Lady Chatterley Research Articles

Literature and psychiatry

In Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence ([1928][1]) compared listening in on (overhearing) the private affairs of other people to the novel. He wrote ‘Here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and

The Cambridge companion to D.H. Lawrence

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Chronology List of abbreviations Introduction Anne Fernihough Part I. Texts: 1. Ideas, histories, generations and beliefs: the early novels to Sons and Lovers Rick Rylance 2. Narrating sexuality: The Rainbow Marianna Torgovnick 3. Sex and the nation: 'The Prussian Officer' and Women in Love Hugh Stevens 4. Decolonising imagination: Lawrence in the 1920s Mark Kinkead-Weekes 5. Work and selfhood in Lady Chatterley's Lover Morag Shiach 6. Lawrence's tales Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate 7. Lawrence's poetry Helen Sword 8. Lawrence as dramatist John Worthen Part II. Contexts and Critical Issues: 9. The biographical issue: lives of Lawrence Paul Eggert 10. Lawrence and modernism Michael Bell 11. Lawrence and the politics of sexual politics Drew Milne 12. Lawrence and psychoanalysis Fiona Becket 13. Apocalypse now (and then). Or, D. H. Lawrence and the swan in the electron Sandra M. Gilbert 14. Post-mortem: Lawrence's critical and cultural legacy Chris Baldick Guide to further reading Paul Poplawski Index.

Literature, morality and the adversarial principle: The ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ quarrel and the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover

Literature, morality and the adversarial principle: The ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ quarrel and the trial of <i>Lady Chatterley's Lover</i>

D.H. Lawrence: fifty years on film

Between 1949 and 1999, the life and works of Lawrence have inspired ten feature films: nine based on works of fiction and one based on biography. In D.H. Lawrence: Fifty Years on Film, Louis K. Grieff examines these films as adaptations, as cultural or historical documents, and as independent works of art. Significantly, the films were not spread evenly throughout decades but appeared in three clusters. The first group, or the black and white, appeared between 1949 and 1960. With the exception of Marc Allegret's L'Amant de Lady Chatterley (1955), all celebrate the British common man as a mid-century hero and promote an unmistakable yet never strident postwar ethos that is Marxism in spirit. The second cluster occurred during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These films show Lawrence's values as similar to the cultural values of the time - non-conformity, neobohemianism, sexual rebellion, war protest, and the celebration of youth. The third group answers the question - why, in an un-Lawrentian decade like the 1980s, was there a revival of Lawrence's works on film? Grieff also deals with the contributions made by directors Ken Russell and Christopher Miles, both of whom directed Lawrence films of the latter two clusters. He shows how Russell and, to a lesser extent, Miles were responsible for bringing mass audiences in touch with the works of Lawrence. Grieff's final and most important goal is to interpret and evaluate the Lawrence films. He looks first at the film as a visual representation of its text, then as an original act of creation and object of art.

Review: The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels * D. H. Lawrence: The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels

Review: The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels * D. H. Lawrence: The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels

D.H. Lawrence and the Bible

Abbreviations Acknowledgements 1. 'The Work of Creation': Lawrence and the Bible 2. Biblical intertextuality: Bakhtin, Bloom and Derrida 3. Higher criticism: Lawrence's break with Christianity 4. Poetic fathers: Nietzsche and the Romantic tradition 5. Pre-war poetry and fiction: Adam and Eve come through 6. Re-making Genesis: The Rainbow as counter-Bible 7. Double-reading the Bible: Esoteric Studies and Reflections 8. Genesis versus John: Women in Love, The Lost Girl and Mr Noon 9. Books of Exodus: Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush 10. Prose sketches, 'Evangelistic Beasts' and Stories with biblical 'Overtones' 11. Prophetic voices and 'red' mythology: The Plumed Serpent and David 12. The Risen Lord: The Escaped Cock, Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Paintings 13. Apocalypse: the conflict of love and power 14. Last Poems: final thoughts List of references Indices.

Censoring Lady Chatterley’s Lover: a case study and bibliographic guide

D.H. Lawrence thought Lady Chatterley’s Lover was his best and most important novel. Yet he had to pay to have it privately printed. His publishers thought his sexual descriptions and language were obscene under the censorship laws of the UK and the USA, and they were right. From 1928 until 1959 no‐one could legally publish or sell the unexpurgated novel, and copies were subject to confiscation. All this changed in 1959 when Charles Rembar successfully defended Grove Press’s right to publish the novel. His defense, which rested on a unique interpretation of Justice Brennan’s opinion in Roth v. United States, introduced the redeeming‐social‐value test for obscenity. Within six years it revolutionized American obscenity laws, ensuring that sexual material with even a small measure of social value would enjoy First Amendment protection.

