English Literature books summary

arrives, leading Isaac by a rope that is tied around his neck. He and the

Black Knight engage in a friendly fight over Isaac. The Black Knight wins,

and Isaac is set free. Two other men bring in another prisoner, the Prior

of Jorvaulx.

CHAPTERS 33 & 34

Prior Aymer is frightened when he is brought in to the camp, but is mostly

disturbed because his beautiful, expensive clothes are ruined. Isaac is

relieved to learn Rebecca is alive and listens carefully when the Prior

offers, for an appropriate price, to use his friendship with the Knight

Templar to free Rebecca. The Black Knight is pleasantly surprised at the

decency with which the outlaws behave.

At a banquet hall in the castle of York to which Prince John has invited

his nobles, rumors are afoot that Torquilstone Castle has been attacked and

captured. Word has it that Front-de-Boeuf and Bois-Guilbert, and perhaps De

Bracy too, are dead. John is disturbed but listens to Fitzurse, who

reassures him that his unscrupulous reign is invincible.

De Bracy dramatically enters the banquet and announces that Richard is in

England, Bois-Guilbert has fled with the Jewish girl, and Front-de-Bouef is

dead. John is frightened at the news and begins to drink heavily. In his

drunken stupor, he realizes that many of his knights are deserting him. He

quickly appoints De Bracy High Marshal to secure his loyalty. De Bracy,

however, no longer trusts or believes in John. John, in turn, sets spies on

De Bracy.

CHAPTER 35

Isaac of York is warned by his relation Nathan that Lucas Beaumanoir, Chief

of the Order of Templars, is also present at Templestowe, where Rebecca is

being held prisoner. Beaumanoir is a rigid knight who is insistent on

Templar principles, a cruel enemy to the Moslems, and a strong hater of the

Jews.

Isaac brings a letter from Prior Aymer to Bois-Guilbert, asking for the

Prior's ransom; the Jew is brought to Lucas Beaumanoir. Until Isaac shows

up, Beaumanoir is completely unaware of Rebecca's presence in the castle.

He is annoyed that Bois-Guilbert is guilty of sequestering Rebecca for

immoral purposes, since he is a strict keeper of the Knights Templar rules

of celibacy.

Isaac is oblivious to the fact that the Prior's letter nastily hints that

Rebecca is a "second witch of Endor"; in it, the Prior says Rebecca has

cast a spell over the Templar. Malvoisin, the preceptor of Templestowe,

seizes on the notion that Rebecca is a witch and defends his friend Bois-

Guilbert. In the meantime, Bois-Guilbert finds he is strongly attracted to

Rebecca and continues to press her to accept him.

Beaumanoir orders a full-scale trial for Rebecca, thinking this is his only

chance to save the reputation of the Knight Templar who has acted so out of

keeping with the order's rules. Bois-Guilbert's attempts to help Rebecca

escape the trial by marrying him are in vain.

CHAPTERS 37 & 39

The scene is set for Rebecca's trial. The Grand Master sits opposite a pile

of logs, which will form the stake at which Rebecca will be burned alive if

she is found guilty. The charges against Bois- Guilbert are read first, but

he is excused on the grounds that Rebecca's evil magic has taken away his

power of reason. Others testify to the supernatural powers of Rebecca, her

healing of Ivanhoe, and her presence and influence at the attack on

Torquilstone. The common people are on her side, deeply affected by her

beauty and her defense; but it is not a fair trial. Bois- Guilbert tries to

save Rebecca by asking for a champion to fight him on her behalf; however,

he suspects no one will come to her aid against him. He then tries in vain

to convince Rebecca to run away with him.

CHAPTERS 40-42

In an earlier chapter, Prince John is seen losing the loyalty of most of

his knights except that of Waldemar Fitzurse, who slips out of the

banqueting hall to confront King Richard before he takes back his power. On

their way to Athelstane's castle of Coningsburgh to bury him, the Black

Knight and Wamba are ambushed by Fitzurse and his men. Richard sounds his

horn to summon Locksley and his outlaws. With their help, he overcomes and

kills his attackers.

Only Fitzurse is left alive. The king banishes him forever from England and

confiscates his lands.

