[In the following essay, Bowlby discusses the British 1960 censorship trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, along with its literary reception, in the context of a history of British censorship.]

Modern British Literature, the final volume of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, includes a long extract—nine pages, almost the whole essay—from D. H. Lawrence's “Pornography and Obscenity.” This could be cited as one of many pieces of evidence for the contemporary stature of Lawrence, the kind of writer whose auxiliary publications are considered canonical; and the essay's subject matter might be seen as an allusion to the particularly violent curbs Lawrence's works faced (among others, The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover were banned following their publication) and overcame before he attained his deserved place. The anthology's editors, John Hollander and Frank Kermode, draw attention to this latter aspect in their introduction to the piece: They begin with the statement that “Lawrence had first-hand experience of those he called ‘the censor-morons’” and then provide a brief history of the fortunes of Lady Chatterley.¹ In light of the triumphant ending, Lawrence's struggle seems all the more heroic, retrospectively a story of popular philistinism prior to the due assignment of his deserved literary status.

It would be possible to proceed from this point to the common allegation that the merit of works in the canon is largely a function of their inclusion, rather than the other way around. But the exaltation of “Pornography and Obscenity” suggests a somewhat more forceful possibility: that the establishment of literary value might be dependent on a corresponding exclusion, not just of a great remainder of works classified as merely indifferent, unexceptional and unexceptionable, but of a category of the obscene, with the recommended values of literature functioning only so far as they can be defined as the obverse of the vilified values of obscenity. It is not that Lawrence happened to write a good piece on a subject he had all too much reason to have thought about long and hard but that the very formation of this canon involves its active differentiation from what is defined as pornographic or obscene. From this point of view, the inclusion within the canon itself of a piece that is expressly concerned with the distinguishing of literary values from pornography and obscenity has a perverse and revealing logic. This may be related to the fact that precisely 2 of 679 pages of text in the Oxford anthology, published in 1973, contain writing by women (Edith Sitwell and Stevie Smith, a poem apiece).

“WRAGG IS IN CUSTODY”

Before turning to Lawrence and Lady Chatterley, a piece of preliminary evidence to set the scene for the preoccupations of that trial:

A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.

This extract from Arnold's “Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864) is a “paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper,” quoted verbatim.² In its new context it serves him as a graphic illustration of what is wrong with England, following the scornful citation of speeches by two men who represent the “exuberant self-satisfaction” of the English. Arnold comments upon the newspaper report:

Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Sir Charles Adderley and Mr Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! “Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!”—how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in the best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of “the best in the whole world,” has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth among us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than “the best race in the world”; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!³

By the Ilissus, there were reputedly quite a few abandoned children; but it is not this which preoccupies Arnold. His citation seems at first as if it may be going to lead to a reflection on the particular moral condition of nineteenth-century England and its fallen women. But England suffers from “an original shortcoming,” not a contingent one, manifest in the irrefutably patent evidence of its “hideous names.” Wragg's tragedy is in her name, in its blatant exhibition of a peculiarly English combination of a “grossness” at once linguistic and natural. Something has been lost, and irretrievably, constitutively: the sound of the words of ancient Greece is Arnold's standard of comparison for Victorian England, which could never, by definition, be remedied (its shortcomings are its nature).

“Wragg is in custody” thus takes on the function of a kind of antipoetic touchstone or refrain, to be muttered as a token of the otherwise unspeakable qualities of the modern English:

And “our unrivalled happiness”;—what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how dismal those who have seen them will remember; the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! … And the final touch,—short, bleak and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. … Mr Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but no other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key.⁴

The very economy of the phrase “Wragg is in custody,” which might have been taken as an abstention from superfluous commentary, becomes “the final touch,—short, bleak, and inhuman,” “bleak” picking up on the “gloom” of the hills outside Nottingham, which seem already to have determined the atmosphere of the events of which they are doomed to be the setting. The lack of Wragg's first name is taken as a violation (“lopped off”), denying her the dignity of the marker of a fragile femininity that might have mitigated her unredeemable contemporary crudeness. It is the very unacceptability of the phrase “Wragg is in custody” that makes it, for Arnold's purposes, repeatable, endowed with a function of negative education symmetrically opposite to that of the consoling “touchstone” lines of good poetry he later evokes in “The Study of Poetry.”⁵

THE WOMAN ON TRIAL

The sensationalistic potential of the newspaper report—a murder, a trial, and behind them a story of poverty and sexual shame—serves Arnold indirectly as a contrast with genuine literary values, and the place of Wragg in Arnold's canonical essay may stand as an emblem for the peculiar association between degraded woman, degraded language, and degraded England that manifests itself time and again in the history of literary trials. When the first proposal in the English parliament for a law on obscene publications was made in 1857, a few years before Arnold's essay, its advocate, Lord Campbell, was at pains to ward off the fear that his proposed legislation might apply to anything published as serious literature. At one point during the debates on the bill, Campbell produced a copy of Dumas' novel La Dame aux Camélias in the English translation, declaring that although he disapproved of it himself, “it was only from the force of public opinion and improved taste that the circulation of such works could be put a stop to.”⁶ The subsequent history of obscenity trials and legislation was to prove him wrong: in future years both literature and the lady were to be pursued by the “force” of law. For it is as though the ambivalent status of those books hovering uncertainly on a crucial boundary between “literature” and “obscenity” was derived in some indissociable way from the dubious figure of a woman and her sexual character. Situated on the verge between two equally untenable verdicts, depravity or respectability, she stands in for the book, a surrogate object of attack or defense. This concern in turn seems inseparable from the wider issues of cultural value that the book and the trial are called upon to represent and to adjudicate.

Arnold's essay was written almost a century before the trial in 1960 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, the novel by Lawrence that had been banned in England since its first publication (from Italy) in 1928 (and only just freed in the United States, in two trials in 1959). Despite their geographical and nominal affinities, the case involving the Nottinghamshire writer and the Chatterley seat in Wragby seems a far cry from the Victorian gloom of “Wragg is in custody,” representing a victory for literary and sexual enlightenment of a kind unthinkable in relation to Arnold's concerns for the moderation of the “excessive and offensive” and the inculcation in its place of “a softer and truer key.”⁷ If the crime of the unmarried and unnatural, murdering mother stands as a cause for outraged lament against the condition of England and its language, Lady Chatterley seems to represent a moral victory for modern literature and modern attitudes to sex. Against the obviousness or the evidence of this story, I want rather to suggest that the 1960 trial and the understanding of Lawrence's work that surrounds it reveal some surprising continuities in the harnessing together of issues of language, sexuality, and morality in English cultural criticism.

THE TRIAL OF LADY CHATTERLEY

The 1960 trial was a test case following the passing of new legislation. The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 added a supplementary criterion for cases considering whether a book (or some other publication) should be banned on the grounds of its obscene content. Henceforth the verdict of obscenity—defined, in a phrase that dates back to Sir Alexander Cockburn's 1868 interpretation of the Campbell Act, as the “tendency to deprave and corrupt”—might be overridden by the consideration of “public good.” The official formulation in the 1959 act is as follows:

A person shall not be convicted of an offence against Section 2 [the section referring to obscenity] if it is proved that publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art, or learning, or of other objects of general concern.⁸

What this meant in the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover was that if the defense could show that the book was of intrinsic literary merit, then it would not matter if it was obscene or not, literary merit being considered “for the public good.” This the defense did with astonishing success. It brought on a devastating array of experts, professional people ranging from literary critics like Raymond Williams and Graham Hough to teachers, social workers, a Church of England bishop, and well-known writers such as C. Day Lewis and E. M. Forster. In all there were thirty-five witnesses and thirty-six more who were not called upon.

This parade of respectable people speaking on behalf of a notoriously “dirty” book provided a rare media spectacle such that the newspapers could tantalize or shock the public with reported citations or interpretations from the work that no one was yet authorized to buy. In this context it is significant that one of the most persistent side issues to emerge was the question of its likely readership. The trial had been instigated when Penguin Books, in light of the new act, declared their intention to publish the banned book at the low price of three shillings and sixpence. This was consistent with Penguin's declared policy at the time of its founding in the 1930s: a low cover price to reach a working-class readership. The defense lawyer made explicit reference to this in his opening speech: “The next year he [Allen Lane] formed this company, Penguin Book Limited, to publish good books at the price of ten cigarettes.”⁹ The concern of the prosecution was not just that the book might be published but that it might be both cheap and accessible; and here it was not only workers, the presumed purchasers of packets of ten cigarettes, but also women who were seen as either dangerous or endangered potential readers.

Near the beginning the chief prosecution lawyer, Mr. Griffith-Jones, asked: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”¹⁰ Far from being taken as the rhetorical question for which it was presumably intended, this question provoked laughter from the jury and, C. H. Rolph remarks, “may have been the first nail in the prosecution's coffin.” The question took on a synecdochic status in cultural mythology for the significance of the trial as a whole, standing for the way that it seemed to mark a turning point in British culture that had already taken place. Mr. Griffith-Jones had appealed to a world no longer there—the world of a homogeneous “we” consisting of middle- or upper-class Englishmen with servants and wives, from whom all dangerous reading matter should rightfully be kept. Griffith-Jones's question backfired because it was taken to reveal the anachronism of his case against Lady Chatterley. Postwar Britain no longer appeared to contain even a significant proportion of middle-class households with living-in servants; and although many middle-class men no doubt had wives, it was not self-evident, as the question required, that their reading should be vetted by their husbands.

In a fascinating way these specifications by age, sex, and class reenact variations and hesitations in the history of legal definitions of obscenity in relation to readers' susceptibilities. Campbell's formulation in 1857 wavered between, on the one hand, an echo of Socrates' accusers in the mention of a particular vulnerable group and, on the other, an appeal to a general concept of mental discipline:

The measure was intended to apply exclusively to works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth, and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in any well-regulated mind.¹¹

Cockburn's modification of this in 1868 omitted the youth and made a number of other significant changes:

I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged with obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.¹²

The tone is now more ominous, “deprave and corrupt” implying more serious and long-term consequences than a transient upset to ordinary “feelings of decency.” Cockburn has shifted the emphasis from exclusive intention to likely effect and restated the general psychological formulation in terms not of personal and transient shock to the average individual but of immoral influence to a group marked off as especially susceptible. And crucially, he has added a clause that draws in the conditions of distribution. The combination supplies the first legitimation for discriminations in terms of price that could clearly bear a relation to class. In To the Pure …, published in 1929, Morris Ernst and William Seagle called the effects of this structure “the aristocracy of ‘smut,’” in other words, the relative invulnerability to prosecution of books with high prices and discreet marketing methods: “ordinarily the publisher, if he confines his advertising to ‘Physicians, Clergymen, and Lawyers,’ has not much to fear.”¹³

The wording of the 1959 act recapitulates Cockburn with the same distinctive yoking of gothic psychology and the sociology of consumption:

An article shall be deemed obscene if its effect or (where the article comprises two or more distinct items) the effect of any one of its items is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.¹⁴

There is thus a legal basis not only to the reference in the Lady Chatterley trial to particular vulnerable groups but also to the concern about mass readership, never openly named. And, interestingly, interrogating lawyers hark back to Campbell's preoccupation with juvenile welfare: to Griffith-Jones's wives and servants are added the differently used category of children, or at least adolescents. Witnesses are habitually asked whether they have children and whether they would mind them coming across the book, the implication being that the book must be all right (or all wrong) if these experts feel happy about their own offspring reading it. Whereas with the wives and servants there is a joke in the idea that gentlemen would take it upon themselves to determine their reading matter, with children the point seems to be taken as reasonable that any responsible parent would withhold literature that was liable to do them harm.

