My Review and Book Cover- Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Monday, March 3, 2014

Banned Books: Lady Chatterly's Lover - Midtownblogger

Above: Modern Library cover for the once banned book, "Lady Chatterly's Lover,"( which I "re-interpreted" as an assignment  for a Design Class at Brooklyn's City Tech. The design was done using a computer graphics software program, Illustrator, which I think is at least as hard to learn to use well as Photoshop--and I found, coming from a computer-ignorant background, that learning Photoshop was a killer)

The overall assignment theme WAS "banned books" and we had to choose one of the zillions of books that people have banned for all sorts of reasons...I guess I chose the D.H. Lawrence book because it was the first book I read when young that had been notoriously banned.  

Anyway, here is my report :

Midterm Book Summary of Lady Chatterly's Lover
AD 360 Sec 7147- Prof. Spevack

Banned Books: Lady Chatterly's Lover 

The British novelist D.H. Lawrence was already well established as an author when he began this book in the mid 1920's (he died in 1930 of tuberculosis, a common disease and cause of death in those days). It is his last novel.

The plot of the book is pretty simple. To quote from the Modern Library's preface by Mark Schorer: " ...The story...is among is the simplest that Lawrence devised. Constance Chatterly, the sexually frustrated wife of an aristocratic British mine owner who has been wounded in the War ( World War I) and left crippled and paralyzed from the waist down,  is drawn to his gamekeeper, the misanthropic son of a miner, becomes pregnant by him , and hopes, by the end of the book, to be able to divorce her husband and leave her class for life with the other man."

Romances which cross class and cultural lines were already a centuries old theme in European literature, and unlike Lady Chatterly's story, most of them end very badly, often fatally for the lovers involved (The French term for this kind of affair is "mesalliance" and in fact is also a theme that had become established in Germany and other places).

There are other aspects to the book than the romance, of course, (with the graphic, explicit sex scenes that got the book banned), and Lawrence is very serious about them. One is how the Northern English countryside had become despoiled by the Industrial Revolution, and the other is the gradual transformation of Lady Chatterly. She changes from being an uptight, snobbish upper class "Lady" with all that implies into someone who is obsessed with with personal self fulfillment, even if it means leaving her marriage and privileged life behind her. For the gamekeeper, Mellors, the affair is exciting but also scary because it means "becoming alive again" ( he had an interesting career as an Army officer and has sort of hidden himself away on Sir Clifford Chatterly's estate-- also, with a bitterly failed marriage behind him.)

Lawrence began the book sometime about 1925 and went through several revisions before he published it in its present form in Italy in 1928. Long banned in the United States as obscene, Grove Press re-printed it in New York in 1958 -- and won an historic lawsuit with the Post Office in 1959 , opening the door to a lot of other fiction that the law had previously suppressed.  The re-publication was greeted with wide critical acclaim ( with the common reservation that it was badly dated and and often "wooden.").

Because its sex scenes are so explicit, ( though they are an integral part of the story of a couple's blossoming sexual love and hardly pornographic in the modern sense) there are still a lot of people around today , especially on the Religious Right, who would probably definitely want to keep this book out of public libraries.

I found the book very moving and saw its only major flaw is that Lawrence romanticizes and idealizes a past Pastoral England so much. However, he is completely accurate in his portrayal of how the English countryside was often almost totally ruined by industrialization. ( In fact, the Chatterly estate has on it all these colleries which have lights on at night and fires etc. visible from outside the main house. Nothing very aristocratic it would seem to me to that).