Lady Chatterley's Lover

Digesting the three ponderous and difficult volumes of Fifty Shades induced me to backtrack to what I perceived to be the original erotica, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (hereinafter, LCL), written in 1928 by D.H. Lawrence.   The book had to be censored, then republished much later in an uncensored version which survived a fairly high profile obscenity trial in the UK in 1960. 

After having finished the book, I watched the 1981 movie version with Sylvia “Emmanuelle” Kristel as the lead role (no one else particularly famous therein); she’s not nearly as skinny as she was in those films and has a much more normal, attractive figure.  Although it made quite a few changes, the basic plot and ending remained essentially the same.  Note: there is also a much more recent 2006 French version as well.

Story.   Lord Clifford Chatterley returns from WWI a broken man, unable to give his Lady the intimacy she deserves.  He seeks solace in the care of an older, matronly woman, Mrs. Bolton (a caretaker, as the relationship is necessarily platonic), while the Lady finds a tramp – the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, somewhat of a rogue.  Despite their class differences, the pair fall in love with each other.  Clifford’s position is somewhat difficult: he knows he can’t satisfy her, and has no heir, but assumed that if she did take a lover, at least he would be an aristocrat like himself and not a bourgeois like Mellors; he actually did earn a commission in the British Army in India, though I suppose bourgeois vs. proletariat is not all that pertinent so long as he’s not upper class.  To some extent Clifford wants her to have an affair and a child so Wragby (his estate) will have an heir, but he can’t reconcile himself to allowing Mellors to be either the lover or the father, partly due to objections about his class but also because he personally dislikes Mellors himself.  As noted above, the 1981 movie changes many of the details but remains true to the story.

Unlike Fifty Shades, which is pretty much a porn book – the plot is as laughably thin as the “screw the pizza delivery guy/pool repairman” ones of most porn movies, notwithstanding considerable pretention to the contrary in the books – LCL is a novel which has a fair amount of sex.  In fact, what I found remarkable about it is how un-bored I was by the substantial discussion of other issues which Lawrence touches upon and addresses at length.  The social, political, and economic issues of England post World War I – some references to anarchism and bolshevism, the nature of the male-female relationship, the various characters’ subjective motivations and concerns, and Mrs. Bolton is fleshed out into a more substantial character in her own right.  In fact, all the characters are more substantial than simply filling convenient roles in what might otherwise be a simple naughty story.  The novel says more than just “Lady Chatterley found a lover.” 

For anyone seeking simple naughtiness, the movie would suffice.   For anyone seeking true literature (albeit with some naughtiness), particularly the “Lady & The Tramp” type of story, the novel is probably worth the effort.