Lady Chatterly's Lover

From Susan Ostrov Weisser's Introduction toLady Chatterley's Lover To some in the reading public, D. H. Lawrence was notorious as a vulgar pornographer; to others, he was an apostle of sexual liberation. It is interesting and ironic to note, therefore, that the early working title of Lady Chatterley's Lover was "Tenderness." Lawrence was indignant and disgusted by the public misunderstanding of his intentions, for he loathed casual sex or promiscuity, but he was also not an advocate of what he called "modern" romantic love. "Love is chiefly bunk," he wrote in 1925 to his friend "Brett," the Honorable Dorothy Brett, "an over-exaggeration of the spiritual and individualistic and analytic side. . . . If ever you can marry a man feelingkindlytowards him, and knowing he feels kindly to you, do it, and throw love after." Certainly the tentative title suggests that Lawrence meant this, his last novel, to be a story of real tenderness, but he intended to write about a different sort of love affair than can be found in the history of the British novel. Unlike the European novel, which is rich in tales of adultery (as inThe Red and the Black,Madame Bovary, andAnna Karenina), romantic love in the nineteenth-century British novel tends either to lead to marriage or is destroyed because of illegitimate sexual activity. But in Lawrence's last novel something new is going on, a new look at the cultural values by which we live: Lawrence's characters are healed by their forbidden sexual love, rather than destroyed by it. The famous love affair between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper was provocative also because it crossed class lines; it skipped over the middle class and united aristocracy and working class in an intimacy meant to threaten traditional sanctified hierarchies. This sexual union became so famous that the lady and the gamekeeper have become a kind of joke or cliche in modern literary culture. But in fact Lawrence drew on a tradition in the English novel of love and sex across class lines: Fielding, Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, and Hardy, to name a few, wrote about lower-class men and women hoping to marry "above" them and sometimes succeeding, or otherwise explored the trouble that class differences cause in love. More often the male lover has the class status, as in Samuel Richardson'sPamelaor Charlotte Bronte'sJane Eyre; frequently this common plot involves the pathos of seduction and the vulnerability of the heroine to male abandonment. The heroines Little Em'ly of Charles Dickens'sDavid Copperfield, Hetty in George Eliot'sAdam Bede, or Tess in Thomas Hardy'sTess of the D'Urbervillesrepresent innocent victims of male sexual exploitation, whereas another innovation of Lawrence's is that the forbidden sexual relationship between his lovers is based on mutual desire. Lawrence was widely read in European literature and well aware of this history of the British novel, in which sexuality and romantic love served the purposes of moral discourse. InLady Chatterley's Loverin particular, he wanted to do something pointedly different. For better or worse, his treatment of the fictional theme of transgressive love and sex thus became fraught with the burden of a new meaning he wanted to place on it, a kind of morality free of tradition and conventional religious prohibitions. But this rebellion is not simply one of individual freedom; Lawrence embedded inLady Chatterley's Loverthe meanings of sexual love and class conflict in a kind of war against our "civilization" as he had come to understandLawrence, D. H. is the author of 'Lady Chatterly's Lover ' with ISBN 9781593082390 and ISBN 1593082398.