Lady Chatterleys Lover

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER AND
THE ISSUES OF SEXUALITY,

GENDER AND FAMILY
Ana Oršulić and Tea Horvat, 2 nd year undergraduates of Hungarian Language and Literature & English Language and Literature
about the author…
David Herbert Lawrence
◦ born September 11, 1885 in Eastwood,
Nottinghamshire, England
◦ English author of novels, short stories,
poems, plays, essays, travel books, and
letters
◦ Sons and Lovers (1913); The Rainbow
(1915); Women in Love (1920)
about the novel…
◦ first published in England in 1932
◦ the novel ”reflects the author’s belief that men and women must
overcome the deadening restrictions of industrialized society and
follow their natural instincts to passionate love”1
1https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lady-Chatterleys-Lover
the obscenity trial
◦ obscenity in publishing (Penguin Books)
◦ The Obscene Publications Act (1959)
◦ sexual intercourse was at the core of the work
◦ Mervyn Griffiths-Jones
◦ the verdict: Penguin Books were found not guilty
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
issues of sexuality
issues of gender
issues of family
issues of sexuality
•the need for physical stimulation as well as
mental stimulation in order to feel complete as a
human being
• Connie’s early sexual experience might have
been transient and superficial but she is still
capable of change and developement
• physical conciousness emerges  key point of
resistance to mechanisation
•Connie slowly begins to reawaken her sensuality
and libido
• love comes after sex  shocking and radical
• Lawrence expresses his philosophical ideas
• post – coital statements of Michaelis and Mellors
 striving for realism
• examination of the human condition and the very
tangled connection between sex and love
˝No substance to her or anything--no touch, no contact.
Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of
webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these
stories, of which Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in
them and they wouldn't last.˝ (Lawrence, 19)
• Clifford as a symbol for her intellect

• lack of sensuality, a missing experience, she needed
to be awakened physically
˝Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so
much insignificant substance. It made her feel immensely
depressed and hopeless. What hope was there? She was old,
old at twenty-seven, with no gleam and sparkle in the flesh.
Old through neglect and denial: yes, denial. Fashionable
women kept their bodies bright, like delicate porcelain, by
external attention. There was nothing inside the porcelain. --
But she was not even as bright as that. The mental life!
Suddenly she hated it with a rushing fury, the swindle!˝
(Lawrence, 71)
•Lawrence proposes a version of health in which
sexual and sensual expression is fundamental for
a person
• remnants of Victorian moralism
• division of the lower functions from the higher
• Clifford  the representative of a sterile version
of life
˝In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have
thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the
shame died. Shame, which is fear; the deep organic shame, the old,
old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can
only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and
routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart
of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-
rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her
sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a
vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life!˝
(Lawrence, 247)
issues of gender
◦ inducing women into the male mode of being

◦ women becoming part of the male world of action
◦ time for man to become more passive and woman more active
”This is the desire of every man (…) that the woman of his body
shall be the begetter of his whole life, that she, in her female spirit,
shall beget in him his ideas, his motion, himself.”2
2Lawrence, David Herbert. The Study of Thomas Hardy.
THE WOMEN THE MEN
Constance (Connie) Chatterley Oliver Mellors
Mrs. Bolton Clifford Chatterley
Lady Bennerley Ted Bolton
Mrs Betts Sir Geoffrey Chatterley
Emma Chatterley Tommy Dukes
Bertha Coutts Duncan Forbes
Mrs Flint Giovanni & Daniele – gondoliers
Gran Arnol Hammond
Connie Mellors Charles May
Hilda Reid Michaelis
Olive Strangeways Sir Malcolm Reid
Leslie Winter
CONSTANCE
CHATTERLEY
”She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his conciousness, his words,
his obsession with himself, his endless treadmill obsession with himself, and his
own words.” (Lawrence, 137)
”…whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts, as you call them,
and is rippling so happily there, like dawn? ” (Lawrence, 298)
”Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself.” (Lawrence, 318)
CLIFFORD
CHATTERLEY
”Any man in his senses must have known his wife was in love with
somebody else, and was going to leave him. Even, she was sure,
Sir Clifford was inwardly absolutely aware of it, only he wouldn't
admit it to himself. If he would have admitted it, and prepared
himself for it; or if he would have admitted it, and actively
struggled with his wife against it: that would have been acting like
a man. But no! he knew it, and all the time tried to kid himself it
wasn't so. He felt the devil twisting his tail, and pretended it was
the angels smiling on him. This state of falsity had now brought on
that crisis of falsity and dislocation, hysteria, which is a form of
insanity.” (Lawrence, 428)
OLIVER
MELLORS
” Anyhow, I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting
to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live
beyond money, and squeeze the life out. There’s a bad time
coming. There’s a bad time coming, boys, there’s a bad time
coming! If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the
future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I
feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are,
going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times
that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out:
not even the love of women. ” (Lawrence, 445)
issues of family
˝All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for
her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father,
husband, all these great dynamic words were half-dead now,
and dying from day to day.˝ (Lawrence, 62)
• words that represent the greater values of life

• family relations no longer valuable
• pre-ordained position in the world
• Clifford’s injury causes Connie to become the more
dominant partner – this should not be the case
• Connie’s unconvential upbringing
• by age 18 both the girls had love affairs
• parents allow
• Sir Geoffrey wants an heir to the Estate – prescribing to a
tradition
• Connie expressed her wish to have a child
• idea of having a child with another man
• Clifford declares that it doesn’t matter if she has an affair
once or twice
• could she ever be content with such a gradual life
• ˝Be tender to it, and that will be its future.˝ (Connie

Chatterley, )
Thank you for your attention!

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LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER AND

THE ISSUES OF SEXUALITY,

• Clifford as a symbol for her intellect

◦ inducing women into the male mode of being

• words that represent the greater values of life

• ˝Be tender to it, and that will be its future.˝ (Connie

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