Source of book: I own this
This book was my selection for Banned Books Week this year. Yeah, it took a while. A bunch of other books to finish, plus 14 music gigs in the first two weeks of October. But, I eventually did get a rainy weekend to sit down and finish it.
You can read my thoughts from over a decade ago (and a different political environment) on banned books week here. The list of official reads is here.
The last several years have seen a resurgence in book bans and challenges - and in attacks on librarians, school teachers, and administrators who do not kowtow to the fundamentalist bigots.
It is no accident that the books targeted tend to be written by certain kinds of authors. While the ostensible reason for bans is claimed to be “sexually explicit," this isn’t actually the case. Most have any sex occur “off screen” so to speak - it is referenced or implied, but not actually described.
Rather, the bans target books by and about minority groups. Books by non-white authors make up the largest group of banned books, particularly for books about history or politics. The next-largest is LGBTQ authors. Also significantly represented are female authors, and authors with disabilities.
It isn’t difficult to see what is going on here. The white, male, cishet, religiously bigoted minority is flexing its power to silence voices that challenge that power.
This has always been the driving force behind book bans: the fear of the ruling majority of losing power and influence.
I was not sure what to expect in reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, honestly. I did know that it was the subject of important court cases on obscenity both here in the United States and in Britain. After all, I studied them in law school. This book was responsible for the most important legal standard when it comes to censorship: does the book have “redeeming social or literary value”? In this case, the court ruled that it in fact did, paving the way for the legalization of many other books of merit that had been banned because of sexual content.
The other thing I knew about the book and the author was that they have been criticized by feminists. I mentioned these criticisms when I read the feminist classics, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin. I feel like I should re-read those sections now that I have read Lawrence.
Whatever I was expecting, this book was quite different than that.
In what ways? Well, first, the sex reminded me far more of female-oriented “bodice rippers” than the male-oriented banned books I have read. (Hello, The Tropic of Cancer and Ulysses, which tended to be more gross than titillating.)
While the sex scenes did have a bit of an obsession with simultaneous orgasm from intercourse (which isn’t possible for most women), and there was a lot of focus on the phallus, the fact that female orgasm and female desire were centered as well seemed a bit feminist for 1928.
I will add that one of the central themes of the book is the need for women to have sexual connection, to have an outlet beyond being just a “wife and mother,” a caretaker to male ambition. For Lady Chatterley (aka Connie), her husband Clifford is a gilded cage, someone who sees her as an ornament and a reflection of himself. She needs more. There is a lot of focus on Connie’s physical and emotional needs, which felt surprisingly progressive for the era. And that is more in line with, say, Kate Chopin, than with many other male authors of the time.
The other thing that I was not expecting was how much this book is really about class, not sex.
Lawrence grew up in a working-class home. His father was a coal miner, and his mother, although educated, because of her lower-class background, was reduced to needlework to support the family.
Thus, he was very sensitive to the way that the higher classes look down on the lower, even when, as was the case for him, he was actually better educated, better read, and a far better writer than the stuck-up Lord Chatterleys of the world.
For Connie to leave him for a working-class man rather similar to Lawrence is the greatest slap that Clifford can imagine.
Finally, the book is strongly anti-industrial, seeing it as grinding and dehumanizing the workers, creating obscenely rich capitalists, polluting the earth, and destroying the beauty of the natural world.
He was not wrong.
Thus, there is a lot more to this book than its sexual content.
I will also say that the writing is really good, the ideas thoughtful, and the ending a lot more positive than I expected. (Hey, how many books from the era dared a happy ending? Especially for a “loose” woman?)
There are a number of strong points to the book. I think Lawrence captured the sense of alienation that class distinctions create for everyone, from Clifford, who cannot see those “below” him as equally human, to Mellors, who feels looked down upon despite his obvious intellectual gifts. The scandal of Connie’s rejection of the aristocrat for the commoner must have been every bit as scandalous at the time as the sexual content. Which is one reason I suspect that the book was banned for so long. There is nothing in here that is more graphic than The Canterbury Tales, after all.
I also thought the general discussions of class, the industrial revolution, nature, and the needs of humans to connect to their own bodies were good. As I said, there is a lot more to this book than the sex, and the court decision nailed it in finding artistic and cultural merit in the book.
I will also note that my own life experience has been somewhat similar to Lawrence’s in one sense. I was born to parents who did not have college degrees, descended from farmers who worked the land. I myself never got a real college education, being instead forced into the law school for the cult my parents were in. To the degree that I have a broad education - and I believe I do - it has been because I did it myself on my own time. Hence the name of this blog, by the way.
So, I have experienced what Lawrence and his stand-in, Mellors, are a bit sore about: being looked down on for lacking the upper or upper-middle class background; at the same time as one’s former peers resent your upward mobility, calling you “stuck up” for knowing more.
It is an interesting experience, and has been a factor in my difficulty with my birth family, as well as a source of discomfort with some of my legal peers who came from a higher social class than I did.
The book resonated with me for that reason as well.
