Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D.H. Lawrence, his last–published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France–before his death in 1930. An unexpurgated version of the novel wasn’t openly published in the UK until 1960, after the publisher, Penguin Books, won in an obscenity trial. The book was also banned for obscenity in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan.
The book controversially tells the story of a sexual relationship between an upper-class woman and a working-class man, using what were originally deemed sexually explicit scenes and then-unprintable four-letter words.
Though the uncensored version of the book has been accepted since the beginning of the 1960s (recall Philip Larkin‘s poem on the new permissiveness resulting from “the end of the Chatterley ban”), Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not considered one of Lawrence’s best works. It’s been said that, though the novel has a high purpose–decrying the problems of the coal-mining industry and the soulless, emasculated modern man (as exemplified in Clifford Chatterley)–it fails in its promoting of an appreciation of sensuality as a solution.
Many film, TV, radio, and theatre adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been made, including a 2022 film released late that year in UK cinemas and on Netflix.
Three major rifts are dealt with in the novel: mind vs body, the upper vs lower classes, and industrialization vs nature. Lawrence felt that it was a modern tragedy that the mind and body are so alienated from each other, often involving an excessive pursuit of intellectual interests while ignoring sensuality. Impotent Clifford especially personifies this problem, but it also expresses itself in the “tentative love affairs” of sisters Hilda and Constance (Lawrence, page 3). Lawrence’s ideal was an integration of mind and body through sensuality (page 340)–hence, the book’s frank expression of sex through the use of “taboo words” (page 367).
Lawrence also contrasts the beauty and vitality of nature with the mechanistic monotony of modern, industrialized life, a theme dealt with in his other novels. This issue can and should be tied in with the theme of class conflict.
As for the rift between the upper and lower classes as depicted in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I wish to begin by saying that I have no illusions about Lawrence’s politics, which in all, seem to have been all over the place, as one looks over the course of his whole life. The novel itself is a paradox, having content to upset conservatives while also having a conservative, even stylistically Victorian, formality.
The only consistent idea I can find, from a cursory reading of Lawrence’s political philosophy, is an advocacy of individualism. Such writers as Terry Eagleton and Bertrand Russell found Lawrence to be reactionary, right-wing, and even proto-fascist in his thinking (during WWI). On the other hand, and I find this significant in relation to when he wrote and circulated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wrote in 1924 that he believed “a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government.” Also, in the late 1920s, he told his sister he would vote Labour if he was living in England.
So, though he certainly despised Soviet-style socialism as much as he did fascism (in his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he denounces “the State” in general–pages 352-353), sympathy for a generalized kind of socialism wasn’t all that far away from his mind. He was, after all, the son of a miner. It might be reasonable to think that he, in his later years, had at least some partiality towards libertarian socialism, if the above references are truly representative of his political thinking towards the end of his life.
In any case, in his “A Propos,” he wrote of a better time in England’s history, of men and women living in harmony with nature, moving to the rhythms of the days and seasons (page 356); from which today’s industrialized world has been a sad decline. He recognizes modern alienation, and the class antagonisms that inevitably result from it (page 365); but in my opinion, he misdiagnosed the problem, claiming that, instead of the cause being capitalism, it is a lack of pagan “blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness.”
Addled by bourgeois biases that one born in a working-class family in the late 19th century surely wouldn’t have had, Lawrence imagines that “In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying, and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream.” (pages 365-366) I find it extraordinary how someone can reconcile the squires’ attitude with the people through “the same blood-stream.” Those denying the classist nature of the world’s problems always find some bizarre alternate cause: the Jews, the Freemasons, the NWO, “corporatism,” or in Lawrence’s case, a shifting away from pagan harmony with nature and away from an embracing of frank sensuality.
Yet it is precisely the capitalist seizure of the Commons, forcing the poor farmers to move to the cities and sell their only salable commodity, their labour, to the industrialists, mining companies, etc., that has led to our modern alienation from nature, from each other, and from our sexuality. Lawrence saw the actual problems, but misinterpreted them.
Therefore, in my analysis, though my Marxist reading of his novel won’t be what he meant, I believe it will uncover the true nature of the problems he addressed in it: alienation from our species-essence (body vs mind), industrial capitalism (industrialization vs nature), and class antagonisms (upper vs lower classes).
After having had those “tentative love affairs,” Constance “Connie” Reid marries Clifford Chatterley, an aristocrat, when she’s 23, in 1917. A month after the marriage, he is sent to fight in WWI, and he returns paralyzed from the waist down, rendering him impotent.
Now, for Lawrence, Clifford is largely an allegorical figure, his paralysis and impotence making him the personification of the life of the mind without the body, since Clifford takes up writing and chats with a number of intellectuals, leaving Connie to feel isolated. Note that one of the criticisms of this novel is how characters are reduced to allegorical types, leaving them without depth.
What I would find far more meaningful is to say that it was the very imperialist war that Clifford was made to fight in that is what has scathed him so, since that’s what has literally happened! No allegorical tripe about a mind without a body–simply a recognition that class antagonisms, which he as an aristocrat embodies, led to the imperialist competition over land that was WWI, and has injured him, alienating him from his species-essence, him mind alienated from his body.
Note that class struggle, be it in the forms of the master/slave, feudal lord/peasant, or bourgeois/proletarian, causes hurt to the powerful as well as the powerless, in that the powerful are always pressured to stay on top, always in fear of losing their power. When we see Clifford so deprived of his manhood (for this fear of the loss of power extends, of course, to the patriarchal family), psychologically as well as physically (recall his later being mothered by Mrs. Bolton), we can see how true this fear of loss of power is, and how this fear is dramatized in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The threat to the power of the patriarchal family is easily seen in Clifford’s having lost the ability to procreate, and therefore to pass the family name and property directly from father to son. When he tells Connie he’s willing to have her get pregnant by another man, as long as he’s of high birth, she doesn’t love the other man, and the baby is understood to be Clifford’s, we are then reminded of a quote from James Joyce‘s Ulysses:
“Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten…Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (Joyce, page 266)
Accordingly, Connie has a brief affair, not yet with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, but first with a visiting Irish playwright named Michaelis. In all of this we can see the flimsy foundation that patrilineal succession is laid on: the whole point behind the maintenance of a man’s power and authority over his wife is to ensure, at least within reason, that he is, indeed, the father of all of the children in his home.
To that end, girls are expected to be virgins on their wedding night, wives are forbidden to have affairs (whereas adulterous husbands are given more of a slap on the wrist), women are discouraged from having careers (for fear of their independence leading to them having affairs), and sons, being the heirs of the family name and property, are treated better than daughters.
We already see in Lady Chatterley’s Lover the beginnings of the breakdown of the patriarchal family system, which writers like Friedrich Engels recognized as intimately linked with systems of class oppression, in how Connie has lost her virginity before even marrying Clifford. The bohemian lifestyle she learned from her father, Sir Malcolm, a painter and unabashed sensualist. Her affair with Michaelis makes her later liaison with Mellors not at all surprising.
In his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence goes on and on about his advocacy of monogamy and marriage, which is an odd way to defend a novel in which the sympathetic characters are committing adultery, trying to get divorced, and only hopeful of getting married by the end. One should remember that there’s a difference between an author’s conscious, stated intentions in writing a novel, and his unconscious reasons for presenting it the way he has.
With the original banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence would have been accused of trying to corrupt public morals (page 345). An impassioned and lengthy defence of monogamy and marriage, as seen in his “A Propos,” is thus not at all surprising. For this reason, I would take his defence of marriage with a grain of salt.
His novel was meant, according to him, as a championing of “true phallic marriage” (page 360), of monogamy with the right admixture of sensuality, of the union of body and mind. That may be all well and fine, but the average reader probably isn’t going to receive that message; one often doesn’t remember all the details that Lawrence was hoping one would retain in reading his book, let alone link those details in a way that makes his message of advocating ‘sensual marriage’ clear.
