Lady Chatterly's lover by D.H. Lawrences

LADY CHATTERLEY´S LOVER SUMMARY AND COMPLETE ANALYSIS
Context
Reviewers and government censors condemned D.H. Lawrence's last novel as radically
pornographic, a vision of a relationship and a society without moral boundaries. But
Lady Chatterley's Lover is not really a radical novel, unless it can be said to be radically
reactionary, a profoundly conservative response to the modern condition. What was the
modern condition that Lawrence found so foul, and who was the author, a paradoxical
man whose somewhat puritan mind raged against modernity through an
unprecedentedly unconstrained celebration of sexuality?
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, the product of an unhappy
marriage between a coal-miner father and a schoolteacher mother. His birthplace,
Eastwood, was a mining village in Nottinghamshire, the heart of England's industrial
midlands. Lawrence became deeply attached to his mother, who was deeply committed
to helping her children escape the working class. In was Nottinghamshire that Lawrence
developed his hostility towards the mining industry that had dehumanized his father and
destroyed the pastoral English countryside of his birthplace, a hostility evident
throughout Lady Chatterley's Lover in Lawrence's fulmination against industrialism and
modern technology.
Lawrence supported himself by teaching school, although his ambition was to become a
poet. In 1909, he published his first poems; in 1911 and 1912, he published his first two
novels: The White Peacock and The Trespasser, respectively. In 1912, he left England
with Frieda Weekley (née Von Richtofen), the wife of one of his college professors; they
were married in 1914, after the publication of his third novel, the autobiographical Sons
and Lovers (1913). His elopement marked the beginning of a nomadic lifestyle. Except
for a stint in England during the First World War, Lawrence spent practically the rest of
his life traveling the world, from Germany to New Mexico, in search of a healthy
atmosphere in which to rehabilitate his lungs (he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis,
the disease that eventually killed him in 1930, at the age of 44). Lawrence's elopement
also marked the first of his rejections of conventional morality, rejections that would
play themselves out in sexual experimentation that almost ruined his marriage, and that
informed his later writing, especially Lady Chatterley's Lover.
In the sixteen years between his marriage and his death, Lawrence was remarkably
prolific, publishing many novels, including the novels generally considered his finest:
The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920); nonfiction, including history textbooks,
travel memoirs and scholarly psychological tracts; and several collections of short
stories and poems. In the last years of his life, wracked by tuberculosis, Lawrence wrote
three very different versions of what would prove his final novel, the sexually explicit
Lady Chatterley's Lover. He survived to see the final version--first published in the
spring of 1928--ripped by most reviewers and censored in England and America.

Lawrence was not the only author writing in the decades after the first World War whose
work was considered radically immoral; famously, for instance, a furor arose over the
publication of James Joyce's great novel Ulysses years before Lady Chatterley's Lover
was written. Many of the modernist writers and poets who dominated postwar avant-
garde literary art placed a high premium on discarding social convention, which they
believed had been exposed as empty by the carnage of the war. Society was morally
bankrupt, empty of real meaning, composed of individuals between whom no real
connection or understanding was possible. In response, artists began to experiment
radically with form, and they set a premium on art that was "real," that eliminated
convention to get at the core of life.
D.H. Lawrence was not really one of these formally and thematically radical modernists.
While he shared the modernist belief that the postwar world was virtually bereft of
meaningful values, Lawrence laid the blame at the doorstep of technology, the class
system, and intellectual life. He believed that modern industry had deprived people of
individuality, making them cogs in the industrial machine, a machine driven by greed.
And modern intellectual life conspired with social constraint to bleed men dry of their
vital, natural vigor. Lawrence wanted to revive in the human consciousness an
awareness of savage sensuality, a sensuality which would free men from their dual
enslavement to modern industry and intellectual emptiness. He was in many ways a
primitivist: he saw little reason for optimism in modern society, and looked nostalgically
backwards towards the days of pastoral, agricultural England.
Summary
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins by introducing Connie Reid, the female protagonist of the
novel. She was raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and was
introduced to love affairs--intellectual and sexual liaisons--as a teenager. In 1917, at
23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month's
honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns paralyzed from the waist down, impotent.
After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the
Chatterley mansion, Wragby. Connie feels isolated; the vaunted intellectuals prove
empty and bloodless, and she resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting
playwright, Michaelis. Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as all
men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing distance between
Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of success in his
writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep
physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford
so that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on
the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance.
Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford's estate,
newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie
feels curiously drawn to him by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his
undercurrents of natural sensuality. After several chance meetings in which Mellors

