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kyatic's reviews
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Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
2.0
--spoilers--
SCENE: a bleak house. Not in the Dickensian way, but in the way that houses can be bleak through the absence of light, or the presence of a loveless marriage, or the setting for a novel about privileged upper class people who simply can't stand one another, but won't leave one another because it would be improper and there would be too much paperwork, which would clutter up the drawing room.
CONNIE: I'm ever so bored here, Clifford. Also, sometimes I miss the time you could use your legs, but often I don't. It was so dreary when we tried to do the sex thing before, but I do so miss the sex thing. That's how I like to refer to it sometimes, too. 'The sex thing'. How very queer.
CLIFFORD: I'm essentially a metonym for the failed, anachronistic upper classes, who are simultaneously ruining the rolling hills of the English countryside through rampant industrialisation whilst perishing in the wake of it all. How bolshevist.
CONNIE: I might have an affair or three.
CLIFFORD: That's very bolshevist of you.
SCENE: the same bleak house, only there are men in it and they are all doing manly things, like smoking and playing cards and saying disparaging things about women.
MAN 1: You know, I've quite forgotten my own name.
MAN 2: Is it because, like me, you're essentially a cardboard cut-out figure; more of a representation of intellectualism and its pretentiousness and inability to address anything of any importance, and therefore totally interchangeable with the other four of us here?
MAN 3: Are there only four of us? I thought there were five.
MAN 2: Christ knows. I've lost track.
MAN 4 / 5: I blame women, because I never learnt how to love, and this is the cause of my loneliness. The fact that I am an identikit prick has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It's all the fault of that other group: women!
CLIFFORD: Damn bunch of bolshevists, the lot of them.
CONNIE: I thought this was supposed to be a steamy, saucy narrative, full of quivering loins and naughty bits. Where is the sex thing? My womb is aching for it. I can't be dealing with all this nonsense - it's just a bunch of men talking about the class system, and I can't get off on that. I'm going to find a piece of rough.
MAN 3: Is it my turn to say something faintly racist now?
SCENE: the woods. They are described in painstaking detail, to the extent that you could basically write a botany textbook based on the purple prose.
MELLORS: I'm a piece of rough.
CONNIE: Golly, will you take me into your hut and have your wicked way with me whilst I cry and think about Clifford?
MELLORS: Ay, ah mun.
CONNIE: Are you talking in that illegible dialect so as to highlight the class differences between us? Because if so, it's an excellent rhetorical device, but doesn't translate too well to the written word. Also, my womb is ready for your seed, and other such phrases which imply that my womb is the arbiter of all things sex-related, and not the clitoris. Would you take me over that tree stump?
MELLORS: Tha'rt a female, s'ah mun. Git tha' dress aw!
CONNIE: I'm madly, passionately in love. I must go to Venice and leave Clifford immediately, or my womb shall simply break in two.
MELLORS: My wife left me, you know.
SCENE: Clifford's bedroom. It's probably covered in posters of miners, with slogans like 'NOT IN MINE NAME' and 'MINERS: NOT ON MY LAWN' and 'INDUSTRIALISATION SUPPRESSES THE MASSES AND THEREFORE IT'S GOOD FOR ME, BECAUSE I AM AN UPPER CLASS INDIVIDUAL'.
CONNIE: Clifford, I'm leaving you. Frankly, I've found the ideal man.
CLIFFORD: Good grief, he's not a bolshevist, is he?
CONNIE: Not at all. He's a raving misogynist, who left his wife because she took too long to orgasm when they had sex and she had the nerve to speak her mind too often. He categorises all women into 5 groups based on how they enjoy doing the sex thing, and he sometimes slips into the vernacular so as to remind me of my own class and the rocky foundations on which our courtship was built. He's ten years older than me and he's cruel to his daughter, and he's an obvious mouthpiece for the author, often monologuing for pages and pages in jarringly poetic language about how men are half dead slaves to the machine, or something. He's a total dreamboat. Plus, we do the sex thing loads.
CLIFFORD: It rather sounds like you don't have a lot in common beyond the whole sex thing.
CONNIE: Yes, but simultaneous orgasms, Clifford. The Italian Way. In freezing huts.
CLIFFORD: Sounds like a load of bolshevist rot to me.
SCENE: a farm. There are cows. 6 of them. Very female.
MELLORS: I hate being alone because I can't do the sex thing by myself, but I love being alone because not being able to do the sex thing means that I get to think about the sex thing a lot. I suppose I should ramble on about the class system a bit more and then end this whole novel with an anticlimax, because that could be a metaphor for the sex thing. Not when I do it, obviously. I'm great at the sex thing.
SCENE: a bleak house. Not in the Dickensian way, but in the way that houses can be bleak through the absence of light, or the presence of a loveless marriage, or the setting for a novel about privileged upper class people who simply can't stand one another, but won't leave one another because it would be improper and there would be too much paperwork, which would clutter up the drawing room.
CONNIE: I'm ever so bored here, Clifford. Also, sometimes I miss the time you could use your legs, but often I don't. It was so dreary when we tried to do the sex thing before, but I do so miss the sex thing. That's how I like to refer to it sometimes, too. 'The sex thing'. How very queer.
CLIFFORD: I'm essentially a metonym for the failed, anachronistic upper classes, who are simultaneously ruining the rolling hills of the English countryside through rampant industrialisation whilst perishing in the wake of it all. How bolshevist.
CONNIE: I might have an affair or three.
CLIFFORD: That's very bolshevist of you.
SCENE: the same bleak house, only there are men in it and they are all doing manly things, like smoking and playing cards and saying disparaging things about women.
MAN 1: You know, I've quite forgotten my own name.
MAN 2: Is it because, like me, you're essentially a cardboard cut-out figure; more of a representation of intellectualism and its pretentiousness and inability to address anything of any importance, and therefore totally interchangeable with the other four of us here?
MAN 3: Are there only four of us? I thought there were five.
MAN 2: Christ knows. I've lost track.
MAN 4 / 5: I blame women, because I never learnt how to love, and this is the cause of my loneliness. The fact that I am an identikit prick has nothing to do with it whatsoever. It's all the fault of that other group: women!
CLIFFORD: Damn bunch of bolshevists, the lot of them.
CONNIE: I thought this was supposed to be a steamy, saucy narrative, full of quivering loins and naughty bits. Where is the sex thing? My womb is aching for it. I can't be dealing with all this nonsense - it's just a bunch of men talking about the class system, and I can't get off on that. I'm going to find a piece of rough.
MAN 3: Is it my turn to say something faintly racist now?
SCENE: the woods. They are described in painstaking detail, to the extent that you could basically write a botany textbook based on the purple prose.
MELLORS: I'm a piece of rough.
CONNIE: Golly, will you take me into your hut and have your wicked way with me whilst I cry and think about Clifford?
MELLORS: Ay, ah mun.
CONNIE: Are you talking in that illegible dialect so as to highlight the class differences between us? Because if so, it's an excellent rhetorical device, but doesn't translate too well to the written word. Also, my womb is ready for your seed, and other such phrases which imply that my womb is the arbiter of all things sex-related, and not the clitoris. Would you take me over that tree stump?
MELLORS: Tha'rt a female, s'ah mun. Git tha' dress aw!
CONNIE: I'm madly, passionately in love. I must go to Venice and leave Clifford immediately, or my womb shall simply break in two.
MELLORS: My wife left me, you know.
SCENE: Clifford's bedroom. It's probably covered in posters of miners, with slogans like 'NOT IN MINE NAME' and 'MINERS: NOT ON MY LAWN' and 'INDUSTRIALISATION SUPPRESSES THE MASSES AND THEREFORE IT'S GOOD FOR ME, BECAUSE I AM AN UPPER CLASS INDIVIDUAL'.
CONNIE: Clifford, I'm leaving you. Frankly, I've found the ideal man.
CLIFFORD: Good grief, he's not a bolshevist, is he?
CONNIE: Not at all. He's a raving misogynist, who left his wife because she took too long to orgasm when they had sex and she had the nerve to speak her mind too often. He categorises all women into 5 groups based on how they enjoy doing the sex thing, and he sometimes slips into the vernacular so as to remind me of my own class and the rocky foundations on which our courtship was built. He's ten years older than me and he's cruel to his daughter, and he's an obvious mouthpiece for the author, often monologuing for pages and pages in jarringly poetic language about how men are half dead slaves to the machine, or something. He's a total dreamboat. Plus, we do the sex thing loads.
CLIFFORD: It rather sounds like you don't have a lot in common beyond the whole sex thing.
CONNIE: Yes, but simultaneous orgasms, Clifford. The Italian Way. In freezing huts.
CLIFFORD: Sounds like a load of bolshevist rot to me.
SCENE: a farm. There are cows. 6 of them. Very female.
MELLORS: I hate being alone because I can't do the sex thing by myself, but I love being alone because not being able to do the sex thing means that I get to think about the sex thing a lot. I suppose I should ramble on about the class system a bit more and then end this whole novel with an anticlimax, because that could be a metaphor for the sex thing. Not when I do it, obviously. I'm great at the sex thing.