Lady Chatterley’s Lover has made waves for nearly a century due to its frank, explicit descriptions of Connie’s sexual encounters. Lawrence breaks with tradition from beginning to end, using profanity and paying a great deal of attention to the mechanics and physical realities of sex. In fact, the final line of the novel sees Connie’s lover, Oliver Mellors, tenderly referencing his paramour’s genitalia. But even as Lady Chatterley’s Lover takes an open-minded view of sexuality, it also reiterates traditional—and traditionally restrictive—gender norms. Connie begins the novel engaging in spirited conversation with her sister, Hilda, and writing books with her husband, Clifford, but these intellectual pursuits leave her unsatisfied. Only when Connie throws herself wholeheartedly into her affair with Mellors, becoming his “passive, consenting thing,” does she find true happiness, suggesting that Lawrence believed women should primarily define themselves through their relations with men. Similarly, the novel mocks Clifford for not being a true “man” because of his lack of sexual potency, equating masculinity with sexual prowess just as it equates femininity with passivity. Ironically, therefore, the novel’s progressive views on sexuality end up underscoring its regressive views on gender, as Connie’s seeming liberation is in fact a return to a more old-fashioned, constrained approach to womanhood.
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Gender and Sexuality Quotes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
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.
“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.”
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.
She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting […] her womb was open and soft, and slowly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her […] and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost.
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!
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.
And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding over with blue encroaching hyacinths. Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinths in shallows! Opinions on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Wither, oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. Oh captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.
“Did you hate Clifford?” She said at last. “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”
“What is his sort?”
“Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.”
“What balls? Balls! A man's balls!”
She pondered this.
“But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.
“You say a man’s got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls when he’s sort of tame.”
“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!”
It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvelous death.
[…] She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.
Clifford was not inwardly surprised to get this letter. Inwardly, he had known for a long time she was leaving him. But he had absolutely refused any outward admission of it. Therefore, outwardly, it came as the most terrible blow and shock to him. He had kept the surface of his confidence in her quite serene.
And that is how we are. By strength of will we cut off our inner intuitive knowledge from admitted consciousness. This causes a state of dread, or apprehension, which makes the blow ten times worse when it does fall. Clifford was like a hysterical child.
