Lady Chatterleys Lover :: essays research papers

Lady Chatterleys buff The greatness of Lady Chatterleys Lover lies in a paradox it is simultaneously progressive and reactionary, juvenile and Victorian. It looks backwards towards a Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to anticipate the social morality of the late 20th century in its frank engagement with explicit field of view matter and profanity. One might say of the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but methodologically radical.The easiest of these assertions to prove is that Lady Chatterleys Lover is "formally conservative." By this I mean that there are few evident differences between the form of Lady Chatterleys Lover and the form of the high-Victorian novels written fifty years earlier in terms of building in terms of narrative voice in terms of diction, with the exception of a very few "profane" words. It is important to record that Lady Chatterleys Lover was written towards the end of the 1920s, a decade which had seen exte nsive literary experimentation. The 1920s opened with the publishing of the formally radical novel Ulysses, which effect the stage for important technical innovations in literary art it made extensive use of the stream-of-consciousness form it condensed all of its action into a single 24-hour frustrate it employed any number of voices and narrative perspectives. Lady Chatterleys Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s, and indeed the entire modernist literary movement, had never happened. The structure of the novel is conventional, tracing a small group of characters over an extended period of time in a single place. The rather preachy fabricator usually speaks with the familiar third-person omniscience of the Victorian novel. And the characters tend towards flatness, towards representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and developing real three-dimensional personalities.But surely, if Lady Chatterleys Lover is "formally conservative," it can hardly be ca lled "thematically conservative" After all, this is a novel that raised censorious hackles across the English-speaking world. It is a novel that liberally employs profanity, that more-or-less graphically--graphically, that is, for the 1920s it is important not to evaluate the novel by the standards of profanity and graphic sexuality that have become prevalent at the turn of the 21st century--describes sex and orgasm, and whose central message is the idea that sexual freedom and sensuality are far more important, more authentic and meaningful, than the cerebral life. So what can I mean by calling Lady Chatterleys Lover, a famously controversial novel, "thematically conservative"?