Southern Medical University World Culture Prof ADama

D.H. Lawrence was a writer whom was much ahead of his times. Having shocked nations and rattled minds through out the world. Having been labeled a pornographer and an agent of sexual smut, he produced works of art that pioneered the way for many artist to explore new and exciting avenues of humanity and that of human nature.

 Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in  The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until (A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in 1929).  The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working- class man and an aristocratic woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of (at the time) unprintable words.

 The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up.  According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story.  Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition.

 It has been published in three different versions.  A heavily censored abridgement of Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in America by Alfred E. Knopf in  This edition was posthumously re-issued in paperback in America both by Signet Books and by Penguin Books in  When the full unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 became a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law.

 The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit.  One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives and the word "cunt".  Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty".

 This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the UK.  The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read".

 The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November  This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom."

Lets take a look at the characters and the story of Lady Chatterley.  What is the Story ?  Who was she ?  Why was this novel considered to be pornography and censored ?  Who were the characters involved ?

 In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence comes full circle to argue once again for individual regeneration, which can be found only through the relationship between man and woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man).  Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships.  The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure.  There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman whom he respects intellectually and, at the same time, finds desirable.  There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, his caring nurse, after Connie has left.

 Lady Chatterley is the protagonist of the novel. Before her marriage, she is simply Constance Reid, an intellectual and social progressive from a Scottish bourgeois family, the daughter of Sir Malcolm and the sister of Hilda. When she marries Clifford Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance (or, as she is known throughout the novel, Connie) assumes his title, becoming Lady Chatterley. Lady Chatterley's Lover chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a sensual being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband, and to love Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. In the process of leaving her husband and conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sensuality and sexual fulfillment.

 Oliver Mellors is the lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby Hall. He is aloof, sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. In the army, he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant — an unusual position for a member of the working classes — but was forced to leave the army because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health. Surprisingly, we learn from different characters' accounts that Mellors was in fact finely educated in his childhood, has good table manners, is an extensive reader, and can speak English 'like a gentleman', but chooses to behave like a commoner and speak broad Derbyshire dialect, probably in an attempt to fit into his own community. Disappointed by a string of unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in quiet isolation, from which he is redeemed by his relationship with Connie: the passion unleashed by their lovemaking forges a profound bond between them. At the end of the novel, Mellors is fired from his job as gamekeeper and works as a laborer on a farm, waiting for a divorce from his old wife so he can marry Connie. Mellors is a man with an innate nobility but who remains impervious to the pettiness and emptiness of conventional society, with access to a primal flame of passion and sensuality.

 Clifford Chatterley is Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a young, handsome baronet who becomes paralyzed from the waist down during World War I. As a result of his injury, Clifford is impotent. He retires to his familial estate, Wragby Hall, where he becomes first a successful writer, and then a powerful businessman. But the gap between him and Connie grows ever wider; obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly interested in love, and she feels that he has become passionless and empty. He turns for solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs. Bolton, who worships him as a nobleman even as she despises him for his casual arrogance. Clifford is portrayed as a weak, vain man, displaying a patronising attitude toward his supposed inferiors. He soullessly pursues money and fame through industry and the meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is symbolic of his failings as a strong, sensual man, and could also represent the increasing loss of importance and influence of the ruling classes in a modern world.

 Mrs. Bolton, also known as Ivy Bolton, is Clifford's nurse and caretaker. She is a competent, still- attractive middle-aged woman. Years before the action in this novel, her husband died in an accident in the mines owned by Clifford's family. Even as Mrs. Bolton resents Clifford as the owner of the mines — and, in a sense, the murderer of her husband — she still maintains a worshipful attitude towards him as the representative of the upper class. Her relationship with Clifford - she simultaneously adores and despises him, while he depends and looks down on her - is probably one of the most complex relationships in the novel.

 Michaelis is a successful Irish playwright with whom Connie has an affair early in the novel. Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, but she decides not to, realizing that he is like all other intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words, passionless.  Hilda Reid is Connie's older sister by two years, the daughter of Sir Malcolm. Hilda shared Connie's cultured upbringing and intellectual education. She remains unliberated by the raw sensuality that changed Connie's life. She disdains Connie's lover, Mellors, as a member of the lower classes, but in the end she helps Connie to leave Clifford.

 Sir Malcolm Reid is the father of Connie and Hilda. He is an acclaimed painter, an aesthete and a bohemian who despises Clifford for his weakness and impotence, and who immediately warms to Mellors.  Tommy Dukes, one of Clifford's contemporaries, is a brigadier general in the British Army and a clever and progressive intellectual. Lawrence intimates, however, that Dukes is a representative of all intellectuals: all talk and no action. Dukes speaks of the importance of sensuality, but he himself is incapable of sensuality and uninterested in sex. Of Clifford's circle of friends, he is the one who Connie becomes closest to.

 Duncan Forbes is an artist friend of Connie and Hilda. Forbes paints abstract canvases, a form of art Mellors seems to despise. He once loved Connie, and Connie originally claims to be pregnant with his child.  Bertha Coutts, although never actually appearing in the novel, has her presence felt. She is Mellors' wife, separated from him but not divorced. Their marriage faltered because of their sexual incompatibility: she was too rapacious, not tender enough. She returns at the end of the novel to spread rumors about Mellors' infidelity to her, and helps get him fired from his position as gamekeeper. As the novel concludes, Mellors is in the process of divorcing her

We have taken a brief look at the story line and learned about the characters. So, Now, WHAT is your opinion…  Do you think it is outrageous for such writing ?  Are you intrigued to learn more ?  Would you read the book ?  How about if you LIVED in the early part of the last century, would you be offended ?  Your thoughts …. ?????