Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Lady Chatterley’s Lover 83
sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. . . . The novel, properly
handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the
passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness
needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening” (IX). Thus the
novel fleshes out the scheme provided by the metaphysic. Lawrence,
for example, knows better than to make Mrs. Bolton a caricature or
diagram, or neglect the broader social context. There must be flow and
recoil, density. The newborn chick is a natural object, though Connie
sees it “eyeing the Cosmos” (X), and her crying at the sight is the
recognizable reaction of a sensitive woman as well as the sign of “her
generation’s forlornness.”
When they first make love, Connie is content without orgasm.
It is enough that in the mechanized, frictional world, rebirth may
be on the way. Later, Lawrence has to try to find a prose capable of
representing genuine orgasm; and, later still, after a few backslidings,
a few profanations, she must move into the next stage of passional
knowledge, an awareness of the phallic mystery which includes a
proper awe of man. Meanwhile, the world seems even more horrible
in its irrelevent excesses, its dissociation from the authenticities of the
bloodstream; but Connie goes on with her initiation and is “born: a
woman” (XII). Remembering Women in Love once more, Lawrence
allows her to say that “it was the sons of god with the daughters of
men.” Her dread of maleness is all but overcome; though she still
can’t quite break herself of the habit of talking about love, that alienating
irrelevance. Life has returned; but the process is not complete.
The book represents Connie’s initiation into mystery as having seven
stages, like the seven stages in the mystery-religion behind Revelation.
She progressively comes alive; she can dance in the unspoiled part of
the wood, and tell her husband that the body, killed by Plato and Jesus,
will be reborn: “It will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the
life of the human body” (XVI ) she says, echoing the Lawrencian view
that eternity is a fourth-dimensional apprehension of the life of the
body here and now. “My dear, you speak as if you were ushering it all
in!” says Chatterley. But there remains an ultimate stage of purgation,
the sensuality which is “necessary . . . to burn out the false shames and
smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity”—the exploration
by the phallus of “the last and deepest recesses of organic shame.”
They must go beyond tenderness, though when the experience is over
Connie begs Mellors not to forget tenderness forever.