For those who don’t know the basic plot, here is a quick summary. (Spoiler warning, but the book IS nearly 100 years old…)
Connie is one of two daughters in a minor aristocratic family. She “marries up” by marrying Clifford, Lord Chatterley.
Alas, he is badly injured in World War Two, which also claimed the other men in his family, and indeed a generation of men in Britain and the continent. He is left paralyzed from the waist down, and unable to get an erection.
In compensation for his loss, he throws himself into a series of projects. First is the group of intellectual aristocratic men who discuss Big Ideas™ while Connie is expected to wait on them, and keep her own thoughts to herself. Then, he becomes a writer of popular but forgettable books, expecting Connie to be his secretary, amanuensis, and editor. Which she does. Finally, he decides to address the failing returns of the coal mine on his estate by attempting to find alternative uses. (And of course, by squeezing wages of his serfs workers.
All the while, he expects Connie to be his companion, his caretaker, his world. He tells himself that this is generosity on his part, but he really has no idea of her needs, desires, or inner life. And, of course, his physical inability to perform the sexual act leads to what Lawrence considers his “emasculization” - a reduction of his humanity to his intellect, devoid of either emotion or physicality.
And it isn’t just Clifford - the author castigates an entire generation of Englishmen (and indeed humans) for the loss of sensuality, passion, and connection to the animal body.
How much of this to truly accept is debatable. Simone de Beauvoir had a valid criticism that emphasis on physicality and the connection of essential humanity to the drives of the penis can be problematic.
In any case, after an unsatisfying affair with a playwright, Michaelis, who seems fundamentally unconcerned with satisfying her sexually, Connie falls for the handsome, physical, and virile Oliver Mellors, a former soldier from a mining family who is now working as Clifford’s gamekeeper.
After a number of passionate sex scenes (which are surprisingly well written for a guy - generally women are better at these, in my opinion), she becomes pregnant with his child.
At the end, she has left Clifford (who has in turn divorced his long-estranged abusive wife), and there is the promise of a future together for them. Definitely scandalous. Perhaps even in our own time.
As usual, I jotted down a bunch of lines that I thought were good.
In this case, the opening is excellent, expressing the feeling after the great war, but which also resonates in our own era.
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to life, no matter how many skies have fallen.
In speaking of the early sexual experiences of Connie and her sister, the author comments on the way too many men are. By the way, this book is an excellent reminder that the first sexual revolution took place in the 1910s, not the 1960s. It was in the 10s and 20s that the massive shift in first sexual experiences for men occurred, changing from initiation with a sex worker to sex with a peer. Anyway, apparently young men haven’t changed much since.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in gratitude to the women for the sex experience, let their souls go out to her. And afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling and found sixpence. Connie’s man could be a bit sulky and Hilda’s a bit jeering. But that’s how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied. When you don’t have them they hate you because you won’t; and when you do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can’t be satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
I also loved this insight into the true “elites” like Clifford. Do not confuse them with who the MAGA sorts call “elite” - that is, educated, thoughtful, white collar sorts who had to earn their money rather than inherit it. The true elites are the obscenely rich, the born rich, who confuse wealth with substance, lucre with brains. (Think: Trump and Elon Musk…) These elites lack any actual breadth of experience and knowledge, mistaking their comfort within their own peer groups for actual cosmopolitanism.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more “society,” was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease in the narrow “great world,” that is, landed aristocracy society, but he was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the truth must be told, he was just a little bit frightened of middle and lower class humanity, and of foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralyzing way, conscious of his own defenselessness, though he had all the defense of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of our day.
Yes, a bit of this still going on today, perhaps? Later, Connie observes this more closely.
But she could not help feeling how little connection he really had with people. The miners were, in a sense, his own men; but he saw them as objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena rather than human beings along with him. He was in some way afraid of them, he could not bear to have them look at him now he was lame.
The intellectual group that Clifford surrounds himself with has some interesting views, some of which may well have been Lawrence’s own. For example, they talk about how sex has become weirdly a matter of public concern, rather than seen as a physical act, like “going to the privy.” It is the obsession with other people’s genitals and what they do with them that makes sex so fraught.
One particularly strange conversation comes from Tommy Dukes, one of the group, who has no particular interest in sex. At least with women - whether Lawrence intended it or not, he comes off as pretty gay.
“Yes, I feel something is wrong between men and women. A woman has no glamour for a man any more.”
This eventually leads Clifford to suggest that Connie have an affair, so she can have the child which (he thinks) will make her happy. His reasoning is intellectual, not emotional, because he has buried his emotions so deeply.
“It seems to me that it isn’t these little acts and little connections we make in our lives that matter so very much. They pass away, and where are they? Where….Where are the nows of yesteryear? … It’s what endures through one’s life that matters; my own life matters to me, in its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections especially? If people don’t exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the life-long companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement.”
Clifford isn’t entirely wrong, of course. A long marriage is about a whole lot more than sex, and the day to day living together is really the meat of the connection. But he also completely misses what his wife craves and needs. And yes, sex is part of that. But also the sense of connection that he imagines they have, but really don’t, because he cannot truly see Connie as human.