Rito de iniciación a la corporeidad en "El amante de Lady Chatterley"

In this paper we will study the use by D.H. Lawrence of the mythical structure of the initiation rite and of the hero’s adventure in Lady Chatterley’s Lover in close relation to the author’s ideology as well as to the moralizing function of the novel. After describing D.H.Lawrence’s ideology with respect to the relation between intellect and body, which he explains in "A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover" and "Pornography and Obscenity", it will follow the study of the novel’s structure to see how it parallels the structure of the hero’s mythical adventure and of the initiation rite in its three stages, according to the schema proposed by Campbell (1973), Villegas (1978) and Eliade (1984;1989): non-initiated life, initiation stage, and post-initiated life. Finally, we will consider the adequacy of this structure to the moralizing function of this controversial novel.

LAWRENCE AND BATAILLE: RECOVERING THE SACRED, RE-MEMBERING JESUS

Lawrence and Bataille share a number of characteristics, including a passion for Nietzsche, for religious anthropology and for the occult. They abhor both conventional orthodoxy and modernity, seeing the sacred as the trans gression of bourgeois values. They remain, like their mentor, fascinated with the figure of Jesus, whom their fiction re-invests with transgressive, sexual characteristics. Bataille concentrates on the crucified Christ, Lawrence on the Risen Lord, most memorably in The Escaped Cock and Lady Chatterley's Lover, both of which present a fully human Jesus, endowed with a sexuality of which his more conventional followers were afraid. This aspect of Lawrence's late work, it is claimed, benefits from the theoretical framework Bataille can provide. I LAWRENCE AND BATAILLE D.H. Lawrence and Georges Bataille may seem unlikely bedfellows. Bataille, recently rediscovered as a significant source for many fashionable post-modern theorists (in particular Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault and Lacan), may at first sight seem to have little in common with Lawrence, who is currently out of fashion in literary circles in spite of the attempts of what Tony Tanner called a 'diminishing band of ageing Leavisites' to keep the flame alive through the New Cambridge Edition of his works, and the massive three-volume bio graphy.1 And yet, as I hope to demonstrate, they shared not just an intellectual and historical context and a number of temperamental characteristics, but a similar aim—to recover a sense of the sacred, lost by modernity, and of the body, suppressed by centuries of Christian asceticism. They both reacted against orthodox Christianity from which they saw themselves as being 'liberated' by Nietzsche, maintaining like their German precursor an ambival ent relationship (of love and hatred, discipleship and rivalry) with the figure of Jesus. Christ, as will become apparent, continued to provide a focus for their attempted rediscovery of the sacred, a rediscovery to be achieved through transgression of bourgeois values, in particular a servile morality based upon fear of the body, to which they believed Christian orthodoxy had succumbed. © Oxford University Press 1999 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 04:57:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism

Burghers, Burglars, and Masturbators: The Sovereign Spender in the Age of Consumerism David Bennett (bio) “Erotic conduct,” Georges Bataille tells us in his study of Sade, “is the opposite of normal conduct as spending is the opposite of getting.” Glossing the rigorous antirationalism of the libertine doctrine, Bataille goes on: If we follow the dictates of reason we try to acquire all kinds of goods, we work in order to increase the sum of our possessions . . . use all means to get richer and to possess more. Our status in the social order is based on this sort of behaviour. But when the fever of sex seizes us we behave in the opposite way. We recklessly draw on our strength and sometimes in the violence of passion we squander considerable resources to no real purpose. . . . [W]e always want to be sure of the uselessness or ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world where thrift is the rule as we can. 1 By contrast with the so-called “producer ethic,” which preaches the ascetic virtues of frugality, sobriety, and the self-repressing postponement of pleasure in the interests of productive labor, the so-called “consumer ethic” stimulates the economy by promulgating the values of spending not saving, self-gratification not self-denial, the pleasures of consumption rather than the dignity of labor. The emergence of consumerist culture in the “West” has been variously dated from the “decadent” 1890s, the “modernist” 1920s, and the “countercultural” 1960s—the decade when Heffner’s Playboy and Penguin’s Lady Chatterley helped to turn countercultural recreational sex into what has been called the “dominant pornographic culture” of contemporary transatlantic consumerism. 2 By identifying the “decisive discovery” of “what spending can really mean” with a Sade pictured as being struck by this “violent truth” in the loneliness of the Bastille as he watched the guillotine at work from his cell window, Bataille dates the emergence of the consumer ethic—and of the spender as “sovereign”—from the very moment of the Bourgeois Revolution itself (SSM 169, 171). It is with the figure of the “sovereign” spender that this paper will be concerned: a figure ambiguously positioned on the dividing-line between [End Page 269] law and the underworld, between “white” and “black” economies, in the writings of early twentieth-century sexual psychologists like Freud and D. H. Lawrence, whose inconclusive efforts to separate a discourse of desire from the discourse of economics reveal (I shall argue) the profound complicity of the consumer and producer ethics in the early twentieth-century moment of that other “long revolution,” the sexual revolution, which is coterminous with modernity itself. Like Lawrence, Freud prided himself on plainspeaking. In 1913 he warned his colleagues that there were two subjects that “civilized people” will always treat “with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy,” and about which psychoanalysts must insist on speaking with “the same matter-of-fact frankness”: “money matters” and “sexual matters.” 3 An ironic warning, you may think, since it was psychoanalysis that taught the twentieth century the impossibility of speaking plainly about money: taught it that speech about money is invariably metaphoric, to be decoded into speech about sex—taught it, in other words, a cardinal principle of the consumer ethic: the imperative of eroticizing money, never economizing on sex. Freud’s case histories continually “dematerialize” economic relationships—the relationships of unequal property and power enacted in the taking, giving, lending, or withholding of money—decoding them into symbolic expressions of erotic desire and denial, secondary transcriptions of a truth anterior to money, the originary truth of sex. This, at least, is the familiar Freud, the one whose “overvaluation of sexuality,” as Jung put it, “has brought upon him the justified reproach of pan-sexualism.” 4 But now consider how the opposite process can occur in Freud’s writing. Addressing fellow clinicians in his 1913 paper “On Beginning the Treatment,” Freud explained why the bourgeois patrons of his new therapeutic technique were making a sound investment in spending their income on the unorthodox practice of purchasing a daily hour of the doctor’s time. Laying down what he called the “rules of the game” for...

Unsuitable for Women and Children?: Greek Tragedies in Modern British Theaters

Unsuitable for Women and Children? Greek Tragedies in Modern British Theaters Ruth Hazel In the 1960 trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London under the Obscene Publications Act, Mr. Griffith-Jones, for the Prosecution, asked the jury: “Would you wish your wife or servants to read this book?” The implication was that Lawrence’s novel breached class as well as sexual codes in revealing to anyone who could read the faults and misdemeanors of ‘their betters’ through describing the impotence of ‘the ruler’ shamed by the avid sexuality of his wife and the joyous virility of his servant. But even in asking this, Mr. Griffith-Jones had unwittingly set himself up as an object of derision , since to pose such a question in 1960 (even in Britain) was to reveal a lamentable lack of awareness of the realities of contemporary life, in which very few of those interested in the case, and almost certainly none of the jury, had servants anyway, and those of his male auditors who were married were unlikely to be able to exert over their wives the kind of Victorian domestic censorship he was suggesting. On the face of it, there might seem to be a closer connection between the subject matter of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and ancient Greek mime than between that novel and the subject of my paper, Athe- 260 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) nian tragedy: an impotent husband; a sexually overactive wife; a randy servant; the inversion of social norms. For the dinosaurish dikastes of the Prosecution the problem with Lawrence’s novel was that it was not a comedy—and so defused and controlled by the conventions and expectations implied by that genre—but a serious work of subversive intent which threatened the Establishment, affronted bourgeois taste, and, in its use of taboo words and explicit descriptions of sex, seemed to bring literature itself into disrepute. The relevance of this brief excursion into the history of the twentieth-century novel might not be immediately apparent, but Mr. Griffith-Jones’ reaction, it seems to me, is not unlike what may well have happened when Euripides’ “proto-feminist” plays were first seen by old men brought up on Aeschylus: that this was not material they would want their servants, slaves, sons—and certainly not their wives—to see. Quite apart from the ongoing question of whether women and slaves would have been present in the audience anyway, it is possible to guess that there were some plays that Athenian citizens might have considered ‘unsuitable for women and children’ (particularly when ‘child’ or ‘boy’ might be used to mean servant or slave).1 Times change. In Britain, the novels of D.H. Lawrence have for some time been texts for ‘A’ Level study (that is, for High School students of sixteen to eighteen years of age). More recently, Theatrein -Education companies have used adaptations of Greek drama texts as well as the narrative of Greek myth for work with primary school Line citations refer to the following editions: Antigone, A. Brown, ed. and trans. (Warminster 1987); Medea, D. Kovacs, ed. and trans. (Cambridge, Mass. 1994). 1 For the texts which are most commonly cited as evidence for a female presence in the audience see E. Csapo and W.J. Slater’s invaluable The Context of Ancient Drama (Ann Arbor 1994) 286–305. For a résumé of the debate about the consistency of the audience, see S. Goldhill, “The Audience of Athenian Tragedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling ed. (Cambridge 1996) 61–5, and on the likelihood that women were present in the audiences, see J. J. Henderson, “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals,” TAPA 121 (1991) 133–47. In the absence of conclusive evidence that women and children were excluded from the audience at dramatic festivals, it may be presumed that if they did attend it was subject to the permission of their kyrios. Hazel: Unsuitable for Women and Children? 261 children. In 1994, for example, Dukes Theatre-in-Education group used Agamemnon and Iphigeneia at Aulis as the basis for their workshop drama for ten-year-olds, The Iron...

