Language and Experience inLady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

Concerning James Joyce and his Work in Progress , Samuel Beckett said: “His writing is not about something; it is that something itself .” 1 The same can be said of any novel whose language has the power to compel the reader’s interest and participation. What the novel is “about” is the least of the invigorating power that makes it what it is . Hence Gustave Flaubert’s desire to write a lively novel about nothing. Beckett’s later novels may not be about nothing, but they are about less and less. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover has most commonly been taken as a novel that is about something: about class prejudice, about challenging censorship, about the destructive character of Victorian moralism, about the human and ecological costs of industrialization, about feminism, about homosexuality, about any number of ideologies. The success of all this critique by and about Lawrence raises the question implicit in Beckett’s comment. Since the problem of what Lady Chatterley’s Lover is all about intellectually has been largely settled, we are left with the more compelling and difficult question: What, if anything, is this novel?