A Contrastive Study Of Lady Chatterley’s Lover And The Golden Lotus

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the last long novel of the British writer D.H. Lawrence(1885-1930). It is a story that concerns a young married woman Constance, or Connie (LadyChatterley), whose upper-class husband has been paralyzed and rendered impotent because ofthe First World War. In sexual frustration, she gets into love affairs with men outside hermarriage, especially with their gamekeeper Oliver Mellors and achieves her satisfactionspiritually and physically. Lawrence believed that “Ours is essentially a tragic age” and thebest way to save that age was sex.The Golden Lotus is an extremely important landmark in Chinese literature. It has beencrowned several “first”. The first long novel created by literati in China, the first long novelthat reflects the reality of the “current” society, the first long novel that describes thedomestic and social affairs in a detailed and direct way, the first long novel focusing onfemales. It is about the history of an upstart’s domestic and social life in the16thcentury ofChina. It’s protagonist Hsi-mên ch’ing was originally an owner of traditional Chinesemedicine shop. Through bribery and marriage, he accumulated tens of thousands of taels ofsilver and became an official. When he was alive, he enjoyed large sums of materials andlarge numbers of women. But after his death, his wealth was transferred to others quickly; hisconcubines soon became others’, too. The writer Xiaoxiaosheng wanted to satirize the reignof his age, the reality of the society as well as to warn people not to be too greedy, especiallynot to be too lusty.Many studies have been made about the two works; however, none of them areconducted by putting the two works together. This dissertation makes a contrastive study ofLady Chatterley’s Lover and The Golden Lotus, talks mainly about their differences as well assimilarities.On differences, the paper poses two chapters to analyze. The first one is about differentways of developing the themes of the two novels. In the second part, phallic consciousnessand mental consciousness are discussed.At the end of the paper, the author especially points out that there are also somesimilarities between the two novels. They are all full of pornographic descriptions and they were once forbidden books, even now, we can only buy abridged versions of The GoldenLotus in the mainland.The author hopes, through this study, people can get a better understanding of the twoworks, appreciate them from different and new ways, and can even change our views of thetwo novels.