COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

In so far as Lady Chatterley’s Lover causes the tide of our sensitive awareness to flow about the secret places of life—and it does this abundantly—it is not merely justified, but positively good. It is a cleansing book, the bringer of a new “katharsis.”

—from The Adelphi (June 1929)

 

JAMES JOYCE

I understand from Miss Monnier that there is a big conspiracy on at the Nouvelle Revue Française to make a boost of Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterbox’s Lover, which is to be brought out in a form exactly similar to Lazy Molly’s ditto-ditto accompanied by a campaign of articles in papers and reviews, the publication to be in French. This scheme is what Bloom would call Utopian and I cannot understand how they can expect any sensible person to pay hundreds of francs for such a production when the genuine article much more effectively done can be had in any back shop in Paris for one tenth of the money.

—from a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver (September 27, 1930)

ALDOUS HUXLEY

What a horror [Lawrence] had of all Don Juans, all knowing sensualists and conscious libertines! (About the time he was writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover he read the memoirs of Cassanova, and was profoundly shocked.)

—from his introduction to The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (1932)

 

ANAIS NIN

[Lady Chatterley’s Lover] is our only complete modern love story.

—from D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (1932)

 

BERTRAND RUSSELL

Lawrence is one of a long line of people, beginning with Heraclitus and ending with Hitler, whose ruling motive is hatred derived from megalomania, and I am sorry to see that I was once so far out in estimating him.

—from a letter to Ottoline Morrell (February 15, 1937)

 

W. H. AUDEN

By its very nature art is an act of making experience conscious, which means that it cannot and must not try to deal with any experience which is ‘existential,’ that is, is falsified by reflection. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is, unfortunately, as pornographic as Fanny Hill. It is of necessity as indecent as, at the other end of the psycho-somatic scale, must be all attempts to describe the Beatific Vision.

—from The Nation (April 26, 1947)

 

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

Only those to whom words can be impure per se, or those to whom “certain subjects” cannot be mentioned in print though they are constantly mentioned in life, or those to whom the fundamental and moving facts of human experience are “nasty” could conclude on the evidence of the text itself that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as Lawrence wrote it, is obscene.

—from a letter to Barney Rosset, Lawrence’s American publisher (January 15, 1959)

JULIAN MOYNAHAN

The genuine yet carefully restrained optimism of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is founded on a belief that the world is alive and that alive-ness is the only thing worth cherishing.

_from ELH (March 1959)

 

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

I think from start to finish [Lawrence] was about as wrong as he can be on the whole subject of sex, and that he wrote a very laboriously bad book to prove it.

—from Encounter (February 1960)

 

EDMUND WILSON

 

I’ve always been meaning to read Lawrence’s novels—other than Lady C.—but have never got around to it. I met him once and thought him ill-bred and hysterical, and his writing mostly affects me in the same way. me in the same—from a letter to Cecil Lang (April 4, 1966)

 

KATE MILLETT

 

In Lady Chatterley, as throughout his final period, Lawrence uses the words “sexual” and “phallic” interchangeably, so that the celebration of sexual passion for which the book is so renowned is largely a celebration of the penis of Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper and social prophet.... Lawrence is the most talented and fervid of sexual politicians. He is the most subtle as well, for it is through a feminine consciousness that his masculine message is conveyed.

—from Sexual Politics (1970)

 

HENRY MILLER

If Lady Cbatterley’s Lover represents another of Lawrence’s failures it does so only because of its impurity, its compromise. And by that I mean, only wherein it is obscene is it magnificent; in its obscenity lies its great purity, its miraculous, its sacred quality.

—from The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation (1980)

GAIL GODWIN

 

There are plenty of snide statements about Lawrence floating around—many of them based on Lady Chatterley. Its notoriety has overwhelmed the real value of his work.

—from Gary Adelman’s Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out (2002)

Questions

1. Is Lawrence fair to his character Clifford? Does Clifford deserve a fate other than the one he gets?

2. “Tenderness” was the working title of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the concept is affirmed in the finished novel. Can you explain what Lawrence might have meant by it? Can “tenderness” be expanded and generalized from the specifically sexual context of the novel? Should Mellors show “tenderness” to Clifford and Michaelis?

3. Can a cohesive argument about what is wrong with British society in general be extracted from the novel?

4. Does Lady Cbatterley’s Lover still have anything to say to us? Does it dramatize problems that still exist or that might always exist?