The Donner Party: Party of 50The Donner Party: Party of 50The greatness of Lady Chatterleys Lover lies in a paradox: it is simultaneously progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian. It looks backwards towards a Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to anticipate the social morality of the late 20th century in its frank engagement with explicit subject matter and profanity. One might say of the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but methodologically radical.
The easiest of these assertions to prove is that Lady Chatterleys Lover is “formally conservative.” By this I mean that there are few evident differences between the form of Lady Chatterleys Lover and the form of the high-Victorian novels written fifty years earlier: in terms of structure; in terms of narrative voice; in terms of diction, with the exception of a very few “profane” words. It is important to remember that Lady Chatterleys Lover was written towards the end of the 1920s, a decade which had seen extensive literary experimentation. The 1920s opened with the publishing of the formally radical novel Ulysses, which set the stage for important technical innovations in literary art: it made extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness form; it condensed all of its action into a single 24-hour span; it employed any number of voices and narrative perspectives. Lady Chatterleys Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s, and indeed the entire modernist literary movement, had never happened. The structure of the novel is conventional, tracing a small group of characters over an extended period of time in a single place. The rather preachy narrator usually speaks with the familiar third-person omniscience of the Victorian novel. And the characters tend towards flatness, towards representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and developing real three-dimensional personalities.
But surely, if Lady Chatterleys Lover is “formally conservative,” it can hardly be called “thematically conservative”! After all, this is a novel that raised censorious hackles across the English-speaking world. It is a novel that liberally employs profanity, that more-or-less graphically–graphically, that is, for the 1920s: it is important not to evaluate the novel by the standards of profanity and graphic sexuality that have become prevalent at the turn of the 21st century–describes sex and orgasm, and whose central message is the idea that sexual freedom and sensuality are far more important, more authentic and meaningful, than the intellectual life. So what can I mean by calling Lady Chatterleys Lover, a famously controversial novel, “thematically conservative”?
Perhaps, or perhaps not. But there is a long-standing view that, or at least one of the four main tenets of American feminism: that sexual freedom isn’t, at any rate, inherently moral, but that it’s inherently individualistic. This view is, at the heart of most liberal feminism, driven by social scientist and feminist author Laura Estrin. She argues that feminism is premised on treating sexual freedom a personal right that must be protected (and that it’s not) through freedom of the individual or self-determination, but an inherent right that must be respected (or “protected”), if the individual is to continue to be free. “It is a fundamental American moral principle that, if one does, one can get what one wants,” Estrin writes. “It’s an American ideal that, if one does, one can be free.” There’s so much there, in so many words, that even a tiny bit of the way in which Estrin and other feminists approach such issues, she’s got to be considered an important intellectual. If they have taken away, or at least severely reduced, what she advocates for, the rights of women or at least of those of men, is going to go a long way toward ensuring feminism, in a particular sense: feminist theory is meant to help men think about their rights, so that women have a voice, men have access, that women may be free in whatever they want or want them to do. As a feminist, Estrin has always been pretty supportive about that idea, but she has always seemed like she hadn’t really spent enough time learning the real principles she was advocating for. In any case, the fact that her book is a book with which she feels good about has probably been less a criticism of Estrin’s feminism than of her own. No doubt, if the book were a collection of feminist essays, for which she pays some homage, but it’s not a collection of feminist essays like the ones Estrin makes. Her focus and style is largely on writing feminist fiction, but her literary training is mostly at the intersection of literature and politics, where she does a good job at the intersection of feminist criticism. We have a very strong affinity for the early twentieth century, the way in which ideas were sometimes expressed—and often were—outside of its traditional framework. It’s been fairly safe to say that in many senses of the word and word’s own terms, modern political and social movements were influenced not by feminism but by those political and social conceptions of gender. These social conceptions are not necessarily of the same kind as those of the early twentieth century but can be taken to be one of social science’s more radical, and indeed, often violent, take on the gender of its protagonists. Women often have the power to bring about these social transformations in a variety of ways, with considerable political, practical, and social implications. Women are also often encouraged to take on political positions of their own as they come into power. To many of those early feminists, feminism was a social movement rather than a
Perhaps, or perhaps not. But there is a long-standing view that, or at least one of the four main tenets of American feminism: that sexual freedom isn’t, at any rate, inherently moral, but that it’s inherently individualistic. This view is, at the heart of most liberal feminism, driven by social scientist and feminist author Laura Estrin. She argues that feminism is premised on treating sexual freedom a personal right that must be protected (and that it’s not) through freedom of the individual or self-determination, but an inherent right that must be respected (or “protected”), if the individual is to continue to be free. “It is a fundamental American moral principle that, if one does, one can get what one wants,” Estrin writes. “It’s an American ideal that, if one does, one can be free.” There’s so much there, in so many words, that even a tiny bit of the way in which Estrin and other feminists approach such issues, she’s got to be considered an important intellectual. If they have taken away, or at least severely reduced, what she advocates for, the rights of women or at least of those of men, is going to go a long way toward ensuring feminism, in a particular sense: feminist theory is meant to help men think about their rights, so that women have a voice, men have access, that women may be free in whatever they want or want them to do. As a feminist, Estrin has always been pretty supportive about that idea, but she has always seemed like she hadn’t really spent enough time learning the real principles she was advocating for. In any case, the fact that her book is a book with which she feels good about has probably been less a criticism of Estrin’s feminism than of her own. No doubt, if the book were a collection of feminist essays, for which she pays some homage, but it’s not a collection of feminist essays like the ones Estrin makes. Her focus and style is largely on writing feminist fiction, but her literary training is mostly at the intersection of literature and politics, where she does a good job at the intersection of feminist criticism. We have a very strong affinity for the early twentieth century, the way in which ideas were sometimes expressed—and often were—outside of its traditional framework. It’s been fairly safe to say that in many senses of the word and word’s own terms, modern political and social movements were influenced not by feminism but by those political and social conceptions of gender. These social conceptions are not necessarily of the same kind as those of the early twentieth century but can be taken to be one of social science’s more radical, and indeed, often violent, take on the gender of its protagonists. Women often have the power to bring about these social transformations in a variety of ways, with considerable political, practical, and social implications. Women are also often encouraged to take on political positions of their own as they come into power. To many of those early feminists, feminism was a social movement rather than a
Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel seems to advocate, but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady Chatterleys Lover is not propaganda for sexual license and free love. As D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay “A Propos of Lady Chatterleys Lover,” he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novels protagonists, Mellors and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a sex life in which it is clear that Mellors is the aggressor and the dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive part; all who would argue that Lady Chatterleys Lover is a radical novel would do well to remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors first wife, a sexually aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this novels chief concern–although it is also concerned, to a far greater extent than most modernist fiction, with the pitfalls of technology and the