Instead, the reader will, rightly or wrongly, more likely glean from Lady Chatterley’s Lover an advocacy of free love and sex for mere physical pleasure. All the things the moralists of yesteryear were condemning the book for. In this, we can see how Lawrence’s critics have said that his novel hasn’t quite succeeded in the purpose he claimed it had.
For such reasons as these, and now that we live in a more liberal world, one far more tolerant of novels, films, etc., the deal more frankly with sexuality, I feel that we can reinterpret the meaning of Lawrence’s novel in our own way, and therefore can reconsider and reappraise it, that is, in a more favourable way. A key hint to how that reinterpretation and reappraisal can be made is in seeing how the novel deals with class, which is also an important feature of the sexual relationship between Connie and Mellors.
Connie is from the upper classes, married to an aristocrat. Mellors is of the working class. Their coming together, as such, in a sexual union is as much a shock to people like Clifford and Hilda as is their adultery and lewdness. We Marxists might look on such a union, as I did with the sex scene between Alexander and Maria in Tarkovsky‘s film, The Sacrifice, as symbolic of the dissolving of class differences.
Now, just as with Lawrence’s pro-marriage arguments, his openly-expressed disdain for socialism, particularly the Soviet kind (page 352), as we read in his “A Propos” and in his other statements at other times of his life, is something we can take with a grain of salt, especially when we place them in historical context. Just as there was opposition to frank, four-letter expressions of sexuality back then, so was there opposition throughout the bourgeois Western world to socialism (consider the proliferation of fascism in the 1920s as an example).
Lawrence’s depiction of the hard, soulless life of the Tevershall miners could easily have been interpreted as an indirect advocacy of socialism, even if Lawrence hadn’t intended such a reading. To protect his reputation from the “commie” label would have been a strong motive for him to speak ill of socialism, regardless of his actual feelings about the ideology. After all, recall how Marx had to deal with the accusation of communists apparently wishing to abolish marriage, and to hold women in common (it can be found in The Communist Manifesto, II: Proletarians and Communists, 37-38–link above).
Now, Mellors is working-class, but he’s more than that. In the army in WWI, he was a lieutenant. He is also well-read and intelligent. When speaking, he sometimes shifts from the accent of one from the middle class to his Derbyshire accent, a more working-class dialect. When speaking in this latter manner, he often uses those four-letter words. But during his more articulate moments, we can see in him the potential of the working class to rise up to something higher.
In the case of Connie, though she’s from the upper class and married to a minor nobleman, her previous bohemian lifestyle, current affair with Mellors, and her attempts at imitating his Derbyshire accent, as well as her learning his naughty words (pages 194-195), all symbolize her willingness to come down, just as Mellors is capable of coming up. This mobility of theirs shows how, in the world of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the boundaries between the lower and upper classes are blurred.
“And now she touched him, and it was the sons of god with the daughters of men.” (pages 191-192) As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the coming-together of such worlds as the divine and human ones is something thought best to be kept separate. Connie’s and Mellors’s sexual union is just such a union socially frowned on.
Just as Connie and Mellors, as well as their coming together, are relatable and sympathetic, so is Clifford, as an aristocrat who is totally out of touch with the real world, totally unrelatable and unsympathetic. His impotence, weakness, and infantile dependence on Mrs. Bolton can all be seen to represent the modern fading-away into irrelevance of the nobility and all things feudal.
His impotence, as it relates to Lawrence’s idealizing of sensuality, is not something Clifford can be faulted with, since it was the result of a war injury and therefore beyond his control. For such reasons as this, I feel that a more legitimate criticism of him is based on his class arrogance and pursuit of money and power on the one hand, and his helpless dependance on workers like Mrs. Bolton on the other.
