If there is one word to describe Lady Chetterley's Lover with, it's dislike. The characters dislike each other, themselves, their worlds. Their contempt fills the pages, to be alleviated with moments of fellow feeling and exultation very sporadically.
As a reader, I was sort of swept up in this sea of dislike, and I have to admit I did not care for any of these characters. I think Lawrence's writing is not for me. He has left behind the external way of describing the thoughts and feelings of characters that was common in the nineteenth century, but hasn't really gotten the hang of the true internal stream-of-consciousness either. His style relies on repetition and varieties of speech, but none of his voices seemed honest.
I thoroughly appreciate anyone for tackling a under-represented theme in fiction: the foundations of female sexuality. I just wish he had done it better. Lady Chatterley's Lover is drenched in prejudice and a very narrow view of what a "healthy" sexuality is. Spoiler alert: if you read closely, this means that women are supposed to lie there and enjoy sex passively. In one of the most telling passages, Connie's lover discusses the abomination of lesbianism.
'Then there's the sort that puts you out before you really "come", and go on writing their loins till they bring themselves off against your thighs. But they're mostly the Lesbian sort. It's astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian.'
'And do you mind?' asked Connie.
'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.' (p. 283)
A little bit later he goes on: 'I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really "come" naturally with a man: except black women, and somehow, well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.' (p. 283-4)
EXCUSE ME?!
I have no words for anyone who compares black women to mud - and for writing into the stereotype that blackness equates an animalistic sexuality. And killing lesbians?!?!
Moving on before I descend into words my mom taught me not to use.
Lawrence's point is closely connected to modernity. It is the industrial society that's killing sex. Men's bodies waste away in the mines and factories, and women lose their softness as they are forced to work and assume "masculine" roles. I am sympathetic to a critique of an industrialized society, but I don't like how for Lawrence, the only possible balance exists between active manly men and passive feminine women.
Although a study of human sexuality, Lady Chatterley's Lover doesn't bring us any closer to understanding it. Only recommended for those who love long monologues on the industrialization in the Midlands, and people who think healthy sexuality is a monolith and only comprises heterosexual penetrative sex (including magic simultaneous orgasms).