What I learned from Lady Chatterley's Lover (hint: it's not sex)

Chickens, screens, Doritos, and intuition

Photo by Jorge.

I am reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I think I was expecting something quaint, adorable: a little glimpse of thigh, an off-color comment, twee scandals giving the British bourgeoisie goosebumps, but DAMN. It is SMOKIN’.

I started it at the pool this summer – do not judge, other books have been read in the meantime, I have been grading approximately 4,952 student essays a week, etc – and I felt, well, a bit embarrassed sitting there in my bikini reading about Lady Chatterley sneaking off to Mellors’ shack in the middle of a rainstorm. Thankfully the Gen Z lifeguards spent most of their time eating Cane’s and having diving contests with Elena so I remained invisible in the dull wasteland of middle-aged womanhood.

Beyond the bold, modern sex, I’m shocked at how relevant D.H. Lawrence still is. I mean, I suppose this is the very definition of a classic – evergreen – but nonetheless, it’s alarming how prescient his insights were. And it speaks to the fact that once a kind of mania grips a civilization, it’s almost impossible to wrench free from it; it becomes no longer a new fervor, but merely reality.

So it goes with industrial (we like to call it post-industrial now, hahaha, but drive four seconds out of Pittsburgh for a reality check on that one) capitalism. Once shocking to people like Lawrence, who saw rural England consumed by a hellscape of smoking mines, it is now, simply, The Way Things Are. “Modernity.” “Progress.”

Lawrence defined society as a “malevolent, partly-insane beast.” In 1928, he wrote:

“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 a thing you didn’t fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy you used out of cant, to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going, in spirits. 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. All that really remained was a stubborn stoicism: and in that there was a certain pleasure.”

I mean, dang. As good a depiction of late capitalism as they come: the frayed-ness of these essential human roles and experiences; their superficiality and appropriation for the cheapest and most vulgar ends (to sell toasters and leggings!); their emptiness, hollowness, cynicism.

And all that is left is the snark that has defined my generation, having to be smarter than everyone else, never giving in to the sentimental, the earnest, the sincere, the “woo.” A stubborn stoicism and wry intelligence confused with meaning and truth.

And then D.H. Lawrence 100% accurately described my personal disillusionment and my journey out:

“Now she came every day to the hens: they were the only things in the world that warmed her heart.”

CHICKENS! Lady Chatterley begins her exit from the drab deadness of her British manor life via none other than WATCHING CHICKENS!

Perhaps this is the magic bullet for our seemingly hopeless contemporary American society, that we all get a couple of Buff Orpingtons and spend a mandated two hours daily watching them preen and coo?? Maybe this would finally end the rampant consumerism paving over our deep spiritual angst? If I ran for President I’d send all of you a couple of hens.

First Lady Chatterley discovers chickens, and nature, and then: Mellors, the uber-man, with his hunting dog and his all-weather boots. Their first encounter is on a blanket in front of a fire in the chicken-tending hut. Mellors represents the anti-achievement culture, Lawrence having been ahead of his time by about a century in capturing this contemporary sickness. The term “bitch goddess of success” comes from William James, but Lawrence gives it its modern shine here:

“The bitch-goddess of success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry.

Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.”

Lawrence identifies the voraciousness, the fierceness of these cycles, the upper classes “snarling” to maintain their foothold on prestige and cultural capital via art or technology or business, the lowest ones fighting for survival. None questions the bitch goddess, the quest to please her, the meaning of her regard. Round and round and round, endless unfulfillable hungers, no meaning, no connection, no flowers, no hens. The bitch goddess ruling as if she were air itself.

In my twenties and early thirties, I placed myself pretty far outside of American culture. I lived unlike most Americans: overseas, often earning very little, traveling, writing, teaching, building my life from scratch. I had no car, no house, no normal 9-5 job (though I always worked), very few possessions.

When I had my daughter, she came home to a 19th-century cabin and co-slept with me in an old wooden bed. Jorge and I lived between the U.S. and Mexico, most of our possessions crammed into a few suitcases, our daughter capable of falling asleep while a full mariachi band played several feet away.

But when our daughter got a little older, my first book was published, and it seemed like time to “get serious” or whatever about life decisions – or at least make some sort of concrete decision about staying somewhere – Jorge and I ended up in the U.S.

Little by little, I found myself getting sucked into American culture. I can see now that I’d always had a weakness for status: even overseas, I wanted to be recognized by the U.S. cultural establishment as, well, great. Important! Smart! Exceptional, one-of-a-kind, the-voice-of-her-generation etc etc etc; you know, all the things one imagines while running and listening to a soaring Kishi Bashi ballad. Being back in the U.S. just exaggerated all that. I wanted that for my daughter, too. I believed, without ever realizing I was believing, in the status quo of what is normal, healthy, good.

