What Did “Lady Chatterley” Liberate?
D. H. Lawrence wrote “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” in six weeks. He was living in Italy, where he had moved in 1925 for his health. He had tuberculosis, and he probably knew that “Lady Chatterley” was likely to be his last novel. (It was. He died in 1930, at the age of forty-four.)
He also knew that the book would be impossible to publish in England and the United States, where most of his readers lived but where anti-obscenity laws were strict and aggressively enforced. Lawrence was very familiar with anti-obscenity laws. His novel “The Rainbow,” published in 1915, had been banned in Britain for eleven years.
But Lawrence believed that modern civilization was sick, and that one symptom of its sickness was a damaged relationship to sex. He wrote “Lady Chatterley” to heal that damage. He used taboo words to represent taboo subject matter, but he wanted to make sex natural and life-affirming, not dirty or obscene. He described his novel as “an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today.”
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Still, for thirty-two years, the book was outlawed precisely for being dirty and obscene—honest, maybe, but definitely not healthy. Then there was a reckoning, in the form of two highly publicized court cases, and the book, or, rather, its publishers, prevailed. “Lady Chatterley” went on to sell millions of copies around the world. Did it make a difference?
Guy Cuthbertson believes that it did, sort of. “We live in a world that ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ helped to create,” he writes in “Lady C: The Long, Sensational Life of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (Yale). What he means, though, is not exactly what Lawrence had in mind. What he means is that the book—for most people, just the title, really—has become a universal meme. “It might be hated, rejected, banned, derided, burnt, defaced, hidden, or binned,” Cuthbertson observes, “but it is a book that has crept into so many walks of life that so many people have heard of, and that has been so frequently adapted, copied, illustrated, and referenced.”
On whether the book has made the world any saner about sex, or about anything else, Cuthbertson is equivocal. The book “has meant freedom for many people,” he says. But it also, he thinks, played a part in “opening the floodgates.” The judicial exoneration of “Lady Chatterley” made it much easier to publish frank talk about, and graphic depictions of, sex, but much harder to regulate manipulative, derogatory, and offensive speech, and to keep pornography, obscenity, and other potentially troubling forms of expression out of the reach of children.
On that matter, Cuthbertson does little more than note the problem—but then neither does anyone else. The First Amendment offers no real guidance. So the fight gets pushed into the social sphere, where it reappears as a front in the culture war. Still, his book’s main claim is persuasive: “Lady Chatterley” is everywhere. Professor Cuthbertson (he teaches at Liverpool Hope University) is a great “Lady Chatterley” search engine, and he has scraped up a staggering number of “Chatterley” hits.
Most of these concern the two principals in Lawrence’s novel: Lady Chatterley, whose name is Connie, and her lover, Oliver Mellors. Connie is married to a baronet, Clifford, who has been made impotent by a war wound, and Mellors is the gamekeeper on Clifford’s estate, Wragby. His job is basically to keep poachers away and to make sure that there are enough pheasants for a jolly shooting party (which, since Sir Clifford uses a wheelchair, seems an improbable entertainment at Wragby).
Strictly speaking, Connie is an aristocrat and Mellors is working class. But Connie is not very class-conscious, and Mellors has returned from the British Army to take up an occupation that allows him almost complete independence. Mellors sometimes speaks in a working-class dialect (“Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody,” or “Let’s not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else”—that sort of thing). But he also speaks standard English perfectly well, is intelligent, and reads books.
He is not especially hunky—thin, with a red face and, like his creator, weak lungs. Connie is described as “a bit Scottish and short,” with a body that is starting to age. A social-class taboo does attach to the affair, but some of Mellors’s working-class manner is playacting. He performs it to make upper-class people uncomfortable, to control the conversation. And “earthiness” is his role in the relationship. It’s what makes the sex genuine.
Whether people approve of censorship or not, most would not have trouble calling the language of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” obscene. “Fuck” is used thirty times in the novel. “Cunt” is used fourteen times. There are ten mentions of “balls,” four mentions of “cock,” and multiple appearances of “arse” (eleven), “shit” (six), and “piss” (three). There are thirteen sex scenes.
Lawrence was trying to make “dirty words” clean, and he was being deliberately explicit about things that writers before him generally had to represent elliptically or euphemistically. But the relationship between Lady Chatterley and her lover is not about sex. The whole point is that they love each other. If you don’t get that, you don’t get the book. People who love each other often have sex. So, in “Lady Chatterley,” the lovers have sex, and Lawrence describes it.