There are a number of interesting conversations about class, wealth, and politics. One interesting bit comes from Mrs. Bolton, who ends up becoming Clifford’s live-in nurse, and displacing Connie in his affections in a weird, quasi-sexual way. She has more common sense than he does, though, for sure. In this conversation, Clifford is worried that his workers might go communist.
“Oh, you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they’re mostly women who’ve got into debt. The men take no notice. I don’t believe you’ll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They’re too decent for that. But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it really. They only want a bit of money in their pocket, to spend at the Welfare, or go gadding to Sheffield. That’s all they care. When they’ve got no money, they’ll listen to the reds spouting. But nobody believes in it, really.”
As it becomes more clear, her point is that if Clifford makes sure his workers have a bit of spending money, they are unlikely to radicalize. Enough to feel comfortable, have a little fun, and so on.
This is a lesson that our present oligarchs would do well to keep in mind. Grinding the faces of the poor leads to revolution.
Lawrence is no fan of industrial capitalism for sure, or for the constant drive to make money. Throughout the book, he refers to the “bitch-goddess” of success. A bit sexist, perhaps, particularly since it is the men in the book that spend their time worshipping it. But the idea of the goddess-mistress, it is defensible.
He realized now that the bitch-goddess of success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry.
I am definitely reminded of the tech-bros here just as much as celebrity culture. The two sides of the worship of the bitch-goddess of success.
Another unexpected parallel to our own times in this book comes when Clifford shifts from his social circles to a withdrawal from human contact.
Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Clifford no longer wanted them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer. He preferred the radio, which he had installed at some expense, with a good deal of success at last….And he would sit alone for hours listening to the loud-speaker bellowing forth. It amazed and stunned Connie. But there he would sit, with a blank entranced expression on his face, like a person losing his mind, and listen, or seem to listen, to the unspeakable thing.
I have seen this withdrawal from acquaintances, family, and clients, where so many withdraw into a Fox News bubble, or an internet bubble, losing sight of reality eventually. It really is a sad state of affairs. And no wonder Connie feels trapped and wants to find a way to actually live, rather than withdraw.
Mellors too feels trapped to a degree. After rising into the middle class during his army days, on his own merits, he found himself out of place in civilian life, and frustrated with the pretense and focus on pretending not to care about the small things of life. I won’t quote it because it is too long, but the contrast between the “not caring about prices” of the middle class (or at least pretending not to care) and the fact that the working class has to care about those things is interesting.
As the book goes on, what little decency Clifford may once have had is eroded by the need to make money. On a walk through the grounds, Connie is interested in the beauty of nature, while Clifford rattles on about why aristocracy is necessary. It sounds a lot like what the tech oligarchs say now. Basically, nothing changes…
Interestingly, he admits to Connie that “blood” (aka genetics) do not really matter. It is nurture. But to him, that is why the common people shouldn’t be educated. That isn’t their role.
“But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the function determines the individual.”
Another telling scene comes when Clifford is reading some philosopher or another (the book doesn’t say who), who makes the claim that man is becoming more spiritual and less physical, and eventually will not even need a body.
And yes, that sounds like Transhumanism way before its time. Who knew? There are a couple of good lines in this, from Connie, who not only understands the issues, but realizes that Clifford really does not. And, for the first time, she actually talks back to him.
“What silly hocus-pocus! As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means he’s a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. Priggish little impertinence!”
Clifford just doubles down, not realizing that his own wife would like a bit of a physical connection to someone, and indeed to the world itself. (Which is, after all, physical.)
“Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being.”
Just like the AI evangelists and the Transhumanists, Clifford is wrong here. Our guts aren’t going away. We cannot separate the body and the spirit - that’s really a gnostic heresy anyway. We are embodied, humans with minds and spirits that are fully integrated with the physical bodies we are.
The last quote I want to feature is another totally unexpected one. It occurs when Connie writes from Venice that she is not coming back to Clifford, but will be leaving him.
The face in the bed seemed to deepen its expression of wild, but motionless distraction. Mrs. Bolton looked at it and was worried. She knew what she was up against: male hysteria. She had not nursed soldiers without learning something about that very unpleasant disease.
Did Lawrence really say that? Did he really mention “male hysteria” - what we in our times dub “testeria”? Yes he did.
And that is why I think this book is a lot more feminist than some feminists give it credit for. Far from accepting the patriarchal claim that men are naturally “less emotional,” Lawrence makes it clear that Clifford - and indeed the men of his generation - have merely suppressed their emotions, lived in denial, and set themselves up for unpleasant episodes of testeria.
There really is so much in this book about that question: how do we live in harmony with our nature? How do we reclaim the physical and emotional in our humanity? How do we connect in every way with our fellow humans? How do we resist the dehumanization of industry and the endless quest for money and fame?
So, yes, the sex scenes are somewhat graphic. But also they contain references to female pleasure, which is probably even more scandalous. The book, however, is about so much more than sex. It embraces the big questions of existence, and proposes answers that are more than merely intellectual, but emotional and even physical.
It rightly deserves its reputation as a classic, and was a good choice for a book to challenge the belief that sex is incompatible with artistic and cultural merit.
No comments:
Post a Comment