Oliver Mellors as imagined on
Oliver Mellors was an ex-soldier turned gamekeeper; so it's not so strange that he carries a gun. One suspects, however, that the sense of menace he conveys is unrelated to the fact that he's armed. At any rate, Connie Chatterley's first reaction is one of fear, not desire. Upon seeing him, she felt threatened as he emerged from the woods in his "dark green velveteens and gaiters [...] with a red face and red moustache" [46].
The narrator tells us Mellors was "going quickly downhill" [46] and it's uncertain whether this refers to his direction of travel, or to a state of spiritual and physical decline due to his isolation and ill health (Connie soon notices his frailty and the fact he has a troublesome chest; a recent bout of pneumonia having left him with a cough and breathing difficulties).
Mellors has a thick head of fair hair and blue all-seeing eyes that sparkle with mockery, yet have also a certain warmth. In terms of build, he was "moderately tall, and lean" [46] and Lawrence writes admiringly of his slender loins and slender white arms. When Connie first spies him semi-naked, she finds it a visionary experience. It's not that he's conventionally good-looking or sturdy of physique - in fact he's rather weedy and looks older than his 38 years - but he has something strangely attractive about him: "the warm white flame of a single life revealing itself" [66] in his body.
Later, when she gazes with wonder as he stands before her fully-naked, Connie decides that her lover is piercingly beautiful:
"Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. [...] The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong. There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body." [209]
Mostly, however, Connie is fascinated with his erect penis, one of the most famous members in literature; "rising darkish and hot-looking from the cloud of vivid gold-red hair" [209]. We also discover that Mellors likes to refer to his big, thick, hard and overweening dick by the popular slang term John Thomas.
Of course, Mellors is more than a walking penis: he has a mind and likes to read books of all kind, including works about contemporary political history and modern science. He even has a few novels on his book shelf (though, unfortunately, Lawrence doesn't reveal what they are).
Mellors also has the ability - increasingly rare amongst modern people - to act in silence with soft, swift movements, as if slightly withdrawn or invisible; like an object. In other words, he has presence, but he wasn't quite all there in a fully human sense; he lacked what might be termed personality.
At the same time, he stares with a fearless impersonal look into Connie's eyes, as if trying to know her as an animal might know its prey. This naturally intensifies her sense of unease and she decides he's a "curious, quick, separate fellow, alone but sure of himself" [47].
In other words, Mellors is a cocky little so-and-so, aloof with his own sense of superiority, despite his lowly social status and the fact he walks with a stoop. Little wonder that Clifford finds him impertinent and something of an upstart: '"He thinks too much of himself, that man.'" [92] Similarly, Connie's sister, Hilda, isn't keen on Mr Mellors, finding his use of dialect affected (which it is - though he mostly deploys it as a defence mechanism in times of social anxiety, so it's really a sign of his own insecurity).
Perhaps his defining characteristic, however, is rage: Mellors is angry with everyone pretty much all of the time. He's angry with the bosses; he's angry with the workers; he's angry with men; he's angry with women - he's even angry with his own small daughter for crying when he shoots a cat in front of her: '"Ah, shut it up, tha, false little bitch!'" [58] No wonder the poor child is frightened of him and that even his own mother admits he has funny ways. When Connie asks him why he has such a bad temper, he replies: "'I don't quite digest my bile.'" [168]
Perhaps this helps to explain why he just wants to keep himself to himself: "He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be alone." [88] He even resents the company of his dog, Flossie (too tame and clinging). For Mellors, solitude equates with freedom. And contact with others - particularly women - only results in heartache. Mellors is not so much a social discontent as a man on the recoil from the outer world (and from love).
Unfortunately, all it takes is a single tear falling from Connie's eye for "the old flame" [115] to leap up again in his loins ... Before he knows where he is or what he's doing, he's fucking her Ladyship on an old army blanket spread carefully on the floor of his hut. For Mellors is a man of desire - and also a man prepared to submit to his fate (no matter how grim).
He's not a man, however, greatly concerned with pleasuring his partner: "The activity, the orgasm was his, all his ..." [116] Afterwards, having caught his breath and lain for a while in mysterious stillness, he buttons up his breeches and exits the hut to ponder what it means for his soul to be broken open again. He rather regrets that her ladyship has cost him his privacy and brought down upon him a "new cycle of pain and doom" [119].
Having escorted Connie home - and inwardly raged against the industrial world with its evil electric lights - Mellors returns home "with his gun and his dog [...] and ate his supper of bread and cheese, young onions and beer" [119]. If it's true that you are what you eat, then this makes Mellor's an extremely simple soul; simple, and rather innocent in the Nietzschean sense of not being troubled by guilt or a sense of sin: "He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself." [120]
(Later, however, Mellors admits to Connie that he is afraid: "'I am. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid o' things'" [124] - things being people and consequences.)
Having finished his supper, he returns to the darkness of the woods, gun in hand, and with his penis stirring restlessly as he thought of Connie. The turgidity of his desire is something he greatly enjoys, as it makes him feel rich. What he doesn't much care for, however, is French kissing - as Connie finds out to her chagrin when she mistakenly offers him her mouth with parted lips one time and asks for a post-coital kiss goodbye.
