《查泰莱夫人的情人》研究
05-16, 2014
浅析《查泰莱夫人的情人》的主题-A Brief Analysis of the Theme of Lady Chatterley's Lover
Ⅰ. Introduction 引言
查泰莱夫人的情人是劳伦斯的一部小说，于1928年首次出版，在意大利佛罗伦萨第一版印刷。本小说在英国被禁了30年。故事发生在第一次世界大战后，它是关于一个年轻的已婚妇女，康斯坦斯（查泰莱夫人），其上层阶级的丈夫克利福德查泰莱，已经瘫痪并变得无能为力。
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy. The novel was banned in Britain for 30 years. The story takes place after the First World War, it is about a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. The hopeless life leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. This novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This novel is also about the social conflicts, the relationship between man and woman, the relationship between man and nature. Moreover, it discusses the damages brought by the industrial society.
Ⅱ. Lawrence and His Works 劳伦斯和他的作品
大卫·赫伯特·劳伦斯在1885年出生在伊斯特伍德，诺丁汉郡，是一名矿工和一位退休老师的儿子，他获得了诺丁汉大学的奖学金，然后找到了当老师的工作。福斯特形容他为“我们这一代人最伟大的想象力的小说家。
David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a retired teacher. He won a scholarship to University College, Nottingham, and then found work as a teacher. E. M. Forster described him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." He is an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic.His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, followed in the next year by The Trespasser. Then Sons and Lovers was published in 1913. Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen, cousin of the famous German flying ace), the wife of one of his professors, and ended up with her in Italy in 1919. He continued to write, finding his way to Sicily and publishing Women in Love, The Rainbow and other novels. The coupled continued to travel, to South America and elsewhere. Only thirty years after its publication did Lady Chatterley's Lover appear uncensored in the United Kingdom. Lawrence died at Vence, near Nice, in 1930.
Ⅲ. Social Background 社会背景
Lady Chatterley's Lover demonstrates how the war changed the English society and the individuals. The First World War brought about many fundamental changes to the post-war society of Europe and Britain. Many suffered from physical and mental injuries, were hit by economic and political changes, and affected by the collapse of a long established sociocultural system. Arthur Marwick said in Britain in the Century of Total War that "society in the Twenties and Thirties exhibited all the signs of having suffered a deep mental wound, to which agony and the bloodshed, as well as the more generalised revulsion at the destruction of an older civilisation and its ways contributed" ( Fernihough, 2005: 62).#p#分页标题#e#
The years after the war were characterised by strikes, wage-cuts, and unemployment. From the end of the war until 1921, the number of unemployed increased to more than two million. Different trades were on strike as they fought to keep their wartime pay, whereas employers reduced the wages to levels before the war. This industrial turbulence peaked with the advent of the general strike in May 1926. Coal mine owners intended to reduce wages and increase working hours in order to survive a collapse in the industry. This attempt resulted in a general strike lasting almost seven months. The strike assumed vast proportions so that it was not a strike, people said, it was a revolution . Within one week four million workers refused go to work. For seven months the miners were locked out. Besides, the railroad network collapsed and the complete British industry was ground to a halt. Although the strike was the greatest industrial dispute ever know in Britain, the workers and their union eventually lost their struggle. Being politically weakened and bitterly impoverished, they went back to work in November.
In addition, traumas from loss, injury, and death occupied British society for many years after the war. Numbers can only be estimated: 750,000 people died, approximately 1.6 million British soldiers were physically wounded, and about 200,000 suffered from mental disorders. Not only were many of the men who endured physical injuries limited in their job and everyday life, but sexual impotence was a probably more severely debilitating response to the war. Moreover, shell-shock was likely to be the most terrible consequence of the war. This phenomenon was diagnosed in vast numbers regardless of class, rank, or age. Furthermore, for many, the trauma continued to affect their lives for many years after the war and the symptoms were outwardly not always recognisable. Due to the physical and psychological wounds, masculinity had to be redefined as the war left a lot of men vulnerable and weak.
Ⅳ.The Characters of Lady Chatterley's Lover 查泰莱夫人的情人的特点
In this novel, Lawrence vividly describes the main characters: Clifford, the representative of the vain, greedy, inhuman capitalist; Connie, the desperate, hopeless upper class lady, who gains new life from nature and Mellors; Melors, the son of nature and the rebellion of the industrial society.
4.1 Clfford Chatterley
4.11 Early Life in Wraghy Hall
Clifford is Connie's husband, he is a baronet, the owner of Wraghy Hall. During World War, the lower half of his body, from the hips down becomes paralyzed. The war destroys his physical health as well as mental health. He is suffering from vacant depression, he becomes away from nature and people. At first, he refused to be looked after by other people. Therefore, Connie has to take all the work of taking care of him."Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he need her every moment, big and strong as he was, he was helpless. He need Connie to be there, to assure him existed at all." (Lawrence, 2004:13)#p#分页标题#e#
Yet he is ambitious, he spends all his time writing stories, from which he gains a lot of fame. However, ironically, according to Connie's father, Clifford's writing "it is smart,but there's nothing in it, it won't last." (Lawrence, 2004:15)
It is true that Clifford has no true love with Connie, as a matter of fact, he is not interested in love, he is passionless, selfish and vain. As a husband, he treated his wife as a maid. "He wanted a good deal from her, and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford did not give her and could not." (Lawrence, 2004:29) In some way, he tries his best to control his wife, inculcating Connie that "Casual sex thing is nothing." (Lawrence, 2004:43) He emphasizes on mental life. Every day, Clifford and Connie just talking, reading, writing, there is no touch, no actual contact, it is as if the whole thing take place inn vaccum, all the mental stuff. As days going by, Connir resents him more and more, for Clifford ignores Connie's feeling all the time. Because of Clifford's lifeless mind and impotent body, Connie is like a flower destroyed by Clifford's bath chair.
Cifford holds the point that marriage is just a tradition of England. He wants Connie to have a child with another man so that someone can inherit his fortune. However, he doesn't care who the man is, as long as the blood is up-class."Give me a son and he'll be able to rule this portion after me", this is his only purpose to have a son."Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an 'it' to him. It... It... it!" (Lawrence, 2004:42)
Whereas, when he knows that Connie's lover is Mellors, he feels ashamed, hopeless, and he depends on the servant like a child in mentality.
