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I recently finished a pile of books from the Book Nook that I bought last summer, all of which ended up being about upper-class (or appearing to be upper-class) women who have extramarital affairs. I guess I should have guessed, coming from a place whose Romance section comprises four aisles and half the store.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover shares utopian visions with Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and, perhaps because it is written further along in the Industrial Revolution’s progress, tries to be smarter (read: more fatalistic) about its philosophy. Both feel that upper-class society is responsible for the pervasiveness of evil fakery and immoral living. However, individuals like Levin from Karenina view low class laborers as inherently more wholesome, incapable of corruption, and a source of all goodness. The objective then, is to eliminate Russia’s urban society and give power to the common people. The English cronies who gather around Mr. Chatterly have a slightly different perspective—-they easily condemn Bolshevism as hog-wash and note that that the workers of Chatterly’s coal mill are irreverant and somewhat lazy ignorants. They become posturally deformed and, therefore, un-human through the toils of their “unnatural labor.” The danger in both approaches lies in typifying a whole class of people as good or bad, especially when the leading character in both is an expeption to that rule. Lawrence believes that if we dumped all our technology into the depths of the ocean, humans would return to equilibrium. Since that obviously can’t happen, the only practical course for Connie and Mellors is to isolate themselves as much as possible and work within the law to free themselves.

Lawrence is also working for a sexual revolution here, portraying the sex between the two lovers as cathartic, freeing, and ultimately child-like. Descriptions are frank rather than scandalous, openly shared rather than salacious, even though both are breaking marriage vows to fulfill sexual lust. This is unexpected and even kind of lovely. Who doesn’t appreciate two people subverting the system? But there is one blaringly obvious misstep—sexual compatibility does not a lifelong relationship make. This is the same dilemma I faced with Steven Shainburg’s movie Secretary. Lee, the secretary, and E. Edwards, the lawyer, find unorthodox delight in each other sexually but are otherwise complete strangers. What they do know about each other is gleaned from observation; Edwards has a tenderness for horticulture and Lee cuts herself. There is never a point where one resorts to confiding in the other about anything, however. Even the scene that is supposed to depict the acceptance and devotion to the other person’s quirks is expressed sexually. That wouldn’t be bad except that they never relate to each other in any other way than sex. In Lady Chatterly’s Lover Connie is repulsed by Mellors’ callused attitude towards his daughter, his affected colloquial speech, and his rough mannerisms. But everytime she needs satisfaction he’s willing, and so these misgivings are never resolved.

Lawrence, in making a social point, abandons believability and treats his characters as types. Connie, we are told, has had a quite Bohemian upbringing. She values intellectual discourse, which she can find pretty much only in other men, but sees sex as a little absurd. Lawrence puts these two qualities in a causal relationship. If Connie enjoys philosophy and other activities that foster the mind, she cannot enjoy activities that foster the body. In order to be sexually free, Connie has to come to detest intellectualism and education for herself as a vanity and submit her very will to Mellors, who is good enough for her because he’s an educated man even though he chooses to physically labor for a living. We are never given direct dialogue of her intellectual conversations, but we are subjected to her desperate reliance on Mellors. “Do you love me? Do you really love me? Really? Say you love me! Say you’ll love me forever!” This is the kind of mental state to which Connie’s character is reduced. Is this really a sexual fruition? Mellors is not depicted as needing this kind of affirmation. In fact, his attitude is mostly to “take it or leave it,” even when he feels (I think justly so) that Connie is using him for sex.

In many ways Lady Chatterly’s Lover is a better crafted book than, say, Madame Bovary, and contains important ideas. It is not the kind of absurd mockery Vanity Fair offers—a universe of wily, weedling, conniving, extravagant, vapid people with the exception of a pure, saintly woman and a pure, saintly man who are repeatedly taken advantage of. Connie and Mellors at least have enough sense to see that they live in a world with conventions and societal dictates rather than unchallengable laws of Truth. It is unfortunate, then, that Connie is flaky and fitful in a way that reminds me of Emma Bovary, who lacks the wit and irony Thackeray gives to the despicable Rebecca Sharp.

This is a disappointing statement to make about Lawrence’s novel. Previously to this, I read a volume of short stories. The short stories exhibited the same frankness about male and female sexuality but more easily portrayed a wide variety of characters of all ages in an interesting, complicated, and believable manner. Maybe it was because the reader of the short stories discovers his view that sex is not a guilty pleasure, just a pleasure, wholly by the behaviors of the characters without extraneous expositional passages by the narrator.