Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build
up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard
work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round,
or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many
skies have fallen.
This was more or less Constance Chatterley's position. The war had
brought the roof down over her head. And she had realised that one must
live and learn.
She married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month
on leave. They had a month's honeymoon. Then he went back to Flanders:
to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in
bits. Constance, his wife, was then twenty-three years old, and he was
twenty-nine.
His hold on life was marvellous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to
grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor's hands.
Then he was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the
lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever.
This was in 1920. They returned, Clifford and Constance, to his home,
Wragby Hall, the family "seat." His father had died, Clifford was now
a baronet, Sir Clifford, and Constance was Lady Chatterley. They came
to start housekeeping and married life in the rather forlorn home of
the Chatterleys on a rather inadequate income. Clifford had a sister,
but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder
brother was dead in the war. Crippled for ever, knowing he could never
have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the
Chatterley name alive while he could.
He was not really downcast. He could wheel himself about in a wheeled
chair, and he had a bath-chair with a small motor attachment, so
he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the fine
melancholy park, of which he was really so proud, though he pretended
to be flippant about it.
Having suffered so much, the capacity for suffering had to some extent
left him. He remained strange and bright and cheerful, almost, one
might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his
pale-blue, challenging bright eyes. His shoulders were broad and
strong, his hands were very strong. He was expensively dressed, and
wore handsome neckties from Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw
the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes,
how proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had
been so much hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his
feelings had gone. There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown
hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She
had big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have
come from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the
once well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one
of the cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days.
Between artists and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda
had what might be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing.
They had been taken to Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art,
and they had been taken also in the other direction, to the Hague and
Berlin, to great Socialist conventions, where the speakers spoke in
every civilised tongue, and no one was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere.
They were at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan
provincialism of art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely
among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical,
sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men
themselves: only better, since they were women. And they tramped off to
the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang
the Wandervogel songs, and they were free. Free! That was the great
word. Out in the open world, out in the forests of the morning, with
lusty and splendid-throated young fellows, free to do as they liked,
and--above all--to say what they liked. It was the talk that mattered
supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love was only a minor
accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love affairs by
the time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked
so passionately and sang so lustily and camped under the trees in
such freedom wanted, of course, the love connection. The girls were
doubtful, but then the thing was so much talked about, it was supposed
to be so important. And the men were so humble and craving. Why
couldn't a girl be queenly, and give the gift of herself?
So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom
she had the most subtle and intimate arguments. The arguments, the
discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were
only a sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anticlimax. One
was less in love with the boy afterwards, and a little inclined to
hate him, as if he had trespassed on one's privacy and inner freedom.
For, of course, being a girl, one's whole dignity and meaning in life
consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and
noble freedom. What else did a girl's life mean? To shake off the old
and sordid connections and subjections.
And however one might sentimentalise it, this sex business was one
of the most ancient, sordid connections and subjections. Poets
who glorified it were mostly men. Women had always known there
was something better, something higher. And now they knew it more
definitely than ever. The beautiful pure freedom of a woman was
infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love. The only unfortunate
thing was that men lagged so far behind women in the matter. They
insisted on the sex thing like dogs.
And a woman had to yield. A man was like a child with his appetites.
A woman had to yield him what he wanted, or like a child he would
probably turn nasty and flounce away and spoil what was a very
pleasant connection. But a woman could yield to a man without yielding
her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not
seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a
man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him
without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex
thing to have power over him. For she only had to hold herself back
in sexual intercourse, and let him finish and expend himself without
herself coming to the crisis: and then she could prolong the connection
and achieve her orgasm and her crisis while he was merely her tool.
Both sisters had had their love experience by the time the war came,
and they were hurried home. Neither was ever in love with a young man
unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were
profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing,
the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking
to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for
months ... this they had never realised till it happened! The paradisal
promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to!--had never been uttered. It
was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it.
It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer
vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like
the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be
put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda
was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that
they had had the love experience.
_L'amour avait passé par là_, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mother, a
nervous invalid in the last few months of her life, she only wanted her
girls to be "free," and to "fulfil themselves." She herself had never
been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven
knows why, for she was a woman who had her own income and her own
way. She blamed her husband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old
impression of authority on her own mind or soul that she could not get
rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm, who left his nervously
hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost, while he went his
own way.
So the girls were "free," and went back to Dresden, and their music,
and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young
men, and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of
mental attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and
expressed and wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young
women. Connie's young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they
simply lived for their young women. In their minds and their mental
excitements, that is. Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed,
though they did not know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is,
the physical experience. It is curious what a subtle but unmistakable
transmutation it makes, both in the body of men and women: the woman
more blooming, more subtly rounded, her young angularities softened,
and her expression either anxious or triumphant: the man much quieter,
more inward, the very shapes of his shoulders and his buttocks less
assertive, more hesitant.
In the actual sex-thrill within the body, the sisters nearly succumbed
to the strange male power. But quickly they recovered themselves, took
the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free. Whereas the men, in
gratitude to the women for the sex experience, let their souls go out
to her. And afterwards looked rather as if they had lost a shilling
and found sixpence. Connie's man could be a bit sulky, and Hilda's a
bit jeering. But that is how men are! Ungrateful and never satisfied.
When you don't have them they hate you because you won't; and when you
do have them they hate you again, for some other reason. Or for no
reason at all, except that they are discontented children, and can't be
satisfied whatever they get, let a woman do what she may.
