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84
D.H. Lawrence
Chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley’s Lover contains what has become
the most controversial passage in all of Lawrence’s novels. The fact
that it describes anal inter course was long ignored; nobody mentioned
it at the 1960 trial. The question has now been argued at length, 3 and
the discussion need not be repeated here. As in Women in Love, the
climactic sexual act is an act of buggery, conceived as a burning out of
shame. The invasion of the genital by the excremental, the contamination
of joy by shame and life by death, was a strategy for the overthrow
of the last enemy. We have seen that Lawrence had earlier thought of
these polarities as reconcilable only by a third force, his Holy Ghost;
the phallus, its representative, will bridge the flows of dissolution and
creation, which, coming together in the genitalia, also come together
in history, at this moment. The metaphysic is very complicated,
not least because Lawrence is less candid at such moments than in
describing more ordinary sexual activity; but he is again fighting the
woman-inspired pudeur which has blanched sex consciousness, made
women “fribbles” and emasculated men.
In Women in Love he tried to distinguish between buggery which
was wholly dissolute and buggery that was initiatory, the symbolic
death before rebirth, the cracking of the insect carapace. Culturally,
the parallel is this: we have to get to the point where nothing is left of
our mistaken civilization, and the Holy Ghost can institute the third
Joachite epoch. The forbidden acts of Gerald and Gudrun, or Birkin
and Hermione, or Mellors and Bertha, are merely corruption within
the rind; the same acts committed by Birkin and Ursula, Connie
and Mellors, are the acts of healthy human beings. When “no dark
shameful things are denied her” Ursula is “free” (Women in Love, XXX).
The next step for Gudrun is death. For Connie it is a ritual death, with
the phallus as psychopomp. She experiences what is “necessary, forever
necessary, to burn out false shames” (XVI). No need ever to do it again;
now there can be tenderness, and even chastity.
This is the climactic sexual encounter, for the last, described in
Chapter XVIII, is a kind of marital epilogue and belongs to initiated
tenderness, not to the harsh intiatory experience we are talking about.
To Chatterley, Mellors’ reputation (there is talk of his buggering his
wife) was merely an illustration of man’s “strange avidity for unusual
sexual postures” (XVII); but Lawrence wasn’t as a rule of Chatterley’s
opinion, and clearly does not want us to be.