Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence’s novel about Constance Chatterley’s affair with her husband’s gamekeeper, is set in the Midlands region of England, once a land of rugged woods and stunning natural beauty. But by 1920, when Connie arrives, these lovely hills have turned into the mining town of Tevershall; at all hours of the night, Connie smells the smoke and hears the clanging sounds of the nearby mines. And just as the picturesque landscape is overrun by these industrial machines, Connie and her friends feel that people themselves are becoming mechanized. Connie’s lover Oliver Mellors and her husband’s nurse Mrs. Bolton worry that people have been consumed by their love of money and consumption. Connie herself feels that the miners and their employers (including her husband Clifford) are not “not men” but creatures “of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon”—a thought that underscores the extent to which the people around her have succumbed to (and even come to internalize) industrialization.
For Mellors in particular, the increasing mechanization of life signals humanity’s impending collapse. But even as the novel reflects Mellors’s anxiety, it also honors Connie’s hope that natural growth and feeling will ultimately triumph. Over and over again, Lawrence details the beauty of various spring flowers, which push through the cold earth and stay “alive” despite the poor air quality and the trampling machines. Similarly, Connie and Mellors often understand their sexual intimacy—the result of a decision to give into their most natural impulses—as a kind of return to nature, threading flowers through each other’s hair and dancing naked in the rain. Indeed, the novel ends on an explicitly “hopeful” note, suggesting that Connie and Mellors’s passion for each other and for the land around them will allow them to triumph over mechanized doom.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Nature vs. Machinery ThemeTracker
Nature vs. Machinery 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.
Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as that of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyze and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is criticize, and make a deadness. […] 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 connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection and if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple.
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.
He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wound 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 reassumed habit. Slow, 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.
“Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” [Clifford] quoted.—“It seems to fit flower so much better than Greek vases.”
“Ravished is such a horrid word!” [Connie] said. “It’s only people who ravish things.”
“Oh, I don't know…snails and things,” he said.
“Even snails only eat them, and bees don’t ravish.”
She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids, and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life sap out of living things.
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.
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!
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.
And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his naval. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his mustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.
“This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,” he said. “And we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their separate ways. Maybe—”
[…] “Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,” she insisted.
“Ay, what was I going to say?”
He had forgotten. And it was one of the great disappointments of her life, that he never finished.
“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.”
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.
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.