However, came the war, Hilda and Connie were rushed home again after
having been home already in May, to their mother's funeral. Before
Christmas of 1914 both their German young men were dead: whereupon the
sisters wept, and loved the young men passionately, but underneath
forgot them. They didn't exist any more.
Both sisters lived in their father's, really their mother's Kensington
house, and mixed with the young Cambridge group, the group that stood
for "freedom" and flannel trousers, and flannel shirts open at the
neck, and a well-bred sort of emotional anarchy, and a whispering,
murmuring sort of voice, and an ultra-sensitive sort of manner. Hilda,
however, suddenly married a man ten years older than herself, an
elder member of the same Cambridge group, a man with a fair amount
of money, and a comfortable family job in the government: he also
wrote philosophical essays. She lived with him in a smallish house in
Westminster, and moved in that good sort of society of people in the
government who are not tip-toppers, but who are, or would be, the real
intelligent power in the nation: people who know what they're talking
about, or talk as if they did.
Connie did a mild form of war-work, and consorted with the
flannel-trousers Cambridge intransigeants, who gently mocked at
everything, so far. Her "friend" was a Clifford Chatterley, a young man
of twenty-two, who had hurried home from Bonn, where he was studying
the technicalities of coal-mining. He had previously spent two years at
Cambridge. Now he had become a first lieutenant in a smart regiment, so
he could mock at everything more becomingly in uniform.
Clifford Chatterley was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was
well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort,
but still _it_. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a
viscount's daughter.
But Clifford, while he was better bred than Connie, and more "society,"
was in his own way more provincial and more timid. He was at his ease
in the narrow "great world," that is, landed aristocracy society, but
he was shy and nervous of all that other big world which consists of
the vast hordes of the middle and lower classes, and foreigners. If the
truth must be told, he was just a little bit frightened of middle and
lower class humanity, and of foreigners not of his own class. He was,
in some paralysing way, conscious of his own defencelessness, though he
had all the defence of privilege. Which is curious, but a phenomenon of
our day.
Therefore the peculiar soft assurance of a girl like Constance Reid
fascinated him. She was so much more mistress of herself in that outer
world of chaos than he was master of himself.
Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling even against his class. Or
perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught
in the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and
against any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous: his own
obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own
wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old
duffers of generals altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even
the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people.
In fact everything was a little ridiculous, or very ridiculous:
certainly everything connected with authority, whether it were in
the army or the government or the universities, was ridiculous to a
degree. And as far as the governing class made any pretensions to
govern, they were ridiculous too. Sir Geoffrey, Clifford's father, was
intensely ridiculous, chopping down his trees, and weeding men out of
his colliery to shove them into the war; and himself being so safe and
patriotic; but also, spending more money on his country than he'd got.
When Miss Chatterley--Emma--came down to London from the Midlands to do
some nursing work, she was very witty in a quiet way about Sir Geoffrey
and his determined patriotism. Herbert, the elder brother and heir,
laughed outright, though it was his trees that were falling for trench
props. But Clifford only smiled a little uneasily. Everything was
ridiculous, quite true. But when it came too close and oneself became
ridiculous too...? At least people of a different class, like Connie,
were earnest about something. They believed in something.
They were rather earnest about the Tommies, and the threat of
conscription, and the shortage of sugar and toffee for the children.
In all these things, of course, the authorities were ridiculously at
fault. But Clifford could not take it to heart. To him the authorities
were ridiculous _ab ovo_, not because of toffee or Tommies.
And the authorities felt ridiculous, and behaved in a rather ridiculous
fashion, and it was all a mad hatter's tea party for a while. Till
things developed over there, and Lloyd George came to save the
situation over here. And this surpassed even ridicule, the flippant
young laughed no more.
In 1916 Herbert Chatterley was killed, so Clifford became heir. He
was terrified even of this. His importance as son of Sir Geoffrey and
child of Wragby was so ingrained in him, he could never escape it. And
yet he knew that this too, in the eyes of the vast seething world, was
ridiculous. Now he was heir and responsible for Wragby. Was that not
terrible? And also splendid at the same time, perhaps, purely absurd?
Sir Geoffrey would have none of the absurdity. He was pale and tense,
withdrawn into himself, and obstinately determined to save his country
and his own position, let it be Lloyd George or who it might. So cut
off he was, so divorced from the England that was really England, so
utterly incapable, that he even thought well of Horatio Bottomley. Sir
Geoffrey stood for England and Lloyd George as his forebears had stood
for England and St. George: and he never knew there was a difference.
So Sir Geoffrey felled timber and stood for Lloyd George and England,
England and Lloyd George.
And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt
his father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any
further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of
everything, and the paramount ridiculousness of his own position. For
willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness.
The gay excitement had gone out of the war ... dead. Too much death
and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an
anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously
isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their
connections. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense
of the weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite
of, or because of the title and the land. They were cut off from those
industrial Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut
off from their own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of
Sir Geoffrey, their father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so
sensitive about.
The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert
was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey
barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding
insistence that it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up
against.
But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt
his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones
of the family had stood for.
Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon
with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as
two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin
when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were
so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in
this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction."
Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his "satisfaction," as so many men
seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And
sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete,
organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not
really necessary. Though Connie did want children: if only to fortify
her against her sister-in-law Emma.
But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no
child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin.