Dehumanization In Lady Chatterley's Lover

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a strong, powerful female protagonist takes the lead against the repressed mental state (that’s a first). “A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived it” (Lawrence 73). And Lawrence evokes powerful messages, or lessons. “Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass” (Lawrence 271). In other words, adhering to the mechanized mental state will stain the mind from realness and closeness and love. He makes this message, and the image of a postwar mechanized mental state as a product of the Industrial Age, very clear throughout the entirety of the text. Workers are dehumanized …show more content…
At the time the novel was read differently for different types of people. For one, “When I was nineteen I wasn’t able to finish it. I think the prose style and class assumptions put me off. Had I finished reading the novel then I think it would have been very harmful” (Green 281). For another, “I saw myself reflected on those pages where Stephen Gordon lived.” Author Donna Allegra: “I, a black girl, Brooklyn-born and raised, had something important in common with this upper-class British noblewoman, something beyond a love for fencing and riding horses” (Green 281). Hall says of the primary purpose of her novel: “To encourage inverts to face up to a hostile world in their true colors and this with dignity and courage. To spur all classes of inverts to make good through hard work, faithful and loyal attachments and sober and useful living. To bring normal men and women of good will to a fuller and more tolerant understanding of the inverted” (Souhami 23). Hall gives us the pain of the struggle against England’s mechanized mental state with Stephen’s struggle to overcome a society restricting girls and women. Stephen Gordon envied boys; she envied her kid neighbor Roger; she envied his “…right to be perfectly natural; above all she envied his splendid conviction that being a boy constituted a privilege in life; she could well understand that conviction, but this only increased her envy” (Hall 47). Veritably, Hall was truly ahead of her time; she inspired a change of construct through this novel, teaching the uneducated about inversion and sexuality. However, some critics have thrown distaste at the novel’s end, saying Hall in the end conformed to heterosexual plot—making it “one thing or the other” (Green 289). Hall gave a voice to the new era and a voice to the lesbians and transgenders. More so, Stephen is very identifiable, not just for the lesbian or