Lady Chatterley’s Lover

I am very bad at understanding people with accents.  By that I mean people whose mother tongue is English, but are from, say, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia…all other former British colonies.  There are, obviously, shades of grey, but I will say that the billet I stayed with in Essex spoke with a Cockney-type accent so strong I had to ask her to repeat just about everything she said (“‘ow old aw yoo?  Ahm four’een”).  Besides an admiration for British pop music (Keith Moon being a favourite earlier in my life), I am no Anglophile.  What’s so glamourous about black lung and conservative class politics?  My billet once complained to me that all the English people in American movies had such “posh accents.”  “I ain’t posh, I’m common!”  she declared.  I didn’t ask her to repeat herself.

My edition of D.H. Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover includes a translation dictionary for the eponymous lover’s local vernacular, including the slang he uses to talk about the female genitals – one of the reasons the book was declared an “obscene publication.”  That, and the fact that the plot revolves around Lady Chatterley carrying on an affair with the groundskeeper while her impotent paraplegic husband glooms around in their country manor.  Either Lawrence is kind of a downer, or newly industrialised England really was just horribly bleak.

After reading another of his books, Sons and Lovers, my biggest issue with ol’ D.H. is his awful attitude towards women.  His female characters are bitter and shrewish.  And he refers to the clitoris as a “beak” (what!) that tears at a man as a woman forces him to stay inside her till she’s satisfied.  Sounds like D.H.  was fucking rocky outcroppings, not women – or maybe he just felt emasculated because the women he was with needed clitoral stimulation?  I hear he was heavily into anal sex, which probably says a lot about him dodgin’ the beak.  I kind of hate him.  Two beaks up for the book, one ruptured sphincter for D.H.