keeps her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance between them, they meet
by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several
occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly
separate from him despite their physical closeness.
One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on
the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous orgasms. This is a revelatory
and profoundly moving experience for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that
they have connected on some deep sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is
pregnant with Mellors' child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to the emotionally-
dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively
closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two
minds or intellects.
Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors' old wife returns,
causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the
negative rumors spread about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated
divorce proceedings. Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby,
but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working on a
farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting: the hope
exists that, in the end, they will be together.
Characters
Lady Chatterley - The protagonist of the novel. Before her marriage, she is simply
Constance Reid, an intellectual and social progressive, the daughter of Sir Malcolm and
the sister of Hilda. When she marries Clifford Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance-
-or, as she is known throughout the novel, Connie--assumes his title, becoming Lady
Chatterley. Lady Chatterley's Lover chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a
sensual being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband, and to love Oliver
Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. In the process of leaving her husband
and conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless
world of the intelligentsia and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in
sensuality and sexual fulfillment.
Oliver Mellors - The lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the gamekeeper on Clifford
Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof, sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born
near Wragby, and worked as a blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an
unhappy marriage. In the army he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant--an
unusual position for a member of the working classes--but was forced to leave the army
because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health. Disappointed by a string
of unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in quiet isolation, from which he is redeemed by
his relationship with Connie: the passion unleashed by their lovemaking forges a
profound bond between them. At the end of the novel, Mellors is fired from his job as
gamekeeper and works as a laborer on a farm, waiting for a divorce from his old wife so
he can marry Connie. Mellors is the representative in this novel of the Noble Savage: he

is a man with an innate nobility but who remains impervious to the pettiness and
emptiness of conventional society, with access to a primitive flame of passion and
sensuality.
Clifford Chatterley - Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a minor nobleman who
becomes paralyzed from the waist down during World War I. As a result of his injury,
Clifford is impotent. He retires to his familial estate, Wragby, where he becomes first a
successful writer, and then a powerful businessman. But the gap between Connie and
him grows ever wider; obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly
interested in love, and she feels that he has become passionless and empty. He turns
for solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs. Bolton, who worships him as a nobleman
even as she despises him for his casual arrogance. Clifford represents everything that
this novel despises about the modern English nobleman: he is a weak, vain man, but
declares his right to rule the lower classes, and he soullessly pursues money and fame
through industry and the meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is symbolic
of his failings as a strong, sensual man.
Mrs. Bolton - Ivy Bolton is Clifford's nurse and caretaker. She is a competent, complex,
still-attractive middle-aged woman. Years before the action in this novel, her husband
died in an accident in the mines owned by Clifford's family. Even as Mrs. Bolton resents
Clifford as the owner of the mines--and, in a sense, the murderer of her husband--she
still maintains a worshipful attitude towards him as the representative of the upper
class. Her relationship with Clifford--she simultaneously adores and despises him, while
he depends and looks down on her--is probably the most fascinating and complex
relationship in the novel.
Michaelis - A successful Irish playwright with whom Connie has an affair early in the
novel. Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, but she decides not to, realizing that he is
like all other intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words,
passionless.
Hilda Reid - Connie's older sister by two years, the daughter of Sir Malcolm. Hilda
shared Connie's cultured upbringing and intellectual education. She remains unliberated
by the raw sensuality that changed Connie's life. She disdains Connie's lover, Mellors, as
a member of the lower classes, but in the end she helps Connie to leave Clifford.
Sir Malcolm Reid - The father of Connie and Hilda. He is an acclaimed painter, an
aesthete and unabashed sensualist who despises Clifford for his weakness and
impotence, and who immediately warms to Mellors.
Tommy Dukes - One of Clifford's contemporaries, Tommy Dukes is a brigadier general
in the British Army and a clever and progressive intellectual. Lawrence intimates,
however, that Dukes is a representative of all intellectuals: all talk and no action. Dukes
speaks of the importance of sensuality, but he himself is incapable of sensuality and
uninterested in sex.

