Pastoral Patterns and Pastoral Variants in Lady Chatterley's Lover

Abstract

Lady Chatterley's Lover is more than sexual: it is pastoral. D. H. Lawrence wrote to Catherine Carswell in 19292, I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away toward the inner realities that are real: and return, maybe, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure.' In this letter Lawrence, perhaps unconsciously, struck upon the pastoral pattern that he was to embody imaginatively in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Because critical interest in pastoral seemed once to have languished, it is hardly surprising that critics have never attempted to analyze the pastoral patterns and pastoral variants in Lawrence's last novel. The novel has for too long been thought a fictionalized treatise on morality or a guidebook to sexual freedom or a work prophetic of an emancipated society. We should, instead, begin to see the novel in its proper perspective: as a pastoral novel that embodies the attitudes, techniques, and patterns of traditional pastoral romance. In an important essay, Julian Moynahan comes close to seeing a pastoral pattern in Lady Chatterley's Lover; and Harry T. Moore, although he does not develop the idea, suggests that the novel is a romance.2 David Cavitch comes closer to seeing the relationship of the novel to pastoral when he calls Lady Chatterley's Lover a pastoral romance and writes that Connie and Mellors live in the formal scheme of a pastoral idyll.' But