Lady Chatterley's Lover
122. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
This novel, originally censored in the United States, tells the story of Lady Constance Chatterley’s illicit affair with her husband’s gamekeeper. Connie’s husband has returned from World War I paralyzed from the waist down, and he has thus lost the ability to sire an heir for his estate. Therefore, he encourages Connie to sleep with another man in order to get pregnant, planning to adopt the child as his own. However, Connie is not stimulated by her husband’s intellectual, upper-class friends; only by bridging the gap between the classes is she able to find physical fulfillment.
Considering that this book was condemned in its time for obscenity, the adult scenes aren’t particularly racy, especially by today’s standards. (No, I didn’t read this book for that reason, but it’s certainly interesting to see how public standards of morality have changed over the years!) I was reminded of something one of my literature professors once said: most literature is about sex, except when it’s actually about sex, and then it’s really about power. This book definitely supports that idea, because Connie’s affair with the gamekeeper is really just an excuse for Lawrence to complain about England’s industrialization and disparity between social classes. He advocates a sort of vague return to nature, in opposition to the hyper-intellectual and mechanical tendencies of his era. Because this novel is primarily a social polemic and not a story, I didn’t particularly enjoy it. The transcript of its 1959 obscenity trial, which is included in the back of the Modern Library edition, was by far the most interesting part of the book, in my opinion.