On Male Dominance In Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover is the last and the most controversial work of D. H. Lawrence's. It despises the modern civilization by means of exploring human sexuality in explicit detail. It has been hotly criticized after its publication. Much attention is paid to its theme---criticism of the mechanized industrial civilization, and to the morality---whether sexuality should be depicted in such a detail or not. Although there is much literature criticism on Lawrence and his works, as far as I know, not much criticism is made from stylistics, especially the feminist stylistic perspective. Therefore, this paper is to make an attempt to its sexual theme of this novel from a feminist stylistic approach.In her Feminist Stylistics, Mills has suggested ways in which those concerned with the representation of gender relations might draw on linguistic and language analysis to develop a set of tools which could expose the workings of gender at a range of different levels in texts. As feminist readers, therefore, we need two kinds of information to construct the possible readings of a text. First, we need to make a close textual analysis of the text, identifying the cues to interpretation. Second, we need to make some generalized predictions about groups of readers'background knowledge By using these two kinds of information, we can build up a picture of how specified social groups might read a text.In the light of the above method, the paper discusses the novel at the levels of sentence and discourse. At the sentence level, by analyzing the transitivity choice, I find that material process is dominate and in most cases Mellors, the hero, is active and in a position of dominating others while Connie, the heroine, is passive and in a position of being dominated by her lover in their love affair. At the discourse level, characters/roles, phallic consciousness and fragmentation are discussed. It is easy to find that Lawrence is actually advocating that male's phallus is the root of male's supremacy and a female can only serve as the prey of a male. This paper shows that Lawrence holds a chauvinist idea towards women and male dominance is easily seen all over the novel. Such ideas of Lawrence's are closely related to his unhappy marriage life, his loss of sexual potency and the die-hard traditional idea of male dominance at that time. When enjoying the charm of the novel, we need to keep wide our critical eyes and guard against the harmful idea of male dominance hidden in the novel.