The Black Knight then reveals himself as the rightful King of England. He

and Ivanhoe proceed to Coningsburgh. Athelstane, who has only been knocked

unconscious and not killed, now rises to tell his story. Ivanhoe rides on,

prepared and ready to champion Rebecca's fate.

CHAPTER 43

Rebecca's trial attracts a large crowd, including many of Robin Hood's men.

Just as her situation seems hopeless, for no champion has offered to defend

Rebecca, Ivanhoe rides into the arena. He challenges those who accuse the

beautiful Jewess. Brian de Bois- Guilbert becomes an unwilling participant

in the fight as a representative of the people who accuse Rebecca;

Beaumanoir and the Knight Templars demand his obedience and loyalty. It is

an exciting and hard-fought battle, but Bois-Guilbert is finally killed.

Ivanhoe has saved Rebecca.

CHAPTER 44

Richard, having intended to champion Rebecca himself, is detained by the

Earl of Essex who warns him of John's evil plans. He arrives at the trial

too late to fight, but brings with him a troop of soldiers and arrests

Albert Malvoisin for plotting with John against him. He gives Lucas

Beaumanoir the choice of exile or death, and Beaumanoir chooses exile.

Richard then banishes all the traitors except John, who is sent to his

mother with a warning. Athelstane gives up his claim to Rowena and retires

from public life. Rowena and Ivanhoe are married. Before departing from

England with her father forever, Rebecca visits Rowena to thank her.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H.Lawrence

Summary

Lady Chatterley's Lover begins by introducing Connie Reid, the

female protagonist of the novel. She was raised as a cultured bohemian of

the upper-middle class, and was introduced to love affairs--intellectual

and sexual liaisons--as a teenager. In 1917, at 23, she marries Clifford

Chatterley, the scion of an aristocratic line. After a month's honeymoon,

he is sent to war, and returns paralyzed from the waist down, impotent.

After the war, Clifford becomes a successful writer, and many

intellectuals flock to the Chatterley mansion, Wragby. Connie feels

isolated; the vaunted intellectuals prove empty and bloodless, and she

resorts to a brief and dissatisfying affair with a visiting playwright,

Michaelis. Connie longs for real human contact, and falls into despair, as

all men seem scared of true feelings and true passion. There is a growing

distance between Connie and Clifford, who has retreated into the

meaningless pursuit of success in his writing and in his obsession with

coal-mining, and towards whom Connie feels a deep physical aversion. A

nurse, Mrs. Bolton, is hired to take care of the handicapped Clifford so

that Connie can be more independent, and Clifford falls into a deep

dependence on the nurse, his manhood fading into an infantile reliance.

Into the void of Connie's life comes Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper

on Clifford's estate, newly returned from serving in the army. Mellors is

aloof and derisive, and yet Connie feels curiously drawn to him by his

innate nobility and grace, his purposeful isolation, his undercurrents of

natural sensuality. After several chance meetings in which Mellors keeps

her at arm's length, reminding her of the class distance between them,

they meet by chance at a hut in the forest, where they have sex. This

happens on several occasions, but still Connie feels a distance between

them, remaining profoundly separate from him despite their physical

closeness.

One day, Connie and Mellors meet by coincidence in the woods, and

they have sex on the forest floor. This time, they experience simultaneous

orgasms. This is a revelatory and profoundly moving experience for Connie;

she begins to adore Mellors, feeling that they have connected on some deep

sensual level. She is proud to believe that she is pregnant with Mellors'

child: he is a real, "living" man, as opposed to the emotionally-dead

intellectuals and the dehumanized industrial workers. They grow

progressively closer, connecting on a primordial physical level, as woman

and man rather than as two minds or intellects.

Connie goes away to Venice for a vacation. While she is gone,

Mellors' old wife returns, causing a scandal. Connie returns to find that

Mellors has been fired as a result of the negative rumors spread about him

by his resentful wife, against whom he has initiated divorce proceedings.

