How is Human Sexuality treated in Lady Chatterley's Lover?

             In the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence, the author took a different view of the relationship between the two sexes than was generally discussed before in novels. The themes, descriptions and words he used were highly controversial at the time it was written, causing its first publications to be in Italy in 1928 even though the author was English. It was not published until the 1960's in England, and even then amongst great controversy due to the reputation of being a sordid book that had grown up around it. However, Lawrence himself did not see the book in such a light. He saw it as a critique of society and the way in which human intellectual and sexual relationships had evolved and become disconnected from each other in a very unnatural way over the years. In this essay, I will attempt to show his analysis of such things in the time he was living and how his views are brought out through the characters with the novel.
             At the time of his writing, sexual attitudes had taken a drastic shift away from the remnants of the Victorian era and into a sort of enlightened, intellectual state of freedom. After the First World War, real advances began to be made in regards to attitudes towards sexual relations. 'Modern sex' and education of a sort had begun to evolve. People were beginning to believe that they had control over their own sexuality and had the choice when to evoke it, loosing the natural vitality that it once had, making it far more meaningless and false. The 1920's was the decade of the introduction of contraception, giving an even wider gap between sex and procreation than had been there before. Already, attitudes had been shifting towards a decrease in the relationship between intellectual thought and sexual relations. The idea of mental compatibility was becoming the desired option for relationships and marriage, when, until fairly recently, it had been chiefly the dom...

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How is Human Sexuality treated in Lady Chatterley's Lover?. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 20:29, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/93057.html