“Lady Chatterley” is a novel that stretches across three hundred or so pages and has more than a dozen characters. A lot of the book is conversation, much of it about the social sickness that Lawrence was obsessed with—passages not exactly conducive to arousal. The sex scenes take up about thirty pages, and arousal is, as always, a matter of taste. Lawrence did not write those scenes to titillate, though. He hated pornography, promiscuity, and masturbation, which he called “perhaps the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization.” Still, the bumper-sticker version of the novel is “Fancy lady has a fling with the gamekeeper,” understood as something along the lines of “Heiress gets it on with the lifeguard.” And that is what feeds the Chatterley-knockoff machine.
Which turns out to be amazingly prolific. Cuthbertson tells us, for example, that in 1960 a boy named John Rankin, dressed as a gamekeeper and carrying a sign identifying him as Lady Chatterley’s lover, was awarded a prize for his outfit in a children’s fancy-dress parade at an event organized by St. Columb’s Cathedral at the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall, in Derry, Northern Ireland. (Interesting that a child was rewarded for dressing up as the lover. I wonder what he was thinking. Or the priests at St. Columb’s.)
A year later, at the Up Helly Aa festival, which marks the end of the Yule season in the Shetland Islands, a skit called “Luvverkey’s Chatter” was performed, featuring people dressed up as gamekeepers standing in front of a giant copy of Lawrence’s novel, along with a large penguin (Penguin being the novel’s publisher). A Lady Chatterley in flimsy attire appeared and ran inside the book. Articles of clothing were thrown out, but, when the gamekeepers opened the book, she had disappeared.
We are informed that at the Lady Chatterley pub, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence was born, you can order an extra-pale ale called a Mellors, alcohol by volume 4.4 per cent. And that, in 1990, the Valentine’s Day masquerade ball at the George Hotel in Rye, Sussex, featured Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s Soup. An artisanal florist in Kent offered a Lady Chatterley bouquet, and there was an escort service called Chatterleys of Liverpool. Someone has created a Lady Chatterley’s Lover cocktail. Its ingredients include gin, olive juice, vermouth, and Tabasco.
In 1962, “Das War die Lady Chatterley” was recorded by the German group Die Schock-Kings. In 1965, a person was arrested for reading “Lady Chatterley” out loud at Sproul Hall, at the University of California at Berkeley (part of the Filthy Speech Movement, which succeeded the better-known Free Speech Movement). In 2016, the Belgian singer-songwriter Maarten Devoldere, performing under the name Warhaus, released an album titled “We Fucked a Flame Into Being,” which is a line from the final chapter of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Then, there are the sequels, the spinoffs, and the rewrites, starting, perhaps, with “Lady Chatterley’s Husbands” (1931). Cuthbertson lists more than two dozen published just in this century: “Lady Myddelton’s Lover” (2014), an Edwardian romance; “Lord Loxley’s Lover” (2015), described as “a gay take”; “Lady Emmeline’s Lover” (2023), set in the Victorian period; and so on.
Most of the Chatterley mentions and appropriations are pretty straightforward, but Cuthbertson teases out a few lines of influence of a more speculative turn. One concerns the song “Try a Little Tenderness,” immortalized by Otis Redding but covered by many other musicians. It was composed in 1932, the year the first complete and unexpurgated edition of “Lady Chatterley,” known as the Authorized Edition, was published, and “tenderness” is a key word in the novel.
In fact, Lawrence, who was not great with titles (“Kangaroo”?), had at one point planned to call his novel “Tenderness.” In case we are skeptical that this counts as an influence on Otis Redding, Cuthbertson points out that on page 271 of the Authorized Edition the word “weary” appears seven times and the word “tenderness” three times—hence, conceivably, the line in the song “But when she gets weary, try a little tenderness.” I’ll buy it. Why not?
That Lawrence might have called his novel “Tenderness” poses an interesting counterfactual. It would have been a challenge to prosecute a book with a title like that. Who would censor tenderness? But the title “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” tells you right off that this is a book about adultery. Public opinion is against adultery. This strengthened the hand of the Crown in its obscenity trial, because just the suggestion of illicit sex was then enough to get books banned in England.
Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness,” for example, was found to be obscene, in a famous trial in 1928, for the line “And that night they were not divided,” “they” referring to two women. “Sleeveless Errand,” by Norah C. James, was banned in 1929, apparently because its characters use expressions like “bloody hell,” “homos,” and “whores.” There is no sex in the book. Adultery was not a crime in England in 1928, and lesbianism never had been. But obscenity law did not require a crime; it required only the suggestion that a book might corrupt its readers.
