Audio Book: Lady Chatterly's Lover: Recent Episodes
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TASTEFUL EROTICA Audio book read by Jan McLaughlin: Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy, and in 1929 in France and Australia.[1] An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books. Penguin won the case, and quickly sold 3 million copies.The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.
After lunch, Constance goes to the cottage of the keeper, where the door is open. He is eating a late lunch. She asks if he is sad, and if he enjoys being a gamekeeper. He responds that he likes being left alone as a keeper, and that he has to work, or he would die. She tells him that she is going away, and asks that he not forget her. He responds that no one forgets. He asks if she wanted to have sex with him so as to get impregnated. She responds that she does not know. He replies that it was not the first time he had been used. She says she didn't want to make use of him -- that she enjoyed his touch. Constance leaves him and feels resentment towards his insinuation that she had used him. But she also wants to make up to him for making him feel used. She goes to a short teatime at Wragby Hall.
In a conversation between Constance and Tommy Dukes, Constance asks Tommy why men and women don't seem to like each other during their times. Tommy claims that he does like women. He also says that liking and talking to a woman means that one cannot love and desire her at the same time, or at least that he does not feel like he can do both at the same time. Constance thinks that there's something wrong in this, and something wrong between men and women in general. Tommy Dukes claims that the sex compulsion is "artificial" and that people ought to just behave decently. Constance knows he is right, but she feels "forlorn", feeling that these men are cold. In contrast to them, she feels her youth. She almost wishes she had gone off with Michaelis, the narrator tells us. One day Constance goes for a walk in the woods. She comes across a child sobbing and a man yelling at the little girl. Constance tenderly addresses the girl and gives her a coin. The child points to a dead cat, and Constance sees that the man, the little girl's father, is a poacher who has shot the cat in front of the girl. Constance takes the girl, who is named Constance Mellors, to her grandmother's house. Constance returns home to Wragby, but thinks to herself that "home" is a word that has lost meaning for her, as are "love" and "happiness" (64). They are words that have been cancelled for her entire generation, she thinks. The only word that has meaning is money, which one needs to keep mechanically going. She feels that she doesn't even really want money, and that it is some sort of mysterious nothingness. She thinks of how Clifford wants to be thought of as "really good" but she thinks that this desire for a good reputation is nonsense. She feels as if the mechanism of consciousness itself is going wrong. She herself decides she wants nothing from now on. She is repulsed by the idea of all men she knows - she cannot think about having a child with any of them. However an idea comes to her. She thinks that she will find a real man. She has an idea he will have to be a foreigner. Constance begins to go for walks every day, alone in the woods. She likes the inwardness and the silence of the woods, and their vital presence. She comes upon the gamekeeper's house one day, and she knocks on his door. When no one answers, she goes around the cottage, where she sees the gamekeeper naked to the hips. Constance backs away -- she feels shocked. She has seen him as a "perfect, white solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone" (66). She ridicules herself though for thinking that a man washing himself is some sort of revelation. She then sits down in confusion. She returns to the house, and she knocks on the cottage door again. He invites her in and she delivers a message from Clifford. She then lingers in his house, asking him whether he lives alone, to which he responds that he does. Later Constance mentions to Clifford that Mellors, the gamekeeper, is a curious person. Clifford responds that Mellors has spent some time in India, but that he has had to fall back into his lower class position being in England. Constance wants Clifford to admit there's something special about Mellors, but he does not. Constance feels like the men of her generation are scared of life.
After lunch, Constance goes to the cottage of the keeper, where the door is open. He is eating a late lunch. She asks if he is sad, and if he enjoys being a gamekeeper. He responds that he likes being left alone as a keeper, and that he has to work, or he would die. She tells him that she is going away, and asks that he not forget her. He responds that no one forgets. He asks if she wanted to have sex with him so as to get impregnated. She responds that she does not know. He replies that it was not the first time he had been used. She says she didn't want to make use of him -- that she enjoyed his touch. Constance leaves him and feels resentment towards his insinuation that she had used him. But she also wants to make up to him for making him feel used. She goes to a short teatime at Wragby Hall.
