SOURCE: Thomas, Jacqueline. “Happy Days: Beckett's Rescript of Lady Chatterley's Lover.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 623-34.

[In the following essay, Thomas studies Happy Days for evidence of a subtext influenced by D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.]

The importance of Beckett's use of literary references in Happy Days is well established.¹ The juxtaposition of truncated yet recognizable fragments of literature provides a frame of reference for the erudite reader or spectator to appreciate fully—at least subconsciously—the irony of the characters' speech and situation. In his manuscript study of the play, Stanley Gontarski lists fourteen allusions identified by Beckett and the stages at which they were deliberately added.² However, Beckett did not acknowledge a significant literary source that resonates throughout Happy Days: D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Subtle echoes of Lawrence's novel provide a hitherto unexplored perspective from which to interpret Happy Days. Unlike the texts to which Winnie directly refers, this one does not deal with confronting death or with despair at the brevity of life. Instead, the Lawrentian subtext establishes Winnie's precarious sexuality and her womanly needs, which Beckett then undercuts, the better to establish the bitter irony of her situation.

Lady Chatterley's Lover relates the story of a woman trapped in a marriage with an impotent, insensitive man. Her life is sterile and joyless until she finds “phallic tenderness” and sexual fulfillment with an outsider.³ One can forget that over one-third of the novel deals with Connie Chatterley's hollow, barren relationship with her partially paralyzed husband and her life of hopeless inertia, in which “[t]he days seemed to grind by with curious painfulness, yet nothing happened” (LCL 76). Throughout the first nine chapters of the book, Connie is slowly dying: she is “spending [her] life without renewing it” (LCL 78). Feeling “completely stranded” (LCL 110), she is vapidly whiling away her life.

Until she finds life after the deadness of marriage and meaningless copulation, Connie Chatterley resembles Winnie. Winnie, in turn, continues the stream of characters who embody Beckett's “concern with the physical details of reproduction, its success or lack of success, [with] the impotence, sterility, and decay of the sexual organs, [and] repulsive copulation.”⁴ Allusions to Connie, who liberates herself through sexual fulfillment, establish Winnie's erotic possibilities, made all the more poignant and frustrating by her inability to satisfy them.

But, more than a dramatist's ploy to add breadth and depth to the characters in his minimalist world, these subtle allusions serve as an outright rejection of Lawrence's credo. Both Winnie and Connie embody their creators' philosophy on women's sexuality and freedom, women's relationships with men, men's impotence in society, and the whole body/mind dichotomy. Similarities in mood, characterization, and imagery reveal the two authors' common preoccupations and profound spiritual ties; yet, unlike Connie, Beckett's fictive character is trapped inescapably, rendering her incapable of being rescued from her desperate condition. Beckett opposes Lawrence's strong convictions concerning the significance of physical passion and rejects the philosophy that phallic powers will save us from the alienation of modern life. With Beckett's bleaker vision, Happy Days provides a harsh rejoinder to Lawrence's proposed solution to (wo)man's hapless condition.

Lawrence's Connie and Beckett's Winnie are both trapped in death-in-life situations that they stoically accept. They question the meaning of their bodies and are aware of their erotic capabilities. They maintain control over their minds, but have unfulfilling relationships with their husbands, who are themselves remarkably similar. But there the similarities end. The gap caused by loneliness and alienation in Connie's life is filled by a tender and satisfying connection with another human being. Such a resolution to the problems of existence is unthinkable in Beckett's world. Winnie exists without a vagina or womb throughout the first act and without breasts in the second act, thus deliberately denied any possibility of experiencing the erotic that Lawrence describes with such relish. Significantly, Beckett did not allow his own exploration into the erotic to be published until after his death.⁵ While Lawrence insists that we make a balance between the consciousness of the body's sensations and experiences and these sensations and experiences themselves, no such balance is possible for Beckett. Winnie's sexual experiences exist as fantasy or memory; the extent of her sensations is intentionally ambiguous. Connie, lurking in the wings, helps us understand Winnie's condition féminine, “the agony of her own female forlornness,” to use Lawrence's words (LCL 114).

