Joyce and Lawrence: Virtuous Immoralists

Both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover portray an incapacitated husband, a sexy adulterous wife and an impressively potent seducer. Both novels describe unrestrained sexual desires in a woman. Molly Bloom has a promiscuous sexual appetite, the comparatively repressed Connie Chatterley has to be gradually liberated from her sexual frustrations and inhibitions. But Joyce and Lawrence had sharply divergent ideas, style, and portrayal of sex. Shortly before Lawrence died, he realized that his influential novel (like Joyce's) had broken the old taboos and become triumphantly absorbed into modern culture.