Constance writes a letter to Clifford, requesting a divorce and claiming to be in love with Duncan. She tells Clifford in this letter that he did not care for her personally. Clifford is not inwardly surprised when he receives this letter, but he is outwardly. Clifford forces Mrs. Bolton to read the letter. Mrs. Bolton also thinks Clifford must have known inwardly, and she has little pity for him. She thinks she just needs to help him release his self-pity. Clifford begins to suffer a kind of male hysteria. He allows himself to be held by Mrs. Bolton. He becomes like a child. However, outwardly he becomes a better businessman because of this ordeal
One Sunday Clifford and Constance go out into the wood together. He jokes that his wheelchair, as his "steed," is like riding on the achievement of mankind's mind. The couple discusses the possibility of a strike by the workers in the coal mines. Clifford says he believes it will not happen, because the people do not want to ruin the industry that feeds their bellies. (He does not think that people can give up their essential necessities in order to demand a better life.) He believes the form of industry itself will be kept alive. According to his view, they will realize that industry comes before the individual, and that the structure of such industry must be kept intact for them to receive work. He goes on to expound on a larger view of class. According to him, one is not born with any natural disposition for a class, but one is only a product of one's environment. However, social life must be divided into a ruling class and an obedient one for it to function. The rulers become responsible for keeping the mechanism of society running. Individuals may make up the aristocratic ruling class, but they function as a whole. Where an individual lands - either in the masses or in the aristocracy, is a mere matter of fate for him.
Lady Chatterley's Lover begins with the marriage of Clifford Chatterley, a young baronet, to Constance Reid. Clifford is the heir to an estate, Wragby, in the English midlands; Constance--or Connie, as she is usually called in this novel--is the cultured, intellectual daughter of a Scottish painter, Sir Malcolm. The marriage takes place during the first World War, a shattering experience for England and all of Europe, and quite literally for Clifford, who is badly injured in combat, paralyzed from the waist down and rendered impotent. By way of background, we learn that Connie was raised in a socially-permissive atmosphere: both she and her sister Hilda had love affairs in their teenage years.
As time goes by, Connie becomes restless, beginning to realize the truth of her father's warning, to see that her life is filled with empty words, and not the vitality of the sensual. Her bouts of restlessness coincide with the visit to Wragby of a young playwright, Michaelis. Despite his success, the Irish Michaelis is treated by the British aristocratic intelligentsia as an outsider; Connie is attracted by his outsider's aloofness, and sympathizes with his mistreatment. She begins an affair with him which, while not fully satisfying sexually--Connie gets sexual satisfaction from him, but only on her own initiative, after he has arrived at orgasm--temporarily rouses her from her doldrums.
At the behest of Mrs. Bolton, Constance goes for walks in the wood. She becomes stronger. She feels she wants to forget people, and forget the world. Constance is as if drifting through the cold currents and the flowers. Amidst these flowers, she drifts over to the cottage of the gamekeeper, where she leans against an "erect" pine-tree. The next day, she goes for another walk, and this time she finds an icy spring. She then hears a faint tapping. She comes upon a secret hut made of poles. She realizes that this is where the gamekeeper rears pheasants. She sees him there, and he salutes her. The gamekeeper speaks to her in a curious dialect, and offers her a seat. He lights a fire for her in the hut. She feels like the hut is a sanctuary. Yet she also thinks she is oppressing the gamekeeper, invading his privacy. She watches him as he works at making a coop. His dog sits near by. This vision of his solitary labor "touches Constance's womb,รข?? making her feel much as she did when she saw him naked. The narrator tells us that "this relieved her of herself" (89) and that she feels irresponsible. Constance asks the keeper for a duplicate key for the hut, even though she is not sure if the hut is his own or if it belongs to the estate. He claims that no one makes keys around there. As Constance walks home, she feels angry at this servant. She reports to Clifford that Mellors has been rather rude to her, and she asks Clifford where there might be a key to the hut. Clifford shares that Mellors was once a blacksmith in Egypt, and also lived in India as a lieutenant. He also lets on that Mellors speaks perfectly well, and that he does not always speak in dialect. Clifford one day decides to go into the wood with Constance. Constance picks some Catkins for him and he responds: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness". Constance feels angry with him for "turning everything into words". There is a tension between them. She feels that she wants to be clear of him, and his obsession with himself. Another day she goes for a walk. She gets caught in the rain and camps out near the hut. Mellors finds her there and gives her a key, offering find another place to rear the pheasants. Constance says she does not want a key, but she simply wants to sit there. Mellors says that he would not want to disturb her, as he would be working near there. She insists that he would not be a nuisance. He then admits that she would be a nuisance to him. She goes home in confusion, not knowing if he expects that she wants him to keep away, or if it is he himself who wants her kept away.
