D.H. Lawrence’s <i>Lady Chatterley’s Lover</i> and the legal overreach in its ban: A study of the implications for law and literature

Abstract

On the one hand, the Age of Enlightenment in Europe triggered off scientific discoveries and technological innovations. Science and Technology became yardsticks for progress in the world. This led to industrialization and the subsequent commodification and annihilation of emotion, spiritual and even sexual life of humankind; on the other hand, in the far East, Iran for example, there is radicalization of religious life and preference of religious life over emotional and sensual life. In Europe, the intellectual life became privileged over the emotional and intuitive life, human relations degenerated so much so that even families grew apart from themselves. Writers as D.H. Lawrence felt the need to draw our attention to the havoc being wreaked on human relations; while Rushdie felt outraged by deification of a man he considered sexually perverse. D.H. Lawrence achieves his aim through the text, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was adjudged by the law as pornographic and was, therefore, banned; while Salman Rushdie also achieves his through his The Satanic Verses, which was rather adjudged blasphemous and was also banned with Fatwa placed on the head of the writer. The objective of this paper was to examine aspects of the narrative as lawyers or judges would examine cases to see how Lady Chatterley’s Lover yielded to obscenity to warrant it being banned as well as to understand why the prosecutors failed and why the work was later unbanned. It examined also The Satanic Verses to also see how it yielded to blasphemy and to understand why it was not banned in Western Countries. It is hoped that this study would help in further understanding the relationship between Law and literature. The methodology deployed was textual data analysis; and it was concluded that the determining of justice in law involves interpretation just as interpretation is needed in the pursuit of meaning in the text; and that legal briefs as well as judgments are in themselves narratives just as literature is. Finally is it was concluded that law will eternally be deconstructive in the pursuit truth or fact just as literature the pursuit of meaning in literature will depend on the eternal deconstructive process.