In defence of decency...
Jonnie Comet
28 April 1994
It provides great pleasure to see that, in response to the harsh
criticisms he received upon the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence provided
a rebuttal, usually included in its scholarly editions. In his essay ‘A Propos’, he addresses several
crucial issues about what constitutes morality and immortality in literature
and in society. Through it all, as with
the novel, he maintains an unwavering philosophy that there is nothing
inherently wrong with simply being honest, provided one is honest about it.
Lawrence
states: ‘I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely,
honestly, and cleanly’. This is hardly an indecent notion. Lady Chatterley’s Lover can be seen as a
rebellion to the Victorian prudishness under which England lingered after the close of
The Great War. The world had opened up;
even Connie acknowledges that while the wireless worked, there could be no
escape from the outside world. But England, in all
her self-preserving pride, endeavoured to resist change. Like the collier gentry of the Midlands, English culture clung to what it had always
known, no matter how dated. Lawrence’s fervent hope
was that minds would open up before they were forced to.
This book is intended as a sort of fanciful love story, true, but
it is also intended to show just how the ‘sensitive’ issues of premarital sex,
marriage, impotence, adultery, nudity, and pregnancy could be discussed, when a
course of events calls for such discussion.
One will note that in Kate Chopin’s eye-opening The Awakening (1899), in
spite of the birthing scene, none of the words ‘pregnancy’, ‘labour pains’,
‘childbirth’, nor even ‘baby’ are ever used.
This type of timidity was positively repulsive to Lawrence, who saw the
world and its inadequacies with open eyes and a poised pen.
He writes of ‘having a proper reverence for sex’, a need for a balance between the mental and
physical impulses of human nature. He
condemns the extremes of both ends and seeks the healthier middle ground. This is only sensible. The genteel tradition of Victorian England
seemed to take an almost perverse pride in its regard for mental and physical
chastity. By the standards of the
‘Roaring Twenties’ its adherents were timid, backward, and ignorant, so out of
touch with what they felt that they almost ceased to be human at all. Lawrence
cites an infamous case of ‘Colonel Barker’, a woman who masqueraded as a man so
convincingly that she married and lived in ‘conjugal happiness’ with another
woman for years without the mate ever being the wiser. ‘The situation is monstrous’, Lawrence lambastes. The poor wife was simply a ‘moron’ on matters
of sex; she had never thought to ask anything about
what she had not experienced, in spite of whatever enquiries her physiology
might have wanted to make. The author
also considers Swift’s poem ‘Dressing Room’, in which Swift’s narrator is horrified
to find that his lover (the context of the word, with regard to Swift, is ripe
subject for debate) performs sanitary bodily functions similar to his own. Lawrence
writes, with sarcasm richly evident, ‘Who doesn’t? And how much worse if she didn’t?’ His use of the somewhat anal-retentive Swift as an example is appropriate,
for Swift’s own depiction of his various incarnations of Utopia are all
conspicuously asexual; he, like the wife of ‘Colonel Barker’, may well have
been so victimised by inhibition that he was deplorably unable to think
sexually at all.
On the other hand is the one whom Lawrence calls the ‘smart jazzy person’, who treats sex as a cocktail, to be imbibed of
often and with gusto. One is reminded
instantly of Eliot’s depiction of the young typist’s evening of meaningless sex
with a pimply clerk in ‘The Waste Land’, so drearily presented, conveying all of the
emotional desolation Lawrence
despised. Such people have little
respect for anything, and accept little responsibility for their actions. I wonder if Lawrence would have appreciated very much the
relative audacity of the ‘free love’ movement of the 1970s. However he puts a fine point on refusing to
suggest that every woman run off with a gamekeeper. His wish is not that the members of society
act impulsively, but that they simply be better aware of their impulses. This completeness of knowledge, after all, is
what Lady Chatterley’s Lover is all about.
Its author is also keenly aware that some high-brow readers will
find the book excessively naïve. By
1990s standards it does seem that his use of certain terms for body parts and
actions (even if they are medically correct) read like a very bad pornographic
novel. In the face of those who would
condemn the book as immature, perhaps representing ‘the mentality of a boy of
fourteen’, Lawrence
is undaunted. His intelligent reply is
that perhaps the fourteen-year-old has a much more wholesome respect for the
whole institution of sexual relations than does an apparent adult who displays
so little respect for anything at all.
