In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the regional dialect of the Midlands area of England is an important motif. The male protagonist, Oliver Mellors, has a strong Black Country accent, and it comes to the fore in moments of vulnerability, passionate intimacy, or serious anger. It is very different from the more “standard” English that the novel’s middle-class characters use. For example, as he speaks intensely to a naked Connie, he says:
“Dunna ax me nowt now, “he said. “Let me be. I like thee. I luv thee when tha lies theer. A woman’s a lovely thing when’ er’s deep ter fuck, and cunt’s good. Ah luv thee, thy legs, an’ th’ shape on thee, an’ th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv th’ womanness on thee. Ah luv thee wi’ my balls an’ wi’ my heart. But dunna ax me now. Dunna ma’e me say nowt.
In this passage, Mellors is asking Connie to lie still and be quiet instead of prodding him to explain his love for her. He's uncomfortable with direct expressions of emotion, so he uses accurate (if explicit) language to say the things he feels about her in a way that seems accessible to him.
Regional accents are a charged topic in the United Kingdom, and were even more loaded in the 20th century. Speaking with a specific regional accent—especially a northerly-sounding one, as Mellors does—usually indicated that a person came from a working-class background. Wealthy or aristocratic people tended to speak in regionless diction, and having an identifiable accent was often considered undesirable in elevated professional circles. Because of this, Mellors's pronounced use of the Black Country dialect in his most emotionally charged moments is part of Lawrence’s overarching narrative about the artificiality of class divisions in 20th-century England. Mellors is very intelligent, but people like Clifford Chatterley and Hilda dismiss him because of the way he sounds.
The motif of Black Country dialect also plays an important part in Lawrence’s exploration of truthfulness within intimate relationships. When Mellors is feeling passionate or intimate, his accent becomes more pronounced. It’s as if it reveals the “truth” of who he is and the façade of standard English falls away. He often sounds at his most Midlands when he's either having sex with Connie or fighting with her.
Interestingly, the way Lawrence employs dialect in Lady Chatterley’s Lover also played a role in the enormous controversy and legal scrutiny the book attracted. The raw and unvarnished explicitness of Mellors’s speech—marked by what some readers thought of as its “lack of refinement” because of the author's use of dialect—became a focal point of the obscenity trial against the book. What Mellors says is no less sensible or refined than the commentaries his wealthier peers make in standard English. He does use curse words, but they’re not gratuitous, they’re descriptive. However, some people thought that having sexually explicit thoughts expressed in working-class diction made them seem even more shocking. This, in itself, is reflective of the class prejudices and biases of Lawrence’s time.
Mellors admires Connie's body during their final night together, wistfully narrating his impressions of it in Black Country dialect filled with idiom and metaphor:
He stroked her tail with his hand, long and subtly taking in the curves and the globe-fullness.
“Tha’s got such a nice tail on thee, “he said, in the throaty caressive dialect. “Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody. It’s the nicest, nicest woman’s arse as is! An’ ivery bit of it is woman, woman sure as nuts. Tha’rt not one o’ them button-arsed lasses as should be lads, are ter! Tha’s got a real soft sloping bottom on thee, as a man loves in 'is guts. It’s a bottom as could hold the world up, it is!”
Mellors is having both an emotional and a sexual reaction to Constance's body in this scene. As he's complimenting her, his voice catches in his throat. Lawrence emphasizes the "caressive" qualities of Midlands English when he describes Mellors's speech here. When Mellors has a hold on himself, his English can be almost as standard and formal as Constance's or Clifford's. When he's overcome with a feeling, however, he reverts to a more heightened version of regional diction. This stronger accent is accompanied by several regional idioms that give the reader a sense of local color and increase the realism of the scene. Mellors isn't quoting Shakespeare to woo Constance. He's speaking plainly and honestly, especially when he uses idioms like “sure as nuts.”
This idiom refers to the stores of nuts and acorns that squirrels make to sustain themselves in the winter. When he says that Connie's bottom is "ivery bit" womanly "as sure as nuts," he's pointing out the obviousness of its size and "globe-fulness." It's "womanly" to him because it's not a small "button" bottom, but a "soft and sloping" one. He's also implying that Connie has a good store of "arse" squirreled away for coming times. It's so big and fine, he goes on to say, that it could "hold up the world." By this, he means to praise its strength, but he also means that it's an excellent example of a nice "woman's arse."
In this passage, Oliver Mellors reprimands Hilda for assuming he's stupid, employing a local idiom. Hilda has just accused him of exaggerating his accent and his use of dialect, and he angrily tells her that:
— Eh, I don’t wear me breeches arse-forrards.
The idiom "breeches arse-forrards" is a retort referring to Hilda’s classist assumptions about Mellors's ignorance. She thinks her jabs at him have been subtle, but Mellors asserts that he isn’t naive or foolish here. Saying that he doesn’t wear his breeches “arse-forrards” literally means that Mellors knows which way to put his pants on. It’s comparable to the modern expression "I wasn’t born yesterday," and it provides the reader with a sense of how an interaction like this might actually have sounded in the early 1900s.
The use of dialect in this passage grounds Mellors in his social and geographical context. Mellors's dialect of English is a regional variation specific to the Midlands. At the time, having a regionally-specific accent in Britain suggested that a person came from a working-class background. In refusing to change his speech when berating Hilda, Mellors continues to confront and challenge her assumptions about his intelligence and capabilities. Part of the reason that Hilda is so uncomfortable with Mellors is because of his natural grace and good manners, since this clashes with her ideas about his social status, thus making her feel ill-at-ease. Rather than bowing to Hilda's simplistic interpretation of him, Mellors chooses to stand up for himself.
