Lady Chatterley's views on landscape

Lady Chatterley's views on landscape

Also from Lady Chatterley's Lover:

"And the trip was really nice. Only, Connie kept saying to herself: Why don't I really care! Why am I never really thrilled? How awful, that I don't really care about the landscape anymore! But I don't. It's rather awful. I'm like Saint Bernard, who could sail down the lake of Lucerne without ever really noticing that there were mountains and green water. I just don't care for landscape any more. Why should one stare at it? Why should one? I refuse to."

p.298 Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence, Jaico Publishing, Mumbai, 2002.

This passage reflects the views before and after the turn of the last century that landscape was something to be appreciated: the Hudson River school and all that. The leisure classes would spend their time looking at "nature", painting it, and so forth, and opine that the only pure thing was nature. So Lady Chatterley is driving through the Swiss Alps trying to feel the way she is told she is supposed to feel and she just doesn't get it. Her natural instincts just come out.

It is the same today. We have commodified our natural landscapes. The U.S. National Park system is an excellent example of this, as Edward Abbey pointed out: the places with the most jaw-dropping beauty are bordered, policed, and given an entrance fee, roads, and services. This is not such a bad thing insofar as it protects some amazing places from being destroyed. But the mentality of the people is commodified: places are consumed, eaten up by the mind. Once you've come and seen it, time to move on. And which place is the most spectacular? I've got to see that. I heard a term once for these landscapes, which I cannot recall. Maybe you can help me with it. But the idea is that these are the sexy landscapes, the thrilling landscapes, and should be prized above others.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was not what I expected. It became a model for romance novel sex scenes once it was allowed to be published in 1960. But by today's standards they are tame. What D.H. Lawrence did do was to try to capture the intuitive subconscious of the male and female mind: how a person feels at a particular moment, regardless of what he or she is thinking. He also described the degeneration of the beauty of the English Midlands by the coal industry. Incidentally, he also wrote non-fiction accounts of travel and of flora.

Lady Chatterley's views on landscape