Summary Summary

Lady Chatterley's Lover begins by introducing Connie Reid, the female protagonist of the novel. She was
raised as a cultured bohemian of the upper-middle class, and was introduced to love affairs--intellectual
and sexual liaisons--as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford Chatterley, the scion of an
aristocratic line. After a month's honeymoon, he is sent to war, and returns paralyzed from the waist
down, impotent.

After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many intellectuals flock to the Chatterley
mansion, Wragby. Connie feels isolated; the vaunted intellectuals prove empty and bloodless, and she
resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright, Michaelis. Connie longs for real
human contact, and falls into despair, as all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is
a growing distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the meaningless pursuit of
success in his writing and in his obsession with coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep
physical aversion. A nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so that Connie
can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading
into an infantile reliance.

Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on Clifford's estate, newly returned
from serving in the army. Mellors is aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by
his innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of natural sensuality. After
several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance
between them, they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This happens on several
occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between them, remaining profoundly separate from him
despite their physical closeness.

One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and they have sex on the forest floor.
This time, they experience simultaneous orgasms. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience
for Connie; she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep sensual level.
She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors' child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to
the emotionally-dead intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow progressively
closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman and man rather than as two minds or
intellects.

Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone, Mellors' old wife returns, causing a
scandal. Connie returns to find that Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread
about him by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings. Connie admits to
Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends
with Mellors working on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister, also waiting:
the hope exists that, in the end, they will be together.

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The story concerns a young married woman, the former Constance Reid (Lady Chatterley), whose upper-
class Baronet husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, is paralysed
from the waist down because of a Great War injury. In addition to Clifford's physical limitations, his
emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple. Her emotional frustration leads her
into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. The class difference between the couple highlights a
major motif of the novel, which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class. The
novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone but must also be alive
physically. That realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience that Constance has felt only with
Mellors, suggesting that love can happen with only the element of the body, not just the mind.

Connie Chatterley and Clifford Chatterley move to Wragby.

Rising Action

Growing restless, Connie begins an affair with Michaelis.

3
Clifford tells Connie he wants an heir.

Connie and Michaelis end their affair.

Connie discovers the hut and spends much of her time there.

Oliver Mellors and Connie have sex for the first time.

Connie and Mellors experience full sexual pleasure.

Connie spends the night at Mellors's cottage.

Connie and Mellors plan how to be free of their spouses.

10

Connie and Mellors make an oath professing their love.

Climax

11

Connie goes to Venice for several weeks.

Falling Action

12

Clifford writes Connie about a scandal involving Mellors.

13

Clifford fires Mellors, who moves to London.

14

Connie tells Clifford she loves Mellors and leaves Wragby.

Resolution

15

Mellors writes a letter to Connie about their future.

Symbols

Clifford's Wound

Clifford Chatterley's wound symbolizes the need for each person—and for humanity as a whole—to find
salvation. His wound is both physical and psychological. It has damaged his body and limited his physical
abilities. It has also damaged his very essence, that which makes him human and allows him to engage in
life in a healthy and meaningful way. His wound represents the paralysis of postwar England, the
alienation and loss of meaning of the postwar generation, and the emptiness and industrialization of
modernity.

World War I shattered the world's innocence and optimism in many ways and left millions of people
searching for meaning. It also coincided with the rise of industrialization, which benefited the machinery
of war and led to economic and social changes that compounded the sense of meaninglessness
experienced by the postwar generation.
D.H. Lawrence feared personal, social, and national wounds threatened the very survival of humanity.
He believed the key salvation was an acceptance of basic human instincts. By acting on these instincts,
people could form loving relationships, find meaning, and counteract the negative influences of
industrialization and soul-dampening social restrictions.

In Chapter 5 Connie Chatterley perceives this wound as causing "the background of [Clifford's] mind [to
fill] up with mist, with nothingness." She also realizes an essential truth about the human soul: the
physical body may recover, but the wound to the soul may not. Instead, it festers and "slowly deepens
its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche." The wounds to the nation, to humanity as a whole, are just as
insidious and pervasive—silently destroying what was good in people and, like with Clifford, filling the
void with nothingness. In Chapter 16 Oliver Mellors predicts that if humans keep going as they are, they
will kill each other off or make themselves and others insane. He affirms Lawrence's message of
salvation by saying, "the root of sanity is in the balls."

Clifford's Wheelchair

Clifford Chatterley's wheelchair is in many ways a symbol of industrialization. Clifford lacks the ability to
use his lower body because of his war injury and must rely on a machine for movement. His dependence
on the wheelchair gives machinery power over the human body. It also limits his knowledge of the
world. In Chapter 5 Clifford wheels himself to a favorite spot in the woods, but he cannot wheel the
chair down the slope. He waxes philosophically about his desire to preserve the spot as he considers it
"the heart of England" and he wants it to remain untouched and preserved, with no one trespassing in
it. Unbeknownst to him, the world has intruded on it. His father had cleared trees for the war's needs,
and through the breach in the woods the colliery railroad and a coal plant can be seen.

