Oliver Mellors Character Analysis

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day-to-day. Home was a place you lived in, love was the thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people […] As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! […]

Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! […]

Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.

The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and whirring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinth, she wasn't all tough rubber goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender.

She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting […] her womb was open and soft, and slowly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her […] and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of men […]

Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animus of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belong to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belonged to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further whirled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasma was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

“No, my child! All this is a romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.”

“Then there is no common humanity between us all!”

“Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the functions determine the individual.”

And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding over with blue encroaching hyacinths. Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinths in shallows! Opinions on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Wither, oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. Oh captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

“Did you hate Clifford?” She said at last. “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”

“What is his sort?”

“Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.”

“What balls? Balls! A man's balls!”

She pondered this.

“But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.

“You say a man’s got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls when he’s sort of tame.”

“So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he came to me!”—She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.

The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change […]. “Tha ma’es nowt o’ me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha’rt more cocky than me, an’ that says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my Lady Jane? […] Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ Lady Jane!”

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his naval. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his mustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

“This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,” he said. “And we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their separate ways. Maybe—”

[…] “Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,” she insisted.

“Ay, what was I going to say?”

He had forgotten. And it was one of the great disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

“But you'll be through with him in a while,” [Hilda] said, “and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.”

“But you were such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes.”

“I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.

It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvelous death.

[…] She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

“Shall I tell you?” [Connie] said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you? […] It's the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”

If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day-to-day. Home was a place you lived in, love was the thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people […] As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing.

Yet it was spring, and the bluebells were coming in the wood, and the leaf-buds on the hazels were opening like the spatter of green rain. How terrible it was that it should be spring, and everything cold-hearted, cold-hearted. Only the hens, fluffed so wonderfully on the eggs were warm with their hot, brooding female bodies! […]

Life, life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life! So tiny and so utterly without fear! […]

Connie was fascinated. And at the same time, never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness. It was becoming unbearable.

The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines. There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanized greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and whirring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform. Soon it would destroy the wood, and the bluebells would spring no more. All vulnerable things must perish under the rolling and running of iron.

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor thing, she too had some of the vulnerability of the wild hyacinth, she wasn't all tough rubber goods and platinum, like the modern girl. And they would do her in! As sure as life, they would do her in as they do in all naturally tender life. Tender! Somewhere she was tender.

She could only wait, wait and moan in spirit as she felt him withdrawing, withdrawing and contracting […] her womb was open and soft, and slowly clamoring, like a sea anemone under the tide, clamoring for him to come in again and make a fulfillment for her. She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her […] and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries. The voice out of the uttermost night, the life! The man heard it beneath him with a kind of awe, as his life sprang out into her. And as it subsided, he subsided too and lay utterly still, unknowing, while her grip on him slowly relaxed, and she lay inert. And they lay and knew nothing, not even of each other, both lost.

Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of men […]

Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animus of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belong to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belonged to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further whirled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasma was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.

“No, my child! All this is a romantic illusion. Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate. And the masses are functioning of another part of fate. The individual hardly matters. It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole. And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.”

“Then there is no common humanity between us all!”

“Just as you like. We all need to fill our bellies. But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes. The two functions are opposed. And the functions determine the individual.”

And the chair began to advance slowly, joltingly down the beautiful broad riding over with blue encroaching hyacinths. Oh last of all ships, through the hyacinths in shallows! Opinions on the last wild waters, sailing in the last voyage of our civilization! Wither, oh weird wheeled ship, your slow course steering. Quiet and complacent, Clifford sat at the wheel of adventure: in his old black hat and tweed jacket, motionless and cautious. Oh captain, my Captain, our splendid trip is done! Not yet though! Downhill in the wake, came Constance in her grey dress, watching the chair jolt downwards.

“Did you hate Clifford?” She said at last. “Hate him, no! I’ve met too many like him to upset myself hating him. I know beforehand I don’t care for his sort, and I let it go at that.”

“What is his sort?”

“Nay, you know better than I do. The sort of youngish gentleman a bit like a lady, and no balls.”

“What balls? Balls! A man's balls!”

She pondered this.

“But is it a question of that?” she said, a little annoyed.

“You say a man’s got no brain, when he's a fool: and no heart, when he's mean; and no stomach when he’s a funker. And when he’s got none of that spunky wild bit of a man in him, you say he’s got no balls when he’s sort of tame.”

“So proud!” she murmured, uneasy. “And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he came to me!”—She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement.

The man looked down in silence at the tense phallos, that did not change […]. “Tha ma’es nowt o’ me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha’rt more cocky than me, an’ that says less. John Thomas! Dost want her? Dost want my Lady Jane? […] Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ Lady Jane!”

And he stuck flowers in the hair of his own body, and wound a bit of creeping-jenny round his penis, and stuck a single bell of a hyacinth in his naval. She watched him with amusement, his odd intentness. And she pushed a campion flower in his mustache, where it stuck, dangling under his nose.

“This is John Thomas marryin’ Lady Jane,” he said. “And we mun let Constance an’ Oliver go their separate ways. Maybe—”

[…] “Maybe what? Go on with what you were going to say,” she insisted.

“Ay, what was I going to say?”

He had forgotten. And it was one of the great disappointments of her life, that he never finished.

“But you'll be through with him in a while,” [Hilda] said, “and then you'll be ashamed of having been connected with him. One can’t mix up with the working people.”

“But you were such a socialist! You're always on the side of the working classes.”

“I may be on their side in a political crisis, but being on their side makes me know how impossible it is to mix one's life with theirs. Not out of snobbery, but just because the whole rhythm is different.”

Hilda had lived among the real political intellectuals, so she was disastrously unanswerable.

It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvelous death.

[…] She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

“Shall I tell you?” [Connie] said, looking into his face. “Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall I tell you? […] It's the courage of your own tenderness, that’s what it is: like when you put your hand on my tail and say I’ve got a pretty tail.”

If things go on as they are, there’s nothing lies in the future but death and destruction, for these industrial masses. I feel my inside turn to water sometimes, and there you are, going to have a child by me. But never mind. All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us.