Before long, Connie and Mellors have sexual intercourse, which “lift[s] a great cloud from her, and give[s] her peace.” After the first time Connie and the gamekeeper “come-off together,” her sexless husband Clifford detects “something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible.” Indeed, much has changed: “the flux of new awakening,” “the new bath of life,” “the voiceless song of adoration.” The sex itself is her newfound salvation: “Connie would not take her bath this evening. The sense of his flesh touching her, the very stickiness upon her, was dear to her, and in a sense, holy.”42
Some time later, after a rapturous night in which “the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her”—the “sharper, more terrible… thrills” of anal sex—Connie compares her experience with Mellors to that of Abélard and Héloïse as well as the Greek gods, the electric sensation “burning the soul to tinder”: “The refinements of passion, the extravagances of sensuality! And necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity. With the fire of sheer sensuality.” While Connie had before imagined that a woman would die of humiliation at such sexual abandon into “the last and deepest recess of organic shame,” instead she experienced blissful wonderment and dissolution of all embarrassment and fear; “naked and unashamed,” she was stripped to “the real bed-rock of her nature.” It was a triumph: “So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.” Poets and purportedly civilized people were “liars” for trying to persuade people they wanted sentiment, when “what one supremely wanted was this piercing, consuming, rather awful sensuality. To find a man who dared do it, without shame or sin or final misgiving!” Refinement and coarseness merge through this consuming, purifying union of lady and gamekeeper—both joyous, and she finally alive to “the very heart of the jungle of herself” after years of walking death.43
By novel’s end, Connie is pregnant with their child, and both are seeking divorces from their livid spouses so that they may be permanently wed to each other. Theirs was what Lawrence called “a deeper morality” than obliging people’s ordinary “little needs”: the morality of seeking out the full achievement of the rhythm of life and death, the “vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.” This rhythm emerged tangibly in love: When Connie asks what Mellors believes in, he pauses before responding, “I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.” Later, after Connie tells Mellors that what distinguishes him from other men is “the courage of your own tenderness,… like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail,” he bluntly boils down his own quality of tenderness to its perfect essence: “cunt-awareness,” or the courage to touch another embodied, passionate soul. “Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it’s touch we’re afraid of.” The final sentence of the whole book comes from a letter Mellors sends to Connie, a droll farewell from his penis to her vagina: “John Thomas says good-night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart—.” However contrived, turgid, sexist, or absurd any of this may sound, the novel’s worship of ecstatic physical union could not be more obvious.44
Lawrence was not entirely alone in writing of sex this way, but his popularity made him a sort of spiritual tribune for a new sexual morality. In his own repeated clarifications of his aims in writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence said that he sought to write of the beauty, holiness, and cleanliness of sex, over against pornography (which he elsewhere defined as “the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it”). He was delighted to see the “real revolution” in sexuality wrought by the young, whom he praised for “rescuing their young nudity from the stuffy, pornographical hole-and-corner underworld of their elders, and… refus[ing] to sneak about the sexual relation.”45 Defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover against the censors, Lawrence explained, “And this is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly and cleanly.”46 Restoring the “deeper… greater morality” of humankind required returning to “vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.” The solution Lawrence offered was not Christian—he believed it was older than Christianity, Plato, or Buddhism—for “the Christian religion lost, in Protestantism finally, the togetherness with the universe, the togetherness of the body, the sex, the emotions, the passions, with the earth and sun and stars.” But “sex is the great unifier,” and “in its big, slower vibration it is the warmth of heart which makes people happy together, in togetherness.”47 Lawrence’s eclectic religious interests took in far more than Christianity, but there was no doubt that he perceived sexuality in profoundly sacred terms.
