverse 
relationship, both sexual and parental. She cares for him, and even loves him, but also despises 
him for his weakness. Clifford refuses to divorce Connie, demanding that she come to Wragby. 
She does come, and in a confrontation is forced to admit that her paramour is not Duncan but 
Mellors. Clifford is outraged, and, furious, accuses her of depravity; he continues to refuse to 
divorce her. She leaves Wragby, and goes with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors, meanwhile, works on 
a farm, making money and waiting out the six-month divorce proceedings.
The novel ends with a letter sent from Mellors to Connie, summing up the message of the novel 
about the social blight upon England. The masses of men are emasculated, poor, hopeless, 
devoted only to getting and spending money. Without a radical change, the future is bleak. Only 
with a mass transformation, a realization of the power of sensuality, will people restore humanity 
and joy to their lives. Mellors comforts himself with thoughts of Connie, and the passion that 
exists between them: "we fucked a flame into being." 
Commentary 
This is not a novel that ends with an epiphany, nor a climactic scene of action and emotion. 
Rather, it fades away. Instead of a revelation, there is a careful summary of the novel's central 
ideological messages; instead of tragedy or triumph, there is a certain measured circumspection, 
a tenuous promise of hope in a vague future. The English author Lawrence Durrell held this 
anticlimactic ending against the novel: "The book falls away rather sadly at the end. It had all the 
ingredients for a big tragedy, but it ends on a whimper." 
Perhaps, however, the ending of Lady Chatterley's Lover should be evaluated remembering that 
the novel is as much an ideological tract as a work of living fiction. One way of reading Lady 
Chatterley's Lover is to view the narrative as the means rather than the end of the novel. This 
approach to the novel implies that in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the plot and the dialogue serve the 
purpose of conveying more effectively the novel's ideology, its set of social messages. Only 
secondarily do the characters assume depth and fictional reality; their primary function is to 
enact scenes that dramatize the novel's agenda. Thus it could be argued that Mellors is less a 
three-dimensional character in his own right than an embodiment of D.H. Lawrence's principles 
of sensuality and irreverence. 
Lawrence Durrell faults Lady Chatterley's Lover for avoiding the "big tragedy" that might have 
brought a satisfying and dramatic ending to the narrative. But this sort of ending would not have 
been in keeping with the social purpose of the novel. Throughout, Lady Chatterley's Lover--most 
explicitly through the character of Mellors, in his role as the author's spokesman--expresses a 
deep pessimism about the future of English society. Mellors is reluctant to bring children into the 
world, which he feels is bound for disaster. In the postwar world of Lady Chatterley's Lover,
tradition has been discarded, men have been emasculated and dehumanized by industry and 
greed, and women have forgotten sensuality. 
There may be little room for optimism, but Connie convinces Mellors that there is room for 
hope. And the novel ends with Mellors writing Connie a letter that balances its condemnation of 
English society with a proposal for a massive societal transformation, and that ends both 
"droopingly" and "with a hopeful heart." Mellors awaits his divorce, while Connie is left in 
limbo, awaiting Clifford's consent for a divorce. A child will be born, but it remains to be seen 
whether Mellors and Connie will be able to live together and raise the child under the protection 
of their love, or whether circumstances will come between them. Thus the future of the 
protagonists is uncertain, just as the future of the English society portrayed in Lady Chatterley's 
Lover remains uncertain. A great tragedy, or a happy reunion, would run counter to the 
perspective of the novel on the broader future of society.
CHAPTER III 
INTRINSIC ELEMENTS 
1. Theme : 
a. The body : 
D.H. Lawrence, for all that he's a pretty brainy guy, wants you to be 
uncomfortably aware of your breathing. Lady Chatterley's Lover hates the life of 
the mind—for almost everyone. It says the majority of people would be a lot 
happier if they danced and had a lot more sex than they currently do. Of course, 
he's not talking about heading down to Ft. Lauderdale for a drunken, overly 
tanned orgy. Bodies are serious stuff, and he wants you to respect yours as much 
as any Promise Keeper. 
b. Men and masculinity 
If so, D.H. Lawrence would very much like you to put down your Xbox controller 
and go do something manly, like build a fire, convince some chickens to sit on 
pheasant eggs, or milk a cow. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, these are acceptable 
manly activities. Unacceptable activities include writing, reading, prematurely 
ejaculating, and knowing anything about machines. Tough luck for all you auto 
mechanics out there, because you're actually responsible for everything that's 
wrong with the world, from World War I to women not being properly feminine. 
If you have a problem with any of that, then you've obviously been corrupted by 
greed for money and need—in Lawrence's words—to grow a pair.
c. Women and Femininity 
If you think that Lawrence is being a little hard on men in Lady Chatterley's 
Lover, wait until you hear what he has to say about women. When they're not 
being promiscuous, they're being frigid; they have the wrong kind of orgasm 
(thanks, Freud); and, worst of all, they don't get dinner on time. Are you turned on 
yet? To be fair—kind of—Lawrence lays most of the blame on men. If men were 
men, he (via Mellors) says, women would be women. But he sure does spend a lot 
of time talking about how awful women are along the way. Really, the only 
creatures that seem to be faithfully fulfilling their feminine role are Mellors's 
chickens—and you get the sense he'd like a harem of human women, too. 
d. Sex 
Finally, the dirty bits. And they're pretty dirty. But as tempting as it is to giggle 
about the insane way that Lawrence describes sex in Lady Chatterley's Lover, we 
should also look at the way he uses it to express his philosophical ideas. This isn't 
50 Shades of Grey: there's a lot more philosophy and a lot less spanking. Sex is a 
way—the way—for two people to connect. It fights back against the uncaring 
harshness of the modern world, and it restores some little bit of beauty and 
realness to life. Good sex gives you more than just bragging rights. It gives you 
wholeness. 
e. Love 
Love comes after sex. This is one of the things that's most radical and shocking about 
Lady Chatterley's Lover. There's no "First comes love, then comes marriage, then 
comes Connie pushing a baby carriage. And with that, Lawrence flies in the face of 
hundreds of years of tradition. He insists that you can't have love without sex, and 
you're fooling yourself if you think there's any such thing as a sexless marriage. Love
is the way that sex expresses itself, and not the other way around. This is why 
Lawrence wouldn't want you heading out to have a bunch of meaningless sex— 
because meaningless sex is mechanical, and being mechanical is the worst thing you 
can do to your body. 
f. Society and Class 
Now we get to the nasty stuff. Lawrence is—there's no way to say this nicely—a 
prick. He hates the aristocracy and the intellectuals, but he hates the working classes 
even more. Sure, Mellors is from a coal-mining background, but he rises above his 
circumstances. Connie and the narrator of Lady Chatterley's Lover both insist that 
he's really, awfully nice, not at all like those other coal miners. Clifford says a lot of 
mean things about the working classes, but Mellors is right there with him, 
condemning them as stupid, ugly, and frivolous. You get the sense that what 
Lawrence really wants is a feudal society with a noble overlord and happy, dumb 
peasants. Yeah, good luck with that. 
g. Isolation 
We hate to be the ones to tell you, but poking your girlfriend on Facebook (does 
anyone poke anymore?) isn't the same as actually hanging out with her. Connie 
discovers this to her dismay when she realizes that Clifford's company isn't actually a 
substitute for real human interaction. Everyone in Lady Chatterley's Lover is alone, 
some by accident (Connie) and some by choice (Mellors). The central couple is 
supposed to be a model of how to find human connection in an inhuman age—not 
through jazz dancing or Foursquare, but real, human sex. 
h. Wealth 
D.H. Lawrence hates a lot of things—men, women, machines, London, Wragby, 
literature, idiots, modernity—but he hates money most of all. Because, he implies in 
Lady Chatterley's Lover, money makes people do things that dehumanize them. The 
problem with money is that once you start using it, you start working to get it rather
than working to live. So instead of working at something that will directly help you 
survive, like farming, and then prancing around the rest of the time in red trousers 
(seriously), you work at a soul-crushing job to get money to spend at movie theaters 
and jazz clubs to convince yourself that you don't hate your life. Big words, D.H. 
i. Freedom and Confinement 
There's a lot of entrapment in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Connie is trapped in an 
unhappy marriage; poor Clifford is trapped in a wheelchair; and Hilda, Connie's 
sister, is trapped in a prison of convention. There are all kinds of traps—marriage, 
family, convention, money, fate—and the novel doesn't give us any real sense that 
it's possible to break out. Connie isn't free at the end of the novel, and neither is 
Mellors. Even divorce isn't necessarily a way out, as anyone with joint custody can 
tell you. We're all trapped together in a world that's basically a prison full of lunatics 
and weaklings. Awesome. 
j. Youth 
You know what's really wrong with the world today? Young people. Yeah, Lawrence 
doesn't think much of the kids these days. In that sense, he's swimming against the 
tide in Lady Chatterley's Lover. As a decade, the 1920s loved youth. Women cut 
their hair like little boys and bound their breasts so they could wear skimpy dresses; 
guys rejected bougie things like marriage and kids; everyone was really into fast cars 
and jazz; college boys were the height of cool. 
