Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by D. H. Lawrence Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Book Review: Sensuality, 1920s style
Summary: 4 Stars
I was first introduced to D.H. Lawrence in a Brit Lit class when I was in college. We read SONS AND LOVERS, and I was totally blown away by Lawrence's verdant prose and by the novel's brutal, uncomfortable beauty. My professor mentioned LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER frequently while we were studying Lawrence, and since then I've wanted to read this later, more well-known, more controversial work. Finally, two years after that class, I got around to it.
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER tells the story of a young woman named Constance Reid, who marries Sir Clifford Chatterley when he's home on leave for a month from the battlefields of World War I. After a month of honeymooning, Clifford must return to the war; and sadly, when he returns six months later, he comes home "more or less in bits," paralyzed from the waist down. The newlyweds settle at Clifford's family home, Wragby, near the industrialized town of Tevershall.
Although Clifford cannot please Constance sexually, he and his wife are intellectually connected; they make love with words, and at first this is enough for Constance. However, a brief affair with one of Clifford's colleagues makes Connie aware of her more carnal needs, of her desire for physical pleasure.
Enter Oliver Mellors, the Chatterleys' groundskeeper who lives a life of solitude in a secluded wooded cabin. In Mellors, Connie is awakened to a higher consciousness, to the power of sexual pleasure and mutual satisfaction. Her relationship with Mellors helps her emerge from her cocoon of prudishness to become a highly sexualized being. The affair continues under Clifford's nose, and he is either too inattentive to notice or just pretends not to.
As a baronet, Clifford is in a position of power, but he finds himself completely powerless. The mines of Tevershall, which he controls, are dying; and not only is his industry dead, so is his sexuality. He, and his business, are impotent. What makes him so interesting is the almost tender way in which Lawrence portrays him. The scene in which he tries desperately to force his wheelchair's dying motor to roll uphill while Connie and Mellors look on is particularly heartbreaking. Clifford is vain, and he has no use for sex or other things of a physical nature, but he also knows that the only way he can produce an heir is if Connie has sex with another man and allows Clifford to claim the child as his own. His lack of power, and his reaction to the knowledge of it, make him compelling.
Unlike Clifford, Connie's other love interest, Oliver Mellors, is confident and unashamed and almost pagan in his celebration of physicality. He's a surprisingly endearing character, a common man with some very intelligent things to say, who isn't intimidated by class boundaries, who doesn't chastise himself for ravishing a married woman.
Constance Chatterley is a woman awakening to her sexual self, and Lawrence chronicles her metamorphosis in explicit, sensitive detail. It's suprising how well Lawrence was able to write from a woman's perspective. However, Connie's perception of her ideal relationship near the end of the novel probably didn't quite ring true for many female readers of the time (at least, not that they would admit): "Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. All that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease!" It's observations like this that made LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER so controversial.
LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER has probably remained so popular for 80 years because of its sexual content, which was undoubtedly completely immoral for the time period in which is was written. But of course the content is not anything too shocking in today's world of pay-per-view pornography and busty women on the covers of erotic fiction sold in supermarkets everywhere. However, this book shouldn't be bunched into that category, by today's standards or any other age's; I would like to think LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER is still popular today because of Lawrence's incredibly brave writing.
Lawrence expounds on many controversial ideas in this, his last major novel before his death in 1930. The novel is rife with criticism of post-WWI England and the failures of industrialization to support a growing economy. Lawrence believes sensuality should be the means of connecting with environment, not through the workings of iron and gritty coal. In LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, industry is impotent; but men and women are sexually alive.
My only issue with the novel is that some of the sex scenes are absolutely ridiculous, and read like Lawrence was writing them merely for the shock factor. His language is often unnecessarily crude, and the whole "John Thomas" and "Lady Jane" thing is just silly. However, this ridiculousness is balanced nicely with some beautiful, sensual descriptions: Connie's first orgasm, the use of twined flowers to symbolize purity in love, the beautiful language Mellors uses in his letter to Connie at the end of the novel: "I love the chastity now that it flows between us. It is like fresh water and rain...like a river of cool water in my soul."
