Lady Chatterley’s Green World: A Frygian Reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover

There are few books that are perhaps as well-known as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel that was censored for decades, was at the heart of a court case about censorship, has been adapted to film and television numerous times, and ultimately, is one of literature’s best-known novels about sex. In some ways, it is almost difficult to imagine there is anything new to say about Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and yet, the novel continues to arouse readers and demand attention. Each adaptation highlights a new aspect of the text, for instance, while still highlighting some of the canonical moments from the text. This article seeks to consider the role of place in the novel, and more particularly draws on Northrop Frye’s notion of the “green world,” as much as an actual place as a powerful energy that both renews and gives life. In my reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I frame the green world as a sexual and erotic landscape that is essential to the novel, while also, and importantly, reflecting on D.H. Lawrence’s own writings on sexuality, notably his notion of “sex in the head.”

This article draws on the literary theory and criticism of Northrop Frye, who, to my mind, remains Canada’s preeminent literary theorist, and his influence, thus far, seems unmatched. Admittedly, Frye belongs to a different generation, often aligned with New Criticism, though Frye himself would rebel against that label. In his diaries from 1950, for instance, on March 14, Frye seems unaware of New Criticism: “Woodhouse has been asked to do a Milton paper at M.L.A. & his opposite his Cleanth Brooks, who apparently belongs to a group called the ‘New Critics’ who are supposed to ignore historical criticism & concentrate on texture, what texture is” and Frye then explains, “I asked Abrams if being in the Kenyon Review would make me a new critic: I certainly can’t claim to be au courant in such matters” (8.288-89). But, by the summer of 1950, on June 29, he writes: “evidently I’m now classed as a ‘new critic’ across the line” (392). Though Frye does not see himself as a New Critic, there are affinities between New Criticism and Frye, as David Damrosch writes in the preface to Anatomy of Criticism:

For Frye as for the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s, a literary work is to be understood first and foremost as a tensile structure or ordered words. Throughout his book, Frye inveighs against purely “external” or “centrifugal” modes of interpretation that neglect the verbal and generic bases of literary meaning. At the same time, he sharply opposes the New Critics for their neglect of wider literary and social contexts, and he is driven to develop a broader understanding of literature as a cultural system of the highest order. Yet all the while, as Roland Barthes would say fifteen years later, “the pleasure of the text” is grounded for Frye in its language.

(ix)

Frye, to be certain, was never a genuine or a real New Critic; he could not ignore the historical context of a given work, and yet he was deeply interested in, as Damrosch writes, the “ordered words” (ix). Indeed, as Damrosch further notes, Frye

was no more a pure Jungian than he was a pure New Critic. Though he values archetypes and myths for their ability to communicate across the ages, far beyond any writer’s conscious intention, he rejects the key Jungian conception of a collective unconscious, “an unnecessary hypothesis in literary criticism, so far as I can judge.”

(xi)

So, though Frye is certainly not a “pure New Critic,” we can agree that some of this methods were taken from New Criticism, such as an insistence upon the literary text, the order of words, and the realization that words have power and meaning. For Frye, as Frederick P.W. McDowell notes in his review of Anatomy of Criticism: “literature has value precisely because it is, in its own right, a dynamic, self-consistent...