Lady Chatterley's Lover

When I first chose this book, I was aware that it had originally been banned due to charges of obscenity, but this didn't bother me because I had already read Madame Bovary, which had the same fate despite its apparent quaintness to modern eyes. Well, times certainly changed between 1856 and 1928. D.H. Lawrence purposefully used certain unprintable words about ten times in this book, with the intention of reclaiming them so they could be used as common, even romantic words. Based on society's past and current opinion of the book, I have to wonder if he made a tactical error. Not only have the words not been reclaimed, but now they are the only thing most people think of when D.H. Lawrence comes to mind. If the reader can follow the plot without giving undue weight to these sections, s/he might be surprised to find that Lawrence has more in common with Hardy and Tolkien than with Ovid.
     The relationship between Connie and Mellors takes place in the East Midlands, against the backdrop of a region which has recently been transformed by the development of the coal mining industry. Critics rightly see in Lawrence's focus on the coal-mining town the important themes of social conflict and the class system. I also saw echoes of Hardy's ache of modernism (see my discussion of Tess) and Tolkien's orcs- beings who are slaves to industry and mechanization, slowly losing their humanity. The coal mine is depicted as an ugly aberration which destroys the beauty of the land and the lives of the people.
     D.H. Lawrence uses the dichotomy of agriculture vs. industry to discuss the theme of mind and body.  Clifford Chatterley, after his paralysis, becomes a writer and an industrialist, living completely in his mind. The coal miners live completely in their deformed bodies, seeming to have very little mind at all. Only Connie and Mellors are able to escape this fragmentation, as their relationship brings them into a life of integrity and wholeness. Lawrence believed that true relationships can reverse the brokenness that life visits upon individuals.
     I am in search of another author who will take this idea a step further back in time and point out that it is only through the brokenness brought by modernity that society (including D.H. Lawrence) has come to view the individual as its smallest unit. Pre-industrial societies did not (and do not) see individuals as their building blocks. Rather, for them, the family is the smallest indivisible unit. I am not talking solely about New Guinean or Andean tribes either: indigenous Europeans viewed life in the same way. The current culture of mechanized, consumerist individualism is not "Western culture". Rather, Western culture was the first to be torn apart by its own juggernaut. Native Americans are right to mourn the loss of their cultures, and to work to preserve and reconstruct them. But they would not be completely correct were they to state that their cultures had been overwhelmed by Euro-American (or Western/Anglo) culture. Rather, both Native Americans and indigenous Europeans have witnessed the erasure of their cultures by industrialism and its functions of individualism and materialism. Western cultures brought industrialism upon themselves, and for them the damage is more complete. Can we even imagine what indigenous European cultures would look like had they survived untouched into the 19th century, as did Native American cultures?  They actually did survive that long in rural areas, and vestiges of early Anglo-Saxon culture are depicted in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, published in 1878 and the subject of my next blog entry.

Stats:
Protagonist: Constance Chatterley
More machine than man: Clifford Chatterley
Working class by birth, noble in deed: Oliver Mellors
Creepy sycophant: Mrs. Bolton
There was a lot of: descriptions of the forest, private conversations, characters' thoughts
There should have been more: I don't know. I wouldn't mind reading Lawrence's thoughts on balance and wholeness, but then it would have been an essay instead of a novel.
This book makes you want to: live an authentic life (don't a lot of good books do that?)
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be a coal miner. or a game keeper. or a paralytic. or one half of a dead marriage.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Published in 1891, Tess is a nineteenth century novel that anticipates the twentieth century.  Thomas Hardy is known for his portrayal of the ache of modernism and his ambivalence toward the Industrial Revolution. Hardy's description of the grain thresher at Flintcomb-Ash as an ominous monstrosity which severs humans from their rightful place in nature foreshadows Steinbeck's discussion of tractors in The Grapes of Wrath. This reminds us that the ache of modernism was not unique to those residents of nineteenth century Britain and America who watched their traditional ways of life being steadily ground down by mechanical progress. The unfortunate Okies of the dustbowl 1930's saw their farms repossessed and consolidated by banks in the name of efficiency, a plague currently sweeping through India as farmers and residents lose property to government seizure for construction of paved highways, despite the fact that only 0.7% of Indians are car owners.
    Some Westerners are now reconsidering whether a highly industrialized lifestyle truly brings the greatest happiness, as can be seen by the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s and its current echo in the 2010s, as well as the huge trend in DIY projects as people learn now to do everything from making cheese to cutting hair, just like Grandma did.  For those interested in more extreme challenges, YouTube features many videos on how to fill your own cavities and do sutures (stitches). I don' t know if Thomas Hardy would have made his own soap, but he did create the idea of Wessex (southwest England) as a separate, cohesive geographical and political identity, and is thus indirectly responsible for the birth of the secessionist Wessex Regionalist Party.  So take heart, aspiriing writers: you too may someday spawn minor political parties which garner 62 votes in a national election...but first please take steps to assure your notoriety by writing something controversial enough to be sold in brown paper bags and burned by a bishop
     But I digress. Back to Tess. Tess herself appears in many ways as a personification of nature; lovely, fertile and easily exploited. Tess is connected with the earth, soil and vegetation; she spends her life on farms and often appears in conjunction with animals (throughout the course of the novel she rides horses, tends chickens, works on a dairy farm and encounters wounded pheasants). She participates in land-based and pagan-influenced events such as harvest and May Day celebrations. Tess is nature, and she is spoiled by the son of a nouveau-riche merchant, which brings Sorrow (the name of their child) into the world.
     Besides presenting anti-industrial themes, Hardy explores the shortcomings of societal mores, particularly the sexual double standard which identifies Tess as a fallen woman despite the fact that she was a victim of force, while her attacker is not judged and suffers no loss of reputation, let alone legal consequences, for his actions. In fact, he eventually becomes a pietistic preacher, securing a place for his soul in heaven, while Tess stoically muses that she will likely suffer an afterlife of condemnation.  Even Angel Clare, who is enough of a freethinker to reject the liturgical trappings of the state church, still spites Tess for her circumstances even though he himself had exhibited far looser moral behavior than she in the past. Unfortunately, Hardy's readers did not agree with his designation of Tess as a pure woman and begin to socially emancipate women. Rather, the 1890s saw more burnings of Hardy's books than of corsets.

Stats:
A pure woman: Tess Durbeyfield
Vaudeville-esque villain: Alec d'Urberville
Free-thinking prude (oxymoron?): Angel Clare
Dour Calvinist preacher:  James Clare
19th century groupies: Izz, Retty and Marion
Setting which is practically a character: Wessex
Unappetizing vegetable: swedes (rutabagas)
There was a lot of: descriptions of nature and its wildness and pagan-ness, moustache-twirling villainry, pietist ethics, unfortunate circumstances for the heroine
There should have been more of: rational thinking by Angel
This book makes you want to: milk a cow, build connections within a small community, visit Stonehenge at sunrise
This book makes you glad you don't have to: live as a woman in the 19th century, walk 30 miles to your new job, dig up frozen rutabagas all winter

p.s. I read this book three weeks ago, and followed it with The Grapes of Wrath and The Bell Jar.  This week is For Whom the Bell Tolls. On deck: Bleak House, East of Eden and The Brothers Karamazov; not necessarily in that order.