It was interesting to refresh myself on some classic D. H. Lawrence. If you're strictly reading this as a period piece, most of the stories are quite humorous, even when they're not 'humorous'. But since I'm a product of my generation, I can still enjoy a number of the stories on their own merit, but the way women are treated in others just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it then behooves me to read deeper into the milieu and see that, in fact, this author really does respect women, as far as it goes and despite his stormy relationship. I really ought to read a lot more of his works to be fair.
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Lady Chatterley’s Lover can perhaps be read as a celebration of raw corporeal union in the face of the cold capitalist industrial complex. As Mailer writes in his classic defense of Lawrence and Henry Miller, The Prisoner of Sex, Lawrence argued that “sex was the only nostrum which could heal, all other medicines were part of the lung-scarring smoke of factories and healed nothing […]” (148). Similarly, Lawrence’s first stories published fourteen years earlier demonstrate how the infectious influence of a rapidly changing socioeconomic structure permeates characters' behaviors and how these individuals deal with emotional and erotic interactions.

Lawrence demonstrates how physical attraction operates as the premier criterion of desire, and how the bodies are commodified and made quantifiable by visual appeal. How individuals perceive bodies and have theirs perceived constructs a forged human bond that is infected by violence and is allowed to fester and deliver cancerous consequences to both the viewer and their object. ( )