In other words, we can blame the 1920s for youth culture. Lawrence is not on board 
that train. In fact, he thinks that youth culture is everything that's wrong with the 
world: loud music, meaningless sex, and unfeminine women. We can think of a few 
fringe religious groups that would agree with him.
2. Plot : 
· Introduction : 
The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class 
husband, Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has 
beenparalysed from the waist down due to a war injury. In addition to Clifford's physical 
limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. 
Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The 
class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the 
unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's 
realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. 
This realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with 
Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind. 
· Conflict : 
Life at Wragby isn't much of a life. It's more of a half-life, or a non-life, or, well, as 
Lawrence puts it, "a life: in the void. For the rest it was non-existence" (2.35). The people 
of the Tevershall village don't like Connie; Clifford's friends patronize her; and Clifford 
himself sees her as a glorified nurse. Both Connie's dad and her sister Hilda worry about 
her, but they come up with different solutions: Hilda takes her to London to perk her up, 
while her dad thinks she should take a lover. Mostly, she spends a lot of time looking at 
flowers and thinking about how much her life stinks. 
· Crisis : 
Eventually Connie follows her dad's advice and picks up a boyfriend, the Irish playwright 
Michaelis. Like most new relationships, it's great for a while: lots of sex, no strings 
attached. And then it ends in flames, when Connie rejects Michaelis's marriage proposal. 
He mutters some nasty stuff about frigid women, and Connie swears off men. 
· Climax :
And then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure 
deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and 
consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there 
crying unconscious inarticulate cries […] The man heard it beneath him with a kind of 
awe, as his life sprang out into her. (10.305) 
The climax of the book is, literally, a climax—and not just any climax, but a 
simultaneous one, which Mellors practically gloats about. We get it, Mellors: you're good 
in bed. Congratulations; have a cookie, and please wear a condom. 
Anyway, there's no going back now for Connie. She definitely can't return to Clifford, 
even if it means giving up Wragby and her title and being plain old "Mrs. Oliver 
Mellors." 
· Resolution : 
At the end of the novel, Mellors and Connie are living happily in a cottage in the north of 
England, with their adorable little baby. Except not. Connie is still trapped at Wragby and 
Mellors is stuck learning how to milk cows while they wait for Mellors's divorce. Happy 
endings are so last century. 
3. Character and Characteristic 
Clifford Chatterley (Protagonist) landowner, disabled WW1 veteran, and 
businessman 
Constance Chatterley(Tritagonist) his wife, an intellectual and social progressive 
Oliver Mellors (Tritagonist) ex-soldier, ex-blacksmith, intellectual, and the 
gamekeeper at Wragby Hall 
Mrs (Ivy) Bolton Clifford’s devoted housekeeper 
Michaelis successful Irish playwright 
Sir Macolm Reid Connie’s father, a painter 
Hilda Reid Connie’s sister
Tommy Dukes an intellectual friend of Clifford’s 
Duncan Forbes an artist friend of Connie and Hilda 
Bertha Coutts Mellor’s wife – who does no appear in the 
novel 
4. Setting 
 Place : 
Wragby 
Wragby is Clifford's estate. It's not much of an estate—the house isn't very 
impressive, and it's near an ugly mining village called Tevershall. Connie is used 
to London and the pretty, green hills of southern England, so she's horrified by the 
"utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands" (2.3). The Midlands were 
the heart of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, sort of England's Silicon 
Valley without all the good design and organic strawberries. 
In the 19th century, the Midlands produced factories, coal, and misery in 
astonishing quantities—and later, a lot of really good rock bands. Connie doesn't 
admire their industry the way Clifford does, though; all she sees are 
clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw 
straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and 
trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of 
wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp 
angles and wilful, blank dreariness. (2.1) 
In fact, the general effect is, well, hellish: "a sulphurous combustion of the earth's 
excrement" (2.3), which is a polite way of saying that the earth is pooping out 
coal.
Connie puts up with it for a while, but eventually it starts bringing her down. 
Wragby takes on a personality of its own: "The great, rambling mass of a place 
seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was 
its victim" (19.61). This is Poe-levelcraziness, but you can't blame her: the setting 
of Lady Chatterley's Lover really is a prison to her. 
It's not all ugly, though. Wragby is attached to a beautiful park, with really lovely 
woods. Lawrence waxes rhapsodic about them. Here are a few typical examples: 
1) "In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks 
beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose 
in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky" (5.4) 
2) "The hazel thicket was a lace-work, of half-open leaves, and the last dusty 
perpendicular of the catkins" (12.1) 
3) "It was a lovely morning, the pear-blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in 
the world in a wonder of white here and there" (12.3). 
 Time : 
The 1920s 
As important as the geographical setting is the temporal setting—not just where it's 
set, but when. Lawrence spends a lot of time bemoaning the loss of the good old 
England; not just the pre-industrial England of the 18th century, the "tattered 
remnants of the old coaching and cottage England" but "even the England of Robin 
Hood" (11.92). It's the woods where that Old England remains—"the great forest 
where Robin Hood hunted" (5.5). 
Nostalgia like this drives home Lawrence's disgust for the modern world. This isn't 
just some cranky ranting about Facebook and iPhones; Lawrence really feels that the 
world is going to hell. We get lots and lots of passages about the new world replacing 
the old. Here's another typical one:
Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are going. 
Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie passed in the 
car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war the Weatherleys had lived 
in style there. But now it was too big, too expensive, and the country had become too 
uncongenial … This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made 
the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out 
the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One 
meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. (11.94-95) 
This is also how you know that Lawrence isn't a progressive. He doesn't want things 
to change, and anything new isautomatically bad. Just to be clear, we're not talking 
about turning the clock back a few years, like putting on a neon shirt and calling it 
retro. He wants to go way back to some kind of hazy feudal past, when the overlords 
were overlords and peasants were peasants. 
One thing is certain: Wragby in the 1920s is about the last place on earth that any 
sane person would want to be. 
5. Point of View 
Third Person Omniscient 
Skillful authors can utilize the point of view of their story to focus their readers’ 
attention on the exact detail, opinion, or emotion the author wants to emphasize. In Lady 
Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence uses the third person omniscient to convey his 
detailed theme of human needs. Through his God-like narration, Lawrence entices his 
reader to understand and empathize with his main character, Constance Chatterley. 
6. Imagery 
While all novels may open with a fair amount of description, some stories are so 
rich in depiction that the reader can see, hear, and feel the motion of the words. From the 
very beginning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, readers may find themselves struck with how
rhythmical the words are. From the cadence, to the beautiful descriptions, D.H. Lawrence 
comes across as truly skilled in regards to language. One aspect that stands out 
immediately is his use of imagery. Lawrence’s ability to appeal to the senses and create 
such a dynamic and clear picture of the story allows the reader to get completely lost in 
the world of Wragby. 
7. Symbolism 
· Chickens 
Lady Chatterley and Mellors bond over the chickens that Mellors has set nesting on some 
pheasant eggs in a clearing in the woods. And Connie identifies with these chickens so 
strongly that they become a symbol of her own captivity. Like her, they have a "soft 
nestling ponderosity" and a "female urge" (10.37); like her, they lose themselves in 
fulfilling their female role: "There's no self in a sitting hen" (12.111). When Connie first 
sees the chickens, her heart breaks because "she herself was so forlorn and unused, not a 
female at all" (10.36). 
Of course what she really wants is Mellors's hands all over her. He handles the pheasant 
chicks with "sure gentle fingers" (10.52) that calm the chickens down. These chickens, 
and Mellors's control over them, seem to symbolize the potential animal/female nature 
that the modern world has suppressed in Connie. They're a symbol of what she could be 
—lost in nurture rather than lost in her head. 
· The Wheelchair 
Clifford is lucky enough to have a motorized chair, except that it doesn't handle being 
outside too well. It's great for rolling Wragby or even touring the paths, but as soon as he 
takes it off road, it gets stuck. No four-wheel drive on this baby.
