Throughout D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, protagonist Constance Chatterley finds herself surrounded by consumerist obsession. Her husband, Clifford, wants only to maximize the wealth he earns from his mining pits; the miners (known as colliers) who work for Clifford pine for the clothes and excursions they want but cannot afford. And while wealthy people like Clifford and Connie’s sister Hilda insist that class hierarchies are “fate[d]” and immovable, Connie thinks that everyone in the modern world has become a “moneyboy” or a “moneygirl”—the only real “difference was how much you’d got, and how much you wanted.”
Throughout the novel, Lawrence contests this consumerist mindset in several ways. First, he demonstrates Connie’s sexual and romantic frustration with the wealthy gentlemen of her own class—only to depict her happiness once she falls in love with the working-class Oliver Mellors, beginning an affair that flies in the face of materialism and upward mobility. And second, Lawrence satirizes wealthy characters like Clifford (bratty and ridiculous) and Hilda (awkward and ill-mannered), showing that status is not a matter of fate but of arbitrary circumstance. Ultimately, then, Lady Chatterley’s Lover reveals that people are happiest when they focus less on consumption and more on things that cannot be bought, whether it is sexual pleasure or natural beauty—when they discover, as Mellors puts it, that “living and spending isn’t the same thing.” In turn, the novel demonstrates that while some amount of money is necessary to survive, too much wealth is both unsatisfying and unflattering for the people who possess it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Class, Consumerism, and Money ThemeTracker
Class, Consumerism, and Money Quotes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
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.
“There might even be real men, in the next phase,” said Tommy. “Real, intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn't that be a change, an enormous change from us? We're not men, and the women aren't women. Or only celebrating makeshifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments.”
“Give me the resurrection of the body!” said Dukes. “But it'll come in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.”
[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.
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.
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.”
“So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he came to me!”—She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.
The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change […]. “Tha ma’es nowt o’ me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha’rt more cocky than me, an’ that says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my Lady Jane? […] Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ Lady Jane!”
“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.
