Previous
Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Gift of Herself:
In the novel’s first chapters, Lawrence delves into the 19th century’s complex ideas about sexual freedom and its connotations for middle-class women. When Constance and Hilda are in Germany, they freely engage in sex and question why it should ever be taboo to “give” themselves sexually if they wish to:
Why couldn’t a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself? So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the lovemaking and connexion were only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Blank of Unfeeling:
As he explains why Clifford has become so cold and withdrawn after returning from World War I, Lawrence employs a metaphor referring to a partial death:
Unlock with LitCharts A+It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.
Related Themes:
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Plucked Apple:
General Tommy Dukes, as he argues with Clifford about the superiority of the “mental life” over the physical, gives a compelling speech emphasizing the indispensability of bodily experiences. He does so using a metaphor that compares a human body to an apple growing on a tree:
Unlock with LitCharts A+But 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 connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple... you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.
Related Themes:
Chapter 5
Explanation and Analysis—Wounded Soul:
Lawrence’s depiction of the tragically stunted Clifford Chatterley is a tragic example of the effects of war trauma on the psyche. Connie, as she reflects on how he has changed, comes to a horrible realization about the true nature of his disabling injury:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding 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 re-assumed habit. Slowly, 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. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.
Related Themes:
Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—Huge Heave of Sap:
As Constance walks through the woods at Wragby in spring, she feels that the rejuvenation of the earth after winter is lining up with her own sexual and emotional reawakening. Lawrence uses metaphor and simile in this passage to draw parallels between Connie and a world breathlessly close to being in bloom:
Unlock with LitCharts A+She went to the wood next day. It was a grey, still afternoon, with the dark-green dogs-mercury spreading under the hazel copse, and all the trees making a silent effort to open their buds. Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of the sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flamey oak-leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a ride running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Sea Anemone:
As Connie and Mellors have sex, she realizes that for the first time in her life she isn’t in control of the sexual power dynamic. Lawrence describes this realization through visual imagery and a metaphor of a sea anemone. During their lovemaking, Connie feels an intense pressure building:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Whilst all her womb was open and soft, and softly clamoring, like a sea-anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfilment for her.
Related Themes:
Chapter 11
Explanation and Analysis—England Blotted:
Connie's drive towards Wragby in Chapter 11 takes on a pall of uncomfortable reflection, as she ponders the rapid changes sweeping over postwar England. Lawrence uses a metaphor referencing ink and writing to explain this thought process. Connie muses to herself that:
Unlock with LitCharts A+This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Globe-fulness:
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:
Unlock with LitCharts A+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!”
Related Themes:
Chapter 16
Explanation and Analysis—Organic Shame:
During her last night of sex with Mellors before she leaves for Venice with Hilda, Connie experiences several important insights into her own character. The author depicts this through two metaphors and through personifying her sense of shame. As Connie and Mellors reach a climax, she feels:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Pierced Again:
In this passage, the author employs two metaphors to depict the cumulative impact sex with Mellors has on Connie. The metaphors describe Connie as being "pierced" during sex and shaken to her "foundations." Lawrence also uses a simile comparing sensuality and desire to "fire," since during this encounter Connie has the following experience:
Unlock with LitCharts A+[...] she was a little startled and almost unwilling: yet pierced again with piercing thrills of sensuality, different, sharper, more terrible than the thrills of tenderness, but, at the moment, more desirable. Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder. Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places [...]
Related Themes:
Chapter 19
Explanation and Analysis—Blow the Crocus Out:
In the letter he writes her at the end of the novel, Oliver Mellors tells Connie Chatterley about his anxieties and hopes for their future through several metaphors:
Unlock with LitCharts A+If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women.
Related Themes:
