Originally Posted by
Walter Susa
When I was a teenager, it was popularly thought Lady Chatterley's Lover was all about erotica, and I read it to get to the best parts. Years later it seems nearly impossible to find much erotica in it. I don't know if that is a comment on our cultural desensetivety, our becoming jaded by our emersion in a more openly pornographic society or to my age. There is little in it now to seem titilating and I now read it with a more meaningful intent. In my edition there is an introduction by Kathryn Harrison where she says the the novel is about grief, and I can see her point. D.H. Lawrence grieves for the loss of old England with it's picturesque cottages natural woodlands and the great estates. He despises the modern mechanical age. The major source of his grief deals with the loss of his own libedo. D.H. Lawrence is all of the charactor's in the book. He is Clifford, Lady Chatterley's husband, because Lawrence himself due to illness suffered from impotence, and Freida his wife had adulterous lovers . Despite this connection he treats Clifford without sympathy. Clifford might be intelligent but in so many ways he has become mechanical and souless. Lawrence is Lady Chatterley in her conclution that her sexuality is even more important then a high station in life or the value of pure thought to be anything other then hot air. That without sex, life and thought is unnatural and shallow. Often I see in romantic male fiction that the male will seek to have a sexless and somehow a more honerable life ie. the cowboy kisses his horse and rides off into the West. Western thought has often held that man in order to achieve perfection in his thinking must stay pure and of the spirit and ignore the body. The body and it's demands were ugly and putrid. Thoughts should be clean and of the sky and the nasty ugliness came from the mud of the earth. Lawrence points out in this book that thought without the body is shallow. I would compare it to a hollow apple without a core and what we see in Clifford is the internal rotting. Mellors is also a version of Lawrence. He is the natural man, a woodsman. He is unhealthy because life no longer offers him a habitate that he can fit in. Lawrence found it difficult to settle. During his life he lived all over Europe and even South America. Mellors has little charactor other then to be a helpless in his passion and the final knowledge that it is right. He is the symbol of a meritous man powerless in the existing society. There are issues about class system of England that undergird the novel and Lawrences inability to shake it's influence. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel that acknowledge's a truth that many men have a lot of trouble coming to terms with and that is that they are utterly and inescapably prisoners of love.