Both women stoically accept the situations into which they are thrust. The opening paragraph of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which Lawrence informs us “was more or less Constance Chatterley's position,” equally well sums up Winnie's:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

(LCL 5)

Winnie is similarly stuck in a “scorched” wilderness⁶ that has reminded at least one critic of the cataclysmic “flash of a Hydrogen Bomb and its power to incinerate.”⁷ Like Connie's husband, Winnie's suffers from restricted mobility and very limited conversation. He provides little comfort to her, except that he prevents her from feeling that she is talking to herself. She survives thanks to her repertoire of little rituals associated with her new habitat; for example, she empties the contents of her black shopping bag, brushes her teeth, “inspect[s]” the state of her gums in a mirror, cleans her glasses, and takes her medicine (HD [Happy Days] 138-41). Buried “up to above her waist” in earth, she sums up her survival technique: “There is so little one can do. [Pause.] One does it all” (HD 138, 145). Likewise, Connie realizes that “[t]o accept the great nothingness of life seem[s] to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness” (LCL 55).

Winnie expresses the little hopes Lawrence refers to in his opening paragraph, what she calls “great mercies” (HD 140). She constantly repeats such hopeful phrases as “Oh this is going to be another happy day!” (HD 142). Yet she is aware that “there is now no smooth road into the future”; in fact, for her, there is no future save that of slipping further into the ground, and, as is typical in Beckett's world, no road. Winnie is able to scramble over obstacles only metaphorically, but this she does cheerfully for the most part. She has apparently accepted the fact that we've got to live—“to speak in the old style” (HD 143)—and she admonishes herself frequently to remain thankful (HD 140).

Neither woman can forget her body. Winnie articulates to her husband, Willie, a sensation of being held against a natural force: “Yes, the feeling more and more that if I were not held—[gesture]—in this way, I would simply float up into the blue.” And she adds, “Yes, love, up into the blue, like gossamer” (HD 151-52). Connie, too, refers to the idea of floating away, but her parallel expression is, while similar, less poetic: “Imagine if we floated like tobacco-smoke!” Her comment follows a discussion about extra-uterine conception and the future of civilization, when “a woman needn't be dragged down by her functions” (LCL 74-75, original emphasis). Thus, Connie and Winnie both incarnate their authors' concern with the problem of women's freedom (or lack of it) as it relates to their bodies.

The two women question the meaning of their bodies. Winnie reminisces about the Shower/Cooker couple who “st[ood] there gaping at [her]”: “What's she doing? he says—What's the idea? he says—stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground—coarse fellow—What does it mean? he says—What's it meant to mean?” The answer is, intriguingly, another question: “And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?” (HD 156). In Beckett's world the body and mobility are not meant to mean. Winnie—part realistically human and part inanimate, incongruously entombed alive and yet somehow totally acceptable to the reader/spectator—exists as a surrealist metaphor for life itself.

This passage subtly echoes and contrasts with the more conventional description Lawrence provides of Connie naked, verifying the ravages of time in a mirror. “Her body was going meaningless, going dull and opaque, so much insignificant substance.” She notices that “[her breasts] were unripe, a little bitter, without meaning hanging there. … Her thighs, too, … were going flat, slack, meaningless.” Connie becomes hopelessly aware that her body is without meaning because it is “[d]isappointed of its real womanhood.” Only her buttocks have life in them still, and Lawrence compares them to “hillocks of sand.” (LCL 70-71). Winnie is buried in something resembling a hillock of sand; and the meaninglessness of her breasts and thighs is a given in the play. Ironically, the only time Winnie looks into a mirror, her purpose is more “clinical … than … narcissistic,” as Shari Benstock has pointed out: she checks on “the state of her teeth and gums.”⁸

