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Sensitive Awareness and Spurious Feeling:

Lawrence the Reviser and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Laurence Steven, Laurentian University

[published in Études Lawrenciennes, 43 (2012): 31-57]

A strand in current postmodern criticism of Lawrence sees the search for coherent

meaning in his work—especially his essays—as a dead end. Rather, such critics as Joan Peters

say, we need to understand Lawrence rhetorically, and his writing—fiction and discursive

prose—as engaging in postmodern performativity in response to situation. The catchword here is

that Lawrence is a “provisional” writer. Paul Eggert, summing up this direction in criticism, says

the central feature of Lawrence’s aesthetic is his “provisionality, the willingness to revise,

rethink, renew — the temporariness of the textual medium which Lawrence’s every writing,

however strongly worded, actually inhabited” (107).

There are intriguing aspects of this perspective on Lawrence, and Lawrence does

regularly assert the lack of absolutes, the inevitability of change, the need to loosen our will-

controlled grip on life and enter the flow. And he does in his rhetoric often perform the concepts

his essays discuss, and fly in the face of conventional reason. Yet for those who pay close

attention to Lawrence’s revisions, simply assigning Lawrence to the category of postmodern,

provisional, performative is not easy to do. Scholars of Lawrence’s work know Lawrence is a

moral writer rather than an aesthetic one, and that he referred to himself as a religious man, and

therefore a novelist, and in considering the revisions we see the moral dimension in full play. As

Littlewood says, rightly, when we watch Lawrence revise we see “a man with a conscience

trying to be more truthful about his most intimate experience . . .” (“Lawrence…” 176). Our

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responsibility as critical readers of Lawrence is twofold: first, to recognize what is actually going

on when he revises—that Lawrence is a truth seeker attempting to “say the real say” (“Preface”

252); and second, to take him to task when our “sincere and vital emotion” (“John Galsworthy”

539) tells us the writing is not true.

If we approach Lawrence the reviser looking for a progression or evolution in his revision

procedure over the years, we will end up reading him wrongly, in effect looking “for the old

stable ego” in his work when he’s actually moving through something like “allotropic states”

(Letter to Garnett, 5/6/1914; 2L: 183). Allotropism, remember, is a chemical term describing

“two or more forms that differ in physical and chemical properties but not in the kind of atoms of

which they are composed” (Gage Canadian Dictionary). Lawrence’s use of allotropic states to

describe what he’s up to with his characters offers us a way to approach him primarily as a moral

reviser rather than an aesthetic or a performative one. Though the three versions of LCL, for

example, manifest quite different characters, we still read them as unmistakably the work of D.

H. Lawrence. Yet the unsettled critical discussion about them over the years registers that they

are not all of equivalent quality. Though the moral-fable-cum-satiric V3 has Lawrence’s

imprimatur as the one he published, some think V1 has a gritty realism which the later versions

lost, while others (myself included) think V2 has a lyricism and heuristic sensitivity not felt to

the same degree in V1 or V3. Regardless of the choice one makes, it’s important to recognize

that as critics we are not just opting for the version that pleases us most from the range offered

by the Lawrentian generic repertoire, but are choosing the one which most clearly reveals D. H.

Lawrence, and often, ironically enough, in spite of D. H. Lawrence. The critical choice is thus a

moral one, in the spirit of Lawrence’s familiar “John Galsworthy” statement that a critic needs,

fundamentally, to be “morally very honest.” J. C. F. Littlewood illustrates this forthrightly and

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succinctly when, in considering the revisions of The Prussian Officer stories, he concludes that

the spring/summer of 1914 is the “first moment of which it is reasonable to say that [Lawrence]

is now truly himself” (323).

The increasingly clear fact that Lawrence was perpetually engaged in revising his work

keeps before us the moral nature of critical engagement. Whether the circumstance we find him

in is aesthetic or psychological, political or economic, the thrust to revise is moral, the desire to

find the truth of his vision at the moment. Though the revisions manifest in a variety of ways,

sometimes one version plus fragments, sometimes two versions or three or even more, the moves

he makes almost any time he revises tend to reflect three patterns. A first version often depicts a

conventional understanding of characters in a predictable, usually realist situation. Yet

something will be there that doesn’t rest quietly within the conventions. Roland Barthes might

refer to this something as a punctum that punctures the studium; Emmanuel Levinas might call it

an irruption of the saying into the said. In the terms Lawrence uses in his “Introduction to Harry

Crosby’s Chariot of the Sun,” a “slit” (255) appears in the painted umbrella that we raise

between ourselves and “chaos.” Such puncturing once more reveals to Lawrence, on later

examination, that the reality we take for granted—and that he took for granted in the earlier

version—is a simulacrum, produced and maintained by convention. Consequently the second

version will be symbolic and deeper, showing the characters (and author) being acted upon by,

feeling, intuiting, and eventually recognizing the punctum and probing it until they come through

into a new and awe-inspiring and fearful and emotionally (and often culturally too) dangerous

world.

Yet, as Lawrence (and his characters) push into the new awareness, the world out of

which they push—Lawrence as historically situated writer and the characters as dwellers in a

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conventional, habituated simulacrum—is still the old one. There is a tangible pressure for

change, in the author and the characters. In a good deal of Lawrence’s fiction at this stage of

revision we find characters acknowledging that they have to wait for the change to come, that

they can’t force it. But even as the characters determine to wait for their destiny to unfold what it

has in store, their author is often impatient. Cognate works written between or alongside second

and third versions show Lawrence wrestling with the destiny in other genres: poetry, painting,

and, significantly, discursive prose that ranges from letters, to analytic/expository prose, to

prophetic declamation—often in the same piece. When he returns to the original work for

another go—often the third version, but sometimes still in the second—the move is toward

abstraction: in some cases the distanced, satiric, often cynical and acerbic tone of the angry

author, in other cases the abstraction of myth, where an alternate world is drawn up alongside the

simulacrum, and in still other cases the abstractions of mental cerebration where discursive prose

breaks into the fictional world. In any event, the revelations encountered heuristically within the

fiction in the earlier (usually second) version become part of a program, are habituated.

Lawrence the satirist mocks the inhabitants of the conventional simulacrum, ostensibly goading

them to break through the veneer. Lawrence the mythmaker creates a revelatory space for his

protagonist/s, sometimes a safe haven as in LCL, sometimes not as in “The Woman Who Rode

Away,” and sometimes a netherworld limbo where the characters wait to get their own back, as

in The Ladybird. Lawrence the discursive philosopher breaks into the fictional world to articulate

the significance of the unfolding events, like a deus ex machina who cannot be held to account.

The need to wait, which is often still there because the simulacrum won’t just go away, is

accepted with cynical resignation. Lawrence’s latter years are problematic ones for him in this

sense because the risk is that his own ideas, the recognitions he has had over and over, the

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recurrent perceptions that have turned into conceptions, have become habitual—they’ve become

structures of thought and feeling which are conventional.

The challenge is that the discoveries, the breakthroughs, largely happen in the fiction and

poetry; that’s why for Lawrence the novel is “the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that

man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside

of its own place, time, circumstance” (528). What’s happening outside the fiction, largely in the

discursive prose, is that Lawrence is habituating the fictional “coming through,” rendering it into

a form that conventional understanding can assimilate. Of course the irony is that, thus rendered,

the discovery is lost, or hidden; it disappears from view. Thus, when Lawrence returns to his

work (usually a third version) with the newly habituated understanding that he wants his

characters to see, they often don’t or won’t, and Lawrence begins a frustrated hectoring. Yet this

is an irony that Lawrence knows all too well. He regularly thematizes it, discursively, in the

novels. Here’s a typical passage from the middle of John Thomas and Lady Jane, version two of

Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

Life is so soft and quiet, and cannot be seized. It will not be raped. Try to rape it,

and it disappears. Try to seize it, and you have dust. Try to master it, and you see

your own image grinning at you with the grin of an idiot. . . . One gesture of

violence, one violent assertion of self-will, and life is gone. You must seek again.

. . . One can fight for life, fight against the grey unloving armies, the armies of

greedy and bossy ones, and the myriad hosts of the clutching and self-important.

Fight one does and must, against the enemies of life. But when you come to life

itself, you must come as the flower does, naked and defenceless and infinitely in

touch. (323)

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The stances Lawrence presents here—the embattled fighter against life’s enemies, and the

defenceless toucher of life—are familiar in his work; I’ve suggested they are like allotropic

states. The critical challenge is to be sensitive to the places where the battle against life’s

enemies shades over into a fight against life itself. In certain places, at certain times, Lawrence

destroys the village in his attempt to save it.

As is so often the case with him, Lawrence provides a critical benchmark for us when we

consider his revisions as moral work:

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And

here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and

lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead

our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel,

properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the

passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs

to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils,

mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt

feelings, so long as they are conventionally ‘pure’. (V3 101)

This passage is justly famous as one of modernism’s talismans in criticism of the novel. It would

be at home in any number of Lawrence’s discursive essays, such as “Morality and the Novel,”

“Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb,” or, perhaps most comfortably, “John Galsworthy.” But of

course its home is not in a critical context but a novelistic one—it’s from the third version of

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though like other Lawrentian touchstones, it has broken away from its

context and tends to float free, ready to be ‘deployed’ theoretically in other critical situations.

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Placing it back into the novelistic context—the comparative context of Lawrence’s

writing/revising three versions of LCL—is illuminating. The moral dimension is clear in the dual

directions the novel can lead us—toward the new, the secret places of life, and away from the

dead and corrupt. Other qualities align with these positive movements: proper handling of the

novel enables—and is—sensitive awareness; improper handling lacks such sensitivity; its

movement is “conventional” only, its feelings therefore “spurious,” “mechanical” and

“deadening.” Yet how is this passage clear to us? With the clarity of limpid expository prose—

that’s what makes the passage a talisman. Yet, shouldn’t we pause at this point? Doesn’t that

very discursive limpidity reinforce conventional prose rhetoric? Lawrence is telling us here, not

showing us. Notice how easy it is for me to speak of this narrator as Lawrence. While the voice

is materially in the novel—the talisman passage is book-ended by Connie Chatterley’s

thoughts—its rhetorical force comes from outside the novel, commenting in the familiar tone of

Lawrence the critic. Rather than our being led by the novel into new places, at this point

Lawrence is telling us where to go. And we like it.

