Lady Chatterley?s Lover: A Sexual Love or a Spiritual Love?
Abstract：Lady Chatterley?s Lover, a controversial book, since its first days of publication, had been banned for almost half a century. In the early days of its publication, people could not understand the deeper meaning of this book. What they saw was the over blank descriptions of sexual love. No one appreciated the true value of this book. The purpose of D. H. Lawrence was to wake up the people by what he called rebirth of human nature. But at that time, in the industrialized England, the ruling party would not let this happened. In the book, Connie gained self-rebirth in her sexual love with Mellors. What made Connie decided to elope with Mellors? Is it a pure sexual love? Or a pure spiritual love? Or both? This paper tries to discuss these from what the ordinary people was shame to talk about loudly: sex. Moreover, this paper studies the relationship of the two main characters, Connie and Mellors.
Key Words: Lawrence Connie Mellors sexual love spiritual love
Ⅰ. D. H. Lawrence and His Lady Chatterley?s Lover A. D. H. Lawrence’s Life Experience
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Sep.11th, 1985, David Herbert Lawrence, one of the primary shapers of 20th-century English fiction, was born in a coal miner’s house in Nottinghanshire, central England. Lawrence received education at Nottinghanshire High School, then he worked as a clerk and later as a pupil-teacher, and later he studied at Nottinghanshire University. After that, he found a teacher’s job. And his writing career began when his first book The White Peacock (1911) came into public. 1912, he met Frieda von Richthofen, and felt in love with her. Six weeks after they met each other, they eloped to Bavaria. July 13th, 1914, they got married. And they traveled in several countries in the final two decades of his life. During the First World War Lawrence and his wife were in strict control of the authority by the name of spying for the Germans because Frieda was a German. In the year 1919, they finally were permitted to emigrate and from then on their life of continuous and restless wandering began. At the age of 44, Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence, France on March 2, 1930.
In his early years, Lawrence mostly described his personal experience and the social environment which he was familiar with. He was unaware of presenting readers his life experience and the anguish of unharmonious marriage life. As he become mature in writing, he moved to the inspection of the relation between the two genders. He thought the establishment of a natural and harmonious relation of man and woman
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was the beginning of dispose of social problems. But Lawrence turned to explore the leader issue and primitive religions. He called on people to obey the orders of the leader. In the last period of his writing career, he turned back to explore the relation between the two genders for he was in question of his doctrines of leaders. Lady Chatterley?s Lover was his most important work in this time.
B. About Lady Chatterley?s Lover
In July, 1926, the Lawrence couple came back to Eastwood, the last time he came back to his hometown. At that time, the nationwide strike, which lasted for 5 months, was just over. The workers didn’t go back to work. In the mining district, what Lawrence saw was lifeless mine shafts, dejected miners, police who were keeping watch on and widespread hungry and violence. Lawrence thought the miners were more painful than those he saw in his childhood. He was deeply moved by the scene, feeling that he should do something to help. He decided to write a book about England. So we had the book Lady Chatterley?s Lover. In fact, this book had three versions. Now the book we see in used is the third version. Lawrence wrote this book because he wanted to wake up the people. He wanted to let them found the guilty nature of the bourgeoisie. He wanted to save the world. He hoped human nature could find permanence in perfect sexual love. He hoped by this way people could awake and begin
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to resist the bourgeoisie.
The story was a love affair between a wealthy, married woman and a gate-keeper, happened during the First World War. Connie, the leading lady, was married to Sir Clifford, a mine owner in Derbyshire. Three months after they got married, the First World War broke out and Clifford went to the front. Half year later, Clifford came back home paralyzed from the waist down, impotent. They return to the Wragby Hall. In the lifeless Wragby Hall, Connie felt isolated and became dejected in the longtime suppress of sex. She lived unhappily and she became wan and sallow. She had a brief affair with a young visiting playwright, Michaelis. One day, in their wood, she met her husband’s gatekeeper----Oliver Mellors. She was deeply attracted by his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality. Then she entered into a passionate relationship Mellors. Gradually, she found herself fall in love with Mellors. And she could not bear the situation any more. She wanted to live with her lover; she wanted to live a new life. So she decided to go away with Mellors when she found herself pregnant. But Clifford refused to give a divorce and let them go. All they could do was to wait for a better time when they could be united.
Ⅱ. The Sexual Love Motive in Lady Chatterley?s Lover
In a sense, all Lawrence’s books were full of descriptions of sexual
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love. Lawrence’s frankness in describing sexual relations between men and women upset a great many people. The book Lady Chatterley?s Lover was the most typical one.
What is the underline meaning of his descriptions of sexual relations between Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley?s Lover? In the internal elements, the sexual love motive in this book is: “the theme of return of human nature to paradise under the sexual love motive and the artistic expression to it.” (Liang Chunhua, 2004) The basic idea of the sexual love motive of this book is to explore the relationship between sexual love and human beings. Lawrence thought modern civilization had worn away human’s primitive feeling about sex. It was why he chose a mining district as the background of the story. In this book, Lawrence attacked the persecution of industrial civilization towards sexual love. So Lawrence created a lost Garden of Eden for the people. The wood was the garden. Connie and Mellors found their true love and the true meaning of life there. Then, How to find the lost Garden of Eden? Lawrence meant to maintain the return of the dissimilated human nature: let human beings gain rebirth in perfect sexual love. By presenting Connie’s different feelings of her sexual love with Mellors, Connie gained rebirth of herself and found the lost Garden of Eden.
Ⅲ. Lawrence’s Views on Sexual Love
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