Julika Griem
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
Geography and Anatomy in Lady Chatterley's Lover
In recent research, D.H. Lawrence's notorious inconsistency has been reconsidered as an effect of a restlessly travelling spatial imagination, linking the rooted and the exiled, the English and the cosmopolitan Lawrence. My paper will pursue this exploration of the author's imaginary geographies in three texts driven by a quest for "the third rare place where a man might meet a woman" ('The Man Who Loved Islands'). In a first step the latter story as well as "The Woman Who Rode Away" will be examined as transgressive journeys through clearly gendered spaces and places: Staging a set of British isles and the American West as topographical backgrounds to act out the topological archetypes of the circle and the line (S. Michelucci), Lawrence in the end subjects both his protagonists to a chronotope offering entropic annihilation instead of exoticist revitalization. In contrast to this dystopian outlook, Lady Chatterley's Lover at a first glance seems to be promising a more utopian spatial fantasy. Here, the leitmotif of the snow is replaced by the image of the flame, and the hut in the woods grants at least a temporary shelter to the Lady riding away to meet a man with a penchant to hide in insular settings. The gamekeeper's hut, however, offers no dialectic closure but remains a problematic heterotopia. In his last novel Lawrence returns to a third place which proves to be a slippery site oscillating between geography and anatomy, between two different narrative modes: Due to the novel's narrative economy of secrecy Lawrence manages to suggest a language revealing his heroine while saving her lover from being ravished by the power of words.