This is not to say that “Winnie … is reduced to a sexless object,” as some critics have suggested.⁹ Beckett deliberately makes Winnie a sexual being, the better to undercut her sexuality and render her situation more paradoxical. The soft curve of her breasts and their erotic possibilities are canceled out by the ever-present mound. The mound itself is intentionally mastoid; in fact, the connection is more obvious in Beckett's French version (written two years later) because he uses the word “mamelon,” which means both “rounded eminence” and “teat, or dug.”¹⁰ And Winnie herself is right in the middle, like an erect nipple, a visual reminder of the erotic possibilities she is denied. Beckett's stage directions for Winnie specify “well-preserved, … arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklace” (HD 138). Elsewhere, Beckett has suggested that Winnie might be viewed as a virile woman.¹¹ While virile is usually associated with a man, the adjective, significantly, carries the meaning capable of procreation. When Beckett directed the play with Billy Whitelaw as Winnie, “he made [her] quite a sexy little piece … very seductive.”¹² Moreover, Aideen O'Kelly, who played Winnie in Shivaun O'Casey's production, asserts, “In her mind [Winnie] certainly is [a sexual being].”¹³

The question of the extent to which Winnie is physically a sexual being surfaces the second time Winnie recalls the conversation of the Shower/Cooker couple. Like Connie, who was supposed to have rather a good figure, and who has become “a demi-vierge” (LCL 70, 17-18), Winnie recalls being referred to in the following words:

Can't have been a bad bosom, he says, in its day. [Pause.] Seen worse shoulders, he says, in my time. [Pause.] Does she feel her legs? he says. [Pause.] Is there any life in her legs? he says. [Pause.] Has she anything on underneath? he says.

(HD 165)

When Beckett first directed the play, “Mr. Shower-Cooker's voice was to have an erotic tone,” according to Ruby Cohn.¹⁴ The audience cannot doubt Beckett's intention to make Winnie an archetypal woman with all her womanly needs. Winnie even specifically mentions sexual intercourse; she alludes to the sadness that follows and, with a typically Beckettian twist, brings it up in the context of “sadness after [a] song” (HD 164). The trivialized reference to intimate sexual intercourse is yet another instance of Winnie ironically echoing Connie. Connie's experience of anti-climax and lack of satisfaction associated with sexual intercourse dominate the first third of Lawrence's novel.

With their meaningless, half-virgin bodies, and surrounded by nothingness, the two women possess control only over their minds and talk, words to get them by. Connie specifically thinks to herself that “If you don't hang on to it in your mind, it's nothing” (LCL 64). Winnie works on the same assumption, and verbalizes her fear of the consequences “If the mind were to go” (HD 161). Winnie unquestionably equates her talking with survival. She is able to go on talking only if she believes something of what she says is heard (by Willie), and she fears the day when she must learn to talk to herself (HD 145, 148). She expresses her anxiety about running out of things to say before the bell for sleep and dreads the day when words must fail (HD 151-52). Frequently Winnie muses about the relationship of words and meaning to reality. Aware of how words change their meaning, she modifies “day,” “night,” and “time” with the phrase “to speak in the old style” (HD 143, 157, 160). After wondering if she can still use the word “life,” she decides poignantly that there is no other word (HD 149). Because she realizes that any reference to the past is composed of empty words, she expounds the following dilemma: “[D]id I ever know a temperate time? [Pause.] No. [Pause.] I speak of temperate times and torrid times, they are empty words” (HD 154).

Likewise, Connie ponders the emptiness of some words caused by a dehumanization of society: “All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half-dead now, and dying from day to day” (LCL 62). At times Connie, like Winnie, identifies words with survival: Life “was words, just so many words. The only reality was nothingness, and over it, a hypocrisy of words” (LCL 50). And, paralleling life in Happy Days, Connie encounters the feeling that life “was all nothing, a wonderful display of nothingness. At the same time, a display. A display, a display, a display!” (LCL 50).