It's not just that the natural world wreaks havoc on Clifford's chair; the chair destroys the 
flowers. It's like mutually assured destruction, as Connie watches the chair "squash the 
little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny" and then make "a wake through the forget-me-nots" 
(13.77). 
Lawrence gets pretty explicit as the chair heads off down a hyacinth-covered hill: 
"O last of all ships, through the hyacinthian shallows! O pinnace on the last wild waters, 
sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Whither, O weird wheeled ship, your slow 
course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old 
black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious." (13.87) 
The contrast between Lawrence's prophetic, poetic prose and the composed, stuffy 
Clifford is funny, but it also points out how pathetic he is—not even able to steer his own 
ship. In this passage, thewheelchair seems to become a metaphor for civilization itself, 
plowing through the hyacinths totally oblivious to the beauty being crushed under its 
wheels. Al Gore would be proud. 
· Natural Imagery 
References to the natural world are sprinkled all through Lady Chatterley's Lover, from 
the long, effusive passages about the beauty of the woods to little side comments, like 
Mrs. Bolton's thought that doctors could "sort of graft seed" to make Connie pregnant 
(11.10)—grafting being a gardening technique where you stick one plant onto another. 
Or take Clifford's anger that Connie wants to hire a nurse, which he says kills "the real 
flower of the intimacy between him and her," although Connie thinks of that flower "like 
an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life" (7.130). Flower, trees, rabbits, 
pheasants:Lady Chatterley's Lover is overrun with flora and fauna. 
So what's all this natural imagery doing? Well, for one thing, it offers a nice contrast to 
Lawrence's opinions about the soulless mechanical world. Underneath the misery of 
Wragby, there's a whole bounty of nature waiting to spring to life.
And take the references to paganism that Lawrence drops. When Mellors comes in from 
the rainstorm with an armful of flowers, Connie looks at him "as if he were not quite 
human" (15.144)—as if, maybe, he's an incarnation of Pan. Pan? 
In Greek mythology, Pan is the god of the wild. He's associated with all sorts of other 
mythologies, like the Horned God of Celtic tradition. Mellors actually refers to him 
explicitly, saying that peasants "should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great 
god Pan. He's the only god for the masses, forever" (19.165). 
In other words, the common people should be worshipping pagan gods with, like, orgies 
and bonfires and piles of flowers rather than sitting in dark, depressing churches. All the 
flowers and tiny forest creatures are pointing the way back to a (probably mythic) past 
when people lived in harmony with the gods of nature. 
It does sound nice, but still—we'll take the indoor plumbing. 
· The Garden of Eden Allegory 
We already know that Lawrence has a thing for the natural world (check out "Natural 
Imagery"), and here's another possible reason: the Wragby woods are a big fat allegory 
for the Garden of Eden. 
8. Moral Value 
 No matter what happens we should be faithful 
 Don’t take your desire first and make you ignore the other important things. 
 It’s good to stand our right but we should do that in the good way. 
 We should be patient no matter what happens. 
9. Genre
Romance 
"Romance" seems like an obvious genre choice for Lady Chatterley's Love. Connie and 
Oliver are almost nauseatingly in love, although sometimes that love is very poetically 
expressed: "But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That's what I 
abide by, and will abide by" (19.167). This "little forked flame" of love—but also of sex 
—is at the heart (so to speak) of the novel.

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Presentasi prose and poetry 1

  • 1. PROSE AND POETRY IT IS SUBMITTED TO FULFILL PSIKOPEND DAN BIMPESDIK ASSIGNMENTS Lecturer: Eri Rahmawati, S.S, M.A. Submitted by : Maratus Solihah : 2223120743 Syifa Khairunnisa : 2223120163 Nurul Hidayah Santika : 2223120196 Aprilia Purwanti : 2223120330 Rosid Ikbal Setiadi : 2223120613 Desvina Eka W : 2223120611 Mega Widyaningsih : 2223120111 Novy Yuliyanti : 2223120520 Ulfathul Mardiah : 2223120105 4A ENGLISH DEPARTMENT TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION FACULTY
  • 2. SULTAN AGENG TIRTAYASA UNIVERSITY 2014 INTRODUCTION Bismillahirrohmanirrohim Assalamualaikum wr. Wb Praise be to Allah God Almighty has given us the opportunity to be able to complete the task groups of subjects is Prose and Poetry . Salawat be glorified together with regards to major prophet Muhammad. He cover prophets and messengers , also of mercy for the faithful followers hold teachings .this paper we make with confidence and all our efforts to understand and also understand about the materials related to the paper that we made . For resolution of this matter with the realization that I am the author would like to thank the thousands of friends groups that have been working on this material are compact and work hard . Especially in our lecturers who have given us direction and also the material so that we can finish this paper in a timely manner . But we also understand that there is no perfect world it . Then we would expect an improvement and constructive criticism so that we can do better in the preparation of the next paper . With this we thank you for your attention on our paper if there is a shortage that is our self. Because the real truth belongs only to Allah SWT . End of the word. Wassalamu`alaikum wr. Wb
  • 3. Cilegon, 2 Juni 2014 Kelompok 2 CHAPTER I Background Basically , we as a student majoring in education and literature English language understand that we will not only explore the science teacher but also science literature . therefore we begin to understand the need for reviewing the contents of a novel , short story , or a variety of papers which of course requires the art of writing and literature in order to analyze secars correct and on target . because the literature does not have the same meaning for some people . therefore , we are here trying to find a common view of the novel . novels we studied may be many who find controversial opinion because the theme is presented is a more mature romance theme is not worth reading for minors especially for eastern nations such as Indonesia . but here we are trying to assess from the literature that explores the submission of the author's thoughts and expertly embodied in a paper which eventually can be enjoyed by the general public . for that we present assessment of this book and the literary scientific as possible in order to achieve our goal of literary analysis for this book from the controversial novel after this . Problem Formulation What are the intrinsic elements that exist in this novel ??? Purpose The purpose of writing this paper we present are : • In order for students to know the intrinsic elements in the novel • In order for students to understand a novel of literary elements • In order for students to know the relevance of the concept of writing and intrinsic element of a novel
  • 4. CHAPTER II SUMMARY  Section IV: Chapter 10 Summary Wragby is virtually abandoned now. Clifford has withdrawn into his mining plans, listening to the radio, and talking with Mrs. Bolton. He maintains a sort of fearful worship of Connie, who increasingly despises him. With springtime, and the resurrection of the forest, Connie's misery seems all the harsher. She goes more and more to the hut in the woods where Mellors, the gamekeeper, is breeding pheasants to hunt. One day, in a spasm of hopeless tenderness for the young chicks, she has a breakdown at the hut. Mellors is there to comfort her; as he does so, his physical desire for her grows. She is mute and unresisting as he takes her into the hut and sleeps with her, but she stays separate from him in her mind, receiving no pleasure from the sex. They leave each other, and Mellors--now torn from his solitude--muses about the importance of desire and tenderness, and the evils of the mechanized industrial world. For her part, Connie is confused: she knows that she does not love Mellors, but is happy that he has been kind not to her personality--to her mind and intellect, which she is coming to believe are meaningless--but to "the female in her." The next day, they meet once again at the hut. Reverting to his Derbyshire dialect, he asks her whether she is not worried that people will find out about her affair with a commoner, but she throws caution to the wind; they have sex again. Mellors deeply and sensually appreciates her body, but again she remains distant; during sex, she notices only how ridiculous his thrusting buttocks look.
  • 5. For several days after, Connie does not go to meet Mellors in the cabin. Instead, one afternoon she takes tea with a friend of hers, Mrs. Flint, who has a newborn baby. Leaving tea, she runs into Mellors in the woods. Although she says she does not want to have sex, he lays her down on the forest floor, and she complies. This time, she has an orgasm simultaneous with his second orgasm, and the impact on her is profound. She feels that her body has awakened to him, that she adores him with all of her physical being. She spends that night in the company of Clifford, but the bond between them has been irrevocably broken. She is in a dreamworld, truly conscious only of the warmth inside of her. Clifford, on the other hand, is empty inside, beginning now to resent the distance between them. That night, Mellors cannot sleep; he replays his life in his mind. On a late-night walk through the woods, he recalls his years as a soldier in India, and his unhappy marriage to Bertha Coutts. He reflects on the difficulty of his position: entanglement with Connie will be emotionally taxing, and will create any number of logistical difficulties. Where will they go? How will they live? He reflects also on his own loneliness, and realizes that loneliness is fundamental to the human condition. Standing outside Wragby in the darkness, thinking of Connie, he is seen by Mrs. Bolton, who--having guessed earlier by Connie's actions that she was having an affair--realizes that Mellors must be the man. Commentary This is the--no pun intended--climactic chapter in Lady Chatterley's Lover. It is here that Connie's sexual awakening begins, catalyzed by her powerful and revelatory orgasm on the forest floor. It is worth spending some time discussing the nature of her revelation, and the way in which this becomes the basis of the relationship between her and Mellors. What should be noted first is that the novel's approach to the significance of sex and sexual relationships is quite vague. At times, it is almost opaque. This owes something to Lawrence's difficulty or reticence in clearly describing sexual scenes. In its time, Lady Chatterley's Lover was considered radically graphic; the difficulty with Lawrence's depiction of sex scenes is not quite a failure of graphic description, but rather a tendency towards the obscure and mystical.
