‘Love’ and ‘chatter’ in Lady Chatterley's Lover

Abstract

The folk image of Lawrence as the author of a sexy book called Lady Chatterley's Lover is not just a consequence of scandal. For of all his novels this was uniquely conceived as a popular expression of his vision of modern life. Not unconnected with this, it is also the work through which Lawrence has been felt to be most available for burlesque purposes. Parody may range from the patronisingly dismissive to the humorously appreciative; and indeed pure contempt is not the best basis for successful burlesque. Attitudes to Lady Chatterley's Lover seem to be somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. In his own country, Lawrence's last novel, with its puritan lay sermons and its archetypal clash of classes, has become a national family joke, like a risque uncle: slightly absurd, to be sure, but unmistakably one of our own. The assimilation of this novel into the broader national consciousness is also unique, I think, in actually having some bearing, however indirect, on the nature of the book. The banning of The Rainbow was a straight clash with the philistinism of the British ‘establishment’. Apart from constituting in itself a telling vindication of Lawrence's diagnosis of the national life, it does not rise to the level of critical interest. The unbanning of Lady Chatterley's Lover was not a critical event of much intrinsic interest either, but it was a great national circus; a locus classicus of uniquely British absurdity. Even in 1960 the book touched a nerve, and its popular resonance is an index of Lawrence's meaning.