I’ll return to the novelistic context of the talisman passage shortly, but first I’ll thicken

the context somewhat by looking at Lawrence’s diagnosis of the solitary modern individual that

we find in a cluster of writings through 1927, as he was finishing John Thomas and Lady Jane

(version two) early in the year, and over the roughly eight month hiatus from the novel before

beginning Lady Chatterley’s Lover (version three) in November or December 1927. I’m thinking

of his essay on Galsworthy, written in February 1927, his essay called the “Individual

Consciousness and the Social Consciousness,” which was probably an early drafted part of the

Galsworthy essay and written about the same time, his book on the Etruscan Places, based on a

trip with Earl Brewster in the summer of 1927, his August 1927 review of Trigant Burrow’s

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book The Social Basis of Consciousness, his introduction to Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana of

September 1927, and of course the versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover itself (which I’ll refer to

as V1, V2, and V3). To summarize: Lawrence sees the solitariness of the modern individual as a

matter of coming to self consciousness, which entails being fragmented from the continuum of

other people and the circumambient universe. Consequently the modern individual has an acute

need for relatedness—rich human relationships. Such subtle human relatedness, however, is a

matter of selflessness, insouciance—entailing a willingness to let oneself go. The challenge here

is that as fragmented individuals we are terrified to surrender the self we have; we are selfish.

There is a conundrum involved: to recognize and become aware of the need to surrender requires

us to become self-conscious; it furthers the problem we’re already in, of fragmentation brought

about by head knowledge. To moderns (and postmoderns) like ourselves actually letting

ourselves go is a radical move; it means, to use Lawrence’s metaphors, throwing oneself on the

flood; it means dying the death. It means a vertiginous step outside our known mental territory

into the physical/emotional unknown. Thus our fear of fragmentation is compounded. So,

Lawrence says, we seek assurance and relatedness by other means, by making our selves more

so. We want insurance, and that comes with money; increasingly money and what he calls in V3

the quest for the Bitch Goddess of Success drives us and determines our goals. This leads in turn

to our objectifying the world, seeing it as at our disposal, a resource to insure our selfhood. An

effect of this drive for security through mammon is that the world is stripped of its mystery, its

spirit.

Such is Galsworthy’s problem: his books, and his characters, have no soul—they are

social beings whose standard is money, through to the core. The genuine individual is connected

to the larger continuum, somewhere, deep down, and his or her human responsibility finally

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won’t bow to money. So thinks Lawrence. And that’s why his novels disturbed Galsworthy and

others of the older generation, and frankly why they continue to disturb us, as well as enliven us

and give us hope. They are a moral/aesthetic critique, often going so far as to be an affront, to

our modern, real world. He says that what you and I as educated, savvy, pragmatic modern

individuals see as reality, just isn’t so. It’s a lattice-work of conventions holding chaos at bay, or

in the strikingly Nietzschean metaphor from his April 1928 introduction to Harry Crosby’s

Chariot of the Sun, mentioned earlier, Lawrence says our reality is just a painted umbrella, which

we’ve forgotten we’re holding up. It’s a dream, as Connie Chatterley thinks in V3, or rather, “it

was like the simulacrum of reality. . . . No substance to her or anything—no touch, no contact”

(V3, 18). The role of the poet or novelist is to bring us into sensitive awareness of the umbrella,

to enable us to recognize the “back of presented appearance” (“Introduction to These Paintings”

579), to “inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness,” and thus

to “lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead” (V3 101).

Yet despite this awareness of the “simulacrum of reality” beginning to surface toward the

end of V2 of LCL, being articulated during 1927 in the gap between V2 and V3 in the essays just

mentioned, and being incorporated in V3 in the passage just quoted, the major change we see in

V3 is an excising of the excess of realism—the passional, intuitive, spontaneous, swooping and

circling, ebbing and flowing of sensitive awareness; the mystery of touch—and the reduction to a

realist image, under the domination of ideas, the mental consciousness. V3 functions as a moral

fable in the tradition of Silas Marner and Hard Times, as Squires and others have pointed out,

but far from undermining realism, the fable lends itself to an allegorical rather than a

symbolic/heuristic reading, where the allegory ironically reinforces the simulacrum by taking it

as real. Lawrence has preconceived goals, and the progress of the novel is predictable. It falls

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into conventional patterns; there are no surprises, beyond perhaps the taboo words and the

explicit sex, which, as Lawrence rightly says in A Propos, might shock the first time, but not

after that. These shocks are superficial only; they don’t force the novel out of the path Lawrence

has laid down for it.

Lawrence’s revisions over the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover show this

dynamic at work, and show where Lawrence is able to enact both the relatedness that rises to

sensitive awareness, and the spurious emotion, will-derived, that intervenes in relatedness. The

latter is often Lawrence’s satiric rendering of those he referred to as social beings, but is also

often Lawrence himself intruding into the narrative when the time is not right—putting his

thumb in the pan.

Before considering sensitive awareness and spurious feeling through Lawrence’s

treatment of the theme of contact as it emerges near the end of V1, is embodied in V2, and is

sidelined in V3, I wish to return to the talisman passage on sympathetic consciousness I began

with to tease out the implications both of its appearing in the novel, and where it appears in the

novel.

