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

Throughout Lady Chatterley, Mellors is linked, metonymically and metaphorically, to a variety of organic phenomena in order to establish a connection between human and nonhuman vitality and to energize the reader's response to him. For example, when he is bathing, he is compared to "a weasel playing with water"; when he runs after and catches Connie, "he took her . . . like an animal"; and just before he weds John Thomas to Lady Jane, "he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body" (68, 240, 246). The continued use of organic images and figures creates the impression that he undergoes metamorphoses like those experienced by the characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The very profusion of organic images applied to Mellors has the net effect of producing imagistic confusion in readers' minds and of blocking their ocularcentric consciousness. That is, as the visual elements of the organic images collide, coalesce, and in effect cancel one another, readers come to associate Mellors with the common life energy associated with those images.(21)

Integrating and Energizing the Reader's Consciousness

The first four sex scenes, which cover seven couplings distributed throughout chapters 10 and 12, are the most critical for initiating the reader. Their aim is to integrate and energize the reader's consciousness and produce a nondual awareness in which subject and object seem to merge. Thus, as Connie and Mellors seem to coalesce, so too is the reader made to identify more and more closely and intensively with their vivid, unifying experience. As Connie responds with awe or wonder to the elemental quality of the interchange, so too is the reader expected to respond with like feelings to the rhythmic language containing dynamic elemental images.

Even the scenes preceding Connie's sacred encounters with Mellors are designed to energize the reader. Most of the frames depict Connie's emotional or physical contact with the creatures of the wood. They prepare readers by putting them in the kind of receptive mood they might have when in nature. Some of the charged diction in these frames is used in subsequent erotic episodes. The carrying over of feeling from frame to main scene is usually assisted by the narrator describing a sympathetic connection between Connie and her natural surrounding. Moreover, her erotic development is implicitly linked to the growth of the wood's organic life. She and the trees are linked by their common sentience and inwardness: "From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world. She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees" (67). Lawrence always emphasized that being connected to the living universe means experiencing the rhythms of decay and growth in the natural environment and being synchronized with those same rhythms in the body.(22) A main narratorial task of the sacralization phase is the coupling of rhythms: of Connie's, the wood's, Mellors's, the text's, and the reader's.