Connie admits to Clifford that she is pregnant with Mellors' baby, but

Clifford refuses to give her a divorce. The novel ends with Mellors working

on a farm, waiting for his divorce, and Connie living with her sister,

also waiting: the hope exists that, in the end, they will be together

Analysis

Valuable Commentory

The greatness of Lady Chatterley's Lover lies in a paradox: it is

simultaneously progressive and reactionary, modern and Victorian. It looks

backwards towards a Victorian stylistic formality, and it seems to

anticipate the social morality of the late 20th century in its frank

engagement with explicit subject matter and profanity. One might say of

the novel that it is formally and thematically conservative, but

methodologically radical.

The easiest of these assertions to prove is that Lady Chatterley's

Lover is "formally conservative." By this I mean that there are few evident

differences between the form of Lady Chatterley's Lover and the form of

the high-Victorian novels written fifty years earlier: in terms of

structure; in terms of narrative voice; in terms of diction, with the

exception of a very few "profane" words. It is important to remember that

Lady Chatterley's Lover was written towards the end of the 1920s, a decade

which had seen extensive literary experimentation. The 1920s opened with

the publishing of the formally radical novel Ulysses, which set the stage

for important technical innovations in literary art: it made extensive use

of the stream-of-consciousness form; it condensed all of its action into a

single 24-hour span; it employed any number of voices and narrative

perspectives. Lady Chatterley's Lover acts in many ways as if the 1920s,

and indeed the entire modernist literary movement, had never happened. The

structure of the novel is conventional, tracing a small group of

characters over an extended period of time in a single place. The rather

preachy narrator usually speaks with the familiar third-person omniscience

of the Victorian novel. And the characters tend towards flatness, towards

representing a type, rather than speaking in their own voices and

developing real three-dimensional personalities.

But surely, if Lady Chatterley's Lover is "formally conservative," it

can hardly be called "thematically conservative"! After all, this is a

novel that raised censorious hackles across the English-speaking world. It

is a novel that liberally employs profanity, that more-or-less graphically-

-graphically, that is, for the 1920s: it is important not to evaluate the

novel by the standards of profanity and graphic sexuality that have become

prevalent at the turn of the 21st century--describes sex and orgasm, and

whose central message is the idea that sexual freedom and sensuality are

far more important, more authentic and meaningful, than the intellectual

life. So what can I mean by calling Lady Chatterley's Lover, a famously

controversial novel, "thematically conservative"?

Well, it is important to remember not only precisely what this novel

seems to advocate, but also the purpose of that advocacy. Lady

Chatterley's Lover is not propaganda for sexual license and free love. As

D.H. Lawrence himself made clear in his essay "A Propos of Lady

Chatterley's Lover," he was no advocate of sex or profanity for their own

sake. The reader should note that the ultimate goal of the novel's

protagonists, Mellors and Connie, is a quite conventional marriage, and a

sex life in which it is clear that Mellors is the aggressor and the

dominant partner, in which Connie plays the receptive part; all who would

argue that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a radical novel would do well to

remember the vilification that the novel heaps upon Mellors' first wife, a

sexually aggressive woman. Rather than mere sexual radicalism, this

novel's chief concern--although it is also concerned, to a far greater

extent than most modernist fiction, with the pitfalls of technology and

the barriers of class--is with what Lawrence understands to be the

inability of the modern self to unite the mind and the body. D.H. Lawrence

believed that without a realization of sex and the body, the mind wanders

aimlessly in the wasteland of modern industrial technology. An important

recognition in Lady Chatterley's Lover is the extent to which the modern

relationship between men and women comes to resemble the relationship

between men and machines.

Not only do men and women require an appreciation of the sexual and

sensual in order to relate to each other properly; they require it even to

live happily in the world, as beings able to maintain human dignity and

individuality in the dehumanizing atmosphere created by modern greed and

the injustices of the class system. As the great writer Lawrence Durrell

observed in reference to Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence was "something

of a puritan himself. He was out to cure, to mend; and the weapons he

selected for this act of therapy were the four-letter words about which so

long and idiotic a battle has raged." That is to say: Lady Chatterley's

Lover was intended as a wake-up call, a call away from the hyper-

intellectualism embraced by so many of the modernists, and towards a

balanced approach in which mind and body are equally valued. It is the

method the novel uses that made the wake-up call so radical--for its time--

and so effective.

