Chapter 1 Notes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In the first chapter of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the setting is described as the Wragby estate, and the social and emotional distance between Sir Clifford and Constance, his wife, becomes evident. The atmosphere is tense and disconnected, symbolizing the societal constraints and emotional disconnection of the characters. Additionally, the contrast between the industrial world and the natural world is introduced, setting the stage for the exploration of these themes throughout the novel.
Constance was one of the daughters of well-known Sir Malcolm Reid who left his wife home and went his own way. Constance was sent to cities in European mainland with her sister Hilda to breathe in art, and they also met Socialist there. They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, and they met sturdy and lusty youths. Both of them had their love-affairs by the age of eighteen. The girls’ doubt, the men’s humble and craving formed the love experience.
But they loved absolute, perfect, pure ,noble freedom more than sexual love. Maybe just as their mother’s hope in her last days. Women was different in sexual love than men, so they could use sex thing to have power over men.
Constance and Hilda both had love experience by the time war came, and they hurried home after been home for their mother’s funeral. Their young men were dead before Christmas of 1914.
The sisters lived in Kensington house and mixed with the young Cambridge group. Hilda married a wealthy man ten years older than herself. Connie met Clifford Chatterley, a young man of twenty-two, who studied technicalities and coal-mining in Bonn and gently mocked at everything.
Clifford Chatterley was aristocracy, more upper-class than Connie, his father Sir Geoffrey, was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount’s daughter. Sir Geoffrey was ridiculously patriotic, he spent more money on his country than he’d got and shove the men to the war, while keeping his position in safe.
The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister had lived curiously isolated to each other , to the industrial Midlands, as well as their own class.
Clifford was more provincial and more timid, and was shy and nervous of all that other big world which was out of his narrow one. Although everything including authorities, classes were ridiculous to him, Clifford was attracted by Constance Reid with her soft assurance of a girl. After the elder brother Herbert’s death in the war, Clifford became the heir of baronetcy and Wragby. And Sir Geoffrey wanted him to marry.
So they married in 1917 when Clifford was home for a month to leave. Inspite of Sister Emma disgusted at his defection. He was virgin so before marriage and Connie feel exulted for being free from sex.
Clifford then went to war, almost die. Two years remained in the doctor’s hands, he was pronounced a cure, but with half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed and he was crippled forever . That meant there would be no sexual part with him. Although his upper body was strong. The couple went back to Wragby in 1920, began to start a housekeeping and marriage life.eeping and married life in the rather forlorn home on an inadequate income. Sister Emma felt his marrying would be a desertion and betrayal of the young ones of the family.
觀滄海 See the Sea 