The mood of Lady Chatterley's Lover is highly changeable, reflecting the rapidly evolving and tumultuous journeys its protagonists take. Initially, there's a prevailing sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Lawrence’s reader is introduced to Connie Chatterley's constrained existence in her golden cage at Wragby Hall. Her husband has changed so much after returning from war that she feels imprisoned in a life she had not planned. In the first few chapters, the reader feels sympathy for her and for the emotionally wounded Clifford, as well as unease at the building pressure of her needs. The episodes that describe Connie’s youth provide them with a perspective on her “aesthetically unusual upbringing” and explain her unconventional approach to sex and love. Until she meets Mellors, there are only brief moments of relief—like those she finds with Michaelis—from an unpleasant feeling of entrapment and enclosure.
As the book progresses, this initial dissatisfaction gives way to excitement and arousal as the reader, with Connie, meets and falls in love with Oliver. Readers become immersed in the reckless and passionate affair between Lady Chatterley and her husband’s gamekeeper, and emotionally attached to both characters trying to navigate each others’ expectations and desires. Their encounters are highly detailed and intense, explaining sexual acts in great detail. The novel’s deliberately erotic qualities scandalized readers and critics. Lawrence, knowing there would be backlash, initially privately printed and published it in 1928, but the book wasn’t officially published in England until 1960. Its unabashed and explicit sexuality is purposeful, not merely erotic. It makes the reader feel the gut-wrenching spikes of arousal, excitement, and despair that Connie and Mellors find together.
Episodes of passionate sex are interspersed with phases of profound introspection and self-discovery. Lawrence delves deep into the psyche of his characters. The book contains lengthy political musings that make the reader sympathize with Mellors’s difficult position and frustration with his place in society. They follow the ups and downs of Connie and Mellors attempting to reconcile their love for each other with the reality of their separate marriages, and with a world that condemns adultery. By the time Connie and Mellors’s affair has become too public to hide, the reader is on the edge of their seat to learn what happens to Connie’s baby and in both protagonists’ divorce proceedings.
Throughout the novel, the mood jumps rapidly between moments of euphoria, liberation, and childlike excitement—Connie’s teenage sexual awakening, the early months of her marriage, meeting and falling in love with Mellors—and instances of shock, sadness, and disappointment. By the end of the book, the reader is left feeling hopeful—but uncertain—of the possibility of successful, "mind and body" marriage for Lady Chatterley and her lover.
