Revitalizing the reader: literary technique and the language of sacred experience in D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover.'

Style, Spring, 1998 by Charles M. Burack

The vitalization phase is built around ten nodal erotic scenes: the introduction of Mellors (chapter 5); Connie's womb vision of Mellors's bathing himself (chapter 6); the seven sexual encounters between Connie and Mellors in or near the wood in the spring and summer (chapters 10-16); and the eighth and final sexual episode in London (chapter 18). Chapter 10 is the narrative center of the 19-chapter novel, and depicts Connie's first pivotal transformation: her experience of "another self . . . alive in her" (143).

The ordering and individual structure of these ten scenes reveal an initiatory design. The introduction of Mellors presents the sacred organic vocabulary and establishes Mellors as a vital figure. The womb vision conveys to readers the possibility of bodily consciousness and solidifies the sense of Mellors's vitality. This vitality qualifies him as a participant in an erotic initiation. This scene also establishes Connie's dynamic, sentient body as the primary focalization through which the reader's consciousness will vicariously undergo a conversion. The next eight erotic scenes, which depict thirteen acts of intercourse, are the most crucial episodes in the vitalization phase and are the main subject of my analysis. The first four episodes, which contain seven couplings, involve the progressive deployment of more numerous and more powerful vitalization devices and discourses to depict the experiences of Connie's body. The progressive increase of these devices is accompanied by a reduction in splintering techniques, for as Connie's and the reader's bodily consciousness is slowly awakened, there is less need for extensive and abrasive mental mortification. The next three sex scenes, which include five unions, break the mood of religious mystery and grandeur developed in the previous scenes and in effect deconstruct any tendency on the reader's part to overvalue the particular experiences or the language in which they are represented. The initial encounters were meant to vivify Connie and the reader, but these encounters are not to be idolized. If they produced their intended enlivening effect, that effect is now part of the reader's past experience. These scenes introduce a variety of erotic actions and feelings in order to convey to readers the sense that the numinous realm can be experienced in numerous ways once nondual awareness has been achieved through initiation. Moreover, they eschew complex literary devices in order to underscore the representational and incantatory limits of language. The eighth scene, which contains the thirteenth and final coupling, offers a psychonarration of Mellors's experience. The revelation of his anxious self-consciousness destablizes the impression he is an infallible initiator of Connie or the reader. His insecurity and fallibility indicate to readers that the relationship is the real initiator. Both characters are initiated by and through the relationship. For the reader, the initiator is the new narratorial consciousness.