Author: Dinah Kolka. Dinah is the founder of Decadent Serpent and a graduate of Edinburgh Napier University with a BA(Hons) in English Literature. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Salisbury Review and The Mallard. She was also published in the Scottish Book Trust’s 2018 anthology Rebel. In 2023, Dinah self-published her own collection of short stories, The Search and Other Stories.

I always adored DH Lawrence for his ability to write about people. He often got in trouble for this one, as for example, the short story titled ‘England, my England’ was based on real people who weren’t the happiest upon finding that out. Saying that he also had a way of weaving in really important themes into his writing without it overwhelming the narrative. So I thought I’d highlight how he incorporated the concept of the machine in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and how the machine is a crucial point from which the key message of the novel is able to shine through.

The changes that occurred in the early 20th century due to technological and industrial development led to many significant changes within society. Naturally, the opinions on the industrial developments were divided, some manifesting in fascination, and some in scepticism or even fear. DH Lawrence handled this divisive subject in Lady Chatterley’s Lover with unexpected precision and a coherent understanding of the issues alongside it. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a guideline to a new society, one that works together across the class system to bridge the gap between pastoral England and its fear of the machine and the industrial England and the machinic fascination.

Lawrence uses Clifford to represent the fascination for the machine and the pro-industrialism while Mellors represents pastoral England and the fears. Connie works as a bridge between them, choosing to mate with Mellors which is a cross-class effort to create a new society, one healed from war that works together to bridge this gap.

We are introduced to Clifford’s wheeled chair on the first page of the novel, ‘so he could drive himself slowly round the garden and into the fine, melancholy park of which he was really so proud though he pretended to be flippant about it’ and as the novel progresses, he becomes more like the chair itself, creating a whole new modern man, the capitalist.

However, as Clifford returned from war crippled, he was a changed man. As his lower part of the body failed to function properly, he could not have an heir to Wragby, which is something he wanted, mechanically, in order to prolong his bloodline rather than from a genuine paternal desire. There is a great disparity between Connie’s lively, Rubensian figure and Clifford’s dry paralysed profile.

When Clifford took an interest in the mines, ‘he began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came into him’. He felt powerful and found a connection to the external world, something that he could use to externalise his power. The colliers have become units to be ruled over and this sense of power drove him to feel like a man once again, despite being paralysed. With the help of the machine – the wheeled motor chair, and with the pits and the technological improvements he wanted to enact, the machine has enhanced him and with it came the fascination. He rejected the concept of a woman, just like what Futurists with Marinetti at its head preached: ‘Future man will reduce his heart to its purely distributive function. The heart has to become, in some way, a sort of stomach for the brain, which will methodically empty and fill so that the mind can go into action.’

Clifford did precisely that, he has reduced his heart to its basic function. This is when dealing with Connie, unable to offer her any physical affection, or with the colliers, who are different to him in status. His heart hardened, and his heart has become ‘a stomach for the brain’.

This was hinted at by  Dan Jacobson ‘An individual who has degenerated in this particular way, who has turned himself into a machine, inevitably sees the natural world and human society as fields for the exercise of his will, instead of as the ‘spontaneous-creative’ flux they really are.’

It is Clifford who states ‘if some of the old England isn’t preserved, there’ll be no England at all’ and it is significant because Clifford deep down understands the need for the society to change. It is through him that Connie discovers the industrial North and understands the fascination behind the machines. There is just someone else who can bridge the gap. Clifford himself has always been part of the aristocracy, so he is not fitting as a tool to create this ‘New England’. It is Mellors who offers the ideal outcome for the sake of the country healing together, according to Lawrence.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of a ‘body without organs’, a concept of a being free from the societal structures that has fluidity and desire and is formed prior to the creation of any external influences. This allows them to cross social boundaries to challenge fixed and stable capitalism. This can most certainly be applied to Mellors, who actively rejects the boundaries of class that are thrust upon him, which allows him to deterritorialise this meaning to destabilise existing social territories and establish himself as an individual being without external influences.

While Clifford was focusing on developing the machine, Mellors was focused on growing actual life which contrasted with the industrial craving ‘And slowly, softly, with sure gentle fingers, he felt among the old bird’s feathers and drew out a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand’.

Mellors is soft and gentle, harnessing life energy, he is the antidote to the machinery and the machinic. And we understand it, when we see Teversham through Mellors eyes, it is not pretty – ‘sharp, wicked, electric lights’ suggest evil, anger, and something sinister. ‘the unease, the ever-shifting dread’, the town comes to live like a resurrected corpse, a dreadful and mechanical creation.

Mellors despite being brought up among the Colliers, joined the army, which allowed him to learn and understand the social issues at hand. He sees the machine for what it is – ‘but the men were all outside there, glorying in the Thing, triumphing or being trodden down in the rush of mechanised greed or of greedy mechanism.’  He rebels against this, and he sees men as blindly following towards their own demise. Yet, he actively chose to withdraw himself from society – deterritorialise and live almost as a primitivist ‘He was temporising with life. He had thought he would be safe, at least for a time, in this wood.’

