Lady Chatterley's Lover

When David Herbert Lawrence died at the age of forty-four he had written over twenty novels, three plays, ten collections of poetry, and a large body of nonfiction, including a number of translations. The son of a coal miner, his scandalous elopement in 1912 with a German aristocrat, Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of his English professor Ernest Weekley, altered the path of their lives irretrievably, making them suspect in England and subsequently exiles. Although ill with tuberculosis for much of his short life (1885–1930), Lawrence was an insatiable traveler, responding with great empathy to the different values and mores of mainly pre-industrialized societies. Perceiving the life of modern man as one of alienation and conformity in a mechanized environment, Lawrence developed a profound, almost religious belief in the importance of spontaneous and natural feelings, especially the sex drive. Strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud, he came to regard the phallus as having an iconic, almost mystical force. These ideas were to become dominant themes in his major early novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921). The first was declared obscene, the publisher Methuen was fined, and all existing copies were ordered to be destroyed. Undeterred, Lawrence continued to create fictions challenging prevailing norms, most famously in his last major novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).

The notoriety surrounding this one book has distorted Lawrence’s reputation, but also served to subject the literary use of “foul language” to legal scrutiny. It has a unique history, being published privately, suppressed, pirated, expurgated, republished, the issue of a groundbreaking trial, and finally rehabilitated. It was adjudged “obscene” under the broad definition applying at the time: “obscenity” (technically “obscene libel” or “matter tending to deprave or corrupt”) was usually interpreted as the explicit depiction of sex and the use of “dirty” or taboo words. In the decades after Lawrence’s death it became the principal text around which the legal definition of obscenity was challenged. Its critical history shows remarkable oscillations in interpretation and evaluation.

Despite the setbacks of The Rainbow (1915), Lawrence remained undeterred in his role as sexual evangelist: “I feel that one has to fight for the phallic reality, as against the non-phallic cerebration unrealities,” he wrote in a letter to Witter Bynner (March 13, 1928) in the year of the genesis of the novel. “So I wrote my novel, which I want to call John Thomas and Lady Jane ,” he continued, somewhat naively ( John Thomas being a British slang euphemism for “penis”). “But that I have to submerge into a subtitle, and call it Lady Chatterley’s Lover .” He

described the half-written work to Samuel Kotelianski as “the most improper novel ever written” ( Collected Letters , 1028), but he always denied that it was pornography. Subsequently, in A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1930) he used the tone of a manifesto: “If I use the taboo words, there is a reason. We shall never free the phallic reality from the ‘uplift’ taint till we give it its own phallic language, and use the obscene words” (Moore 1955, 267).

The book was printed and published privately in Florence in July 1928, and by April of the following year five pirated editions had appeared all over the Continent and in America. The initial critical responses were universally hostile, as can be assessed from D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (ed. R.P. Draper 1970). Under the headline “Famous Author’s Shameful Book,” an unsigned review in the patriotic magazine John Bull (October 20, 1928) denounced the work in extraordinarily vituperative terms as “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness. The creations of muddy-minded perverts, peddled in back-street bookstalls in Paris, are prudish by comparison” (cited in Draper 1970, 278). The marked correlation between explicit sexuality and “filth” is shown in the dismissals of the work as “the fetid masterpiece of this sex-sodden genius,” “the abysm of filth,” and “the foulest book in English literature,” culminating in the call that “The circulation in this country of Lady Chatterley’s Lover must be stopped” (cited in Draper 1970, 280). The book was suppressed for immorality. Copies imported into England were regularly seized and destroyed by order of the Home Secretary. Uncharacteristically, Lawrence attempted an expurgated version, which he found almost impossible, observing: “I might as well as try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds” (cited in Draper 1970, 21). Nevertheless, the expurgated version appeared, also in 1928.

Some thirty years later in 1959, Grove Press of New York published an unexpurgated edition in the United States. The ensuing action eventually generated the celebrated judgment by Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan in favor of the publishers, conceding that “Four-letter Anglo-Saxon words are used with some frequency,” but insisting that “The book is not ‘dirt for dirt’s sake’” (in Craig 1962, 158). In the same year the Obscenity Act was revised in important ways in the United Kingdom. These revisions set new ground rules for a pivotal trial in 1960 at the Old Bailey in London in which Lady Chatterley’s Lover became a test case ( Regina v. Penguin Books ), the proceedings of which are described in detail in C.H. Rolph’s study The Trial of Lady Chatterley (1961). The new act required that the book had to be “regarded as a whole” and that the courts had to listen to evidence from experts who could be called to justify the work as being “for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning.” However, the old core was retained, since a book could be “deemed to be obscene if its effect … [is] such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely to read it” (cited in Rolph 1961, 10).

As expected, much discussion in the trial focused on the artistic suitability of the most notorious “four-letter” words. In the novel these are copiously used by the gamekeeper Mellors in dialect, as in this dialogue with Connie Chatterley:

“Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When th’art willin’!”