Many of Lawrence’s detractors deemed him abnormally obsessed with sex and offered armchair psychological diagnoses explaining his fixation. He was “a sex-crucified man,” one wrote in typical fashion—a casualty of warped cravings for whom sex was “a means of escape that will give him neither refuge nor rest, a perpetual thorn in the spirit, a reminder of his own insufficiency and weakness and lack of courage.” A tortured man whose art was merely self-justifying autobiography: such was the ignominy heaped on Lawrence long after his death.48
The censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover supposedly centered on its steamy depictions of adulterous sex. But take another look at the full context of that sexual activity. The traditional marriage between the aristocratic and sedentary Clifford and bored but dutiful Connie is one of hierarchy and the subordination of a submissive wife to her sexless but demanding husband; against that arrangement, Connie chooses to be with a common man of a much lower class, one who disbelieves in such hierarchies and who is muscular, carnal, and erotically thrilling. Mellors speaks crudely yet treats her as an equal and speaks openly about viewing her sexual fulfillment as important as his own. Connie rejects aristocratic roles and norms of propriety in favor of a simpler, more modest life with an unrefined man who seems wholly indifferent to social conventions, disdainful of manufactured measures of social class, and untroubled by sexual equality. Hers is an unambiguous rejection of civilized society with its hierarchies and upward ambitions, in favor of the rough-and-tumble world of intimate passion she fashioned with Mellors in the forest. It is this world, characterized by freedom and personal abandon, that Lawrence promises will nourish and sustain Connie and Mellors over time, in contrast to the cramped, angry, and stifling realm of conventional wedlock.
For traditional audiences, the scandal of the book was not merely sex or an unfaithful tryst. The greater outrage was the wholesale repudiation of traditional marriage, gendered order, and elite male power. The book described more than secret infidelity, the kind that might just tear apart a marriage; it bespoke the annihilation of cherished social norms, if not Christian civilization itself.
LAWRENCE’S RELIGIOUS VISION OF SEX was controversial. However much he battled the censors and sought to explain the far distance between his writings and obscene pornography, he could not overcome their hostility. Those most vexed by Lawrence—admiring his literary gifts while detesting the content of his work—included a set of conservative Christian literary critics. The most prickly (and most influential) of these was Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), the Missouri-born writer and St. Louis native who moved to England in early adulthood and eventually became a British subject. In England, Eliot converted from the liberal Unitarianism of his upbringing to a conservative strain of Anglicanism, describing his conservative predilections in 1929 as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.”49 The Anglo-Catholic Eliot, orthodox in his Christian
devotion, loathed the unorthodox Lawrence and at times seemed intent on grinding his literary reputation to dust.
T. S. Eliot did have occasional words of measured praise for Lawrence; an early reference from 1917 has Eliot describing him as “a poet of quite peculiar genius and peculiar faults.”50 But the attacks far outweighed admiration. In 1927, Eliot published his first critique of Lawrence for La Nouvelle Revue Française, a French journal about English novels. Eliot argued that Lawrence’s “splendid and extremely ill-written novels—each one hurled from the press before we have finished reading the last” had but one subject in mind. He described Lawrence as “a demoniac, a natural and unsophisticated demoniac with a gospel,” arguing darkly that Lawrence’s characters lacked “all the amenities, refinements and graces which many centuries have built up in order to make love-making tolerable.” When those characters “make love—or perform Mr. Lawrence’s equivalent for love-making—and they do nothing else,” they essentially moved backward through evolutionary time, passing backward the ape and fish to “some hideous coition of protoplasm.” Eliot shuddered at the “progressive degeneration in humanity” exhibited in the novels, lamenting, “This is not my world, either as it is, or as I should wish it to be” (emphasis in original).51 It was rather a world in which Eliot found, or at least claimed to find, sex quite intolerable. Eliot’s acerbic portrait diminished Lawrence not simply to the level of brutes but to the most primitive stage of living cells.
Lawrence returned the invective, identifying Eliot as the very type of dry, lifeless corpse he found so abhorrent among civilized people. He may also have gotten back at Eliot in a slyer way. Some literary critics pointed out that Lady Chatterley’s dour husband, Clifford, seemed closely modeled in his ideas and language on Eliot, and that some of his speeches insisting on ordered emotions and belittling passion and the body struck themes from Eliot’s own writing.52 Further, Clifford had become a writer after his disabling injury in the war (an injury that left him impotent), and his writings, in Lawrence’s words, contained “no touch, no actual contact”: “It was as if the whole thing took place on an artificial earth,” yet Clifford was “morbidly sensitive” in wanting the approval of all. Chatterley/Eliot was a pathetic, needy, and crabbed person, all malice and superficiality, of little substance.53 He was just the sort of traditionalist Christian who would despise Lawrence’s work and deem it demoniacal.
Indeed, Eliot exemplified a particular Christian way of thinking about religion and sex that Lawrence spurned, representing an attitude toward passion that would have been at home with the Christian censors. After Lawrence’s death, he wrote that Lawrence had “failed completely” at creating genuine art, for he merely reveled in his own sensations without turning them to greater ends. Lawrence was “a very sick soul,” and Eliot vilified Lawrence’s “offensive” use of Christian faith for “non-Christian or anti-Christian” ends, attributing this tendency to the decadent lure of a “shadowy Protestant underworld” that picked and chose its religious symbols at will and was far outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. Lawrence mistook human love to be the highest good, rather than the love of God; he pined for a degree of human intimacy that was impossible between living persons, particularly for one who did not realize that “the love of two human beings is only made perfect in the love of God.” Political reform, social justice, racial equality—all were ultimately as egotistic and as inadequate for genuine human connection and meaning as sex, in Eliot’s view.54
Eliot repeated and embellished these critiques in his 1934 book on the moral failings of modern literature, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, in which he described Lawrence as a “great genius” sickened by “a distinct sexual morbidity.” Denouncing “the deplorable religious upbringing which gave Lawrence his lust for intellectual independence,” Eliot scoffed, “like most people who do not know what orthodoxy is, he hated it.” He damned Lawrence’s lack of “tradition” and analyzed him as having had “no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.” Having adopted what Eliot plainly deemed a “spirituality” that was flighty, self-righteous, and unmoored, Lawrence exhibited a “spiritually sick” vision, a “social obsession” with upending the proprieties of social class. Lawrence’s characters displayed “the absence of any moral or social sense,” betraying “no respect for, nor even awareness of, moral obligations” or conscience. They epitomized the worst instincts of humanity: the very model of modern heresy, the destruction of the moral universe.55 The renunciation of traditional marriage signaled a wholesale rejection of civilized manners and obedience to the dictates of society.
Eliot was not alone in his contempt of Lawrence’s spiritual earnestness toward sex, his dismissal of civilized conventions, and his determination to renounce modesty and bring sexual matters out into the light. Not long after Lawrence’s death, Ruth Frisbie Moore, a conservative literary critic, wrote disparagingly of his frank language—calling “spades spades”—and “outrageous grossness,” a quality of the “spade cult” who claimed Lawrence as “its major prophet”: “Lawrence himself treated [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] as an inspired utterance, and the more radical critics approached it in a religious spirit, according it the reverent treatment a true Fundamentalist offers to Jonah and Genesis.” Lawrence and his “disciples” displayed “perfect moral certitude” in their assessments, a snobbery about their explicitness that was dogmatic, self-righteous, and “cock-sure”—altogether pious to the point of ludicrous condescension. “For those of us with a devout upbringing,” she wrote, “there is a decidedly musty odor about some of Lawrence’s statements.” His defenders were “veritable Impuritan Fathers,” making “obeisance to his gods” in endless praise for his work as “rhapsodic,” “flamingly intense,” “rapturous,” “ecstatic,” and more. Harold Gardiner, the long-time literary editor of the Jesuit magazine America and a widely influential Catholic critic, lamented “the minute detailing of sexual aberrations” in the novel and noted that it was like other restricted books that do not merely depict sin but in fact “teach immorality.” Lawrence, in the view of such antimodern critics, had mistaken health for sickness, honesty for vulgar desecration. By making depravity seem alluring, his writings posed an urgent danger to the culture.56
