Richard Madden as Oliver Mellors in the BBC TV adaptation of
Lady Chatterley's Lover, dir. Jed Mercurio (2015)
Lawrence famously completed three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and there are significant differences between the gamekeeper, Parkin, who appears in the first and second versions of the novel, and the gamekeeper Mellors who emerges with swift menace from out of the woods to fuck Connie in the third.
Indeed, there are also significant variations in character between Parkin the first and Parkin the second (whom I'll refer to here as P1 and P2) and I shall touch on some of these as I trace out the becoming-Mellors of Oliver Parkin in terms of a becoming-woman and becoming-hors classe of the working man.
There were two major problems presented by the stubborn, semi-literate, and class-bound P1: firstly, he doesn't make a very convincing lover for a woman like Connie; secondly, he doesn't make a very convincing advocate for a writer like Lawrence. Ultimately, both Connie and Lawrence seem frustrated and disappointed with P1, who ends the novel employed in a Sheffield steel mill and as secretary of the local communist party, having deteriorated into someone dreary and political.
And so P1 is replaced by the superior model, P2. Or, at any rate, a less angry and resentful figure; someone more concerned with preserving his own virile integrity, rather than promoting world revolution and killing the upper-classes. P2 wants to put his hands around the body of a woman, not round the throats of the rich. In other words, he's more of a lover than a militant and Lawrence repeatedly emphasizes his sensitivity and difference from other men.
For her part, Connie actively encourages P2 to develop his touchy-feely side and produce a molecular woman within his molar male subjectivity. It's not that she wants to feminize or emasculate her lover, but she wants him to explore and experience otherness. P2 concedes the importance of this, but he nevertheless speaks of his becoming-woman with intense bitterness on occasion and admits to finding the process terribly humiliating. For, unfortunately, he equates becoming-woman with a loss of manliness. This greatly angers and disappoints Connie - and so, just like P1, he has to go.
His replacement, Oliver Mellors, is an altogether different kettle of fish. Not quite a gentleman, but far more cultured and better educated than either P1 or P2, Mellors is able to move fairly freely through society and, indeed, move outside of class altogether. For Mellors shares Lawrence's view that ultimately it makes no sense to think or act in terms of class when the whole of mankind has today become robot. That is to say, a vast homogeneous body of slaves all integrated into the same system of capital.
If there remains any theoretical opposition, it is no longer between classes as such, but between the robot mass of humanity and those very rare few who, miraculously, remain on the outside and might potentially sabotage the Machine; outlaws and outcasts such as Mellors who do not fit in (and who do not want to fit in); singular men and women who are not so much déclassé as hors-classe.
If Mellors remains quite consciously afraid of the Machine that sparkles with malevolence and electric lights, he is nevertheless free from all sense of shame when it comes to sex. Lawrence tells us that Mellors had "No sense of wrong or sin: he was troubled by no conscience in that respect." He accepts that his affair with Connie will bring trouble his way - that the fatality of love invariably involves a new cycle of pain - but any post-coital anxiety is quickly replaced by a defiant joy and the desire to make the world anew, or, at the very least, protect the tenderness of life.
This, ultimately, is all Mellors can hope to do; keep his peace of soul and abide by the little forked flame fucked into being between himself and Connie, whilst dreaming of a democracy to come in which people sing, dance, and walk naked and light along the Open Road.
In Mellors, Connie finally finds a man whose child she is happy to bear. That said, she's not prepared to marry him in any hurry having just got rid of one husband ...
See: D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
See also: Stephen Alexander, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), Part 4, chapter 12, from where the material for this post has been taken in an edited and revised form.
