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 arrives home, Clifford cross-examines her about her whereabouts. Despite Mrs. Bolton’s best efforts to calm him, Clifford hates the idea of Connie out in the woods during a rainstorm—especially because Connie doesn’t come home after the rain stops, making it unlikely that she simply got caught in the rain. Mrs. Bolton, of course, knows that Connie has actually been with Mellors.
Clifford’s suspicion is mounting, though he does not ever name—seemingly even to himself—his belief that Connie is having an affair. Whereas Connie and Mellors act on their intuitions and instincts, Clifford ignores his, much to his own detriment.
Themes
Though Connie resents that Mrs. Bolton has discovered the affair, she cannot hide her joy—her rosy cheeks and starry eyes give it away. Connie even feels bad for Mrs. Bolton; after all, whenever Clifford flies into one of his rages (often provoked by her absence), it is Mrs. Bolton who has to deal with him. Connie tries to soothe Clifford, telling him that she went to the hut and took a shower in the rain, leaving out that she took this shower with Mellors.
As Connie’s affair with Mellors deepens, the novel begins to ascribe even more femininity to her physical appearance, again suggesting her fulfilling sex stems from a more conventional understanding of gender roles.
Themes
Clifford senses that Connie is lying to him, but despite himself, he cannot help admiring her, both for her obstinacy and her flushed beauty. That evening, Clifford tries to be kind to Connie, reading her his “scientific-religious” books, all of which focus on leaving the body behind in favor of high-minded mental pursuits. But all Connie can think about is Mellors, particularly his praise of her “arse.” Unlike talking to Mellors, Connie feels that conversation with Clifford “had to be made, almost chemically.”
The main thing Connie and Mellors talk about is their bodies, using four-letter words to praise and please each other. Clifford’s focus on leaving his body seems particularly inorganic in contrast, a juxtaposition that is reflected in the almost “chemical” way Clifford has to force companionship.
Themes
As Clifford wistfully imagines vanishing into abstract form, Connie—still thinking of Mellors’s words—insists that she likes her body. Clifford feels that it is cruel for Connie to wave her newfound happiness and bodily freedom in his face, but Connie is hardly bothered. That night, Clifford, disturbed by his wife’s words, again struggles to sleep; instead, he forces Mrs. Bolton to stay up all night gambling with him.
Before having sex with Mellors, the sight of Connie’s body in the mirror made her cry; now, seeing herself through Mellors’s eyes, she learns to love her body. More and more, Clifford gets his way through force, requiring Connie to sit next to him or Mrs. Bolton to gamble with him as if they were parts in one of his machines.
Themes
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It is almost time for Connie to head off. First, she tells Mellors that if everything looks like it will work out for their last night together, she will hang a green shawl out of her window (if there is trouble, she’ll hang a red shawl). Then, Connie works with Mrs. Bolton to pack for the trip. While they pack, the two women gossip about men. Mrs. Bolton believes that caring for a man means “giving in” to him—but so few women know this because so few women ever truly care for their lovers.
Mrs. Bolton reaffirms the lesson the novel has already taught Connie: true passion, for a woman, is about submitting (“giving in”) rather than controlling the situation. Though it has been decades since Mrs. Bolton last was intimate with a man, her memories of her dead husband Ted are sustaining—affirming Connie’s newfound belief that momentary intimacies are powerful enough to determine the future.
Themes
At last, the day of Hilda’s arrival rolls around. Hilda is in the middle of her own divorce, and when she learns that Connie is sleeping with the game-keeper, she makes her displeasure clear. Hilda loathes Clifford, but she also doesn’t want Connie to “lower” herself with a servant. Still, despite Hilda’s anger (which reminds Connie of their mother), she agrees to help Connie in her plan to have one last night with Mellors. Connie hangs the green shawl on her windowsill.
In their adolescent years at Dresden, the sisters were unified, both preferring intellectual connections to passionate sex. But now, Connie’s experience with Mellors has caused the sisters to diverge; whereas Hilda still retains rigid ideas (not only about sex but about class and propriety), Connie is happier and freer.
Themes
As Hilda drives off with Connie, she feels new sympathy for Clifford; personally, Hilda hates sex, and she thinks Connie should appreciate her husband’s impotency. And when Connie challenges her sister’s distaste for Mellors on a political level—“you’re always on the side of the working classes!”—Hilda insists that she is only allied with working-class people in the abstract. Hilda thinks it should be impossible for rich people to “mix” their lives with the poor.
