LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
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D.H. Lawrence originally planned to name his last major novel “Tenderness”; he also considered “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” the playful terms his characters use to describe their sex organs. Both titles would have been appropriate; that’s what makes Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as the book was finally called, so lastingly remarkable. Even in our explicit age, the connection Lawrence makes between emotional tenderness and earthy eroticism is unusual. If our society is much more candid than the one that suppressed Lawrence’s 1928 novel, it still links sex to power more than to affection, and identifies manliness in terms of prowess rather than passion. In the age of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lawrence’s sensitive, sensual Oliver Mellors is as rare and wonderful a figure as he was when Lawrence invented him.
Mellors is the working-class hero who arouses the vitality of Lady Constance Chatterley, the repressed young wife of Sir Clifford Chatterley, an aristocrat crippled in the recent slaughter of World War I. (Joanne Witzkowski Kalec’s costumes establish the time frame perfectly.) At first resisting her attraction to her social inferior–Mellors is the gamekeeper on her husband’s country estate–Constance finally gives in to her feelings; she finds Mellors to be the gentle, responsive, sensitive lover she thought didn’t exist, while Mellors, embittered by a previous marriage, is nourished by the humanity beneath Constance’s upper-class facade. “I don’t want a woman as couldna shit nor piss,” he enthuses.
