I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Unable to find a miniseries or film version that seems to be accurate enough for my needs, I’ve started reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover (henceforth, LCL) by D.H. Lawrence. Maybe reading rather than watching is for the best anyway so I can experience the obscenity for myself (It was banned for obscenity in the U.K. until 1960, and also in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, and Japan).
Why was it banned? Because it depicts in great detail (or so I hear) a physical and emotional affair between a married upper-class woman, Constance Chatterley, and a working-class man, Oliver Mellors. It allegedly has explicit descriptions of sex and, I can confirm after reading a few chapters, uses profane words such as f*ck.
I did already come across a somewhat explicit sex scene and I found it at the same time tame and inspiring. But that’s not what I’m going to write about today.
Early on in the book, Lawrence declares what seems to be a theme that will be further developed (or so I’m thinking, based on what I know of the plot):
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 sorded connections and subjections.
But we know, from any description of the plot, that Connie marries a man who is gravely wounded in the Great War (World War I) so that he is paralyzed from the waist down. And this is, eventually, the cause of a lack of freedom.
Even before the injury, Clifford was little interested in or inspiring during sexual relations:
Clifford married Connie… 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.
So, while Lawrence gave Clifford a built-in excuse to refuse or limit sexual contact with Connie — it seems he wasn’t that into it anyway.
Connie helped Clifford with the stories he had published in “the most modern magazines:”
Connie helped him as much as she could. At first she was thrilled. He talked every thing over with her monotonously, insistently, persistently, and she had to respond with all her might. It was as if her whole soul and body and sex had to rouse up and pass into these stories of his. This thrilled her and absorbed her.
But they were missing an important connection with one another, the physical and sexual. Connie’s father says to her one day, “I hope, Connie, you won’t let circumstances force you into being a demi-vierge.” And later, he says the same to Clifford, “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite suit Connie to be a demi-vierge.”
“A half-virgin!” replies Clifford, and gets offended.
The story continues:
[Clifford] wanted to say something later to Connie about the demi-vierge business…the half-virgin state of her affairs. But he could not bring himself to do it. He was at once too intimate with her and not intimate enough. He was so very much at one with her, in his mind and hers, but bodily they were non-existent to one another, and neither could bear to drag in the corpus delicti. They were so intimate, and utterly out of touch.
My own experience in marriage was similar, that there were certain areas of intimacy, and certain areas of out-of-touchness. We ask marriage to provide so many different kinds of connection. And this can set up the conditions for infidelity, both in fiction, and in real life.