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Lady Chatterley’s Lover 85
This was a bold thing to have done, and obviously it was a matter
of importance to Lawrence. One thinks of Milton’s necessary audacity
in describing the love-making of the angels; each writer, we may think,
could well have avoided the course he follows. But Milton could not
think his interpenetrating angels redundant; they were of the stuff of
the imagination. Lawrence was equally committed to this reconciliation
of dissolution and creation in anal sex. Mellors, in the England of
Lloyd George, is the Saint George who kills the dragon (the serpent
of corruption, of shame at defecation) and sets the lady free; an act
as apocalyptic as that of Spenser’s Saint George. And he also opened
her seven seals to initiate her. In the end, as Lawrence Chatterley’s
paralysis, “Whether we call it symbolism or not, it is, in the sense of
its happening, inevitable” (Phoenix II, 514). What made it so was the
force of Lawrence’s belief in the phallus as the Comforter, the reconciler,
the agent of rebirth. And just as Lawrence himself recognized,
when he read his first draft, that Chatterley’s lameness symbolized
“the paralysis, the deeper emotional or passional paralysis, of most
men of his sort and class today” (514) so we recognize the symbolism
of Connie’s rebirth. Both symbolisms belong to a metaphysic which
Lawrence had long since internalized, and which the tale had, in its
own way, to make objective.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, like most of Lawrence’s novels, has astonishing
lapses; he occasionally allows himself risqué sexual punning
which, in this context, obviously constitutes a dangerous mistake; and
occasionally he lapses into the jeering viciousness of some of the work
of the preceding years. But it remains a great achievement, not only in
itself but in the change it helped to bring about in Lawrence himself.
The book ends on a “long pause,” the pause between epochs. Lawrence
filled the pause in his own life with poems, pictures, one of the greatest
of his stories (which is also about rebirth into creativity) and some of
his most impressive and enduring polemical-discursive prose.
PORNOGRAPHY AND OBSCENITY
Under this heading I group the essays A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s
Lover, Pornography and Obscenity, and a few related pieces. 4 Lawrence
had fought bruising battles with various censors before, and he must
have known his later work would run into trouble, especially when