Charles May, Hammond, Berry - Young intellectuals who visit Wragby, and who, along
with Tommy Dukes and Clifford, participate in the socially progressive but ultimately
meaningless discussions about love and sex.
Duncan Forbes - An artist friend of Connie and Hilda. Forbes paints abstract canvases, a
form of art both Mellors and D.H. Lawrence seem to despise. He once loved Connie, and
Connie originally claims to be pregnant with his child.
Bertha Coutts - Although Bertha never actually appears in the novel, her presence is
felt. She is Mellors' wife, separated from him but not divorced. Their marriage faltered
because of their sexual incompatibility: she was too rapacious, not tender enough. She
returns at the end of the novel to spread rumors about Mellors' infidelity to her, and
helps get him fired from his position as gamekeeper. As the novel concludes, Mellors is
in the process of divorcing her.
Squire Winter - A relative of Clifford. He is a firm believer in the old privileges of the
aristocracy.
Daniele, Giovanni - Venetian gondoliers in the service of Hilda and Connie. Giovanni
hopes that the women will pay him to sleep with them; he is disappointed. Daniele
reminds Connie of Mellors: he is attractive, a "real man."
Section I: Chapters 1-3
Summary
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins with the marriage of Clifford Chatterley, a young
baronet, to Constance Reid. Clifford is the heir to an estate, Wragby, in the English
midlands; Constance--or Connie, as she is usually called in this novel--is the cultured,
intellectual daughter of a Scottish painter, Sir Malcolm. The marriage takes place during
the first World War, a shattering experience for England and all of Europe, and quite
literally for Clifford, who is badly injured in combat, paralyzed from the waist down and
rendered impotent. By way of background, we learn that Connie was raised in a socially-
permissive atmosphere: both she and her sister Hilda had love affairs in their teenage
years.
At the war's end, Clifford and Connie live at Wragby, near the grim, soulless coal-mining
village of Tevershall. The handicapped Clifford has become totally dependent on Connie,
and Connie tends to him diligently and sympathetically. But she notices that he seems
curiously detached from his surroundings, disconnected from other people; he is unable
to relate to the workers in the coal mines that he owns, seeing them more as objects
than as men. Clifford becomes a successful author, absorbed in writing short stories,
and Wragby becomes a sort of salon for young intellectuals. Connie is, at least for a
while, entranced by this intellectual life, her world structured by literature and ideas. But
her father, Sir Malcolm, intimates that there is a danger in living an intellectual life
devoid of sensuality, in living as Connie does with Clifford.

As time goes by, Connie becomes restless, beginning to realize the truth of her father's
warning, to see that her life is filled with empty words, and not the vitality of the
sensual. Her bouts of restlessness coincide with the visit to Wragby of a young
playwright, Michaelis. Despite his success, the Irish Michaelis is treated by the British
aristocratic intelligentsia as an outsider; Connie is attracted by his outsider's aloofness,
and sympathizes with his mistreatment. She begins an affair with him which, while not
fully satisfying sexually--Connie gets sexual satisfaction from him, but only on her own
initiative, after he has arrived at orgasm--temporarily rouses her from her doldrums.
Commentary
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins with a paragraph that establishes the social and cultural
context for all that follows. Like many modernist, postwar writers, D.H. Lawrence
believed that the first World War was a vast tragedy, one that had thrown Europe into
chaos, casting doubt on all that civilization had previously believed meaningful. The
problem was how to continue to live after the apocalypse: "Ours is essentially a tragic
age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the
ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes." Lady
Chatterley's Lover is a novel with profound social, political and cultural concerns. It
interests itself not just in the love affair between Connie and Mellors in particular, and
not just in personal relationships in general, but in the structure and survival of Western
society.
Clifford Chatterley becomes a figure for the aristocracy and intelligentsia of postwar
England. In the years after the war, the poet Ezra Pound referred to European
civilization as a "bitch gone in the teeth," an old and useless dog. In Lady Chatterley's
Lover, postwar England is depicted as crippled and impotent: Clifford functions as an
allegorical figure as much as he does as a real character. His physical emasculation
reflects an internal weakness and emptiness. He becomes incapable of breeding his own
heir. This is a novelistic device, but it also must be seen as a social commentary;
Lawrence is concerned that without a radical reconception of personal relationships and
social order, England will not perpetuate itself, will not survive its "tragic age" except as
an agglomeration of corporate machines.
The first indictment in this novel of postwar English society comes as a critique of
English intellectual life. Clifford becomes a successful author, but his art proves devoid
of meaning, incapable of forging a real connection between him and his wife. Connie is
temporarily entranced by the world of letters, but she finds, as the novel progresses,
that intellectual life is nothing but letters without substance, a vain, foolish striving for
success. This theme of the emptiness of intellectual life is handled most thoroughly
through Lawrence's devastating depictions of the bohemian salons at Wragby in later
chapters.
It is telling that the first person to warn Connie of the dangers of eschewing the physical
is Sir Malcolm, her lusty Scottish father. Sir Malcolm is a painter of the old school; a
member of the Royal Academy, he paints traditional, figural Scottish landscapes, in