Later, she finds Clifford reading a book by Proust. He says that he enjoys Proust because he has a "well-bred anarchy". Constance retorts that she finds Proust boring, and that he doesn't have real feelings, just a lot of streams of words about feelings. Instead, she says, Proust is full of self-important mentalities. That night, Constance slips out of the house with anger and rebellion in her heart, to be with Mellors.
One February morning, Clifford--in his motorized wheelchair--and Connie go for a walk in the woods on the Chatterley estate. The beauty of the untamed English countryside still survives in the forest, but the sulphurous smell of the coal mines encroaches on the wildness, and ubiquitous are places where the trees have been cut down to provide lumber for the war effort. Clifford speaks of his responsibility to preserve the woods as they were before the war. He is concerned also with preserving the Chatterley line and the aristocracy as guardians of tradition. To this end he urges Connie to have a child with another man, a child who could be brought up as heir to the Chatterley estate. Connie's having sex with another man, Clifford believes, would not be important, a momentary contact incomparable to the long marriage, the intertwining of lives. Connie agrees, although inwardly she foresees a time when she will become uncomfortable bound into a lifelong marriage. Immediately after Clifford and Connie's conversation, Mellors, the gamekeeper, comes into view. Clifford bids him accompany them to help the wheelchair up any hills. Mellors treats Clifford with cold respect, and utterly ignores Connie. He carries himself with a kind of innate nobility and aloof dignity.
Constance and Hilda disagree on the meaning of Constance's relationship with Mellors. Constance claims that she has found real tenderness with Mellors, and she accuses Hilda of being too self-conscious to achieve such a relationship. Hilda, who is in the middle of a divorce, counters that what she sought was a complete intimacy, in which ideas were shared with another person. Constance thinks that Hilda is a slave to her own idea, whereas Hilda thinks that Constance is a slave to someone else's idea. Constance however, is unconvinced by Hilda, and finally feels as if she has attained freedom from the dominion of her sister. The two head to London, where they meet with their father, Sir Malcolm. To Constance, everyone in London seems to be spectral or blank. The family travels to Paris. Constance notes that there is some sensuality in this city, but it is worn out. Everything is devoted to the mechanism and tension of money there. Constance believes that Wragby is more real than all these places she travels to. She wonders what people meant to do with just simply "enjoying" themselves as tourists, as she believes the touristic experience is humiliating.
Clifford begins to listen to the radio. He becomes a hard shell, a practical man, with a soft, flaccid interior. Constance meanwhile notes the terror and insanity of the world. She feels that Clifford is terrified that she will leave him, and notes that he is like a child in his emotional life. She asks him again about having a child, and he says that he would only want one if it would not ruin their relationship with each other. He tells her that without her, he is nothing. She feels a lot of responsibility put on her with this assertion. She feels like he crushes her to death. Often, Constance goes to the wood. One day, the keeper comes up to the hut while she is there, and shows that he has a key made for her. She notes that he seems very protective of his own privacy. She feels that at least he, of all people, is a sane person.
Constance is sorting through some old things of the Chatterley family in the lumber-room with Mrs. Bolton. She mentions to Mrs. Bolton that Clifford might still be capable of giving her a child. Mrs. Bolton is very surprised but excited to hear this. As they are sifting through the lumber-room things, Constance finds a japanned box full of brushes, mirrors, and other small trinkets. She gives it to Mrs. Bolton. Mrs. Bolton begins to spread the rumor around town that there might be a baby Chatterley soon - and that she is sure that it would be Clifford's if so. Clifford hears the rumor and supports it - beginning to believe the baby might even be his. Meanwhile Clifford comes up with a plan to sell electric power from his new fuel invention. Constance hears the rumor from Clifford and is horrified. She nevertheless suggests that she go abroad in July and August, to Venice with her family. (The indication is that she will get a lover there and then get pregnant.) Clifford agrees to let her go for three weeks.
