After class, I considered the importance of the desolation of the natural environment in which Connie flees to have her "death" with Mellors/Parkin. After the first read, the nature scenes appeared as the traditional Romantic return to nature as a place to find inspiration, solace and peace. After watching the movie, I started to see the danger and overall creepiness that accompanied her constant forays into the savage garden of Wragby. I had a much more menacing view of the woods through the camera angles that kind of stalked Connie as she went to the hut and pursued her bliss.
The emphasis on the return to pre-Christian forms of ritual experience to lead to rebirth was also much more apparent in the movie version. While the wedding of the penis and vagina in the book was detailed, actually seeing their unofficial ceremony was somehow more primal--especially after the naked run through the rain. I made a connection to the bacchanals of Greece and Rome as ancient and sacred fertility rites and celebrations. I can see the gospel-quality of Lawrence a little more easily with these visuals and correlation with touch as the sacraments of his belief system. Through the brutal power of their illicit sex, Connie is able to be reborn and find meaning in through the “hypocrisy of words” and “the anguish of her generation’s forlornness” (50, 115).
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Excellent work. With your strong background in Catholicism, you may want to write your term paper on sacraments and rituals in the text - that is, DHL's attempts to write about sacraments that can bring about the rebirth of the modern world. DHL - and Blake for that matter - are essentially religious writers.
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