contrast to the non-representational art that dominated avant-garde European painting
after the war. Sir Malcolm is also an unabashed proponent of sensual living, urging
Connie to have an affair and--much later in the novel--bonding instantly with Mellors
over frank, earthy discussions of sexual prowess. Note that in Sir Malcolm, the wild
Scotsman in touch with both his artistic and sensual sides, Lawrence joins conservative
artistic technique with unconventional sexual mores. This blend of conservatism and
unconventionality is evident throughout the novel, and it may be held up as Lawrence's
ideal.
Section II: Chapters 4-6 Summary
Connie's attachment to Clifford survives her affair with Michaelis, although she realizes
more clearly than ever that Clifford does not satisfy her. His success as a writer,
however, brings many young intellectuals to Wragby. Among them are Tommy Dukes,
Charles May, and Hammond, whose chief pastime is the discussion of love and the
relationships between men and women. The men seem sexually progressive, espousing
the idea of sex as a natural extension of conversation. The intellectual life seems to flow
seamlessly into the sensual life. And yet there is something missing in these young
intellectuals; their theory seems strangely divorced from practice. Tommy Dukes, the
cleverest of them, believes in the importance of the intelligence coexisting with warmth
of heart, sexual activity, and the courage to speak profanely. But he admits that he
himself is incapable of this warmth and this open approach to sex and profanity.
One February morning, Clifford--in his motorized wheelchair--and Connie go for a walk
in the woods on the Chatterley estate. The beauty of the untamed English countryside
still survives in the forest, but the sulphurous smell of the coal mines encroaches on the
wildness, and ubiquitous are places where the trees have been cut down to provide
lumber for the war effort. Clifford speaks of his responsibility to preserve the woods as
they were before the war. He is concerned also with preserving the Chatterley line and
the aristocracy as guardians of tradition. To this end he urges Connie to have a child
with another man, a child who could be brought up as heir to the Chatterley estate.
Connie's having sex with another man, Clifford believes, would not be important, a
momentary contact incomparable to the long marriage, the intertwining of lives. Connie
agrees, although inwardly she foresees a time when she will become uncomfortable
bound into a lifelong marriage. Immediately after Clifford and Connie's conversation,
Mellors, the gamekeeper, comes into view. Clifford bids him accompany them to help
the wheelchair up any hills. Mellors treats Clifford with cold respect, and utterly ignores
Connie. He carries himself with a kind of innate nobility and aloof dignity.
Connie begins to realize, more clearly than before, that Clifford's injury in the war has
also damaged his soul. His writing and his mental life, while clever, seem ultimately
devoid of substance. Clifford's emotional vacuum spreads to his wife, and Connie begins
to fear that her life will slip away into emptiness and indifference. In the summer,
Michaelis comes to visit again, and they resume their affair. He offers to marry her if
she divorces Clifford, and she, vulnerable, almost agrees. But later that night Michaelis
becomes resentful and angry by their inability to achieve simultaneous orgasms. She is

traumatized by his selfish anger, and their relationship falters; she feels that her sexual
urge towards all men has been destroyed. In a conversation with Tommy Dukes, Connie
laments the fact that men and women seem fundamentally incompatible. Dukes says
that physical love and intellectual connection seem never to go hand-in-hand, and that
men and women have lost their mystery, their attraction, their "glamour" to each other.
Connie falls deeper into her depression, and further away from Clifford. She feels that
love and happiness are unavailable to her generation. The only solace she takes is in the
possibility of having a child.
Walking through the woods, Connie has a chance encounter with the gamekeeper,
Mellors, who is yelling at his daughter. She intervenes, and takes the child back to its
grandmother's cottage. Still later, she volunteers to bring a message from Clifford to
Mellors. Walking up to the cottage, she sees him shirtless in his backyard, washing
himself, and is struck by his warmth and vitality. When she speaks to him and delivers
the message, she is again impressed--despite his aloofness, and the tinge of mockery
that infuses everything he says to her--by the warmth and kindness of his eyes.
Commentary
This section establishes a clear contrast between the young intellectuals, with their
clever but pointless theoretical conversations on love, and the gamekeeper Mellors,
behind whose aloof facade there is a reservoir of warmth and passion.
Lawrence's portrayal of the young intellectuals is a devastating commentary of the
English intelligentsia, the more effective for its subtlety. Tommy Dukes, especially,
seems a sympathetic character. He is intelligent, funny and engaging. Moreover, he
seems to have his heart in what Lawrence thinks is the right place, believing strongly in
the importance of the sensual, and in sex as a vital means of communication between
men and women. And yet Dukes himself is uninterested in women and in sex. His
theoretical progressivism is empty and pointless; all of his conversations are without
real substance, because they are without practical application. The failure of postwar
intellectual thought, Lawrence believes, is not necessarily in its theoretical cowardice,
but in its inability to go beyond words.
To a certain extent, then, Dukes serves as Lawrence's mouthpiece. Although ultimately
he is exemplary of the effete intellectual, he voices the ideas upon which Lawrence
would like to see society reconstruct itself. In this sense, Dukes fails as a novelistic
character. He is a spokesman, not a man in his own right. At the beginning of chapter
six, for instance, it is nearly impossible to take Dukes seriously as a man speaking his
own thoughts and emotions. His words coincide too nearly with the general moral of the
story: physical love has become incompatible with intellectual connection, and men and
women lack allure, "glamour," to one another. It is one of the great failings of Lady
Chatterley's Lover that the characters, on occasion, become subordinate to the social
purpose of the novel. As the poet Archibald MacLeish writes in his introduction to the
Modern Library version of the novel: "The characters are sometimes symbols rather
than human beings and the propaganda purpose occasionally shows through."