The passage appears in V3 when Lawrence sets up Mrs. Bolton’s “talking Tevershall” as

an object lesson in how the novel can lead into new life, away from things gone dead, or can

corrupt the reader’s sympathies, reinforcing spurious feeling. He shows Mrs. Bolton’s gossip as

leading us away from the creative relationship staring us in the face in Tattie Allsop and

Willcock. Bolton cynically outlines the 53 year old Tattie Allsop’s marriage to the 65 year old

Willcock after her dominating father dies, and laments the problems with older people these days

who don’t act with propriety. Yet, Tattie and Willcock have done just that, in Lawrence’s

understanding of what’s proper. They have seized the moment and let themselves go, and in so

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doing have created a new thing—their love relationship; their marriage. The outward form of

“marriage” has an organic connection with their beings. Mrs. Bolton, in the name of convention,

misses that, despite her having experienced it in her relationship with Ted, her husband who has

died. By showing Mrs. Bolton improperly handling her story—missing the “subtle inter-

relatedness,” the kairos, the continuity of reality that emerges in the moment, “the truth of time,

place, and circumstance” as he calls it in “Morality and the Novel”, Lawrence shows us how he

properly handles his novel.

But, as I intimated earlier, we need to reflect about what kind of “showing” Lawrence is

engaged in with this Bolton episode. In effect we need to ask what kind of novelist he is at this

point. As I said a moment ago, the passage about leading our sympathetic consciousness

combined with Mrs. Bolton’s Tevershall talk is an object lesson. Lawrence satirically uses

Bolton’s gossiping to make a discursive, expository point about how novels work. His use of the

gossip is very well done, but it is finally an example used to illustrate method. The lead up

passage is really an introduction, done in expository mode. Though book-ended by Connie’s

sensibility, the narrator’s voice here is the voice of Lawrence the teacher. Here is the full

passage, in context:

Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards, always a little ashamed.

She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the

most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the

struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine,

discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our

sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast

importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places

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the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in

recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal

the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above

all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and

freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils,

mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt

feelings, so long as they are conventionally ‘pure’. Then the novel, like gossip,

becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always

ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs Bolton’s gossip was always on the side

of the angels. ‘And he was such a bad fellow, and she was such a nice woman—’

whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton’s gossip, the woman had

been merely a mealy-mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry

honesty made a ‘bad man’ of him, and mealy-mouthedness made a ‘nice woman’

of her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most

novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now

only to an appeal to its vices. (V3 101)

Lawrence (the narrator) says “even satire is a form of sympathy.” And he’s right. But

consider where his satiric treatment of Bolton’s gossip leads our sympathetic consciousness.

First of all we find ourselves, as Connie finds herself, listening to gossip. We probably don’t feel

the slight humiliation that Connie does though, because unlike her we aren’t in the scene. In fact

we are further distanced by Lawrence’s expository move; we are aware that we are being shown

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an example of a point he wants to make. So, while we sympathize with Tattie and Willcock

against Bolton’s treatment of them, we are not given enough room to nurture a spirit of respect

for their struggling, battered human souls that have finally found each other. Lawrence’s framing

discursive mode leaves us outside looking in. Our sympathy for Tattie and Willcock, genuine as

far as it goes, is a matter of mental awareness and could be diagnosed as “spurious.”

We also might wonder what has happened to our sympathy with Mrs. Bolton herself. In

V3 Lawrence places her in a direct line of descent from the interfering housekeeper Nellie Dean

of Wuthering Heights. But she didn’t start out that way. Her background is as a strong, highly

sympathetic Lawrentian woman who married a Lawrentian man—in V1 she was in effect the

awakened Elizabeth Bates from “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” 20 years after her husband was

killed down pit. The fact that Mrs. Bolton can act so conventionally and superficially in V3

despite “knowing” better is a function of Lawrence using her increasingly instrumentally through

the latter part of V2 and in V3 rather than letting her develop all of a piece, or organically. He

revises her into a gossipy, tricky traitor who informs on her fellow townsfolk to Clifford as she

gradually becomes mistress of Wragby in place of Connie.

Lawrence treats Clifford similarly. Early in V1 Clifford gains our sympathy by the

generous way he releases Connie sexually, even though we agree with Connie that the situation

for him was largely “theoretical.” But as V1 goes on Lawrence transforms Clifford into someone

distinctly unlikable. And the transformation continues in V2 and V3. Clifford becomes an

embodiment of the social being lacking organic connection to his circumambient world through

his feelings. He lives in his mind, will and abstract spirituality. He becomes a master of the

mines, as well as an aesthete. By V3 he is a disciple of the “Bitch Goddess of Success.” He is the

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epitome of spurious feelings. Connie’s father says of his writing: “There’s nothing in it. It won’t

last” (V3, 17), and the epithet applies to Clifford as well.

Lawrence makes Clifford, in effect, a Galsworthy-like author and character both—a

social being who can “keep up convention, but [who] cannot carry on a tradition” (“John

Galsworthy” 543). And this is ironic because it is Clifford who brings this discussion into the

novel at the point where he and Connie discuss who will inherit England. Lawrence gives

Clifford the words, but his deeds—the books he writes and the authors he reads—show how

conventional he is.

From a certain satiric perspective, it is fitting that Clifford and Mrs. Bolton are left in a

perverse mother/lover/child tangle by the end of V3. Where else could they end up? Clearly

Lawrence has intended his novel to lead our sympathy away in recoil from this thing gone dead.

But critical opinion has been unsettled about Lawrence’s treatment of these battered human

souls. The concern is not that such things shouldn’t be depicted, but that there seems to be a

surplus of spite in the depiction—a feeling (the best word to use here, taking Lawrence’s lead)

that Lawrence is enjoying the display of his own cruelty. And if so, aren’t we awfully close to

the novel glorifying corrupt feelings? Not Clifford’s and Bolton’s, but Lawrence’s. Lawrence is

clearly, like Mrs. Bolton the gossip of conventional morality, on the side of the angels. We

understand the import and intent of the depiction, and are meant to assume Lawrence’s satiric

stance. But we balk. And the balking is the beginning of criticism.

The problem, as Michael Squires identifies, is that “Clifford is psychologically motivated

from the ‘outside,’ from a narrator whose bias prevents him from seeing … Clifford’s … unique

identity as a human being” (59). While I can agree with Squires on this point, I have a harder

time when he says that in V3 “Connie and Mellors are psychologically motivated from the

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‘inside’” (59). In my view the mental awareness that manipulates Clifford instrumentally in V3

also affects the depiction of Connie and Mellors. To see this more clearly we need to look at the

shift in presentation of the theme of “contact” over the three versions.

Near the end of V1 (209, 211) Duncan Forbes focuses the issue of “contact.” Yet the

recognition is not one his character would have had, and it fits him uneasily. As Keith Sagar

says, “At the end of the novel Lawrence is aware that he has not been able to do enough with

communism, and makes a last desperate attempt to inflate its significance by putting his own

hopes directly and quite inappropriately into the mouth of Duncan Forbes” (293). Here is the

passage in question:

Do you know what I think the English really want? . . . Contact! Some sort of

passionate human contact among themselves. And perhaps if the Communists did

smash the famous ‘system’, there might emerge a new relationship between men:

really not caring about money, really caring for life, and the life-flow with one

another. (V1, 211)

Sagar is right to see this assertion as Lawrence rather than Forbes, but his implicit dismissal of

the view stated is problematic. The theme of contact, or touch, becomes the central one in

version two, John Thomas and Lady Jane. Having it enter V1 near the end is not so much a

matter of Lawrence’s desperation, but of his undergoing a significant revelation in a context that

is inappropriate for receiving it. In an attempt to connect the new awareness more organically

with the narrative world, he gives the revelation to Connie just five pages from the end:

What? What? The contact, the infinitely subtle living contact between her and

him. The relationship. Duncan was right: it was the new contact that was the clue

to life. She knew it now, now that it had suddenly broken off, and she felt herself

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like a dead limb, cut off from the body of life. . . . she realized her mistake. There

had been a holy thing, a living, flowing, intangible contact between her and the

man. And tonight she, with her stupid arrogant will, and Clifford, with his baboon

lips, had broken it. (V1, 216-217)

The more we study Lawrence’s revisions, the more we see Lawrence as a writer who

realizes the import of his writing in the course of writing it; the conscious awareness of the

revelation’s significance surfaces during and after the fact; Lawrence needs a second version in

order to shape the emergent truth back into the context, creating an organic connection that can

work didactically on the reader’s feelings from below, so to speak, to educate them into a “fine,

discriminative sympathy” as the narrator says in V3 (101). We can also see, though, that often

the revisionary shaping that takes place in second and subsequent versions, because it developed

in hindsight and often in another mode of composition—expository essays, letters, poetry, etc.—

does not organically connect with the host work, but imposes on it or intervenes in it—

interposing Lawrence in another allotropic state. And the lack of sympathetic, organic

connection often means the new knowledge or vision shaping the new version is will-controlled,

mental awareness, and the engagement with the characters can be spurious.

We can see the process at work in V1 and its transition to V2 and V3. By the point of

Duncan’s revelation and assertion about contact, Connie and Parkin have developed an intimate

and nourishing relationship on the level of their feelings, but on the mental level they are drifting

further apart. Duncan acts as a bridge between them in the last part of the novel because

Lawrence doesn’t know how to bring them together. The understanding of contact is a mental

knowing, used in an expository fashion; it lacks organic connection.

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The biggest piece of evidence in V1 that the full importance of contact emerges as the

novel proceeds, and that Lawrence isn’t in conscious moral/aesthetic control of the emergence, is

that it is virtually absent in the lead up to Connie’s and Parkin’s first sexual encounter in V1, but

not so in the other versions. In V1, from the beginning of the novel to the first encounter is

roughly 14800 words, and within 500 words beyond the first encounter, they’ve has sex twice

more, and Connie has had her revelatory orgasm, feels “lapped in a new womb,” and knows she

“loved the man, loved him with all the depths of her body, and her body’s splendid soul” (38).

This amounts to 31 pages in the Cambridge edition. In V2 it is 52300 words to the first encounter

and 58300 to Connie’s revelatory orgasm, or 106 and 118 Cambridge pages respectively. And

where in V1 the consequence of the orgasmic revelation is that she loves the man, in V2 she

feels danger and fear at the change she’s experienced with and through this strange person. He is

recognized as something outside her ken: “She had thought to take this man in the wood, and

appreciate him, and be grateful for his service to her, all in the same range of emotion as she had

known all her life” (342). But her habitual world is no more; “She was like a volcano” (342). The

volcanic feelings erupting from within herself have an incalculable organic connection, whereas

her emotions are conventional, social, and superficial; they are what Lawrence calls our

“domesticated animals” (“The Novel and the Feelings”, 756).

In V3 it is 46600 words to the first encounter, and 53700 to her revelatory orgasm, or 94

and 108 Cambridge pages respectively, roughly 12 fewer pages to the first encounter than V2,

and 10 fewer to the revelatory orgasm. And where in V1 the consequence is she loves the man,

and in V2 that loves changes to awe and fear of the transformation in her occasioned by this

distinctly other person, in V3, though ostensibly holding onto the discovery of V2, she in effect

reverts to the conventional contact of V1. Here’s the passage:

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Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft and sensitive in her womb

and bowels. And with this self, she adored him, she adored him till her knees were

weak as she walked. In her womb and bowels she was flowing and alive now, and

vulnerable, and helpless in adoration of him as the most naïve woman.

“It feels like a child!” she said to herself. “It feels like a child in me.”

So it did. (135)

That tiny coda from the narrator—“So it did.”—displays a confident if not complacent

understanding of the process Connie has just undergone. Lawrence knows the import of the

revelation, forensically. In fact we sense that what is looming large for Lawrence at this point is

not Connie’s revelation so much as the theme of inheritance, the importance of the child—the

question of who will inherit England—which plays so important a role in V3. Lawrence has it

stand in opposition to the theme of mammon—the Bitch Goddess of Success—which dominates

Clifford increasingly in V3. What we see here is that the revelatory moment has changed over

the versions, from a conventional love, to awe and fear and uncertainty as habits are undermined,

to adoration for the man who is the father of the mother’s child, certainly a return to a more

conventional response. The deep feeling and sensitive awareness of V2 become the spurious

emotion of V3 as Lawrence’s social/prophetic/satiric tone and rhetoric come to dominate the

narrative stage.

In the space remaining I will look somewhat more closely, to illustrate just how the

treatment of “contact” changes, and why, in the lead up to Connie’s first actual meeting with

Parkin, on her walk in the wood with Clifford. V1 opens very quickly, as if Lawrence is setting

up a narrative thought experiment along the lines of “What would happen to the love relationship

if a young, robust woman is given her sexual freedom by her thoughtful but crippled and

19

sexually impotent husband?” Within four pages of the opening, Clifford has released her, and on

the fifth page “The gamekeeper, Parkin, came out of the cross-path on to the riding. Constance

released her husband’s hold” (11). Lawrence’s preparation of Connie for the encounter is

limited to “Strange feelings surged in her” (11).

In V2 it is not until chapter 3 that Connie and Clifford go to the park, after chapter 1

where Connie, settled at Wragby, begins to bend under the strain of her paralyzed life, and

chapter 2 where her father Sir Malcolm tells both her and Clifford not to let her remain a demi-

vierge. The day of the walk is described as “ghostly”; she feels “something mysteriously alive in

the wood” (241); Clifford starts talking and the words intervene: “So many words! Oh god, so

many glib words! And she had been sensing another mystery, in the wood” (242). Clifford goes

on to say they haunt each other with their wills; she looks at his eyes: “they still held a strange

power over her, in their pale, uncanny concentration. She knew they had power over her. And

she knew she enjoyed it, or got a strange, unearthly thrill out of it.—She forgot now the other,

silent feeling within the wood, that had been drawing her away from him” (243). Clifford then

recounts what Connie’s father had told him about Connie becoming a demi-vierge, and then

releases her to have an affair, after articulating that their marriage is on a more spiritual plane

and can do without the “incidents” of sex:

“You’d keep the arm of your will round me all the time?” she said, with

quiet acceptance that might contain a sting of irony.

“The arm of my will, if you like to call it such,” he said.

They were silent, both very much moved: and moved worlds apart from

one another. (247)

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As she and Clifford move apart, Parkin immediately appears out of the cross riding. At

their meeting Lawrence reveals the connection between Connie and Parkin at a level of deep

feelings, far below conscious awareness:

Constance, absorbed in a confusion of thoughts and emotions, met his glance

almost without knowing it. She was hardly aware of him, being so much disturbed

in herself by what Clifford had said. But the man’s watchful, hard eyes caught the

unresolved trouble in the wide blue eyes of the young woman, and the

unconscious spark of appeal. He felt the queer spark of appeal touch him

somewhere, but he stiffened, and hardened his spine in resistance and in

unconsciousness. He did not choose to be aware. (248)

Over the next few pages Lawrence shows Connie thinking about Parkin, and then shows

Parkin thinking about her. The narrative ebbs and flows between them, the thoughts and feelings

of each tentatively defining the outlines of their relationship, their relatedness.

