Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Intellect vs. Bodily Experience
Nature vs. Machinery
Class, Consumerism, and Money
Gender and Sexuality
Catastrophe, Continuity, and Tradition
Summary
Analysis
Connie has started clearing out some of the junk in Wragby, including a number of very ugly pictures that Sir Geoffrey had collected. While she works, Connie suggests to Mrs. Bolton that she might have a child soon. To Mrs. Bolton’s shock, Connie hints that Clifford may be regaining his potency—an idea that Clifford himself put in her head. Silently, Mrs. Bolton wonders if Connie is actually going to have a baby with Mellors instead of her husband.
Connie is now using her husband’s words against him; if Clifford is deluded enough to believe that his material gains could have biological repercussions, then Connie will use that belief to conceive a child with Mellors.
Themes
As Connie goes through the old objects, she comes across a giant box, filled with secret compartments and expensive toiletries. Mrs. Bolton loves the box, so Connie gives it to her—much to the nurse’s delight. Over the coming weeks, Mrs. Bolton has a variety of friends over to see her new treasure. And each time a new person comes to see the box, Mrs. Bolton spreads the surprising rumor of Clifford’s returning virility.
Earlier, Mrs. Bolton decided to stay quiet about Connie’s affair out of some sense of female solidarity. Therefore, her decision to spread this rumor can now be read as her covert way of helping Connie; if more people believe that Clifford could have a child, then it will be easier for Connie to execute her secret plan.
Themes
One day, Squire Leslie Winter comes over to Wragby to discuss Clifford’s idea for a new coal-mining technique. Even Winter has heard the rumor of Clifford’s newfound potency, which prompts Clifford to bring it up with Connie while she is putting some flowers in a vase. Connie is baffled that this news has traveled so far, but Clifford hopes that these rumors are actually “prophecy.”
The frightening extent of Clifford’s delusion starts to come clear: though he is the person who started the rumor of his returning fertility, he has come to see it as a divine “prophecy.” After reflecting that mining could make men like “gods, or demons,” Clifford seems to have fully internalized this belief in his own godlike powers.
Themes
Connie tells Clifford that Sir Malcolm has invited her to a three-week trip in Venice. Clifford is nervous about letting Connie go, but Connie fervently promises that she will return (though the real reason for her passion is her commitment to Mellors, not to her husband). Connie also thinks that a trip to Venice might give her a cover with Clifford were she to become pregnant with Mellors’s child—Clifford would just assume she’d had a lover in Venice.
Though Clifford has let much of his emotional life go, his nervousness around Connie’s trip suggests that he intuits at least something about her new affair. Interestingly, Connie and Mellors have yet to articulate this commitment to each other, though they both feel it—another way in which language takes a backseat in their relationship.
Themes
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At the same time, Connie has no real desire to go away, preferring to stay with Mellors. She laments that her life is always “arranged” for her: “wheels that worked one and drove one, and over which one had no real control!” On a drive, Connie feels that everything is ugly—the rainy weather, the soot-blackened buildings of Tevershall, the trashy movies, even the off-key singing of the village schoolgirls. Connie feels that “the living intuitive faculty” is dead in all the Tevershall villagers, replaced only by “mechanical yells” and will-power.
Connie seems to enjoy relinquishing agency during sex, but outside of an intimate context, her loss of “control” feels like one more of mechanized destruction (wheels that “worked” and “drove”). This despair at the spread of technology is then reflected in Connie’s physical surroundings, in which all “intuition” seems to have been replaced by the “mechanical,” polluting mines.
Themes
Once, the Midlands were emblematic of old England (“Shakespeare’s England,” as Connie jokes to herself). But now, this area has become too focused on money and politics and not at all alive to emotions, beauty, and art. Even as Connie feels so little hope, however, she desperately wants to bring a child into this world. Connie’s car drives south, past the new mine at Stacks Gate, which has giant chemical works in “shapes not known to man,” “new on the face of the earth.”
The Midlands of Shakespeare’s time, romantic and picturesque, are gone. But this passage contrasts two different visions for the region’s future, one hopeful and one bleak. On the one hand, Connie hopes to restore some of the natural tenderness that came before, creating change and continuity via natural childbirth. On the other hand, the mines herald a completely foreign future, never before “known to man.”
Themes
On the other side of the road, Connie notices a beautiful old manor, and she thinks of the “ancestors” who must have enjoyed their lives there. Connie feels that grand houses like this (and, to some extent, like Wragby), are the only places where the old England really exists. In reality, though, even villages like Tevershall and Stacks Gate have old mining houses and pubs at the center of them—rundown buildings which have some real history, but which are not the version of old England that Connie romanticizes.