Winnie and Connie both cope with the burden of existence by relying heavily on quotations from literature. Winnie quotes—albeit in truncated form—from Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, among others. Connie similarly comforts herself at dark moments in her life. As in Winnie's case, “endless phrases swept through her consciousness” (LCL 85).¹⁵

To describe the one woman's relationship with her husband is to describe the other woman's. Clifford, who is paralyzed from the waist down, has restricted mobility. Lawrence calls attention to “the burden of his dead legs,” describes him as “helpless,” and likens him to a child. Elsewhere the reader finds Clifford compared to “a legless worm,” a “squirming monster,” and “one of the … crabs” (which, incidentally, live at ground level and move sideways) (LCL 292, 110). Because he is rendered “like an idiot” without her (LCL 110), his repressive dependence on Connie has become a weighty responsibility for her. Not only is Clifford sexually impotent, he is also an emotional cripple. Typical of his generation, he is “not in touch … with … anybody,” even Connie, who feels that “perhaps there was nothing to get at, ultimately: just a negation of human contact” (LCL 16). Physically, Connie and Clifford are non-existent to one another. Of their marriage, Lawrence specifies, “there were days when it all became utterly blank and nothing” (LCL 50). “Clifford tend[s] to become vague, absent, and to fall into fits of vacant depression” (LCL 63). Most important, he is unaware of and unresponsive to his wife's needs.

Willie, who crawls around (backwards) on his hands and knees, lives in a hole in the ground behind Winnie's mound. No physical contact between them is possible, and he does not exist independently from Winnie in the final version of the play.¹⁶ She characterizes him as rather helpless and frequently talks down to him as to a child. His impotence is implied in his association with “[c]astrated male swine”—his longest independent utterance—and in the scene when she is telling him how to get into his hole (HD 159, 147). She even reminds him about his Vaseline.¹⁷ When Winnie screams, Willie remains cruelly absent (HD 165).

Both husbands are associated with a lack of communication. Clifford writes stories that Connie considers hollow. His wife accuses him of having nothing original to say and quoting annoyingly, and sometimes out of context, from literature. Willie reads aloud inanely from an old newspaper. He provides predominantly monosyllabic answers to his wife's questions, repeats her comments, and calls her name pathetically. Only twice in the play does he venture an innovative thought.

Each man is represented at one time as pathetically idolatrous of his wife. Clifford's “declarations of idolatry” are said to “[torture]” Connie: “It was the cruelty of utter impotence” (LCL 112). With an amusingly different tone, Winnie mocks Willie's proposal of marriage: “I worship you, Winnie, be mine. […] Life a mockery without Win” (HD 166).

Because neither woman feels fulfilled in marriage, both wait and dream. Connie dreams of having a baby and hopes to find a “real” man to father it (LCL 64-65). Winnie, in humorous contrast, dreams that one day Willie will “come round” in front of the mound where she can see him (HD 158). Both works end with the suggestion that their dreams have come true. Connie is pregnant with her lover's baby. Moreover, the novel closes on a sexually optimistic note: “John Thomas says good-night to lady Jane, a little droopingly, but with a hopeful heart—” (LCL 302). In wonderful contrast, Willie—whose name in British slang also refers to genitalia, but to a small boy's diminutive, dangling member—is at the foot of Winnie's mound, having been unable to mount it. The final tableau consists of Willie “on his hands and knees looking up at” Winnie as she has just sung “the Waltz Duet ‘I love you so’ from the Merry Widow” (HD 168, 155). The erotic symbolism has been noted,¹⁸ and the parody is not lost on the reader or spectator who is familiar with Lawrence's text.

Other similarities between the women's situations, when they are compared, emphasize Winnie's stasis, her inability to change. Connie is figuratively trapped on the Wragby estate, where life resembles “being inside an enclosure.” Yet, Lawrence's image of her enclosed and restricted, on a “denuded … knoll,” functions as the background for an important discussion between Connie and her husband about his inability to sire an heir. For Lord Chatterley, only “the habit of each other” matters, not any short-lived sexual connection. Connie reluctantly agrees, but with the proviso that “life may turn quite a new face on it all” (LCL 41-45). At that precise moment, Mellors the gamekeeper literally walks into her life and becomes the new face that will ultimately change her concept of marriage and sexual connections. In contrast, Winnie is literally trapped on a denuded knoll. Her enclosure denies her the possibility of sexual connections and dooms her to a marriage of mere habit. Moreover, when Willie finally appears within Winnie's view he lacks “jizz” (HD 167), which Kristin Morrison suggests means sperm.¹⁹ The parallels in the two women's situations are so strong that the impossibility of Winnie's being rescued underscores her unbearable predicament.

This image of the women trapped—Winnie inescapably—in a death-in-life situation is one of the most compelling ties between Lawrence's novel and Beckett's play; but there are still others.²⁰ Two significant passages in Lawrence's novel have exact parodic counterparts in Beckett's play and underscore the contrast between the two women's erotic possibilities. One deals with events leading up to Connie's epiphany and is reflected in one of only three incidents to occur in Happy Days. The other, which exhibits specific verbal echoes, describes the location where Connie's sexual enlightenment takes place; its equivalent figures among Winnie's nostalgic reminiscences of the days when she was young and attractive.

Out of loneliness and boredom, Connie has started visiting the secret sanctuary of a hut in a remote area of her husband's property. Mellors rears pheasants there, and her discovery that they have laid eggs reinforces her feelings of unfulfillment and barrenness. Fascinated initially at the sight of the newly hatched chicks, she reflects, “Life! Life! Pure, sparky, fearless new life! New life!” However, her urge to conceive and her sense of abandonment replace her excitement and force tears from her eyes: “never had she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness” (LCL 114).²¹ Her despondent state inspires the gamekeeper's tenderness, and he forges a regenerative connection with her, one that takes up most of the rest of the novel (and accounts for its notoriety).

Intriguing for its similarities yet important differences is a scene in Act One of Happy Days: Winnie discovers a sign of life—the only sign of normal life in the whole play—on her mound. Even the fertility connection is made. She says:

Oh I say, what have we here? […] Looks like life of some kind! […] An emmet! […] Willie, an emmet, a live emmet! […] Where's it gone? […] Ah! […] Has like a little white ball in its arms. […] It's gone in. […] Like a little white ball.

(HD 149-50, stage directions omitted)

In response, Willie now utters his only two original comments, thus emphasizing their significance. He says, “Eggs,” followed almost immediately by his sexual pun: “Eggs. […] Formication” (HD 150). Winnie and Willie share briefly the intimacy of Willie's pun on fornication; but even as they are laughing, Winnie cannot be sure that they are laughing at the same thing. The anticlimactic link with the Lawrentian subtext of new birth accentuates the agony of Winnie's female forlornness and subtly undermines Lawrence's ideology.

The scenes that made Lady Chatterley's Lover controversial take place in the late afternoon in “a secret little hut made of rustic poles.” Lawrence provides the following description:

The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little rustic table and a stool, besides her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then a big box, tools, new boards, nails, and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet, traps, leather things, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the light came in through the open door. It was a jumble. But also, it was a sort of little sanctuary.

(LCL 87-88)

Here, the gamekeeper (who has a red moustache [LCL 46]) releases Connie from her unendurably bleak situation through the active realization of her own sexuality. This very description is recalled in Happy Days, when Winnie recollects her first kiss and her own initiation into sexuality. She reminisces:

Very busy moustache, very tawny. [Reverently.] Almost ginger! [Pause.] Within a toolshed, though whose I cannot conceive. We had no toolshed and he most certainly had no toolshed. [Closes eyes.] I see the piles of pots. [Pause.] The tangles of bast. [Pause.] The shadows deepening among the rafters.

(HD 142-43)

In a manner indicative of the connection to Lawrence's famous hut, Beckett translated toolshed in the French version as “réduit de jardinier,”²² which has connotations of both a hut lived in by a landowner's gardener and a retreat. Moreover, in subsequent versions of the play, Beckett insisted on the moustache even when other references were becoming vaguer.²³ Winnie's recollections function “as ironic counterpoint” to her impaired sexuality, as Kristin Morrison has suggested.²⁴ The irony of her sexual disability is accentuated by the allusion to Lady Chatterley's Lover. The observant reader or spectator who associates this description of sensual experience in a toolshed with the archetypal erotic heroine, who finds in a hut the tenderness and togetherness she has been craving, appreciates more fully that irony.