The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and Three Other War Novels of 1929

When Richard Aldington published his first novel, ironically titled Death of a Hero, in September 1929, he had his English publisher Chatto & Windus include a note on how his manuscript had differed from the printed text. In it he said: To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. I had not the slightest intention of appealing to any one's salacious instincts.... But I am bound to accept the opinion of those who are better acquainted with popular feelings than I am. At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made.... In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe. (vii) Thus self-righteously, Aldington took his stand against censorship and made his points with asterisks. He was having similar but less severe censorship problems with his American publisher, Covici-Friede. Aldington was not alone in grappling with the suppression of language in 1929, a year that exceeded all other postwar years for published war fiction. [1] On both sides of the Atlantic, three other authors of the most successful and memorable war novels of 1929 had their texts expurgated: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Frederick Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (better known by the title of the expurgated edition, Her Privates We). The altered texts were just the latest in a growing number of serious works of fiction that tested and protested the limits of acceptable language in the Anglo-American literary communities patrolled by repressive vice societies citing outdated obscenity laws. The noisy clash between iconoclastic early modernist writers and moralistically protectionist censors had been going on noticeably since 1915, when in England, 1,000 copies of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow were seized and destroyed under the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act (1875), known as Lord Campbell's Act, and the same year in America, when Theodore Dreiser's The Genius ran afoul of the postal obscenity law (1873), known as the Gomstock Law, and was banned in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati. [2] Richard Aldington, an admirer and defender of Lawrence, whom he had known since 1914, could hardly have been astonished in 1929 at the need to repress his own frank language in Death of a Hero. His note, for all its tone of amazed regret, was an ingenuous fabrication. He knew well what had been going on in the war of words. All the banning, burning, seizing, and censoring in the 1920s, under authority of the obscenity laws, forced authors who wanted to be published either to alter their texts under the guidance of sometimes sympathetic but justifiably nervous publishers or to publish unexpurgated texts outside their country, usually in Paris, where expatriate presses after World War I busily flouted conventions. It proved a financially rewarding but bitter choice for authors to bowdlerize their texts for the potential royalties and readership that only established publishing houses could provide. Some writers, including Lawrence and Aldington, published altered texts at home for profit and unexpurgated versions abroad for pride. After Lawrence's The Rainbow in England and Dreiser's The Genius in America, both banned in the second year of the war, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) epitomized the postwar assault on the puritanical and repressive values of the censor-morons, as Lawrence called them. [3] Neither novel could be published as written, and although both authors had their original manuscripts published abroad-- Joyce in Dijon, France, through Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop, and Lawrence in Florence, Italy, through Pino Orioli's bookshop--shipments of their unexpurgated texts were intercepted, banned, and destroyed in England and America. …

A linguistic approach to the erotism of Lady Chatterly's lover

The present paper pursues two main goals. First, we attempt to carry out a linguistic analysis of "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" in search for some evidence in favour of the line of literary criticism which regards the novel as an erotic rather than as a pornographic work. Second, we take the language of the novel as the starting point for the description of the defining characteristics of the language of erotism. In so doing, we shall pay attention to its syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive characteristics.