“What is cunt?” she said.

“An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.”

“All on’t,” she teased. “Cunt! It’s like fuck then.”

“Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ th’art a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter—even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!”

(1960, 185)

Today this reads like an unconvincing lesson in sex education with some unintentional comedy as Mellors, close to the earth and nature, “initiates” Connie into sexual mysteries which her upper-class breeding has supposedly denied her. Aldous Huxley shrewdly reflected in The Genius and the Goddess on the problematic relationship between “four-letter words” and “four-letter acts”: “In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli [grounds for war]” (1955, 103).

In the trial some thirty-five defense witnesses were called, including major authors and academics, such as E.M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, Helen Gardner, Raymond Williams, Graham Hough, Kenneth Muir, and the Bishop of Woolwich. There was something slightly ironic in the spectacle of these fine minds and subtle sensibilities opining on the coarsest and most taboo words in the language. The prosecution avoided articulating the words by asking the witnesses for their assessment of the literary merits of the book. Virtually all took the view that it undoubtedly had literary merit, but was not Lawrence’s best work. Likewise, they supported the coarse language on artistic grounds, though in considering the passage just quoted, Dr. Graham Hough a respected Cambridge academic and authority on Lawrence, dissented: “I don’t think that this passage comes off at all. I see what he has tried to do, but I think he has failed” (cited in Rolph 1961, 49). Professor F.R. Leavis, also a great champion of Lawrence, was far more critical. He wrote after the trial about “turning on the dialect,” that is, using it as “a way of putting over ‘the four-letter words’—of trying to make the idea of their being redeemed for non-obscene and undefiant, or ‘normal,’ use look less desperate.” He concluded trenchantly: “I find these performances on Mellors’s part insufferable” (Coombs 1973, 416-17).

The issue of “redeeming” fallen words loomed large in the trial. Dr. Helen Gardner of Oxford took the view that “by the end Lawrence has gone very far within the context of this book to redeem this word from low and vulgar associations” (cited in Rolph 1961, 60). Dr. Richard Hoggart agreed, saying: “They [the words] were being progressively purified as they were used” (cited in Rolph 1961, 99). Significantly, he was the only witness to use the word " fuck " personally, pointing out: “Fifty yards from this Court I heard a man say the word ‘fuck’ three times as he passed me” (cited in Rolph 1961, 99). A profound comment by William Butler Yeats was invoked more than once, from a letter to Olivia Shakespear in 1933: “The coarse language of the one, accepted by both, becomes a forlorn poetry uniting their solitudes, something ancient, humble and terrible” (cited in Draper 1970, 298).

Several witnesses justified Lawrence’s treatment of sex as having a religious quality. A distinguished lawyer, Norman St. John-Stevas, author of a standard work, Obscenity and the Law (1956), took the view that Lawrence is “essentially a writer in the Catholic tradition” (cited in Rolph 1961, 136). Dylis Powell, a noted film and book reviewer, asserted: “I regard it as an extremely moral book,” before making this powerful distinction: “a great deal of the contemporary cinema seems to degrade the whole sanctity of sex, treating it as something trivial. But in Lawrence’s book, which has great elements of sacredness, sex is taken as something to be taken seriously and as a basis for a holy life” (cited in Rolph 1961, 150).

On November 2, 1960, the jury took less than three hours to reach its decision that Penguin Books was not guilty of publishing an obscene article. In retrospect the trial has been shown to have focused too much on certain areas of sexuality and to have ignored others. The prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, used the phrase “putting adultery on a pedestal” some thirty-two times. However, it appears that despite Lawrence’s almost obsessive “positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image” ( Collected Letters , 967) and his daring use of “the obscene words,” he was not entirely candid in his description of the crucial union between the lovers late in the book, in chapter xvi. Here he writes symbolically of “Burning out the shames, the deepest oldest shames, in the most secret places,” of “the sensual flame [that] pressed through her bowels and breast” to “the core of the physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it.” More disturbingly, “She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave.” Lawrence only hints that this is intercourse of a different kind: “It was not really love. It was not voluptuousness. It was sensuality sharp and searing as fire, burning the soul to tinder.” He uses strange metaphors, such as “to burn out false shames and smelt out the heaviest ore of the body into purity” and shows Connie Chatterley’s ambivalent response to the act: “And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!” (1960, 258-59).

