Clifford, appearing in this novel as a professional writer, can be regarded as an early personification of the transitional stage from industrial capitalism to consumer capitalism in the 1920's, because in a consumer capitalist society knowledge and information rather than material things become more and more important than in the prior stage of capitalism. After his literary success, his interest veers towards management of a coalmine. This conversion implies his transition from ambisextrous identity-writing books was then regarded as a feminine occupation-to masculine one of potency. It is, however, nothing other than a return to the feudal system of the past, and his noblesse oblige is at odds with entrepreneurial qualities in a consumer society. The apparent description of Clifford and Mellors as opposite characters embodying culture and nature respectively makes explicit the culture/nature dichotomy: the former heads for a more advanced industrial system, while the latter dreams about returning to some idyllic countryside in the past. This results from the fact that Lawrence, who inherited the nineteenth-century criticism of industrialism, could not have a schema which would have enabled him fully to interpret those incipient symptoms of the new social conditions emerging in the last phase of his career.