Abstract
The antagonism many feminists feel about Lawrence’s portrait of Ursula Brangwen in Women in Love is exceeded by their anger at his claims for the sexual rebirth of Connie Chatterley. And just as these critics undervalue the essential criticism Ursula supplies for Birkin’s cherished beliefs, so do they often not admire — or even acknowledge — the real target that informs Lawrence’s characterization of Lady Chatterley: her gradual acceptance and ultimate understanding of Mellors’s brand of loving suggests the full extent of Lawrence’s disgust with what he disparagingly calls the ‘modern’ notions of sexuality and commitment popular in the 1920s. By the time of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence dogmatically associates his culture’s more liberal, post-war attitudes towards passion, gender roles, courtship, and marriage with a deadening mechanization (a ‘mentalizing’, as he often puts it) of the instinctive sexual impulse: ‘The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no one is this more true than of the free and emancipated young. Above all, their bodies are the bodies of trained dogs.’1 Thus not surprisingly today, considerable feminist displeasure often is directed at the structure, premises, and ethics of Lawrence’s most phallic novel; other aspects of recent ideological attacks variously are levelled at Mellors and/or Connie and the purported sexism of their characterizations.
‘A woman has no glamour for a man any more.’
‘Kiss me!’ she murmured.
‘Nay, wait a bit! Let me simmer down,’ he said.
That amused her.
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Notes
Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Harry T. Moore (ed.), Sex, Literature, and Censorship (New York: Viking, 1959), 87.
Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 101.
Lawrence, ‘Why the Novel Matters’, in Edward D. McDonald (ed.), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1972), 535.
Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Grove, 1959; London: Heinemann, 1963), 146. Page numbers in my text refer to the Grove edition.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970; London: Virago, 1977), 240.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Random House, 1975), 351–5.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 246.
Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 140.
Hilary Simpson, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press; London: Croom Helm, 1982), 17.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1957), 243.
Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959; London: Panther, 1980), 23.
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribners, 1954), 15.
Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), 118.
I shall deal with Millett’s indictment of Lawrence in the body of this essay, but I must note here that the recent response to Hemingway is comparably instructive. Much recent criticism often ignores any sustained analysis of Hemingway’s fictional heroines, and is content to make ad hominem attacks on what it regards as the inappropriateness of his preoccupations with war, courage, and sexual achievement. For instance, in a frenetic and politicized essay, that dismisses Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer from a list of acceptable writers, Vivian Gornick, the co-editor of the widely used college anthology, Woman in Sexist Society, reflects an approach similar to Florence Howe’s confident dismissal, in the 1980s American Association of Colleges report, of Lawrence’s purported message. She describes the ‘emotional adolescence’ of Hemingway, and then berates what she calls a ‘misogynistic culture’ that ‘subscribed to the same adolescent truths about men and women as Hemingway did, and experienced these truths as a metaphor for life’. Gornick uses the past tense, of course, in her proud recognition that she writes in the 1970s, and that ‘the culture no longer’ subscribes to these adolescent truths. In ‘Why Do These Men Hate Women?: American Novelists and Misogyny’, The Village Voice, 6 December 1976, 12–15.Even widely anthologized and more academic attempts to debunk Hemingway’s work evade an understanding of characters like Catherine Barkley. Wendy Martin, for instance, sees A Farewell to Arms as a ‘contemporary re-enactment of Eden’, a metaphor that she uses to pursue her view of Catherine as tainted with original sin, a mere ‘compliant companion’, whose death ‘expiates’ her sin of sleeping with Henry. Martin shows little concern for the strength that Catherine manifests throughout her ordeal, nor does Martin explain how the novel’s depiction of modern warfare functions in her strained allegorical reading. In ‘Seduced and Abandoned in the New World: The Image of Woman in American Fiction’, from Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran (eds), Woman in Sexist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 226–39. More recently Joyce Wexler, in ‘E.R.A. for Hemingway: A Feminist Defense of A Farewell to Arms’, in The Georgia Review, 35 (Spring 1981), 111–23, does understand what she properly regards as the ‘development’ of Catherine’s character, and she demonstrates the inadequacy of angry feminist attacks on Hemingway, typified by their inability ‘to regard Catherine as a distinct character’ (112). But as the politicized title of Wexler’s essay suggests, she is more interested in calming her feminist colleagues by indicating ways in which Catherine’s character can be accommodated to contemporary notions of the liberated woman. Her argument ultimately ignores the essence of Catherine’s poetic acceptance of the archetypal feminine, as Wexler implicitly pursues the totalitarian notion that only some form of variant feminism, operating in A Farewell to Arms, could make this work palatable. Such a response resembles the feminist analysis of Connie Chatterley that prefers her single sex life on the continent to her monogamous affair with Mellors.
Lawrence, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter’, in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964), 83–99.
Hemingway, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s 1966), 21.
Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968), 36.
Mailer, Marilyn (New York: Warner Books, 1975), 102.
Mailer, The Deer Park (New York: Putnam, 1955; London: Deutsch, 1959), 294.
For an interesting study of Stopes’s life and work, see Ruth Hall, Passionate Crusader: The Life of Marie Stopes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).
Ti-Grace Atkinson, ‘The Institution of Sexual Intercourse’, in Women’s Liberation: Notes from the Second Year (1970), 12. Quoted by Mailer in The Prisoner of Sex, 50.
W. D. Snodgrass, ‘A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live’, in The Hudson Review 11 (1958), 191–200, and reprinted in
Mark Spilka (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963), 117–26.
Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 177–204.
See Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex, 93–115, and Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon, 1976), 34–41.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, edited by George Ford and Sylvere Monod (New York: Norton, 1966), 17.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 227–48, and reprinted in part in Hard Times, 339–59. In this essay and in his first study of Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Knopf, 1955; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), Leavis does establish several provocative insights into Lawrence’s work by noting the apparent influence of Dickens on the later novelist. The essay in The Great Tradition on Hard Times makes note of the similar environments of Coketown and Tevershall, although Leavis does not pursue my notions about the relation between the ‘machine’ and sexual passivity.
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© 1989 Peter Balbert
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Balbert, P. (1989). Feminist Displeasure and the Loving of Lady Chatterley: Lawrence, Hemingway, Mailer, and the Dialectic of ‘Sex-with-Guilt’. In: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19889-4_6
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