Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Foucauldian InterPretation

Lady Chatterley's Lover, the last novel written by David Herbert Lawrence, has engendered critical interest and controversy than his other works mainly due to its explicit and strong expressions of sexual lives of men and women. Studies upon this novel conducted by Chinese critics, though valuable for our analysis and appreciation of Lawrence's attempt and achievement in this novel, are mainly concerned with interpretation of sex acts and their symbolic meaning, suggesting that Lady Chatterley, like a dormant princess, has to be awakened by phallic potency and male sexuality of her gamekeeper Oliver Mellors, namely, through male empowerment over female, and reaches her true fulfillment only by submitting her body and soul to him. Based on the recognition of what formalist, biographical, sociological and feminist approaches have achieved so far, I find the type of interpretive perspective that has a particular effect on Lady Chatterley's Lover is inspired by Michel Foucault's notion of sexuality and power. This thesis therefore attempts to take a Foucauldian perspective and reevaluate sexual love between Connie and Mellors, holding that Connie and Mellors, no matter who initiates sexual contact, both have to surrender to their mutual relationship which is fundamentally a system of various power relations. Another conclusion we may draw is that the explicit sex description in Lady Chatterley's Lover indicates Lawrence's special way of fighting against threat to natural, fulfilled life posed by modern industrialization.