Watching a screener for “Lady Chatterley,” the French film inspired by
D.H. Lawrence’s novel that played recently in New York, was like a trip
down memory lane. Banned until 1959 in the United States, I read it as
soon as it came out. As a 15 year old overwhelmed by raging hormones,
the novel was a great introduction to the mysteries of sex along with
Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” which had been banned until 1961, and
a marital hygiene book that I discovered buried in my parent’s closet.
Although I was barely aware of class distinctions when I read “Lady
Chatterley’s Lovers,” the clash between Lady Chatterley and Mellors, the
gamekeeper, who both resented and loved his employer’s wife, was obvious
to me. Lord Chatterley was a prototypical British bourgeois figure, who
owned a vast estate of the sort associated with the eighteenth century
as well as an inherited coal mine.
Since wounds suffered by Lord Chatterley during WWI had cost him the use
of his lower body, his wife felt sexually frustrated. When she first
spied Mellors bathing his bare upper body on the front yard of his
house, she felt an immediate attraction. For Lawrence, Lord Chatterley’s
paralysis was a symbol of the decline of the British Empire. Although he
was not a political thinker, and by some accounts even a right-winger,
Lawrence had little use for privilege. As the son of an illiterate
coal-miner, he had a deep identification with the character Mellors.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/07/08/lady-chatterley/
