Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and D. H. Lawrence’s own explanation, the “Propos”, do reveal how the consumptive both embraced and escaped his country. Lawrence encapsulated a rootless contempt for his background and his people, the coalmining communities of the midlands. His last novel, rewritten three times, rails against the perceived deadened inauthenticity of English life; the mannered abstraction of a scientific worldview denying the consummate union of man and wife in a real marriage. Thus, science, technology, capitalism and money are unified into a system that saps and destroys what it means to be human.
This is not a particularly old or unusual message. Nevertheless, Lawrence weaves and reinterprets conservative themes in modernist frames. Authenticity will invigorate marriage and the nation of England. To view this focus as a conservative strand within Lawrence’s writing is to surrender to political constraints, when the author restructured his sense of alienation against his country. The consumptive’s exile pours out through the novel, as he tries to explain why using obscenities as norms becomes a marker for an honest world of sexual union, recreating an England worth living in for the author (though it does lend the novel an air of pomposity and ambitious challenges for bad sex writers to the present day).
How sad that exile and censorship obliterated our understanding of a state of the nation novel that set out an ideal of England, standing foursquare in a wider artistic tradition that speaks with more urgency today.
OTOH, the Germans were wonderful and vital. How sad that Britain missed their chance at manly improvement,eh?
WTF!?
My life has been enriched by reading England, My England. Now free.
DH Lawrence was a git.
And What Frederick said.
In case anyone was confused, IIRC, there was a quite complementary passing mention of some young German in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence seems to have been quite taken with German ideas and Kultur.
The movie Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
written by Alan Sillito,
will be getting an new airing soon.
50th anniversary edition.
I lived in the Nottingham that the movie starring Albert Finney is set in for three years.
Nothing had changed from his time to mine.
But something had, between Lawrence and then.
The people got Money, balls and power!
Dont let the bastards grind you down!
Was the main theme of that movie.
Much more edifying than anything D H had to say about his fellow countrymen.
Watch it if it comes near you.
An antidote to Eastenders, it was described as, in one of the papers today.
D.H.Lawrence is a great novelist who has had great impact on subsequent generations of writers; he wrote in times which were troubled and shaken by the stunning realization of the real nature of human beings revealed at the beginning of the 20th century; Lawrence was brave, though limited by the narrow-mindedness of the period; brave enough to express what the others feared even to think about; i haven’t read lady chatterley’s lover but i’m sure it has its own value as a work of art