The “wives and servants” conjunction is particularly telling in regard to this novel, whose story concerns the romance of a lady with a man of a lower social class: her husband's gamekeeper. There is thus a strange repetition in this worry about who might read the book, as if it were implicitly being acknowledged that it might be taken as a kind of recipe or invitation for women and servants, ladies and gamekeepers, not to keep their social and sexual places. Against this the defense argues for the validity and worth of “human relationships” between the sexes and between different social classes, not excluding a sexuality in relation to which the woman, too, is now to be regarded as having needs and desires. The defense takes the line that, far from being pornographic or obscene, Lady Chatterley is in fact highly moral, not least because it implicitly advocates ideals whose validity has now come to be acknowledged in the mid-twentieth century, the age of social and sexual enlightenment. One of the witnesses, an educational psychologist named James Hemming, puts it like this: “It is now well recognised that for young people to grow up and marry with a prudish and ashamed attitude towards sex is positively harmful. Lady Chatterley's Lover presents sex as it should be presented.”¹⁵ At the same time (and here literature is serving the same social function as it does for Matthew Arnold), because the generality of culture is debased, it is all the more crucial for the true values the novel teaches to be made available. Hemming uses the language of scientific medicine when he describes Lady Chatterley as a potential “antidote” to the prevailing “shallow and corrupting values with regard to sex and the relationships between the sexes.”¹⁶

In this regard, it is interesting that the defense witnesses in fact tend to make their case by picking up exactly the same terms as those used to damn Lady Chatterley's Lover. The prosecution rests its case on the idea that this is a dirty book, liable to “deprave and corrupt” the minds of those who read it. The defense does not say that that is an inappropriate way of putting the matter, that it might be difficult or futile to determine the difference between a dirty book and a non-dirty book. Instead, it claims that Lady Chatterley's Lover is an exceptionally clean or wholesome book. Where the prosecution is saying that it will have a deleterious effect on public and private morality, the defence says not only that it won't but that it will have an effect that is positively salutary. In other words, the defense, too, adopts the categories of clean and dirty, wholesome and unwholesome, moral and immoral.

Such moves emerge in relation to two particular features of the novel, the aspects with which the trial seems to be most preoccupied. The first is the question of what are euphemistically referred to throughout as “the four-letter words,” generally to be located in “purple passages” and in the context of “bouts.” The words that particularly concern the prosecution are “fuck” and “cunt”; some of the funniest moments in the trial occur when the prosecution lawyer tries reading passages that contain these words, written in Lawrence's transcription of the Nottinghamshire dialect that Mellors, the gamekeeper, would have spoken. The intention of the lawyer here is to demonstrate—it is supposed to need no further argument than the mere showing—how filthy the book quite clearly is. The defense's response is not simply to disagree with the “touchstone” criterion (to hear or to see is enough to damn). Instead, a definite case is made in relation to the positive virtues of these words: Lawrence was trying to purify, to clean up, the language by getting back to the original unsullied significance of these words which modern culture has debased.

Richard Hoggart, for instance, argues as follows when he is in the witness box:

Fifty yards from this Court this morning I heard a man say “fuck” three times as he passed me. He was speaking to himself and he said “fuck it, fuck it, fuck it” as he went past. If you have worked on a building site, as I have, you will find they recur over and over again. The man I heard this morning and the men on building sites use the words as words of contempt, and one of the things Lawrence found most worrying was that the word for this important relationship had become a word of vile abuse. So one would say “fuck you” to a man, although the thing has totally lost its meaning; it has become simply derision, and in this sense he wanted to re-establish the meaning of it, the proper use of it.¹⁷

An entire theory of linguistic history and sexuality is contained in this. Like Arnold, Hoggart sets some store by the repetition of an obnoxious phrase as a kind of negative incantation, overhearing this thrice-muttered curse. But the word “fuck” is not, for Hoggart, “vile” or abusive in itself: it has become so by being severed from its original sexual meaning. The problem is not that the word names sex but that it does not: and “this important relationship” has suffered too, by implication, since the word for it has been turned to other ends, to the point that “the thing has totally lost its meaning.” Sexual and linguistic faults and proprieties are inseparable; the “proper” employment of the one has to be matched by that of the other.

It is significant too that what Hoggart says here is entirely consonant with pronouncements that Lawrence made himself. More than most novelists, Lawrence was given to expressing his opinions on matters of art, sex, society, morality, and language—all the matters that are supposed to be under consideration in the trial of Lady Chatterley. In “Pornography and Obscenity,” for instance, written in 1929 after the thwarted publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, he states:

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable. Take the very lowest instance, the picture postcard sold under hand, by the underworld, in most cities. What I have seen of them has been of an ugliness to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty. …

It is the same with the dirty limericks that people tell after dinner, or the dirty stories one hears commercial travellers telling each other in a smoke-room. Occasionally there is a really funny one, that redeems a great deal. But usually they are just ugly and repellent, and the so-called “humour” is just a trick of doing dirt on sex.¹⁸

As in Hoggart's statement, and, in a different way, as with Arnold's desperate contrast between Attic Greece and the smoke of the Mapperly Hills, an original purity of language has been sullied. Sex itself, “a vital human relationship,” has been subject to “insult,” and the “cheap and nasty” urban commodity epitomizes “the very lowest instance” of degradation that is indicated by its exclamatory opposition to what it is not.

