Author: DH Lawrence
Publisher: Tipografia Giuntina
Rating: WORTHY!
Read impeccably by Margaret Hilton.
This novel was surprising. Coming into it knowing nothing more about it than what gossip, reputation, and rumor would have you believe, it was quite an eye-opener, but not in the way you might think! The setting is pretty much where I grew up, in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, so in some ways it felt very familiar to me (my home town, Matlock, is mentioned!). Of course, I wasn't around when this novel was written - not even as a twinkle in someone's eye!
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a study in duality: upper class versus lower, human society vs. nature, healthy v. sick, decency v. vulgarity, mind v. body, male v. female, Clifford's wealth v. his impotence, Lady Chatterley's in-two-minds view of life, the gamekeeper's apparent inability to decide which language dialect he wants to speak, but it’s also about similarity. Both of the main protagonists, Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, are married unhappily, although it takes Connie a lot longer to figure this out, and both want the same thing.
While being mindful that it was written and published in the 1920's, in a different era, the story is very ordinary and conventional, particularly by modern standards. It’s about a real love affair between a woman and a man who is of what was then considered a markedly lower social class, but it’s not rife with debauchery and carnality. Far from it. Most of it is ordinary social interaction - which is of course the problem for Lady Constance Chatterley.
And most of it has not seen the sight of four-letter words. On the contrary: it's beautifully written, even in the parts which do contain such words. I honestly don’t care if bad language is used in a novel, if it fits with the story and the characters. Bad things, bad language, bad events, and bad people occur in real life so there's no reason at all why they cannot be realistically depicted in fiction if you have a good story to tell about them.
My biggest problem with this novel was that parts of it were downright boring! It was too long. A good editor would have seriously cropped the sections where Lawrence rambles pointlessly on about social mores and philosophical issues. They don't move the story nor do they contribute to it. The sexual parts of the novel were few and far between, and very tame, especially by modern standards. The philosophical parts were at best mildly interesting, at worse, tedious. On the other hand, there was a lot of humor in the novel, which quite surprised me.
The story itself is about Constance Reid who marries Clifford Chatterley, a man who is a rung or two above her on the social ladder. He is soon called to war (1914-18) and comes back paralyzed from the waist down, having to move himself around in a motorized wheelchair, and needing his wife's assistance with dressing and some other activities.
Connie frequently has contradictory views of her life: feeling that she's in the right place and the wrong place, feeling that things are comfortable and that they're ridiculous, feeling at ease and on edge, feeling that she's happy with her husband, and that she's not. She takes a lover but is ultimately dissatisfied with him. At one point, Clifford suggests that it would be fine with him if she became pregnant by another man, and then the two of them would raise the child as their own, giving Clifford an heir, but Connie cannot think of anyone in their social circle with whom she would wish to make a baby.
The last thing Mrs Chatterley expects is to fall in love with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. He's also a war veteran, having risen above his own class status to the rank of lieutenant. Separated from his wayward wife, he's hired as a gamekeeper for Clifford's estate - one through which Connie is in the habit of walking daily. It’s many months before she first encounters him, and a while longer before they end up in bed together. When it does happen it’s almost like a rape. There is no violence or force involved, and Connie does not refuse or struggle, but neither does she enter into it with any animation at all - she simply lies there, almost in a state of catatonia letting it happen to her. Later though, she determines that she wants more, and becomes a very willing, even proactive participant.
Connie comes to fully realize that there are two sides to her life - the mental and the physical, and the latter has withered, bringing down the mental along with it. She realizes that she needs the physical even as she acknowledges the ridiculousness of the act of physical love. Indeed, her observations on it, both as it happens and in retrospect, are quite entertaining.
It’s the physical which she gets from Mellors, becoming slowly appreciative and then addicted to it after starting out indifferently. Eventually, when she's on vacation with her close and supportive older sister, Hilda, and her father, she realizes two things: that she is in love with Oliver, and that she is pregnant by him. It’s their attempts to find out how they can be together and how they can navigate society's hypocritical and contradictory perspectives on their situation which drives the closing act.
This novel is far from perfect (then which novel is?!), but overall I enjoyed it a lot, found it entertaining and rewarding, and was glad (for once!) that I chose to add this to my reviews of classics. It helped significantly that Margaret Hilton the reader of the audio book version, seemed perfectly suited to reading this. I recommend it.
