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
Mrs. Bolton, driven by a desire both feminine and professional to protect her friend, urges Connie to go explore the daffodils. As Connie heads into the meadow, she is reminded of Mellors’s shirtless body—“like a lonely pistil of an invisible flower.” For the first time in months, Connie feels the stirrings of desire.
If Connie’s feelings for Clifford are an ugly flower, Mellors’s body is conflated with the daffodils, strong and beautiful as they push through the hard ground. Connie’s comparison of Mellors to a flower is explicitly phallic (he is like “a lonely pistil”), so it is perhaps unsurprising that this thought arouses Connie sexually.
Themes
It is a cold day, but Connie feels cheered by the spring flowers (primroses and violets) that have sprung up in the hard ground. When she at last reaches Mellors’s cabin, Connie heads to the back, where the daffodils are. The house is empty, but Connie still appreciates the bright yellow flowers, “erect” and “alive.” She hates the idea of going back to Wragby, with its thick walls, and when she gets home, she is surprised by how little patience she now has with Clifford.
The sexual, phallic symbolism of flowers continues here. The freshness at Mellors’s cottage makes Wragby’s remove starker, with its thick walls sealing it off from the natural world that Connie now finds herself so profoundly drawn to.
Themes
The next day, Connie explores again; this time, she hears an unexpected hammering, and she follows the sound towards a secret little hut in the woods. Mellors is there with his dog, and Connie asks if she can stay for a bit. Mellors assents, speaking in his thick dialect as he builds them a fire. Connie marvels that she feels both a little afraid and protected by this strange man. Mellors, too, is in turmoil: he does not want to be in contact with anyone, much less a woman, as he is still bruised from his last relationship. Yet Connie is his boss, and she can do what she wants.
Later, the novel will establish that Mellors and Connie both feel more comfortable when, in keeping with conservative gender hierarchies, Mellors takes control. But for the moment, Connie’s class privilege inverts this gendered imbalance, yet another way that the novel paints class divisions as damaging and unnatural.
Themes
Quickly and skillfully, Mellors builds a new chicken coop and takes apart the old, battered ones. Connie is impressed by Mellors’s solitary intensity: he seems patient and experienced, which makes Connie feel like she can be wild and irresponsible. Privately, Mellors resents Connie’s presence, and he feels only dread at the flicker of desire in his crotch.
Clifford operates in the realm of words; he does not even type out his own stories, preferring to cast off even that most basic action onto Connie. But Mellors is skilled with his hands (and in touch with his physical instincts, as seen in the desire he registers for Connie in his crotch).
Themes
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Connie asks about the possibility of getting another key so that she could come and go from the hut as she pleases, but Mellors makes this sound like an impossibility. This offends Connie, and she leaves; as she goes, Mellors laments his powerlessness against this upper-class woman. When Connie returns home, Mrs. Bolton explains that Clifford was impatient for Connie to come home to make him his tea. Connie feels frustrated at Clifford’s dependency.
While Mellors craves power, Clifford wants to be waited on. And crucially, Clifford is concerned not just with his making sure his needs are taken care of but with forcing Connie to take care of these needs; even though Mrs. Bolton is on his payroll, he still waits for Connie to do most of the basic tasks, as if her service is proof of her spousal loyalty.
Themes
In Clifford’s study, Connie puts the tea kettle on and gets a jug of water for her violets; though they are drooping, she is confident they will revive quickly. Clifford quotes Shakespeare on flowers, and Connie, annoyed, remarks that there is no “connection” between this poetry and the flowers’ reality. Connie asks Clifford about another key to the hut and confesses that Mellors was a little rude to her today.
Flowers, themselves natural and beautiful, have already come to represent the burgeoning attraction between Mellors and Connie. But in converting these flowers into poetry, Clifford once more turns biological fact into something mental and “[dis]connected,” destroying the natural vitality that Connie cherishes.
Themes
Clifford believes that Mellors has internalized his high status in the military (where he was patronized by a powerful general); now, he needs to relearn lower-class deference. This strange tension also explains why Mellors sometimes speaks in dialect and sometimes speaks without it.
Mellors’s use of dialect joins two of the novel’s most important themes. On the one hand, the Midlands dialect—as least as Mellors uses it—is shorter and less intricate, getting to the points that Clifford often circles. On the other hand, the Midlands dialect, spoken primarily by the working-class residents of the region, signals Mellors’s disdain of the upper classes; though he has access to many of these high-status mannerisms, Mellors insists on sprinkling this dialect into conversation, as if proving how arbitrary these class markers really are.
Themes
Clifford decides that he, too, wants to go out in the woods, and so Connie helps him move his wheelchair out of the house. Though the air is fresh today, Connie cannot help feeling that the haze and smoke from the mines is toxic; “people are killing the very air,” she laments, with their boredom and discontent and anger. Connie gathers flowers for Clifford, and he again begins quoting poetry. This angers Connie: “how she hated words,” she thinks, “sucking all the life-sap out of living things.” The rest of the walk is tense.
Earlier, Connie’s despair at the mechanized world was obliquely associated with death. Now, she makes that connection explicit, painting industrialization as a kind of environmental murder. Clifford’s use of language then parallels his use of industry: both “words” and mines are hateful and extractive, “sucking” the life force out of natural things.
Themes
The next week is rainy, but Connie ventures out to the hut anyway. At first she is alone, but gradually, the brown spaniel arrives, followed by Mellors. Mellors worries that Connie has been waiting out in the rain, but she protests that she is fine. Surprisingly, Mellors gives her his key, assuring her that he will find or make another one.
It is unclear whether Mellors has gotten Connie a key because he wants to be around her or because he feels obligated to fulfill her request. The fact that Mellors is always seen with his dog once more conflates his presence with a return to a more natural, almost animalistic form of life.
Themes
Connie asks Mellors why he speaks in dialect instead of “ordinary” English, and Mellors replies that his version of the language is “ordinary.” This annoys Connie, who tells Mellors that she does not need her own key to the hut. But Mellors refuses to take the key back, saying that he doesn’t think it right for him to be in the hut at the same time as Connie is. Connie reiterates that Mellors’s presence will not disturb her, and eventually he relents. Connie goes home bewildered, not sure if she has been insulted and confused by her own strong feelings.
Though Connie has already started to loathe Clifford and his classist ideas about language, she cannot help but repeat them here. In reframing dialect as “ordinary” English, Mellors then helps Connie see that language itself can be a tool of oppression; when Connie labels Mellors’s Midlands dialect as lesser, she is playing into the very class hierarchies she claims to resent.
Themes
