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question Lawrence puts to himself. He wants to eliminate the secrecy,
wants to bring sex fully into the open. But he has a great
belief in the mystery of sex, utterly unknown and in the darkness.
If sex is properly explained, brought into the open, without secrecy,
won't the "mystery of the phallcs1’ (LCL 219) go away?
Surely this is a sign of Lawrence's lingering puritanism in LCL, The
secrecy must be finished because it is part of the old misconceptions
of the "grey puritans" and in LCL Lawrence is anti-puritan,
in his way.
Lady Chatterley is representative of all the unsatisfied
women in the world. I cannot help thinking that her sexual needs
were heavily restrained for almost all the twelve years before she
met Mellors
Of course the whole novel unfolds around the fact
that she does not want to renounce sex after she feels Mellors*
tenderness. If she had renounced Mellors he would have been an
affair and there would not have been a "phallic novel", but maybe
a love-story with a tragedy. Yet Lawrence says in the beginning
of the storys
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it
tragically." (LCL 5)
Moreover, he hates tragedy and later on, in a short story, he
saysf "Tragedy is lack of experience«" (SUN, in SFS 217)
Before she meets Mellors, Connie has an affair with Michae-
lis, one of Clifford's friends and guests. Michaelis is one of
those "mental-lifers" whom Connie and Lawrence hate. He is a
mistake in Connie’s attempt to find a lasting sexual connection.
Technically they cannot have complete sexual fulfilment because
they do not come together to their orgasm. Connie has to go on
holding him after he has finished in a minute. They accuse them-