Review: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So maybe this was the Fifty Shades of Grey of the '50s? I can see where the explicit sexual passages could get this on banned book lists even today.

All this wild sex punctuates a love affair that is largely one-sided and thus not really passionate Lady Chatterley’s lover takes great pains not to use the l-word and comes across as largely appreciative of the affair as if he had been handed a slice of pie at a picnic; accepting and unappreciative.

This is really, in my mind, more of a post-WW I tale about societal changes, emerging feminism, challenges to class distinction, and emergent individualism. Connie, or Lady Chatterley, and her sisters grew up under the guidance of bohemian free-thinking parents. Her father continues this approach even upon meeting her lover over drinks. Those girls explored their sexuality and then this free spirit selects an introverted, intellectual aristocrat (Clifford). He becomes a WW I paraplegic shortly after their wedding. He is now bound to his wheelchair and his damaged pride. Connie takes up with the artist Michaelis, but is largely unfulfilled by the fling with this started cuckold although another artist (Duncan) figures highly in the complex negotiations that bring a legalistic flavor to the denouement. While wandering in the woods, Connie peeps the new groundskeeper bathing. This Oliver Mellors offers the lustful and carnally satisfying sexual tryst that becomes love, at least for Connie. For Mellor is seems another duty, another onus, only different for its pleasure. This happens while Clifford practically orders Connie to get some discreet affair going so that their sterile marriage can bring in a scion. Later, he expresses surprise that she chose Mellors even though Mellors had written Connie a letter saying he was fired since Clifford found out about them. Which man was being disingenuous?

Mellor’s obscure dialect (Derbyshire? Cockney?) is a slog to get through. Fortunately, he can turn it completely off when the author needs him to say or write a class distinction speech to power the novel’s sociological dimension.

While Clifford had overtly pushed Connie into a free marriage (not that she resisted the push much), she and her sister, Hilda, convince him to hire a nurse, Ivy Bolton. Ivy is crudely direct and Clifford has really a Platonic affair with here, so everyone seems set up to be happy.

Oh yeah, Mellors proudly calls his penis John Thomas and names Connie’s counterpart Lady Jane. This is necessary to pick up on in order to make sense of the final pages… Eventually Connie finds John Thomas has impregnated her. Here plan is to go to Venice with her sister and father to allow ground for a fake affair so Clifford can believe whatever he wants. Everything comes out and Clifford needs to be the winner and wants the heir, so he refuses to allow a divorce. At novel’s end, Mellors learning farming and waiting for his own divorce while Connie is waiting for the baby to be born and her divorce. Just as social issues go on unresolved, so does this dysfunctional group or family and near family.

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