The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [340]
The role of Clifford Chatterley in the story is to stand as a kind of cardboard amalgam of everything about the modern world and contemporary England that Lawrence wishes to attack, as oppressive, effete and opposed to life. Living in his ancestral home, Wragby Hall, near the coal-mining village with its squalid, brutalised inhabitants which provides his wealth, Sir Clifford represents the privilege and arrogance of the upper classes. He is a capitalist living off the degrading work of others. Paralysed by the wartime injury which confines him to a wheelchair, he is cut off from the physical world. And in his self-centred, unreal way, he lives almost entirely through his mind, writing precious, pseudo-intellectual novels. Trapped in a bloodless marriage to this monster, his young wife Connie, now in her late twenties, feels her youth and spirit fading away, with nothing left to live for. Then Lawrence brings her together with Mellors, the gamekeeper, who stands for everything Sir Clifford is not. He comes from a working-class background, although, as evidence of his manly qualities, he had during the war been made an officer. Bruised by a disastrous marriage, he is a solitary, independent figure, who likes to live apart from society in the natural world of the woods. Above all, he is supremely physical, which is why, before long, he and Connie are falling into each other's arms, to make the mad passionate love which is what the novel is really all about.
What Lawrence wants to show is how the physical act of sex between a man and a woman is the highest, deepest, most life-enhancing experience humanity can know. As he describes the couplings of Constance and Mellors in ever more graphic detail, he wishes to emphasise that this level of sexual intimacy is something which only a minority of people can ever hope to achieve. On p. 140 (Penguin edition), they for the first time enjoy mutual orgasm:
`She turned and looked at him. "We came off together that time"; he said.
She did not answer.
"It's good when it's like that. Most folks live their lives through and they never know it", he said, speaking rather dreamily ...
"Don't people often come off together?" she asked with naive curiosity.
"A good many of them never. You can see by the raw look of them."
By p. 180, she is enjoying an orgasm far greater than anything she could have imagined possible:
`She quivered again at the potent inexorable entry inside her, so strange and terrible ... she dared let go everything, and be gone in the flood. And it seemed it was like the sea, nothing but dark waves raising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, the heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation