Lady Chatterley's Lover (Signet classics)
by D. H. Lawrence

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Book Reviews of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Signet classics)

Book Review: Don't be put off by the censors
Summary: 5 Stars

Ulysses by James Joyce was recently selected by the Modern Library as the best novel of the 20th century. Like Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley', it was banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of "lewd", "indecent", "filthy", or "obscene" materials. The Comstock laws, while now to some extent unenforced, remain for the most part on the books today. The Telecommunications Reform Bill of 1996 even specifically applied some of these outdated and outmoded laws to computer networks.

So what's my message here? Simple - if we continue to allow censors to dictate what we can and cannot read, we stand the chance of being robbed of some of the world's finest written works. We're not talking exceptions here. Consider, for example John Cleland's Fanny Hill - Candide, Voltaire's critically hailed satire - Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography Confessions - Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - Boccaccio's Decameron - Defoe's Moll Flanders, and various editions of The Arabian Nights. All were banned at various times in the US.

The 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shocking treatment of the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled married woman and her husband's game keeper. Now that we're used to hearing and reading about sex, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful writer whose wonderful story takes us bodily into the world of its characters. Of Connie Chatterley's indecisiveness, her husband's callousness, the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors' persuasiveness - all are portrayed in a quiet, even manner until the climactic end. Necessarily, some of the language and imagery is mildly explicit (though you can read a lot worse in many of the magazines that lie around in dentists' waiting rooms), because Lady Chatterley's Lover affirms Lawrence's vision of individual regeneration through freely-expressed sexuality. The book's power and complexity make it a unique, original work-a triumph of passion and eroticism over sterility.

The next time you hear that something has been censored, question whether it is really to protect public morals (where war, and starvation appear to be more acceptable than freedom of sexuality), or whether it is to protect the censors' own frustrated identities! Lady C is a powerful reminder that all the censors have ever succeeded in doing is to ban outstanding literature in the name of public morality.

Summary of Lady Chatterley's Lover (Signet classics)

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