Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. Highly recommended.
Constance Reid, who discovers her pseudointellectual life and loses her virginity on the Continent just before World War I, marries Clifford Chatterley. Shortly thereafter, he joins the war effort and is injured, becoming a paraplegic. He returns home, having inherited his father's grim estate, Wragby, as Sir Clifford. No longer capable of many physical pursuits, including sex (at least, sex of a conventional nature) or procreation, Clifford becomes a pseudointellectual, debating meaningless questions of life, the universe, and everything with equally empty-headed friends, while writing books and stories that sell and make him into a minor celebrity. When Connie's more practical Scots father asks rhetorically, "What do they mean?", she can think of no answer. After a brief affair with an Irish acquaintance of Clifford's, an aspirant to a higher class he can never achieve by virtue of his Irishness, Connie seems doomed to a life devoid of sex, meaning, and vitality at Wragby, living with Clifford only because he sees their marriage as not a tie of love or romance or sex, but just as a tie that is sacred in and of itself—something to be clung to just for the sake of clinging.
Then she meets Oliver Mellors, Clifford's gamekeeper, a former military man who is lost halfway between the working classes and the ruling classes, and therefore ill suited for either, looked down upon by both. Lady Chatterley's lover is intelligent but not intellectual; perceptive yet crude; wounded yet still capable of hurting. In other words, a human being, not a "monkey," as he derisively calls the masses around them. They begin a spring/summer affair in which Connie goes from a "lying there and taking it" approach to sex to a completely lost, completely sensual embrace of it. She is most happy and most sexual when she is least conscious of herself; love becomes most real when it is least thoughtful.
The most well-drawn character in this novel is not Connie, Mellors, Clifford, Clifford's nurse, or any human. It is Tevershall and the surrounding coal district. Wragby stands where the great Nottingham Forest of legend once dominated the landscape. Now it is coal—mines, colliers, colliers' shanties, colliers' towns, and, most of all, money and ennui. It is dead, as seen through the eyes of Mellors and Connie—dead, lifeless, and grim, slowly sucking away at what is left of humanity and of human tenderness. The only idyllic place is the remnant of the Forest where Mellors is gamekeeper, and even it reeks of the smell of coal and of money and of the folly of money. The colliers and those who command them, the Cliffords, are soulless, dead, and, tellingly, impotent in the most important ways. D. H. Lawrence has a unique voice and tells this tale in a unique way, albeit heavy-handedly in places. His characters have sermon-like conversations that are a little hard to swallow as realistic. But the frustrations and the spiritlessness of the people are real enough and save the novel from becoming too much of an intellectual exercise or a diatribe. I found myself wishing for the more subtle touch of a Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, another novel in which a human story is told against a larger setting, or even of a Tolstoy, but this is more of a story-in-a-box—a limited box. Recommended if you can suspend belief a bit; if you are looking for a good story rather than a great one; and if you are looking not for puerile pleasure in Lawrence's liberal smattering of "naughty" words, but for a place to begin start asking the questions. There are no answers here, but there is the foundation for a beginning.
3 July 2000.
© 2000 by Diane L. Schirf.
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