When I didn’t believe in it, I thought I was the problem. I didn’t want my kid to sleep in a crib. It felt wrong. It felt silly. I tried it for a few nights and thought, why on earth am I putting my screaming baby to bed far away from my boobs? How is this the medical establishment’s idea of normal? It seemed like a recipe for waking up in desperation and madness and having the kind of accident that would then ironically lead the medical establishment to label co-sleeping as dangerous.

So I took my baby into my bed and she didn’t leave for the next three years, and slept beautifully. But I didn’t ever tell a doctor this. And I didn’t tell many people, either. I didn’t feel ashamed, but I felt eccentric.

I didn’t want to feed my kid tubes of pink yoghurt or Oreos or choline-packed Superpuffs. I didn’t even really want to feed her Cheerios. I didn’t like the fact that her preschool got a SmartBoard in the classroom the second year she was there. I wrote the school about it and asked about screen time, but I felt very sensitive about all of these concerns. Later, I didn’t want her playing apps at school or watching YouTube or getting a smart phone until she was out of high school (or really, ever??) Was I crazy? Was I exaggerating? Was I too much? Was I weird, over the top, “crunchy,” granola?

I definitely knew some moms who I thought were over the top, not letting their kid dare to eat a non-organic carrot or catch a glimpse of Daniel Tiger without complete parental oversight, meticulously cultivating their library carts so that nothing so base as Captain Underpants ever tainted their child’s milieu. I didn’t want to be like one of those moms, so self-serious in her regimen, snatching the disgrace of plastic from her child’s hands to replace it with a handcrafted wooden rainbow.

But in my wariness about being overly smug and puritanical I doubted my own values, and gaslit myself. And I failed to see how contempt and mockery of moms who do, say, opt for wood over plastic, or choose esoteric salt toothpastes, or feed their kids fish curry or nurse them until they can talk, is a real and powerful thread in American Mom discourse, and one that – surprise, surprise! – serves corporate interests very well.

As I have gotten older, I’ve watched American kid culture get crazier and crazier. I’ve seen progressive women with whom I share many values argue that there’s nothing wrong with letting kids eat as many Oreos and Doritos as they choose, that these foods shouldn’t be demonized but seen as neutral as carrots. I’ve heard them argue that kids should play video games as long as they want “so they don’t develop a fetishized relationship with screens.”

While I understand the argument for not demonizing certain foods and for being extremely wary of diet culture, I’m amazed at how many people embrace these perspectives without considering the fact that these (often quite evil!) corporations are not neutral: they are investing billions of dollars in co-opting children’s bodies and brains.

NPR recently gained access to previously redacted internal documents from TikTok, which demonstrate just how insidious and rapacious the tech industry can be with regards to children’s health and well-being. The documents revealed that the company’s studies show users are likely to become fully addicted to the platform in 35 minutes.

TikTok’s internal research stated:

“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety…compulsive usage also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”

Meanwhile corporate ag giants like Monsanto have colonized the seed market in many Latin American countries and planted massive monocultures of GMO crops, despite significant protests – especially in states like Oaxaca – from local farmers, and often with incredibly shady lobbying tactics.

Monsanto was just revealed to have heavily lobbied, along with the US Trade Administration and the US EPA (!!), the Mexican government not to overturn a ban on glyphosate. The U.S. Trade Representative attempted to force Mexico to overturn the ban as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, but failed.

In other countries in Latin America, Monsanto has successfully lobbied governments to plant monocultures of corn and soy and spray them with thousands of pounds of pesticides, in spite of intense activism from farmers and citizens.

Meanwhile, corporate food giants, inspired by the tobacco industry that proceeded them, have seen the wisdom in spending their dollars overseas. Remote villages across Mexico may not have a vegetable market or grocery store, but they will have at least two or three misceláneas stocked to the brink with Coke, Doritos, and Takis.

It’s hard to see Doritos as a “neutral food” when you’ve met fourteen-year-old mothers from Chiapas whose babies exist entirely on packages of them, washed down with a can of Coke.

Nowhere is this problematic “neutral” approach more obvious than in the use of screens in schools.

In this recent article on Jonathan Haidt’s newsletter “After Babel,” Amy Tyson, a former adolescent and child therapist who founded an organization to study the use of tech in schools, writes, “The fundamental problem with the implementation of screens in schools today is that it’s been adopted wholesale, haphazardly, and without the consideration of sound research.”

In the article, she shares some horrifying insights from six years of close study of screens in school. One teacher, she writes, “shared that when her district introduced iPads, the only instruction she received was, ‘Use the device as much as possible.’”

