Games keeper! Think about it! I bet that's what most of us think when we think of the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, we think of this cliche. For example, I remember my friend Walter flirting with his handsome gardener and making silly references to D. H. Lawrence. Making jokes to me about my relationship with my gardener. Because frankly, it's a joke. The name Lady Chatterley is code for amorous upper class woman on the prowl. Hard to believe, then, that the novel was at the center of an important obscenity trial in 1960 - a trial that changed the course of literature. What can this novel tell us about sex, about love, or about class today?
As it turns out, it has a lot to say. About sex and domestic intimacy, about class discrepancy, post war grief and about industrialization, That's what my Classic Book Discussion Group discovered when our librarian at Patrick Henry Library in Vienna Virginia recommended we read Lady Chatterley's Lover.
So, the novel might no longer shock us. Yet what Lawrence calls "the sex thing" is teased out as a separate kind of intimacy and power to the companionship and domestic closeness offered by a marriage. He also has a thing or two to say about the ruling class ... "You don't rule," Connie tells Clifford in one vicious argument, "you've only got more than your share of the money."
When Lawrence writes about heartbreaking changes in English landscape, about how the new England blots out the old, how industrial England blots out agricultural England, how the minor's cottages blot out pastoral villages, he might almost have been writing about the England of today - or at least about English perceptions of the changes in the England of today.
Class discrepancy and its surprising role in intimacy is a huge theme in this novel - not only in the relationship between Connie and her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors, but also in the relationship between Connie's crippled husband Clifford and his nurse Mrs Bolton.
Connie is drawn to Clifford Chatterley for his mind - but when he returns from war, paralyzed from the waist down, he is impotent. Clifford has always been a man of the mind more than of the body, Then Ivy Bolton enters the picture as Clifford's nurse, and Connie relinquishes all her physical interactions with Clifford. She allows Mrs. Bolton (who lost her husband in a mining disaster) to take on the physical care of her husband. Their marital and physical intimacy is severed. When shaving him, dressing him, moving him from wheelchair to bed, become Mrs Bolton's tasks, rather than Connie's, Connie loses all remaining physical contact with her husband.
But here's the thing. Meanwhile, Mrs Bolton actually enjoys Clifford. As a member of the upper class, he is a novelty to her. She loves the way he asserts his needs. The fact that his body is in her charge, gives her new energy. Class plays a big part in their interactions. She enjoys her insider access to the upper class. Her intimacy with Clifford extends to when she comes in her dressing gown, her hair in a plait, to play chess with him and share biscuits and coffee with him into the nights when he cannot sleep.
Clifford, in turn, is energized by Mrs. Bolton's commentary on village life and the Tevershal Pits - the miner's work. It gives him new impetus in his work, and a sense of power. It gives him "a rush of new life." There's no denying the erotic nature of this relationship. It might be sexless, but it's highly charged. Connie even observes that Mrs Bolton must certainly be in love with Clifford, on some level.
Connie sees exactly what Clifford does for Mrs. Bolton - just as Mrs. Bolton is the first to suss out that Connie is having an affair with the games keeper. She sees Mellors waiting in the driveway, from Clifford's window, like a "lovesick male dog." But even before she sees him, Mrs. Bolton is sure that Connie has a lover. Meanwhile, Clifford who is no longer tuned into Connie or her needs, ascribes the change in his wife's demeanor to a baby she encountered at afternoon tea with one of the neighbors.
But the main course in this novel is certainly Connie's sexual awakening with the games keeper Oliver Mellors - as well as the ways she wakes him up sexually. Before she meets Mellors there's a wonderful scene where Connie looks at her naked body in the mirror and sees it as reduced and unloved. When she and Mellors make their connection, it is in spite of himself. He thought he was alone. He even wanted to be alone. Lawrence writes of the "bitter privacy of a man" who thought he had done with it all. "Done with it all?" Connie asks. "What?" and Mellors says "Life."
He has a sense of foreboding. Mellors feels he has opened them both up but also believes that his heart will protect them for a while. Even though as a reader you want Connie to have her months of passion - and you want Mellors to be opened up to life, the sense of foreboding hangs over their relationship.
For D. H. Lawrence there seems to be only one true sexual intimacy - that of the simultaneous orgasm. The clitoris, in Lawrence's mind, is almost equated with witchery. He speaks of the clitoris as a "beak" - It's a bit shocking when Mellors describes his wife, who he has come to despise, like a whore or a hag, as she tries to bring herself to clitoral orgasm. I have to say at this point in my reading, I was like No.This guy on some level has a hatred of female sexual autonomy and he is not the man for our girl Connie!
Yet at the same time, Lawrence has Lady Chatterley enjoy anal intercourse with Mellors. This is all a okay. Connie says she wants to have a child with someone she wants in her bowels. She speaks of the man as a phallus bearer as a temple to be torn to pieces and how the "depths of her bowels and womb... sang the song of adoration."
Okay. Fine. Make of all this what you will.
But for me, the central scene of the book - the scene where everything really comes together, is the one where Clifford is going for a walk with Connie through his estate - she is walking and he is wheeling in his chair. Then the engine jams on his wheelchair - and Mellors, the games keeper comes to help him out. The metaphor as the scene transpires is palpable - the sexual power and the physical power juxtaposed with class struggle - all of it comes into play. The chair tramples the bluebells as Clifford insists on trying to make the engine work. "Will you get off her," Clifford screams at Mellors at one stage- meaning off his chair. Then the brake jams. He has no brake. Clifford is "yellow with anger" and by the time he finally asks Mellors to help push the chair, the brake is completely jammed.
It's a little bit sad to think of D. H. Lawrence, who was himself impotent, describing sex in so much detail, when it clearly meant so much to him. And yet, he writes at one point about sex: "God who had created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture driving him blind craving for this ridiculous performance"
Ridiculous or not - it drives our passions forward.
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