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
At lunch, Connie lectures Hilda about all the things she is missing out on. This annoys Hilda, who insists that all she wants is “complete intimacy”—even though that idea seems boring to Connie. Hilda feels that Connie has become a “slave” to Mellors’s desires, while Connie uses her resentment of Hilda to conjecture that she must resent all women.
Hilda’s focus on “complete” connection ignores the mystery and sense of feeling “lost” that Connie has so loved with Mellors. While Hilda feels that Connie’s passivity is a kind of “slavery,” Connie believes that there is power in submission.
Themes
When they get to London, Connie is glad to reunite with Sir Malcolm, who has recently gotten remarried to a rich young woman. Connie has always been her father’s favorite, and the two have go on fun excursions together. As they walk or sit, Connie observes her father’s masculinity in his strong—albeit aging—legs. She realizes that her time with Mellors has made her newly attuned to “the existence of legs.”
Every element of Connie’s perception has been shifted by her affair with Mellors: she now pays attention to new parts of the body, focused on physical strength and vitality more than just someone’s head and features.
Themes
Unfortunately, Connie thinks everyone else around her seems tired and blank. When they get to Paris, Connie sees a little more “sensuality”—but here, too, all people think about is “money, money, money.” Connie begins to feel afraid of the world, which she sees is being overrun by the Americans and English, all of whom lack “tenderness.” Indeed, Connie now agrees with Mellors that people are “alike” everywhere; even travel, supposedly leisure, feels determined and money-grubbing. Connie wishes she were at Wragby.
Mellors’s perspective clearly shapes Connie’s experience of Europe, which she sees as just as mechanical and impersonal as her English home. Even Paris, allegedly the city of love and “sensuality,” feels materialist.
Themes
Finally, they arrive in Venice. They are staying at a little place called the Villa Esmeralda; on the way over, Hilda and Connie take a gondola, steered by a gondolier named Giovanni. Giovanni convinces the sisters to hire him for the duration of their trip so that they can have easy transport away from the dull Scottish couple who is hosting them.
The Italian city is filled with canals; to get around, people ride on long, flat-bottomed boats known as gondolas. Though this languorous form of transportation is traditionally associated with romance and sensuality, Connie feels embittered here, too.
Themes
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Though there are a good deal of other people staying at the villa, Hilda and Connie think that most of them are very boring. Sir Malcolm takes his daughters to restaurants and plays, and to the Lido—but through it all, Connie can only think of the excess. “Too many ices, too many cocktails,” she thinks, “too many men-servants wanting tips […] altogether far too much enjoyment!” Even Michaelis has found his way to Venice, and he follows Hilda and Connie around.
The Lido is a barrier island, but being close to the sea does not make Connie feel any closer to nature. Instead, she sees only the inorganic effort behind all these tourists’ “enjoyment” (as Michaelis, who seems to be wherever there are cocktails and dancing, symbolizes).
Themes
Hilda likes this drugged kind of pleasure, especially when she goes to jazz clubs and dances intimately with strangers. But Connie just wants to get in the gondola and go to some quiet part of the city, where she can bathe alone. Unfortunately, even this peace is complicated when Giovanni—thinking the two sisters are looking to have sex—hires his friend Daniele as a sort of sex worker. Connie and Hilda want no such thing, and Connie thinks it is extremely sad that even sex can be converted into money.
Hilda’s appreciation of this forced enjoyment once more testifies to the absence of real, joyful intimacy in her life. Importantly, Connie’s sadness at Giovanni’s attempted prostitution is twofold. Explicitly, it makes Connie sad that sex can be so baldly commodified, turned not into instinct but into transaction. But implicitly, the idea of male prostitution seems particularly dismal within the novel’s framework of desire, which suggests that women should be passive participants instead of active seekers in sexual pleasure.
Themes
As the weeks pass, Connie discovers two things. First, she now senses that she is pregnant; there is something full and “stupefying” about the way her body feels. And second, Clifford writes to inform Connie that Mellors’s wife, hearing that Mellors had started on a divorce, returned and claimed residency in his cottage. Connie writes to Mrs. Bolton to get more information. Around this time, Duncan Forbes, an artist and longtime friend of the Reid family, arrives in Venice.
It is telling that, despite all the external, purchasable forms of enjoyment around her, Connie only finds real happiness within her body, through the feeling of her pregnancy. The return of Bertha Coutts spells trouble for Mellors and Connie, as Bertha’s unwillingness to go through with the divorce will surely make the illicit couple’s already complex circumstances even more difficult.
Themes
Mrs. Bolton writes back clarifying the story. Apparently, Bertha broke into Mellors’s cottage, forcing Mellors to stay with his mother. While at the cottage, Bertha found evidence that Mellors was having an affair, and she spread rumors of this to the entire town of Tevershall. Connie is horribly depressed by this news, feeling that Mellors’s association with the awful Bertha somehow implicates him, too.
Mellors now hates Bertha, but at one time, he did find himself drawn to her—and because so much of what attracts Connie to him is his intense, unfiltered desire, his long-ago love of Bertha makes his judgment (and Connie’s attraction to that judgment) seem suspect.
Themes
Connie confides in Duncan Forbes, who comforts her by telling her that people merely hate those who have good sex—“it’s the one insane taboo left.” Duncan’s words allow Connie to feel fondly towards Mellors again, and she impulsively includes a note to him in her next letter to Mrs. Bolton. In the note, Connie assures Mellors that she is on his side and that this trouble with Bertha will pass.
Like Sir Malcolm, Duncan is a painter, preferring to communicate his ideas in images instead of words. Perhaps that is why, like Malcolm, he embraces frank conversation about sex rather than shying away from it. So, just as the novel (somewhat ironically) critiques literature, it seems to praise painting as a more truthful medium of artistic expression.
Themes
Soon, Clifford writes again, updating Connie on the scandal and saying that all the colliers’ wives are now on Bertha’s side. He mocks Mrs. Bolton as being a bottom-feeder, obsessed with the lowest gossip; he also hints that he is firing Mellors because of the rumors. Clifford even shares a particularly odd conversation he had with Mellors: when he chided Mellors for the affair, Mellors merely replied that, “it’s not for a man i’ the shape you’re in, Sir Clifford, to twit me for havin’ a cod atween my legs.” Finally, Clifford encourages Connie to stay on vacation until the scandal dies down.
While Mrs. Bolton, having had her own intense moment of passion years ago, tends to ally herself with Mellors and Connie, most of the colliers’ wives have had no such intimacy, and so they sympathize not with Mellors’s true love but with Bertha’s vengeful commitment. Mellors’s retort to Clifford—said in dialect to mock Clifford’s upper-class mannerisms—makes explicit the novel’s ableist linking of Clifford’s disability (the “shape” he’s in) with his errant masculinity.
Themes
Connie is irritated and confused until she gets a letter from Mellors himself. Mellors’s letter clarifies what exactly Bertha knows; she found Connie’s initials (‘C.S.R.’) scribbled all over the house and put together that Mellors was likely having an affair with Lady Chatterley herself. Mellors ends his letter by announcing that he is leaving Wragby and will go to London instead. Connie is angry that Mellors did not ask about her at all in this letter.
Though Connie prides herself on not needing language to communicate with Mellors, when they write letters to each other, words are all they have. Mellors’s refusal to express care or concern with language thus poses a problem for Connie here, especially given their newly precarious circumstances. On the other hand, though, the fact that Connie’s scrawled initials gave the couple away to Bertha again signals the untrustworthiness of written language.
Themes
To distract from her anxiety, Connie spends her days with Duncan Forbes, whose longtime crush on her has been reignited. Duncan thinks that everyone feels as lonely as he does, remarking that Daniele—despite being so handsome—looks so solitary. But Connie knows that Daniele is married with two young children. “Perhaps,” Connie muses, “only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe.”
In this reflection, Connie’s insights into Daniele perhaps hint at her own desire to feel calm about separating from Mellors, instead of anxious to be even momentarily “alone.”
Themes