In Arnold's commentary on Wragg, the girl's sins or misfortunes are displaced onto the offensiveness of her name, which is found guilty in its own right of the crimes and abuses perpetrated by or on its bearer. In the case of the Lady Chatterley trial, however, it is the morality of the woman herself, fictional in this instance, that comes to stand in for the whole question of the book's merits or crimes. Lady Chatterley, like Wragg, is herself in custody. This second feature of the prosecution's attack is closely related to the focus on linguistic propriety: Was she or was she not justified in her adultery with the gamekeeper? As with the question of dirty language, the defense witnesses do not refuse the relevance of this issue. Instead, they provide the symmetrically opposite case, arguing that Constance Chatterley's conduct was not only not immoral, but as moral as could be. And there are several grounds for them for saying this.

In the terms of the novel itself, Constance Chatterley is rather an unusual adulteress, since her husband is incapable physically of sex (he was mutilated in the war) and has suggested at various times that she might like to have a child, which would clearly not be his biologically.¹⁹ The defense's argument is made sometimes in terms of “a woman's natural desires,” as when C. Day Lewis replies to Griffith-Jones's interrogation by saying, in the normative language of sexology, “I think it is in her nature because she is an averagely sexed woman.”²⁰ But there is no suggestion that indiscriminate or noncommittal sexual involvements might be acceptable. Hoggart, for instance, is moved to revive by negation the specter of Victorian sexual grime: “If it had simply been a [sic] case that her husband was impotent and she wanted sex, she could have, and would have, had sex in every hedge and ditch round Wragby.”²¹ The case is also made on the grounds of the sanctity of marriage and the indispensability to this of a sexual relationship. According to this argument, Constance's marriage to Lord Chatterley is effectively null and void, not an issue, because it cannot include sex. The real marital relationship of the novel is that of Constance and Oliver, who are working their way toward the complete union that is marriage in the proper, spiritual sense. In the words this time of no less qualified a judge in matters theological than the Bishop of Woolwich, “what Lawrence is trying to do is to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred.”²²

Here again, this defense in fact accords with Lawrence's own published view of the matter. In 1930, following what was already a complicated story of the vicissitudes of the novel's publications and piratings, he wrote a piece called “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover” in which—among many other things—he declared that the greatest contribution of Christianity to Western civilization had been the invention of matrimony. Defense witnesses have a gift in being able to refer to this, which sounds so unlike the image of Lawrence the sex-obsessed pornographer which they are at pains to contradict. Lawrence also states here, as though giving Arnold's strictures about Wragg's sexless English name a more virile revision, “An England that has lost its sex seems to me nothing to feel very hopeful about.”²³ (A later passage in the essay goes on to stress the virtues of “the phallic religion,” and it is fortunate for the defense that Mr. Griffith-Jones does not pick this up.)

There is thus an unexpected complicity in the cases brought by the two sides of the trial. Both are against dirt, against what they are calling obscenity. Lawrence can be defended on the grounds that his writing is not dirty at all—neither in the words he uses nor in the forms of life that he advocates. He is in fact more wholesome than his detractors, who make of sex a “dirty secret,” whereas modern society recognizes that it does not have to be, and indeed should not be. The respectable qualifications of the defense indicate to all the world that this is a matter not of gutter literature but rather of purity itself, a higher form of art precisely because it is restoring the importance of sexuality in marriage, as the highest form of human “communion” (another word that, like “sacred,” brings together sexual and religious experience).

“A WOMAN'S LOVE”

The way in which the Lady Chatterley trial was regarded as an indicator of changes in social attitudes to sex at the beginning of the 1960s was linked, as we have seen, to ideas of progressive cultural enlightenment. In this connection, it makes perfect sense that the test case novelist should have been Lawrence, whose advocates in less manifestly legal spheres had presented his work as central to that understanding of the problems of modern English culture that a literary education might play a useful part in disseminating. In particular, F. R. Leavis chose Lawrence as the sole twentieth-century writer deserving to be tacked on to the “great tradition” of English novels combining literary merit with social criticism: in 1955, he had written a lengthy study called, laconically, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. This text is instructive in that it shows the solidarity between those values the experts, both literary and nonliterary by profession, saw in Lady Chatterley and those that were being claimed for Lawrence more generally as the representative of literature and its social value.

Leavis himself pointedly refused to stand as a witness for the defense in the Lady Chatterley trial. His reasons were made evident in a piece called “The New Orthodoxy,” which he wrote for The Spectator, on the publication of Rolph's transcript of the trial shortly after it as a Penguin Special. For one thing, the novel was not one he considered representative of Lawrence's art (he had barely mentioned it in his book): “Lady Chatterley's Lover, then—it is important that this obvious enough truth should be asserted—is a bad novel.”²⁴ More generally, he distrusted the facile switch of allegiances on the part of some who had never been eager to come forward as Lawrence's defenders when Leavis was attempting to make the case for him in criticism, and saw their case as a transposition of his own to the wrong object: “Reading the testimonies now printed in the Penguin Special, I couldn't help feeling that I had a heavy degree of responsibility. It gave me a sense of guilt when I saw those formulations, which were so familiar to me, applied to Lady Chatterley's Lover, to which I (explicitly) did not apply them.”²⁵ Leavis thus belatedly enters the litigation, protesting guilt by multiple proxy and therefore also making himself responsible for the defense's success. And, ironically, the absence of Leavis in person from the trial does highlight the degree to which the defense of Lawrence as a great writer was conducted in terms compatible with, if not directly derived from, his own.