Indeed, his Oedipal dependence on her can easily be related to the final stage of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic, in which the slave, through the accumulated labour value of all of his or her work for the master, has rendered the master so helpless and dependent that the roles of powerful and powerless are traded. Accordingly, Mrs. Bolton’s attitude towards Clifford is paradoxically one of admiration and worship of his nobility, yet also of contempt for his arrogance. “She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power.” (page 88) She is a mother to him, adoring her sweet baby, yet also looking down on the pathetic weakling.
In contrast to Clifford’s vain pretensions to being a part of the literary world, we have the earthy language of Mellors, with its fucks, cunts, arses, pisses, shits, etc. He is a double of Clifford in many ways, though a much more sympathetic version. He, too, has been cuckolded by his wife (Bertha Coutts), whom he hasn’t yet divorced, as Clifford never divorces Connie within the confines of the novel. Mellors is aloof and sarcastic, not wishing to socialize much, paralleling Clifford’s arrogant disconnect from the people. He, too, was scathed while serving in WWI, though he suffered pneumonia from it, rather than paralysis. Mellors, however, has a nobility from his inner character, rather than from a position of birth. He is the stud that Clifford can never be.
His use of four-letter words, as well as his sex scenes with Connie, contrast with Clifford’s abandonment of the body in a way that can symbolize something Lawrence never wrote of in his “A Propos”: the superiority of a materialist philosophy to that of idealism, making possible a Marxist spin on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Four-letter words give most physical expression to the sexual and biological acts they refer to, an all-too physical expression for prudish minds.
More can be said on the novel’s preference of materialism to idealism, as seen on page 258, when Connie says this to Clifford: “Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind…With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb.” (my emphasis)
As far as the bad-mouthing of “Bolshevism” in the novel is concerned, in Chapter IV in particular, consider the sources of it. Bolshevism is “hate of the bourgeois,” according to Charlie May, to which Tommy Dukes agrees “Absolutely”; Hammond would “deny that Bolshevism is logical,” and he says, “The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent”; Berry considers Bolshevism to be as “half-witted” as “[their] social life in the west” (pages 38-39). There’s of course no way Clifford would ever approve of “Bolshevism.” When Connie coldly doesn’t kiss him goodnight, he imagines her to be a “bolshevik” (page 52), projecting his own coldness onto her.
But who are all of these men, in the world that Lawrence constructed? They aren’t at all sympathetic. None of them has the required, vaunted sensuality. These intellectuals are all talk and no action, engaging in empty, meaningless discussions on love, sex, and politics. They personify what I said above about how inferior idealism is to materialism.
Lawrence recognizes the evils that come from money and greed: “Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” (page 104) Mellors, to a great extent the spokesman of Lawrence, imagines he’ll protect Connie from “the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanical greed.” (page 130)
Still, Lawrence acknowledged, through Mellors’s experiences, how “if you were poor and wretched you had to care [about money]…the care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes.” (page 155)
Shortly after the above quote, we have Mellors thinking about how much he wants to have Connie “in his arms” (page 156). He goes over to the Chatterley’s house, in his wish to be close to her. Mrs. Bolton sees him through the window, recognizes him by his nearby dog, and realizes that he is Lady Chatterley’s lover. (page 158)
This juxtaposition of his recognition of the need for money with his need to be with Connie, even to the point of going over to Clifford’s house in the hope of seeing her, is significant. Clifford has, in abundance, all the things that working-class Mellors needs: money, “the woman” (page 156), and the property.
Mellors’s making love with Clifford’s wife, the taking of the aristocrat’s ‘property’ (recall what I said above about Engels and the relationship of the patriarchal family with the origins of property), is thus symbolically a revolutionary act. We see here the connection between capitalism and patrilineage, and how Mellors’s affair with Connie–his seizing of the means of reproduction, as it were–is a defiance of these two forms of ownership. Mellors going over to Clifford’s house is also symbolic defiance.