Lawrence believes industry dehumanizes people and damages their ability to live life fully. He shows
how machinery harms life in several scenes in which the wheelchair tramples plants and flowers. In
Chapter 13, as Clifford navigates his chair through a path in the woods its "wheels jolt over the wood-
ruff and the bugle, and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny." Later when he attempts to
get his wheelchair started he smashes the flowers without concern for the damage he is causing. From
Clifford's perspective the only thing that matters is getting the machine moving, and anything that
stands in its path can be destroyed. This matches the industrialists' views: they are willing to pillage
Earth of its resources and destroy the environment to support their industrial needs. The scene in
Chapter 13 in which Oliver Mellors pushes the malfunctioning wheelchair highlights the superiority of
human physical strength to machine energy.
Woods

The woods surrounding Wragby symbolize the conflict between the old and the new. In Chapter 5
Clifford Chatterley describes these woods as old England and the heart of England. He wants to preserve
them so they remain as they have always been for centuries, when they were part of a larger forest in
which Robin Hood and his band traveled. This desire reflects his resistance to change and idealization of
tradition.

The old England, however, is no more. The clearing where Sir Geoffrey Chatterley cut trees for the war
needs illustrates the loss of that England. In Chapter 5 the narrator describes the clearing as full of dead
and barely living things, such as "a ravel of dead bracken," tree stumps with "grasping roots," "a thin and
spindly sapling," and blackened vegetation. This shows the decay of both the woods and England.

The woods in turn become the meeting place for Oliver Mellors and Connie Chatterley. Connie is more
open to change than her husband and knows that modernity is creeping into the countryside
surrounding the Wragby estate and into Wragby itself. Unlike her husband she does not want to
embrace the past for tradition's sake. Nor does she want to stop modernity or embrace it. She is
disillusioned with the meaninglessness of her husband's stories and the life of the mind, as
demonstrated by her husband's and his friends' intellectual talk. She finds something lacking in her so-
called intimate life with her husband and the absence of any physical touch. This drives her out of the
house and into the woods. The woods become the stage on which Connie's sexual awakening occurs and
where the restorative power of sex for both Mellors and Connie takes place. They reject both the
tradition of social norms and modernity and find personal salvation in the primal human instincts that
have survived through time.

SETTING: Wragby; the 1920s

Wragby

Connie obsesses over being trapped at Wragby, so it's not surprising that most of the novel is set there.

Conflict

Like a Virgin

Life at Wragby isn't much of a life. It's more of a half-life, or a non-life, or, well, as Lawrence puts it, "a
life: in the void. For the rest it was non-existence" (2.35). The people of the Tevershall village don't like
Connie; Clifford's friends patronize her; and Clifford himself sees her as a glorified nurse. Both Connie's
dad and her sister Hilda worry about her, but they come up with different solutions: Hilda takes her to
London to perk her up, while her dad thinks she should take a lover. Mostly, she spends a lot of time
looking at flowers and thinking about how much her life stinks.

Complication

Don't Call Me, Maybe

Eventually Connie follows her dad's advice and picks up a boyfriend, the Irish playwright Michaelis. Like
most new relationships, it's great for a while: lots of sex, no strings attached. And then it ends in flames,
when Connie rejects Michaelis's marriage proposal. He mutters some nasty stuff about frigid women,
and Connie swears off men. Like a Virgin, Pt. 2.

Climax

Literally

Let's let D. H. speak for himself:

And then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening
whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was
one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying unconscious inarticulate cries […] The
man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. (10.305)

The climax of the book is, literally, a climax—and not just any climax, but a simultaneous one, which
Mellors practically gloats about. We get it, Mellors: you're good in bed. Congratulations; have a cookie,
and please wear a condom.

Anyway, there's no going back now for Connie. She definitely can't return to Clifford, even if it means
giving up Wragby and her title and being plain old "Mrs. Oliver Mellors."

Suspense

Connie Gets Her Groove Back

Sex is awesome, and Connie has it at every opportunity: in the forest, in a rainstorm, in the hut, in
Mellors's cottage. She even sneaks out like a teenager to spend the night with her boyfriend. Obviously
this can't last. We're not in a Harlequin Romance here; this is Serious Literature, so someone's going to
get shamed.

Denouement

Call the Tabloids

While Connie's off in Venice trying to convince her family to help her get a divorce, Mellors's drunken
wife shows up (naked in his bed, to be precise) and causes trouble. She figures out that Mellors's lover is
Connie and starts spreading it around the neighborhood. It's ugly, and it gets uglier. When Connie
returns, she tells Clifford that the story is true, and he says some truly awful things about animals and
the lower classes.

Conclusion

The Waiting Game

At the end of the novel, Mellors and Connie are living happily in a cottage in the north of England, with
their adorable little baby. Except not. Connie is still trapped at Wragby and Mellors is stuck learning how
to milk cows while they wait for Mellors's divorce. Happy endings are so last century.