  • 6. Thus, during the first sex scene between Mellors and Connie, Lawrence refers to Mellors entering "the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body." In a novel that appears to flaunt its bold contempt for euphemisms, this is a strange euphemism, to say the least. The reader will also recall Lawrence's contortions when trying to describe Connie's naked body at the beginning of chapter seven; I, at least, have no idea what "glimpsey" thighs or "meaningful" breasts look like. What seems evident is that Lawrence believes some mystical power to reshuide in the human body, and in the sex act, which cannot precisely be described. There is no real distinction, for the reader, between the three sex scenes depicted in this chapter, and yet the third scene, on the forest floor, proves orgasmic and profoundly meaningful. Lawrence gives the reader very little idea why this might be. It is simply taken for granted: Mellors brings Connie to orgasm simultaneous with his orgasm, and what results is the deepest of human connections. She begins to adore Mellors. Her increased passion even seems to guarantee her pregnancy: the physical stimulus of orgasm triggers a reaction of such psychological importance that it, in turns, stimulates her physically to pregnancy. "It feels like a child in me," Connie thinks. Surely, this is not a scientific but a mystical--a pseudo-pagan, even--explanation for her pregnancy. Lawrence's mysticism makes it difficult for the reader to trace the evolution of love in Connie and Mellors; it is difficult to identify with them or understand their emotions, because their response is sensual, with sensory stimuli triggering deep emotion. In this sense, this is a very difficult chapter for the reader. Lady Chatterley's Lover refuses to act like a typical novel, familiarizing the reader with its protagonists. I have observed that in many ways Lady Chatterley's Lover is a conservative novel. What information one can glean from the sex scenes between Mellors and Connie seems to support this assertion. The reader will notice that Connie is purely passive in all three of these sex scenes. It is in the third scene--the one where she successfully reaches orgasm with Mellors--that her passivity, even docility, is most explicit. She does not want to have sex with Mellors, but she yields to the force of his passion: "She was giving way. She was giving up." It is only through utterly surrendering herself to Mellors that she arrives at her sexual awakening. The reader will remember that the great sin of Mellors' wife, Bertha Coutts, is that she was sexually aggressive. Lawrence seems to exalt female passivity; women in his system become merely receptors. It is
  • 7. through passivity, through yielding to the male urge, he indicates, that women can be fulfilled. The reader will remember that on the night before Connie leaves for Venice (in chapter 16), when she is transported by sensual pleasure, she needs first to subject herself: "she had to be a passive, consenting thing, like. . .a physical slave." The contemporary reader may find this troubling; I certainly do. What must be said, I think, is that, however radical are Lawrence's graphic depictions of sex, his approach to the sex-act itself, and the roles of the sexes within it, is hardly progressive.
  • 8.  Section V: Chapters 11 & 12 Summary While sorting through a storage room with Mrs. Bolton, Connie finds the Chatterley's family cradle, and tells Mrs. Bolton that she is thinking of having a child. Mrs. Bolton is surprised, as Clifford Chatterley is impotent because of his paralysis. Still, she spreads the rumor throughout the village. Even Squire Winter hears the rumor. Clifford himself begins to speak of technological advances that will enable him to impregnate Connie. Connie, of course, has no intention of having a child with Clifford. She will soon travel to Venice to spend a month, and she plans to give birth to Mellors' child and tell Clifford--who has permitted her to have a child by another man--that she had an affair with a nobleman in Venice. Connie travels to the coal-mining village of Uthwaite, and is deeply disturbed by what she sees: a landscape corrupted by the mines, men twisted and dehumanized by the work. The new industrial England is eclipsing the old England of countryside and manor-houses. All seems grim, gritty, hopeless. On her return, she has a conversation with Mrs. Bolton about the nurse's dead husband, killed in a mining accident. Mrs. Bolton reveals her bitterness towards the mining bosses and owners whom she holds responsible for her husband's death, and she speaks movingly of the memory of her husband's touch, the way that his physical love has stayed with her for the years since his death. Connie goes to visit Mellors at his house. He seems uncomfortable to have her visit him there, reminded of the class-difference between them. As usual, he speaks to her curtly, and drops quickly into a bad mood. She tells him that she would like to bear his child, and he acts as if she had been using him for her needs. He will not touch her in the house. Instead he insists that they first go to the cabin, where they have sex. As in the beginning of their relationship, she keeps him at an emotional distance. She is a little bit afraid of sensual abandon, and she sees them as if from above, as if she were separate from the ridiculous act of lovemaking. She begins to sob,
  • 9. lamenting, "I can't love you." Yet when he gets up to go, she finds herself clinging to him, and in her need for him she receives him again. They once again have sex, and this time she comes to orgasm. The sex that from an emotional distance seemed ridiculous now seems warm and wonderful. Afterwards, she asks if he loves her, and he says that he loves her in that she opens herself to him. This satisfies her. Playfully, they speak to each other in his Derbyshire dialect, which she cannot quite master. Commentary In describing Connie's trip to Uthwaite, Lawrence issues one of the strongest indictments of the English industrial economy since Dickens. It is a portrait of a village filled with "half-corpses," whose "living intuitive faculty was dead." This section is one of the few places in the novel where Lawrence's emotion so overpowers him that he directly addresses the reader, and in which his explicit political stance comes out: "England my England! but which is my England?" Lawrence--for here there is no separation, one senses, between Lawrence himself and the narrator of the novel, and one might argue that this is one of the novel's failings--bemoans the transformation of old England, with its cottages and its stately manors, into the new England, choked by soot. This hatred for the mining economy should not, however, be mistaken for a particular concern for the plight of the working man; Lawrence was not Dickens. Lady Chatterley's Lover certainly detests the coal mines, but it has curiously little sympathy for the men whose lives are degraded by working in the mines. (Just as, incidentally, it seems to have little sympathy for Clifford, a war-hero who was paralyzed in combat; human sympathy for victims is unusual here.) These men have been dehumanized, and as such Lawrence extends to them very little human sympathy. Critics of Lawrence's work have often noticed a kind of self-hatred in Lawrence's unsympathetic approach to the coal miners. There is a certain poignant force to Connie's horror at the coal-miners, as she imagines bearing a coal-miner's child: "Children from such men! Oh God, oh God!" Lawrence himself, of course, was the child of a coal-miner. In an introduction to the novel, the American poet Archibald MacLeish points that, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, "One is never left in doubt as to what Lawrence is against in the modern,
  • 10. industrialized world, but it is less clear what he is advocating in its stead." Lawrence is no socialist, spending time in this novel mocking socialism. Indeed, he lays the blame for the coal-miners' dehumanization squarely on their own shoulders. And yet he seems to propose no alternative social ordering. What he evidences is a profound nostalgia for England's past, without real concern for the past's social and political imperfections. When Connie goes to Uthwaite, the reader will notice that one of the novel's chief complaints is the destruction of the old, aristocratic manor houses. The new King, Lawrence comments bitterly--for this is no longer the voice of Connie or of the narrator--occupies himself chiefly with opening soup-kitchens, not with preserving England's past. Lady Chatterley's Lover seems to advocate a return to an English heyday with a King concerned for the health of the aristocracy rather than the feeding of the poor, a heyday in which the aristocracy--with its lovely manors and perfect manners--reigned supreme. Lady Chatterley's Lover does, it should be noted, make some provision for the health and sustenance of the coal-miners, who would be jobless in a return to pre-industrial England. This provision comes in the form of a plan by Mellors to restore the humanity and the dignity of the coal-miners, given in chapter 15. If Mellors had his way, he says, he would tell the coal-miners to stop working so hard: "no need to work that much." He would dress them in red pants and white jackets. Within a month, women--inflamed, presumably, by these outfits--would begin to act like women, and men would be real men. They could pull down the mining village and erect a "few beautiful buildings" to house everybody. What is remarkable about this plan is that Mellors seems quite passionate about it; Connie takes it seriously; and it is actually repeated in Mellors' letter to Connie which comprises the final pages of the novel. It is, indeed, one of the thoughts on which the novel ends. It may be understood, it seems, as a proposal that this novel takes seriously as an ideal vision for the future of the working classes. The reader must determine whether the serious proposal of this plan is a failing or strength in this novel; it should be evident, however, that this the novel is one which draws its power as a social critique not from its vision of a better future, but rather from its condemnation of a corrupted present. Still, the reader should not confuse baby with bathwater; at heart--however impractical and even ridiculous the specific plan might be--this novel and Lawrence believe that the social order will be improved when people learn to trust and appreciate their bodies and their sensual urges.
