D. H. Lawrence’s 1932 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover begins just after the trauma of World War I. Even from the very opening lines, Lawrence locates his reader in this fractured era: “the cataclysm has happened,” the book begins, “we are among the ruins.” For many of the characters, including Clifford Chatterley and his band of intellectual friends, the loss and chaos of the war presents a chance to rebuild differently. They focus on new inventions (like the radio) and new forms of industry (like the cutting-edge mining technologies Clifford obsessively studies). But for Clifford’s wife, Connie, and her lover, Oliver Mellors, this post-war industrialization feels less like recovery and more like destruction, as if this new version of their country has completely replaced everything that came before it. This kind of development is, in Connie’s mind, “not organic, but mechanical”—a sentiment suggesting that she values the idea of continuity, or the notion that the future should somehow be connected to everything that came before it. Whereas Connie and Mellors crave a more “organic” form of continuity, Clifford obsesses over finding more efficient ways to run his mines, thinking that inventions and new beginnings are the best way to forge ahead. By juxtaposing Clifford’s “mechanical” rebuilding with Connie’s more natural view of continuity and restoration, then, Lady Chatterley’s Lover suggests that nostalgia, care for nature, and an attention to “history” are all key to moving forward from catastrophe without “blot[ting]” out everything that came before.
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Catastrophe, Continuity, and Tradition ThemeTracker
Catastrophe, Continuity, and Tradition Quotes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had brought the roof down over her head. And she had realized that one must live and learn.
But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use the sex thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.
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.
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.
Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! […]
Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! […]
Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.
The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and whirring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.
He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinth, she wasn't all tough rubber goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender.
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. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.
Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of the old England. It had taken her years to realize that it was really blotted out by this terrifying new and gruesome England. That the blotting act would go on till it was complete.
Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further whirled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasma was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.
“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.”
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. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us.