This is a novel with high purpose: it points to the degradation of

modern civilization--exemplified in the coal-mining industry and the

soulless and emasculated Clifford Chatterley--and it suggests an

alternative in learning to appreciate sensuality. And it is a novel, one

must admit, which does not quite succeed. Certainly, it is hardly the

equal of D.H. Lawrence's great novels, Women in Love and The Rainbow. It

attempts a profound comment on the decline of civilization, but it fails

as a novel when its social goal eclipses its novelistic goals, when the

characters become mere allegorical types: Mellors as the Noble Savage,

Clifford as the impotent nobleman. And the novel tends also to dip into a

kind of breathless incoherence at moments of extreme sensuality or

emotional weight. It is not a perfect novel, but it is a novel which has

had a profound impact on the way that 20th-century writers have written

about sex, and about the deeper relationships of which, thanks in part to

Lawrence, sex can no longer be ignored as a crucial element. Characters

Lady Chatterley - The protagonist of the novel. Before her marriage, she

is simply Constance Reid, an intellectual and social progressive, the

daughter of Sir Malcolm and the sister of Hilda. When she marries Clifford

Chatterley, a minor nobleman, Constance--or, as she is known throughout

the novel, Connie--assumes his title, becoming Lady Chatterley. Lady

Chatterley's Lover chronicles Connie's maturation as a woman and as a

sensual being. She comes to despise her weak, ineffectual husband, and to

love Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate. In the

process of leaving her husband and conceiving a child with Mellors, Lady

Chatterley moves from the heartless, bloodless world of the intelligentsia

and aristocracy into a vital and profound connection rooted in sensuality

and sexual fulfillment.

Oliver Mellors - The lover in the novel's title. Mellors is the

gamekeeper on Clifford Chatterley's estate, Wragby. He is aloof,

sarcastic, intelligent and noble. He was born near Wragby, and worked as a

blacksmith until he ran off to the army to escape an unhappy marriage. In

the army he rose to become a commissioned lieutenant--an unusual position

for a member of the working classes--but was forced to leave the army

because of a case of pneumonia, which left him in poor health.

Disappointed by a string of unfulfilling love affairs, Mellors lives in

quiet isolation, from which he is redeemed by his relationship with

Connie: the passion unleashed by their lovemaking forges a profound bond

between them. At the end of the novel, Mellors is fired from his job as

gamekeeper and works as a laborer on a farm, waiting for a divorce from

his old wife so he can marry Connie. Mellors is the representative in this

novel of the Noble Savage: he is a man with an innate nobility but who

remains impervious to the pettiness and emptiness of conventional society,

with access to a primitive flame of passion and sensuality.

Clifford Chatterley - Connie's husband. Clifford Chatterley is a minor

nobleman who becomes paralyzed from the waist down during World War I. As

a result of his injury, Clifford is impotent. He retires to his familial

estate, Wragby, where he becomes first a successful writer, and then a

powerful businessman. But the gap between Connie and him grows ever wider;

obsessed with financial success and fame, he is not truly interested in

love, and she feels that he has become passionless and empty. He turns for

solace to his nurse and companion, Mrs. Bolton, who worships him as a

nobleman even as she despises him for his casual arrogance. Clifford

represents everything that this novel despises about the modern English

nobleman: he is a weak, vain man, but declares his right to rule the lower

classes, and he soullessly pursues money and fame through industry and the

meaningless manipulation of words. His impotence is symbolic of his

failings as a strong, sensual man.

Mrs. Bolton - Ivy Bolton is Clifford's nurse and caretaker. She is a

competent, complex, still-attractive middle-aged woman. Years before the

action in this novel, her husband died in an accident in the mines owned by

Clifford's family. Even as Mrs. Bolton resents Clifford as the owner of

the mines--and, in a sense, the murderer of her husband--she still

maintains a worshipful attitude towards him as the representative of the

upper class. Her relationship with Clifford--she simultaneously adores and

despises him, while he depends and looks down on her--is probably the most

fascinating and complex relationship in the novel.

Michaelis - A successful Irish playwright with whom Connie has an affair

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53