The camera lens of the novel quickly changes focus. Immediately after Tommy Dukes'
admission that he is unable to reconcile his theories on sensuality with his personal
inability to feel sexual attraction, we are given a scene with Clifford and Connie in the
woods. The contrast is striking. We are transported from the intellectual emptiness
inside Wragby to the last remnants of an unspoiled, pastoral England. Mellors first
comes into view in this setting, and we are told that he was dressed in "the old style." A
gamekeeper familiar with the woods, he is a representative of wild England, and seems
utterly incompatible with the bloodless intellectuals who congregate at Wragby.
Mellors' internal warmth, his sensuality, is inseparable from his connection to the forest,
to old England. His ability to relate to Connie as a woman, then, cannot be distinguished
from his ability to relate to the untamed land. By extension, it can be noted that the
empty reliance on the mind and neglect of the body that characterizes Wragby, and that
proves destructive to Connie's marriage, is the same illness that Lawrence believes
afflicts the English countryside, manifesting itself in the soulless mining enterprises.
Lady Chatterley's Lover observes that it is one pandemic illness that afflicts all of
society.
Section III: Chapters 7-9 Summary
Some of Clifford's friends, including Tommy Dukes, are at Wragby, and they have a
discussion about the relationship between the body and the future of civilization. Clifford
looks forwards to civilization's utter elimination of the physical, to the extent of birthing
babies from bottles. Tommy Dukes, always theoretically correct despite his personal
sexual frigidity, believes that the salvation of civilization is in "the resurrection of the
body" and the "democracy of touch." Connie, as always, agrees with Dukes. Meanwhile,
however, her own body is fading. At 27, isolated so long from physical passion, Connie
has lost the bloom of youth; her body is slackening and withering. She begins to feel a
sense of injustice, as if she has been wronged, and the blame falls on Clifford, with his
cold, aristocratic reserve.
Connie's depression continues unabated, and her sister Hilda comes to comfort her.
Together, they decide that Connie can no longer be shackled to Clifford as his sole
caretaker; instead, they hire Mrs. Bolton, a local nurse, as Clifford's caretaker and
companion. Mrs. Bolton's husband was a coal-miner who died in the mines owned by
Clifford's family. She thus resents him as an oppressor and an industrialist, a member of
the upper class, but, at the same time, however, she worships his wealth and nobility.
Freed from the responsibility of caring for Clifford, Connie's physical and psychological
health begin to improve. In her walks in the woods, she seems inexorably drawn to the
gamekeeper, Mellors. She comes upon him one afternoon at a hidden hut, where he is
raising pheasants for Clifford to hunt. Although he is attracted to her, Mellors resents
her presence; having been wounded in the past by love, he jealously guards his
solitude. Connie asks him for a key to the hut so that she can come frequently, and
Mellors becomes sullen and disdainful, shifting from English into the crude local dialect
to mock her for her aristocratic pretensions. This happens a second time: they meet