4.12 Cliifford's Class Discrimination
As Connie's physical and mental health declines in the first section of the novel, Clifford acquires a nurse, Ivy Bolton. Ivy Bolton is a widow of a miner yet her education and her professional training gain her an entry to the world of the lives of upper class. She is an independent working woman, she maintains a worshipful attitude toward Clifford as the representative of the upper class. At first, Clifford hates being touched by such a woman. But later, he feels comfortable with her, Bolton is an easy-going, open-minded woman, she talks a lot to Clifford. Thanks to her, Clifford' s life becomes more colourful. "He was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of power." (Lawrence, 2004:99)
Clofford enjoys the feeling of being worshipped. "No wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself at his service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!" (Lawrence, 2004:99)
On one hand, Clifford depends on her, one the other hand, he looks down upon her, thinking he is superior. After Connie's escape with Mellors, he goes mad and weak, and searches comfort from Bolten. " And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exaltation, the exaltation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man." (Lawrence, 2004:297)#p#分页标题#e#
Mrs. Bolton encourages Clifford to shift his energies towards the development of his mines, and Clifford is pleased to transform his energies from the "populace of pleasure to the populace of work" which he finds grim and terrible, but also more substantial:"the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry". (Lawrence, 2004:107)
4.1.3 Clifford's Cruety as a Capitalist
Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford becomes increasingly absorbed in business and in his mines, in the brute business of industial production.
From mines, he gains a new sense of power, the power over the hundreds of colliers whom he saw as ojects even animals rather than men. Now he is a greedy businessman who concerns nothing but money, who thinks poverty is ugly. He is the boss of the "show", he doesn't show one heartbeat of real sympathy. The lives of the villages are industrialized and hopeless, for which, Clifford doesn't care. As Connie put it "You only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a weak, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you're dried up! You only bully with your money!" (Lawrence, 2004:195)
When his chair doesn't work, he asks Mellors to push the chair. However, the chair is so heavy for Mellors to push. He is always so arrogant, cold-blooded that he refuses to show emtions about his gamekeeper.
In short, Clifford Chatterley is a symbol of the lifeless civilization mechanical world.
4.2 Constance Chatterley
4.2.1 Connie's Life in Wraghy Hall
Constance Chatterley is the heroine of the novel, she married Clifford in 1917. Before her marriage, she was an energetic, lovely young lady. She and her sister Hilda were send to Paris, Florence and Rome where they received good education. They had a good time there and love-affairs. After her marriage to Clifford, she returned to Wraghy Hall--Clifford' home. The life in Wraghy Hall is void, hopeless and isolated. As for Clifford, he depends solely on Connie. There is no contact between the outside and her.
"No substance to her or anything... No touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last." (Lawrence, 2004:24)
Day after day, life is just the same, Connie becomes lonely and desperate, she could do nothing but help Clifford with the writing. As Connie's father put it, she was going to become a "demi-vierge". Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. "Their marriage, their life is based on the habit of intimacy. It words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingless, and over it a hypocrisy of words. There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddness!" (Lawrence, 2004:20)#p#分页标题#e#
Slowly, Connie has a feeling that she was growing restless, a mad restless which thrills her body. She has nowhere to go, no one to talk to,for Clifford focus only on his stories." Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion." (Lawrence, 2004:23) She had lost touch the outside, the vital life. To her, Wraghy Hall is a prison and she is the prisoner, weeping in desperate. Wragby Hall thus appears as a kind of prison, its very aspect as oppressive as the atmosphere reigning inside, in distinct contrast with the natural environment outside its walls
4.2.2 Connie's Relationship with Michaelis
Just in time, there comes Michaelis who is a succesful Irish playwright. At that time Clifford often invite writers home to discuss stories, and Michaelis is one of them. Unlike Clifford, Michaelis didn't put on airs to himself, he had no illusions about himself, he is also sensible, which attracts Connie a lot. Afterwards, Connie has an affair with him. In some ways, Michaelis brings some fresh air to Connie's life, or else she would die of loneliness and despair.
However, " There is something childlike and defencelsess about his naked body." (Lawrence, 2004:27) Soon after, Connie finds that, Michaelis is like all other intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words. Besides these, he is such a selfish man, passionless. With Michaelis, Connie still feels hopeless, hence, when Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, Connie decides not to.
After Michaelis, Connie decides that she wants nothing in life. " Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living." (Lawrence, 2004:24) That's her fate, whether she wants it or not, she has to accept it. Connie is like a beautiful flower doom to die.
4.2.3 Connie's Awakening
One time, Clifford sends Connie to inform Mellors something, she sees Mellors having a shower. Connie is so shocked to see his body.
"Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty,but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body! " (Lawrence, 2004:25)
That's is the first time Connie feels the beauty of body, the beauty of life, the vital life of a man, which Clifford could not offer.
Meanwhile, one night, she took off all her clothes, and looked herself in a mirror. Sadly she finds that her body has so much changed.
"Her breast were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and expectant, with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless." (Lawrence, 2004:68)#p#分页标题#e#
All of these makes her feel extremely miserable and depressed. There is no hope, she is getting old,old at twenty-seven,with no gleam and sparkle in flesh. All of sudden, she hates Clifford's mental life. "Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very soul!" (Lawrence, 2004:68)
4.2.4 Connie's New Life
After hiring Mrs. Bolton, Connie has more spare time. She flees to the wood as possible as she could, where she can feel the nature and escape from the dead life of Wragby Hall.
" Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life!" (Lawrence, 2004:113)
From the above, we can see that Connie loves nature, and from nature she gains a new life.
In the wood, Connie feel relaxed and comfortable. It is also in the wood, she encountered her true love: Mellors.
