Lady Chatterley's Lover is far more than a mere work of complaint, for Lawrence was primarily an artist
rather than a social activist. He is frequently accused of being a polemical, didactic writer, but this is
partly because readers have taken his characters' exposition of their ideologies to represent Lawrence's
own point of view. This assumption is naive, however, for he deliberately refrains from speaking in a
clearly defined authorial voice throughout his novels. Instead, he mercurially shifts his perspective from
one character to another on their level, showing us how they react to each other in turn rather than writing
from a plane of understanding above them. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, he dissolves his prose into the
thoughts of each of the characters including those whom one might assume to be antipathetic to him,
like Sir Clifford. Most of the novel, however, is written from Connie's point of view, right down to the
stops, starts, haltings and accelerations of her own mind, as '.. .she felt again in a wave of terror the
grey, gritty hopelessness of it all... yet Mellors had come out of all this. -Yes, but he was as apart from
it as she was.'
Lawrence may start a passage in an authorial tone, but before long he will have assumed
Connie's own flow of thought. Here, for instance, Lawrence judges her state of mind detachedly, and
then gives the reader direct access to it, in the lines 'with the stoicism of the young she took in the utter
soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance, and left it at what it was... Well, there it
was: fated, like the rest of things' It was rather awfal, but why kick? You couldn't kick it away. It just went
on. Oneself also went on. Life, like all the rest!' Occasionally, but much less frequently, Lawrence allows
the reader to eavesdrop on Mellors' thoughts, as in the scene where he sits '...in a stupor of bitter thoughts
until midnight...And what then? What then? Must he start again, with nothing to start on? Must he entangle
this woman? Must he have the horrible broil with her lame husband? - and also, some sort of horrible
broil with his own brutal wife, who hated him? Misery! Lots of misery!'
Although Lawrence does approach
a certain mimicry of Mellors' fragmented. Jerky, tortured and circular thoughts, the prose style is still
recognisably that of Lawrence. Only very occasionally does he go in the direction of Joyce, actually
appropriating not only the flow of a character's thoughts, but also their own particular idiom, the manner
in which they express these thoughts to themselves. A striking moment at which Lawrence slips into
such a style is when Mrs. Bolton sees the keeper loitering outside the house in the early hours of the
morning and thinks 'Well! Well! So her ladyship had fallen for him! Well - her Ladyship wasn't the first: there
was something about him. But fancy! A Tevershall lad born and bred, and she her Ladyship in Wragby
Hall! My word that was a slap back at the high and mighty Chatterleys!' These are very obviously the
thoughts not of Lawrence but of Mrs. Bolton, and the reader judges them accordingly, for we negotiate
the novel's voices as they shift. Although Connie's voice often yields to Lawrence's, for instance, he
always protects her from the reader's criticism. Her voice is not muzzled, but shaped so that a significance
can be provided for her more often than she can provide it for herself. There is nothing patronising about
this, however, for the voice that describes Mellors' 'strange potency of manhood' is not the voice that sees
his penis as 'proud' or 'lovely.' The challenge to Connie's voice is not the same as the challenge to her
values, which are open to the readers' criticism in a way in which her voice is not. She possesses the
voice of a character becoming free, shaping an identity very different from Lawrence's own, and although
her voice is framed by his, she speaks for herself. Thus, she dashes spontaneously into the rain, not to
give Mellors an opportunity to 'take her', but to assert her independence and to express her own 'sudden
desire.'