Lawrence tried to circumvent the censorship problem by publishing “Lady Chatterley” privately (meaning that he put up the money) in Florence. The book was typeset by an Italian printer who had no English, and Lawrence felt obliged to tell him what was in the book. The printer shrugged. “Oh, we do it every day,” he is supposed to have said. The book was sold to individuals by subscription and to a few bookstores, and the first printing of a thousand copies sold out quickly.
This made the book easy prey for pirates (“bookaneers”). A banned book cannot be copyrighted. Nothing, therefore, prevented someone from printing and selling an edition of “Lady Chatterley” without paying Lawrence, or even asking his permission. Nothing except English and American law, that is. So pirates published the unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley” in Paris, a city that was for many years the home of English-language pornography. By 1936, there were three “Lady Chatterley” editions being sold in France.
The French had obscenity laws, too, but they were designed to be hard to enforce, and, in any case, the French didn’t care much about English-language pornography in the nineteen-twenties, since it was purchased mostly by tourists. (France would tighten up its censorship regulations in 1939.) Lawrence himself went to Paris to ask Sylvia Beach if she would bring out an edition of “Lady Chatterley.” In 1922, Beach had published James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” a book that, for the next decade, remained banned in England and America (although, interestingly, never in Ireland). But Beach told Lawrence that she did not want to become known as a publisher of erotica.
She did, however, introduce him to a wealthy American bookseller named Edward Titus, who agreed to bring out a cheap edition (in order to undersell the pirates, who were price gouging) and to pay Lawrence a royalty. After Lawrence’s death, his English publisher, Martin Secker, and his American publisher, Alfred Knopf, brought out expurgated editions. Until 1960, those were the “Lady Chatterley”s most readers knew.
Then came the judges. The British trial, Regina v. Penguin Books, held in the Old Bailey in October and November of 1960, was a highly publicized event, even in the United States. The New Yorker’s Mollie Panter-Downes covered it in a Letter from London. Sybille Bedford wrote a voluminous account for Esquire. There are at least two books about the trial.
The interest was not all jurisprudential. A. S. Byatt called the trial “one of the great comic moments in British culture.” And it did have its caricatural “No sex, please, we’re British” bits. At one point, the prosecutor (his name, almost too perfect, was John Mervyn Guthrie Griffith-Jones, M.C.) asked the jury, “Is this a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Jurors laughed at “servants,” a bad sign for the Crown.
Thirty-five witnesses testified for Penguin, none for the Queen (except a policeman who had taken a copy of the book into custody), and the jury was out for just under three hours before returning a verdict of not guilty. It was the opening bell for the “swinging sixties,” memorialized as such in Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis”:
(Larkin was a lifelong “Chatterley” enthusiast. He called it “the greatest idealistic work since ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ ” Of course, he also collected pornography and is sometimes regarded as the very definition of a “dirty old man.”)
Cuthbertson covers the trial as the spectacle it was, but he is not especially interested in the legal details. You could say that they aren’t really within his purview, but the novel isn’t what opened the floodgates. It was the courts. “Obscenity” had to be reinterpreted for Lawrence’s novel to be legally printed and sold, and to then make it possible to print and sell “Tropic of Cancer,” “Naked Lunch,” “Lolita,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” and “Fanny Hill”—Lady Chatterley’s children.
The legal story really begins a few years earlier, in New York, where Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, published an unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley” in 1959. It was seized by the post office (as Rosset had expected) and duly declared obscene by the postmaster of the city of New York, a man named Robert Christenberry. Grove appealed on First Amendment grounds, and a federal court reversed the postmaster’s ruling. The judge, Frederick van Pelt Bryan, could not see what qualified Christenberry to pass judgment on a work of literature. His verdict was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1960.
Rosset had helped Judge Bryan reach this conclusion by including, in the Grove edition, statements by people who were qualified to pass judgment. There was a prefatory letter by Archibald MacLeish, a professor at Harvard and a former Librarian of Congress, and an introduction by Mark Schorer, a professor of English at Berkeley, along with blurbs from other eminent men of letters. (It was Schorer who had initially encouraged Rosset to publish the unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley.”)
The court took notice. “A work of literature published and distributed through normal channels by a reputable publisher stands on quite a different footing from hardcore pornography furtively sold for the purpose of profiting by the titillation of the dirty-minded,” Bryan wrote. “The courts have been deeply and properly concerned about the use of obscenity statutes to suppress great works of art or literature.” (Neither Grove nor Penguin minded profiting from titillation, of course, as long as the professors approved.)
