“Civilization and its discontents” in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s

Lover

Although D.H. Lawrence’s most well-known novel apparently focuses on Constance

Chatterley and her relationship to Mellors, the character of Clifford – her husband - plays a

critical role in that he pertains to the set of oppositions and symbols on which the novel is

built. Among these feature an antagonism that is analogous to the classic notion of “Culture

versus Nature” but should be nonetheless replaced in a specific context of writing, from an

intellectual point of view.

If the author claims Clifford’s symbolical dimension is not necessarily intentional, his

portrayal of the character in his “A Propos” confirms that it is no coincidence that Clifford

should be confined in a wheelchair, his condition as a disabled person symbolically

encapsulating his emotional infirmity and the dry abstractedness of his soul: a “pure

personality” (i.e. a disembodied mind), Clifford is a “pure product of our civilisation, but he is

the death of the great humanity of the world”. This phrase indicates that the character is

both a victim and an active part of civilization, understood as a force at odds with “Nature”.

Far from being univocal, the latter term could be defined, as far as the novel is concerned, as

the phenomena and objects which man has not created, and on which he has no control or

very limited control. And Nature, in Lawrence’s views, is not a potentially deadly force;

rather, it relates to the Greek notion of “Cosmos”: an essentially ordered, harmonious

whole. In its physical sense, it includes not only the vegetal and animal life but also human

life in all its instinctive and organic aspects. On the other hand, civilisation represents – again

in the novel’s symbolism - if not the contrary of the Cosmos, the process of cultural,

economic, technological ... development which led mankind to drift away from it, through

attitudes which conflict with Nature in general and their nature in particular, usually creating

unhappiness and a lack of significance: ”The rhythm of the cosmos is something we cannot

get away from, without bitterly impoverishing our lives”. This antagonism runs through the

whole novel, and the alienated, morbid, dehumanised dimension of the civilized man is

repeatedly lamented, be it on the side of intellectuals or on the workers’: “We’re not men,

and the women aren't women. We're only cerebrating make-shifts, mechanical and

intellectual experiments”, says Tommy Dukes, while Constance is appalled by the industrial

England “producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and

political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead”. Besides, the narrative significantly

contrasts descriptions of the dismal industrial landscapes and lifestyle with celebrations of

nature. Many symbolic details and narrative strategies attest that Lawrence consistently

uses these concepts in a coherent interpretative framework for the world in which he lives

and writes. Although Lawrence opposed some of Freud’s ideas 1, there is no denying that his

approach of contemporary times is, to some extent, connected with the theories of the

founder of psychoanalysis. Without proceeding to a systematic comparison of the two

authors, our approach of how Lawrence displays the unhealthiness of a drifting civilization

and its need for renewal will be informed by their philosophical convergences.

The incident of the chair in Chapter XIII is a major key for the understanding of the

symbolism that is at stake in Lady Chatterley’s lover, as underlined by Michael Squires in his

2002 edition2. If Clifford has not chosen to be crippled, it is clear that he has adapted to his

condition and “even seem[s] to have a certain conceit of himself in his lameness”, for which

he compensates through several kinds of “fetishes”. As a matter of fact, the victims and

representatives of civilisation and its hubristic abuses seem to display three main ways of

compensating their incapacity to live in touch with the “rhythm of the cosmos”. These forms

of compensation, very much akin to Pascal’s notion of divertissement (diversion from

existential misery) are to be found in an over-investment in the material realm (money,

technology ...); in a kind of libido dominandi (search for power) and in a sterile, abstracted

use of the mind.

1 D H. Lawrence. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,1921

2 , Introduction by Michael Squires, in Lawrence, DH, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002

Clifford is representative of all of these makeshift solutions. First, the wheelchair has

obviously become part of himself, of his own body, so much so that it nearly becomes a

character in its own right: it plays a major part in Chapter XIII and is extensively talked about

as if it were a living being, eventually called “she” or “old girl” by its owner. Clifford’s

eagerness to use it despite its inadequacy to his environment and his will to demonstrate its

power and autonomy are further evidence of his psychological investment in the chair,

which is paralleled by his worrying use of the radio (“he would sit alone for hours listening to

the loudspeaker (...) with a blank entranced expression on his face”). Such signs show that

he perfectly fits in what Freud calls the “prosthetic god”. By such a term, which appears in

Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud refers to the modern man as a hybrid being, marked by

an extensive use of technology as a protection “against the forces of nature” and a way of

“perfecting his own organs”. Although the phrase seems to imply a sense of unlimited

power, Freud suggests that man’s use of technological devices as extensions of himself may

be a source of deep disappointment and fragility: “When he puts on all his auxiliary organs

he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much

trouble at times”. Indeed, the mechanical device eventually necessitates human physical

force – as Connie and Mellors push the chair back to Wragby. Thus, the failure of the chair to

“fight the hill” (i.e. its natural environment) and its eventual breakdown represent the failure

of technology, while Clifford’s reaction exemplifies the modern man’s denial of Nature’s

superiority over machines and technological prostheses, as well as the hubris inherent to the

civilisation he epitomizes.

However pathetic Clifford may look in this episode, the implicit stance of the narrator

is pitiless regarding this character, who is not seen so much as a victim than as a conceited

man making for his paralysis by a tyrannical behaviour (i.e, a streak towards libido

dominandi) as a husband, as the master of Wragby, and as a colliery manager. The reader is

led to feel antipathy for him and to disapprove of the ideas and existential attitude he stands

for, as an insensitive man somehow willingly cut off from Nature. Beyond its metaphysical

significance, the symbolism involved in Clifford’s psychology also has political and

sociological implications. Clifford is not only a product of a civilisation dominated by

technology; he participates in producing it as part of the dominant class. An aristocrat and a

coal industry owner, he reifies and shows absolute contempt for the workers and their living

conditions. If indeed the lives of colliers and inhabitants of industrial towns lack in meaning

and dignity, as Mellors himself admits, those who own and manage the industry have a

responsibility which Clifford denies. In this perspective, the novel is marked by a Marxist

ideology, as the alienation of man by industry and machinery and the sense of crisis attached

to it are exposed by Mellors: “the human world (...) has doomed itself by its own mingy

beastliness (...): men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken

away, and all their real life. I'd wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the

industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake”. Nevertheless, the implicit ideology of the

novel differs from Marxism in that not only the lower strata of society but the dominant

classes are victims of industrialization and modernity –though in different ways.

Through the character of Connie’s husband, the novel also targets the deadening and

unproductive forms of intellectual activity and habits, which include some uses of language

and culture. The best example of it is the excessive rational activity and talking such as

represented by Clifford and some his Cambridge friends, like Hammond, whose rejection of sex is

deemed unhealthy by Duke: “You can keep the purity and integrity of your mind, but it's going damned dry. (...)

You're simply talking it down ». Clifford is the most closed-off to the emotional and organic life: even before

losing the use of his lower body, “the sex part did not mean much to him”, and he assumes

his wife shares the same standpoint. His over-investment in activities such as writing and the

reading of technical works reflect his lack of investment in the emotional and “physical life”.

The same mechanism is at stake when in Chapter VIII, Constance, intensely moved by the

beauty of nature, resents her husband’s always relating to it by scholarly metaphors: “she

was angry with him, turning everything into words(...). How she hated words, always (...)

sucking all the life-sap out of living things.”

Beyond these straightforward antagonisms, it would be a reductive understanding of

the characters to see Clifford as the pure intellectual and Oliver Mellors as the pure

representative of natural instinct. Mellors is marked by duality: his trend towards

philosophical reasoning is balanced by his simple way of living and enjoying physical

pleasure, together with his scorn for affectation: Such duality is illustrated by his contrasted

use of language, now vernacular and vulgar, now eminently correct and even sophisticated.

In Chapter XVI, Connie suggests to him that “normal English”, equated with “good manners”,

would be “more natural”. His retort is tell-tale: 'Second nature, so to speak! (...) I'm weary o'

manners. Let me be!”. Oliver has made the thoughtful and rational choice to give priority to

“nature” – understood as the free expression of body and soul - which gives both coherence

and dignity to his stance. It is not an animalistic nature Mellors chooses: he has found a way

to give a well-balanced place to the intellectual, the emotional and the physical, which

allows him to serve as a worthy mouthpiece for Lawrence’s ideas, by not only voicing them

in his theoretical developments, but concretely embodying them in his demeanour.