Though the novel valorizes Connie’s pastoral ideal, her romanticized version of Shakespeare’s England is still predicated on her own upper-class status: plenty of historical traces remain in Tevershall and Stacks Gate, but because they speak to poverty and not wealth, Connie dismisses them.
Themes
Indeed, the grand old England of Robin Hood is being torn down everywhere Connie can see; on her drive, she sees many of these stately Elizabethan homes being demolished. “This is history,” Connie thinks, “one England blots out the other.” The mines that had made these houses rich now destroyed them, just as industrial England was overtaking the agricultural England. And Connie, raised with wealth and therefore devoted to the older version of the nation, hates that this “continuity is not organic, but mechanical.”
In this vital passage, Connie speaks explicitly to the way that “mechanical” continuity—in which technology forces change—differs from “organic” continuity (like childbirth or plant growth). It is perhaps unsurprising that this artificial change would follow immediately on the heels of WWI, in which the old forms of fighting and national pride—based on valor and tradition—were replaced by brutal machines, killing and depleting soldiers on all sides.
Themes
Literary Devices
Connie visits Leslie Winter at his mansion, which is called Shipley. Shipley has beautiful gardens and big windows, and Connie thinks it is much prettier than Wragby. Still, Shipley is now bordered on all sides by colliers, and Winter feels that he is being pushed out by the very men that (in his mind) he used to encourage. Instead of walking around, Winter just hides inside; he knows the colliers resent that their work pays for his house, and while he feels some guilt, he has no intention of bucking the system.
Like Connie (and unlike Clifford), Winter acknowledges the basic unfairness of the stratified class hierarchy. But also like Connie, Winter is hesitant to alter the system in any meaningful way, in part because it benefits him and in part because he associates his own personal wealth with beauty and historic tradition.
Themes
In less than a year, Winter will die, leaving Clifford a great deal of money in his will. None of his heirs will want to preserve Shipley so it, too, will be torn down. But now, Connie does not know any of this; all she knows is that she fears the future terribly. Her most awful realization is that the men of today are no longer men—Connie thinks that “something that men should have was bred and killed out of them,” ruined by the iron and coal. Only Mellors feels different to Connie.
This flashforward, a complete structural anomaly in the book, points to Winter’s rarity: he is the only living character in the novel who truly represents England’s past, so his death—though not within the confines of the narrative—also signals the death of old England. For the first time, Connie begins to explicitly equate mechanization with a loss not only of humanity but of masculinity in particular; Mellors is an exception because he works with the land (and similarly detests industrialization).
Themes
When Connie returns home, Clifford wants to hear about her interactions with Winter and various townspeople. Connie implores Clifford to venture out into the world again, pointing out that he cannot expect to be adored by the working classes if he does not show his face to them, but he has no interest in doing so. Later that evening, Clifford brings up Venice, hoping Connie will not have a serious love affair there; she jokes that she would only have a minor affair. Clifford wants Connie to acknowledge marriage as something “eternal,” but Connie is troubled by the thought.
Just as Connie’s relationship with Mellors has changed her, Clifford’s new fascination with the mines has freed him of his earlier need for approval; now, all he cares about is material wealth. Interestingly, Clifford is still obsessed with the idea of something “eternal” and continuous, perhaps not realizing that his new technologies are the very things responsible for the region’s lack of continuity.
Themes
The next morning, Connie is surprised to see Mellors’s dog in the halls of Wragby—and even more surprised when she sees Mellors talking to Clifford. She is curious how Mellors ended up as a servant, and a line of Shakespeare comes into her head (“the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings”). Connie wonders how class impacts the way that Mellors sees her.
With this quotation from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Connie briefly wonders if Mellors’s lower-class status marks him as somehow lesser in character. But this thought quickly passes—and it is worth noting that, just as Connie disdains Clifford when he quotes Shakespeare to describe the flowers, the pristine language of Shakespeare is often depicted in this novel as untrustworthy (like all “words” are, to some extent).
Themes
That afternoon, Connie and Mrs. Bolton work in the garden together, planting flowers. The two have gotten closer recently, and Connie now starts asking Mrs. Bolton about her deceased husband. Mrs. Bolton believes that her late husband, Ted, was “too sensitive” to ever go in the mines; she sometimes wonders if he would rather have died than stayed working there. Mrs. Bolton admits that even now, 23 years later, she has not gotten over “the touch of him.” Mrs. Bolton feels that people are distrustful of true attraction between men and women—but despite her pain over Ted’s absence, she feels lucky to have known real love.
Since flowers so often symbolize new life and new love, it is significant that Connie and Mrs. Bolton bond over planting flowers together. Just as Connie’s lust for Mellors makes her want to build a future with him, Mrs. Bolton’s reflections on her intimate life with Ted demonstrate how momentary passion is—at least in the novel’s framing—the seed of real romantic longevity.
Themes
