Sex, Death, and Shit—the Great Taboos

They evoke, depending on the person, context, or culture, intense emotions such as fascination, fear, vulnerability, shame, desire, disgust, mystery, and a reminder that we are subject to forces that we do not really control. It is perhaps for this reason that in D.H. Lawrence’s novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, those three things seem to be weaved together in the lives of the main characters, especially Connie, the upper-class woman who has an affair with Mellors, the lower class servant of Sir Clifford, Connie’s husband who embodies everything that socialists despise: a greedy industrial capitalist with little empathy for his workers and who profits from their labours while living in comfort and luxury. Another major theme of the novel is the intersection between sex, class relations, and the geopolitical context of the time when the novel was written: just after World War 1, which had left deep scars on all of Europe and which, among other things, led to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the existential clash between the West and the East. This ideological clash, as we will see, impacted even the most intimate relations of people who were present at the time.

The novel begins with the Great War. Shortly after the marriage between Connie and Sir Clifford, the latter, like most young British men, went to the front to fight and was seriously wounded, coming back to his young wife permanently paralyzed from the waist down and unable to perform the conjugal functions of a husband. Initially, it seems as if he and Connie could preserve the matrimonial bond through their mental connection: Clifford demonstrates the bourgeoisie appreciation for art and the life of the mind, which Connie finds attractive. But their lack of physical intimacy leaves her deeply dissatisfied, leading to a kind of emotional crisis which leads to a brief affair with the insecure and peripatetic artist Michealis. Although she is fascinated by his “unscrupulousness” and youthful beauty, his sexual egoism ultimately leaves her dejected. She then meets Mellors, the gatekeeper and servant of Sir Clifford. She perceives in him “a vividness not far from death itself”.  Her consciousness of death, and her attendant emotional crisis is also captured when, during a walk in the woods, she sees the cemetery by the Church, “with hideous tombstones that seem like teeth”, and comes to the realization that she will soon be buried there.

Shortly after, the romance between her and Mellors begins, but it does not follow the traditional script of courtship, flirtation, and consummation. Rather, it has an animal like-quality to it: after a chance meeting in the woods, Mellors is overcome with the male procreative urge, while Connie is seemingly helpless to her impulses as well. It is as if their union has the force of nature, almost completely independent of each other’s will. Although, at least initially, the dalliance follows the traditional pattern of Mellors as the dominant male and Connie as the submissive female, both are subject to forces that neither can control. As we will see, this kind of romance is a metaphorical kind of resistance to the bourgeoisie order that both parties are contemptuous of: instrumentally rational, rule based, suppressive of the natural and instinctual, and organized around the seeming impermeability between the classes.

The novel depicts their love-making in explicit detail and with a poetic force that must have jarred the sensibilities of readers in early 20^th century Britain, when the book was published. Their union is compared to the creative force “at the beginning of time” and Connie’s orgasms are described as “rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite, and melting all of her molten inside”. That is quite the literary achievement: capturing and conveying the seemingly ineffable subjective sensations of orgasm with the English language is no easy feat, and D.H. Lawrence has done it. Another curious feature of the lovemaking between the two is its association with human excrement. Before making love, the novel repeatedly refers to how they could feel the sexual attraction for each other “in their bowels”. Mellors displays a curious fascination with Connie’s anus, at one point touching it and saying “if that shits and the other pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want no woman that couldn’t shit or piss”. Later in the novel, he asks Connie why she likes him, and she replies “your courage and tenderness to put your hand in my tail” (one of D.H. Lawrence’s curious euphemisms for anus). This, I think, provides a clue to their love: there is a primordial tenderness that does not shy away from the deepest (pardon the pun) and most vulnerable parts of the naked body. It is no coincidence that this kind of sex clashed with the upper-class bourgeois and industrial post-war order that both parties detested, where the union between men and women was more about producing offspring to bequeath inherited wealth rather than satisfying the animal lust that humans are often subject to.

Sex and Geopolitics

As a political scientist my knowledge of the Great War tends to be restricted to the realm of geopolitics. As any first year student knows, the conflict led to a new world order: the rise of the US as the world’s dominant power, its mission to spread democracy and a world governed by law rather than force, the creation of the League of Nations (the precursor to the UN) and other global governance institutions, the complete redrawing of borders in Europe, Asia, and especially the Middle East (and for the last of those regions we are still living with the aftermath). One of the beneficial aspects of reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover is learning about the intersections between World War 1 and the intimate relations between the sexes. The immense slaughter and industrial-scale violence impacted families all across Europe, and this was also the case for the characters discussed here. After being wounded in battle Sir Clifford becomes paralyzed from the waist down, and hence his marital union with Connie cannot be completed. With all his British stoicism Clifford seems to be resigned to his fate and is content to pursue the life of the mind, but not Connie. She is young (28), brimming with the desire to fully explore and pursue her womanhood, and to eventually reproduce. Clifford understands this, and even encourages her to have an affair while in Italy and become pregnant so that they could raise a child as if it was his. This would also ensure offspring for Clifford to whom he could bequeath his accumulated property.

It does not turn out that way, of course. Connie feels free to pursue affairs with other men, but ends up with one of Clifford’s servants. The political content is inescapable: Connie’s union with a man below her in status, wealth, prestige, and class is a direct affront to Clifford’s bourgeois world which was characterized (and still is, I would argue) with the near impermeability between the classes. Different cultures, habits, tastes, rhythms of life, language, and networks usually ensure that mating is usually intra- rather than inter- class, and this continues to be true today. It is a major channel that directly transmits the economic inequality of the system to future generations and ensures the perpetuation of the existing order. Connie’s passion for Mellors is a direct assault on this pattern, which is one of the things that makes it so intriguing.

During their discussions and pillow talk, Mellors reveals himself as sympathetic to the ideals of the Bolsheviks, whose revolution in Russia in 1917 was made possible by convulsions of World War 1. He rails against the institutionalized greed of the capitalist system, and how it subjects the classes to a dehumanizing and degrading existence, and how it prioritizes industry, rationalization, and rules over instinct, the intuitive faculty, and the body’s natural functions. In an echo of the later complaints of environmentalists, he also condemns the ugliness of the factories and the towns organized around them, and how they despoil the beauty of nature. Connie agrees with him, but unlike Mellors she is a direct beneficiary of the system: her upper-class upbringing and education, her life of comfort and luxury with Clifford, were made possible by the wealth that her class accumulated. These philosophical disagreements come to the fore in one dramatic scene when she argues with Clifford, condemning him and the order that he embodies. Her sympathy for the ideals of the Bolsheviks represents a direct and irreconcilable clash with Clifford. He replies that inequality has always existed, regardless of the economic or political system in place (he is right about that), and that societies will always divide themselves into classes because that is the nature of things. She senses he is right, and although her love affair with Mellors is a direct refutation of his observation, she is perhaps dimly aware that it is radically unique and rare. More common is the attitude of her sister, Hilda, who has sympathy for the plight of the working classes but would not genuinely inter-mix (in every sense of the term) with them, because of the radical differences in outlook, communication, taste, and all the other building blocks of human bonding and intercourse.

The association of death, sex, and shit throughout the text has an ominous undertone at times, and one could not help but think that the love triangle between Clifford, Connie, and Mellors would end in tragedy, perhaps with Clifford murdering Mellors or vice versa. Happily, it does not turn out that way. Connie becomes pregnant with Mellors’s child, and has to make the grindingly difficult decision on whether to stay with Clifford and raise the child as the latter’s son (and give him an heir) or follow her instincts and leave Clifford so that she could be with Mellors. In light of the general thrust (wink) of the text, it is unsurprising that she chooses the latter option. The book ends there, leaving the reader wondering whether the love between her and Mellors endures the trials and tribulations of Connie choosing to live with a much lower standard of living than she was used to, and raising a child under these new conditions. In the real world, one could imagine that this would eventually cause a lot of strife between them, especially after the intensity of their passionate love died down, as it often does. Or perhaps they would have remained together, monogamous and faithful, raising children and diligently working hard to ensure that all their material needs were met. This would have been ironic, since their love affair, which began as a form of resistance to the system, would have ended in classic bourgeois style.