Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

80
D.H. Lawrence
as the only means to regeneration both personal and national. The
approaching death of the English, which he had prophesied in the
war years, was an aspect of the final extinction of that old consciousness.
The war had announced the Last Days, the bad time that would
come, whether or not there was a rebirth. Constance Chatterley in
part be comes like Ursula, at moments a representative of England as a
sleeping beauty, only to be revived by the grosbaiser of a phallic prince.
Always apocalyptic when he wrote of regeneration, Lawrence made
this prophetic novel absorb much of the last version of his apocalyptic
theory. There is the sexuality of death—the impotence of Chatterley,
the “loving” of Michaelis—and there is something else, so far beyond
it that the word sex barely applies to it, which is why, when he thought
of Mellors, Lawrence habitually spoke not of sex but of the phallus as
beyond sex. The sense of sexual experience as something to be passed
through, as the prelude or initiation into a more satisfactory condition
of life on the other side, is strong in him; so are the ideas of renunciation
and chastity. A man who admits to having been in his youth
enraged by the idea of a woman’s sexuality (“I only wanted to be aware
of her personality, her mind and spirit” [Phoenix II, 568]) might well
feel that the only good chastity must come after the restoration of the
“natural life-flow.” It is a further charge against the mother, that a son
should regard sex as an improper secret; Lawrence’s mother thought
it indecent that there should be a seduction in The White Peacock: “To
think that my son should have written such a story.” 2 Lady Chatterley’s
Lover retains traces of the puritanism inherited from the mother, as
well as evidence of a desire to take a last revenge on her, and on all
the women who have ruined England; to them Connie will be the
Scarlet Woman, to him she is the Woman Clothed with the Sun;
Saint John took them apart, and Lawrence puts them together again
as an emblem of a virtually impossible restoration
Although Chatterley regards sex as an atavistic organic process (I),
his impotence is a direct result of the war. The second sentence of the
book places the story firmly in the postwar era: “The cataclysm has
happened, we are among the ruins.” It is a world of death and impotence;
the melancholy park, the ruined countryside, the unmanned colliers,
Chatterley in his mechanical chair. This is the background against
which Connie’s rebirth will be described. In the old world of death,
women use sex as an instrument by means of which to gain power over
men. We recall that Kate, in The Plumed Serpent, had to forego orgasm;