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
When Connie gets to the gate, Mellors is already there. As they walk back to the cottage, Connie worries again that Mellors hurt himself when he was pushing Clifford’s wheelchair. Connie is angry with Clifford, but Mellors only feels that Clifford lacks “balls”—meaning, as Mellors puts it, that “he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him.”
Mellors offers Connie food, but she is not hungry. He then tries to feed his dog, but the dog refuses to eat, and Mellors accuses it of being temperamental and jealous of Connie, saying “tha’rt a female, tha art!” While Mellors undresses, Connie looks around the room, noticing a large portrait of Mellors and his wife, Bertha, when they were young. The picture is in a hideous frame, and Connie suggests that Mellors should burn it.
Mellors’s prejudices against women, many of which he has kept under wraps, now come out in his dismissal of his dog. The fact that Mellors and Connie have begun to primarily speak Midlands dialect with each other affirms their commitment to carnal feeling over intricate language.
Themes
Mellors likes this plan, so he takes the picture off the wall and begins to disassemble it. As he does so, Connie asks Mellors if he ever loved Bertha. After Mellors explains that he does not even want to think about her, Connie encourages him to get a divorce. Mellors is hesitant at first, but when Connie points out that his wife could now claim legal rights to him and his property at any moment, he agrees that a divorce is a good idea. Mellors throws the picture from his wedding night into the fire.
Though Mellors and Connie have never actually agreed to spend their lives together, Mellors’s burning the picture—combined with his promise to get a divorce—suggests that both partners are very much on the same page about sharing their future together.
Themes
Finally, Mellors tells Connie the story of his past romances. When he was young, he fell in love with a school-master’s daughter, who was beautiful and literary but who dreaded having sex. So Mellors left her and wound up with an older woman (“a demon”) who loved cuddling and foreplay—but this woman, too, hated the actual act of penetrative sex. So again, Mellors left, desperate to find a woman who wanted him sexually as much as he wanted her.
Mellors wants Connie to be passive, but his scornful recollection of past sexual partners makes it clear that he wants Connie’s passivity to stem from her own desire to explore an aspect of her identity, not from her disinterest. Mellors’s quite literal demonization of women he deems sexually deviant is another manifestation of the novel’s conservative notion of gender roles; though Mellors ostensibly encourages female desire, he also believes that desire should exist only on his own terms.
Themes
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Mellors met Bertha Coutts when he was 21, working as a blacksmith, like his father before him. Though he had known Bertha since they were young, she had just come back from working as a fine lady’s companion, and Mellors was impressed by the “sensual bloom” she had taken on. Soon after reconnecting, Mellors and Bertha got married, and he was happy that she was “common” and seemed to actually enjoy sex.
Fascinatingly, in his memory of Bertha Coutts, Mellors conflates her “sensuality” with her working-class, “common” status. Though Connie (and to some extent her father) are exceptions to the rule, Mellors seems to feel that upper-class people are particularly alienated from their passions and instincts.
Themes
But after a while, Bertha started to resent how much Mellors enjoyed having sex with her, and the two began to squabble, even occasionally getting into violent fights. When they did have sex, Mellors would finish first, and then Bertha would use his still-erect penis to have her own orgasm, an act that horrified Mellors with its “selfishness.” Indeed, Mellors came to believe that Bertha only had sensation at “the top of her beak,” a place he associates with “whores.”
Mellors’s description of Bertha’s sexual habits closely resembles Connie’s routines with Michaelis and her Dresden boy. But here, Mellors turns that act into something “selfish” and shameful, implying that women who prefer clitoral orgasms to penetrative sex are in some way unnatural. Subtly, Connie’s persistent conflation of sex and procreation aligns with Mellors’s view that penetrative sex is the most legitimate form of intimacy.
Themes
Soon after their child was born, Mellors left for the war, and he refused to come back until he knew that Bertha was with another man. Yet even though he hated his years with Bertha, Mellors still prefers her to the women who refused to have sex with him. He also criticizes the women who want him to “go off” in unusual places and the women who rub themselves up against him and thus are, in his mind, “lesbian.” Mellors speaks with a great deal of rage about all the women that he sees as sexually deviant.
In listing all the ways that women can be sexually deviant, Mellors creates an ideal female sexuality almost by process of elimination. In his mind, women should be passive and adoring, orgasming only via penetrative sex and only at the same time as men do. Notably, Mellors’s sexual preferences line up almost exactly with what Connie has recently learned to enjoy.
Themes
Mellors confesses that though he sometimes fears what will happen once he and Connie get more entangled, he is deeply “glad” to have found her. Connie reflects that they are both “battered warriors,” having survived many awful intimate experiences in order to find each other. By the time this conversation is done, the picture of Bertha and Mellors on their wedding day has been burnt to ash.
