Monday 15 January 2018

Lady Chatterley's Lover's Love of Red Trousers

I've never read Lady Chatterley's Lover and this review does not encourage me to do so. However, I was intrigued to read about Mellors' belief in the power of red trousers:

"Mellors has a plan for world reform that requires men to wear scarlet trousers “and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket.” And if you think this a passing fancy, swiftly suppressed, you are wrong. The plan to save the world with red trousers is restated at the end of the book, where Mellors raves, “If the men wore scarlet trousers, as I said, they wouldn’t think so much of money: if they could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could do with very little cash.”"

Hitchens points out that much of what the book tells us about Jews, lesbians, black women and so on is, shall we say, not very nice. I only hope that the efforts of the anti-red trouser brigades will not persuade us to add Mellors' rather innocent plan for red-legged world peace to the book's list of offences.

No comments:

Post a Comment