Life & Times

      Post-Victorian Britain

      David Herbert Lawrence was a creative talent who consistently tested the boundaries of acceptability through his work. He viewed post-Victorian Britain as morally bankrupt, due to the effects of industrialisation and the associated changes in social structure, and was generally regarded as anti-establishment by his contemporaries. The sexual content of his literature was considered by many at the time as little more than pornography prose. While other writers merely implied instances of sexual encounter in their work, Lawrence wrote detailed descriptive accounts of his characters’ sexual exploits. He also dared to suggest that class divides were crossed for want of sexual gratification, and for that he became something of a social pariah.

      Lawrence was reportedly sexually confused in his early life. He had intimacies with young men as well as women and although in his work there are no overtly homosexual encounters, his use of the term ‘lovers’ does suggest that Lawrence was hinting at gender ambiguity. His work shocked polite society as it was, because the plots could be boiled down to a contest between love and lust.

      Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence married a German divorcee named Frieda Weekley. He also publicly voiced his anti-war views, which were at odds with the majority of the British public, who displayed a strong fighting spirit and will to win. The German connection and his expressed contempt meant that Lawrence and his wife were treated with a good deal of suspicion. In addition to this, Lawrence was investigated for obscenity in his writing. Everything came to a head when he and his wife were accused of spying for the Germans. They lived on the Cornish coast and were accused of signalling information to German U-boats. By 1917, the Lawrences had been forced to relocate to central England, away from the coastline, with use of the Defence of the Realm Act.

      With the capitulation of the Germans in 1918, the war was ended and the Lawrences opted for voluntary exile abroad. In 1919 they moved to Italy and spent three years exploring southern Europe and a few years later, in 1922, they emigrated to the United States via Australia. Eventually, Lawrence’s ill health forced them back to Europe, where he received treatment for tuberculosis.

      Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Obscenity Trials

      In his final years, Lawrence drafted his most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published in 1928, two years before his early death at the age of 44. The book caused an outrage and was initially banned from publication.

      By today’s standards the plot is not especially racy, but at the time of its publication, the book caused an absolute scandal. This was due, in part, to the explicit sexual content, but also for the revelation that people have extramarital affairs. This was also the story of a refined woman falling for the animal charms of a workman. On top of all of this, the author made gratuitous use of highly taboo sexual slang in his prose, which lent the story a brutal honesty that many found difficult to accept.

      In fact, the novel was not made available to the British public until 1960, when Penguin Books took the matter to court to contest the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, serving to redefine British attitudes to sex and literature. In other countries, varying controversial and expurgated versions have been published to lessen the impact of the language. It wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that Britain was ready for this novel, and the jury at the obscenity trial took five days at court to decide that the book did not subvert morals or religion. On its first day of publication, Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold 200,000 copies.

      Culture, Etiquette – and the Place of Sex

      To Lawrence the novel was not merely a story designed to shock due to its sexual content. It was a comment on the idea that attaining sophistication and class required divorcing the mind from the prime directive. He wanted to demonstrate that having sex is to obey a fundamental drive in humans that cannot and should not be ignored, regardless of the pretensions high society may have. The message is that it is entirely acceptable to defer to one’s base instincts and still think of one’s self as cultivated and refined. Sex is nothing to be ashamed of, but something to be celebrated.

      The real trouble, however, lies in the fact that modern civilisation relies on the suppression of the animal in humanity. Not just sex drive, but other behaviours that, if freely expressed, would be problematic. Although etiquette varies in its detail, its purpose is to make society work, because rules of behaviour maintain a status quo in which people feel contentment through familiarity, as opposed to feeling uncomfortable and threatened by extremes. Sexual swear words exist for similar reasons, precisely because they refer to elements of human anatomy and behaviour that need to be taboo in order to create the illusion that humanity is elevated from its animal origins.

      This is undoubtedly why Lady Chatterley’s Lover made such a cultural impact. The bottom line was that many people already celebrated and enjoyed their sex lives – thanks very much – so their reaction to Lawrence was to wonder why on earth he wanted to vulgarise sex by dragging it into the light. To many, the novel was simply unnecessary pornography and the product of an adolescent mind that seemed to think he had discovered something new when the learned understood the point of keeping sex a covert and private matter.

      If we consider how the book would be changed with the removal of the sex, then we realise that the story itself is not that scandalous. Basically the plot is ‘bored housewife has fling with gardener’, which works as a device in the context that early 20th-century society and etiquette would have regarded this as outrageous and scandalous. However, with the current surge in erotica literature, and especially ‘Mummy porn’ and other such literature aimed at women, there remains a heightened interest in such work, even in the modern age. While such rigid forms of etiquette no longer exist in our everyday lives to the same extent, that has certainly not stopped today’s readers’ fascination with period taboos, sexual mores and a glimpse behind closed doors.