Symbolically, the burning of Bertha’s picture represents the removal of an obstacle to Connie and Mellors’s union. It is worth noting that this moment of closeness comes only after Mellors’s surprising rage; to Connie, perhaps, this rage is just one more proof of his “spunky wild” masculinity.
Themes
Mellors goes outside with the dog, and Connie takes a moment alone, too. Then they cuddle by the fire, and though Connie feels at ease, she cannot help but notice the “black void of despair” inside her lover. Connie tries to push back on Mellors’s logic about his past sexual encounters, but each new comment only frustrates him further. When she presses him to confess what he believes in, Mellors that “I believe in being warm-hearted […] in fucking with a warm heart.” But before Connie can agree, Mellors snaps at her, accusing her of “self-importance” and telling her to go home.
Mellors’s belief in being passionate and “warm” comes to be the guiding principle for the couple in this final chunk of the narrative; rather than espousing the importance of emotional intimacy, Mellors emphasizes the importance of tender, instinctual passion (“fucking,” in his lingo). At the same time, Mellors’s sudden coldness toward Connie suggests that he, too, has some fear at the strength of his feelings, despite his clear values.
Themes
Literary Devices
This comment hurts Connie, and she wonders aloud what has happened to make her lover so nasty. Seeing Connie’s real sadness melts Mellors, and he takes her in his arms, feeling for her vagina under her dress. As he holds her, Mellors asks to never fight again, and he vows to be faithful to Connie, “heart an’ belly an’ cock.” Connie cries a little, and they go to sleep, her curled up against him.
Mellors’s commitment to be faithful to Connie “heart an’ belly an’ cock” almost perfectly mirrors Tommy Dukes’s earlier reflection that true knowledges comes from “the belly” and “the penis” as much as from the brain. The novel thus seems to assert that both real knowledge and real care are corporeal as much as mental, built on feeling and instinct even more than they are built on thought.
Themes
The next morning, Connie is almost surprised to realize that she is still in Mellors’s cottage. Mellors, grateful for the new day, strokes Connie’s breasts and takes off her nightgown. Mellors, too, undresses, and Connie reflects that he is as beautiful now as he was the first time she saw him washing himself. Mellors is ashamed that Connie sees him in this aroused, naked, state, but Connie wants only to admire his body.
Mellors and Connie are newly able to be naked with each other, but more than that, they are no longer shy about their appreciation for each other’s naked forms. Perhaps because she knows that Mellors finds women’s desire attractive, Connie at last allows herself to admire Mellors’s body as he has long admired hers.
Themes
Literary Devices
Connie particularly admires Mellors’s penis, which she reflects is “like another being […] a bit terrifying!” Mellors now names their genitalia: he calls his penis “John Thomas” and Connie’s vagina “Lady Jane.” Mellors and Connie continue to joke with these new pet names, and then have sex again. After they have sex, Connie marvels that Mellors’s penis, which had been so large only moments before but has now gone flaccid. Tenderly, she touches Mellors’s genitalia, cooing to Mellors that “he’s mine too. He’s not only yours.”
In this vital passage, sex breaks down class hierarchies in several ways. First, by using the title “Lady Jane” for Connie’s genitalia, Mellors pokes fun at the entire system of English aristocracy (while also elevating Connie’s genitalia to something close to royalty). And perhaps more touchingly, Connie breaks down the idea of possession, suggesting that something of Mellors’s can belong to her not because of wealth (as Clifford would have it) but because of desire and care.
Themes
Mellors and Connie have sex again. When they have both finished, Connie hears the sounds of the mine at Stacks Gate, a sign that it is now seven in the morning. Connie confesses that she wants to live with Mellors “always,” which both gratifies and upsets him; he loves her, but he also fears that committing to her will bring dire consequences. The two sit in naked silence for a moment, and then Mellors gets dressed.
As has happened during several of their intimate encounters, the sounds of the mine here remind Connie and Clifford of the dangerous, mechanized world that their love must survive.
Themes
Literary Devices
Connie again looks around the room, noticing Mellors’s books: he has works on Bolshevist Russia, on atoms and electrons and the causes of earthquakes, and even some novels. Connie wishes that she could stay here forever and that “there weren’t the other ghastly world of smoke and iron.” When she voices her desire that the rest of the world should disappear, Mellors reminds her that no such thing is possible. Before she leaves, Connie affirms that she wants to come and live with Mellors soon, for real this time.
In this fascinating passage, Mellors’s opposition to language takes on a new cast; he is a voracious reader, just as politically savvy and literary as Clifford himself. But whereas Clifford reads instead of existing within the natural world, Mellors merely uses his books to complement his embodied experience. Seeing Mellors’s bookshelf allows Connie to realize that what she must fight is the mechanical, “ghastly world of smoke and iron”; her enemy is not language itself, but rather the destruction that Clifford’s overreliance on language makes possible.
Themes
