What Did “Lady Chatterley” Liberate?

On that matter, Cuthbertson does little more than note the problem—but then neither does anyone else. The First Amendment offers no real guidance. So the fight gets pushed into the social sphere, where it reappears as a front in the culture war. Still, his book’s main claim is persuasive: “Lady Chatterley” is everywhere. Professor Cuthbertson (he teaches at Liverpool Hope University) is a great “Lady Chatterley” search engine, and he has scraped up a staggering number of “Chatterley” hits.

Most of these concern the two principals in Lawrence’s novel: Lady Chatterley, whose name is Connie, and her lover, Oliver Mellors. Connie is married to a baronet, Clifford, who has been made impotent by a war wound, and Mellors is the gamekeeper on Clifford’s estate, Wragby. His job is basically to keep poachers away and to make sure that there are enough pheasants for a jolly shooting party (which, since Sir Clifford uses a wheelchair, seems an improbable entertainment at Wragby).

Strictly speaking, Connie is an aristocrat and Mellors is working class. But Connie is not very class-conscious, and Mellors has returned from the British Army to take up an occupation that allows him almost complete independence. Mellors sometimes speaks in a working-class dialect (“Tha’s got the nicest arse of anybody,” or “Let’s not live ter make money, neither for us-selves nor for anybody else”—that sort of thing). But he also speaks standard English perfectly well, is intelligent, and reads books.

He is not especially hunky—thin, with a red face and, like his creator, weak lungs. Connie is described as “a bit Scottish and short,” with a body that is starting to age. A social-class taboo does attach to the affair, but some of Mellors’s working-class manner is playacting. He performs it to make upper-class people uncomfortable, to control the conversation. And “earthiness” is his role in the relationship. It’s what makes the sex genuine.

Whether people approve of censorship or not, most would not have trouble calling the language of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” obscene. “Fuck” is used thirty times in the novel. “Cunt” is used fourteen times. There are ten mentions of “balls,” four mentions of “cock,” and multiple appearances of “arse” (eleven), “shit” (six), and “piss” (three). There are thirteen sex scenes.

Lawrence was trying to make “dirty words” clean, and he was being deliberately explicit about things that writers before him generally had to represent elliptically or euphemistically. But the relationship between Lady Chatterley and her lover is not about sex. The whole point is that they love each other. If you don’t get that, you don’t get the book. People who love each other often have sex. So, in “Lady Chatterley,” the lovers have sex, and Lawrence describes it.

“Lady Chatterley” is a novel that stretches across three hundred or so pages and has more than a dozen characters. A lot of the book is conversation, much of it about the social sickness that Lawrence was obsessed with—passages not exactly conducive to arousal. The sex scenes take up about thirty pages, and arousal is, as always, a matter of taste. Lawrence did not write those scenes to titillate, though. He hated pornography, promiscuity, and masturbation, which he called “perhaps the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization.” Still, the bumper-sticker version of the novel is “Fancy lady has a fling with the gamekeeper,” understood as something along the lines of “Heiress gets it on with the lifeguard.” And that is what feeds the Chatterley-knockoff machine.

Which turns out to be amazingly prolific. Cuthbertson tells us, for example, that in 1960 a boy named John Rankin, dressed as a gamekeeper and carrying a sign identifying him as Lady Chatterley’s lover, was awarded a prize for his outfit in a children’s fancy-dress parade at an event organized by St. Columb’s Cathedral at the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall, in Derry, Northern Ireland. (Interesting that a child was rewarded for dressing up as the lover. I wonder what he was thinking. Or the priests at St. Columb’s.)