Sexuality And Power: A Foucauldian Reading Of D.H.Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover

One discovers in most mainstream Lawrence criticism a more or less uncontested repetition of Lady Chatterley's Lover's male empowerment over female. Lady Constance Chatterley, like a dormant princess, is awakened by phallic potency and male sexuality of her gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and finally reaches true fulfillment only by submitting herself to him. Thus, it ends up being the very target of feminist criticism on Lawrence's misogynistic violence and male chauvinism in his writing.This thesis intends to argue against such a bias by reevaluating sexual relation between Connie and Mellors in light of Michel Foucault's conception of sexuality and power. In other words, the relationship between sexuality and power in the context of Lady Chatterley's Lover is given a detailed analysis both from Lawrentian and Foucauldian perspective.The paper will be organized in five parts. Chapter One introduces the reader to Foucault's notions of sexuality and power. Chapter Two presents Lawrence's opinions on sexuality and power. The two parts lay sound theoretical (both Foucauldian and Lawrentian) bases for the ensuing interpretations of sexual relations (of Connie-Mellors and of Connie-Clifford) in the next two sections. Chapter Three follows with a Foucauldian power analysis of Connie-Mellors sexual relation to prove that they both participate in a transformative relationship. They save each other through the sex act shared between two sides, not one dominating the other and the o ther surrendering to the one but each becoming a part of the other. On the basis of the power analysis of sexual relations in the third part, Chapter Four is then devoted to Lawrence's novelized examination of social control on sex, to which his solution is to write openly about sexual relations between men and women. The novel is a manifestation of the writer's fighting against social repression of sexuality. Finally I will bring the previous discussions to a terse conclusion. And it is expected that it can offer the reader a new angle and help achieve a better understanding of Lawrence and his works.