Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:
- Loss of pastoral world
- Class system
- War
He quoted from Wordsworth
"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"
The world is too much with us; late
and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a
sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the
moon;
The winds that will be howling at all
hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping
flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out
of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd
rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant
lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less
forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the
sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed
horn.
Mellors represented the world that is being lost. He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks. His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".
We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors. It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate. They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.
Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel. They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking. This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times. At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"
Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global. The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.
Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel. How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it. For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us. His hero, Mellors holds the power. Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel. He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus. It's the man who liberates the woman. He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually. For me it was quite paternalistic. I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.
Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men. Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.
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