Lady C. With Love and Money

...His finish in the final version, however, is partly a concession to the very society to which he stands opposed...

...Thus, although he does become a kind of "working success" through the coal-fields, as he had been a "popular success" in the little magazines, we are never permitted to view these "successes" with admiration...

...But never mind...

...Thus Connie can only hope that what she has found with Mellors in and beyond the sex is truly real and may somehow be perpetuated...

...There's a bad time coming, boys, there's a bad time coming...

...The importance of the novel, he insists, is that "it can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away from things gone dead...

...As one reviewer noted with apparent disappointment, Lawrence is closer to Jane Austen than to Henry Miller...

...Lawrence's problem of developing his love-world fully while recommending it to us becomes most acute with Mellors...

...and his terrible point is that in the modern world they are irrevocably opposed...

...Can a man choose his salvation when it appears...

...We'll be together next year...

...From this intrusive horror, Constance Chatterley seeks escape in nature and the natural life of instinct and the senses...

...WRITERS and WRITING Lady C. With Love and Money By Paul hauler Department of English, University of Massachusetts CERTAINLY Lady Chatterley's Lover tries to make a full, natural sex life exciting and desirable...

...I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me...

...Whatever role he plays, writer or businessman, Clifford is nothing more than a dog fawning before the "bitch-goddess" success: "Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offer her amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money...

...Lawrence never leaves us in doubt that Clifford's way, society's normal way, leads downward...

...So they won't be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me...

...In proportion as Clifford wins the goddess' nods, his own inner being rots...

...from this perspective his fame as writer and his fortune as magnate appear irrelevant shams...

...And to Mellors, as to Lawrence, there remains only the assertion, in the face of Clifford and Tevershall, of a romantic dream: " 'I'm frightened, really...

...The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling...

...But the very generalities in which her experience of the night are rendered indicate, by their contrast to the immediacy of her responses in the earlier woodland interludes, that sex itself is falling prey to artificiality and rationalization, becoming an act staged to distract them from the world's oppression...

...For Lawrence cannot, whatever his desires, dissolve the social pressures that isolate Mellors...

...And Clifford's devotion to money is all the more horrible in its apparent inevitability—he makes no conscious "choice" but is the first to insist that his role, like every man's role, is fated...

...Pity and lust lead him into the affair with Connie—are they the gateways to Paradise...

...I feel the devil in the air, and he'll try to get us...

...Lawrence himself seems to be accepting Clifford's mechanistic theory that some are chosen and some damned...

...But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers...

...Anyhow I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out...

...The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the favor of the bitch-goddess...

...Lawrence cannot always resolve his artist's knowledge that in this world love is a tenuous, fitful emotion, subject to collapse or corruption, and his moralist's desire to claim love as an antidote to mechanical society...

...Quite the contrary...

...money with its crushing fatalities has become even more dominant in the intervening century...

...For Lawrence always presents Clifford inside-out, reversing the usual novelistic technique of moving from apparent achievement toward inner failure...

...But Lawrence's Either/Or world excludes compromise...

...As Clifford symbolizes modern be havioristic man, so his coal-dusted Tevershall represents man's mechanistic world: "The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black...

...To his wife he becomes a leech, draining her toward his own sterility...

...And when love, in any of its phases, becomes contrived and begins to require explanation and excuse beyond what itself supplies, it loses its power...

...The danger is that as society presses in upon the woods, the lovers will take refuge in the extreme revolt of "sensual passion," at best a fallen kind of love...

...Friendship degenerates into hire and salary, lordship into tyranny...

...nor can he resolve Connie's fear that she can never grasp a substantial reality, never know just what and where she and her lover are or will be, beyond the next embrace...

...Still, Lawrence refines the game keeper with each revision of the novel, perhaps to make him more acceptable to Connie (and to the reader I as a lover...

...But then what does make Mellors eligible for salvation...

...Inexorably this coalscape blots out the old England, leveling the Shipleys, glowering in from behind the thin screen of trees at Wragby itself...

...For Lawrence's subject, like Jane Austen's, is really "love and money...

...Few people now believe it isn't...

...Lawrence does not bring Connie or Mellors, or his reader, to assent to them...

...If things go on as they are, there's nothing lies in the future but death and destruction for these industrial masses...

...All the bad times that ever have been, haven't been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women...

...Of course it can be argued that the culture and history Mellors shares with Clifford represent the defects which, as a man, he cannot escape...

...And "success" brings Clifford himself only outward distraction ; to achieve a mere childish peace in his solitude he must surrender his last vestige of manhood to Ivy Bolton...

...Perhaps it is the deeper honesty of the novel that these last questions, despite Lawrence's apparent desire to answer them affirmatively, remain questions...

...To Lawrence such a moral point is not just legitimate, but necessary if a novel is to rise above plain gossip...

...Is the way of love, then, ultimately more than a romantic illusion...

...The "dirty" words are also among his (and Lawrence's) weapons to root out the hearer's bourgeois shame or fear...

...The novel leads the reader's sympathies into the woodland hut where Connie discovers herself in love, and impells the reader to accept love as a possible defense against money...

...The book's "message" is not merely that orgasm is grand, but that between love and money, we must choose love...

...Not because Lawrence neither tries to rouse, nor succeeds in rousing, his reader's libido...

...Why cannot Michaelis or Tommy Dukes then enter...

...Jane Austen, admitting the power of money in the world, could at least permit her characters some compromise of love without withdrawing its powers utterly...

...If this is the case...

...On the other hand, Lady C. need not be tucked next to Fanny Hill in the Zeta locked-and-bolted stack...

...Mellors' use of dialect and four-letter words represents a somewhat artificial, if very human, attempt to maintain his attachment to the "realities"' which society's toying with language obscures...

...The sexual episodes function on the story level both as means to Connie's revitalization and as the only possible symbols for the mutual and total love Lawrence views as salvation...

...and if that is all we can discover in the book, we must, like J. Donald Adams, shelve it with dusty marriage manuals (though Lawrence as sexologist is by no means a flop...

...While dis-integration and despair perpetually hover about the lovers...

...We always see Clifford, as it were, with his pulpy core outermost...

...Lady Chatterley's Lover therefore charts Clifford Chatterley's path through the pits toward money, and his lady's through the woods to love...

...Still...

...Or not the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of people, wanting money and hating life...

...Lawrence admits, however, that Connie's commitment to a kind of primitivism, to the fancy that man's animal instincts remain his only sure guides, can lead to sexual excess...

...And in Clifford's world can a Mellors really exist...

...This would be an easy truth to accept were we obsessed less with sex and more with vital morality...

...That the book does not complete the story may be its artistic virtue, if its rhetorical defect...

...But because sexual stimulation is integral to the book's art and rhetoric, not merely a product of gratuitous sensationalism...

...Or is Lawrence insisting that Mellors' essential, inborn nature had only to be released from mechanistic society by love...

...In this environment, man's language, his body, indeed man himself survive as little more than chattering toys...

...There's a bad time coming...

...Rhetorically, they work to win the reader's approval for the participants and their life...

...The response of Mellors and Connie to the visit of her sister, Hilda, is a night of voluptuousness which Connie rationalizes as necessary to "burn out false shames...

...It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything...

...The whole last part of the book vibrates between a sense of the futility of Mellors' and Connie's love, and an assertion, not merely of its value, but of its viability...