Happy Days: Beckett's Rescript of Lady Chatterley's Lover

The importance of Beckett's use of literary references in Happy Days is well established. The juxtaposition of truncated yet recognizable fragments of literature provides a frame of reference for the erudite reader or spectator to appreciate fully — at least subconsciously — the irony of the characters' speech and situation. In his manuscript study of the play, Stanley Gontarski lists fourteen allusions identified by Beckett and the stages at which they were deliberately added. However, Beckett did not acknowledge a significant literary source that resonates throughout Happy Days: D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Subtle echoes of Lawrence's novel provide a hitherto unexplored perspective from which to interpret Happy Days. Unlike the texts to which Winnie directly refers, this one does not deal with confronting death or with despair at the brevity of life. Instead, the Lawrentian subtext establishes Winnie's precarious sexuality and her womanly needs, which Beckett then undercuts, the better to establish the bitter irony of her situation.

Many gods and many voices: the role of the prophet in English and American modernism

In Many Gods and Many Voices distinguished scholar Louis L. Martz addresses works by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and D.H. Lawrence, with brief treatment of the relation of Pound's Cantos to Joyce's Ulysses. Martz argues that a prophetic tradition is represented in the Cantos, The Waste Land, Paterson, and H.D.'s Trilogy and Helen in Egypt, along with Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent and the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Martz's premise is that biblical prophecy, with its mingling of poetry and prose, its abrupt shifts from violent denunciation to exalted poetry, provides a precedent for the texture of these modernist works that will help readers to appreciate the mingling of voices and the complex mixture of elements. Examining their interrelationships and their common themes, Many Gods and Many Voices offers fresh insights into these modern writers.

Vessels of Meaning: Women's Bodies, Gender Norms, and Class Bias from Richardson to Lawrence

Tracing the progression of images of women's bodies through nearly two centuries of literature, Fasick analyzes selected novels from Samuel Richardson to D. H. Lawrence to construct a historical overview of class and gender relations as reflected and refracted in the pages of the English novel. Though recent discussion and women's roles in literature and culture has centered on women's sexuality as the defining factor in the female character, Fasick focuses instead on ways that writers have depicted women as possessing nurturing qualities that distinguish them from men. Rigid adherence to this idealization of femininity constructs a standard difficult for women to achieve. Held to the ideal, Fasick asserts, women appear grossly culpable rather than simply human. Fasick begins with an analysis of Samuel Richardson's novels that examines three linked themes: sensibility, maternity, and anorexia. She continues with a discussion of Frances Burney's treatment of the expressive female body. She then analyzes novels by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Bronte in light of Victorian attitudes toward women and food and toward female invalidism. In conclusion, she returns to Richardson, pairing his novel Pamela with Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover for an examination of cross-class romance and the resulting implications for class and gender. Throughout, references to conduct books and periodical literature of the time provide contexts that illuminate the primary texts. Fasick's insights will interest students of the novel, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, women's studies and gender studies, and class relations in literature.

"Us is near bein' wild things ourselves": Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden

"Us is near bein' wild things ourselves":Procreation and Sexuality in The Secret Garden Ulf Boëthius (bio) Us is near bein' wild things ourselves.Us is nest-building too, bless thee. Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911) is full of mysterious allusions and half-uttered messages. The reader imagines a voice whispering something beyond and between what is written. Lately an interesting discussion has been going on about the gender relations in Burnett's novel, a discussion tied to the enigmatic ending, where Mary is suddenly put aside as the principal character and replaced by her cousin, Colin, the heir to Misselthwaite Manor. Referring to this ending, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser has claimed that Burnett "seems to be affirming male supremacy" and making "a defense of patriarchal authority" (12). Phyllis Bixler, on the other hand, maintains that the novel should instead be read as "a nearly utopian vision of female nurturant power" ("Gardens" 210). She sees the garden as the main character and conceives of it as "an image of powerful motherhood." According to Bixler, the children in Burnett's novel are surrounded by "a community of mothers" connected with the garden: the housemaid, Martha; her mother, Mrs, Sowerby; and, last but not least, the deceased Mrs. Craven, whose spirit remains in the garden ("Gardens" 212), Motherhood and nurturant power can also be found in some of the male characters, above all in Martha's brother Dickon, but also in the gardener Ben Weatherstaff. Another of these nurturant males is the robin, nesting and feeding his brood. In Bixler's interpretation these nurturant powers also conquer and transform Misselthwaite Manor, a symbol of male power and female dependence. She reads the scene in which the door to the garden is flung wide open and Colin leaps into his father's arms as a metaphoric delivery in which the garden represents the maternal body. What the book is really about, according to Bixler, is "the usually repressed desire to explore the secret mysteries of the mother's body as well as her soul" ("Gardens" 223).1 Bixler's reading is in many ways convincing, but I think she misses an important point in this article. The Secret Garden is a tribute not just to motherhood and nurturance but also to procreation itself. The novel is not only about bearing and bringing up children but also about generating them. It is by penetrating the forbidden garden (significantly, with the help of a male robin) that the children come to life. Although it is masked, sexuality is nevertheless strongly present in The Secret Garden as a kind of imprint of the forbidden and repressed. With remarkable frequency the text talks about the procreation of flowers and birds, while at the same time emphasizing the similarities of human beings, plants, and animals. Burnett's novel is full of gaps, omissions, and incomplete events, but that which is not to be mentioned by women or to an audience of children is indirectiy conjured up over and over again. Some scholars—among them Bixler herself—have touched upon this point. In her latest work on The Secret Garden, Bixler comments on "the latent sexuality of Mary's discovery of the garden with Dickon" (57). She also sees sexual symbolism in the description of the garden (57), and, like Kathleen Verduin and Judith Plotz, stresses The Secret Garden's similarities to D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.2 Claudia Nelson mentions that The Secret Garden recognizes female sexuality and looks at physical matters in a positive way (Boys 27-28). But nobody has paid adequate attention to procreation as a main theme in Burnett's text, even though The Secret Garden is very much a novel not only of motherhood but also of fecundity. The work's fascination with this issue is apparent in its imagery, which also reveals Burnett's use of a hitherto unnoticed source. Burnett often borrowed from other authors; one obvious example is her rewriting of a tale from Frances Browne's Granny's Wonderful Chair (1856) for St. Nicholas Magazine(Bixler, Burnett 51). In the case of The Secret Garden, we already know that the novel is full...

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (review)

Reviewed by: Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship David Novitz Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, by J. M. Coetzee; xi & 289 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, $24.95. J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country was a brilliant novel. It was distinguished by a passion for the dry earthiness, the upfrontness, in-your-faceness of human existence, and by a simultaneous, yet paradoxical infatuation with signs, texts, and the endless deferral of brute fact. This same tension runs throughout Coetzee’s volume of essays on censorship, but here it is frustrating rather than enticing, annoying rather than suggestive. For Coetzee turns out, in these essays, to be a theoretical fence-sitter of a kind that makes all intellectual effort redundant. He does have arguments but he seems whimsically to undermine them—so that in the end he lands up high and dry, deftly buggered by the fence post that he should have scaled. Now my bet is that Coetzee, and one or two readers besides, will be offended by my last remark, and that the editors of this journal will have a ripe old time deciding whether or not to strike it. According to Coetzee, we take offense when our dignity is compromised (pp. 14–15) and when we feel powerless to avert this, or else when there is “the experience or premonition of being robbed of power” (p. 3). In this he is just wrong. Certainly, if Coetzee turns out to be offended by my remark, this may well be because it compromises his dignity and his scholarly standing, and with it his reputation and power. But what of others who may be offended by my crudity and nastiness? Those who think the remark gratuitously unkind and entirely unwarranted will also think it offensive, but not because it, or remarks of this type, undermine their power or compromise their dignity—nor yet on account of any such premonition. They could be offended even though they have no intention of ever writing a book, so that there is no threat and certainly no premonition of similar treatment at the hands of an unscrupulous reviewer. Their offense, so it seems to me, will take root in the belief that my remark is gratuitously hostile and without foundation. If so, they will take offense in just the way I do at racist comments—without being threatened by the remarks and without my dignity or power being compromised. The offense that I take has everything to do with the fact that the expressed sentiments are without any rational basis and are damaging to the reputation of people who deserve better. Coetzee considers this (or a closely similar) account of offense in the opening pages of his book and simultaneously accepts and rejects it. “I myself am (and am also, I would hope, to a degree not) an intellectual of this kind,” he tells us. And he goes on to say that although capable of being offended, he “does not particularly respect his own being-offended” (p. 5). But why not, if, as he suggests, there may be excellent grounds for his outrage and offense? Ordinary self-respect requires that, in a case where there are good reasons for it, one should take the fact of one’s being offended seriously. One sad aspect of the otherwise sage response to the current rage for victimhood is that there is [End Page 482] a tendency to lose touch with the fact that there can be good grounds for moral outrage, and that when there are, one’s outrage and offense make perfectly justifiable moral claims on those who offend you. Despite these caveats, the book does have many virtues. For one thing, the essays range widely and confidently over a broad range of topics that are not just of considerable interest but which refiect the scope of the problem of censorship. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Catharine MacKinnon on pornography, Erasmus and Foucault on madness and reason, Osip Mandelstam’s famous capitulation to Stalin, Geoffery Cronjé’s blueprint for apartheid, censorship in South Africa, André Brink’s ideas about the relation of the writer to the state, are just some of the...

Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Theater of Censorship M. Keith Booker Adam Parkes. Modernism and the Theater of Censorship. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. xii + 242 pp. Modernism and the Theater of Censorship is a study of the encounters of several modernist novels (all written between 1914 and 1928) with official censorship. Beginning with a discussion of the tribulations of Oscar Wilde as background, the book includes individual chapters on D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (with a collateral discussion of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which did not experience official censorship). These chapters include a number of readings of the texts involved, but they are primarily designed to trace the history of official censorship of these texts and to explore the implications of that history. The book includes a substantial amount of historical information about the charges that were leveled against specific texts as well [End Page 505] as documentation concerning actual legal proceedings. Meanwhile, it attempts to place the censorship of modernist texts within a broader historical context. In so doing, Parkes clearly wants to make a case for modernism as a subversive movement that was perceived as a threat to the status quo by government authorities in both the United States and Great Britain. In particular, Parkes argues that the texts he discusses were perceived as troubling because of the variety of fundamental challenges they posed to prevailing notions concerning gender roles and sexual behavior. This focus on gender and sexuality, while allowing Parkes to support his arguments with substantial detail, is also a serious limitation. For example, while Parkes characterizes the period 1914–1928 as one of radical transformation in both British and American society, and while he makes occasional nods to World War I as a marker of this transformation, he shows no awareness whatsoever of the important role of economic and class issues in this transformation. There is no discussion of the astonishingly rapid rise of consumer capitalism in this period, no acknowledgment of the concomitant rise in discourses such as advertising, public relations, and popular culture, no exploration of the crucial importance of the threat of communism (except for one passing reference to characterizations of modernism as “literary Bolshevism”) to the mood of anxiety that was so prevalent in capitalist societies in this period. As a result, while Parkes clearly wants to historicize his findings, he leaves a number of crucial questions unanswered in this regard. For example, what was the relationship between anxieties over gender and sexuality and anxieties over the growing threat of working-class political power during this period? In addition, were explorations of new gender roles really subversive, or did they merely act to divert attention (and energy) away from the more genuinely subversive challenge of collective politics? While Modernism and the Theater of Censorship provides important reminders of the once-embattled cultural position of modernist texts, its failure to engage issues such as class or colonialism seriously limits its usefulness as a contribution to cultural history. For example, Parkes usefully places the censorship campaigns he discusses within the context of early twentieth-century fears of degeneration, but does not seem aware of the central role played by stereotyping of both colonial [End Page 506] subjects and working-class subjects in the development of the discourse of degeneration. Similarly, Parkes frequently notes the traditional British tendency to associate transgressive sexuality (and pornographic representation of that sexuality) with France, but does not explore the important ways in which such associations are linked to the British anti-Jacobin frenzies of the early nineteenth century and ultimately to a general horror of mass political action. Meanwhile, in the case of Irish writers such as Joyce and Oscar Wilde, Parkes does not note the way in which these French connections are associated with a long Irish nationalist tradition of looking to France for support in their campaigns against the British. Indeed, Parkes shows no awareness whatsoever that Joyce is a colonial writer, and his failure to acknowledge trends toward such an awareness in recent Joyce scholarship is a major shortcoming that substantially limits his ability to...

Modernism and the theater of censorship

Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of the censorship encountered by several modern novelists in the early twentieth century. He situates modernism in the context of this censorship, examining the relations between such authors as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public controversies generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. These authors located obscenity at the level of stylistic and formal experiment. The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, and Orlando dramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises on which their censors operated. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.