A little over a year after the trial, John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls College at Oxford, caused a furor in an article in the intellectual review Encounter 101 (February 1962). Analyzing the passages just quoted, he questioned the acuteness of interpretation of some of the “expert” witnesses, and even accused Lawrence of “this failure of integrity, this fundamental dishonesty” (41). Sparrow argued cogently that “The practice approved by Lawrence is that known in English law as buggery…. [of which] the ‘full offence’ involves penetratio per anum [i.e. sodomy]” (36). In an earlier article in Encounter 96 (September 1961), Andrew Schonfield had argued that such an interpretation seemed “a reasonable guess” (64). Much later Professor Frank Kermode of London University concurred in his standard study of Lawrence, even implying that there had been a conspiracy of silence on this embarrassing point: “The fact that it describes anal intercourse was long ignored; nobody mentioned it in the 1960 trial…. As in Women in Love , the climactic sexual act is buggery, conceived as a burning out of shame” (1973, 130).

J.M. Coetzee, the noted South African Nobel Laureate, later cast some useful light on the taboos broken in the novel in his curiously titled article “The Taint of the Pornographic: Defending (against) Lady Chatterley .” Coetzee argues, unexpectedly for a writer of modern fiction, that the book “offends against decorum on a fairly gross scale,” continuing: “The intercourse of Lady Chatterley with the gamekeeper transgresses at least three rules: it is adulterous; it crosses caste boundaries; and it is sometimes ‘unnatural,’ that is anal” (1988, 304).

Arguing that in the Edwardian period in which the novel is set, caste is a more appropriate term than class , Coetzee continues: “Lady Chatterley not only has a passionate affair across caste boundaries with her husband’s servant, she falls pregnant and decides to elope with him. More seriously, Mellors sodomizes the Lady of the Manor just as, according to his ex-wife, he had sodomized her” (1988, 305-6). In addition, Coetzee demonstrates, there is a fourth transgression: “Mellors pollutes Connie’s mind (I use the language of the time) by instructing her in the use of taboo words” (1988, 306). According to the prevailing double standards, bad language was harmless among men, but taboo in women, unless they were “fallen.” This throws light on the passage quoted previously and several others: “his fingertips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire. ‘an if tha shits and an if tha pisses, I’m glad. I don’t want a woman as couldna shit and piss.’ Connie could not help a sudden snort of astonished laughter, but he went on unmoved” (1960, 232). An important supporting point for Coetzee’s argument is that Mellors’s uses the notorious “four-letter” words only when he speaks in dialect. At the same point in the novel, Lawrence in the authorial voice adopts a very different style: “With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mound of Venus.” More pointedly, when the lovers talk of the future:

“You do as you wish,” he said.

And he spoke in good English. (1960, 232)

Although, as F.R. Leavis objected earlier in the discussion, Lawrence seems to be “turning on the dialect,” Lawrence himself clearly felt that only among the lower orders and in regional speech could the words still be used in an innocent fashion.

Another aspect was ignored in the trial. Considering that Lawrence wrote like an evangelist for sexuality, and was more concerned with the woman’s orgasmic response than the man’s, there is a surprising hostility toward lesbianism expressed by Mellors:

“It’s astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously or unconsciously. Seems to me that they’re nearly all Lesbian.”

         “And you don’t mind?” asked Connie.

“I could kill them. When I’m with a woman who’s really Lesbian, I could fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.”

(1960, 212)

In retrospect, it is interesting to speculate how this watershed trial would have developed had the defense raised these contentious issues.

The verdict seemed to usher in what was termed in the journalistic cliché of the times, “the permissive society.” The poet Philip Larkin paid ironic homage to this change in mores in his little ditty “Annus Mirabilis” (1967):

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first L.P.

As it was, the verdict made Lady Chatterley’s Lover a succès de scandale and a fortune for the publishers. It also served to rehabilitate Lawrence from the status of disgrace in which he had died. Five years after the trial The Rainbow was prescribed for school study.

When Lawrence died in 1930, he was still a deeply controversial figure. The previous year an exhibition of his nude paintings at Dorothy Warren’s gallery in London was closed and the works were confiscated by the police. This had a wider literary repercussion, since his publisher omitted fourteen poems from his forthcoming collection Pansies out of fear of prosecution. In the title poem Lawrence daringly articulated some unorthodox sexual ideas, clearly using pansy as a double-entendre:

Ronald, you know, is like most Englishmen,

by instinct he’s a sodomist

but he’s frightened to know it

so he takes it out on women.

This is one of the earliest uses of pansy to mean “a male homosexual.” In his remarkable essay, “Introduction to his Paintings” (also 1929), Lawrence attempted to identify the roots of the puritanical attitude toward sex that he found to be a major feature of English society. He detected the cause in syphilis, which, he argued, had caused a fundamental rupture in the emotional life of Renaissance England.

Although Lawrence’s influence as a pioneer in breaking the taboos against explicit sexuality in modern fiction is clear, the degree to which his championship of the “four-letter” words has redeemed them is questionable. Frank Kermode concluded that “They can hardly be said to have acquired a tender, let alone a numinous quality” (1973, 123). Lawrence has also drawn some severe criticism in modern times for his frequently chauvinist attitude toward women, his hostility to lesbianism, and for the general political implications of his ideas.