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82
D.H. Lawrence
what is left of the natural world, that “greenwood” into which E. M.
Forster in Maurice dispatches his drop-out bourgeois with another
game keeper. He is related to Lawrence’s Indians and gipsies (The
Virgin and the Gipsy was written only a short time before the novel),
but the difference is important; he has found his way out of the white
consciousness. This is why Lawrence makes him an educated man
and an ex-officer, and why he gives him two dialects, middle class and
peasant. To the latter belong the famous four-letter words; spoken in
the Chatterley dining room they are nasty, here they are “part of the
natural flow” (Phoenix II, 570). Mellors is also part of that flow; we see
that when he pushes Chatterley’s mechanical chair as well as when he
goes about his gamekeeper’s business; we see it in his difference from
his social superiors. He inhabits his world alone and chaste; when he
has to move into Connie’s worn-out world he feels the “bruise of the
war” (V) but dreads rebirth; for that is what his relation with her must
involve. As for Connie, she has to abandon the impurity of Michaelis,
whose way is only down and out, for the way of Mellors, which is a
passage through the gates of life and death (Etruscan Places, which also
celebrates this mystical journey, is contemporary with the novel).
Mellors might have been a lay figure, representing Lawrencian
opinions; he calls his little daughter a “false little bitch” for crying
dishonestly (VI) and holds the right views about marriage. In many
ways he differs little from Dukes, with his prophesying of the end:
“Our old show will come flop; our civilization is going to fall. It’s
going down to the bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe
me, the only bridge across the chasm will be the phallus” (VII). But
Connie, though moved by this talk of “the resurrection of the body”
and a “democracy of touch” finds more than words in Mellors; even
as she deeply senses “the end of all things,” she is capable of receiving
“in her womb” the shock of the vision of the gamekeeper’s body as he
washed: “the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and
the sense of aloneness” (VI). She goes to him not in frustrated desire
but in the need to be reborn in the last days—a harsh ecstasy, unlike
that of Chatterley’s surrender of his solar plexus (no stimulus possible
to his lumbar ganglia) to Mrs. Bolton.
What follows is Connie’s initiation and mystic rebirth, as in the
original plot of Apocalypse; and Lawrence is suggesting that the
novel itself mimes this process, for “it can inform and lead into new
places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our