We have observed the extent to which the defenders of Lady Chatterley take up the terms of cleanliness and social wholesomeness that are simply the reverse side of the prosecution's accusations of dirt and social damage, and how they maintain the distinction of good from pornographic writing by insisting on the literary distinction of the novel on trial. The same structure of thought can be seen to operate in Leavis's approach. The following quotation from the book on Lawrence gives the characteristic tone: “Any great creative writer who has not had his due is a power for life wasted. But the insight, the wisdom, the revived and re-educated feeling for health, that Lawrence brings are what, as our civilization goes, we desperately need.”²⁶ In “revived” and “re-educated,” the “re” draws on that sense of a return to something formerly existing but now lost in modern civilization, which appeared in Hoggart's statement. The two words combine life—“revived”—and education. In Lawrence, and perhaps even more in Lawrence's advocates, Life is a value whose potency has been covered over or distorted under modern social conditions; and which (great) literature has the vocation of bringing back to us, or bringing us back to. Literature is then by the same token educative, didactic: it will teach us what we have forgotten. The urgency, even emergency, in Leavis's emphatic final clause continues the Arnoldian tradition of seeing literature as a desperate remedy (stronger here in its dose than Hoggart's bland “antidote”) for a social situation identified as mechanistic and devalued. Criticism annexes itself here to a function taken to be inherent in the literature, one whose life-restoring powers it points out.²⁷

This linking of literature and life, so forceful in Leavis's appeal on Lawrence's behalf, is reinforced by a strain in Lawrence's own writing, in his novels and elsewhere. It is not only that his novels can be said to offer an image of a different “civilization”; but they also offer outright criticism of a negatively represented modernity. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, there are several points at which Lawrence's narrator lashes out against the state of contemporary culture:

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stack of soap in the grocers' shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the greengrocers! the awful hats in the milliners! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet-picture announcements, “A Woman's Love!”²⁸

Here, with “dismalness … soaked through and through everything,” we are back on Arnold's “dismal Mapperly Hills” with a vengeance. Instead of a crime and a dead baby, there is “the utter death of the human intuitive faculty”; instead of Wragg denied her femininity by the newspaper, there is the sequence of crude commodities and the headlined “wet-picture” title of “A Woman's Love!,” its declarative force sufficient to indicate its unnaturalness when set against “the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has.”

The passage works partly by repetition—“utter … utter … utter … utter,” “ugly … ugly … ugly”—and by loaded words like “squalid,” “blackened,” “horror,” “awful,” “dismalness,” all taken as self-evident evaluative terms and contrasted with their polar opposites: “the gladness of life,” “the instinct for shapely beauty,” “the human intuitive faculty.” It is fascinating that here, as regularly in Lawrence, the cinema epitomizes what is wrong with modern culture—“horror,” no less (along with the scorn for commerce in general in the form of a random assortment of shops)—but that the view of the town is from inside another thoroughly modern cultural artifact of the 1920s, the car. The cinema stands for counterfeit feminine emotion and for a cheap veneer (the “plaster-and-gilt” exterior), yet the car is the place from which the observer with the genuine critical eye can see it for what it is. The reader's view is aligned with that of the speedy narrating traveler who knows with an unquestionable assurance that a film called “A Woman's Love!” is superficial, whereas a novel about the love of a woman called Lady Chatterley is not. And in the same way, Leavis can refer in relation to Lawrence to “the major orders of value-judgement, those depending on the critic's sense for the difference between what, in his time, makes for health and what makes against it.”²⁹

Lady Chatterley's Lover itself partakes of that dismal dismissal of mass culture with which Lawrence's and Leavis's followers became associated. One of the ways in which the unfortunate Chatterley is shown to be thoroughly feeble is by the fact that he is always “listening in” to the radio. Constance herself calls it “the emotional idiocy of the radio”;³⁰ it is expressly represented as a poor imitation of earlier sounds of life:

“Will you have Mrs Bolton play something with you?”

“No! I think I'll listen in.”

She heard the curious satisfaction in his voice. She went upstairs to her bedroom. There she heard the loudspeaker begin to bellow, in an idiotically velveteen-genteel sort of voice, something about a series of street-cries, the very cream of genteel affectation imitating old criers.³¹

Lawrence is against all these mechanical things that he opposes to the “life” values; against the “velveteen-genteel” veneer, Mellors will set his peculiar version of pastoral, involving a return to a nature of colorful masculinity: “An' I'd get my men to wear different clothes: appen close red trousers, bright red, an' little short white jackets. Why, if men had red, fine legs, that alone would change them in a month. They'd begin to be men again, to be men! An' the women could dress as they liked. Because if once the men walked with legs close bright scarlet, and buttocks nice and showing scarlet under a little white jacket: then the women 'ud begin to be women.”³² The restoration of a preindustrial ideal community crucially depends upon a call for a return to a natural difference of the sexes.

It is revealing that the targets chosen by Lawrence should now seem so inappropriate. The radio and the cinema are two of his favorites; another is the gramophone. The first two at least now have wonderfully authentic-sounding, almost old-fashioned overtones: in the age of television and home videos, there is no great concern with the potentially damaging effects of radio or film, and certainly not in relation to silent movies or the crackling wireless voices of the twenties. Where previously they could serve as a symbol of mechanization and commercialization, these two now carry a connotation nearer to that of a lost social harmony.³³ These shifts in the rhetoric should indicate how difficult it is to maintain the kinds of clear-cut demarcation that Lawrence (and later Leavis) wanted to assert.

