David Herbert Lawrence (1885 -- 1930) is a world-renowned British novelist and poet. During his short life, he covered more than ten novels, three plays, several hundred poems, and a great number of reviews, novellas, and prosaic travels, which exerted a tremendous influence on the Western modern literature. In the early 20th century, after Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920), the three novels that reflected Lawrence’s unique style, were published, the young man’s incredible perceptiveness towards human inner world rocked the British criticism circles. Their praise and astonishment laid a foundation for his future standing and reputation as a novelist. However, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the last work in Lawrence’s life, came out, both the novel and the author were vigorously offended. The novel was regarded as a salacious story, and even Lawrence himself was fiercely criticized. It was not until 1959 and 1960 that the whole book was formally published in Britain and America respectively, since it had been grouped into banned books for quite a long time. But history is justified. As several decades went by, Lawrence as well as his work got more and more understanding, and he was exalted as one of the most creative and outstanding novelists in those days.
As a matter of fact, Lawrence was a really serious writer. Though a bedridden invalid, he remained devoted and rewrote three times his creation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. So long as people read it without any ill understanding, Lawrence would never be regarded as just showing sexual matter in a vulgar and bawdy way.
In Lawrence’s opinion, people were supposed to establish a kind of sound and complete relationship on the basis of the normal human nature so as to rescue the civilization from declination; marriage and family were the very ties used to shape such relationship. The blue-bloods of the capitalist class would easily reveal their excessive self-centeredness and sham philosophy of life because of their Mammon-worship and sense of superiority from their noble birth and social status, which brought about a sort of abnormal psychological state towards human sexual relations whose nature was the split between flesh and spirit.
In the novel, Sir Clifford Chatterley, Connie’s (Lady Chatterley) husband is poured with a symbolized meaning. Shortly after his marriage with Connie in 1917, he had himself wounded in the war so that he had to be kept in the wheelchair permanently for the rest of his life. Actually he was wounded both physically and psychologically. As a coal owner, he viewed miners as articles rather than human beings; as a husband, he viewed Connie as his possession rather than his wife. He ignored human nature and underestimated normal and independent personality, believing that sexual relation was just the vulgar demand in human life, or even a mere appendage, and that it was the status and money that really existed. Lady Chatterley could no longer bear what his husband did and thought, longing for a sound and harmonious sexual relationship and family life, therefore, she chose to betray her nominal husband. After a brief affair with Michaelis, a slim playwright who left her unsatisfied, she enjoyed an extremely passionate relationship with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their estate. At last, conflicting in heart for quite a long time, Connie was at length determined to carve her way to a brand-new life with Mellors.
Lawrence held the viewpoint that the relationship between Connie and Mellors embodied the trust, sincerity, and mutual supporting peculiar to humans. They got closer due to their mutual understanding, which drove them to fall in love with each other, and finally got united in wedlock, establishing a new pattern of family relationship. They were completely equal; their personalities were mutually respected; they got balance both in spirit and in flesh.
Lawrence was meant to express by his novel that the development of the industrial civilization brought about the vicious expansion of some human desire and the inevitable loss of some natural demand. He also emphasized the essential part the plain and natural living environment played in human sentiment, which meanwhile revealed the limit in his mind: he failed to discover that compared with agricultural civilization and primitive civilization, industrial civilization was after all progressive.
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