Lawrence's philosophy about (wo)man's desolate condition is summed up by the gamekeeper. He says to himself, “It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it—all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times!” (LCL 145). Beckett's view of a dehumanized and tragic world parallels Lawrence's. However, with his bleaker outlook, Beckett would deny the possibility that the gap can be filled. In Winnie, with all her womanly needs, buried to above her waist in Act One and to her neck in Act Two, Beckett has—with typical irony—created Lawrence's worst nightmare.

The post-censorship editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover finally appeared in 1959 in the U.S. and in 1960 in Britain and were published by Penguin, who published Happy Days in 1961. Perhaps Beckett read the novel then and transposed aspects of it deliberately into his play. More likely—though the evidence must remain circumstantial—he read the work at a more formative time in his career, when his literary path crossed that of Lawrence in France.

During 1929, following the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in Florence, Lawrence's good friends Richard Aldington and Aldous Huxley approached Sylvia Beach about a cheap Paris edition of the controversial novel.²⁵ Beach's Shakespeare and Company had published Joyce's equally controversial Ulysses, but neither they nor Lawrence himself could persuade her to publish the work. In April of that year Edward Titus, who also published Lawrence's “Pornography and Obscenity” in his magazine This Quarter, agreed to publish Lawrence's Paris edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover at his Black Manikin press. A cheap, un-pirated edition was thus available in Paris in 1929, and original manuscripts had been in the hands of Beach, Titus, Aldington, and Huxley.

Throughout the period 1928 to 1930, the young Beckett was living in Paris, where he was in contact with a number of literati, notably Joyce. He also met Titus and Aldington. His first writings appeared during this period: Beckett's essay on Joyce and his short story “Assumption” were published in June 1929. The following year Aldington and Nancy Cunard awarded the first prize in a poetry contest to Beckett's entry. Beckett subsequently spent time with Aldington in Paris cafés and visited Aldington's home. During this time the young Irishman was translating poems for Titus's This Quarter, three of which appeared in a 1930 issue.

The fact that “[a]ll the little presses and literary groups bought each other's work” and that “most of the copies were passed freely (and free) from one to the other”²⁶ leads me to believe that Beckett is likely to have read Lady Chatterley's Lover when he was in Paris. We know for sure that Joyce did: he rejected it as “a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.'s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself” and attacked the English as “sloppy.”²⁷ Given the antipathy known to have existed between Joyce and Lawrence, and Beckett's admiration for Joyce, Beckett would certainly have similarly dismissed the novel. However, allowing that much of what he read and wrote was subsequently sublimated and transposed into the uniquely Beckett oeuvre, a convincing case can be made that the playwright absorbed ideas and images from Lawrence, the echoes of which reverberate today in Happy Days.²⁸

Many intriguing hints suggest that the intertextual correspondences between Lawrence's novel and Beckett's play are more than mere coincidence: they imply a desire to undercut the telling of Connie's story, which Dennis Jackson has convincingly argued was itself a response to Joyce's Ulysses.²⁹ Thus Happy Days provides a new round in the well-documented quarrel that Lawrence had with Joyce's approach to art and life in general, and to his treatment of sex in particular. If Connie Chatterley's story was intended as a corrective to the marital situation that Lawrence had seen described in Joyce's Ulysses, then we have come full circle. Winnie's story is a rescript of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Notes

1. See Anthony S. Brennan, “Winnie's Golden Treasury: The Use of Quotation in Happy Days,” Arizona Quarterly, 35:3 (1979), 205-27; Ruby Cohn, “Beckett and Shakespeare,” Modern Drama, 15:3 (1972-73), 223-30; and James Knowlson, “Beckett's ‘Bits of Pipe,’” in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S. E. Gontarski, and Pierre Astier (Columbus, OH, 1983), 16-25.