THE TRIAL CONTINUES

In the passage from the novel cited above, the intertwining of sexual and social views of health is once again apparent. As we have seen, the vindication of the novel at its trial rested heavily on the claim that its version of sexual relationships was not only permissible but positively beneficial (with this mode of argument partly determined by the need to prove not only that the book was not harmful but that it was “for the public good”). Even though the trial was seen as a watershed for the liberalization of sexual values associated with the 1960s, the case is actually made in quite traditional terms: Lawrence is promoting a monogamous, heterosexual form of love. Promiscuity is explicitly rejected, homosexual love is not mentioned, and the scene of anal sex—highly euphemistic in the novel itself—is strategically ignored by the defenders of the novel.

I want finally to move to one side and look briefly at a different issue raised in relation to Lawrence's representation of sexuality in the years since the trial. In 1970 the American Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, an inaugural work in what has subsequently become the well-established field of feminist literary criticism. Millett proceeded by analyses of texts by male writers as manifestations of the workings of patriarchy. First among these culprits of phallocracy was D. H. Lawrence. What Millett saw in Lawrence was not dirt exactly, nor wholesomeness either, but maleness of a particularly extreme, misogynistic, and offensive kind. Where others would have attributed Lawrence's success to his articulation of commonly held twentieth-century feelings and opinions about human life and values, Millett took it quite simply as a function of his all-too-clear articulation of the violent, megalomaniacal tendencies of masculinity.

Without entering into the details of Millett's criticisms, I would like simply to note two things. First, her critique represents one of the first examples of a quite different tendency, developing over the past twenty years, in arguments about pornography and obscenity. In 1960 the question was about the lifting of taboos, a new enlightenment in which there would be no need to shrink away shamefully from a sexuality now seen as part of the fullness of healthy human life. For Millett, and for a host of feminists since then (by no means all feminists, but a significant proportion), the question is about how pornography misrepresents women and their sexuality, how it does violence to them in ways that may or may not be materially different from actual physical violence and that may directly encourage it. The pornography-literature relationship has shifted: the Lady Chatterley trial marked very strongly the difference between them, and maintained a clear demarcation between good healthy sex and bad vulgar sex, with literature figuring as precisely what transcended common, street pornography; but now literature is taken as potentially tainted with the same brush and all the more insidious for being privileged as exempt. Millett's targets have to be “great literature” for her polemic to have some effect. For all the respectable people already agreed that what is called pornography was unpleasant and violent (though they might not have worried about its being misogynistic). The scandal was to declare that what they thought absolutely different from that run-of-the-press trash was in fact not so at all.

The second point I want to note in relation to Millett's criticism of Lawrence is that in many ways she does not depart from the criteria of her own opponents, just as the defenders of Lady Chatterley share common ground with the novel's attackers. Millett too has a notion of healthy, wholesome sex between mature people, which—in spite of herself, in a way—is thoroughly Lawrentian. For example: “Though his prose can be as loving a caress to the male body as any of Genet's, it is never as honest. Moreover, the projected masculine alliance, the Blutbruderschaft, is so plainly motivated by the rather sordid political purpose of clubbing together against women, that this too gives it a perverse rather than a healthy and disinterested character, either as sexuality or as friendship.”³⁴ “Rather sordid,” “healthy and disinterested,” “honest”: the terms are exactly Lawrence's—or Leavis's, for that matter. Once again, there is a firm standard of what is to be thought genuine—honest, disinterested, healthy—and what is not, and this standard is taken as read. It can only be pointed to by the gesture of “of course”—“so plainly motivated,” she says—which implies that the writer assumes the reader will agree with her. In this light Millett is a worthy successor to the English tradition of cultural criticism that operates in the declarative mode, assuming clearly separated categories through which the absolutely good (or honest or healthy) is set up unproblematically against its opposite. There is an arbitrary assertion whereby one term being taken as natural and good, the other is a fake or distorted or mechanical substitution for it.

This appeal to common standards is related to the prescribed question decided at the trial of Lady Chatterley. Before the issue of “public good” was considered, the jury had first to determine whether or not the work was obscene, with obscenity defined, as noted above, in this way: “The book is to be deemed to be obscene if its effect … if taken as a whole, [is] such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read … the matter contained … in it.”³⁵ There is a wonderful contradiction built in here. The jury is supposed to decide, on behalf of the populace at large, whether or not the book has this “tendency to deprave and corrupt.” (In the case of the Lawrence trial, the jury was not permitted to take Lady Chatterley home, but sat reading it in a room next to the court for three full days.) If it then had been depraved or corrupted, presumably, by the terms of the trial, it would no longer be in a position to judge the book: it had become depraved and corrupt. But the jury would not know this because a depraved person is no judge of depravity. Thus there could never, in these terms, be such a thing as a fair trial for obscenity. Either it does not corrupt you, which proves it was not obscene in the first place since obscenity corrupts; or it does, but then you are corrupt, no longer a sane, reasonable person, and hence in no position to judge. In either case, you cannot be supposed to know your own state of mind.³⁶

This impasse applies in some version to all forms of delegated censorship or cultural gatekeeping (not to be confused with gamekeeping). Someone or some group of people has to take upon itself the position of superior immunity to whatever is supposed to be potentially harmful in the film or book under consideration. It is the same structure as with the insinuation that three and sixpence is rather a dangerously low price for a high book that might thus risk looking like a low book (or for a purely, or impurely, low book, quite simply, depending on which side you're on): some people know better than others what is good for “us.” (There is an additional contradiction, built into the 1959 act, that the saving attribution of “public good” cancels out the legal but not the alleged psychological effects of an obscene publication: the book would still, presumably, be getting on with its depraving and corrupting even while it was compensating for this by its public benefits.)

The same problem, then, that occurs in the distinctions drawn between healthy and unhealthy sexuality, and between genuine and artificial social forms, is built into the very form of the demand that a book be tried for obscenity defined in this way as what tends “to deprave and corrupt.” The addition of the incompatible escape clause referring to public good only serves to make evident the complicity of this banning of the obscene with the process by which works are legitimated as positively valuable—as tending to revive and reeducate, for instance.

In the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover itself, there is a particularly eccentric illustration of this in the form of an opinion delivered by George Bernard Shaw not long after its first appearance:

If I had a marriageable daughter, what could I give her to read to prepare her? Dickens? Thackeray? George Eliot? Walter Scott? Trollope? or even any of the clever modern women who take such a fiendish delight in writing able novels that leave you hopeless and miserable? They would teach her a lot about life and society and human nature. But they would leave her absolutely in the dark as to marriage. Even Fielding and Joyce and George Moore would be no use: instead of telling her nothing they would tell her worse than nothing. But she would learn something from Lady Chatterley. I shouldn't let her engage herself if I could help it until she had read that book. Lawrence had delicacy enough to tell the best, and brutality enough to rub in the worst. Lady Chatterley should be on the shelves of every college for budding girls. They should be forced to read it on pain of being refused a marriage licence.³⁷

The mixture of the ludicrous and the tyrannical here adds a new piquancy to Leavis's “force” for life, in this enumeration of the extraordinary controls to be exercised by the well-meaning fatherly dictator, lasciviously or sadistically imagining a college full of “budding girls” for whom the forced reading of a novel prompted by “brutality enough to rub in the worst” is their only (“on pain of”) escape into the brutality of which it has just given them a foretaste. Truly, the wives and servants never had it so good: whether or not the exaggeration is meant as a joke, it is revealing. Shaw presents in an extreme form the argument of many of the novel's later defenders, asserting not merely that Lady Chatterley does not corrupt but that it should be (literally) required reading.

Thirty years after the event to which the title of the transcript refers quite simply as The Trial of Lady Chatterley, the issues it raises are again to the fore in many areas of cultural representation in Britain. The oppositional language of “sick” or “depraved” as opposed to “sane” or “healthy” individuals or social groups continues to structure debate on issues of pornography, censorship, and illegitimate sexualities (the ambiguous “Clause 28” ban on the “promotion” of homosexuality). In many ways, as the vaunted return to “Victorian” values would suggest, some of the categories and concerns are thoroughly recognizable in the terms of the first legislators against obscene publications and the first advocates of the restorative powers of the literary canon. There is still a constant attempt to establish or police the boundaries between what is thereby decreed either dangerous or permissible material. Lady Chatterley may have been vindicated in 1960, but Wragg is still in custody.

Notes

1. Frank Kermode and John Hollander, eds., The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. 6: Modern British Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 449.

2. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), in Selected Prose, ed. P. J. Keating (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 145.

3. Ibid., 145-46.

4. Ibid., 146.

5. “The Study of Poetry” (1880) is described in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986, p. 1441) as having been “extraordinarily potent in shaping literary tastes in England and in America.” For a full analysis of Arnold's place in the history of English criticism, see Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

6. Morris L. Ernst and William Seagle, To the Pure … : A Study of Obscenity and the Censor (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929), 136.

7. Lest this connection seem farfetched, the reader is referred to the fifth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. This includes all but the beginning of Arnold's essay; among the helpful footnotes is one explaining the reference to the Mapperly Hills: “Adjacent to the coal-mining and industrial area of Nottingham (later associated with the writings of D. H. Lawrence)” (1420).

8. C. H. Rolph, ed., The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 11.

9. Ibid., 25. Cigarettes would at the time connote a working-class purchase, a cheap, everyday luxury. For more on the implications of the trial from the point of view of both social and publishing history, see John Sutherland, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960-1982 (London: Junction Books, 1982), chap. 1, “November 1960: Lady Chatterley's Lover,” 10-31.

10. Rolph, 17.

11. Quoted in Alec Craig, The Banned Books of England (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1937), 23.

12. Ibid., 24.

13. Ernst and Seagle, 75-76.

14. Quoted in Alec Craig, The Banned Books of England and Other Countries: A Study of the Conception of Literary Obscenity (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962), 123.

15. Rolph, 119.

16. Ibid., 118. In the next sentence, these values are exemplified in the terms of feminist cultural criticism: “For example, the picture is put before the young girl that if she has the right proportions, wears the right clothes, uses the right cosmetics, she will become irresistible to men and that that is the supreme achievement of a woman.”

17. Ibid., 98.

18. “Pornography and Obscenity,” in D. H. Lawrence, A Selection from Phoenix, ed. A. A. H. Inglis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 312.

19. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover,” Lawrence responds to whether Lord Chatterley's paralysis was meant to be symbolic: “When I read the first version, I recognized that the lameness of Clifford was symbolic of the paralysis, the deeper emotional or passional paralysis, of most men of his sort and class today. I realized that it was perhaps taking an unfair advantage of Connie, to paralyse him technically. It made it so much more vulgar of her to leave him” (359-60). Yet in “Pornography and Obscenity,” Lawrence takes a special exception to Jane Eyre, which is singled out as pornographic partly because of the physical state of Rochester at the end: “Mr. Rochester's sex passion is not ‘respectable’ till Mr. Rochester is burned, blinded, disfigured, and reduced to helpless dependence” (314). In some sense, Clifford might then be understood as a properly defunct and incapacitated version of Rochester, representing by caricature the “counterfeit” impotence of the type of sexuality which the later novel rejects.

20. Rolph, 153.

21. Ibid., 101. The description of Wragby near the start of the novel has many points of correspondence with Arnold's description of the setting of Wragg's misadventure:

    Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone, begun about the middle of the eighteenth century, and added on to, till it was a warren of a place without much distinction. It stood on an eminence in a rather fine old park of oak trees, but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.

    (14)

22. Rolph, 70.

23. Lawrence, “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover,” 352.

24. F. R. Leavis, “The New Orthodoxy,” The Spectator, Feb. 17, 1961, 229. The following week (p. 255), the paper published a letter from Martin Turnell that gleefully quotes Leavis's opinion of the novel in 1933. In For Continuity, he had written: “There is no redundancy in Lady Chatterley's Lover, no loose prophecy and passional exegesis, and no mechanical use of the specialised vocabulary. He returns here to the scenes of his earlier work, and the book has all the old sensuous concreteness without the fevered adolescent overcharge: ripe experience is in control.” Touché. Nonetheless, Leavis comes back unchastened, referring (Mar. 3, 1961, 291) to “that obscure pioneer essay” and continuing: “What was important at the time—and for long afterwards—was to insist that he had a major claim on our attention, and above all, that he was not a pornographer or anything of the kind. Now, thirty years later, things are very different. Work of critical advocacy has been carried on with some pertinacity—at the cost (I speak from painful experience) of obloquy, slander and worldly disadvantage.” “Not a pornographer,” “what was important at the time”: here Leavis defends himself against the charge of inconsistency by claiming to have used precisely the strategic approach he abhors in the case of the defense witnesses at the 1960 trial.

25. Ibid., 230.

26. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 16.

27. On the insistence upon the relationship between Literature and Life in Leavis and the group of critics around him, see Francis Mulhern, The Moment of “Scrutiny” (1979; rpt. London: Verso, 1981).

28. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 158.

29. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, 28-29.

30. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, 144.

31. Ibid., 128.

32. Ibid., 228-29.

33. Not, however, for F. R. Leavis, objecting in 1966 to a journalist's allusion to “a familiar resentment and envy, often seen in Britain, that working people should be going to Florence and Majorca, and buying Beethoven long-playing records” (quoted in F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America [London: Chatto and Windus, 1969], 4). Leavis resents her premises: “I myself, after an unaffluent and very much ‘engaged’ academic life, am not familiar with Majorca or Florence, but in those once very quiet places very much nearer Cambridge to which my wife and I used to take our children the working-class people now everywhere to be met with in profusion carry transistors around with them almost invariably” (5). The rebuttal is curious in its logic. The sense seems to be that since he hasn't been able to get to Spain or Italy to test the hypotheses on the ground, then at least he can speak from firsthand experience of the mob (“now everywhere to be met with in profusion”) that has invaded the local retreats for overworked and underpaid dons. The foreign locations and domestic music somehow get conflated. First, if these people are trailing their trannies round East Anglia, then evidently they do not have any classical LPs. And second, the working class's experience is oddly put into relation to the Leavises': if he can't afford to go abroad, they might at least not blast out the former decent pastoral havens with their vulgar noise.

34. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970; rpt. London: Virago, 1977), 267-68.

35. Rolph, 10 (the passage from the Act is here quoted in abbreviated form, as it applied to the particular publication the jury was to consider).

36. On one occasion, however, a witness did announce his own corruption. At the 1967 trial of Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, David Sheppard, former England cricket captain and now Church of England bishop, declared himself “not unscathed” by reading the book. At this trial, the remarkable decision was taken to have an all-male jury, as though paternalism of the “wives and daughters” were a foregone conclusion in matters of literary judgment. Recalling this recently, an article in The Guardian (Jan. 4, 1990, 26) came up with a sentence that, if taken at face value, would seem to have altered the course of Western history at a stroke: “This was in keeping with the Establishment spirit of the times and the idea that men rather than women needed protection from sexual candour.”

37. Quoted in Craig, The Banned Books of England, 31-32, from Frank Harris's Bernard Shaw (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 232-33, where one further sentence, italicized, concluded the quotation—“But it is not as readable as ‘Ivanhoe’ or ‘A Tale of Two Cities’”—which is followed by three italicized exclamation marks. In Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (New York: Atheneum, 1969), Colin Wilson supplies an anecdote that seems to clarify this: “He was incapable of grasping this [postwar] poetry of spiritual bankruptcy, or D. H. Lawrence's attempt to find true values again in sex. (Although he told General Smuts [sic] at a luncheon party that every schoolgirl of sixteen should read Lady Chatterley's Lover, he later admitted to [Stephen] Winsten that he had never succeeded in reading Lawrence” (267). Barbara Bellow Watson, author of A Shavian Guide to the Intelligent Woman (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), who also (p. 130) gives the quotation from Harris, makes no remark about its language, taking it straight as an illustration of Shaw's liberal views on sex education: his endorsement of the novel's uses “becomes even more emphatic when we realize how strongly Shaw disapproved of Lawrence's language.”

The first version of this essay was written as an informal lecture for the 1988 Scottish Universities International Summer School at Edinburgh University, organized by Patrick Williams.