forbidden sexual relationship between his lovers is based on mutual desire.
Lawrence was widely read in European literature and well aware of this history of the British novel, in which sexuality and romantic love served the purposes of moral discourse. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover in particular, he wanted to do something pointedly different. For better or worse, his treatment of the fictional theme of transgressive love and sex thus became fraught with the burden of a new meaning he wanted to place on it, a kind of morality free of tradition and conventional religious prohibitions. But this rebellion is not simply one of individual freedom; Lawrence embedded in Lady Chatterley’s Lover the meanings of sexual love and class conflict in a kind of war against our “civilization” as he had come to understand it. For Lawrence, the novel was a kind of weapon against a peculiarly modern development: He saw the social alienation from our bodies and the pleasures of the senses as the direct result of a soulless industrialism, the spirit of possessiveness and commercialism.
It is not coincidence that the interlinked themes of industrialism, class identity, and division on the one hand, and adulterous love on the other, were also important in Lawrence’s own life. In his partly autobiographical essay, “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside,” Lawrence portrays the area in which he was born and raised as marked by a curious division. He described Eastwood, a mining village near Nottingham, in contrasting terms, “a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England”: “It was still the old England of the forest and agricultural past.... The mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robin Hood and his merry men were not very far away” (Phoenix, pp. 133, 135; see “For Further Reading”).
For Lawrence, town and country, industry and nature, old and new, were startlingly close by one another and yet also hopelessly separated. Lawrence felt this conflict deeply. On his father’s side, Lawrence was connected to the mining industry that dominated the town for generations. His grandfather had been company tailor for the local mine, and Arthur Lawrence, his father, was a collier (miner), though he rose to the position of “butty,” a kind of manager of a group of miners, a slightly better-paying job. As readers of Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers know, Lawrence’s father married a woman, Lydia Beardsall, who considered herself above his class, a conflict that became a seminal fact in Lawrence’s upbringing. Lydia Beardsall’s family had once made (and lost) money in the Nottingham lace industry, and in her own view she was far more cultivated, religious, and shrewd—“superior” (that is, possessing the manners, accent, and culture of the middle class). Bitterly disappointed in her choice of husband and the life he could give her, she turned her full attention to her children and her ambitions for them.
The fourth of five children, three boys and two girls, David Herbert Lawrence was delicate and sensitive, both admiring and despising his strong, hearty, vigorous, blunt but unmannered, hard-drinking working-class father. Young David, called “Bert,” identified so much with his mother that as a child he wished his father would either be converted to his mother’s Christianity or die and leave them in peace. He could not fail to observe that his mother’s quick tongue and linguistic superiority often trumped his father’s masculine bullying: If the father would shout, “I’ll make you tremble at the sound of my footstep,” the mother would ask which boots he intended to wear for this occasion. Bert thus observed both the power of language, and also its ability to diminish his father’s masculinity. We will see this ambivalence about the uses of language in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
After the death in 1901 of the mother’s favorite child, Bert’s older brother William Ernest, the future writer became the focus of Lydia Lawrence’s deep devotion and ambition for her children. Lawrence was clever in school, and his future was marked out for teaching, but he hated the work and began to write fiction in secret. At the same time that Lawrence began expressing himself in poetry and prose, he began to seek love and sex with various women, more or less unsuccessfully. Though he had important emotional connections, such as the long relationship with Jessie Chambers, whose fictional portrait appears in Sons and Lovers, none proved entirely satisfactory. This was a restless and frustrating period in Lawrence’s life, in which he felt stymied on all fronts, creative, emotional, and financial.