Transcript David Herbert Richards Lawrence

Southern Medical University
World Culture
Prof ADama
D.H. Lawrence was a writer whom was much ahead
of his times. Having shocked nations and rattled
minds through out the world.
Having been labeled a pornographer and an agent of
sexual smut, he produced works of art that
pioneered the way for many artist to explore new
and exciting avenues of humanity and that of
human nature.
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Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H.
Lawrence, first published in 1928.
The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy;
it could not be published openly in the United
Kingdom until 1960. (A private edition was
issued by Inky Stephensen's Mandrake Press in
1929).
The book soon became notorious for its story of
the physical relationship between a workingclass man and an aristocratic woman, its
explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of (at
the time) unprintable words.
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The story is said to have originated from events in
Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he
took inspiration for the settings of the book from
Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he grew up.
According to some critics, the fling of Lady
Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason
who came to carve plinths for her garden statues,
also influenced the story.
Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel
Tenderness and made significant alterations to the
text and story in the process of its composition.
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It has been published in three different versions.
A heavily censored abridgement of Lady
Chatterley's Lover was published in America by
Alfred E. Knopf in 1928.
This edition was posthumously re-issued in
paperback in America both by Signet Books and by
Penguin Books in 1946.
When the full unexpurgated edition of Lady
Chatterley's Lover was published by Penguin
Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under
the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 became a
major public event and a test of the new obscenity
law.
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The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had
made it possible for publishers to escape
conviction if they could show that a work was of
literary merit.
One of the objections was to the frequent use of the
word "fuck" and its derivatives and the word
"cunt".
Various academic critics and experts of diverse
kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner,
Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman
St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the
verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not
guilty".
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This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom
for publishing explicit material in the UK.
The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of
touch with changing social norms when the
chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked
if it were the kind of book "you would wish
your wife or servants to read".
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The Penguin second edition, published in 1961,
contains a publisher's dedication, which reads:
"For having published this book, Penguin Books
were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications
Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20
October to 2 November 1960.
This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve
jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a
verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H.
Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to
the public in the United Kingdom."
Lets take a look at the characters and the story of
Lady Chatterley.
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What is the Story ?
Who was she ?
Why was this novel considered to be
pornography and censored ?
Who were the characters involved ?
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In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence comes full circle to
argue once again for individual regeneration, which can be
found only through the relationship between man and
woman (and, he asserts sometimes, man and man).
Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind
this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of
different types of relationships.
The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between
Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by
preventing his pleasure.
There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he
cannot find a woman whom he respects intellectually and,
at the same time, finds desirable.
There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that
ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton, his
caring nurse, after Connie has left.
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Lady Chatterley is the protagonist of the novel. Before her
marriage, she is simply Constance Reid, an intellectual and
social progressive from a Scottish bourgeois family, the
daughter of Sir Malcolm and the sister of Hilda. When she
marries Clifford Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance
(or, as she is known throughout the novel, Connie) assumes
his title, becoming Lady Chatterley. Lady Chatterley's Lover
chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a sensual
being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband,
and to love Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her
husband's estate. In the process of leaving her husband and
conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady Chatterley moves
from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia and
aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in
sensuality and sexual fulfillment.
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Oliver Mellors is the lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the gamekeeper
on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby Hall. He is aloof, sarcastic,
intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a
blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. In
the army, he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant — an unusual
position for a member of the working classes — but was forced to leave
the army because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health.
Surprisingly, we learn from different characters' accounts that Mellors
was in fact finely educated in his childhood, has good table manners, is
an extensive reader, and can speak English 'like a gentleman', but chooses
to behave like a commoner and speak broad Derbyshire dialect, probably
in an attempt to fit into his own community. Disappointed by a string of
unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in quiet isolation, from which he is
redeemed by his relationship with Connie: the passion unleashed by their
lovemaking forges a profound bond between them. At the end of the
novel, Mellors is fired from his job as gamekeeper and works as a laborer
on a farm, waiting for a divorce from his old wife so he can marry
Connie. Mellors is a man with an innate nobility but who remains
impervious to the pettiness and emptiness of conventional society, with
access to a primal flame of passion and sensuality.
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Clifford Chatterley is Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a
young, handsome baronet who becomes paralyzed from the waist
down during World War I. As a result of his injury, Clifford is
impotent. He retires to his familial estate, Wragby Hall, where he
becomes first a successful writer, and then a powerful
businessman. But the gap between him and Connie grows ever
wider; obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly
interested in love, and she feels that he has become passionless
and empty. He turns for solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs.
Bolton, who worships him as a nobleman even as she despises
him for his casual arrogance. Clifford is portrayed as a weak, vain
man, displaying a patronising attitude toward his supposed
inferiors. He soullessly pursues money and fame through industry
and the meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is
symbolic of his failings as a strong, sensual man, and could also
represent the increasing loss of importance and influence of the
ruling classes in a modern world.
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Mrs. Bolton, also known as Ivy Bolton, is Clifford's
nurse and caretaker. She is a competent, stillattractive middle-aged woman. Years before the
action in this novel, her husband died in an
accident in the mines owned by Clifford's family.
Even as Mrs. Bolton resents Clifford as the owner
of the mines — and, in a sense, the murderer of her
husband — she still maintains a worshipful
attitude towards him as the representative of the
upper class. Her relationship with Clifford - she
simultaneously adores and despises him, while he
depends and looks down on her - is probably one
of the most complex relationships in the novel.
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Michaelis is a successful Irish playwright with
whom Connie has an affair early in the novel.
Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, but she
decides not to, realizing that he is like all other
intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain
ideas and empty words, passionless.
Hilda Reid is Connie's older sister by two years,
the daughter of Sir Malcolm. Hilda shared
Connie's cultured upbringing and intellectual
education. She remains unliberated by the raw
sensuality that changed Connie's life. She disdains
Connie's lover, Mellors, as a member of the lower
classes, but in the end she helps Connie to leave
Clifford.
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Sir Malcolm Reid is the father of Connie and
Hilda. He is an acclaimed painter, an aesthete and
a bohemian who despises Clifford for his
weakness and impotence, and who immediately
warms to Mellors.
Tommy Dukes, one of Clifford's contemporaries,
is a brigadier general in the British Army and a
clever and progressive intellectual. Lawrence
intimates, however, that Dukes is a representative
of all intellectuals: all talk and no action. Dukes
speaks of the importance of sensuality, but he
himself is incapable of sensuality and uninterested
in sex. Of Clifford's circle of friends, he is the one
who Connie becomes closest to.
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Duncan Forbes is an artist friend of Connie and Hilda.
Forbes paints abstract canvases, a form of art Mellors
seems to despise. He once loved Connie, and Connie
originally claims to be pregnant with his child.
Bertha Coutts, although never actually appearing in
the novel, has her presence felt. She is Mellors' wife,
separated from him but not divorced. Their marriage
faltered because of their sexual incompatibility: she
was too rapacious, not tender enough. She returns at
the end of the novel to spread rumors about Mellors'
infidelity to her, and helps get him fired from his
position as gamekeeper. As the novel concludes,
Mellors is in the process of divorcing her
We have taken a brief look at the story line and
learned about the characters.
So, Now, WHAT is your opinion…
 Do you think it is outrageous for such writing ?
 Are you intrigued to learn more ?
 Would you read the book ?
 How about if you LIVED in the early part of
the last century, would you be offended ?
 Your thoughts …. ?????