  • 11.  Section VI: Chapters 13 & 14 Summary One Sunday morning, Clifford and Connie go into the woods, which are beautiful in early summer. They discuss the plight of the coal-miners, with Connie complaining about the hideousness and hopelessness of the miners' lives, and Clifford taking the position that he, as a capitalist, is doing his responsibility to provide work for the common people. Clifford theorizes that it is environment that makes people noble or common, that unstoppable and systematic forces are what shape aristocrats and workers; "the individual hardly matters." Clifford's motorized wheelchair becomes stuck on a sharp incline, and he calls Mellors to come fix it. There is a tense scene in which Clifford insists on getting the chair up the incline on its own power, while Mellors and Connie realize that only pushing will get it up. Connie inwardly scoffs at the powerlessness of Clifford, the man who so recently bragged about the strength and responsibility of the aristocracy. The chair slips, and Mellors--already weakened by pneumonia-- lunges to catch it, in the process exhausting himself. Connie is furious at Clifford for his stubbornness, which she holds responsible for the situation. That night, Connie slips out of the house and meets Mellors; they have planned for her to spend the night at his cottage. She sees that he still has a picture of his wife, Bertha Coutts, and convinces him to burn it and to initiate divorce proceedings. He explains why he married Bertha, in the process telling her about his sexual and emotional history, and initiating their first real conversation. He began his professional career as a clerk, and during his clerkship he had two lovers before Bertha, both women who loved him deeply but who were uninterested in sex. He felt that they were robbing him of his masculinity (they had "nearly taken all the balls out of me"). Taking a more manly job as a blacksmith, he married Bertha because he saw a deep sensuality in her. As it turns out, he was right: they had deep sexual desire for each other. But she began to assert herself too aggressively, holding out when he wanted sex, refusing to have
  • 12. orgasms with him, seizing sexual control. They began to sleep separately, and to hate each other. He went off to the army in India, and she moved in with another man. After recounting his history of sexual woes, Mellors begins a heated discussion of the purpose of sex, and the nature of sexual satisfaction. He explains his personal credo--"I believe in being warm-hearted. . .in fucking with a warm heart"--and talks about how a proper relationship with a woman involves mutual and simultaneous orgasm. Connie senses a deep despair in him, a belief that true passion and tenderness are dying, that "there's black days coming for us all and for everybody." They begin to quarrel, accusing each other of excessive self-involvement; he accuses her of an inability to open herself tenderly to him. But they resolve their quarrel in a moment of longing and tenderness, after which they have sex on the rug. They fall asleep, and when they wake up in the morning they once again make love. For the first time, she appreciates his penis closely: "so proud! And so lordly!" He begins their tradition of referring to their sex organs as separate from them, John Thomas and Lady Jane. She asks if he really loves her, and he responds as he did earlier in the novel: he loves her "womanness." Commentary In his long discourse on his sexual history and his theory of sexuality, Mellors reveals himself for the first time to the reader. For the first time, the reader has an extended look into Mellors' head, and develops a picture of his past and his personality. It should hardly be taken for granted, I think, that it is an attractive personality. Mellors is a complex character, and the question of whether he is sympathetic is debatable. The English author Lawrence Durrell, writing about Lady Chatterley's Lover, complains, "I find that Lawrence has failed to secure the reader's sympathy for this strange, self-satisfied little boor, so complacent about his 'flamy' body and hard-worked 'prick'. . .Mellors just sits around waiting to be fished out of holes by poor Connie. . .One pities the poor lady when one thinks of the future she promises herself with a man like this--listening to his half-baked twaddle about putting miners into pinafores in order to save their souls." Well, that's Lawrence Durrell's opinion. It need not be taken as absolute truth. It is hardly arguable, though, that Oliver Mellors is a difficult person: he picks fights (his treatment of Connie's sister Hilda is particularly brutal); he is disdainful and condescending, even to Connie; he pleases nobody unless it is in his own interest. Durrell seems right that he has a curious lack
  • 13. of initiative, needing Connie to tell him to divorce his wife and burn her picture. His use of Derbyshire dialect is almost impossibly irritating for both the reader and, at times, for Connie. It is in his approach to sex that Mellors can be most difficult to appreciate. Difficulty sympathizing with Mellors can amount to a difficult sympathizing with Connie, without which sympathy this novel fails. If Mellors is a braggart and a buffoon, or at least a jerk, it becomes hard to understand why Connie would risk everything to spend her life with him. And it makes the reader reevaluate Connie as protagonist. Mellors is frustrated because his first two lovers are not really interested in sex with him. He is frustrated by his wife, Bertha Coutts, because she is too sexually aggressive. The reader will note that the crime of which Mellors accuses Bertha--restraining her orgasm until after Mellors', and then using Mellors' penis to come to her own orgasm through her own exertions--is precisely what Connie does to Michaelis. And Michaelis loses the reader's sympathy for his resentment of this behavior. However open Mellors is in his broad sensuality, he seems to have an antagonistic approach to women in this section, especially in referring to Bertha's vagina as a "beak," and speaking of it tearing into him. He resents women who want to be the "active party." In a trope that has become familiar from puerile boys' locker-room talk, he complains that a huge number of women who don't satisfy him, or who are not satisfied by him, are really just lesbians. It may be difficult for the modern reader to sympathize with this man, who brags about the amount of sex that he has had and considers himself a victim because so few of his companions have had orgasms. It should be remembered that Mellors' ultimate goal, of course, is mutuality, love and tenderness through the bonding experience of simultaneous orgasm. And that what Mellors conveys, more than anything--and despite his failings as a sympathetic character--is an attitude towards sensuality and towards the body, an appreciation of the physical. He is perhaps hyperbolically oversexed; in this, he better serves his propagandistic or idealistic purpose. It might be argued that he is a kind of laboratory creation, an abstracted man with enough experience in sex to be licensed to evaluate human sexual failings. This does not absolve his failings as a character, but merely points out that Mellors is more than a character in a novel; he is an allegorical figure
  • 14. representing sensual, savage man. The relationship between Mellors as allegory and Mellors as personality is complex, and tortured  Section VII: Chapters 15 & 16 Summary Connie learns that she will be leaving for Venice soon; Clifford makes her promise that she will come back to him, but she is secretly planning her final escape. She meets with Mellors in the cabin during a rainstorm, and they discuss running away to the British colonies. He also tells her about his time in the army, and about the colonel who became his surrogate father. He explains his theory of social decline: English society is faltering because technology and industry have emasculated English men. Eventually, men will be drawn in their despair to wipe each other out. It would be a shame, he says, to bring a child into this world. Connie--planning to bear his child--begs him for a sign of hope, and he talks about the way society can be repaired. The working classes will have to stop subjugating themselves to the industrial machine, and recover the life of the body. Machines will have to be destroyed, and manhood restored. Connie suddenly leaves the cabin, and runs outside. He joins her, and they dance naked in the rain, and have sex on the ground. They go back into the hut and warm themselves before the fire. Running his hand over her "secret places," he tells her she has a beautiful body, that he adores her in all of her base physicality. They discuss the future, planning to run away together and have a child; they will both pursue divorces. They agree that she will spend the night before she leaves for Venice with him in his cottage. They fall into a lover's game, intertwining flowers in each-others' pubic hair, playfully referring to the wedding of their genitals, Lady Jane marrying John Thomas. It is late, and raining. On her way home, Connie runs into Mrs. Bolton, who has been sent to look for her. They return to Wragby, where Clifford scolds Connie for impetuously running around
