Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981): Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981) Chatterleys Lady Lover is a film adapted from the novel by D.H. Lawrence. After a war injury makes the husband impotent. Lady Chatterley is torn between love for her husband and the demands of her body. With the permission of her husband, she is looking for other ways to fill the gap ...
Lady Chatterley's Lover
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This article is about the novel. For other uses, see Lady Chatterley's Lover (disambiguation).
First edition
| |
| Author | D. H. Lawrence |
|---|---|
| Country | Italy (1st publication) |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Romance Erotic |
| Publisher | Tipografia Giuntina |
Publication date
| 1928 |
| Preceded by | John Thomas and Lady Jane (1927) |
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy, and in 1929 in France and Australia.[1] An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case, and quickly sold 3 million copies.[1] The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where he grew up. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.[2] Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three versions.
Plot introduction[edit]
The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, the novel's title character. The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.
Themes[edit]
In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence comes full circle to argue once again for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man). Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure. There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman whom he respects intellectually and, at the same time, finds desirable. There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, his caring nurse, after Connie has left.
Mind and body[edit]
Richard Hoggart argues that the main subject of Lady Chatterley's Lover is not the sexual passages that were the subject of such debate but the search for integrity and wholeness.[3] Key to this integrity is cohesion between the mind and the body for "body without mind is brutish; mind without body... is a running away from our double being."[4] Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the incoherence of living a life that is "all mind", which Lawrence saw as particularly true among the young members of the aristocratic classes, as in his description of Constance's and her sister Hilda's "tentative love-affairs" in their youth:
The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each has with their previous relationships: Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband who is "all mind" and Mellors's choice to live apart from his wife because of her "brutish" sexual nature.[6] These dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that builds very slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors develops, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body; she learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act, and he learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love.
Neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Blechner identifies the "Lady Chatterley phenomenon" in which the same sexual act can affect people in different ways at different times, depending on their subjectivity.[7] He bases it on the passage in which Lady Chatterley feels disengaged from Mellors and thinks disparagingly about the sex act: "And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with hands inert on his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical. Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis."[8] Shortly thereafter, they make love again, and this time, she experiences enormous physical and emotional involvement: "And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass."[9]
Class[edit]
Lady Chatterley’s Lover also presents some views on the British social context of the early 20th century. This is most evidently seen in the plot; the affair of an aristocratic woman (Connie) with a working class man (Mellors). This is heightened when Mellors adopts the local broad Derbyshire dialect, something he can slip in and out of. Critic and writer Mark Schorer writes of the forbidden love of a woman of relatively superior social situation who is drawn to an "outsider" (a man of lower social rank or a foreigner). He considers this a familiar construction in D.H. Lawrence's works, in which the woman either resists her impulse or yields to it.[10] Schorer believes the two possibilities were embodied, respectively, in the situation into which Lawrence was born, and that into which Lawrence married, therefore becoming a favourite topic in his work.
There is a clear class divide between the inhabitants of Wragby and Tevershall, bridged by the nurse Mrs Bolton. Clifford is more self assured in his position, whereas Connie is often thrown when the villagers treat her as a Lady (for instance when she has tea in the village). This is often made explicit in the narration, for instance:
There are also signs of dissatisfaction and resentment from the Tevershall coal pit colliers, whose fortunes are in decline, against Clifford who owns the mines. Involved with hard, dangerous and health-threatening employment, the unionised and self-supporting pit-village communities in Britain have been home to more pervasive class barriers than has been the case in other industries (for an example, see chapter two of The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell.) They were also centres of widespread non-conformist (Non-Anglican Protestant) religion, which tended to hold especially proscriptive views on matters such as adultery. References to the concepts of anarchism, socialism, communism and capitalism permeate the book. Union strikes were also a constant preoccupation in Wragby Hall.
Coal mining is a recurrent and familiar theme in Lawrence's life and writing due to his background, and is also prominent in Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, as well as short stories such as Odour of Chrysanthemums.
Industrialisation and nature[edit]
As in much of Lawrence's fiction, a key theme is the contrast between the vitality of nature and the mechanised monotony of mining and industrialism. Clifford wants to reinvigorate the mines with new technology and is out of touch with the natural world.[12] In contrast, Connie often appreciates the beauty of nature and sees the ugliness of the mines in Uthwaite. Her heightened sensual appreciation applies not just to her sexual relationship with Mellors, but to nature too.
Controversy[edit]
An edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in Britain in 1932 by Martin Secker; reviewing it in The Observer, Gerald Gould noted that "passages are necessarily omitted to which the author undoubtedly attached supreme psychological importance – importance so great, that he was willing to face obloquy and misunderstanding and censorship because of them".[13] An authorised abridgment of Lady Chatterley's Lover that was heavily censored was published in America by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1928. This edition was subsequently reissued in paperback in America by Signet Books in 1946.
British obscenity trial[edit]
Main article: R v Penguin Books Ltd.
When the full unexpurgated edition was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Another objection related to the use of the word "cunt".
Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".
The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'not guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom".
In 2006, the trial was dramatized by BBC Wales as The Chatterley Affair.
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