One day, Connie was upset as usual, she went to the wood, she wanted to touch the hens that Mellors raised. However, the mother-hen pecked Connie's hand, feeling rejected, all of sudden, Connie burst into tears, she couldn't hold her feelings, she just let it go. Mellors looked at her apprehensively, it seemed that he understand her anguish. That's the first time they had sex. For Connie, she couldn't figure out what was happening, she just lay there still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. Even after they had sex, Mellors is a stranger to Connie, he is cold, distant and rude. She resents his dialect, he can speak standard English, then why he talks to her in such a way? At first, she avoid seeing him, not going to the wood.
Then, she begins to love him, she deeply feels from the misery into joy,from death to life. "Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her.Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowls, and with this self she adored him." (Lawrence, 2004:134)
Her feeling for him is complex, she used to weep after having sex, " I can't love you, but I want to love you, I can't, it only seems horrid" (Lawrence, 2004:174)
Meanwhile, she is attached to him, she is just afraid to love him. With Mellors, she is reborn, she falls in love with him. When a woman loves a man ,she wants to be loved in return. " Say you'll always love me!" she pleaded. (Lawrence, 2004:177)
Connie is totally in love with this man, as Lawrence puts it " it is divine love". Mellors arouses her sense of body. Connie is not just physically in love with Mellors, from their talk, she senses that he has his own understanding of love, relationship, nature and society. In a word, Connie regains life from Mellors.#p#分页标题#e#
4.3 Mellors
Mellors is the lover in the novel's title, he is the gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof, sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. His marriage with Bertha Coutts is a failure, it faltered because of their sexual incompatibility: she was too rapacious, not tender enough. At last, she separated from him but not divorced. After that, Mellors wants to have nothing to do with any woman any more, he wants to keep himself and to keep his privacy. Hence, he chooses to live in quite solitude. As far as he is concerned, the industrial noises broke the solitude, a man could no longer be private and withdrawn, so he hate the ruins the industry brings. Mellors is the son of nature, he lives in the wood, he does not want to be involved with any relationship. Therefore, when he meets Connie, he feels stuck in a complex confusion, he shows compassion to her miserable life, but he doesn't want to be involved in a relationship with a woman, any woman, to be exact, he doesn't want to be involved in the society.
" She, poor thing,was just a young female creature to him; but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he desired again". (Lawrence, 2004:119)
"He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast." (Lawrence, 2004:119)
Afterwards, he loves her, he loves her tenderness, which he thinks has gone out of the celluloid of women of today.
In fact, he was finely educated, he can speak standard English; however, he chooses to speak with a Perbyshire dialect to show contempt toward the upper class. He refuses to talk to Hilda in standard English because he thinks she is a hypocrisy.Different from Mrs Bolton, he despises the upper class, he even considers Clifford as " the sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls" (Lawrence, 2004:198)
In spite his experience, he does believe in something, he believes in being warm-heated, he believes in love. Inward, he is a true gentleman.
IV. Theme 主题
5.1 Lawrence's Attitude toward the Mechanical Civilization
Lawrence wages a strong criticism in his works against a civilization that has been turning bad, mechanical and repressive. In his opinion, the bourgeois Industrial revolution, which makes its realization at the cost of ravishing the land has stared the catastrophic up rooting of man from nature. Those profit-seeking capitalists, with the half-man, half –machine Clifford Chatterley as their typical representation, frenziedly worship the filthy materialism and the mechanism of matter to inflict their exploitative will in the workmen, the society and the earth. Under this mechanical civilization, extraordinary glories in science and speculation may be achieved, and society may attain the finest and subtlest veneer of prosperity; but human beings will be turned into unanimated matter, while the unanimated matter will be animated to destroy both man and earth. As a matter of fact, the whole western world has become a wretched picture of death or the living death o physical paralysis after the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence’s writing. Clifford Chatterley is the very character depicted by Lawrence in this condition.#p#分页标题#e#
At the beginning of novel, both Connie and Clifford love the "old England". " I want this wood perfect... untouched. I want nobody to trespass in it" said Clifford. (Lawrence, 2004:41)
However, the old England is history. One England has turned out to another. As Connie observes:
"The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shaply beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appelling. The stacks of the awful hats in the milliner's! All went by ugly, ugly, ugly," (Lawrence, 2004:68)
"The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical" (Lawrence, 2004:157)
5.2 Appeal to Return to Nature
Lawrence also cherishes a passionate love for the beauty of the nature world. From his early years, he has been aware that the ancient sacred wood in his hometown is steadily shrinking and that the dirty mines ravished the beautiful landscape, In the Lady Chatterley’s lover, Lawrence describes the beautiful wood and the log many times compared with the dirty mines that belong to Clifford Chatterley. In Lawrence’s opinion, the natural unspoiled place is corrupted by unnatural circumstances and the march of civilization: and the modern world has substituted, for the real and natural man, an artificial, mechanic controlled being that will inevitably be unhappy and unbalanced because his instincts has been suppressed. To revive the natural instincts of men and women and to establish an ideal community of human life on earth, Lawrence strongly advocates a return to nature, to primitive way of life. Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover are the symbols of returning to nature. Mellors, once a up-class gentleman, is tired of the mechanical world. Although he can speak Standard English, he would rather use crudity dialect when communicates with Commie and Clifford Chatterley. This makes him near to the nature.
Lawrence believes that modern industrial civilization to destroy the environment, while suppressing distortion of human nature, but also trampled on the devastation wrought on humanity and the sex instinct. Lawrence has thoroughly exposed the industrial civilization on the environment and human nature of the destruction, vigorously promote the return of love, return to nature.
5.3 The Relationship between Man and Woman
"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." Lawrence once wrote to justify the themes of his fiction, a statement which can be interpreted in several ways: the circumambient universe in Lady Chatterley’s Lover can be the age and world of industrialisation, but it also refers to the natural environment and the social one, in sharp opposition. The social environment described in the novel is so coercive and suffocating that Constance Chatterley’s personality seems confined and subjected; she cannot let it express itself, and to an artistic nature like hers it is particularly frustrating. A good example of the restraint forced upon her behaviour is the role she must play as hostess of Wragby Hall, a very paradoxical role. When "the cronies" have their evening debates she is not supposed to interfere or even admit she is listening, being a woman, yet she is required to sit in the background because her presence inspires them and gives them confidence. Likewise her role as hostess at the table is based on pretence since she presents their male guests with a look and manner of perfect innocence pleasing to them and must keep her thoughts to herself. Wragby thus appears as a kind of prison, its very aspect as oppressive as the atmosphere reigning inside, in distinct contrast with the natural environment outside its walls. Whereas some aspects of human personality and need can never fully be voiced through the social. And indeed the forest challenges Connie’s half-deadness, gradually reveals her true self, her potential, and coaxes her into reacting, in a way that her social life never could, despite the numerous conversations with her father and sister, aware of her decline. Nature therefore holds the part of a magic mirror, throwing light upon the characters’ unconscious thoughts and needs, facing them with the truth they refused to acknowledge. Most of the time it is through contrasts rather than parallels that the characters’ feelings are exposed because the discovery of their shortcomings must entail a response. The description of Connie’s first outing after her nervous depression #p#分页标题#e#
focuses on the manifestations of spring in the woods in the shape of new flowers and leaves:
"Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandine’s at the wood’s edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the little anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves." (Lawrence, 2004:110)
The abundance of flowers of several kinds, their omnipresence in the woods and the movement that suffuses the scene, conveyed by verbs such as "bobbing", "swaying", "rustling and fluttering and shivering", contribute to giving a sense of new life which makes a strong impression on Connie, herself deadened by the life at Wragby. But she clearly identifies with the struggling wind and this display of natural determination inspires her to take a hold on life and free herself from her ties to Clifford. The extended metaphor of the boat unmistakably emphasises her desire for freedom.
In the same way, Connie’s confrontation with the hens and then pheasant chicks brings her own infertility acutely home. The adjective "female", applied to the hens, is repeated many times in the space of a few lines to insist on the bond Connie feels between the hens and herself, as well as the realisation that she does not qualify as a female because she remains "unused". The brooding hens thus become a form of comfort to her thwarted femaleness and we could almost say she lives the incubation by proxy, feeding and watching over the mothers. The contrast between fertility and sterility is further emphasized by notions of hot and cold, the fecundity of the hens characterized by "heat", "warm", "hot", a warmth passed on to Connie, contrary to the "cold" and "cold-hearted" human world. Her encounter with the hatched chicks heightens her distress at not having children but it also triggers once again her admiration for life, more deeply than the flowers and tree had. Lawrence’s style here wonderfully portrays his protagonist’s excitement: an abundance of adjectives to qualify the chick convey her emotion, especially when they are repeated:"one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round", along with several exclamations, more repetitions, an increasing ternary rhythm "Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life!" (Lawrence, 2004:113) and intensifying adverbs.
Connie and Mellors, as we have just seen, are brought together by Nature, first in the scene of the pheasant chicks, and closer still in the scene of the thunderstorm in the woods where their intimacy reaches its highest point, culminating in the "wedding of Lady Jane with John Thomas". (Lawrence, 2004:231)#p#分页标题#e#
5.4 The New Garden of Eden
Finally, the end of this scene depicts Connie’s final act of rebellion as she and Mellors run out naked into the rain, the shedding of her clothes a symbol of freedom equivalent to shaking off the shackles of civilisation. An allusion to the eurhythmic dance-movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden reinforces the notion of freedom since we know, thanks to the analepsis in chapter one, that her youth abroad was marked by independence. The rain itself appears as a source of purification and we could interpret Connie’s "sudden desire to rush out into the rain, to rush away" (Lawrence, 2004:223) as a need to be washed of her old self, of her social self, in which Mellors readily follows her.
This last episode is undoubtedly the best example of connection between human beings and Nature: the Constance we see here is in touch with the natural elements, no longer an empty shell "beautifully out of contact" as Lawrence ironically puts it . What’s more it is now she who leads the gamekeeper into connection with the cosmos and following Lawrence’s views on cosmology, their personal relationship is replaced by a more universal relationship. Yet we may wonder if such an illustration of his beliefs is enough to convince his readers of the necessity and urgency of turning back to Nature and saving it as well as themselves from destructive industrialism.
V. Conclusion 结论
To sum up, the paper has analysed the main characters of this novel and their personality. As mentioned above, Clifford is a selfish, vain, weak and cold-hearted man, he doesn't treat other people as a human. He is a representative as a profit-seeking capitalists. Thus, Connie feels desperate and hopeless, she is more dead than alive in Wraghy Hall . She is getting thinner and thinner until she meets Mellors, who is the gamekeeper in the wood. She is given a new life and finds true love.
In this novel Lawrence utilizes symbolism. Wragh Hall, symbolizes the upper class and capitalist; the mine stands for the tough life of miners and the hideous environment; the wood is the symbol of the old England, the harmonious nature; and Connie is the symbol of vital life regained from nature.
Lawrence also passionately praises the love between Connie and Mellors. D.H. Lawrence believes that without a realization of sex and body, the mind wanders aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover are the symbols of returning to nature.
From the above analyse, we can see human-being has to come back to nature. Only in nature can they be relaxed and comfortable. The industry not only destroys the environment, but also do harm to the physical and mental health of human-being. Therefore, Lawrence appeals again that we human being have to return to nature.
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[8] 王雅萍.“《查泰莱夫人的情人》中的睡美人主题”.《重庆交通学院学报》 2006,(07)
Ⅰ. Introduction 引言
查泰莱夫人的情人是劳伦斯的一部小说，于1928年首次出版，在意大利佛罗伦萨第一版印刷。本小说在英国被禁了30年。故事发生在第一次世界大战后，它是关于一个年轻的已婚妇女，康斯坦斯（查泰莱夫人），其上层阶级的丈夫克利福德查泰莱，已经瘫痪并变得无能为力。
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy. The novel was banned in Britain for 30 years. The story takes place after the First World War, it is about a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed and rendered impotent. The hopeless life leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. This novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically. This novel is also about the social conflicts, the relationship between man and woman, the relationship between man and nature. Moreover, it discusses the damages brought by the industrial society.
Ⅱ. Lawrence and His Works 劳伦斯和他的作品
大卫·赫伯特·劳伦斯在1885年出生在伊斯特伍德，诺丁汉郡，是一名矿工和一位退休老师的儿子，他获得了诺丁汉大学的奖学金，然后找到了当老师的工作。福斯特形容他为“我们这一代人最伟大的想象力的小说家。
David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a coal miner and a retired teacher. He won a scholarship to University College, Nottingham, and then found work as a teacher. E. M. Forster described him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." He is an English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic.His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, followed in the next year by The Trespasser. Then Sons and Lovers was published in 1913. Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen, cousin of the famous German flying ace), the wife of one of his professors, and ended up with her in Italy in 1919. He continued to write, finding his way to Sicily and publishing Women in Love, The Rainbow and other novels. The coupled continued to travel, to South America and elsewhere. Only thirty years after its publication did Lady Chatterley's Lover appear uncensored in the United Kingdom. Lawrence died at Vence, near Nice, in 1930.
Ⅲ. Social Background 社会背景
Lady Chatterley's Lover demonstrates how the war changed the English society and the individuals. The First World War brought about many fundamental changes to the post-war society of Europe and Britain. Many suffered from physical and mental injuries, were hit by economic and political changes, and affected by the collapse of a long established sociocultural system. Arthur Marwick said in Britain in the Century of Total War that "society in the Twenties and Thirties exhibited all the signs of having suffered a deep mental wound, to which agony and the bloodshed, as well as the more generalised revulsion at the destruction of an older civilisation and its ways contributed" ( Fernihough, 2005: 62).#p#分页标题#e#
The years after the war were characterised by strikes, wage-cuts, and unemployment. From the end of the war until 1921, the number of unemployed increased to more than two million. Different trades were on strike as they fought to keep their wartime pay, whereas employers reduced the wages to levels before the war. This industrial turbulence peaked with the advent of the general strike in May 1926. Coal mine owners intended to reduce wages and increase working hours in order to survive a collapse in the industry. This attempt resulted in a general strike lasting almost seven months. The strike assumed vast proportions so that it was not a strike, people said, it was a revolution . Within one week four million workers refused go to work. For seven months the miners were locked out. Besides, the railroad network collapsed and the complete British industry was ground to a halt. Although the strike was the greatest industrial dispute ever know in Britain, the workers and their union eventually lost their struggle. Being politically weakened and bitterly impoverished, they went back to work in November.
In addition, traumas from loss, injury, and death occupied British society for many years after the war. Numbers can only be estimated: 750,000 people died, approximately 1.6 million British soldiers were physically wounded, and about 200,000 suffered from mental disorders. Not only were many of the men who endured physical injuries limited in their job and everyday life, but sexual impotence was a probably more severely debilitating response to the war. Moreover, shell-shock was likely to be the most terrible consequence of the war. This phenomenon was diagnosed in vast numbers regardless of class, rank, or age. Furthermore, for many, the trauma continued to affect their lives for many years after the war and the symptoms were outwardly not always recognisable. Due to the physical and psychological wounds, masculinity had to be redefined as the war left a lot of men vulnerable and weak.
Ⅳ.The Characters of Lady Chatterley's Lover 查泰莱夫人的情人的特点
In this novel, Lawrence vividly describes the main characters: Clifford, the representative of the vain, greedy, inhuman capitalist; Connie, the desperate, hopeless upper class lady, who gains new life from nature and Mellors; Melors, the son of nature and the rebellion of the industrial society.
4.1 Clfford Chatterley
4.11 Early Life in Wraghy Hall
Clifford is Connie's husband, he is a baronet, the owner of Wraghy Hall. During World War, the lower half of his body, from the hips down becomes paralyzed. The war destroys his physical health as well as mental health. He is suffering from vacant depression, he becomes away from nature and people. At first, he refused to be looked after by other people. Therefore, Connie has to take all the work of taking care of him."Yet he was absolutely dependent on her, he need her every moment, big and strong as he was, he was helpless. He need Connie to be there, to assure him existed at all." (Lawrence, 2004:13)#p#分页标题#e#
Yet he is ambitious, he spends all his time writing stories, from which he gains a lot of fame. However, ironically, according to Connie's father, Clifford's writing "it is smart,but there's nothing in it, it won't last." (Lawrence, 2004:15)
It is true that Clifford has no true love with Connie, as a matter of fact, he is not interested in love, he is passionless, selfish and vain. As a husband, he treated his wife as a maid. "He wanted a good deal from her, and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life of a man, and this Clifford did not give her and could not." (Lawrence, 2004:29) In some way, he tries his best to control his wife, inculcating Connie that "Casual sex thing is nothing." (Lawrence, 2004:43) He emphasizes on mental life. Every day, Clifford and Connie just talking, reading, writing, there is no touch, no actual contact, it is as if the whole thing take place inn vaccum, all the mental stuff. As days going by, Connir resents him more and more, for Clifford ignores Connie's feeling all the time. Because of Clifford's lifeless mind and impotent body, Connie is like a flower destroyed by Clifford's bath chair.
Cifford holds the point that marriage is just a tradition of England. He wants Connie to have a child with another man so that someone can inherit his fortune. However, he doesn't care who the man is, as long as the blood is up-class."Give me a son and he'll be able to rule this portion after me", this is his only purpose to have a son."Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an 'it' to him. It... It... it!" (Lawrence, 2004:42)
Whereas, when he knows that Connie's lover is Mellors, he feels ashamed, hopeless, and he depends on the servant like a child in mentality.
4.12 Cliifford's Class Discrimination
As Connie's physical and mental health declines in the first section of the novel, Clifford acquires a nurse, Ivy Bolton. Ivy Bolton is a widow of a miner yet her education and her professional training gain her an entry to the world of the lives of upper class. She is an independent working woman, she maintains a worshipful attitude toward Clifford as the representative of the upper class. At first, Clifford hates being touched by such a woman. But later, he feels comfortable with her, Bolton is an easy-going, open-minded woman, she talks a lot to Clifford. Thanks to her, Clifford' s life becomes more colourful. "He was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of power." (Lawrence, 2004:99)
Clofford enjoys the feeling of being worshipped. "No wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself at his service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!" (Lawrence, 2004:99)
On one hand, Clifford depends on her, one the other hand, he looks down upon her, thinking he is superior. After Connie's escape with Mellors, he goes mad and weak, and searches comfort from Bolten. " And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exaltation, the exaltation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man." (Lawrence, 2004:297)#p#分页标题#e#
Mrs. Bolton encourages Clifford to shift his energies towards the development of his mines, and Clifford is pleased to transform his energies from the "populace of pleasure to the populace of work" which he finds grim and terrible, but also more substantial:"the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry". (Lawrence, 2004:107)
4.1.3 Clifford's Cruety as a Capitalist
Under Mrs Bolton's influence, Clifford becomes increasingly absorbed in business and in his mines, in the brute business of industial production.
From mines, he gains a new sense of power, the power over the hundreds of colliers whom he saw as ojects even animals rather than men. Now he is a greedy businessman who concerns nothing but money, who thinks poverty is ugly. He is the boss of the "show", he doesn't show one heartbeat of real sympathy. The lives of the villages are industrialized and hopeless, for which, Clifford doesn't care. As Connie put it "You only got more than your share of the money, and make people work for you for two pounds a weak, or threaten them with starvation. Rule! What do you give forth of rule? Why, you're dried up! You only bully with your money!" (Lawrence, 2004:195)
When his chair doesn't work, he asks Mellors to push the chair. However, the chair is so heavy for Mellors to push. He is always so arrogant, cold-blooded that he refuses to show emtions about his gamekeeper.
In short, Clifford Chatterley is a symbol of the lifeless civilization mechanical world.
4.2 Constance Chatterley
4.2.1 Connie's Life in Wraghy Hall
Constance Chatterley is the heroine of the novel, she married Clifford in 1917. Before her marriage, she was an energetic, lovely young lady. She and her sister Hilda were send to Paris, Florence and Rome where they received good education. They had a good time there and love-affairs. After her marriage to Clifford, she returned to Wraghy Hall--Clifford' home. The life in Wraghy Hall is void, hopeless and isolated. As for Clifford, he depends solely on Connie. There is no contact between the outside and her.
"No substance to her or anything... No touch, no contact! Only this life with Clifford, this endless spinning of webs of yarn, of the minutiae of consciousness, these stories Sir Malcolm said there was nothing in, and they wouldn't last." (Lawrence, 2004:24)
Day after day, life is just the same, Connie becomes lonely and desperate, she could do nothing but help Clifford with the writing. As Connie's father put it, she was going to become a "demi-vierge". Clifford's mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. "Their marriage, their life is based on the habit of intimacy. It words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingless, and over it a hypocrisy of words. There was Clifford's success: the bitch-goddness!" (Lawrence, 2004:20)#p#分页标题#e#
Slowly, Connie has a feeling that she was growing restless, a mad restless which thrills her body. She has nowhere to go, no one to talk to,for Clifford focus only on his stories." Vaguely she knew she was out of connexion." (Lawrence, 2004:23) She had lost touch the outside, the vital life. To her, Wraghy Hall is a prison and she is the prisoner, weeping in desperate. Wragby Hall thus appears as a kind of prison, its very aspect as oppressive as the atmosphere reigning inside, in distinct contrast with the natural environment outside its walls
4.2.2 Connie's Relationship with Michaelis
Just in time, there comes Michaelis who is a succesful Irish playwright. At that time Clifford often invite writers home to discuss stories, and Michaelis is one of them. Unlike Clifford, Michaelis didn't put on airs to himself, he had no illusions about himself, he is also sensible, which attracts Connie a lot. Afterwards, Connie has an affair with him. In some ways, Michaelis brings some fresh air to Connie's life, or else she would die of loneliness and despair.
However, " There is something childlike and defencelsess about his naked body." (Lawrence, 2004:27) Soon after, Connie finds that, Michaelis is like all other intellectuals: a slave to success, a purveyor of vain ideas and empty words. Besides these, he is such a selfish man, passionless. With Michaelis, Connie still feels hopeless, hence, when Michaelis asks Connie to marry him, Connie decides not to.
After Michaelis, Connie decides that she wants nothing in life. " Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living." (Lawrence, 2004:24) That's her fate, whether she wants it or not, she has to accept it. Connie is like a beautiful flower doom to die.
4.2.3 Connie's Awakening
One time, Clifford sends Connie to inform Mellors something, she sees Mellors having a shower. Connie is so shocked to see his body.
"Yet in some curious way it was a visionary experience: it had hit her in the middle of the body. She saw the clumsy breeches slipping down over the pure, delicate, white loins, the bones showing a little, and the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone. And beyond that, a certain beauty of a pure creature. Not the stuff of beauty, not even the body of beauty,but a lambency, the warm, white flame of a single life, revealing itself in contours that one might touch: a body! " (Lawrence, 2004:25)
That's is the first time Connie feels the beauty of body, the beauty of life, the vital life of a man, which Clifford could not offer.
Meanwhile, one night, she took off all her clothes, and looked herself in a mirror. Sadly she finds that her body has so much changed.
"Her breast were rather small, and dropping pear-shaped. But they were unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. And her belly had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of her German boy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and expectant, with a slack thinness. Her thighs, too, they used to look so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness, somehow they too were going flat, slack, meaningless." (Lawrence, 2004:68)#p#分页标题#e#
All of these makes her feel extremely miserable and depressed. There is no hope, she is getting old,old at twenty-seven,with no gleam and sparkle in flesh. All of sudden, she hates Clifford's mental life. "Unjust! Unjust! The sense of deep physical injustice burned to her very soul!" (Lawrence, 2004:68)
4.2.4 Connie's New Life
After hiring Mrs. Bolton, Connie has more spare time. She flees to the wood as possible as she could, where she can feel the nature and escape from the dead life of Wragby Hall.