In V3 the mysterious sense of life Connie had felt in the woods and that melded easily

and naturally into the ebb and flow between herself and Parkin is gone. As well as changing his

name to Mellors, Lawrence omits the gamekeeper’s interior perspective, taking him out of the to

and fro, ebb and flow of the mostly unconscious rhythmic connection between them. Though

Lawrence says that the “wood was [Connie’s] one refuge, her sanctuary” (V3, 20), he qualifies

the point immediately:

But it was not really a refuge, a sanctuary, because she had no connection with it.

It was only a place where she could get away from the rest. She never really

touched the spirit of the wood itself—if it had any such nonsensical thing. (V3,

20)

21

And when Mellors appears “he had frightened Connie, he seemed to emerge with such a swift

menace. That was how she had seen him, like a sudden rush of a threat out of nowhere” (V3, 46).

Again, the connection that Lawrence’s prose in V2 had enabled us, with Connie, to intuit, is

gone. Rather than inhabiting a simulacrum but having some deep awareness somehow of its

falsity, and of a genuine reality somewhere, here we have a realistic gamekeeper scaring a

realistic woman.

The lengthier V2 reflects the significance that the appropriate moment has on the organic,

hesitant, tentative, ebbing-and-flowing emergence of the contact between Connie and Parkin, out

of unconscious depths and rhythms that connect them to each other in their circumambient

world. While Lawrence does shape this tacit connection into the novel, the shaping is more than

instrumental; it comes out of Lawrence taking a new attitude to his inspiration for the book—an

attitude prepared to wait for the right time, the kairos moment in which the significance reveals

itself. The opening pages of chapter 4 Lawrence refers to as Connie’s “evil days” (V2, 255-6),

when she approaches a nervous breakdown. Here her inability to break out of her insane space

without assistance from outside it (254), mirrors Lawrence’s stance when he is on the verge of a

new and deeper allotropic state. There is always an intuited sense of something drawing him on,

but something he can’t articulate. A representative illustration comes from a March 1913 letter

mentioning The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, which was “all crude as yet . . . most

cumbersome and floundering — but I think it’s great — so new, so really a stratum deeper than I

think anybody has ever gone, in a novel. But there, you see, it’s my latest. . . . nobody will

publish it. I wish I had never been born” (1L, 526).

In V3 Lawrence is far less willing to wait for the contact to emerge. Whereas in V2

Connie and Clifford go on their walk into the woods and meet Parkin in Chapter 3, in V3 this

22

walk and meeting with the keeper are in Chapter 5. Lawrence inserts before it the Michaelis

episode in Chapter 3 and the cronies discussing a variety of ideas in Chapter 4. The introduction

of Michaelis signals a change in emphasis for Lawrence. As Derek Britton says,

Michaelis is a type-figure, the principal motive for whose introduction into the

novel, demanding extensive revisions of the early chapters of the book, was

possibly to define the phallic sex of the keeper more clearly, through setting up an

antithetical relationship with active mental sexuality. (246)

I don’t doubt that Britton is right in his assessment of Michaelis’s role. But when the episode

enters the novel at the expense through revision of the slow, careful weaving of the strands of

contact between Connie and her environment and of Parkin within it, then we need to question

the significance. Michaelis is a type—chosen to play a role in an argument. Though he is

sexually active, he is not a dynamic character; Lawrence does not want one here. Lawrence

wants to illustrate a point: that social beings who have no deep feelings but who live from their

minds and wills, can’t love. Their emotions are spurious.

Similarly with Chapter 4 where the cronies discuss love, marriage, Bolshevism,

industrialism, and what a whole life means (but not “touch”, pace Squires, 31). In the space of 10

pages we get a spate of ideas bandied about by social beings, or in the case of Tommy Dukes,

apathetic ones, with Connie sitting there primly, silently, stitching. Yet it ends thus:

Hate’s a growing thing like anything else. It’s the inevitable outcome of forcing

ideas on to life, of forcing one’s deepest instincts. Our deepest instincts, our

deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas. We drive ourselves with a

formula, like a machine. (V3, 39)

23

Lawrence’s ostensible point in including such an idea-larded chapter, of course, is to show the

irony of these cerebral social beings waxing eloquent on wholeness and sexuality. There is a

certain sharp humour in the depiction. But further, Lawrence can have Tommy Dukes teach

Connie about the ways of the world.

Michael Squires is of another mind about these insertions:

In version 3 Lawrence … uses Sir Malcolm’s notion that Connie should “meet

people” by introducing Michaelis and Clifford’s Cambridge friends into the

narrative. Not simply expanding his materials, Lawrence coherently builds one

version upon the other. … he supplies Connie with a false sensual connection—

Michaelis—in order to make more persuasive her discovery of genuine fulfillment

later in the novel … and he shows Clifford’s Cambridge friends intellectualizing

sex when they visit Wragby. Thus the theme of illegitimate sex well controls the

content of the scenes… (32)

The difficulty here is that the novelistic coherence and control that Lawrence gains by including

Michaelis and the cronies at this early point is conventional. They become the negative side of a

fictional argument to persuade Connie about fulfillment in which the keeper, revealed later, is the

positive. Lawrence’s heuristic art, emergent in V2, is replaced by a didactic art which directs the

show. The effect on the novel of inserting two instrumental chapters so early in the book, and

before Connie has even met the keeper, is debilitating. They determine the direction. As the book

moves forward, it does so on the tracks laid down by these illustrative/expository/satiric set

pieces. Of course Mellors is going to be everything Michaelis is not; of course he does not force

ideas onto life. Clearly, he is what Connie desperately needs.

24

In V2, significantly, the cronies chapter is the 5th, and takes only “touch” as its theme

rather than the spate of ideas of V3. In V2 this abstract discussion of “touch” comes only after

Lawrence has woven Connie and Parkin into a relationship, in Chapter 3 where she meets

Parkin, and chapter 4 where she sees him washing. Only in chapter 5 does the discussion turn

abstract, with the cronies discussing contact and Dukes articulating the democracy of touch. And

Connie contributes to the conversation, albeit not as much perhaps as we would like. When

Connie says she can imagine nicer places than Wragby, Jack Strangeways smirks that she wants

Scotch castles and Italian villas. She responds:

“No! Where one needn’t be desperate about owning anything. Where a bit

of life flowed.”

“You’re quite right, Connie!” said Dukes, looking at her with his shrewd

eyes. “A flow of life, and contact! We’ve never had proper human contact—and

we’ve never been civilized enough. We’re not civilized enough even now, to be

able to touch one another. . . . The next civilization will be based on the

inspiration of touch: believe me—” (V2, 276)

Lawrence develops Connie’s sensitive awareness deftly here, with Dukes’ more abstract

observation rising organically out of Connie’s life as we’ve seen it develop thus far. In V3, on

the other hand, the discussion of the democracy of touch, arguably the theme of V2, is reduced to

a few lines stuck into chapter 7. When Dukes mentions it, “Something echoed inside Connie.

‘Give me the resurrection of the body! The democracy of touch!’ She didn’t at all know what the

latter meant, but it comforted her, as meaningless things may do” (V3, 76). Even Lawrence’s

tone is half cynical, slightly mocking. He hasn’t done enough work on Connie’s sensitive

25

awareness, and the result is that he half wonders if her emotions might not be spurious. Actually,

though, it’s Lawrence’s we find ourselves wondering about.

Yet, Lawrence himself again enables us to find our critical bearings by directing us back

to the novel as a form of sensitive awareness, emerging unconstrained by the author’s spurious

mental awareness. In “The Novel and the Feelings,” which Sagar’s Calendar says was written in

June 1925 (144-145), but which internal evidence places far closer to 1927/8 and the emergence

of V3 of LCL, Lawrence speaks about the importance of educating ourselves in the feelings, “not

by laying down laws and inscribing tablets of stone, but by listening” (759). How should we

listen to the innermost feelings? “If we can’t hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark

veins, we can look in the real novels, and there listen-in. Not listen to the didactic statements of

the author, but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of

their destiny” (759-760).

I’ve only been able to glance here at some of the issues involved in considering

Lawrence’s treatment of emotion through a study of his revisions. Suffice it to say at this point,

that the wealth of material made available by the Cambridge Edition, at all stages of Lawrence’s

writing process, and all periods of his life, gives us a remarkable opportunity to enter the flow of

Lawrence’s sympathetic consciousness. To assume that the last version is the best, or the one we

should regard as the real Lawrence, is to ignore the punctums that are prodding us at every point.

26

Works Cited

Britton, Derek. Lady Chatterley: The Making of the Novel. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Eggert, Paul. “C. S. Peirce, D. H. Lawrence, and Representation: Artistic Form and Polarities.”

D. H. Lawrence Review 28. 1-2 (1999): 97-113.

Lawrence, D. H. The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa

Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999 [pbk 2001].

---. “Introduction to Chariot of the Sun by Harry Crosby.” Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald.

New York: Viking, 1936. 255-262.

---. “Introduction to These Paintings.” Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking,

1936. 551-584.

---. “John Galsworthy.” Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking, 1936. 539-550.

---. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Ed. and with notes by Michael Squires. London: Penguin, 2006.

---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I, September 1901—May 1913. Ed. James T.

Boulton, Cambridge UP, 1979.

---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume II: June 1913—October 1916. Ed. George J. Zytaruk

and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.

---. “Morality and the Novel.” Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking, 1936.

527-532.

---. “The Novel and the Feelings.” Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Viking, 1936.

755-760.

---. “Preface to ‘The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence.’” Phoenix. Ed. Edward McDonald.

New York: Viking, 1936. 251-254.

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Littlewood, J. C. F. “Lawrence and the Scholars.” Essays in Criticism XXXIII (1983): 175-186.

---. “Son and Lover.” Cambridge Quarterly 4 (Winter 1969-1970): 323-61.

Peters, Joan Douglas. “Rhetoric as Idea: D. H. Lawrence's Genre Theory.” Style (Spring,

2000): online at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1_34/

ai_66496010/?tag=content;col1

Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of his Works. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979.

---. D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. London: Penguin, 1985.

Squires, Michael. The Creation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Baltimore and London: Johns

Hopkins UP, 1983.