Reconciling Murry and Millett
"Millett calls [Lawrence] a reactionary sexual politician intent on accomplishing the 'perfect subjection of women.'" |
by Christelle Chua En Lin
Since its publication, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has generated a storm of controversy because it deals with two contentious issues: class boundaries and sexuality. Both J. M. Murry's contribution to Adelphi and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics acknowledge these two issues, yet they present differing ideas. Murry deems Lawrence to be a significant but imperfect advocate for the revolution of human relationships (284), while Millett calls him a reactionary sexual politician intent on accomplishing the "perfect subjection of women" (241). Given such varying views, what should we make of the novel, from our position in the 21st century? The answer to that lies, perhaps, in the reconciliation of the two different views presented by Murry and Millett.
It seems a daunting task to reconcile their views. While both agree that Lawrence's ideas of social revolution and sexual revolution are tied up--Millett says: "Lady Chatterley's Lover is a programme for social as well as sexual redemption, yet the two are inextricable" (242), and Murry concurs: "[For Lawrence] the sole real emergence from that isolation [of the individual is] in the perfect sexual fulfilment" (281)--they disagree on whether the novel really does preach "the class system as an 'anachronism' " (Millett 244). Murry believes that the "hero," Mellors, "has passed beyond class distinction to an individual self-awareness" (281), but Millett says "the lovers have not so much bridged class as transcended it into an aristocracy based on sexual dynamism" (244). It is apparent that Lawrence did not quite abandon the idea of class--the necessity of converting Mellors into a "son of god" during the lovemaking (Lawrence 174) hints that Lawrence is simply advocating a new class system where the sexually-able are to be held in awe. Also, the fact that Connie tries, ridiculously, to speak her lover's working-class dialect (Lawrence 177) implies that sexual relationships do not negate the issue of class so much as reinforce the differences between them.
Millett further refutes Murry's belief that the novel is revolutionary in its ideas of the awareness of the sexual mystery and its role in a greater awareness of organic relationships. To Murry, "Certainly it is a book of the utmost value … and in it is the courage of a new awareness [of the human touch]" (283). Millett, on the contrary, finds that Lawrence writes his novel in such a way that Mellors dominates Connie both in conversation and in bed, and for her, the call to a "new" sexual awareness is not revolutionary at all, but simply a call for a "reversion to older sexual roles" (242). Murry feels that the characters are "most real precisely … in their sexual mating" (281), and to him a phrase such as "For she was all open to him and helpless!" (Lawrence 173) is one which "causes the tide of our sensitive awareness to flow" about the loveliness of sex (282). Millet, on the other hand, sees this description of sexual mating as "scarcely a reciprocal event-it is simply phallic" (239), an assertion of the power of the male over the female.
These discrepancies in perception between Murry and Millett, especially with regard to the authenticity of the sexual relationship described by Lawrence, can be attributed to the different times during which the two critiques were written. Murry writes in the 1920s, where, as Millett herself says, "the doctrine of the nineteenth-century middle classes [is] 'sex is for the man'" (240), whereas Millett writes in a feminist era. It is understandable that Murry does not see the tendency of the novel to portray Connie as helpless devotee to the "strange potency of manhood upon her" (Lawrence 174) as something derogatory to women.
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