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 first somatic localization is that of Mellors's libido, and the second is that of his hand. His libido is figured as a flame and is represented as a quasi-independent subject possessing its own intention, knowledge, and motion:

For suddenly he was aware of the old flame shooting and leaping up in his loins. . . . He fought against it. . . . But it leapt, and leapt downwards, circling in his knees. . . . And there was something so mute and forlorn in her, compassion flamed in his bowels for her. (122)

Mellors's libidinal flame is depicted as a sentient being. In this scene, its feeling is compassion, its intention is to soothe Connie, and its motions are quick and forceful like a wild animal's: shooting, leaping, darting, circling. Its action is stronger than, and contrary to, his personal will. Mellors has become a kind of burning bush at the mercy of the sacred compassion inflaming him. The narrator transvalues "compassion" by associating it with Mellors's bowels. The libidinal flame finds expression in Mellors's hand, and the hand then becomes a somatic subject whose focalization is rendered. As a representative of the body's divine force, the hand possesses its own desire, knowledge, motion, intention, sensation: "He laid his hand on her shoulder, and softly, gently, it began to travel down the curve of her back, blindly, with a blind stroking motion, to the curve of her crouching loins" (122-23). Mellors's hand is stressed in the first four sex scenes because he is the initiator of erotic connection. Lawrence's patriarchal logic required active male initiative and reactive female surrender, at least at the beginning of the relationship.(27) Once Connie is "born . . . a woman," she starts to initiate sexual contact and exploration (187-88). Moreover, regardless of who initiates connection, both Mellors and Connie have to surrender to their relationship. As somatic subject, the hand takes on the linguistic subject position and has a soft, gentle stroking motion that contrasts with the darting, shooting motion of the initial erotic impulse. The hand's blindness enables it to operate without ocular interference. A few paragraphs later, the hand's desire and knowledge are explicitly acknowledged: "Yet the hand knew, too, how to unclothe her where it wanted" (123).

The first two acts of intercourse are still largely dominated by Connie's resisting ocularcentric consciousness, but her bodily awareness is nevertheless activated for short periods. As a result, only small portions of each episode present her tactile localizations. In these passages, her skin registers the movements, desire, and knowledge of Mellors's body. For example, during their first coupling,

She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream. Then she quivered as she felt his hand groping softly. . . . Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him. (123)