Lady Chatterley
When this world is trying its hardest
To leave me unimpressed
Just one caress
From you and I’m blessed
–Depeche Mode “One Caress”
After enduring the dullness of daily routines, now I’m ready to talk about “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
It is an extremely controversial book, continually denounced for its explicit sexual content. It is true that it does contain some, uh, steamy parts. However, I find myself equally enjoying the first half of the book, especially the descriptions of Connie’s disillusion with life and love. The words, coated with elegance and sorrow, are unbelievably accurate accounts of the unbearable emptiness of 20th century life.
The plot is actually quite predictable. Connie, the heroine, married Sir Clifford Chatterly before the war. Tragedy hit Clifford before he returned from the battlefield–he was severely injured and thus was paralyzed from the waist down. Unable to travel around like normal aristocratic men do, Clifford found his pleasure in writing, having intellectual talks with his friends, and later his mining projects. While Connie enjoyed Clifford’s recreations from the beginning, she gradually grew aware of the meaninglessness of these activities. Moreover, her female self begged to be adored and cherished. Things grew even grimer when her tentative affair with Michaleas turned out to be disappointing and humiliating. Finally, she found solace with Mellors, the Chatterley’s gamekeeper, who lived in a hut in the woods…
When I first finished reading the book, I was obsessed with the mutual love Connie and Mellors have established as most dreamy girls would be. Their relationship is passionate, honest, intense, perilous, tender but exciting. Clifford is the villain who is incapable of facing the reality, showing respects to his wife, and do with his foolish stubbornness. Nevertheless, while envying Connie and Mellors’ love, I began to sympathize with Clifford, even more than the lovers.
Clifford, after all, is the most wretched victim of war in the book. Circumstances force him to move out of his misery and move on, and composing, reading, chatting, and bossing around are his ways to remain positive about life. Although Connie’s zest for love and sensuality should be fulfilled, Clifford cannot afford to think about them since he would never be able to provide them for her. His pleasure in reading and composing literary works is, unfortunately, incomprehensible to Connie.
Due to personal experiences, I realize that people would naturally turn to intellectual development, or the so-called “reason,” when there is no way that their sensual desire would be satisfied. As people gain more and more knowledge, they also drift away from the primitive, spontaneous, and sheer affection Connie and Mellors share.
Love is worth yearning for, but I can’t bear to think about it now…
In addition to probing into love and relationships, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is compelling in its celebration of innocent lives and beautiful landscapes. Categorized as Modernist literature, it offers solutions to tolerate modern life and ways to find retreats. Well, the amorous parts alone are worth reading. Wrought with emotion and fragility, they are much deeper than the b-rated romantic sagas commonly found in bookstores.
- Books & Literature | Time: 7:30 am (UTC+8)
Some personal reflections on this book, the movies that came from it and my own belief system.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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AMONG THE RUINS
In the opening lines of Lady Chatterly’s Lover(1928) D.H. Lawrence writes “the cataclysm has happened; we are among the ruins; we start to build up new little habitats and to have new little hopes.” In 1928 the world was, in fact, rebuilding because the moral and spiritual heart of western civilization had been decimated. A new spiritual age was dawning but so very unobtrusively.-Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, John Murray Publications Ltd., London, 1991,p.173.
We did start to build
so unostentatiously
the world did not even
know. For the building
of new little habitats,
which he tended so very
lovingly from so far away,
as his predecessors had
also tended that Force of
enormous power as best they
could for some 77 years,
hardly known in the West.
But entre deux guerres, those
years between the wars a new
spiritual energy was canalized
through a new instrument into
an evolving Administrative System,
expressed in points of light,
spreading so slowly,so slowly,
in new little hopes,during that
hiatus period* among the ruins**
with the Zeal of the Lord inch
by incremental inch leading us,
tender, green and oh so verdant.
Ron Price
12 September 1999
(updated for MySpace
11/1/08)
* the period 1921 to 1936 is often referred to as a hiatus period, a waiting period, during which the Guardian was laying the foundation for the Administrative system, a system which would canalize the international teaching program in the years after 1937.
** the ruins, of course, are the ruins after WWI.
Comment by RonPrice — January 10, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
I wouldlike to add another prose-poem-comment on Lawrence’s work and my own beliefs, opening this piece of writing with some lines from Philip Larkin on the same theme of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and sex….Ron Price, Tasmania
MORE THAN SEX GOING ON HERE
Sexual intercourse began
In 1963
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
-Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis, quoted in Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide.
Sexual activity began
In 1962
Between the beginning of my pioneering
And the complete institutionalization
Of charisma in the conveyance
Of authority in an emerging world religion.
-Ron Price, Untitled Poem, written only here to convey a perspective.
The year I became a Baha’i
Lady Chatterly’s Lover1 went
on trial, four-letter words
became okay, sex was opened
to public discussion endlessly,
the unsayable became sayable
and pornography began to
travel in rivers to the sea of
our lives. The permissive
society was well on its way,
Betty Friedan published her
Feminine Mystique and the
tenth stage of history made
its entrance2 in the greatest
drama in the world’s spiritual
history—as I tasted my first
experience of depression,3
hungered for sex and was
initiated into the mysteries
and secrets of pioneering.4
Ron Price
1 August 1998
1 The first year of my experience as a Baha’i was October 1959 to October 1960.
2 The tenth stage of history is part of a Baha’i paradigm of history. It began in 1963.
3 This outline of the early 1960s is found in many places. I drew on Margaret Drabble: A Reader’s Guide, Valerie Myer, Vision Press, NY, 1991, pp.13-14.
4 this poem is another example of the vahid(Farsi word for unity), a poem of 19 lines.
Comment by RonPrice — January 10, 2008 @ 2:20 pm