Nicola Tarrant-Hoskins
University of Kentucky, USA
Departing Eastwood – far from a miner's son
"I wish from the bottom of my heart, the fates had not stigmatized me 'writer.' It is a sickening business…One sheds one's sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them." And yet in the final pages of his final novel, D. H. Lawrence ends with Mellors writing a love letter to Connie Chatterley – "Well, so many words, because I can't touch you…" The final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel fully embodying Lawrence's philosophy of connection and the physicality of love, ends not in touch but in the written word. Mellors turns to the pen. In A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence writes "…we know that the oneness of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars." This oneness is not guaranteed between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, but Mellor's letter offers hope in the possibility. Mellors clearly represents Lawrence himself in these final pages. In tracking the three versions of Lady Chatterley, one sees how Lawrence's intentions change, how his final novel moves far away from the original Parkin and a critique of class issues, to a tender, albeit quite naive love story, a love story that symbolizes Lawrence's hopes for humanity. Mellors, the epistolary lover, sums up Lawrencian philosophy in a nutshell. Looking at Lawrence's last pilgrimage to Eastwood, the topological inspiration for his final novel, and charting the radically thematic differences and clearly the author's priorities in the very last years of his life, this paper examines the transformation of the three versions of Lady Chatterley. One can view these texts as Lawrence's final departure from Eastwood. In the end he was less concerned with class struggles and his own humble genesis as a miner's son; in the end Lawrence was a writer, a writer of love letters.