A wood path to the vital self: the power of nature in D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover

A wood in spring of such tender and perceptive description would certainly stir a living string not only in Connie Chatterley, the heroine of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. The vividness and intensity of life that glares out of this 'picture' represents a dominant feature of Lawrence's novel which belongs to the last, fifth period of the author's career. It is not a mere coincidence that what later became published as Lady Chatterley's Lover was, in fact, a novel Lawrence originally proposed to call Tenderness. It is indeed sensibility of extraordinary degree, intense perception of colours, of slight movements and changes that occur in nature and the parallel changes taking place in the characters that play a vital role in this novel. This "extension of consciousness, [ ... ] an ability to experience what it is like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or what he (A. Huxley) called Lawrence's 'superior otherness",2 chiefly account for the poetic, soothing, almost pastoral character of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It seems to be in this novel that Lawrence's long-lasting belief in the revitalizing and revivifying power of nature, the idea of man's contact with and return to nature and the acceptance of his origins therein as the only means of survival for mankind come to their climax and..