It's undeniable that Lawrence's prose is absolutely intoxicating and exciting, and he proves it again and again in the pages of this novel, written even as his life was ending. And that's what makes LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER memorable: not the sex, but the words used to describe the sex. LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER is an intimate look at love and sex, a novel whose popularity has remained for 80 years--and probably will remain far into the future, and rightfully so.
Book Review: ruined by its ignorance of female sexuality
Summary: 1 Stars
I found this book embarrassing to read - not because it's risque, but because it so clearly illustrates how the French & Italians got their reputations as great lovers. Is this the best that English literature can give us? This fellow clearly understands little of female anatomy, let alone female sexuality.
It's also mean-spirited. Lawrence proves his points by setting up his version of idealized man and even more idealized woman, and then spends most of the book trying to knock down every other character and concept. This is his only real method of proving the superiority of his ideal. He drips way too much contempt.
Everything outside of sex is dumb, meaningless, ridiculous. Attempting to derive enjoyment from the "mental life" makes one ridiculous; being paralyzed makes one ridiculous; trying to have sex in any way outside Lawrence's own true and correct way makes one pathetic, or defective, or spiteful; not being able to enjoy the sort of lovemaking Lawrence proposes makes one undeserving of the title of "woman" or "man"; and so on.
Looking at Italian art is stupid. Everything in Paris is stupid. Constance can apparently tell from a glance that nobody in France knows how to have sex properly.
Reading the book without his openly contemptuous commentary on what's "wrong" with everyone except C. and M., one might easily conclude that Constance doesn't really seem happier now that she's sleeping with the gamekeeper, and Hilda does seem happier in Venice - the author counters this by ridiculing "that kind" of happiness as delusional and druglike. He even seems to imply that her being so pleased with her life is yet more proof that there's something wrong with her. Of course Constance is wretched, because she does not have that one thing that, in Lawrence's view, really matters in life - not Mellors, but Mellors' equipment. This book does degenerate into phallus-worship, which makes the author's hostility toward "druglike" pleasures seem sort of ironically comical.
Hilda is pathetic precisely because she can derive enjoyment from sensual pleasures: from Venice, from the feel of the sun, from jazz, from dancing. This seems weird to me - as if Lawrence is punishing the uppity woman. Hilda is also described as worse than pathetic - she is a "user", with strong suggestions that she is cold and immoral - because she enjoys that part of dancing which allows her to press up against a strange man, only to walk away when the dance is over. (This may be why at least one reviewer called the book sexist, since obviously Lawrence doesn't mind if Mellors is callous and behaves as a "user".)
It's actually sort of creepy how an author who seems to be claiming that sensuality is good consistently knocks sensual pleasures like the feel of sunshine on one's body. Everything is stupid except sex - and not just any sex, but his notion of real sex.
This is where astute readers will have the most trouble. Lawrence clearly defines a "real" woman - Constance Chatterly - by contrasting her with bad examples.
A woman who lays there "unfeeling" is clearly an example. Such a woman is described in terms suggesting she lacks warmth/decency/heart/womanhood/etc. Lawrence doesn't even seem to have considered the possibility that maybe what the man is or isn't doing could even be related; it's presented quite clearly as a difference between good/desireable women vs. women who are defective not only physically, but in character.
On the other hand, a woman with an unfeminine urge to be In Control - that is, one who insists on moving herself, rather than sitting passive and letting the man do what he will - is forgivable when Michaelis is the male (because he's premature, and meant to be pathetic), but it turns unforgiveable when it's women in general and especially Mellor's Bertha, who just refused to come when she should out of spite. Bertha just had a sick (!) urge to be In Control, demonstrating her essentially vicious and pathological nature. The only thing Mellors did wrong was to not put her in her place promptly - he "spoilt" her.