Tyson observed students swiping endlessly through books on Epic in order to earn a reward, spending hours on the app without having read a single word. She found that it takes answering 888 questions on Prodigy, a math app widely used in both public and private schools, to see a one-point improvement on a math tests. She found that – shocker! – the Ed Tech industry heavily lobbies the American Academy of Pediatrics. Also, 41% of teenagers are viewing porn at school.

Meanwhile, when I asked my students to leave their cell phones in a box at the front of the classroom one semester, I was absolutely eviscerated in my evaluations. Not because of anything we actually learned or did in class: because they didn’t have their phones on their physical bodies at all times. I discussed this with the Director of Composition, and was told that students really needed their phones on them “because they just don’t feel safe without them.”

I couldn’t say BUT THAT’S INSANE, because to much of our culture, it’s not insane! So instead I just told my students that if I saw them on their phones even once they would fail the class. They do manage to hold out for the whole hour and a half – and then each and every one of them immediately reaches into their backpack and unearths their magic device, glued to it before they’re out the door.

It starts to feel a little dizzying, a little insane, how far American culture has moved from earthbound things: from things I’d dare to call “real.”

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence described Mellors, the gamekeeper, surveying the English countryside:

“He went to the top of the knoll and looked out. There was no sound save the noise, the faint shuffling noise from Stacks Gate colliery, that never ceased working: and there were hardly any lights, save the brilliant electric rows at the works. The world lay darkly and fumily sleeping. It was half-past two. But even in its sleep it was an uneasy, cruel world, stirring with the noise of a train or some great lorry on the road, and flashing with some rosy lightning-flash from the furnaces. It was a world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all. Only greed, greed stirring in its sleep.”

Most of us no longer notice the “rosy lightning-flash of the furnaces,” or the “world of iron and coal”: instead, we have the perpetual glow of screens. We have people who can’t even move out of the way on the sidewalk because they’re so wedded to their phones. We have kids, as Jorge and I witnessed to our devastation in this year’s journeys in Mexico, who no longer go outside to explore their villages but spend hours on cracked iPhone screens playing the cheapest video games. We have parents who think that’s “modern.” “It’s good for them, right?”

I know I have made so many mistakes as a parent. I lay awake at night often thinking of them. But as I’ve moved into my forties I’ve stopped apologizing for my divergences from the culture, because I’ve come to think the culture is nuts.

It’s a culture that has lost touch with the most fundamental, earthbound truths. My neighbor up the street couldn’t recognize a chicken. When she saw one of ours in the front yard, she asked, “What kind of animal is that?”

“A chicken!” I said. She shrugged.

“I grew up in New York,” she said.

Food. Earth. Plants. Farms. Communities. A childhood free of fake dopamine and psychiatric drugs. Reading! A hearty suspicion of major corporations and the industries they subsidize.

Of course, it’s easy to become a hideously smug Wellness Person moralizing about the evils of contemporary society on Instagram over a video of one’s child barefoot in a stream, and it’s easy to become obsessed with a kind of purity in which children can never touch a bleeping plastic toy or be tainted forever by the mindlessness of capitalism.

Do I feed my kid boxed, fluorescent Mac and Cheese? Yes, sometimes. Do we watch shitty reality TV and dog videos on Instagram? Yes, sometimes. But I don’t see the need to argue in favor of these things. They already have billions of dollars of lobbying and funding and corporate greed behind them. I’d rather argue for sitting on the porch, watching the chickens.

The point isn’t necessarily one absolutely rigid set of values: never this, always that. Rather, it’s faith in my intuition – especially when it runs counter to the norm – and a refusal to apologize for it.

Homeschooling steeled this in me. So many people were clearly, well, horrified: one woman at my daughter’s school actually rolled her eyes when I told her what we were doing. I don’t think she was trying to be rude; it was just such an instantaneous, given reaction she didn’t even think would be offensive. Yet imagine if I’d rolled my eyes when she said her daughter was “learning math” by playing Prodigy at school for 2.5 hours a day.

The given is rarely suspect; the alternative, always.

“Ours is essentially a tragic age,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover begins, “so we refuse to take it tragically.”

Resistance, as it turns out, is the greatest joy. It’s community: making a pact with other parents to let our kids roam the streets without caring what people say. It’s being bored and being bored and being bored with your kid and refusing to cave to the begging for a screen, and then suddenly, out of this, an epic game of “Babies” in which your child invents a floating ark of infants and animals who need to be fed and burped and saved from sharks and it’s frankly exhausting and kind of miserable and so difficult for your adult brain but afterwards so damn rewarding, because it is real, because it is earthbound, because it is not a fleeting junk thing. Not cheap and frayed. Not fake dopamine. Because it is one of the Big Words. Love.

And leaning into it takes work, and it also takes a no.

No, I won’t do that. I don’t want that.

“We are among the ruins,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. “We start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes.”