I was amused by this, and encouraged. Indeed it seems that with relating the
experiences of Connie Chatterley, Lawrence
is trying to reach young people above all, as they represent the best chance of
improving public awareness about sex for posterity. He makes a point that the whole prospect of
adolescence, for example, is a turmoil of emotional and sensual urges and
social and familiar responsibilities. It
is a contradiction of insatiable curiosity and natural urges set against social
expectations and healthy prudence. What
might Stevenson and Gauguin have noted? --that in Polynesia, sexual awareness is
cultivated and encouraged by the entire society. Western civilisation has always imagined the
Polynesian lifestyle as being one of sensuality and promiscuity, but the
reality of it is that these people just have a very practical view of their
physiology. No Polynesian child over
four is unaware of sex; no adolescent is dissuaded from exploring it; and in
fact parents are more likely worried if their 15-year-old daughter has not been
sought for sexual favours– to the point where the whole village will endeavour
to set her up with a young man to get her in gear. This may sound horrendous to a 20th-C Western
viewpoint, that is, a viewpoint steeped in the genteel tradition, but to the
Polynesians it is merely a perfectly natural part of life. I am sure Lawrence was well aware that all animals
besides man are mated as soon as possible after puberty.
In my own novel I included the character of a well-educated
upper-middle-class 16-year-old girl who is depicted lolling about in lacy
underwear and sipping brandy out of her father’s liquor locker of her own
volition. Christine intimidates her
so-called peers by so freely discussing what the narration calls, deliberately
prudently, ‘adult issues’. She’s a
virgin, but she’s not a naïve one, the kind of girl who has been purposefully
taught well in advance of puberty just what the whole scheme of human
physiology is about. Is this so
bad? I am sure Lawrence would rather
have had a readership full of wide-eyed adolescents than to merely have his
book not deemed too racy by their elders, for if the alternative were to allow
a significant proportion of the population to end up like the naïve wife of
‘Colonel Barker’, he says outright: ‘Better to give all girls this book, at the
age of seventeen’.
Does all this constitute a ‘dirty’ mind? I don’t think so. In no way would one be able to say that Lawrence had a ‘dirty
mind’, or that he was ‘obsessed’ with sex.
He merely practises what he preaches: that it is an eligible topic for
adult discussion. In fact he condemns
the ignorance and immaturity of profane culture too. His overall intention is to keep the mind ‘sufficiently
developed in physical and sexual consciousness’. Whatever labour of love this book may have
been, in its advent, it appealed in the spirit intended to a very narrow
audience. Between the three factions
closing in, the ‘stale grey Puritan who is likely to fall into sexual indecency
in advanced age, the smart jazzy person of the young world. . . and the low uncultured person with a dirty
mind’, there is scarcely any room for a book of this
nature to be accepted on its own terms.
‘Life’, its author maintains, ‘is only bearable when the mind and the
body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has
a natural respect for the other’.
To which I added, in my copy of his book, ‘You, sir, are
correct’. Because I couldn’t agree more.
* * *
p. 5 - meaningless sex... The Waste
Land - Eliot; ‘The Waste Land’,.
ll. 222-256
p. 6 - the mentality of a boy of fourteen - LCL, p. 334
p. 7 - my own novel - In Love Me Do (ch. 4) I posed the character of Christine Polvere deliberately to illustrate something I have always thought important: the early and earnest education of young people about who they really are and what it all means. Healthy discourse about things like human sexuality is more positive than shunting the issue aside till later, when it may prove too little, too late. It is an inclination in which I have vowed not to fail to share with my own two daughters as they grow up –JC
p. 8 - Better to give all girls this book, at the age of seventeen - LCL, p. 333. Author’s note: I still completely agree; though for the modern world (early 21st C.) I would amend this to age fourteen --JC
p. 8 - sufficiently developed in physical and sexual consciousness - LCL; p. 334.
p. 9 - stale grey... dirty mind’ - Ibid
p. 10 - Life... the other’ - Ibid, p. 334-335
p. 6 - the mentality of a boy of fourteen - LCL, p. 334
p. 7 - my own novel - In Love Me Do (ch. 4) I posed the character of Christine Polvere deliberately to illustrate something I have always thought important: the early and earnest education of young people about who they really are and what it all means. Healthy discourse about things like human sexuality is more positive than shunting the issue aside till later, when it may prove too little, too late. It is an inclination in which I have vowed not to fail to share with my own two daughters as they grow up –JC
p. 8 - Better to give all girls this book, at the age of seventeen - LCL, p. 333. Author’s note: I still completely agree; though for the modern world (early 21st C.) I would amend this to age fourteen --JC
p. 8 - sufficiently developed in physical and sexual consciousness - LCL; p. 334.
p. 9 - stale grey... dirty mind’ - Ibid
p. 10 - Life... the other’ - Ibid, p. 334-335
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