Techno-Primitivism: Á Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover

This article aims to undo the double abstraction at work in current enquiries into modernism's material culture: of form and function from raw material, and of meaning from form and function. It argues for the emergence in modernist literature of a "techno-primitivism" attuned to the tensions between the raw and the cooked, between plantation and chemical laboratory, made manifest by the production and marketing of rubber (a semi-synthetic plastic) during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The focus is on Lawrence's understanding of Connie Chatterley as an exemplary modern woman in the final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover.