Lady Chatterley's Lover Themes

Lady Chatterley's Lover Themes

The Body

Are we minds living in bodies, or are we bodies that just happen to have minds? Is the mind part of the body, or is it something different? Are you uncomfortably aware of your breathing right now?...

Men and Masculinity

Are you currently in possession of a set of male genitalia? If so, D.H. Lawrence would very much like you to put down your Xbox controller and go do something manly, like build a fire, convince som...

Women and Femininity

If you think that Lawrence is being a little hard on men in Lady Chatterley's Lover, wait until you hear what he has to say about women. When they're not being promiscuous, they're being frigid; th...

Sex

Finally, the dirty bits. And they're pretty dirty. But as tempting as it is to giggle about the insane way that Lawrence describes sex in Lady Chatterley's Lover, we should also look at the way he...

Love

Love comes after sex. This is one of the things that's most radical and shocking about Lady Chatterley's Lover. There's no "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Connie pushing a baby c...

Society and Class

Now we get to the nasty stuff. Lawrence is—there's no way to say this nicely—a prick. He hates the aristocracy and the intellectuals, but he hates the working classes even more. Sure, Mellors i...

Isolation

We hate to be the ones to tell you, but poking your girlfriend on Facebook (does anyone poke anymore?) isn't the same as actually hanging out with her. Connie discovers this to her dismay when she...

Wealth

D.H. Lawrence hates a lot of things—men, women, machines, London, Wragby, literature, idiots, modernity—but he hates money most of all. Because, he implies in Lady Chatterley's Lover, money mak...

Freedom and Confinement

There's a lot of entrapment in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Connie is trapped in an unhappy marriage; poor Clifford is trapped in a wheelchair; and Hilda, Connie's sister, is trapped in a prison of con...

Youth

You know what's really wrong with the world today? Young people. Yeah, Lawrence doesn't think much of the kids these days. In that sense, he's swimming against the tide in Lady Chatterley's Lover....