Clifford’s stance, on the other hand, is much more contradictory. While the character

seems at first to embody the pure ascetic, he shows an increasingly emotional and sensual

personality. This unexpected “return of nature” in Clifford’s attitude has a fundamentally

unhealthy touch to it, and aptly corresponds to the psychoanalytical concept of repression,

according to which natural impulses negated by society are necessarily sublimated, that is

expressed in alternative ways (“the body hits back at you”, as Lawrence puts it). But

repression may generate deviant or extreme reactions, and Clifford suddenly shifts to a

ineluctable release of passions At that point, he shows a strong emotional reaction and

collapses in a sort of perverse sensuality: “they [Mrs Bolton and Clifford] drew into a closer

physical intimacy, (...) when he was a child stricken with an apparent candour”; “He would

hold her hand,(...) put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in (...) the

exultation of perversity”. Adopting the role of a “child-man under [Mrs Bolton’s] will”,

indulging in a neurotic behaviour allows Clifford to let loose, “at last”, his sexual impulses.

An object of several obscenity trials around the world, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was

viewed by Lawrence’s contemporaries as an extremely shocking novel. No wonder that the

novel and its condemnation are alluded to in Philip Larkin’s poem "Annus Mirabilis”3 as an

important milestone for our cultural approach of sexuality. But a little critical distance

suffices to qualify the revolutionary or progressive dimension of Lady Chatterley. First, the

social transgression which could be seen in Connie’s connexion with a commoner is not so

clear as the narrator heavily insists on his manners, education and especially his experience

of upward mobility. On a philosophical level, the novel displays a disparagement of

modernity paralleled with the ideal of a return to Arcadian lifestyle, as evidenced by the

3 Larkin, Philip. High Windows. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.

idyllic descriptions of nature and the final hope for Connie and Mellors to live in a farm away

from the worries of civilisation. Indeed, the novel and “A Propos” evince the notion that

“there is something rotten” in England. The civilised world, in its contemporary

manifestations, has come to a deadlock, and constitutes a source of misery and negative

pressure for both Lawrence and Freud, who share a sense of decadence, but differ as for the

solution. Freud suggests that the solution to deal with the constraints of civilisation is

shifting from undergoing them to interiorizing them: “external coercion gradually becomes

internalized; for a special mental agency, man’s super-ego, takes it over”4. Lawrence,

conversely, appears to have a more liberal train of thought. He locates the decadence in an

inhibition which is within people’s minds rather than linked with external agencies. As a

consequence, “it is the mind we have to liberate” on the subject of body and sex, and society

requires a sexual “regeneration”. But how really liberal is Lawrence in this respect? The

author is far from calling to a change precursory of the 1960s, or to sexual anarchy. Lady

Chatterley is in no way a libertine novel: the relationship between Mellor and Constance,

regardless of its adultery character, has nothing really revolutionary to it, being exclusive,

heterosexual and ultimately meant for procreation. The change is to happen not so much in

practice, as in people’s minds. It translates into a movement backward, into “a return to

ancient forms”, and the locus of such regeneration is the institution of marriage: ”Mankind

has to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage”. The

necessity of this renewal emerges from the fear that a wrong attitude to sex defiles what

should be a sacred ritual and generates perversity; therefore “think[ing] sex, fully (...) and

cleanly” –such as achieved in the novel – is supposed to bring the reader “where we want to

get, to our real and accomplished chastity”. The author of an allegedly obscene piece was

thus driven by a purifying purpose!

As we can see, the “transgression” at work in Lawrence’s text is actually based on a

somewhat moralistic aim, the liberation it calls for - a rather controlled one- has no

hedonistic dimension to it, and the paradoxical progress it advocates consists in “the eternal

submission to the greater laws” of the world. In other words, if Lady Chatterley’s Lover

4 Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an illusion (1927), in Standard Edition of the complete psychological

word of Sigmund Freud, Vol XXI, London, Hogarth Press, 1961

endorses any revolutionary ambition as a remedy to the “discontents of civilisation”, it

appears to take on the form of a fairly conservative revolution.

Primary sources

Freud, Sigmund, Joan Riviere, and James Strachey. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Hogarth

Press, 1975. Print.

Lawrence, D H, James T. Boulton, and Michael Squires. Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Propos of "lady

Chatterley's Lover". Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Print.