Whereas Lawrence saw it as both possible and essential to reconcile religion and sexual candor, Eliot and many other conservative Christians believed that the sort of sexual openness embodied in Lawrence threatened the very essence of Christianity. Even if it was a “serious quest for an alternative spiritual tradition” spurred by many of the same impulses that nurtured Christian faith—alienation from rational scientism and the worship of money—it was “will-worship of the ego,” another Anglican writer put it.57 A young Thomas Merton, who would become one of the major American Catholic writers of the twentieth century, pronounced Lawrence “a complete pagan” whose “gospel culminated in the proclamation of himself as a Messiah, as one who had come to save the world from intellectualism and give back to men the joyful ‘mindlessness’ of the Hopi snake dance.” A “very flourishing cult of Lawrence the Messiah” existed, in the view of these critics, and its antidote could not come soon enough.58 From the traditionalist Christian point of view, the possibility of a rich and powerful alternative to Christianity coming to fruition was dire, as it would dethrone the powers of church authority in favor of something earthier and disorderly, the rejection of self-sacrifice and church authority alike. Eliot and his cohort could not abide Lawrence’s antinomian challenge.
Female sexual awakening, an important theme in Lawrence’s writings, was also a threat to a conservative Christian worldview that continued to uphold traditional gender norms as well as a hierarchy that remained closed to the idea of women’s equality within the church and the broader society. The notion that women did not merely tolerate sex for the higher good of childbearing but that, once awakened, they realized they needed sex—s
uch an idea certainly did not trouble all Christians, but in the ordered world of the conservatives it was hazardous. The specter of the sexually liberated female, ominously embodied in Margaret Sanger, also saturated Lawrence’s work: however cogently later feminists would critique those portrayals for reifying gender hierarchy and female objectification, they were nonetheless subversive to the Christian worldview of the period. Lawrence’s frank acknowledgment and graphic depictions of female appetites was shocking in the 1930s. The threat to Christianity posed by writers such as Lawrence appeared twofold: the problem of a seemingly decadent, pagan religion was but the flip side of the hazard posed by a positive view of sexuality and the honoring of sexual pleasure for women.
Eliot and many other Christian writers detested Lawrence’s fiction for its anti-church anarchism and its renunciation of tradition, marriage, and social customs, and their perspective reflected the public Christian consensus still ascendant in the 1930s. Soon enough, however, liberal Protestants and even some Catholics reread Lawrence and undertook to defend him, sometimes even resurrecting part of his vision of sexuality for illumination and Christian appropriation. These reassessments appeared in the 1940s and into the 1950s (and beyond). Brother George Every, a British Anglican scholar and poet, wrote several times about Lawrence and showed increasing admiration for the ways in which his work illuminated “the limitations of the liberal, democratic, and scientific outlook” and exemplified a critique of “modern scientific and sociological thinking” that made some sense—even though, from Every’s Christian worldview (and certainly Eliot’s and Merton’s), his solutions were antithetical to Christian truth.59 Citing Every’s writings, an Anglican priest argued in 1951 that some “amends” were necessary to counter “the abuse that has been hurled” at Lawrence “by so many Christians.”60 The renowned Nathan Scott, a literary scholar and ordained Episcopal priest who helped found the academic field of “literature and theology,” gave ample attention to Lawrence and reassessed the linkage between religion and sexuality that had so profoundly offended Eliot, by resituating Lawrence within a particular mystical stream of tragedy in the European Romantic tradition; Lawrence, Scott pleaded, understood and deeply felt the “anguish” of humanity’s “ontological solitude” and utilized sex to illumine both humans’ alienation from one another and divine union or completion.61 This kind of openness to Lawrence’s writing signaled the new sorts of religious thinking about sex that were beginning to emerge.
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