On pages 166-167 there is a vivid description of Connie’s experience, during a car ride to Uthwaite, of “the long squalid straggle of Tevershall” (pages 165-166). Here we have a depiction of the harsh life of the English working class, of the local miners and where they live…”all went by ugly, ugly, ugly…”
As Connie looks on the ugliness of Tevershall with horror, she shudders at the thought of producing an heir to Wragby, thus continuing this classist state of affairs. Lawrence may have insisted on his diagnosis that the problem of the “Half-corpses, all of them” [that is, the Teverhsall workers] is because industrialization has cut the men away from the rhythms of nature, yet as I said above, it was precisely the development of industrial capitalism, the ruthless pursuit of profit, that brought about that cutting away.
It’s the elephant in the room that Lawrence, addled by anti-Sovietism, completely missed. “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.” (page 171) Put another way, capitalist England stole the Commons from the English farmers, forcing them to look for work in the ugly, industrialized cities.
On pages 174-175, Connie further contemplates the ugliness and death-like state of the miners. One senses her feelings of alienation from these men, their alienation from each other, and each man’s alienation from his species-essence.
After having contemplated the miners, Connie returns home, and she sees Mellors there. Just as the miners work for Clifford, so is Mellors “One of Clifford’s hirelings!” (page 177). Immediately after, the novel quotes Julius Caesar, with two lines from Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Act I, scene ii, lines 140-141)
In the context of this section of Lawrence’s novel, with Connie’s having just contemplated the plight of the miners, of Mellors similar position as a “hireling,” and “an underling,” the Shakespeare quote, meant to rouse Brutus to join Cassius’ conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, is implicitly being used to suggest the need for a revolt of the “underlings” against Clifford.
Immediately after is a discussion between Connie and Mrs. Bolton about the death of the latter’s husband in the mining pit (pages 178-179). So again, by way of juxtaposition, we see a linking of the suffering of the miners, and of that of Mellors, with the death of Mrs. Bolton’s husband in the pit–all examples of the oppression of the working class.
Mrs. Bolton speaks of the alienation caused by those “as runs the pit…they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they’re [physically] together.” The killing of her husband was just such a separation, the taking of him from her.
Such alienation finds its opposite in the lovemaking between Connie and Mellors, especially when she orgasms in Chapter XII. “Beauty! What beauty!…How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled?” (page 192) It is just after this lovemaking, her first with him that feels warm and wonderful, instead of ridiculously distant, that she repeatedly asks him if he loves her (she manages to squeak a yes out of the otherwise aloof man), and she imitates his Derbyshire dialect and dirty words. In all of this, we can sense their growing togetherness.
In the following chapter, we get a sense of Clifford’s arrogant attitude towards the miners, him wishing to prevent them from striking without their consent (page 197). Connie, with him in the woods, gets into an argument with him about the miners’ plight, and his callous attitude towards them. Again, given our sympathy to her and antipathy to him, we can safely conclude that the narrative is far more favourable to the working class than to the upper class, despite Lawrence’s denials.
After the argument, Clifford’s motorized wheelchair gets stuck on a steep incline. He wants Mellors to fix it. Stubborn Clifford insists on trying to get up the incline without any help from Mellors or Connie, but it becomes obvious that only a push from them will get the wheelchair up.
In this scene, so humiliating for Clifford, we see the fall of the pride of the man who just spoke of the strength and responsibility of the aristocracy over the workers. Clifford’s powerlessness represents the waning power and relevance of the upper classes.
Mellors’s helping of Clifford, despite exhausting himself because of how his pneumonia has weakened him, puts him in the same position as mothering Mrs. Bolton: we see again the final stage of the slave/master dialectic, with Mellors’s rising power and Clifford’s decline, a contrast paralleled with the former’s phallic potency vs the latter’s lack of it.
Yet if Clifford feels physically and psychologically emasculated, so has Mellors felt that way, if only psychologically so. He tells Connie of his past sexual experiences with those women who weren’t interested in sex, those who “had nearly taken all the balls out of [him]” (page 221). Then came Bertha Coutts, who liked sex all too much for Mellors’s liking. Too sexually aggressive for him, she had a vagina that “was a beak tearing at [him],” like a vagina dentata.
So as I said above, Mellors is in a number of ways a double of Clifford. Bertha’s sexual aggression, relative to Mellors, is parallel to Connie’s sexual aggression, relative to Clifford. Commenting on Mellors’s experience of his wife, she quotes As You Like It and says that he had “too much of a good thing.” Some criticize the novel’s depiction of Bertha, treating her sexual aggression as a bad thing, as not acceptably ‘womanly’; but it’s not that she has desires that are ‘unwomanly,’ for Melors is happy to have a woman who wants sex. It’s just that she’s too aggressive about it, even for him.
Added to Bertha’s excesses are her fleeing to another man while Mellors was in the army in India, and all of her troublemaking while Connie is in Venice, stirring up the gossip about his affair with Connie, which leads to Mellors getting fired. Bertha has psychologically castrated him many times, but he’s a far more sympathetic character than Clifford.
Mellors seems to be ambivalent about the issues that socialism raises. On the one hand, he has a bookshelf including “books about bolshevist Russia” (page 233), yet on the other, he blames “a steady sort of bolshevism [for] just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing.” (page 238) Still, he recognizes that “We’re forced to make a bit [of money] for us-selves, an’ a fair lot for th’bosses.” (page 240) He would “wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.” (page 242)
Recall what I said above about the capitalists starting industrialization, something Lawrence isn’t interested in acknowledging. Now, the Bolsheviks, of course, industrialized, too (i.e., Stalin beginning his Five-Year Plans around the time that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written), but with the aim of building up the productive forces in order ultimately to end capitalism and the alienation it causes. Capitalists industrialize only to maximize profit, not to provide for all.
In contrast to all this antipathy towards mechanistic, ugly industrialization, our two lovers adore all that is nature; and during a heavy rain, they both strip naked (Connie first) and run out into it and get soaked (pages 242-243). Back inside after having made love out there, they get warm by the fire, he strokes her buttocks and “secret entrances” (page 244), he admires her beautiful body, and they discuss plans of running away together, having their baby, and divorcing their spouses…acts of liberation!
Intertwining flowers in each other’s pubic hair, they imagine a wedding of their genitals, naming them “John Thomas” and “Lady Jane.” Incidentally, Lawrence at one point considered naming his novel John Thomas and Lady Jane.
Another example of the novel’s acknowledgement of how problematic class is comes when Hilda learns that her sister’s lover is working class. Hilda, of course, disapproves (page 262), for “she loathed any ‘lowering’ of oneself, or the family.” She imagines the affair will end, but this is wish-fulfillment. “One can’t mix up with the working people.” (page 265)
Hilda, when meeting Mellors, dislikes him even more, from hearing his Derbyshire dialect. She’d rather he spoke “natural,” or “normal English” (page 268), since it would sound more pleasing to her “solid Scotch middle class” disposition. (page 262)
Now, Connie would naturally defend Mellors against her sister’s snobbish judgements of him, but her own upper-middle-class prejudices rise up from her unconscious when she, in Venice now, has learned of Bertha’s stirring up of trouble back home (page 290). She imagines of Mellors, upon hearing of his wife’s excesses, that “He was perhaps really common, really low,” and she worries about the “humiliating” damage done to her reputation if Clifford should learn about her affair with Mellors.
Her father, Sir Malcolm, warms up to Mellors soon enough after meeting him back in England; but when Clifford finally learns of the affair, he regresses to such a childlike state that, kissed consolingly by maternal Mrs. Bolton, he is “in a relaxation of madonna-worship.” (page 320) When he learns that the other man is Mellors, though, Clifford is in such a fury that he says she “ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!” (page 326) This choice of words, by the way, is interesting in how they echo Mellors’s wish to wipe machines off the face of the earth. Note how the antipathies of the upper class are diametrically opposed to those of the working class. Mellors would wipe out machines that destroy the proletariat; Clifford would wipe out women who defy the patriarchal family. Accordingly, he refuses to divorce her.
