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Lady Chatterley’s Lover 81
Lawrence seemed to think that a woman, holding back orgasm until
after her partner’s ejaculation, was merely asserting herself, preferring
the quasi-masturbatory pleasure of clitoral orgasm, induced by pelvic
friction, to unassertive submission, or vaginal orgasm. In the end, even
the patient and skillful womanizer Michaelis, who let Connie get her
satisfaction in this way, condemns her for it (“You couldn’t go off at
the same time as a man, could you? You’d have to bring yourself off!
You’d have to run the show!” [IV]); and full vaginal orgasm is a stage
along the way to life in the affair with Mellors. “Beaked” sex (clitoral
orgasm) belongs in a world out of order; it is not distinct from the
blighted countryside, from the ruined miners and their wives, who
have lost even the sense of subordination, or from the lifeless, nervous
stories of Chatterley.
The marriage of the Chatterleys is, of course, a sex less relationship
quite unlike the positive chastity of Connie and Mellors at the close;
far from being “valid and precious,” it is simply death. Connie’s affair
with Michaelis is another aspect of the profound degeneracy that
Lawrence nearly always associated with race; Michaelis is Irish, but
he has the look of “a carved ivory Negro mask. . . . Aeons of acquiescence
in race destiny, instead of our individual resistance. And then a
swimming through, like rats in a dark river” (III). This is the Lawrencian
imagery of degenerate corruption, fin de la race; he returns to it,
finding in Michaelis “that ancient motionlessness of a race that can’t
be disillusioned any more, an extreme, perhaps, of impurity that is
pure. On the far side of his supreme prostitution to the bitch goddess
he seemed pure, pure as an African ivory mask that dreams impurity
into purity” (V). He stands for the fascinating racial corruption of the
Last Days. And at this point the only voice that speaks of the need
for a deeper blood consciousness, a transformation of sex, is the somewhat
implausible voice of Dukes: “Real knowledge comes out of the
whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as
much as out of your brain and mind . . . once you start the mental life
you pluck the apple” (IV). He gives a potted account of Lawrence’s
own views on this Fall and extends it to cover the whole world crisis;
but set down as conversation with the skeptical Chatterley it is all thin
and unconvincing; deliberately so, for we are to learn under a more
gifted teacher.
The gamekeeper looks back to Annable in The White Peacock;
the educated gamekeeper who has dropped out of civilization into