Thus, he becomes the body without organs – he freed himself from the social structures, and being on a modest salary he receives from Clifford, he is ready to deterritorialize. The union with Connie allows this to happen – despite Mellors having to return to society after he loses the job with Clifford, the act of deterritorialization is concluded when Connie gets pregnant. It is their child that is a symbol of them breaking the boundary together which will help the new machine-driven society heal.

That is because the machine is ever-present. As stated in the Rhythm magazine: ‘my aim is to stir other human beings to revolt against the materialisation, the stultification, and the vulgarisation of life, but very quickly I discover that my only means of circulating my call to arms is by machinery’. The Machine is already ever-present, and one cannot live without it. Even to raise awareness about the dangers of the machine, the machine is still being used for that purpose and will never stop being utilised. One only has a choice of either using the machine to go against it or proceeding to live in a quasi-primitivist Ted Kaczynski-like cabin. Mellors has chosen the latter in the beginning, he rejected the society, but this was just one part of it, this territorial isolation.

Meeting Connie has given him new fuel to find new ways of going against the machines and find that essential element that would bridge the gap between the pastoral and the industrial. Connie sits in between Clifford and Mellors and offers an insight into the polarity of the industrial debate at the time. She witnesses Teversham for the first time, seeing the industrial north and the wrath it brought. Her instinct tells her to fear it but she cannot help but be fascinated by it. But she gets used to them, the machines become the disastrous reality that she experienced in her daily life.

Connie is the vehicle through which we see the changes. And even the change that is done to England, the change that tears down homes and builds factories, is non-organic. The continuity of England, the old England of the stately homes and pastoral landscape is being blotted out, the continuity ‘is not organic, but mechanical’. And it is a negative. She understands Clifford’s point of view, to an extent, but her bond with Mellors is stronger. Here, again, Connie, as a woman coming from a middle-class intellectual background deterritorializes and chooses to mate with Mellors. It is the liberated desire at its finest through which they are capable of crossing the boundary and making a change in the world. Deleuzian desiring-production in their case is creating a new being into the world, one that can unite the England of old with the England of new, without the need to tear it down – neither the stately homes nor the machines.

And the more time Connie spends with Mellors, the more she sees Clifford as a mechanised being. Gradually, over time, Clifford becomes less and less human and humane. DH Lawrence mentions his ‘network of nerves’, once again making a subtle allusion to Clifford as a machine.

Oswald Spengler himself, in The Decline of the West, talks about the transcendental impact of the machine:

‘And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy.’

‘Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible.’

This is a more transcendental argument on the inherent evil of the machine – it takes away the humanness from humans, it gives power to a man that should only be vested in God.

But in Lady Chatterley’s lover, it is the petit bourgeoisie and the outlier who must work together in order to create a whole new future. The premise is somewhat reminiscent of Metropolis where ‘there can be no understanding between the hand and the head unless the heart acts as mediator.’ In this case, Connie acts as the heart between the head (the aristocracy/Old England) and the hand (the working class/New England).

There is an understanding, that the gaping mouth of the Moloch-machine was likely to lead men to their death and to the eradication of old England.

Just like Gilbert Gannan mentions: ‘Life is far too good and far too precious a thing to be smudged with mechanical morality, and fenced about with mechanical lies, and wasted on mechanical acquaintanceships when there are splendid friendships and lovely loves in which the imagination can find warm comradeship and adventure, lose and find itself, and obtain life,’ and this is what DH Lawrence is putting across, Clifford engages in mechanical morality and mechanical lies, while Connie chooses real life with ‘real body’ and chooses that vitality of warm comradeships.

If we turn to Deleuze and Guattari, Lawrence as an author focused and limited himself strictly to the personal zone, which looked out onto the social and touched on the political. However, his characters have the tools to make the cross over into the world-historical zone. They can make the change together by not following the social norms and harnessing their desire and using it towards the greater good, thus freeing themselves from the crutches of their environment.

In a way, Clifford’s fascination with industrial work is enhanced by his own physical malfunction and the support he receives from a machine – a motor chair. This, in turn, turns him into a quasi-man-machine, deeply reliant on the machine which then prompts him to take a greater interest in the pit as a member of the ruling class. On the other hand of this spectrum, Mellors rejects progress and sees it as a distraction from important social matters. In a state of Deleuzian deterritorialization, he becomes a ‘body without organs’ and his union with Connie reterritorializes them in the society, thus becoming quasi-anti-capitalist tools. They create a union of Deleuzian minority but based on class rather than race. In this case, Connie is a link between the fascination and fear. But the fears and fascinations aren’t baseless – the fear is often rooted in the relation of the machinic progress to the oppression of the proletariat, and the fascination comes from the Faustian spirit and pure undistilled desire to harness progress.