Lady Chatterley's Tedious Lover... (Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence)

Member Name: Matt_Roberts

Product:	Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
Date:	02/04/04 (227 review reads)
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Written in 1928 (and being Lawrence’s last novel) Lady Chatterley, along with Sons and Lovers, is one of his most famous novels. But is that because of the controversy? Because of the fact that Lawrence decided for once to go beyond and write about love and sex. To write, explicitly, about sexual partners and experiences. In Sons and Lovers Lawrence’s portrays different aspects of love. Here, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover he portrays different aspects of sex. There is no doubt that Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s best work, but is Lady Chatterley’s Lover a close second. I myself didn’t think so…

Without a doubt that before reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover you’re going to think about the sexual contents that are raised in it. It’s known for it’s “explicit” scenes and Connie (the main characters) hunger for sex. Within a couple of pages I’d learnt a lot about how Connie lost her virginity and her first experience with sex. Immediately I didn’t like Connie. She had something about her (that I couldn’t put my finger on) that made her patronising. She admitted she had sex with this specific man as she then had “control” over him. It was nothing loving and pleasing about it, she held back from having an orgasm, it was pure sex, and she felt that in that time she was in control. Over the man. She ruled what happened, and he had no say. She’s somewhat spiteful towards men. She feels power during sex and nothing else:

“… A woman could yield to her man without yielding her inner, free self. A woman could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself
back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis.”

You can clearly see here that Lawrence didn’t want you to like characters immediately. He can’t have, or he wouldn’t have written this in the first few pages. He shows Connie’s true feelings. True beliefs. Which aren’t one’s that any would agree to. Lawrence didn’t something no other author had done at that time; he showed us a character’s true colours. He showed us the character’s true colours.

After her experiencing with this man she meets Clifford. Clifford goes off to the war, and returns wheel chair bound and impotent. Having stuck to the rule of no sex before marriage (well on his account, anyway) they hadn’t gotten intimate, therefore Connie and Clifford never had sex, even after they got married, because by then Clifford was impotent after his accident. Not having sex, and not being able to have sex, perhaps gives Connie and Clifford that better bond. She knows now she can’t have sex with him. She’s got power over him, anyway, therefore she doesn’t need to have sex with him, and control herself from climax to achieve it. Connie can be relaxed with him; she can be who she wants to be. She doesn’t necessarily love Clifford but she feels something for him. At times I thought it was pity, but she does feel something loving towards however small that is…

When she has sex with Michaelis, a man who comes to stay in her house, it’s after minutes of meeting him. Connie can’t stand the intensity, the need to have sex. This time she has it not for power, but for enjoyment. Not to love, but to have sex. Not to make love but to “fuck”, as she puts it! And when she meets the gamekeeper, she
falls for him too. But instead of just having sex with him, she also begins to fall in love with him. And that’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The experiences (mostly sexual) between Connie Chatterley and her lover; the gamekeeper….

I can easily say I didn’t enjoy this novel. Reading it was at times tiresome, and although some parts I found I couldn’t put down, other parts were simply dull and repetitive. It doesn’t help either that I really disliked the main character. I have read novels before where I’ve really disliked the character (more so than I did Connie) but it still kept me gripped either by the writing or because of other characters. Sons And Lovers, for instance, I really disliked Mrs Morel, and Paul, but the fantastic writing kept me totally hooked on the story. I fell in love with Lawrence during that, but this has certainly made me slip back out once again.

Lawrence did succeed, at times though, by contrasting his characters. Connie and her husband Clifford were two completely different characters. As a man Clifford isn’t very strong emotionally, or is he confident. He’s very coy, and even was before his accident. At the beginning of their marriage, if anything, I got the feeling he was glad that he’d had the injury because he was so scared of having sex with Connie. I don’t know whether it was because he was scared he wouldn’t reach her standards, or whether he was just a bit too shy, but at the beginning of their marriage he was somewhat relieved that he didn’t have to have sex with her. Connie on the other hand is confident (if not too much) and although she can be considerate and kind, awfully self centred who think about herself more often than not. She was the complete opposite of Clifford, an
d at times, it was interesting to see the difference in their characters.

So, what about the sex? Well, they weren’t as explicitly described as I thought. Obviously back in 1928 Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the Footballers Wives of our time! It was controversial and too explicit. The censored Lady Chatterley’s Lover (that didn’t include the explicit sex descriptions) was published first, and the original in full wasn’t published until years later. They weren’t as explicit as I thought they were going to be, but I felt that Lawrence concentrated on them too much, instead of concentrating on his writing style, and I felt it took away from his usual brilliance. It was written tastefully, and was done very tastefully, but it wasn’t a shocker to read. It would have been in its time, but not now.

So, as you’ve probably gathered I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It most certainly doesn’t deserve the title “classic” and I was disappointed after reading it. Unlike other novels it took me ages to read, as well. At least a month. That was probably because I was so bored and dreaded reading it at times. I think die-hard Lawrence fans should read it just to see how he deals with different things, but other than that I don’t recommend it at all to anyone. It’s bland, repetitive and concentrates too much on sex to be anything over than “a book with sex scenes described in it”. Lawrence could have made this one of the best he’d written, but instead he made it one of the worst. It could have been so good, but it wasn’t. Instead it was a big disappointment.


© Matt Roberts 2004

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