Lady Chatterley, her Lover and their Room with a View: Modernist discourses on love and reality
The dawn of the 20th century in Britain witnessed changes in almost every aspect of women>s everyday lives. The emergence of the women's movement and a new generation of female professionals transformed the traditional patriarchal social structure. The present paper pursues two main goals. First, it shows how the novels Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Room with a View emerged from this social-historical moment in Britain. Since the novels depict the period before the Great War, they connect two periods in English history: Victorianism and Modernism, two different ways of living and two different approaches to moral principles. The protagonists of the novels, Connie, later lady Chatterley, and Lucy, personify the young and impressionable women of that era. Second, the focus is on the layers of interpretation/the codes of meaning that indicate the narrative interface: similarities in the novels' plots and their characters. They also reflect on the social divide that marked the period. The paper also shows that, according to the story, plot, and discourse of the novels, money and social status cannot substitute for the bindings of love.