  • 15. outside in the rain. That night, Clifford reads to her from a book that predicts the spiritual rise of man, and his physical decline. But Connie has been converted to the worship of the sensual and physical. She decries the spiritual life, the life of the mind, and valorizes instead the human body, predicting a future blessed by the realization of the body's preeminence. Clifford is taken aback. After a conversation with Mrs. Bolton--who sometimes serves as her expert on male psychology--Connie realizes that Mellors was probably depressed in the hut because he was angry with her for going to Venice. Hilda arrives to pick up Connie for the trip. Connie explains her plan: they will leave Wragby, acting as if they are departing for Venice, but Connie will spend the night at Mellors' house. The next day Hilda will pick her up and they will make good their departure. Hilda is appalled to learn that Connie is having an affair with a common gamekeeper; nevertheless, she agrees to abet Connie in her subterfuge. That night, Hilda drops Connie off at Mellors' cottage, and Mellors and Hilda confront each other. She treats him with contempt and condescension; he responds by reverting to his Derbyshire dialect--asserting himself as a common, earthy man--and accusing her of sexual frigidity. They do not get along. Connie spends a night of pure sensual passion with Mellors, in which she reaches new heights of sexual pleasure through passivity before his masculine will, learning in the process to discard shame and convention. In the morning she leaves for Venice. Commentary In his essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence explained at length the mentality he was trying to combat with his frank sexuality and worship of the body. "The mind," he writes, "has an old groveling fear of the body and the body's potencies." He observes that even the likes of the great poet and satirist Jonathan Swift seemed afflicted by a terror of the body: "The insanity of a great mind like Swift's is at least partly traceable to this cause. In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain, "But--Celia, Celia, Celia s---s" (the word rhymes with spits), we see what can happen to a great mind when it falls into panic." According to Lawrence, even a great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made himself. "Of course Celia s---s! Who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't. And then think of poor Celia, made to feel iniquitous about her proper natural function, by her "lover." It is monstrous." Lawrence
  • 16. was appalled at the idea of people feeling shame about their bodies. Shame, for Lawrence, was simply a manifestation of fear. Chapters 15 and 16 in Lady Chatterley's Lover are, to a great extent, the chronicle of Connie's loss of shame, which disappears during her passionate night with Mellors before her departure for Venice. And these chapters contain what almost seems a direct response to Swift's unhappiness at acknowledging physicality in his lover: "An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad," says Mellors. It is during that night between Connie and Mellors that the reader gets the clearest picture of their relationship. Throughout their affair, Connie has asked him whether or not he loves her. He always responds with a qualified answer: he loves that he can touch her; he loves sex with her; her loves her for her physicality. And here it is confirmed with crystal clarity: "It was not really love. . .It was sensuality." Love, it seems, requires the interaction of minds. Connie and Mellors rarely speak, and when they do it is rarely real, intimate conversation; either Mellors fulminates, losing his individuality in acting as a spokesperson for Lawrence, or they engage in a kind of meaningless love-prattle. Their attraction instead grows out of sex and sensuality, an attraction more bestial than personal; she is a "bitch," he is a "wild animal." The entire point of the relationship between Connie and Mellors is that it is shaped not around their personalities, but around a kind of wild, depersonalized, primordial sex-force. It is telling that, as Connie reveals to Hilda, the paramours never refer to each other by name: they only call each other John Thomas and Lady Jane, pet-names for genitalia. Indeed, Lawrence called the penultimate draft of this novel "John Thomas and Lady Jane." And in Mellors' letter to Connie with which the novel ends, the final sentence is a salutation not from one person in love with another, but from John Thomas to Lady Jane. In the language of the book, he has become a "phallus," she a "cunt": and this is--for this novel--the highest, and the purest, human aspiration.
  • 17. Section VIII: Chapters 17-19 Summary Connie travels to Venice by way of London, Paris, and the overland route through the Alps. She finds herself awakened to sensuality in peoples' bodies, noticing how few people have truly alert bodies, and how few places have any appreciation of sensuality. She longs to be back in Wragby, away from the cloud of tourists bent single-mindedly on enjoying themselves. In Venice, she and Hilda join her father, Sir Malcolm and several others, including Duncan Forbes, as guests in the home of a rich Scotsman, Sir Alexander. Connie has a pleasant but not fabulous time in Venice, bathing with Hilda on remote beaches across the lagoon, ferried by the gondoliers Daniele and Giovanni. Soon, however, she gets letters from Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, telling her that Bertha Coutts, Mellors' wife, has come back to him. He expelled her from the house, but she broke in again, and he has gone to live with his mother, abandoning the house to Bertha. Bertha apparently found perfume in the house, and the postman also recalls hearing a woman with Mellors one morning; they do not, of course, know that this woman was Connie, but Mellors is suspected of adultery, and Bertha is spreading rumors accusing him of sexual deviancy. Connie's first reaction is a revulsion against Mellors. She feels humiliated to be associated with a commoner like him, with somebody who would marry Bertha Coutts. But she comes around, remembering his tenderness to her and how he awakened her sexually. She sends a note of support to Mellors through Mrs. Bolton. With a second letter from Clifford, and one from Mellors, Connie learns that the situation has gotten worse. Bertha Coutts has begun to spread the rumor that Connie herself was Mellors' paramour. Coutts has been silenced by an injunction from Clifford. When Clifford confronted Mellors with questions about his sexual conduct, Mellors responded disrespectfully;
  • 18. Clifford then fired Mellors, who went to London. Meanwhile, Connie is now certain that she is going to bear Mellors' child. Connie and her family return to London, where she meets up with a dejected Mellors. Mellors says that they should call their relationship off: he has nothing to offer her, and he is too proud to live on her money, as a consort to an aristocrat. But they go back to her room and make love, and she tells him that she admires the courage of his tenderness, his ability to ignore shame and appreciate the physical. She urges him to trust the tenderness between them, and to disregard the worldly differences. He agrees to stay with her, and even to love their child, despite his fears about the future of society. Connie discusses her situation with her father, who, despite his happiness that she has found sexual satisfaction, is outraged that her lover is a commoner. But Sir Malcolm agrees to meet Mellors, and they get along well, discussing sex earthily: they have a common ground in sensuality. Between Hilda--who still hates Mellors--Connie, Sir Malcolm, and Mellors, they develop a plan. Mellors will lay low and pursue his divorce with Bertha. Connie will pretend that she is having an affair with Duncan Forbes, who will be named as the father of the child and the co-respondent in the divorce (if Mellors is named as father, his admission of adultery will complicate his own divorce). Clifford is more likely to accept Connie's having an affair with Duncan, a member of the leisured class, than with Mellors, a gamekeeper. Duncan agrees to pose as the father, despite Mellors' insulting his art by calling it soulless and self-indulgent. Connie sends Clifford a letter, telling him that she loves Duncan, and asking for a divorce. Clifford, despite having inwardly anticipated this, goes into shock. Mrs. Bolton comforts him and tends to hi; more than ever, he becomes like a child in her arms. They enter into a perverse relationship, both sexual and parental. She cares for him, and even loves him, but also despises him for his weakness. Clifford refuses to divorce Connie, demanding that she come to Wragby. She does come, and in a confrontation is forced to admit that her paramour is not Duncan but Mellors. Clifford is outraged, and, furious, accuses her of depravity; he continues to refuse to divorce her. She leaves Wragby, and goes with Hilda to Scotland. Mellors, meanwhile, works on a farm, making money and waiting out the six-month divorce proceedings.
