Secrecy And Obscenity In D. H. Lawrence`s Lady Chatterley`s Lover

I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds. D. H. Lawrence.

Early attempts to publish and disseminate Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) were shrouded in secrecy. The first edition was published privately in Florence at just a thousand copies; an unexpurgated version would be banned by British censors for the next thirty-two years. At which time, a highly-publicised criminal trial determined the original text's legal release into the public domain. As a result, much subsequent scholarship has analysed ideas surrounding literary obscenity through legal and historical categories. This is to some extent justified: first, the legal precedent set by the case was significant because it attempted to clarify the legislative parameters of obscene publications; and second, the outcome of the trial was similarly significant because it could be conveniently situated as a precursor to an era of liberal permissiveness - a view predominantly established due to the book's perceived endorsement of sexual freedoms and disavowal of traditional morality. Literary scholarship on obscenity should remain mindful, however, of the ways in which LCL - and Lawrence's work generally - is steeped in forceful politics and a distinct aesthetic style. Scholarship on Lawrence`s aesthetics (of which there is plenty) has tended to avoid a serious engagement with obscenity; scholarship on his class politics, whilst interested in sex, has similarly eschewed obscenity in critical discussion. Lawrence used obscenity, and ideas surrounding obscenity, to produce a political and aesthetic result. (It should be remembered that he could not face expurgating the 'obscene' passages, which, if he had managed, would have facilitated a wider initial publication of the novel.) It is the case that Lawrence is often positioned within modernism, and, as Potter argues, '.modernist writers use obscene images because they want to reveal, and sometimes revel in, the uncomfortable limits of representation'. However, the importance of the relationship between secrecy and obscenity to Lawrence's aesthetic and political sensibility has not yet been fully explored by critical scholarship on LCL. It seems somehow inadequate to simply claim that Lawrence is an obscene modernist writer - given the peculiarity of LCL as an autonomous text and Lawrence's wider relationship with modernism. Modernism's treatment of the obscene does not appear a sufficient explanation for the aesthetics and politics of the novel. Lawrence's use of secrecy is integral to questioning the way obscenity in the novel defies traditional literary categorisation. This essay will attempt to locate secrecy in LCL, and examine how secrecy qualifies and alters obscenity in Lawrence's use of literary techniques. The essay will open by understanding obscenity through previous discussions of modernist politics and aesthetics, then contextualising Lawrence's literary position within existing conceptions of modernism, and, finally, outlining how, for Lawrence, secrecy is integral to ideas of obscenity. More precisely, this part will establish secrecy in relation to the '.ways in which ideologies of class, gender and sexuality inform and modify each other' to produce a comprehensive notion of obscenity. Following this, the essay will analyse the content, style and form of LCL. This essay aims to reveal how Lawrence, through secrecy in the novel, is able to complicate, reformulate and exceed existing literary categories of obscenity.