" Then, one day, a lovely sunny day with great tufts of primroses under the hazels, and many violets dotting the paths, she came in the afternoon to the coops and there was one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round in front of a coop, and the mother hen clucking in terror. The slim little chick was greyish brown with dark markings, and it was the most alive little spark of a creature in seven kingdoms at that moment. Connie crouched to watch in a sort of ecstasy. Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life!" (Lawrence, 2004:113)
From the above, we can see that Connie loves nature, and from nature she gains a new life.
In the wood, Connie feel relaxed and comfortable. It is also in the wood, she encountered her true love: Mellors.
One day, Connie was upset as usual, she went to the wood, she wanted to touch the hens that Mellors raised. However, the mother-hen pecked Connie's hand, feeling rejected, all of sudden, Connie burst into tears, she couldn't hold her feelings, she just let it go. Mellors looked at her apprehensively, it seemed that he understand her anguish. That's the first time they had sex. For Connie, she couldn't figure out what was happening, she just lay there still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. Even after they had sex, Mellors is a stranger to Connie, he is cold, distant and rude. She resents his dialect, he can speak standard English, then why he talks to her in such a way? At first, she avoid seeing him, not going to the wood.
Then, she begins to love him, she deeply feels from the misery into joy,from death to life. "Connie went slowly home, realizing the depth of the other thing in her.Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and bowls, and with this self she adored him." (Lawrence, 2004:134)
Her feeling for him is complex, she used to weep after having sex, " I can't love you, but I want to love you, I can't, it only seems horrid" (Lawrence, 2004:174)
Meanwhile, she is attached to him, she is just afraid to love him. With Mellors, she is reborn, she falls in love with him. When a woman loves a man ,she wants to be loved in return. " Say you'll always love me!" she pleaded. (Lawrence, 2004:177)
Connie is totally in love with this man, as Lawrence puts it " it is divine love". Mellors arouses her sense of body. Connie is not just physically in love with Mellors, from their talk, she senses that he has his own understanding of love, relationship, nature and society. In a word, Connie regains life from Mellors.#p#分页标题#e#
4.3 Mellors
Mellors is the lover in the novel's title, he is the gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof, sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. His marriage with Bertha Coutts is a failure, it faltered because of their sexual incompatibility: she was too rapacious, not tender enough. At last, she separated from him but not divorced. After that, Mellors wants to have nothing to do with any woman any more, he wants to keep himself and to keep his privacy. Hence, he chooses to live in quite solitude. As far as he is concerned, the industrial noises broke the solitude, a man could no longer be private and withdrawn, so he hate the ruins the industry brings. Mellors is the son of nature, he lives in the wood, he does not want to be involved with any relationship. Therefore, when he meets Connie, he feels stuck in a complex confusion, he shows compassion to her miserable life, but he doesn't want to be involved in a relationship with a woman, any woman, to be exact, he doesn't want to be involved in the society.
" She, poor thing,was just a young female creature to him; but a young female creature whom he had gone into and whom he desired again". (Lawrence, 2004:119)
"He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast." (Lawrence, 2004:119)
Afterwards, he loves her, he loves her tenderness, which he thinks has gone out of the celluloid of women of today.
In fact, he was finely educated, he can speak standard English; however, he chooses to speak with a Perbyshire dialect to show contempt toward the upper class. He refuses to talk to Hilda in standard English because he thinks she is a hypocrisy.Different from Mrs Bolton, he despises the upper class, he even considers Clifford as " the sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls" (Lawrence, 2004:198)
In spite his experience, he does believe in something, he believes in being warm-heated, he believes in love. Inward, he is a true gentleman.
IV. Theme 主题
5.1 Lawrence's Attitude toward the Mechanical Civilization
Lawrence wages a strong criticism in his works against a civilization that has been turning bad, mechanical and repressive. In his opinion, the bourgeois Industrial revolution, which makes its realization at the cost of ravishing the land has stared the catastrophic up rooting of man from nature. Those profit-seeking capitalists, with the half-man, half –machine Clifford Chatterley as their typical representation, frenziedly worship the filthy materialism and the mechanism of matter to inflict their exploitative will in the workmen, the society and the earth. Under this mechanical civilization, extraordinary glories in science and speculation may be achieved, and society may attain the finest and subtlest veneer of prosperity; but human beings will be turned into unanimated matter, while the unanimated matter will be animated to destroy both man and earth. As a matter of fact, the whole western world has become a wretched picture of death or the living death o physical paralysis after the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence’s writing. Clifford Chatterley is the very character depicted by Lawrence in this condition.#p#分页标题#e#
At the beginning of novel, both Connie and Clifford love the "old England". " I want this wood perfect... untouched. I want nobody to trespass in it" said Clifford. (Lawrence, 2004:41)
However, the old England is history. One England has turned out to another. As Connie observes:
"The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shaply beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appelling. The stacks of the awful hats in the milliner's! All went by ugly, ugly, ugly," (Lawrence, 2004:68)
"The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical" (Lawrence, 2004:157)
5.2 Appeal to Return to Nature
Lawrence also cherishes a passionate love for the beauty of the nature world. From his early years, he has been aware that the ancient sacred wood in his hometown is steadily shrinking and that the dirty mines ravished the beautiful landscape, In the Lady Chatterley’s lover, Lawrence describes the beautiful wood and the log many times compared with the dirty mines that belong to Clifford Chatterley. In Lawrence’s opinion, the natural unspoiled place is corrupted by unnatural circumstances and the march of civilization: and the modern world has substituted, for the real and natural man, an artificial, mechanic controlled being that will inevitably be unhappy and unbalanced because his instincts has been suppressed. To revive the natural instincts of men and women and to establish an ideal community of human life on earth, Lawrence strongly advocates a return to nature, to primitive way of life. Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover are the symbols of returning to nature. Mellors, once a up-class gentleman, is tired of the mechanical world. Although he can speak Standard English, he would rather use crudity dialect when communicates with Commie and Clifford Chatterley. This makes him near to the nature.
Lawrence believes that modern industrial civilization to destroy the environment, while suppressing distortion of human nature, but also trampled on the devastation wrought on humanity and the sex instinct. Lawrence has thoroughly exposed the industrial civilization on the environment and human nature of the destruction, vigorously promote the return of love, return to nature.