As for all those touchy-feely things that women so frequently enjoy? Forget it. Lawrence suggests that Mellors does at least sometimes kiss and touch, but if it happens at all it appears to be mostly incidental, nothing important. A Real Woman doesn't need foreplay. Just hop on and go, and if she's what she ought to be, she'll feel crashing waves and dark tides sooner or later.
These were what I found the most embarrassingly inaccurate - that a woman's duty is to lie there, not too passive, but not too active, and come when she's supposed to (and if she doesn't, it's her own fault); while a man's job is to climb on top and "perform". All of this is based on what ought to be a perfectly logical set of assumptions that are, unfortunately, not true. The truth is that a woman's vagina is not the equal-but-opposite inverse of a male penis; there's a thing that both males and females start out with, which in a man becomes the penis, and in the woman becomes (or remains) a clitoris. Lawrence seems to assume that what a woman feels is similar to what a man feels - but he assigns this feeling to the wrong body part.
Women have always known about their own bodies; surely a man so dedicated to the advancement of sexuality could have and should have taken more time to research how women really feel about things, preferably apart from what women think men "want to hear". This, too, is no doubt why it has been accused of being "sexist". The author (or at least Mellors) openly blames women who cannot or will not "come to the crisis" when she ought, as if it were entirely of the woman's doing and had nothing at all to do with the man.
It's also likely that science will eventually prove (if it hasn't already) that women like Constance Chatterly are not the norm or 'what a woman ought to be' emotionally as well as physically. For all that Lawrence spends an awful lot of energy ripping apart what he sees as silly, even noxious emotions and desires - such as "intimacy" and "connection", both of which he has Constance openly ridicule - biologists are increasingly finding that not only do men and women tend to have different feelings and expectations when it comes to the sex act, but that there is believed to be an evolutionary advantage in these differences, based on the notion that a man's biological job is to get his DNA out there, while reproduction for a woman involves a heavy emotional and physical commitment. If this is true, it would be the woman who takes such a cavalier and reckless attitude toward sex who is the deviant, not the one who wants to connect emotionally with the future sire of her child.
So - while there may or may not be women who feel as Constance does, at the same time it's not so clearly obvious that a woman "should" feel that way, as to justify Lawrence's open belittling of women whose emotional states don't match masculine emotional detachment and distance.
There's a lot of talk of "tenderness" - in fact, Constance keeps mentally accusing everyone in Venice of somehow "lacking tenderness" - but quite frankly I am unclear on what exactly is supposed to be so tender. The only thing he values about her is that he quite clearly likes having sex with her, but even there she only stands out particularly because a good sex partner is so difficult to find.
I can imagine a woman putting up with - but I cannot imagine a woman particularly treasuring - a man who rebuffs her when she wishes to talk, who is rude to her instead of treating her as equal (remembering she's a Lady) when she asks him questions, who calls her c--t as if that were her name, and generally treats her as if she were a whore. I could imagine a woman finding this fun if it were a game they jumped into and out of, but this is how their relationship really is; she spends far too much time begging or wanting to beg him for reassurance - for the things he won't say and the questions he won't answer - for me to find her undiluted enjoyment in their relationship particularly credible.
For what it's worth, I think life will be better when this book has become obsolete. It is exactly this sort of schlock that had women feeling pressured to fake their sexual responses - at great cost to their marriages, if not their selves. Those who agree that heppiness is linked to sexual satisfaction should be in favor of replacing this book with something that deals with sex in a way that reflects female sexuality in an honest and realistic fashion. As for those who just want a good read - I'd call it a matter of personal taste. Obviously some people enjoy this book. (Equally obviously, I did not.)
Book Review: Complex and Beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
I read Lady Chatterly's lover for the first time in high school, and to be honest, it was more for the juicy bits than anything else. Five years later, though, it was an aside from a professor during a lecture on Nabokov that convinced me to pick it up again.
This was the first novel that I'd read where I truly felt an inner conflict brewing - but in a good way. Lady Chatterly's Lover, though banned for its immorality on its publication, is a book that will force a person to question their own morality and moral judgements, and perhaps rethink them.
It is a story of a young woman married to an older man who is confined to a wheel chair due to a war wound. Her husband and she have a respectful relationship, though she does not love him, and though he may love her, he is not particularly attentive. To cure her boredom and satisfy her libido, she turns to adultery. Her first lover is a egotistical Irish writer, but she leaves him quickly over "performance" issues. She finds herself attracted to Oliver, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. They continue the affair under the nose of her husband, who, afraid that she will leave him, pretends not to notice.
Lawrence's writing is sublime, to say the least. His descriptions of the estate are picture perfect, and each scene is told almost cinematically. The characters are perfectly developed; you can feel Lady Chatterly's inner turmoil in the beginning of the novel as she copes with caring for her husband and her unsatisfied libido, without any social outlets but her husband's friends. As she begins her affair with Oliver, you notice how that tension that she held is slowly released - and how her husband, paralyzed and coping with a wife who spends less and less time with him, absorbs this tension. Beautiful read.
Book Review: SURVIVING ON THE RUMORS OF ITS SORDID REPUTATION
Summary: 2 Stars
I heard about this book growing up but didn't read it until just recently (a middle-aged adult) and I have to agree with so many other reviewers who feel its popularity largely stems from the time period in which it was written, i.e., it was SO SHOCKING AND DISGUSTING! Such filth! I mean, that's why I heard about the book when I was growing up. But as so many others have already pointed out, it is tame by today's standards. I also have to agree with another reviewer who wrote that the "female protagonist is completely a male fantasy. The book's message is simply that men like women who are able to climax at the same time as their partners without any need for foreplay or other effort on the man's part..." Now, you see, what struck me about Sir Clifford's situation, and Lady Chatterley's, for that matter, is if they really loved each other, his paralysis from the waist down wouldn't have had to put a stop to his supplying her with orgasms; there ARE other things that can be done, yes? In fact, quite possibly Connie would have had an orgasm for the first time! (Ahem, women readers will know what I mean.) But Clifford treated Connie poorly. With or without the lack of sex issue, I think she would have been emotionally open to an affair anyway. Which to me, just goes to show that a man wrote the book...a man totally out of touch with what really makes a woman tick. Book Review: Couragous Novel; Lawrence is still right about sex
Summary: 5 Stars
People are often confused about sex, not only when this novel was written, but even in this seemingly oversexed era.
DH Lawrence wrote this lyric and sensual book, where the heroine Lady Chatterley, who was well-born and well bred, happens to be married to an invalid, whose injuries were sustained in World War I. Her husband is a baronet, Sir Clifford.
The love interest in the book is Sir Clifford's gamekeeper. Connie Chatterley is not a virgin when she has this affair, but Mellors, (the gamekeeper) awakens her to life, to higher consciousness that comes with tender lovemaking.
It would be insultingly simplistic to say that Lawrence believed lovemaking is really the solution to the poison of industry, mechanization, and lack of awareness and connectedness to one's environment. Although the invalid and sexually incapable Sir Clifford is a symbol of the impotence of modern mechanization, Lawrence believed that lovemaking is only the solution when it's done right. In other words, with tenderness. The author was certainly not advocating misogyny or meaningless sex. He was saying, with sexual love where the lovers have body awareness, as opposed to cerebral awareness, which is from the mind, only part of the body.
Do we have too much sex in our age? What Lawrence would probably say, is that we have too much cerebral sex. We are not connected to our lovemaking.
This book is not pornography. Any one who believes that it is porno should read Lawrence's essay entitled "Pornography", where Lawrence ridicules pornography. Why? Because it does dirt on sex; it makes sex look dirty. In reality, pornographers hate sex; they make it look ugly and trite.
In a digital internet age, like the industrial age of the 1920s, there is no connectedness with the body and the world. Our age is filled with pornography but not filled with the kind of sex Lawrence believed in. The search continues.