Lady Chatterley's Lover Themes & Symbolism

Lady Chatterley's Lover Significant Topics

Love and Relationships between Men and Women

Love and personal relationships are the threads that bind this novel together. Lawrence explores a wide range of different types of relationships. The reader sees the brutal, bullying relationship between Mellors and his wife Bertha, who punishes him by preventing his pleasure. There is Tommy Dukes, who has no relationship because he cannot find a woman who he respects intellectually and at the same time finds desirable. There is also the perverse, maternal relationship that ultimately develops between Clifford and Mrs. Bolton after Connie has left.

Love, or the lack of love, is what drives the main characters to their individual courses of action and inevitably leads them to face the consequences. Of all the characters in the novel, none is motivated to search for a meaningful relationship more than Constance Chatterley. Driven to despair by her sterile, passionless marriage to Clifford and confused and frustrated by her lifeless friends,...
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