20th Century Literature

Lady Chatterley's Lover - DH Lawrence According to Lawrence, World War I was a tragic disgrace and resulted in a chaotic society in England. He felt that the English morals and guidelines changed drastically after the war. In the first chapter of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence wrote: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes (Lawrence, 1995, p.

2)." Lady Chatterley's Lover is full of social, political, and cultural implications. By focusing on the forbidden relationship between Lady Connie Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, Lawrence reveals a great deal about the structure and politics of post-war society. While the main theme of this book is love, the unproductiveness, inhumanity and ugliness of life in a local mining community play a large role in this book. The political elements of this book are clearly demonstrated by Lady Chatterley's life in a society devoted to making money.

The book was extremely controversial when published because it is erotic. However, Lawrence was not aiming to create a pornographic work. Instead, through his descriptions of physical love, he aimed to show that a relationship cannot exist without love and caring. In a society in which harshness and brutality run rampant, Lawrence aimed to show couples must overcome their surroundings to develop a loving, harmonious relationship together. Mellors, a local gamekeeper, shows the harshness of the political society through his dedication to being a warm and kind man.

In this respect, he gains the affection of Lady Chatterley. The compassion of Mellors for the wicked ways of Lady Chatterley is what attracts the couple to one another. Their relationship involves many political elements, as it is considered an immoral relationship by the powers of England. Many of the defense witnesses were vulnerable - particularly the four Church of England clergy.

However, it is apparent to most that the couple is guilty of immorality, which was greatly frowned upon by a society that desperately wanted to create an image of perfection. The Chatterleys' marriage was main theme in the story, as society unfairly viewed its failure as the fault of Lady Chatterley, who had a difficult time maintaining a relationship with a husband who was half paralyzed and half crazy. She looks to Mellors to make her feel alive again.

However, the prosecution fails to realize that the couple is building a strong relationship that has a good chance of leading to a successful marriage. They can only point finders and accuse the couple of immorality. One of the main points of Lawrence's book is to show that love and lust are driven by the same impulses and problems as economics and politics.

There is an obvious connection between society's sexual malaise, and the political and economic malaise of England during the time the novel was written, which is clearly demonstrated by the issues that arise as a result of Lady Chatterley's relationship with Mellors. The book starts by introducing Connie Reid, a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class who is well versed in love and sexual relations. She marries Clifford Chatterley at the age of 23.

She enjoys about a month of marital bliss, then her husband is sent to war and comes back paralyzed, impotent and a bit mad. When he returns, Clifford becomes a successful writer and Connie is surrounded by groups of intellectuals. Connie is, at first, enticed by his world, but later discovers that intellectual life is nothing but words without substance. Her character reveals the emptiness of intellectual life and the bohemian salons, which many people believed to be at the top of society.

Connie feels empty around the intellectuals and is driven to committing adultery. However, all of the men she meets lack truth and passion. When she meets Oliver Mellors, a local gamekeeper, she is attracted to his nobility and passion. However, Mellors maintains a distance from her, due to the class distance between them. Eventually, they develop a physical relationship but the politics of class separation drive a wedge between them.

When Connie becomes pregnant with Mellors' child, she is thrilled as she feels he is a real and purposeful man, as opposed to the dehumanized industrial workers and pretentious intellectuals she surrounded by. The distance closes between the two and their relationship resembles more of a real marriage than Connie's true marriage ever could. At the end of the novel, Mellors' former wife returns, creating a scandal and getting Mellors fired from the Chatterleys' estate.

Connie tells Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but Clifford will not divorce her. The novel ends with Mellors working on a farm and.