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.

Pride and Prejudice

Alas, the poor blog languisheth.  I finished Pride and Prejudice five days ago, and am well into the next one on my list, but I haven't had a chance to compose an entry until now.  I know you're all dying to know my opinion.

Although I have seen several film versions of this Jane Austen classic, at last I have taken the opportunity to read the book itself.  The film versions do justice to the plot and dialogue, but there is much in the structure of the novel that can't adequately be captured on film.  The first part of the book takes place mainly as a series of performances in the public sphere, but Darcy's letter to Elizabeth is a clear divide, after which the plot and character development take place mainly through letters and internal musing.  This contrast between writing styles parallels the plot development, which begins with the characters' first impressions of each other and interactions with each other, and then moves to a more thoughtful section in which the characters must reassess, and sometimes completely deconstruct, their initial opinions of each other.

There are libraries full of scholarly analyses of Austen's work, and of this novel in particular, which I cannot summarize.  I can merely touch on the book's  relationship to its context and historical setting.  The work itself is set during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which are only implied in this novel in the movements of troops and garrisons from one English town to another.  War and political issues are never mentioned.  Pride and Prejudice was also written after Mary Wollstonecraft had become well-known as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and Austen's main character Elizabeth, while not feminist in the current sense, certainly has views about the education and role of women, views which conflict with those of her society. (Darcy agrees with Elizabeth on many points.)  The novel is set among the landed gentry of 19th century England, and addresses issues of class, inheritance, perception and identity.  All this, woven into a most delicious love story.

Stats:
Best catch: Mr. Darcy
Guy you want to slap: Mr. Collins
Biggest airhead: Lydia...no, Mrs. Bennet...no, Lydia...no, Mrs. Bennet...no...
There was a lot of: dancing, walking, conversing, analyzing others' behavior
This book makes you want to: write letters, walk in the countryside, play the piano on a quiet evening
This book makes you glad you don't have to: fawn over those in higher social classes, become "accomplished" in frivolous amusements (women), walk three miles to your neighbor's house