Constance Chatterley, or Connie, is wife to
Clifford Chatterley, baronet of the Wragby House. They were married at a time
when England was at war, and after a month's honeymoon,
Clifford was sent back to Flanders. However, he came back six months later, paralysed from the hips down, thereby rendering him impotent. The couple thus sought permanency in Wragby where Clifford devoted his time to his writing. The venture being successful, Wragby was soon flocked with intellectuals whom Connie saw as all talk and no spirit. Isolated, she had a brief but unfulfilled affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis.
Connie longed for real human contact and as Clifford could not give this, with his constant but senseless pursuit of
success and his obsession with coal-mining, a distance grew between them. Connie yearned to be free from Clifford and Wragby and her continual walks in the wood led her to Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper of Clifford's estate. She was drawn to his aloofness and innate grace, to his isolation and sensuality. The two had sex, which was repeated on several occasions, and Connie felt nothing special about the motion. She was detached, looking in at sex from the outside. It was when they had sex on the forest floor did Connie feel the attachment of the spirit to the act. There was sexuality and sensuality. Soon, Connie was all for leaving Clifford permanently and living with Mellors. But there was the problem of Mellors' previous wife and Clifford's refusal to give Connie a divorce. Is there hope for Connie and Mellors?
My mother brought this book to orient me in what she called 'The Classics'. This was in 1998. I have never opened the book until now. So this abstract is ten years in the making. Is the novel any good? I would have to say yes considering the multi-layered plot and the interesting characters. I do not glorify the illicit affairs depicted in the novel but this is real as real can get. The completeness of a human is in the blending of the body and spirit. And if the person finds that someone who can make her complete, why should it matter what society will think? There is also the controversy on the affairs of a woman from the upper class and a man from the lower ranks. If it be the other way around, would it have been tame, albeit an affair of people from different classes? More importantly, for me anyway, is the theme of greed and its effect on society. Man's quest for success must be coupled with a consciousness for the world and its people. It is not success if one destroys the natural habitat in the process. For me, it's waste.
The novel jolts with a statement that
ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. Yet it ends
with a hopeful heart. We see the lesson here.