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
One day, Connie asks Tommy Dukes why men and women no longer seem to like each other. Dukes is surprised by the question, as he likes Connie a great deal. But to Connie’s dismay, Dukes seems to think that desiring a woman sexually gets in the way of wanting to talk to a woman, and vice versa. Then again, there are really no women whom Dukes seems sexually interested in; he feels that the whole “sex thing” is overrated and over-emphasized.
Connie is hurt to hear Dukes describe sex and good conversation as opposed, even though she herself felt that way during her time at Dresden. Clearly, Connie’s sexless life with Clifford—coupled with her intimate pain with Michaelis—is causing her to rethink the connection between physical and emotional intimacy.
Themes
Connie begins to feel that everyone around her is much, much older than she is. She begins to understand why people become obsessed with cocktails and jazz parties: “you had to take it out some way or other, your youth,” she reflects, “or it ate you up.” Connie wonders if she should have just gone away with Michaelis, turning her life into one long cocktail party.
Connie’s age group is known, historically, as “the Lost Generation” for their tendencies toward hedonism and reckless spending. Now, Connie examines that instinct in herself; after spending her young adulthood dealing with conflict and injury, Connie now feels eaten alive by the “youth” she never got to have. And again, money becomes the only way she can envision to escape her unhappiness.
Themes
On one of her saddest days, Connie goes for a walk in the woods—only to be interrupted by the sound of a gunshot, followed by voices arguing. When Connie investigates the sound, she finds Mellors, arguing with a little girl in thick dialect. In an effort to cheer the girl up, Connie leans down, cooing comfort and giving her some change. The little girl explains that she is upset because Mellors—her father—shot a cat, though Mellors winks that it was only “poachers.”
As before, Mellors’s entrance (this time with a gunshot) signals danger and excitement; also as before, Connie finds Mellors in the woods, as he becomes a literal and symbolic interruption of her repetitive, unnatural life inside Wragby’s walls. The little girl is likely Mellors’s daughter, the result of the marriage Clifford told Connie about.
Themes
The girl, who introduces herself as Connie Mellors, keeps crying, so Connie offers to take her to her Gran’s house. Connie can’t help feeling that Mellors is disrespecting her authority, though she is also annoyed by the manipulative little girl. When the two Connies arrive at the grandmother’s little cottage, the old woman is embarrassed and grateful for “Lady Chatley’s” time. Connie Chatterley is relieved to be done with the situation; the grandmother is sad that Connie saw her in her coarse clothes, her face dirty.
Class dominates even simple, quotidian interactions. Connie feels that Mellors is disrespecting her authority as his boss; the little girl, sensing wealth, immediately tries to manipulate Connie; and Mellors’s mother seems to have a great deal of internalized shame around her working-class status.
Themes
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As Connie heads home, she reflects that “all the great words […] were canceled for her generation”: “home” is now a physical place more than an emotional feeling, just as “joy” has been reduced to a good night of dancing the Charleston, and “husband” has become a term for a sexless companion. The only word that still has any real meaning is “money,” which seems to be the only thing needed for survival, the only thing people still feel any sort of pride about.
Connie has earlier lamented that “words” are swallowing real experience, but now she gets more specific: material life (houses and parties and marriage licenses) has replaced emotional life, and so words that express feelings—like “joy”—no longer have any meaning. In this critical passage, then, the novel suggests that its characters have replaced the normal, human hunger for sex, peace, and companionship with a single-minded focus on accruing wealth.
Themes
Connie returns to Clifford, resolving to help her husband talk through his next short story (though she knows he will be inspired less by creative fervor and more by sheer willpower). And though Connie sometimes collapses into crying fits, she is determined to want “nothing more than what she’d got”; she has sworn off wanting sex ever since Michaelis was so cruel to her.
Artistry, too, has lost its meaning, just like “joy” and “home”; when Clifford writes, it is not because he has something to say but rather because he craves success and mechanically forces himself to go get it. But even as Connie laments this way of living, she also tries to adapt to it, feeling that true desire—like the kind she had for Michaelis—is too painful and unreliable.
Themes
The only thing Connie will still allow herself to want is a child, though she has not yet met anyone she considers a candidate for this child’s father. She does not feel she needs to love the father of her child, but she still wants him to be “a man!” Unbidden, a Bible verse comes into her mind: “go ye into the streets and byways of Jerusalem, and see if ye can find a man.”
Tommy Dukes and his friends bemoaned the modern, androgynous women of their era. Now, Connie feels a similar way about men; she also wants a return to traditional gender roles. By emphasizing the word man in this verse from Jeremiah 5:1, Connie expresses a longing for a kind of rugged, ancient masculinity, very different from the sort that Clifford and his friends possess.
Themes
One day, Connie heads into the woods, even though it is raining. The mines are closed today, and Connie feels that the world is ending; still, she finds comfort in the dark forest, with trees that seem to be patiently awaiting death. She realizes that she has stumbled upon Mellors’s cottage, and the plume of smoke coming from the chimney indicates that he is home. Connie knocks twice, but no one is here, so she goes around to the back of the house.
Again, Connie identifies with the trees, though this time the trees are just one more symbol of her despair, perhaps even hinting that she is contemplating suicide. Mellors’s cottage in the woods, so much more exposed to the elements than Clifford’s walled-off digs, further helps to set the two men apart.
Themes
Connie sees that Mellors is washing himself, shirtless, in the backyard. Though it is by no means unusual for a man to wash himself in this way, Connie feels that it is “a visionary experience” to witness such a thing; she is struck by Mellors’s beauty and by the physical reality of his body, with muscles and contours that she could reach out and touch. Confused and embarrassed, Connie starts to walk away, though she also feels this new admiration for Mellors deep within her stomach.
Mellors’s muscles signal that he is exactly the kind of “man” Connie wished for only moments ago; indeed, her use of the word “visionary” clearly links Mellors’s body to the Biblical quotation from moments before. It is worth paying attention any time a character feels something in their stomach (or their “bowels,” or their “womb”). As Tommy Dukes pointed out, real knowledge is contained in “the belly” as much as in the mind, so the feelings in Connie’s stomach are perhaps more trustworthy than the “words” she disdains.
Themes
Eventually, Connie loops back to the cottage. Mellors, now dressed, invites her inside. Mellors explains that he lives in this cottage alone, as his daughter lives with his mother over in the village. Connie notices Mellors’s sharp eyes, which suggest that he has been through a great deal of suffering—but also still contain some measure of warmth. On his end, Mellors reflects that Connie is “real” and “nicer than she knows.”
Increasingly, Mellors emerges as a figure of contradictions: he is at once gentlemanly and working class, independent and tied down by family, wounded and warm. Mellors’s reflection that Connie is “real” perhaps links to the novel’s description of her as earthy and feminine, unusual for the more styled women of her age.
Themes
Connie continues to wonder about Mellors, who at once seems so rugged and so unlike a member of the lower classes. When she asks Clifford about this, Clifford explains that Mellors did well for himself in the army, climbing through the ranks and perhaps picking up some gentlemanly habits there. Connie feels that Clifford is concealing something from her, and she again resents the men of her generation.
English society is notorious for its lack of social mobility, but in the upheaval of wartime, Mellors was able to transcend some of the rigid stratifications of class. Clifford’s withholding about Mellors might hint that he has already intuited his wife’s attraction to this strange figure.
Themes