He speaks of tenderness, but Mellors is much more a wam, bam, thank you ma'am, kinda guy. Thus one day, he bumps into Connie in the woods and forces himself upon her, despite her words of protest and gestures of resistance:
"He stepped up to her, and put his arm round her. She felt the front of his body terribly near to her, and alive.
'Oh, not now! Not now!' she cried, trying to push him away." [132]
Ignoring this, Mellors forces her to lie down - like an animal - and is in such a hurry to fuck her that he literally snaps her knicker elastic: "for she did not help him, only lay inert" [133].
I wouldn't go so far as to characterise this as a rape scene, but some readers might and, at the very least, it demonstrates that Mellors has scant concern for notions of consent.
Indeed, rather than worry about the finer points of sexual politics and etiquette, he prefers to reminisce about his childhood (he was a clever boy); his estranged wife Bertha (she was brutal); his life in the army (he loved his commanding officer); his own poor health (weak heart and lungs); or the lack of any real difference between the classes (all are now slaves to money and machinery - or tin people, as he calls them).
These things certainly troubled him and kept him awake at night. But when engaged in conversation with Connie one evening, he reveals that the real source of his resentment and bitterness is his failure to form a satisfactory sexual relationship. His first girlfriend, he says, was sexless - and his second also "'loved everything about love, except the sex'" [201].
Then came Bertha Coutts - whom he marries - and she loves to fuck. So, for a while, he's happy: "'I was as pleased as punch. That was what I'd wanted: a woman who wanted me to fuck her. So I fucked her like a good un.'" [201] But then the arguments start - and the domestic violence: "'She flung a cup at me and I took her by the scruff of the neck and squeezed the life out of her. That sort of thing!'" [201]
Even worse, according to Mellors' account, is the fact that Bertha preferred to grind her own coffee:
"'She'd never come off when I did. Never! She'd just wait. If I kept back for half an hour, she'd keep back longer. And when I'd come and really finished, then she'd start on her own account, and I had to stop inside her till she brought herself off, wriggling and shouting.'" [201-02]
Mellors hates women like this; just as he hates those women who encourage non-vaginal ejaculation - '"the only place you should be, when you go off'" [203] - or women who insist he withdraw prior to ejaculation and then '"go on writhing their loins till they bring themselves off'" against his thighs [203].
Women like this, he tells Connie, are mostly all lesbian - consciously or unconsciously - and this triggers his violent homophobia: '"When I'm with a woman who's really lesbian, I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'" [203]
Now, I don't know what Connie thinks of all this - although she nervously protests some of what he says - but such overt misogyny and reactionary sexual stupidity is pretty shocking and shameful to many readers today and does make it hard to find Oliver Mellors a likeable figure. And the casual racism only makes things worse: '"I thought there was no real sex left: never a woman who'd really 'come' naturally with a man: except black women - and somehow - well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.'" [204]
As I said earlier, Mellors talks a lot about tenderness and the need for warm-heartedness, but there's a nastiness in him - and more than a touch of madness, as he fantasises, for example, about the end of mankind: '"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species [...] it calms you more than anything else.'" [218]
Again, to her credit, Connie isn't quite convinced by this. And she knows that Mellors still hopes that the human race might find a way into a new revealing - if only the men might learn to wear bright red trousers and short white jackets:
'"Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket, then the women 'ud begin to be women.'" [219]
This longed for revolt into style - and desire for gender authenticity where men are men and women are women - is at the heart of Mellors's völkisch utopian vision, along with neo-paganism and certain eugenic proposals, such as severely restricting the number of births; '"because the world is overcrowded'" [220]. That might be true, but it's probably not the kindest thing to tell the woman carrying your unborn child.
In sum: whilst Mellors might have natural distinction, he lacks discretion and seems to go out of his way to upset people - even those who, like Duncan Forbes, are trying to help him and Connie. He tells Duncan, an artist, that he finds his work sentimental and stupid and that it "murders all the bowels of compassion in a man'" [286], and so succeeds in gaining himself one more enemy in the world.
Ever alert to the slightest hint of insult, Mellors is thus outrageously rude to other people - many of whom, including Clifford and Bertha, he wants to have shot. When Connie points out that's not being very tender towards them, he says:
"'Yea, even the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.'" [280]
Connie tries to convince herself that he isn't being serious when he says such things. But Mellors is quick to put her right: he'd shoot them soon enough, '"and with less qualms than I shoot a weasal" [280].
Does this make him a bumptious lout and a miserabe cad, as Clifford says? Or "more monstrous and shocking than a murderer like Crippen" [267] as the local people think?
Maybe, maybe not ...
But Oliver Mellors is certainly no angel and shouldn't be thought an heroic figure. He might write a fine letter and he might have a good cod on him (as Connie's father likes to assume), but this Lawrentian bad boy is a bad son, a bad husband, a bad father, a bad employee, a bad citizen, and - unless one likes it rough and Greek style - a bad lover ...
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993). All page numbers given in the post refer to this edition of the novel.
