Clifford Chatterley
Rather like Jed Mercurio, whose recent adaptation of
Lady Chatterley's Lover for the BBC caused some consternation in Lawrence circles, I'm increasingly sympathetic to the figure of Sir Clifford Chatterley. For whilst, metaphorically speaking, the war had
brought the roof down over his wife's head, it was he, poor devil, not she, who had been shipped home from Flanders
more or less in bits, paralysed from the waist down, and in need of constant medical care for two full years.
The narrator tells us Clifford had a marvellous hold on life and that, despite the nature of his injuries, he was not really downcast. Indeed, Clifford remained bright and cheerful - "almost, one might say, chirpy, with his ruddy, healthy-looking face, and his pale-blue, challenging bright eyes". What's more, Clifford also kept up a certain dandyish display of style: "He was expensively dressed, and wore handsome neckties from Bond Street."
One might very reasonably admire such stoicism, but the narrator seems keen to foreclose this possibility. Clifford, he says, isn't courageously indifferent in the face of pain and misfortune, rather, having been so badly hurt, "the capacity for suffering had to some extent left him ... something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone". All that was left, writes Lawrence, was blank insentience and the "slight vacancy of a cripple". In other words, Clifford is not only physically paralysed, he's numbed in soul.
We are also informed that, even before his injury, Clifford wasn't a particularly passionate man. Still virgin at twenty-eight when he married Connie, the sex between them didn't mean much to him; it was just "one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary".
Having said that, he, like her, longed for a son and heir and hoped that he might one day regain some degree of potency, desperately trying to convince himself that he wasn't really mutilated and that the possibility of an erection wasn't entirely out of the question, even if the muscles of the hips and legs were paralysed: "'And then the seed may be transferred.'"*
Even, if need be, Clifford is open to the possibility of raising another man's child born of Connie as his own. Connie sees the logic of his thinking on this question; but she also finds it monstrous and slowly but surely she begins to turn against Clifford. Acknowledging that he wasn't to blame for the situation they found themselves in - and that his was the greater misfortune - she also concludes that he was responsible for the lack of tenderness between them: "He was never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bred, cold sort of way!"
In this way, Connie justifies her rejection and sexual betrayal of her husband: "Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him off. ... Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What is more, she felt she had always really disliked him." Before long, this dislike has become pure hate:
"For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself."
Charming! No wonder then that he eventually turns to his nurse and housekeeper, Mrs Bolton, for comfort and affection: "At first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her fingers ... But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness." After his breakdown, following Connie's decision to abandon him, Clifford and Mrs Bolton draw into a closer physical relationship:
"He would hold her hand, and rest his head on her breast, and when she once lightly kissed him, he said! 'Yes! Do kiss me! Do kiss me!' And when she sponged his great blond body, he would say the same! 'Do kiss me!' and she would lightly kiss his body ... And then he would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation ... Mrs Bolton was both thrilled and ashamed, she both loved and hated it. Yet she never rebuffed nor rebuked him."
Lawrence describes this as an intimacy of perversity, but his characterization of the relationship as such betrays something both limited and limiting - and at times deeply unpleasant - in his own thinking on sex and disability. The fact is, whilst Lawrence posits genital intercourse as the only truly legitimate and authentic sex act, others of us are happy to experience and experiment with a far wider range of pleasures and not worry whether these be counterfeit, unnatural, decadent or perverse in character. We're happy also to accept that people with disabilities may - through choice or necessity - differ in the manner they express their sexuality.
One way or another, it's Mrs Bolton who makes a man of Clifford and rouses him to action in the world:
"And in this Mrs Bolton triumphed. 'How he's getting on!' she would say to herself in pride. 'And that's my doing! My word, he'd never have got on like this with Lady Chatterley. She was not the one to put a man forward. She wanted too much for herself.'"
This, I think, is true: acutely aware of her own feelings and desires throughout the novel, Connie never seems to consider that Clifford had also been gradually dying within the marriage and that she had neglected him and his needs. By the time she's fucking Mellors, she doesn't touch her husband any longer; not even hold his hand. Yet she blames their lack of physical intimacy entirely on Clifford and his impotent cruelty.
I don't, like Clifford, believe that Connie's actions indicate she's abnormal or insane, or one of those perverted women who must run after depravity. But I do think her selfish and somewhat fickle. And I do rather sympathise with Clifford, in a way that I didn't twenty years ago when I thought of her as an embodiment of the New Eve and of him only in the wholly negative - often ablelist - terms suggested by the author-narrator.
*Note: The exact nature and extent of Clifford's spinal cord injury isn't made clear in the novel and so there is no reason for us as readers to pour scorn on his hopes. Nor should we subscribe to the mistaken idea, prevalent amongst the non-disabled, that disabled persons are incapable of enjoying an active and fulfilling sex life, replete with orgasms. For decades, the medical community assumed - logically, but incorrectly - that paraplegics such as Clifford couldn't experience the latter. But now, thanks to recent research in this area, we know differently. There is only one thing that definitively precludes such and that is massive damage to the sacral nerve roots at the base of the spine which interferes with the automatic nervous system. For orgasm is an internal (automatic) reflex, not a somatic sensation transmitted from skin and muscle movement and it needn't be exclusively genital in character; some people with spinal cord injuries develop compensatory erogenous zones allowing them to experience orgasms triggered by stimulation applied, for example, to their necks, knees, or nipples. You're triggering the same sacral reflex, just doing so via different routes. Mary Roach describes these non-genital orgasms rather nicely as immaculate; see chapter eleven of her work on the scientific study of sex, Bonk, (Canongate, 2008).
See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