Within a year of Bryan’s decision, in July, 1959, “Chatterley” went to No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list and sold two million copies. The Times called it “the authentic descendant of ‘Madame Bovary’ and ‘Anna Karenina.’ ” But it was still uncopyrighted. By the end of the year, there were five unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley”s on the American market.
Grove’s victory emboldened Penguin, which reportedly stockpiled two hundred thousand copies for release to bookstores in the U.K. the minute a verdict was reached in the London courtroom. A trial was actually in the interests of both parties. For Penguin, the publicity promised robust sales. (And the launch was hugely successful: within a month, two million unexpurgated “Lady Chatterley”s were sold, and, in 1961, Penguin went public.) For the British government, the trial was an opportunity to road test a new piece of legislation, the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.
The act was intended to relax the legal standards for obscenity, which had not changed since 1868, and it had two prongs. The first was that a work must be “such as to tend to deprave and corrupt.” However (prong two), people were not to be convicted of an offense based on the “deprave and corrupt” prong 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.”
In other words, there was a highbrow exception. This is why Penguin paraded its thirty-five witnesses, most of them persons of Oxbridge-level pedigree, including E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Helen Gardner, Cecil Day-Lewis, Richard Hoggart (the author of “The Uses of Literacy,” an influential study of working-class culture, oddly unmentioned by Cuthbertson), and the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, who would soon become famous as the author of “Honest to God,” a work of existentialist theology. The publisher was said to have had some fifty additional witnesses on call.
Penguin was following Rosset’s lead: enlisting learned opinion to convince a jury that, to some distinguished minds, and regardless of what a juror’s own experience might tell him, “fuck” is not a dirty word. After the trial, it was rumored that the jury had initially been split 9-3 for acquittal, and that the minority was brought around by the expert testimony. The book satisfied the second prong. It checked the “public good” box.
Still, neither of the “Chatterley” trials unpacked the conundrum at the heart of censorship cases, which is the definition of “obscene.” “Nobody knows what it means,” Lawrence once wrote, and he was right as far as the courts were concerned. Is something obscene because it’s arousing? Or is it obscene because it’s gross? Is lust, a pleasurable feeling, the relevant affect? Or is it disgust, an unpleasant one? Somehow, a piece of writing that arouses sexual feelings has the same status as one that repels.
When I was twelve, I had to take a Bible course at school. One day, we read II Samuel 11, where it is written that King David took Bathsheba, “and she came unto him, and he lay with her.” At that age, I had no real idea of what adult genitalia looked like or what the sex act consisted of, but I suddenly realized what “lay” meant, and I thought I was going to throw up. Obscene? Certainly sounds like it. (I’m O.K. with it now.)
Legally, the term has been a kind of black hole. Every definition seems to require another definition. Under British law at the time of the “Chatterley” trial, something was obscene if it tended “to deprave and corrupt.” But what is depravity? Is it an action or a state of mind? Is adultery depraved? Is “corruption” a code word for masturbation? The absurd part is that corruption and depravity are not crimes, and neither are adultery and masturbation. If you masturbate without the aid of a book, apparently, the government is fine with it.
Under American law in 1960, a book or a movie was obscene if its predominant appeal was to “prurient interest.” Same problem: What does “prurient” mean? The Supreme Court defined prurience as “a tendency to excite lustful thoughts,” but also as “a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion,” which sounds rather different. Are lustful thoughts “shameful”? What would be a “morbid interest” in nudity?
The over-all impression left by Cuthbertson’s book is that, after being liberated from the censors, “Lady Chatterley” went very quickly from being a scandal to being a joke. It was fodder for spoofs and double-entendres. Even Lawrence’s admirers felt obliged to distance themselves from the novel. Iris Murdoch called it “an eminently silly book by a great man.”
It may be that Lawrence’s frankness simply made people uncomfortable, so they called the book humorless or embarrassing to avoid having to confront the subjects Lawrence raises. His anger at the industrialization and materialism that he thought were destroying English life appealed to intellectuals. Descriptions of the female orgasm, which is the chief concern of the sex scenes, not so much.
The result is that “Lady Chatterley” is not like “Ulysses,” a book that also triumphed over the censors to become something one is supposed to have read. (Lawrence was no admirer of Joyce, by the way. He called Molly Bloom’s soliloquy “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written.”) But no one is supposed to read “Lady Chatterley.” It’s famous, but in the way Mickey Mouse is famous. On the other hand, if Lawrence had called his novel “Tenderness,” would anyone have named a cocktail after it? ♦