  • 19. The novel ends with a letter sent from Mellors to Connie, summing up the message of the novel about the social blight upon England. The masses of men are emasculated, poor, hopeless, devoted only to getting and spending money. Without a radical change, the future is bleak. Only with a mass transformation, a realization of the power of sensuality, will people restore humanity and joy to their lives. Mellors comforts himself with thoughts of Connie, and the passion that exists between them: "we fucked a flame into being." Commentary This is not a novel that ends with an epiphany, nor a climactic scene of action and emotion. Rather, it fades away. Instead of a revelation, there is a careful summary of the novel's central ideological messages; instead of tragedy or triumph, there is a certain measured circumspection, a tenuous promise of hope in a vague future. The English author Lawrence Durrell held this anticlimactic ending against the novel: "The book falls away rather sadly at the end. It had all the ingredients for a big tragedy, but it ends on a whimper." Perhaps, however, the ending of Lady Chatterley's Lover should be evaluated remembering that the novel is as much an ideological tract as a work of living fiction. One way of reading Lady Chatterley's Lover is to view the narrative as the means rather than the end of the novel. This approach to the novel implies that in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the plot and the dialogue serve the purpose of conveying more effectively the novel's ideology, its set of social messages. Only secondarily do the characters assume depth and fictional reality; their primary function is to enact scenes that dramatize the novel's agenda. Thus it could be argued that Mellors is less a three-dimensional character in his own right than an embodiment of D.H. Lawrence's principles of sensuality and irreverence. Lawrence Durrell faults Lady Chatterley's Lover for avoiding the "big tragedy" that might have brought a satisfying and dramatic ending to the narrative. But this sort of ending would not have been in keeping with the social purpose of the novel. Throughout, Lady Chatterley's Lover--most explicitly through the character of Mellors, in his role as the author's spokesman--expresses a deep pessimism about the future of English society. Mellors is reluctant to bring children into the world, which he feels is bound for disaster. In the postwar world of Lady Chatterley's Lover,
  • 20. tradition has been discarded, men have been emasculated and dehumanized by industry and greed, and women have forgotten sensuality. There may be little room for optimism, but Connie convinces Mellors that there is room for hope. And the novel ends with Mellors writing Connie a letter that balances its condemnation of English society with a proposal for a massive societal transformation, and that ends both "droopingly" and "with a hopeful heart." Mellors awaits his divorce, while Connie is left in limbo, awaiting Clifford's consent for a divorce. A child will be born, but it remains to be seen whether Mellors and Connie will be able to live together and raise the child under the protection of their love, or whether circumstances will come between them. Thus the future of the protagonists is uncertain, just as the future of the English society portrayed in Lady Chatterley's Lover remains uncertain. A great tragedy, or a happy reunion, would run counter to the perspective of the novel on the broader future of society.
  • 21. CHAPTER III INTRINSIC ELEMENTS 1. Theme : a. The body : D.H. Lawrence, for all that he's a pretty brainy guy, wants you to be uncomfortably aware of your breathing. Lady Chatterley's Lover hates the life of the mind—for almost everyone. It says the majority of people would be a lot happier if they danced and had a lot more sex than they currently do. Of course, he's not talking about heading down to Ft. Lauderdale for a drunken, overly tanned orgy. Bodies are serious stuff, and he wants you to respect yours as much as any Promise Keeper. b. Men and masculinity If so, D.H. Lawrence would very much like you to put down your Xbox controller and go do something manly, like build a fire, convince some chickens to sit on pheasant eggs, or milk a cow. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, these are acceptable manly activities. Unacceptable activities include writing, reading, prematurely ejaculating, and knowing anything about machines. Tough luck for all you auto mechanics out there, because you're actually responsible for everything that's wrong with the world, from World War I to women not being properly feminine. If you have a problem with any of that, then you've obviously been corrupted by greed for money and need—in Lawrence's words—to grow a pair.
  • 22. c. Women and Femininity If you think that Lawrence is being a little hard on men in Lady Chatterley's Lover, wait until you hear what he has to say about women. When they're not being promiscuous, they're being frigid; they have the wrong kind of orgasm (thanks, Freud); and, worst of all, they don't get dinner on time. Are you turned on yet? To be fair—kind of—Lawrence lays most of the blame on men. If men were men, he (via Mellors) says, women would be women. But he sure does spend a lot of time talking about how awful women are along the way. Really, the only creatures that seem to be faithfully fulfilling their feminine role are Mellors's chickens—and you get the sense he'd like a harem of human women, too. d. Sex Finally, the dirty bits. And they're pretty dirty. But as tempting as it is to giggle about the insane way that Lawrence describes sex in Lady Chatterley's Lover, we should also look at the way he uses it to express his philosophical ideas. This isn't 50 Shades of Grey: there's a lot more philosophy and a lot less spanking. Sex is a way—the way—for two people to connect. It fights back against the uncaring harshness of the modern world, and it restores some little bit of beauty and realness to life. Good sex gives you more than just bragging rights. It gives you wholeness. e. Love Love comes after sex. This is one of the things that's most radical and shocking about Lady Chatterley's Lover. There's no "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Connie pushing a baby carriage. And with that, Lawrence flies in the face of hundreds of years of tradition. He insists that you can't have love without sex, and you're fooling yourself if you think there's any such thing as a sexless marriage. Love
  • 23. is the way that sex expresses itself, and not the other way around. This is why Lawrence wouldn't want you heading out to have a bunch of meaningless sex— because meaningless sex is mechanical, and being mechanical is the worst thing you can do to your body. f. Society and Class Now we get to the nasty stuff. Lawrence is—there's no way to say this nicely—a prick. He hates the aristocracy and the intellectuals, but he hates the working classes even more. Sure, Mellors is from a coal-mining background, but he rises above his circumstances. Connie and the narrator of Lady Chatterley's Lover both insist that he's really, awfully nice, not at all like those other coal miners. Clifford says a lot of mean things about the working classes, but Mellors is right there with him, condemning them as stupid, ugly, and frivolous. You get the sense that what Lawrence really wants is a feudal society with a noble overlord and happy, dumb peasants. Yeah, good luck with that. g. Isolation We hate to be the ones to tell you, but poking your girlfriend on Facebook (does anyone poke anymore?) isn't the same as actually hanging out with her. Connie discovers this to her dismay when she realizes that Clifford's company isn't actually a substitute for real human interaction. Everyone in Lady Chatterley's Lover is alone, some by accident (Connie) and some by choice (Mellors). The central couple is supposed to be a model of how to find human connection in an inhuman age—not through jazz dancing or Foursquare, but real, human sex. h. Wealth D.H. Lawrence hates a lot of things—men, women, machines, London, Wragby, literature, idiots, modernity—but he hates money most of all. Because, he implies in Lady Chatterley's Lover, money makes people do things that dehumanize them. The problem with money is that once you start using it, you start working to get it rather
  • 24. than working to live. So instead of working at something that will directly help you survive, like farming, and then prancing around the rest of the time in red trousers (seriously), you work at a soul-crushing job to get money to spend at movie theaters and jazz clubs to convince yourself that you don't hate your life. Big words, D.H. i. Freedom and Confinement There's a lot of entrapment in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Connie is trapped in an unhappy marriage; poor Clifford is trapped in a wheelchair; and Hilda, Connie's sister, is trapped in a prison of convention. There are all kinds of traps—marriage, family, convention, money, fate—and the novel doesn't give us any real sense that it's possible to break out. Connie isn't free at the end of the novel, and neither is Mellors. Even divorce isn't necessarily a way out, as anyone with joint custody can tell you. We're all trapped together in a world that's basically a prison full of lunatics and weaklings. Awesome. j. Youth You know what's really wrong with the world today? Young people. Yeah, Lawrence doesn't think much of the kids these days. In that sense, he's swimming against the tide in Lady Chatterley's Lover. As a decade, the 1920s loved youth. Women cut their hair like little boys and bound their breasts so they could wear skimpy dresses; guys rejected bougie things like marriage and kids; everyone was really into fast cars and jazz; college boys were the height of cool. In other words, we can blame the 1920s for youth culture. Lawrence is not on board that train. In fact, he thinks that youth culture is everything that's wrong with the world: loud music, meaningless sex, and unfeminine women. We can think of a few fringe religious groups that would agree with him.
  • 25. 2. Plot : · Introduction : The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has beenparalysed from the waist down due to a war injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind. · Conflict : Life at Wragby isn't much of a life. It's more of a half-life, or a non-life, or, well, as Lawrence puts it, "a life: in the void. For the rest it was non-existence" (2.35). The people of the Tevershall village don't like Connie; Clifford's friends patronize her; and Clifford himself sees her as a glorified nurse. Both Connie's dad and her sister Hilda worry about her, but they come up with different solutions: Hilda takes her to London to perk her up, while her dad thinks she should take a lover. Mostly, she spends a lot of time looking at flowers and thinking about how much her life stinks. · Crisis : Eventually Connie follows her dad's advice and picks up a boyfriend, the Irish playwright Michaelis. Like most new relationships, it's great for a while: lots of sex, no strings attached. And then it ends in flames, when Connie rejects Michaelis's marriage proposal. He mutters some nasty stuff about frigid women, and Connie swears off men. · Climax :
  • 26. And then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying unconscious inarticulate cries […] The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. (10.305) The climax of the book is, literally, a climax—and not just any climax, but a simultaneous one, which Mellors practically gloats about. We get it, Mellors: you're good in bed. Congratulations; have a cookie, and please wear a condom. Anyway, there's no going back now for Connie. She definitely can't return to Clifford, even if it means giving up Wragby and her title and being plain old "Mrs. Oliver Mellors." · Resolution : At the end of the novel, Mellors and Connie are living happily in a cottage in the north of England, with their adorable little baby. Except not. Connie is still trapped at Wragby and Mellors is stuck learning how to milk cows while they wait for Mellors's divorce. Happy endings are so last century. 3. Character and Characteristic Clifford Chatterley (Protagonist) landowner, disabled WW1 veteran, and businessman Constance Chatterley(Tritagonist) his wife, an intellectual and social progressive Oliver Mellors (Tritagonist) ex-soldier, ex-blacksmith, intellectual, and the gamekeeper at Wragby Hall Mrs (Ivy) Bolton Clifford’s devoted housekeeper Michaelis successful Irish playwright Sir Macolm Reid Connie’s father, a painter Hilda Reid Connie’s sister
  • 27. Tommy Dukes an intellectual friend of Clifford’s Duncan Forbes an artist friend of Connie and Hilda Bertha Coutts Mellor’s wife – who does no appear in the novel 4. Setting  Place : Wragby Wragby is Clifford's estate. It's not much of an estate—the house isn't very impressive, and it's near an ugly mining village called Tevershall. Connie is used to London and the pretty, green hills of southern England, so she's horrified by the "utter, soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands" (2.3). The Midlands were the heart of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, sort of England's Silicon Valley without all the good design and organic strawberries. In the 19th century, the Midlands produced factories, coal, and misery in astonishing quantities—and later, a lot of really good rock bands. Connie doesn't admire their industry the way Clifford does, though; all she sees are clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness. (2.1) In fact, the general effect is, well, hellish: "a sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement" (2.3), which is a polite way of saying that the earth is pooping out coal.