again at the hut, and he again dodges her requests for a key to the hut, trying to keep
her at arm's length in his desire for solitude. Still, in contrast to Clifford, Mellors seems
an improvement.
Indeed, Connie is developing a deep distaste for Clifford. Walking with her husband,
Connie is struck by his insensitivity, by his inclination to intellectualize every physical
sensation. She believes that, in his pursuit of success, he has become single-mindedly
maniacal. And although Clifford still feels attached to her, he is transferring his attention
to Mrs. Bolton, becoming completely reliant on her. Even as he treats her with
aristocratic contempt, he is like a small child in her care; and she is thrilled by her
contact with the upper-class. Mrs. Bolton incessantly shares the local gossip with
Clifford, who begins for the first time to think seriously about the local villages, and
about the coal mines in which the local men work, mines which Clifford owns but
ignores. He decides to pursue success through revitalizing the dying local coal industry.
And the tension between him and Connie continues to grow.
Commentary
Lady Chatterley's Lover diagnoses the illnesses in English society, and--although less
precisely--suggests a cure. One of the chief social concerns of the novel is the problem
of the English class system. In this novel, the nobility-- represented by Clifford
Chatterley-- is portrayed as hopelessly emasculated and consumed by greed. The
aristocrats are the self-appointed guardians of the land and of English tradition. But they
seem to care little about the common people who live on their land and work for them.
Coal miners become cogs in Clifford's industrial machine, and he has no sense of them
as individuals; the irony, of course, is that Clifford himself becomes a servant of the
machine, prostituting himself for success. But this novel by no means glorifies the
working man. In a particularly wrenching passage in chapter 11, in which Connie drives
into a mining village, she finds the people utterly degraded and dehumanized, forcing
themselves into industrial servitude in their mindless pursuit of money.
It is noteworthy in this context that Oliver Mellors, this novel's ideal sensual man, seems
to be neither aristocrat nor working class. Certainly, he was born into a working-class
family, and worked for years as a blacksmith. But Lawrence is quite explicit on several
occasions that Mellors seems to have an innate nobility that makes him the equal of any
aristocrat. And Mellors earned a lieutenant's commission in the army, usually the
preserve of noblemen. Mellors is capable, the reader will note, of shifting between the
high-English accent used by Connie and the broad, coarse, Derbyshire accent used by
the coal miners. He uses this Derbyshire accent, it seems, to mock Connie when she
acts too condescendingly towards him, resorting to it whenever he is forced to recall his
social inferiority; the question of whether this is an obnoxious habit, and whether
Mellors is himself an obnoxious person, is wide open. Mellors' position outside the class
structure makes him Lawrence's idealized man--in Lawrence's mind, graceful and noble
enough for philosophizing, and savage enough to appreciate sensuality--but it also has
the negative effect of making him something of an idea, rather than a man. He seems,
as the writer Lawrence Durrell observes, something of an "abstraction," a man created

in a laboratory perfectly to conform to the author's needs. He is an unnatural addition to
the world of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a world riven by class barriers: a man without
class allegiance, but partaking of the strongest qualities of every class.
Perhaps the most fascinating relationship in this novel is the relationship introduced in
this section between Clifford Chatterley, the crippled aristocrat, and Mrs. Bolton, the
working-class nurse who becomes his sole companion and caretaker. It is probably
Lawrence's most honest grappling with the question of inter-class relationships. Mrs.
Bolton is no classless abstraction, like Mellors; rather, she is deeply rooted in the
working class, and it is a complex tangle of emotions that connects her to Clifford. He
depends upon her, but disdains her; she serves him, but also controls him, for he is
powerless on his own. And she has an awe of aristocrats, while despising them for their
treatment of the working class. As the novel progresses, their relationship assumes
something of the quality of a romantic love affair, even as it remains a master-servant
relationship; a companionship between friends; and a mother-child relationship, with
Clifford completely dependent on Mrs. Bolton.
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 reside 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.
Analysis
The greatness of Lady Chatterley's Lover lies in a paradox: it is simultaneously
progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian. It looks backwards towards a
Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to anticipate the social morality of the late
20th century in its frank engagement with explicit subject matter and profanity. One
might say of the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but
methodologically radical.
The easiest of these assertions to prove is that Lady Chatterley's Lover is "formally
conservative." By this I mean that there are few evident differences between the form of
Lady Chatterley's Lover and the form of the high-Victorian novels written fifty years
earlier: in terms of structure; in terms of narrative voice; in terms of diction, with the
exception of a very few "profane" words. It is important to remember that Lady
Chatterley's Lover was written towards the end of the 1920s, a decade which had seen
extensive literary experimentation. The 1920s opened with the publishing of the
formally radical novel Ulysses, which set the stage for important technical innovations in
literary art: it made extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness form; it condensed all
of its action into a single 24-hour span; it employed any number of voices and narrative
perspectives. Lady Chatterley's Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s, and indeed the
entire modernist literary movement, had never happened. The structure of the novel is
conventional, tracing a small group of characters over an extended period of time in a
single place. The rather preachy narrator usually speaks with the familiar third-person
omniscience of the Victorian novel. And the characters tend towards flatness, towards
representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and developing real three-
dimensional personalities.
But surely, if Lady Chatterley's Lover is "formally conservative," it can hardly be called
"thematically conservative"! After all, this is a novel that raised censorious hackles
across the English-speaking world. It is a novel that liberally employs profanity, that
more-or-less graphically--graphically, that is, for the 1920s: it is important not to
evaluate the novel by the standards of profanity and graphic sexuality that have become
prevalent at the turn of the 21st century--describes sex and orgasm, and whose central
message is the idea that sexual freedom and sensuality are far more important, more