5.3 The Relationship between Man and Woman
"The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment." Lawrence once wrote to justify the themes of his fiction, a statement which can be interpreted in several ways: the circumambient universe in Lady Chatterley’s Lover can be the age and world of industrialisation, but it also refers to the natural environment and the social one, in sharp opposition. The social environment described in the novel is so coercive and suffocating that Constance Chatterley’s personality seems confined and subjected; she cannot let it express itself, and to an artistic nature like hers it is particularly frustrating. A good example of the restraint forced upon her behaviour is the role she must play as hostess of Wragby Hall, a very paradoxical role. When "the cronies" have their evening debates she is not supposed to interfere or even admit she is listening, being a woman, yet she is required to sit in the background because her presence inspires them and gives them confidence. Likewise her role as hostess at the table is based on pretence since she presents their male guests with a look and manner of perfect innocence pleasing to them and must keep her thoughts to herself. Wragby thus appears as a kind of prison, its very aspect as oppressive as the atmosphere reigning inside, in distinct contrast with the natural environment outside its walls. Whereas some aspects of human personality and need can never fully be voiced through the social. And indeed the forest challenges Connie’s half-deadness, gradually reveals her true self, her potential, and coaxes her into reacting, in a way that her social life never could, despite the numerous conversations with her father and sister, aware of her decline. Nature therefore holds the part of a magic mirror, throwing light upon the characters’ unconscious thoughts and needs, facing them with the truth they refused to acknowledge. Most of the time it is through contrasts rather than parallels that the characters’ feelings are exposed because the discovery of their shortcomings must entail a response. The description of Connie’s first outing after her nervous depression #p#分页标题#e#
focuses on the manifestations of spring in the woods in the shape of new flowers and leaves:
"Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the celandine’s at the wood’s edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor. Cold breaths of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind, like Absalom. How cold the little anemones looked, bobbing their naked white shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding themselves." (Lawrence, 2004:110)
The abundance of flowers of several kinds, their omnipresence in the woods and the movement that suffuses the scene, conveyed by verbs such as "bobbing", "swaying", "rustling and fluttering and shivering", contribute to giving a sense of new life which makes a strong impression on Connie, herself deadened by the life at Wragby. But she clearly identifies with the struggling wind and this display of natural determination inspires her to take a hold on life and free herself from her ties to Clifford. The extended metaphor of the boat unmistakably emphasises her desire for freedom.
In the same way, Connie’s confrontation with the hens and then pheasant chicks brings her own infertility acutely home. The adjective "female", applied to the hens, is repeated many times in the space of a few lines to insist on the bond Connie feels between the hens and herself, as well as the realisation that she does not qualify as a female because she remains "unused". The brooding hens thus become a form of comfort to her thwarted femaleness and we could almost say she lives the incubation by proxy, feeding and watching over the mothers. The contrast between fertility and sterility is further emphasized by notions of hot and cold, the fecundity of the hens characterized by "heat", "warm", "hot", a warmth passed on to Connie, contrary to the "cold" and "cold-hearted" human world. Her encounter with the hatched chicks heightens her distress at not having children but it also triggers once again her admiration for life, more deeply than the flowers and tree had. Lawrence’s style here wonderfully portrays his protagonist’s excitement: an abundance of adjectives to qualify the chick convey her emotion, especially when they are repeated:"one tiny, tiny perky chicken tinily prancing round", along with several exclamations, more repetitions, an increasing ternary rhythm "Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life!" (Lawrence, 2004:113) and intensifying adverbs.
Connie and Mellors, as we have just seen, are brought together by Nature, first in the scene of the pheasant chicks, and closer still in the scene of the thunderstorm in the woods where their intimacy reaches its highest point, culminating in the "wedding of Lady Jane with John Thomas". (Lawrence, 2004:231)#p#分页标题#e#
5.4 The New Garden of Eden
Finally, the end of this scene depicts Connie’s final act of rebellion as she and Mellors run out naked into the rain, the shedding of her clothes a symbol of freedom equivalent to shaking off the shackles of civilisation. An allusion to the eurhythmic dance-movements she had learned so long ago in Dresden reinforces the notion of freedom since we know, thanks to the analepsis in chapter one, that her youth abroad was marked by independence. The rain itself appears as a source of purification and we could interpret Connie’s "sudden desire to rush out into the rain, to rush away" (Lawrence, 2004:223) as a need to be washed of her old self, of her social self, in which Mellors readily follows her.
This last episode is undoubtedly the best example of connection between human beings and Nature: the Constance we see here is in touch with the natural elements, no longer an empty shell "beautifully out of contact" as Lawrence ironically puts it . What’s more it is now she who leads the gamekeeper into connection with the cosmos and following Lawrence’s views on cosmology, their personal relationship is replaced by a more universal relationship. Yet we may wonder if such an illustration of his beliefs is enough to convince his readers of the necessity and urgency of turning back to Nature and saving it as well as themselves from destructive industrialism.
V. Conclusion 结论
To sum up, the paper has analysed the main characters of this novel and their personality. As mentioned above, Clifford is a selfish, vain, weak and cold-hearted man, he doesn't treat other people as a human. He is a representative as a profit-seeking capitalists. Thus, Connie feels desperate and hopeless, she is more dead than alive in Wraghy Hall . She is getting thinner and thinner until she meets Mellors, who is the gamekeeper in the wood. She is given a new life and finds true love.
In this novel Lawrence utilizes symbolism. Wragh Hall, symbolizes the upper class and capitalist; the mine stands for the tough life of miners and the hideous environment; the wood is the symbol of the old England, the harmonious nature; and Connie is the symbol of vital life regained from nature.
Lawrence also passionately praises the love between Connie and Mellors. D.H. Lawrence believes that without a realization of sex and body, the mind wanders aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover are the symbols of returning to nature.
From the above analyse, we can see human-being has to come back to nature. Only in nature can they be relaxed and comfortable. The industry not only destroys the environment, but also do harm to the physical and mental health of human-being. Therefore, Lawrence appeals again that we human being have to return to nature.
Bibliography 参考文献#p#分页标题#e#
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