Erotic Class Masquerade: Sex and Working-Class Dialect in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

This article examines the inter-class relationship between Lady Connie Chatterley and gamekeeper Oliver Mellors in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and the novel’s startling, but tantalizing triangulation of sex, class, and language. By analysing occasions of sexual and linguistic role playing through the lens of Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival, this article demonstrates how class-based hierarchies are (temporarily) upended through eroticized and performative inversions of classed labour and language, a narrative practice I call erotic class masquerade. In examining the novel’s allegedly obscene provocative content, overt discussions of sex, use of profanity, and the representation of working-class dialect, this article reconsiders these features as avant-garde aesthetic innovations. This reading ultimately proposes that the novel’s imagining of class subjectivity extends far beyond economic and hierarchical distinctions and delves deep into the realms of the aesthetic and the sexual. By re-reading this infamous novel with new attention to these narrative practices, I suggest that Lady Chatterley’s Lover be re-evaluated for its simultaneous contributions to avant-garde and working-class studies.