Hilda and Connie were both raised in socialist circles, so Hilda’s hypocrisy is especially striking. In satirizing Hilda and Clifford, the novel critiques upper-class intellectuals, many of whom espouse ideas in theory (like the end of class hierarchy) that they have no interest in actually putting into practice.
Themes
After Hilda has checked in to a nearby hotel, the two sisters drive down the road near Mellors’s cottage. Connie introduces her sister to her lover, and the three walk in total silence through the woods. Once they arrive at the cottage, Hilda looks around the room, and then at Mellors himself. When Hilda takes a seat, Connie softly corrects her that she is in Mellors’s chair (though Mellors himself does not mind).
Connie’s quiet ask that Hilda shift her chair is yet another mark of Connie’s newly submissive attitude; rather than allying herself with her sister, as she used to do in their youth, Connie puts Mellors’s comfort above everything else.
Themes
The conversation quickly sours after Hilda accuses Mellors’s dialect of sounding “a little affected.” Mellors strikes back that Hilda will criticize anything he does, given that she does not approve of this affair in general. For her part, Hilda hates that Mellors has an instinctive grace and good breeding that she herself lacks. When Connie tries to make peace, Hilda just scolds her, telling her, “You’ve got to have some continuity in your life. You can’t just go making a mess.”
In this important passage, Hilda’s discomfort with Mellors stems from his contradictions: he possesses the grace she lacks even as he speaks a working-class dialect and lives in a small hut. In fact, Mellors’s grace comes from his ability to follow his instincts, the very skill Hilda (and Clifford) lack. Hilda’s emphasis on “continuity” further links her to Clifford, who hopes to force Connie into being a “link in the chain.” But even if Hilda cannot see it, Connie is establishing a private, more natural form of continuity, intending to turn her passionate love for Mellors into a child with a future of its own.
Themes
Mellors, angered by this, starts using explicitly sexual language to describe his relationship with Connie, which offends Hilda so much that she gets up and leaves. Once Hilda is gone, Connie, unbothered, just wants Mellors to kiss her. He feels that he needs to “simmer down” first, however, so he does chores in silence while Connie admires his “handsome” anger.
Mellors’s insistence on crude language is a rebuke of Hilda’s taut, mannered way of being; whereas Hilda refuses to name the reality of the situation, Mellors names it with four-letter words, brusque and effective.
Themes
Literary Devices
They have sex for a final time, and it is rougher and more sensual than usual. Connie feels that she needs to be Mellors’s “passive, consenting thing” in order to burn out all the “deepest, oldest shames” she carries. After they both finish, Connie wonders why people have been trying to tame sex for centuries—since the ancient Greeks—when in reality it is such a messy, fiery thing. “What liars poets and everybody were!” Connie thinks. Instead of wanting “sentiment,” what she has always really wanted is this “piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality.”
In addition to reiterating that Connie most enjoys sex when she is “passive” instead of active, this important passage also explains Connie’s critique of language; so often, she feels, language tries to simplify the hard-to-understand, “awful” appeal of intercourse. Connie prefers rough, “consuming” sex to any words that one might use to flatten that experience. And just as she once reflected that words were “meaningless,” Connie now believes that literature itself is a “lie,” trying to contain sex to the page rather than embracing its inarticulable realities.
Themes
Literary Devices
Connie goes to sleep. The next morning, she is woken by Mellors’s lustful gaze. For the first time, Connie sees herself from Mellors’s perspective, and the voluptuous image of herself in his eyes delights her. Mellors brings her breakfast in bed, and she lets herself imagine a life with him. As they eat, Connie makes Mellors again promise that they will live together when she returns.
Connie’s appetite around Mellors contrasts with the disinterested attitude toward food she used to have around Clifford. Perhaps her new awareness of—and pride in—her body makes her more willing to fuel it, just as Clifford’s lack of attention to her body made Connie ignore it, too.
Themes
The postman arrives, bringing some photographs from British Columbia; this is one of the places Mellors thinks they could go to after leaving Wragby. Slowly, the two of them get dressed and walk to the road, where Hilda is waiting. Connie feels that the whole purpose of life is nights like the one they just shared, but Mellors reminds her that “there’s the rest o’ the times to think on,” too. This comment plunges Mellors into a sad and anxious mood, and when Hilda arrives, he hides in the bushes instead of facing her.
Though Connie mentally links her present happiness to an exciting future, Mellors struggles to take the long view. Interestingly, of all the characters in the novel, only Connie seems to have a healthy relationship with time: Clifford and Hilda focus too much on the future, men like Sir Geoffrey and Leslie Winter focus too much on the past, and Mellors feels terrified of “the rest o’ the times” outside of his encounters with Connie.
Themes
