Lady Chatterley's Lover: Class, Sex and Censorship

Censorship in the media is a topic I've always been fascinated with. Why are certain things seen as more taboo than others? Why when I turn on the TV am I more likely to see a man being beheaded and maimed than a naked body of which we all have? Who gets to decide when violence gets too violent or when a kiss goes too far? How has media censorship evolved especially during the era of the internet where you are subjected to 18+ material without even looking for it?

Censorship is a large, complicated and interesting topic which I'm going to delve into over the next three blog posts. The first about censorship of the past relating to the present using the same text over three different time periods, the second about censorship of the present and future regarding the internet and how it's evolving and the third looking at censorship in other countries and how their media censorship laws relate to our own. My own opinions on censorship relate very much to what is being censored and for whose benefit. As somebody interested in filmmaking I believe it's an essential topic to discuss and understand. Censorship is, after-all the biggest influence over what gets from the script page to our eyeballs.

Censorship: The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

1. Lady Chatterley, an introduction

For this first installment I am going to be looking at a text which has spent its entire existence in controversy. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel from 1928 infamous for its explicit depictions of sex, use of swearwords and its representation of an intimate relationship between an upper class Lady and the working class estate gamekeeper. It was, as it were, the 50 Shades of Grey of its day. An uncensored version of the novel wasn't published in the UK until 1960 after being the subject of an obscenity trial against Penguin books, a trial that was dramatised as The Chatterley Affair in 2006. In order to win the trial Penguin had to prove that the novel was off literary merit with many people protesting the book over its use of the words "fuck" and "cunt". The chief prosecutor quite hilariously asked "If it was the kind of book you would wish your wife or servants to read" the pompous git.

So, what horrible, gratuitous and total inappropriateness is in this book? (Asked the 3 million people who bought it in the UK as soon as it was made legal) What was so shocking about it and is the book still shocking today?

Well, I read the book (Purely for research purposes as I'm sure you understand... that isn't a joke with a wink, I'm gay so 1920's straight hanky panky doesn't quite do it for me!)

The answer is...

Yeah. This book is still kind of shocking. I was expecting it to be much tamer considering that showing an ankle could be considered scandalous back then but what's interesting is that this book is shocking for different reasons today than it would have been when it was written, especially relating to the class politics that D.H Lawrence has threaded through the novel. Back then what was shocking wasn't just the multiple sex scenes but it was the class difference between the two leads.

Connie Chatterley is a "well-bread" Lady married to an influential and pompos upper-class man who was crippled from the waist down during the war. She is not content with her life in Wragby Manor, married to Clifford who talks down on everyone and who takes her presence and love for granted, seeing himself on a higher intellectual plain than anyone else and above matters of the body. During her marriage she is deeply unhappy and falls into a deep state of depression until she is introduced to Oliver Mellors the new game-keeper who is of working class and who at first comes off as curt and rude to Connie until they form a more intimate relationship. Even then he doesn't change much as a character, he still speaks his mind, he still holds anger for those who sit comfortably in the upper classes and he still speaks in a strong Derby accent even though for Sir Clifford he can change to the Queen's English.

In the early 1930's their being familiar at all would have been a red flag. Inter-class relationships were seen as a lowering of the upper-class person. Something degrading and sinful.

To a modern audience, that isn't so much as an issue. What is an issue to modern concerned folk is "how graphic is the sex?"

The sex is graphic in a weirdly non-graphic way. Lawrence has a strange way of writing such scenes where to fully understand what's going on you have to decipher your way through a heap of metaphor and innuendo. By modern standards these scenes are still relatively tame but it's the contents around them that make them shocking. Back then there were next to no books that talk about sexual experience from a women's point of view. The good and the bad. These kind of afterthoughts would have been obscene as Lady Chatterley thinks about what she wants out of her relationship with Mellors. In many ways this kind of sexual freedom on the woman's part is empowering and ahead of its time. Although Lawrences anatomy might be a bit off as I don't think any women has felt a stir in her womb at the prospect of anything really...