Constance arrives home only to be cross-questioned. Clifford is in a nervous frenzy because she had gone out during the storm. He is upset she did not even come home after the rain stopped. He had wanted to send two men after her, but Mrs. Bolton convinced him to send her instead. Constance returns to Clifford, furious. She tells him that she danced naked in the rain and made a fire in the hut. Clifford is shocked, and is surprised that she was not wary of someone coming along. She tells him that said person would've had the fright of his life. Clifford then begins to discuss the book he is currently reading. He quotes the idea that the universe has two aspects: it is physically wasting away and it is spiritually ascending. Only a ripple will represent the physical world in the future. Constance thinks the idea is silly, and she thinks that the man who wrote the book must have been a physical failure, and wanted to dub the whole universe a failure. She personally declares that she would like to have her body, to remain there physically, as the greater reality. Clifford retorts that woman does not take part in the life of the mind. He believes that God is eliminating the functions of the body, slowly evolving out things like the alimentary system. Constance says that that is contrary to the feeling she has in her guts.
Constance returns to her bedroom and looks at herself naked, examining her body. She notices that she is getting thinner. She thinks of how her body is "going meaningless, getting old, and she thinks that it is the mental life which has swindled her. She is now 27, and she thinks of how she once was so scornful of sensuality. She goes to sleep and feels bitterness towards Clifford, thinking of him as someone who has "defrauded a woman even out of her own body". She feels a sense of injustice. She bounces back and forth between blaming Clifford and not blaming him, and rather blaming the "general catastrophe". She wonders what is the good of her life and her sacrifice to Clifford. She feels that she is merely serving his vanity, and that Clifford was really a buffoon. Clifford's aunt, Lady Bennerley, comes to visit. She praises Constance for aiding Clifford in attaining success. She encourages Constance to live her life. "A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it!" she tells her. She encourages Constance to go to London to live in the world, but Constance does not really like this idea. Another set of visitors is at Wragby: along with Tommy Dukes, there is now Harry Winterslow, Jack Strangeways, and his wife Olive Strangeways. Olive is reading a book about how babies in the future will be fed by bottle and immunized, and she is glad that women will be released from their bodily function. Lady Bennerley professes that civilization is good because it helps one forget one's body. Dukes believes that man can never be released from his body, and that civilization is in a state of collapse. Lady Bennerley agrees that civilization will collapse, but has no idea what will come after it. Tommy believes that might be real men in the next phase, ones who do not just cerebrate. Constance likes some of Tommy ideas, such as the idea that there might be a "democracy of touch" after the fall of civilization, but she also thinks of it as just talk. She feels bored and the days begin to grind away. She writes to Hilda to come visit her, as she is getting thinner and losing some of her vitality. When Hilda visits her, she immediately notices something is wrong with Constance. She looks ill. Constance claims that she is just bored. Hilda tells Clifford that she will take Constance into London to see a doctor, which annoys Clifford. Hilda tells Clifford to get a manservant to look after him. Clifford hates this idea. The doctor simply tells Constance that she needs to be amused, must renew her life. Michaelis visits them while they are in London and he also notes that Constance looks ill. He tells her to come away with him, but Constance feels she cannot abandon Clifford. Clifford agrees to get a servant, a woman named Mrs. Bolton. Her husband had died when he was 28, and Mrs. Bolton is now 47. He had been killed in a coal pit in an accident. Mrs. Bolton received compensation but she was only allowed to collect it in small sums once a week. Nevertheless, determined to be independent and provide for her two children, she has become a nurse. When Mrs. Bolton speaks she shows that she likes the colliers (those who work in the mines) but she also acts as if she is superior to them in class. Mrs. Bolton has a very particular way of speaking and likes to ramble, and she rouses a "new ear" in Constance. However when Mrs. Bolton waits on Clifford, she is very timid. He likes this, because he thinks of her as a "useful nonentity" (82). She accepts her class position vis-a-vis Clifford. Clifford, although accommodating himself to Mrs. Bolton, feels he will not forgive Constance for giving up on her personal care of him. He thought it killed their intimacy, but Constance does not mind this. She feels as if she is untangling the threads of her consciousness from his. A new phase in her life is beginning.
Upon returning from Mellors' cottage, Constance receives a letter from her sister Hilda at breakfast. Clifford hates that Constance is leaving because he does not feel safe about her trip. Meanwhile he tells Constance about his new project to sell his new fuel source. Constance thinks about the fact that to keep industry alive, there must be more industry created. She thinks of this as the insanity of the world. At night, Clifford has been playing pontoon with Mrs. Bolton. This card game makes him intoxicated, giving him an intoxication of blankness.
