Sexual Politics

Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover tells the story of “the salvation of one modern women […] through the offices of the author’s personal cult, ‘the mystery of the phallus’” (238). Lawrence’s avowed aim is removing perverse acts from sexuality. However, throughout the book and his other later works, Lawrence uses “the words ‘sexual’ and ‘phallic’ interchangeably, so that the celebration of sexual passion for which the book is renowned is largely a celebration of the penis of Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper and social prophet” (238). Constance Chatterley is overawed by Oliver’s penis, seeing it as offering “irrefutable evidence that male supremacy is founded upon the most real and incontrovertible grounds” (239). Throughout, the illustrious penis far outshines the “mere passive ‘cunt,’” a word which serves as “Mellors’ highest compliment for his mistress” whom he describes as “good cunt” and “Best bit o’ cunt left on earth” (239). Playing out the understanding that “female is passive, male is active,” Mellors and his phallus are the center of sexual activity while “Connie is ‘cunt,’ the thing acted upon, gratefully accepting […] the will of her master” (240). Preoccupied with the idea that both men and women in modernity are lost, the novel is focused on “rehabilitating Constance Chatterley through the phallic ministrations of the god Pan, incarnated in Mellors” (242).