2. Stanley Eugene Gontarski, Beckett's Happy Days: A Manuscript Study (Columbus, OH, 1977), 76-77.

3. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1993). Subsequent references are to this edition, cited as LCL, and appear parenthetically in the text. According to Richard Aldington, “phallic tenderness” is what Lawrence called his poetic and purely physical theory of sex as a motive force in human contact. See, for example, Portrait of a Genius, but … (London, 1959).

4. Kristin Morrison, “Defeated Sexuality in the Plays and Novels of Samuel Beckett,” Comparative Drama, 14:1 (1980-81), 18.

5. See Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, ed. Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier (New York, 1992).

6. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1986), 138. Subsequent references are to this edition, cited as HD, and appear parenthetically in the text.

7. Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (New York 1973), 149.

8. Shari Benstock, “The Transformational Grammar of Gender in Beckett's Dramas,” in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Urbana, IL, 1990), 176.

9. Anne Marie Drew, “A Sigh into a Looking Glass: The Trickster in The Winter's Tale and Happy Days,” Comparative Literature Studies, 26:2 (1989), 95.

10. Samuel Beckett, Oh les beaux jours: Pièce en deux actes (Paris, 1963), 9.

11. Samuel Beckett, quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York, 1978), 563.

12. Billie Whitelaw, interview by Linda Ben-Zvi, in Women in Beckett, 4. See note 8.

13. Aideen O'Kelly, interview by Rosette Lamont, in Women in Beckett, 37.

14. Ruby Cohn, “Beckett Directs Happy Days,” Performance, 1:2 (1971-72), 115.

15. See Dennis Jackson, “Literary Allusions in Lady Chatterley's Lover,” in D. H. Lawrence's “Lady”: A New Look at Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson (Athens, GA, 1985), 170-96, for a fuller description of Lawrence's “allusions to the Bible, hymns, popular songs, classical myths, and other literary works from Plato to Proust” (170).

16. See S. E. Gontarski, “From ‘Female Solo’ to Happy Days,” in The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 80.

17. See Drew, 104 (see note 9), for a discussion of this metaphor.

18. Morrison, 27. See note 4.

19. Ibid., 34 n. 10.

20. Both authors explore the body/mind dichotomy—albeit from different perspectives—resulting in interesting thematic similarities and contrasts. Unfortunately, a discussion of the thematic links falls outside the scope of this paper.

21. In her review of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (“De Beauvoir, Lessing—Now Kate Millett,” New York Times Book Review [6 September 1970], 12), Barbara Hardy notes the sincerity and intensity of Connie's despair, which Millet had condemned as a sign of female submission.

22. Beckett, Oh les beaux jours, 22. See note 10.

23. In “From ‘Female Solo’” Gontarski states that “the sexual overtones of both the Charlie Hunter (at one stage called Bunny Hunter) and Johnston reminiscences were more explicit” in earlier versions and that originally the two reminiscences were continuous. Gontarski, 81, 88-89. In the French version of the play, Beckett translates “Hunter” as “Chassepot” (breech-loading rifle). See Oh les beaux jours, 21.

24. Morrison, 28.

25. See Hugh D. Ford, Published in Paris (New York, 1975), 195.

26. Bair, 106. See note 11.

27. James Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 17 December 1931, Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1957), 309.

28. André Malraux read Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1931-32, when Gallimard were preparing the first French translation. In fact, Malraux wrote the preface to that edition, and D. G. Bevan argues that “Malraux's reading of Lawrence in 1931-32 was crucial to the importance and meaning he was to attach to the erotic in La Condition humaine.” See Bevan, “The Sensual and the Cerebral: The Mating of D. H. Lawrence and André Malraux,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 9:2 (1982), 202-5.

29. Dennis Jackson, “Lady Chatterley's Lover: Lawrence's Response to Ulysses?” Philological Quarterly, 66:3 (1987), 410-16. In particular, Jackson documents Lawrence's “‘horr[or]’ [at] Joyce's novel,” at “its treatment of [passionless] sexuality.” Jackson, “Lawrence's Response,” 410, quoting Compton Mackenzie, On Moral Courage (London, 1962), 109.