Susan Reid
University of Northampton, UK
"His recoil from the world was complete": the angelic body of Lady Chatterley's Lover
This paper will explore the notion of an imaginative return to Eastwood in Lady Chatterley's Lover. However, rather than a retreat from the perceived extremism of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence's final novel would seem to represent the culmination of both his "recoil from the world" and his vision of the divine male; not a triumphant return to the body, perhaps, but its ultimate transcendence in the evocation of Oliver Mellors as a "pure masculine angel".
This paper will address the apparent conflict in Lawrence's last two novels between an avowed ethics of sexual difference and a sexless, disembodied ideal, similar in some respects to the "angel" which haunts Luce Irigaray's Ethics of Sexual Difference. Consideration of some key moments in The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover will highlight the inherent contradictions of divine manhood, the implications of becoming "more than a man". In situating the source of sexual difference outside the body, in the divine, does Lawrence heal the mind/body split or merely reinforce the transcendence of the mind? An increasing emphasis on sex, the body and the female divine during the drafting of these texts may suggest that Lawrence was aware of a possible imbalance, but to what extent are notions of both body and female nevertheless absorbed and/or excluded? Indeed, to what extent does the angelic male body represent a retreat from heterosexuality into a male angelic order? In summary, the key question for this paper is whether Lady Chatterley's Lover achieves "recoil" into a new world of sexual difference or merely a return to a male gendered transcendence of the mind.