authentic and meaningful, than the intellectual life. So what can I mean by calling Lady
Chatterley's Lover, a famously controversial novel, "thematically conservative"?
Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel seems to advocate,
but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady Chatterley's Lover is not propaganda for
sexual license and free love. As D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay "A
Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own
sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novel's protagonists, Mellors
and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a sex life in which it is clear that
Mellors is the aggressor and the dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive
part; all who would argue that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a radical novel would do well
to remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors' first wife, a sexually
aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this novel's chief concern--
although it is also concerned, to a far greater extent than most modernist fiction, with
the pitfalls of technology and the barriers of class--is with what Lawrence understands
to be the inability of the modern self to unite the mind and the body. D.H. Lawrence
believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders aimlessly in
the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important recognition in Lady
Chatterley's Lover is the extent to which the modern relationship between men and
women comes to resemble the relationship between men and machines.
Not only do men and women require an appreciation of the sexual and sensual in order
to relate to each other properly; they require it even to live happily in the world, as
beings able to maintain human dignity and individuality in the dehumanizing
atmosphere created by modern greed and the injustices of the class system. As the
great writer Lawrence Durrell observed in reference to Lady Chatterley's Lover,
Lawrence was "something of a puritan himself. He was out to cure, to mend; and the
weapons he selected for this act of therapy were the four-letter words about which so
long and idiotic a battle has raged." That is to say: Lady Chatterley's Lover was intended
as a wake-up call, a call away from the hyper-intellectualism embraced by so many of
the modernists, and towards a balanced approach in which mind and body are equally
valued. It is the method the novel uses that made the wake-up call so radical--for its
time--and so effective.
This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of modern civilization--
exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the soulless and emasculated Clifford
Chatterley--and it suggests an alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. And it is a
novel, one must admit, which does not quite succeed. Certainly, it is hardly the equal of
D.H. Lawrence's great novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow. It attempts a profound
comment on the decline of civilization, but it fails as a novel when its social goal eclipses
its novelistic goals, when the characters become mere allegorical types: Mellors as the
Noble Savage, Clifford as the impotent nobleman. And the novel tends also to dip into a
kind of breathless incoherence at moments of extreme sensuality or emotional weight.
It is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has had a profound impact on the way

that 20th-century writers have written about sex, and about the deeper relationships of
which, thanks in part to Lawrence, sex can no longer be ignored as a crucial element.
What advantages has the chosen point of view? Does it furnish any clues as to the
purpose of the story?
3rd person omniscient is used in this story mostly, except during the sex scenes with
Mellors, when it becomes 3rd person limited omniscient, as we can’t see what Mellors is
thinking. This is a story where we get very personal with every character. It’s important
to know what everyone is feeling because often they are thinking exactly opposite
things, especially Clifford and Connie. From this point of view, one gets to realize things
about characters that even the characters don’t know about themselves. One can
understand every character’s motives- it provides the reader with a bit of superiority
over the characters, as you know things they don’t. It also makes the characters more
human because we can see what they’re all thinking. The reader is not glued to one
character, but gets to know them all very intimately. One is able to get a character’s
background much quicker using this method. You know things about the people not
directed connected to the story (i.e. miners) that they don’t realize about themselves,
but that are important to the story as a whole. As mentioned above, the purpose of the
story was partly to show what was wrong with the world: there was no tenderness.
Connie found a solution and therefore there is hope that others will too. One has to see
everything that is wrong with the world and with Connie’s life to fully appreciate her
success, and 3rd person omniscient is the best way to do this.
What do you conceive to be the story’s central purpose? How fully has it achieved that
purpose?
I believe the purpose of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was to shock post-war England out of
its dreariness. D.H. Lawrence wanted to show people a new view of themselves: show
them how they had no tenderness, and that tenderness was what was desperately
needed in the world at that time- and still is today. Lawrence wrote about what he
wanted to see: people in love, being tender, disregarding money and class. He wrote
passionately, in language that everyone could understand. However, people didn’t want
to hear this stuff: it was too painfully accurate, and so they banned the book. D.H.
Lawrence definitely shocked the English public. He also proved through this book that
tenderness is the most important quality a person can have. I think if people would but
read the book, they would see its purpose quite clearly, and they would see that it has
attained it also.
Are the characters consistent in their actions? Adequately motivated? Plausible? Does
the author successfully avoid stock characters?
The characters are consistent in their actions in the sense that they act like real people.
Real people don’t linearly progress in the development of their personalities and neither
do these characters. Connie goes from feeling repugnance for Mellors, to love, back to
repugnance again. Sometimes real people have irrational feelings: so do these