In a letter to Connie, Mellors–who is in the process of working out his divorce from Bertha–discusses such things as the workers wanting to nationalize industry, and wanting to establish a Soviet; he shows his ambivalence about such things again (page 324). He says the men are doomed, and he makes a thinly-veiled reference to Lenin: “they go about as if there was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done.” (page 330)
He then speaks of his preference of a society unconcerned with money (one might recall, in this connection, that one of the ultimate goals of communist society is that it should be money-less). Instead, Mellors would have everybody dancing about like pagans who “acknowledge the great god Pan”–more of Lawrence’s vague solutions to modern problems.
Among the last things that Mellors says to Connie in his letter, which brings the novel to an end, is his dialectic, as it were, of chastity and fucking, the former of which he equates with the snow of winter, and the latter of which he equates with spring. He says, “So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking.” (page 332)
He puts it this way because he and Connie have to wait until both are properly divorced before they can marry and therefore resume their lovemaking. They must be patient before they can have that sensual pleasure again. For him, “it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in [his] soul.” (page 332)
This chastity is like a building-up of reserved passion, to be held in until finally they can be together again, to release that passion in a fiery explosion of sex. I’m reminded of the Hindu concept of tapas, which in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty‘s book, Siva: the Erotic Ascetic, is defined as “The heat of asceticism.” (O’Flaherty, page 324) Elsewhere in her book, she speaks of tapas in this way: “Chastity was characteristic of Indian asceticism from the very start. The Upanishads say that one may realize the Self by practising tapas in the forest, free from passion…Sexual excitement represented a threat against which the ascetic must constantly be on guard. When Brahma desired his daughter, he lost all the tapas which he had amassed in order to create…Although in human terms asceticism is opposed to sexuality and fertility, in mythological terms tapas is itself a powerful creative force, a generative power of ascetic heat.” (pages 40, 41)
So Lady Chatterley’s Lover ends with the hope that Connie, with child by Mellors, will be with him again one day. Then, the winter of their chaste discontent will be made glorious spring by this son of a fuck.
As we know, Lawrence bemoaned modern, industrialized England’s decline from its earlier world, in which men and women lived in harmony with nature, and the body and the mind weren’t alienated from each other, but unified in freely-expressed sensuality. Though his novel depicts the barriers of class in all their ugliness, he seems to prefer old English tradition to a socialist resolving of the class problem, which is odd, given his portrayal of aristocratic Clifford as not only weak and ineffectual, but also unsympathetic, perpetuating industrialization and its killing of the workers’ souls, just so he can make more money…like a capitalist.
It is for these reasons that I feel that a Marxist reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in spite of how different Lawrence claimed his intentions were in his “A Propos” of the novel, is by far the easiest and best interpretation of it. A writer may claim that his novel means one thing while he’s unconsciously meant something quite different. He might intentionally mislead us about his intentions, to protect us from knowing its real meaning and therefore not spoiling us with its secrets, or to protect himself against allegations of corrupting morals or promoting socialism, as I speculated above. In any case, I don’t feel bound to keeping my interpretations in conformity with his “A Propos,” and I therefore feel free to interpret as I wish.
Connie’s affair with Mellors, as I see it, is a symbolic act of revolt against the patriarchal family and the class system, two social problems that are intermixed. The frank expression of sexuality, with its four-letter words, is connected with the advocacy of such a revolt, since, despite Lawrence’s denials, it’s a case of épater la bourgeoisie. The lovers’ bearing of a child that is not Clifford’s is a symbolic termination of the patriarchal family and the upper classes, all in one stroke.
Connie’s and Mellors’s union is that of the upper and lower classes, a symbolic blurring of class distinctions. Their leaving of Tevershall and Wragby is a turning of one’s back on the ugliness of industrial capitalism. I’d say the book’s censorship had even more to do with this political subversiveness than the dirty words…even if Lawrence had never intended it.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York, Bantam Classics, 1968
Infinite Ocean 
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