Sir Clifford Chatterley Character Analysis

Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as that of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyze and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is criticize, and make a deadness. […] Mind you, it's like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection and if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple.

It’s what endures through one’s life that matters; my own life matters to me, and its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the lifelong companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day-to-day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing…that’s what we live by…not the occasional spasm of any sort.

He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.

And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wound shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slow, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day-to-day. Home was a place you lived in, love was the thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people […] As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” [Clifford] quoted.—“It seems to fit flower so much better than Greek vases.”

“Ravished is such a horrid word!” [Connie] said. “It’s only people who ravish things.”

“Oh, I don't know…snails and things,” he said.

“Even snails only eat them, and bees don’t ravish.”

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life sap out of living things.

[Mrs. Bolton] was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the money […].

She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this tidal gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his educating her roused in her passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he knew.

She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting […] her womb was open and soft, and slowly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her […] and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of men […]

Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animus of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belong to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belonged to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

“No, my child! All this is a romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.”

“Then there is no common humanity between us all!”

“Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the functions determine the individual.”

And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding over with blue encroaching hyacinths. Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinths in shallows! Opinions on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Wither, oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. Oh captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

“Did you hate Clifford?” She said at last. “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”

“What is his sort?”

“Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.”

“What balls? Balls! A man's balls!”

She pondered this.

“But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.

“You say a man’s got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls when he’s sort of tame.”

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his naval. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his mustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

“This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,” he said. “And we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their separate ways. Maybe—”

[…] “Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,” she insisted.

“Ay, what was I going to say?”

He had forgotten. And it was one of the great disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

“But you'll be through with him in a while,” [Hilda] said, “and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.”

“But you were such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes.”

“I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.

“Shall I tell you?” [Connie] said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you? […] It's the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”

Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall. Clifford was like a hysterical child.

Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as that of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyze and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is criticize, and make a deadness. […] Mind you, it's like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection and if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple.

It’s what endures through one’s life that matters; my own life matters to me, and its long continuance and development. But what do the occasional connections matter? And the occasional sexual connections especially! If people don't exaggerate them ridiculously, they pass like the mating of birds. And so they should. What does it matter? It’s the lifelong companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day-to-day, not the sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional excitement. The long, slow, enduring thing…that’s what we live by…not the occasional spasm of any sort.

He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.

And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wound shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slow, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day-to-day. Home was a place you lived in, love was the thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people […] As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” [Clifford] quoted.—“It seems to fit flower so much better than Greek vases.”

“Ravished is such a horrid word!” [Connie] said. “It’s only people who ravish things.”

“Oh, I don't know…snails and things,” he said.

“Even snails only eat them, and bees don’t ravish.”

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life sap out of living things.

[Mrs. Bolton] was coming bit by bit into possession of all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the money […].

She was thrilled by her contact with a man of the upper class, this tidal gentleman, this author who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his educating her roused in her passion of excitement and response much deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth the very fact that there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he knew.

She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting […] her womb was open and soft, and slowly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her […] and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of men […]

Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animus of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belong to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belonged to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

“No, my child! All this is a romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.”

“Then there is no common humanity between us all!”

“Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the functions determine the individual.”

And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding over with blue encroaching hyacinths. Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinths in shallows! Opinions on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Wither, oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. Oh captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

“Did you hate Clifford?” She said at last. “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”

“What is his sort?”

“Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.”

“What balls? Balls! A man's balls!”

She pondered this.

“But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.

“You say a man’s got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls when he’s sort of tame.”

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his naval. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his mustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

“This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,” he said. “And we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their separate ways. Maybe—”

[…] “Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,” she insisted.

“Ay, what was I going to say?”

He had forgotten. And it was one of the great disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

“But you'll be through with him in a while,” [Hilda] said, “and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.”

“But you were such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes.”

“I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.

“Shall I tell you?” [Connie] said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you? […] It's the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”

Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.

And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall. Clifford was like a hysterical child.