Previous
Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Intellect vs. Bodily Experience
Nature vs. Machinery
Class, Consumerism, and Money
Gender and Sexuality
Catastrophe, Continuity, and Tradition
Summary
Analysis
After lunch, Connie goes into the woods again, which are overflowing with flowers. Mellors is not at his hut, so she goes to his cottage, where he is eating a simple lunch. Mellors offers to make Connie tea, but she insists that she will make it for herself. Though she does not know why, Mellors seems distant. Connie looks around the house, which is small but well-kept.
Connie and Mellors’s relationship neatly parallels the seasons; as their love deepens, more and more flowers start to boom, now filling the forest.
Themes
In an attempt to get to the bottom of Mellors’s mood, Connie asks why he continues as a game-keeper. Mellors explains that though he could afford to work for himself, he needs the structure of a boss to help him get through the day; even so, Mellors admits he is almost always in a bad mood. Connie announces that she is going to Venice, and she pleads with Mellors not to forget her, but he stays quiet and crabby.
Though Mellors does not articulate it in exactly these terms, it is possible to read his insistence on a working-class job as a small-scale protest against capitalist ideology (which dictates that financial and professional advancement are some of the chief goals of life).
Themes
Connie then describes her conversation with Clifford about having a child, even telling Mellors her plan to pretend the father is someone she met in Venice. Mellors, feeling that he has been “made use of” for Connie’s pregnancy plans, grows nonchalant and cold. Only when Connie assures him that she likes his body does he return to normal, asking her to go upstairs with him. Connie does not want to have sex at the hut, though she confesses that she does want to “feel” Mellors’s body just as he feels hers.
Mellors’s horror that his body might have been a tool in Connie’s larger plan to have a child links back to Michaelis’s resentment when Connie sought her own orgasm against his body. In both cases, the men are disgusted by the idea that sex could be utilitarian and mechanical. But whereas Connie had no real desire for Michaelis’s body on its own terms, with Mellors, she wants to “feel” as much as much of him she can—sensation for sensation’s sake.
Themes
Connie heads home, again feeling conflicted and frustrated—so frustrated, in fact, that after tea-time she returns to the hut in search of Mellors. He is there, tending to the hens. Connie is touched by the “blind devotion” of the mother hens, but her observations are interrupted by Mellors asking her to go inside the hut. Each lover wants reassurance that the other one wants them; only when they get it do they head inside.
Mellors will not verbally assure Connie of his readiness to have a child, but his kindness to the hens silently demonstrates how tender he is capable of being to new life. For the first time, Mellors and Connie use their words to affirm the desires they have already revealed to each other physically.
Themes
Get the entire Lady Chatterley’s Lover LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mellors begins kissing Connie’s breasts, sighing that “tha’rt nice!” But for some reason, Connie does not feel swept away this time. Instead, she sees sex as absurd: she notes “the ridiculous bouncing of the buttocks” and “the wilting of the poor insignificant” genitalia. She wants to throw Mellors out of her body—yet when he finishes, Connie feels deeply lonely and abandoned. She begins to cry, and Mellors agrees that the sex was bad because Connie “wasn’t there,” mentally.
When she first started sleeping with Mellors, Connie struggled to be present in the physical facts of sex; now, she finds herself overwhelmed by the logistical silliness of intercourse. These two extremes suggests that there is a balance—intellectualized sex loses its meaning, but so does sex that is exclusively about physical contact. Once again, Mellors understands Connie deeply, realizing that she was not present before she even says anything.
Themes
Connie sobs that she can never love Mellors, though this sentiment does not seem to bother him. Instead, he just gets dressed, speaking in dialect the whole time in a way that drives Connie insane. Still, despite her annoyance, Connie does not want Mellors to leave. “It was from herself she wanted to be saved,” Connie realizes, “from her own inward anger and resistance.”
Mellors here uses dialect to distance himself from Connie, reminding her of the circumstantial and financial divides between them. Connie’s desire to be saved from her “resistance” once more demonstrates that the ideal woman in the novel is passive and submissive, giving herself over instead of acting on her own agency.
Themes
Mellors embraces Connie again, and she melts in his arms, becoming small and vulnerable. This vulnerability then causes a new wave of attraction in Mellors, and they have sex again. This time, Connie imagines that she is on the ocean, billowing away into some “primordial” peace. Connie feels at once that “she was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.”
Connie’s rebirth as a “woman” in this moment provides the clearest definition of femininity thus far: a true “woman” is vulnerable, passionate, and passive, relinquishing herself to a man. In finding herself “gone,” Connie also reaches back in time to something “primordial” and permanent, long before there were baronets or coal mines.
Themes
Similarly, once Mellors rolls over, Connie is struck by his “strange potency of manhood.” She touches all of the parts of his body, amazed that she now finds beautiful what only a few minutes ago seemed ridiculous. They have sex again, and when it is done, they lie together in a long silence. Of this moment, they both realize, “they will never speak.” Connie asks Mellors to say he loves her, so he does, his hands stroking her as if she were a flower.
If Connie defines her own femininity as powerlessness, it follows that Mellors’s masculinity is defined by physical “potency”—the very force that Clifford seems to lack. Once again, language fails (“they will never speak” of their deepest connections), and the couple instead leans into instinct, as the recurring floral imagery symbolizes.
Themes
As they get dressed, Mellors says, “I love thee that I can go into thee.” But when Connie presses for commitment, Mellors hesitates, arguing that everything gets too complicated once people start “thinkin’” about it. Instead, Mellors wants Connie to come sleep with him in his cottage. Connie agrees to go on Sunday, and she, too, begins speaking in dialect, as a flirtatious sort of game.
Mellors now essentializes Connie to her anatomy, articulating his “love” for her in terms of his ability to penetrate her. Connie’s embrace of dialect in this moment shows her ultimate refusal of the “life of the mind” (or “thinkin,’” as Mellors says); now Connie, too, can speak in the straightforward vernacular that so many people of her class disdain.
Themes
Mellors praises Connie as the “best bit o’ cunt left on earth.” Connie does not know what the word “cunt” means, and she wonders if it has the same meaning as the word “fuck.” Mellors explains the distinction—“animals fuck,” he argues, “but cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee […] an tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter?” Connie asks Mellors if he cares for her, but he just kisses her goodbye. As she goes home, Connie marvels at how alive the woods seem.
The use of the words “cunt” and “fuck,” impolite and onomatopoeic, show just how much embodied, carnal communication has triumphed over language (at least for Mellors and Connie). Similarly, Mellors refuses to put his feelings for Connie into words, instead communicating them only with a kiss.
Themes
