On Death, Revival, And Disillusion In Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence is one of the most controversial writers in the twentieth-century English literature. Of all his fictional works, Lady Chatterley's Lover has incurred the fiercest censure. It concerns not just with the love affair between Connie and Mellors but with its author's effort at figuring out a way for Western cultures to wean themselves away from conventional social and hypocritical sexual mores.This thesis consists of three Chapters, apart from the introduction and the conclusion.In the introduction, the author of this thesis has a brief review of the critical studies on Lawrence concerning his fluctuating reputation in literary history, of his creating career, and finally of his charisma as an author. This thesis focuses on addressing the following two questions: (1) What is the real purport Lawrence originally intended for his most controversial novel LCL1 to carry, and what is the moral he intended for the novel to impart? (2) Is the solution Lawrence put forward in LCL applicable to modern Western society?LCL is a novel full of contrasts and dialectical thinking. The emphasis of Chapter One is laid on making an analysis of one of the two antithetic types of personality: the living dead, the epitome of which can be found in Sir Clifford staying in the Wragby hall, or in "the half corpse" miners drudging in Clifford's colliery. Both worship money, and both are devoted to the mechanistic organization. In the end, their human organism maimed, their Dionysian impulses defeated with the process of industrialization, they are becoming the living dead.Chapter Two presents an analysis of the reviving: How Connie and Mellors have been struggling to ward off the destruction of the "insentient iron world," and retrieve life forces2 by virtue of sexual consummation.The third Chapter is mainly concerned about the impossibility of the modern love myth to survive the besiegement of the modern industrial civilization. Like his contradictory love entanglement, Mellors cannot escape the vexation of "money squabble" in real life either. In the third part of this Chapter, Lawrence's sexual orientation will be touched on from the perspective of "the Lawrence problem." It can be readily perceived an attempt at dimming sexual crudity and dabbling in mysticism. In the novel a surge of male chauvinism is not too difficult to detect.The conclusion offers an affirmation of the positive meaning of Lawrence's statement that the insentient mass production and modern logocentric culture suppressed and distorted human nature, to the effect of physical damage and spiritual catastrophe. So modern people are being confronted with the responsibility of vitality-restoration and self-redemption. The only way out, as Lawrence believed, is to return to nature and be alive in a corporeal sense. But he exaggerated the role human physical existence can play in transforming the diseased Western society, and ignored the destructions of the "insentient iron world" on the forces. Second, Lawrence exalted female passivity. It is through yielding to the male urge that a woman can be fulfilled. Third, love needs the interactions of the two beloved minds; while Mellors and Connie rarely have real, intimate conversation. Lawrence seldom depicted the trace of the evolution of love. In the novel can be readily perceived an explicit tendency of obscuriticism and mysticism-...