There are also some parts that are shocking now for reasons that nobody back then would have blinked an eye at. Consent for example isn't really a thing that exists in this book or was a done thing at the time. While the audience know what Connie wants it's hard not to view some of Mellor's actions as sexual assault and when his ex Bertha comes back to wreak havoc on his life the book treats him as a victim of her when in actuality, while Bertha may not be an angel, she seems to have been more a victim of him with sentences that allude to violence and even a sexual violence between the two of them... romantic ey?

Also there is a really random bit when Mellors goes off on one about wanting to kill lesbians... not even prompted... seriously weird especially since Lawrence has written sympathetic lesbian characters in the past (Women in Love) and was rumoured to be homosexual himself.

So yes the book is shocking, just not the same kind of shocking and it's interesting that these latter points rarely come up when this book is discussed. It's all about the swearing and the sex when actually the biggest shocks are the social norms of the 1920's. It's like they were trying to sensor the story when really they should have been censoring the era.

2. Early Film Adaptations

As with most things regarding censorship (As I will discuss in a later post) Europe tends to be a bit quicker than the British and Americans when it comes to making profanic material available to the public. The book was published in Italy and France before anywhere else and from those two countries it was met with no resistance. It's not surprising then that the first film adaptation is French called L'Amant de lady Chatterley in 1955. I have not watched this first film adaptation as it's become pretty impossible to find but the film was banned in America which leads me to believe it is a faithful adaptation.

The most well known adaptation of Lady Chatterley is the 1990's version starring Sean Bean which was turned into a mini-series. Before it was a rather trashy version in 1981 which keeps the controversial bits but decides to ignore the context around them.

Ultimately this is a hard novel to adapt, walking a fine line between an interesting reflection on the class attitudes and conflict of spiritual, emotional and physical connections and... well... porn. Film-wise this story has had very little success. Partly because changing attitudes towards sex and relationships makes the story problematic but without the problems the message and interesting picture of 1920's social life is lost. Sex in the book is there to serve a narrative purpose as is the "fowl" language. A tame version wouldn't quite work... not that it hasn't been tried...

3. Lady Chatterley in 2015

So, confession time. I came across the story of Lady Chatterley's lover by scrolling through Jodie Comers IMDB... She plays a younger version of Mrs Bolton in the 2015 film adaptation of Lady Chatterley and her character isn't the only dramatic change.

The 2015 version is an odd case study because I really don't know what inspired it to be made. Lady Chatterley might be relevant as a historic text but in modern days its messages and themes become contradictory and problematic. Written by the creator of shows like The Bodyguard and Line of Duty, the 2015 version stars Richard Madden and Holliday Grainger as the leads in a highly censored version of the story. The essence of the plot is the same and when I watched it for the first time (unaware of the source material) I found it hilariously cliche.

Censoring the sex works since the audience can probably fill in the gaps but this does mean that a lot of the main characters more intimate conversations are not mentioned or seem to appear out of nowhere. The language is also very censored with nowhere near the amount of swears as in the original text. By proxy this means that the story itself is rather dumbed down and while the themes are present, to make anything interesting they would have to be front and centre. This adaptation had the power to do something different with the story and prove that it is of literary merit. Instead it just tells us a slightly altered version of a story that by this point has been told and parodied to death.

4. The Censorship of Lady Chatterley

In many ways Lady Chatterley is responsible for how lax our censorship laws are in the UK. The trial in 1959 proved that the book was of merit and since then UK authors have managed to push the bar more than they would be able to in most other countries. You can thank Lady Chatterley for your 50 Shades of Grey and the majority of tumblr's content which is why as trashy as it may seem it's an important text to discuss.

In my personal opinion Lady Chatterley isn't a thematic masterpiece or anything of the sort but I do feel like it teaches an interesting lesson on the balance and purpose of censorship. Lady Chatterley isn't aimed at children nor is it something anyone under the age of 18 would be remotely interested in, therefore I don't believe censoring the explicit parts does a service to anyone. On the other hand context is needed in order to justify the explicitness within the narrative. If Connie can't talk about her depression under the restrictiveness of upper-class society then she shouldn't be talking about her sexual experiences with Mellors. The two elements need each other. They make each other mean something.

5. Next time

Next time I'll be looking at censorship in modern day. I'll be looking at the controversy stirred up by Game of Thrones and how censorship around violence has changed across media platforms.