Constance feels as if she had always hated Clifford, and she realizes he has been eating her life away. She realizes that society is insane, Michaelis is insane, and Clifford is insane, and that "money and so-called love are its [society's] two great manias" . She notes that Clifford is shifting his grip to Mrs. Bolton, who was subservient to him. Mrs. Bolton had initially thought that there was something different about Clifford, as he was supposed to be a real gentleman. But gradually she discovered that he was a "baby grown to man's proportions". Mrs. Bolton also used to learn a typewriter so that Clifford could dictate to her his writing. Constance thinks that Mrs. Bolton is in some way in love with Clifford. She would often tell him about the Tevershall village gossip. Clifford finds it very useful for his writing, as material. Constance realizes that his "genius" was just about being talented at gossip. Constance herself listens curiously sometimes to Mrs. Bolton, while also feeling ashamed. We are given a snippet of the kind of gossip Mrs. Bolton tells to Clifford. She talks about a woman named Tattie Allsop who had married a man 12 years older just a week earlier. She then begins to talk about how women in the pits are jealous of other women for their clothing -- it is money, as opposed education, that matters to these women now. Morality too is unimportant to people. Similarly she finds that young men in their society are selfish, and that many burdens fall upon the older generations. Clifford questions her about the popularity of socialism amongst the working classes, and she responds that the only ones interested in such ideas are women who are in debt. She declares that the people haven't the brains or the seriousness to be socialists. Constance thinks to herself how similar the lower classes are to all the rest, consisting of just "money boys" and "money girls". Mrs. Bolton talks more about how the Tevershall pits will soon be depleted, and how many workers are moving to Stacks Gate and Whiteover. However she notes also that one day, machines may replace men. She observes that the more machines there are, the more people are needed to work them. She compares a dead colliery to death itself. Clifford is re-vitalized by Mrs. Bolton's talk. He begins to think about how he has previously catered to those seeking pleasure in his work. However, he realizes that there is a whole another way to achieve success. He sees that one can try to get the approval of those who work. His new "bitch-goddess" of Success is those men who made money by industry, who gave real substance to the world. He wants now to attain success through industrial production. He begins to read up on mines, and devises a new method for obtaining fuel from coal. He notes that the men in this industry have the mental age of 13. Nevertheless when he goes to the mines he feels a sense of power. He is fulfilled by this industry, whereas his writing/art had not fulfilled him. He retains though a secret fear of Constance, because he knows he owes everything to her.
Constance finds herself faced with a decision: would she stay with Clifford or would she leave him? She stops by London on her journey home from Venice. She travels with her father, and tells her that she is unsure if she will return to Wragby. She tells him about her pregnancy. The father suggests that she allow the child to remain the heir to Wragby, so long as Clifford did not mind that it would not be his own child. Her father is also glad to hear that she has had a real man. Constance goes to her hotel, Hartland's, where a letter from Mellors is awaiting her. Mellors then arrives that evening in formal attire, as if he is a member of her own class. Something flows from him physically for Constance, and this allows her to feel at ease. She tells him about her child. He tells her he has mistrust of the future. She tells him that he need not be responsible; that she could make the child a baronet. This makes Mellors pay, and tells him he would take it if he is the real father.
Connie's attachment to Clifford survives her affair with Michaelis, although she realizes more clearly than ever that Clifford does not satisfy her. His success as a writer, however, brings many young intellectuals to Wragby. Among them are Tommy Dukes, Charles May, and Hammond, whose chief pastime is the discussion of love and the relationships between men and women. The men seem sexually progressive, espousing the idea of sex as a natural extension of conversation. The intellectual life seems to flow seamlessly into the sensual life. And yet there is something missing in these young intellectuals; their theory seems strangely divorced from practice. Tommy Dukes, the cleverest of them, believes in the importance of the intelligence coexisting with warmth of heart, sexual activity, and the courage to speak profanely. But he admits that he himself is incapable of this warmth and this open approach to sex and profanity.
At the war's end, Clifford and Connie live at Wragby, near the grim, soulless coal-mining village of Tevershall. The handicapped Clifford has become totally dependent on Connie, and Connie tends to him diligently and sympathetically. But she notices that he seems curiously detached from his surroundings, disconnected from other people; he is unable to relate to the workers in the coal mines that he owns, seeing them more as objects than as men. Clifford becomes a successful author, absorbed in writing short stories, and Wragby becomes a sort of salon for young intellectuals. Connie is, at least for a while, entranced by this intellectual life, her world structured by literature and ideas. But her father, Sir Malcolm, intimates that there is a danger in living an intellectual life devoid of sensuality, in living as Connie does with Clifford.