"Lady Chatterley's Lover"
by D.H. Lawrence
"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."
Victor Hugo
"Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly
and without law, and must be plucked where it is found,
and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration."
D.H. Lawrence
Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is the story of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage who finds love with the virile gameskeeper of her husband's estate. The book portrays the regenerative power of sexual love between man and woman - an affirmation of life and the possibility of happiness.She took off her things, and made him do the same. She was lovely in the first soft flush of her pregnancy.
"I ought to leave you alone," he said.
"No!" she said. "Love me! Love me, and say you'll keep me. Say you'll keep me! Say you'll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody."
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong, naked body, the only home she had ever known.
"Then I'll keep thee," he said. "If tha wants it, then I'll keep thee."
He held her round and fast.
"And say you're glad about the child," she repeated. "Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you're glad it's there."
But that was more difficult for him.
"I've a dread of puttin' children I' th' world," he said. "I've a dread o' th' future for 'em."
"But you've put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be it's future already. Kiss it!"
He quivered, because it was true. "Be tender to it, and that will be its future."- At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus within the womb.
"Oh, you love me! You love me!" she said, in a little cry like one of her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went into her softly, feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to her, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went into her that this was the thing he had to do, to come into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity as a man. After all, if she had money and means, and he had none, he should be too proud and honourable to hold back his tenderness from her on that account. "I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings," he said to himself, "and the touch of tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is a battle against the money, and the machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me there. Thank God I've got a woman! Thank God I've got a woman who is with me, and tender and aware of me. Thank God she's not a bully, nor a fool. Thank God she's a tender, aware woman." And as his seed sprang in her, his soul sprang towards her too, in the creative act that is far more than procreative.