  • 28. Connie puts up with it for a while, but eventually it starts bringing her down. Wragby takes on a personality of its own: "The great, rambling mass of a place seemed evil to her, just a menace over her. She was no longer its mistress, she was its victim" (19.61). This is Poe-levelcraziness, but you can't blame her: the setting of Lady Chatterley's Lover really is a prison to her. It's not all ugly, though. Wragby is attached to a beautiful park, with really lovely woods. Lawrence waxes rhapsodic about them. Here are a few typical examples: 1) "In front lay the wood, the hazel thicket nearest, the purplish density of oaks beyond. From the wood's edge rabbits bobbed and nibbled. Rooks suddenly rose in a black train, and went trailing off over the little sky" (5.4) 2) "The hazel thicket was a lace-work, of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins" (12.1) 3) "It was a lovely morning, the pear-blossom and plum had suddenly appeared in the world in a wonder of white here and there" (12.3).  Time : The 1920s As important as the geographical setting is the temporal setting—not just where it's set, but when. Lawrence spends a lot of time bemoaning the loss of the good old England; not just the pre-industrial England of the 18th century, the "tattered remnants of the old coaching and cottage England" but "even the England of Robin Hood" (11.92). It's the woods where that Old England remains—"the great forest where Robin Hood hunted" (5.5). Nostalgia like this drives home Lawrence's disgust for the modern world. This isn't just some cranky ranting about Facebook and iPhones; Lawrence really feels that the world is going to hell. We get lots and lots of passages about the new world replacing the old. Here's another typical one:
  • 29. Now they are pulling down the stately homes, the Georgian halls are going. Fritchley, a perfect old Georgian mansion, was even now, as Connie passed in the car, being demolished. It was in perfect repair: till the war the Weatherleys had lived in style there. But now it was too big, too expensive, and the country had become too uncongenial … This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. (11.94-95) This is also how you know that Lawrence isn't a progressive. He doesn't want things to change, and anything new isautomatically bad. Just to be clear, we're not talking about turning the clock back a few years, like putting on a neon shirt and calling it retro. He wants to go way back to some kind of hazy feudal past, when the overlords were overlords and peasants were peasants. One thing is certain: Wragby in the 1920s is about the last place on earth that any sane person would want to be. 5. Point of View Third Person Omniscient Skillful authors can utilize the point of view of their story to focus their readers’ attention on the exact detail, opinion, or emotion the author wants to emphasize. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence uses the third person omniscient to convey his detailed theme of human needs. Through his God-like narration, Lawrence entices his reader to understand and empathize with his main character, Constance Chatterley. 6. Imagery While all novels may open with a fair amount of description, some stories are so rich in depiction that the reader can see, hear, and feel the motion of the words. From the very beginning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, readers may find themselves struck with how
  • 30. rhythmical the words are. From the cadence, to the beautiful descriptions, D.H. Lawrence comes across as truly skilled in regards to language. One aspect that stands out immediately is his use of imagery. Lawrence’s ability to appeal to the senses and create such a dynamic and clear picture of the story allows the reader to get completely lost in the world of Wragby. 7. Symbolism · Chickens Lady Chatterley and Mellors bond over the chickens that Mellors has set nesting on some pheasant eggs in a clearing in the woods. And Connie identifies with these chickens so strongly that they become a symbol of her own captivity. Like her, they have a "soft nestling ponderosity" and a "female urge" (10.37); like her, they lose themselves in fulfilling their female role: "There's no self in a sitting hen" (12.111). When Connie first sees the chickens, her heart breaks because "she herself was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all" (10.36). Of course what she really wants is Mellors's hands all over her. He handles the pheasant chicks with "sure gentle fingers" (10.52) that calm the chickens down. These chickens, and Mellors's control over them, seem to symbolize the potential animal/female nature that the modern world has suppressed in Connie. They're a symbol of what she could be —lost in nurture rather than lost in her head. · The Wheelchair Clifford is lucky enough to have a motorized chair, except that it doesn't handle being outside too well. It's great for rolling Wragby or even touring the paths, but as soon as he takes it off road, it gets stuck. No four-wheel drive on this baby.
  • 31. It's not just that the natural world wreaks havoc on Clifford's chair; the chair destroys the flowers. It's like mutually assured destruction, as Connie watches the chair "squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny" and then make "a wake through the forget-me-nots" (13.77). Lawrence gets pretty explicit as the chair heads off down a hyacinth-covered hill: "O last of all ships, through the hyacinthian shallows! O pinnace on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Whither, O weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious." (13.87) The contrast between Lawrence's prophetic, poetic prose and the composed, stuffy Clifford is funny, but it also points out how pathetic he is—not even able to steer his own ship. In this passage, thewheelchair seems to become a metaphor for civilization itself, plowing through the hyacinths totally oblivious to the beauty being crushed under its wheels. Al Gore would be proud. · Natural Imagery References to the natural world are sprinkled all through Lady Chatterley's Lover, from the long, effusive passages about the beauty of the woods to little side comments, like Mrs. Bolton's thought that doctors could "sort of graft seed" to make Connie pregnant (11.10)—grafting being a gardening technique where you stick one plant onto another. Or take Clifford's anger that Connie wants to hire a nurse, which he says kills "the real flower of the intimacy between him and her," although Connie thinks of that flower "like an orchid, a bulb stuck parasitic on her tree of life" (7.130). Flower, trees, rabbits, pheasants:Lady Chatterley's Lover is overrun with flora and fauna. So what's all this natural imagery doing? Well, for one thing, it offers a nice contrast to Lawrence's opinions about the soulless mechanical world. Underneath the misery of Wragby, there's a whole bounty of nature waiting to spring to life.
  • 32. And take the references to paganism that Lawrence drops. When Mellors comes in from the rainstorm with an armful of flowers, Connie looks at him "as if he were not quite human" (15.144)—as if, maybe, he's an incarnation of Pan. Pan? In Greek mythology, Pan is the god of the wild. He's associated with all sorts of other mythologies, like the Horned God of Celtic tradition. Mellors actually refers to him explicitly, saying that peasants "should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan. He's the only god for the masses, forever" (19.165). In other words, the common people should be worshipping pagan gods with, like, orgies and bonfires and piles of flowers rather than sitting in dark, depressing churches. All the flowers and tiny forest creatures are pointing the way back to a (probably mythic) past when people lived in harmony with the gods of nature. It does sound nice, but still—we'll take the indoor plumbing. · The Garden of Eden Allegory We already know that Lawrence has a thing for the natural world (check out "Natural Imagery"), and here's another possible reason: the Wragby woods are a big fat allegory for the Garden of Eden. 8. Moral Value  No matter what happens we should be faithful  Don’t take your desire first and make you ignore the other important things.  It’s good to stand our right but we should do that in the good way.  We should be patient no matter what happens. 9. Genre
  • 33. Romance "Romance" seems like an obvious genre choice for Lady Chatterley's Love. Connie and Oliver are almost nauseatingly in love, although sometimes that love is very poetically expressed: "But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are! That's what I abide by, and will abide by" (19.167). This "little forked flame" of love—but also of sex —is at the heart (so to speak) of the novel.