ABSTRACT
D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel that hardly needs to be read to know something about it. It was, perhaps still is, a salacious novel that caused a court case that challenged censorship. Though written in the 1920s, it wasn’t published unchallenged until 1960. This is a novel about sex, and as Lawrence writes in the opening pages, “however one might sentimentalise it, this sex business was one of the most ancient, sordid connexions and subsections.” And even though the “poets who glorified it were mostly men,” Lawrence will undertake the task of imagining sex once more and will work, in some fashion, to make it less sentimental. He laments that men “insisted on the sex thing like dogs,” while acknowledging that the “beautiful pure freedom of a woman was infinitely more wonderful than any sexual love” (3). In some ways, I had always imagined and read Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a novel about sex, perhaps even a sexy novel. But upon a recent re-reading, I couldn’t help but re-read the opening sentence: “our is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically” (1). While the age is undoubtedly tragic, what is it that “we refuse to take tragically?” It had not occurred to me previously, but perhaps the tragedy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is to be found in Sir Clifford Chatterley, who has been read many times in terms of his disability, but in this chapter, I focus on another corporeal tragedy, namely his infertility. As the opening page reads, “Clifford had a sister, but she had departed. Otherwise there were no near relatives. The elder brother was dead in the war. Crippled forever, knowing he could never have any children, Clifford came home to the smoky Midlands to keep the Chatterley name alive while he could” (1). The tragedy, then, I suggest in this chapter, is Sir Clifford’s infertility, which quickly becomes about the end of the Chatterley family.