characters. For example, Connie often feels irrationally angry with Mellors and with
Clifford. Nevertheless, everything the characters do is adequately motivated and
plausible. Constance is driven to have an affair by a long period of desperate loneliness.
She leaves Clifford because she grows to love someone else. Some of Clifford’s actions,
however, are a tad bit bizarre, but even he has motivation: he is partly crazy and rather
childlike and immature. Not one of the characters is a stock character. As this book
pushes limits, so too do these characters in terms of their humanity and novelty: they
are completely real and completely original.
Who is the protagonist? What are the conflicts? Of what nature are they? Is the main
conflict between good and evil, or is it more complex?
I would say Constance Chatterely and Oliver Mellors are the protagonists of the story,
as is their love for each other. Most of the conflicts are between these two people and
the world. Mellors has outer emotional conflicts with society, with his wife and with
Clifford. His conflict with society makes him dread bringing a child into it and this causes
conflict between him and Connie. Connie has emotional conflicts with Clifford and with
society. She begins to hate Clifford for his immaturity. The world wants to come
between Connie and Mellors, and not let them be together, because of the scandal.
Connie seems to have few internal conflicts. She feels no inner guilt over cheating on
her husband. All the conflicts are emotional, because all of the characters act on
emotions, not logic. There is really no sharply defined good and evil in Lady Chatterley’s
Lover. The world is a bad place to be in the book, but that isn’t the fault of the people
and both protagonists believe the people can change. Clifford is the antagonist, but he’s
not evil- he’s just weak and stubborn. Connie and Mellors are passionate and in love, so
they are the protagonists. However, from Clifford’s point of view Connie and Mellors
might be the villains. There is really no firmly divided line between good and evil in this
book. People are just people, trying to get by, with a minimum of conflict.
What contribution to the story is made by its setting? Is the particular setting essential
or could the story have happened anywhere?
The particular setting of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is essential to the plot. The book takes
place in the dreary industrial midlands of England: a depressing country where Connie
lives in a depressing house. The setting is described in great detail at the beginning of
Chapter 2.
“Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the
eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much
distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather fine old park of oak trees, but alas, one
could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its 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 willful, blank dreariness…
From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at

the pit, the puff of the winding engine, the clink-clink of shunting trucks, and the hoarse
little whistle of the colliery locomotives. Tevershall pit bank was burning, had been
burning for years, and it would cost thousands to put it out. So it had to burn. And when
the wind was that way, which was often, the house was full of the stench of this
sulphureous combustion of the earth’s excrement. But even on windless days the air
always smelt of something under-earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. And even on the
Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently, incredible, like black manna from skies
of doom… On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered,
dappling and swelling and contracting, like burns that give pain. It was the furnaces. At
first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror; she felt she was living underground.
Then she got used to them. And in the morning it rained… the country had a grim will of
its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else they had: certainly
neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard, shapeless and dreary as the
countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was something in their deep-mouthed
slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hobnailed pit-boots as they trailed
home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious”
(Lawrence 10-11).
The wretchedness and soullessness of the countryside is part of what makes Connie so
depressed. The horrible landscape, the depressing house and the brain-dead people
make her feel empty and indifferent inside. She grows thin with boredom, sadness and
loneliness. Her feelings of depression, caused by the scenery, are what make Connie
take Mellors as a lover, without which there would have been no story. Therefore the
setting is essential to the plot, because if Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been set
somewhere stimulating and joyful like Italy, Connie wouldn’t have become depressed
and desperate and therefore would never have taken Mellors as a lover.
Does the story have a theme? What is it? Is it implicit or explicit? Is it universal? Does
it make you see things in a new or different way?
The theme of this story is tenderness. I would say that it is an explicit theme, as it is
brought up quite often. The main problem in this book is lack of tenderness. This fact is
often commented on. Tenderness is what makes Connie live again. It’s what Mellors has
that makes him a man. I think quite explicitly it is stated in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that
lack of tenderness is what is wrong with the world. It is a universal theme. Everyone has
to have passion and love in their life- or else what is life? Tenderness is something
everyone can relate to in some way: everyone has felt tenderness, or at least
depression from the lack of it. Our society today is a bit like post-war English society in
the book. We are a little deadened by industrialization, by our gadgets. Our love is often
fabricated and in mimicry of the false love shown in the media, or we love for money.
There are exceptions to this rule however. I feel I am one. Lady Chatterley’s Lover told
me what I already know: that passion is important, but it helped me to realize this fact
in a whole new way. The world needs to learn how to be tender: to the earth, to the
other people in it, if there’s to be any hope of survival for us.

Lady Chatterly's lover by D.H. Lawrences

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