The Fluctuating Meanings of Marine Metaphors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

The poetic polysemy of marine metaphors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover enables Lawrence to set up images of the flux he perceives as a creative force against images of petrification and dissolution, but the fluctuating meanings of the sea images themselves recall the sea’s instability, which serves as a metaphor for love, sex, otherness, connection, degeneration, and rebirth.