A Comparative Analysis of the Ending of The Bridge of Madison County and Lady Chatterley's Lover

Abstract

The Bridge of Madison County is one of Robert James Waller’s representative works, which tells a love story about a married woman called Francesca Johnson who had an affair with Robert Kincaid. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D.H. Lawrence. It tells a story that Connie fell in love with a gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. Finally, Connie and Oliver Mellors decided to divorce with their own partners and started a new life together. Both of two novels’ heroines have affairs, but the endings of them are different, and they highlight the contradiction between love and ethics and the conflict between personal desire and responsibility in real life. 

Previously, scholars at home and abroad have done studies respectively about two writers’ views of marriage, feminist concept embodied in the work, and their language style and narrative techniques. But no one has compared the endings’ differences between them. From the perspective of literary research, this paper analyzes the psychological process of the hero and heroine, and combines with the author’s writing intention to make readers have a deeper understanding between love and responsibility, and discuss on the change of industrial civilization to human nature and the damage to environment.  

The main body of this paper consists of four parts, focusing on the analysis of the reason why two novels have different endings even if they have same plots. The first part is to analysis the authors’ writing intention, combining with the social background, the reasons why two authors arranged the different ending. The second part is analyzing two female characters based on feminism, Waller’s attitude towards feminism is ambivalent, and Lawrence’s feminism was deemed to be eco-feminism. The third part is a detailed analysis of the images of fore protagonists. Part four is about different views of marriage and love embodied in the two novels. 

Through analysis in this paper, it can be drawn that two authors have unique experience and different social backgrounds at their time, it is rational that they arrange different endings although two books have similar plots. While through analysis these two books, the best way what Waller and Lawrence advocate to deal with the destruction of industrial civilization is returning to nature, building harmonious relationship between human beings and nature.

Key words: Robert James Waller; D.H. Lawrence; Lady Chatterley’s Lover; The Bridge of Madison County