- 1 See Potter, Obscene Modernism, 17.
- 2 Early in his career, Lawrence reluctantly accepted the editorial censorship of Ford Madox Hueffer a (...)
- 3 In a well-known letter to Morris Ernst of 10 November 1928, for instance, Lawrence wrote “Our civil (...)
1The censorship of D.H. Lawrence’s work was founded on the notion that obscene literature has the power to corrupt allegedly vulnerable people, particularly women and children.1 From the very beginning of his career, Lawrence resisted this bourgeois, patriarchal perspective, which infringed upon his creative freedom. Until the successful prosecution of The Rainbow for obscenity in November 1915, Lawrence was able to navigate censorship laws and pressures without serious incident.2 However, following this catastrophic event and the poverty which resulted from it, he would spend much of the rest of his career writing back against what he saw as an absurd limitation placed on his artistic autonomy, as well as a generally idiotic practice.3
2Reflecting in the third person on the prosecution of The Rainbow in an autobiographical essay of 1928, Lawrence said the following:
In England during the period of the war – pretty well isolated. In 1915 The Rainbow was suppressed for immorality – and the sense of detachment from the bourgeois world, the world which controls press, publication and all, became almost complete. He had no interest in it, no desire to be at one with it. Anyhow the suppression of The Rainbow had proved it impossible. Henceforth he put away any idea of ‘success,’ of succeeding with the British bourgeois public, and stayed apart.4
- 5 See LEA 111 and Nehls iii 232.
3Lawrence’s use of the third-person creates an impression of detachment and objectivity which is perhaps a little surprising given that Jean Watson, the manager of Curtis Brown’s Foreign Department, had told Lawrence that the French publishing house which requested the essay wanted something personal.5 But Lawrence is attempting to stand back and make sense of the past, and to explain how it has shaped his career. In July 1928 (when this was written) he began posting out to subscribers copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is as if he is saying that the prosecution of The Rainbow was a staging post in his alienation from the bourgeois public. Now his detachment from it was truly complete.
4Lawrence’s mother strove to instil into her children the values of bourgeois respectability. In many of his late essays, Lawrence would refer to the expectation his mother placed upon him to “get on” in the world, to advance up the social ladder and settle into a middle-class world of family values and respectable work.6 Ultimately, Lawrence would come to condemn the bourgeois worldview which he found to be prevalent in the English public at large; one can see him reflecting on this in his 1923 essay “On Coming Home,” which he would describe as “a very caustic article by me, against England” (4L 549). The essay criticises the complacency and insularity of the English middle class, representing England as a lifeless and claustrophobic country which is hostile to him and to all outside influence. Lawrence’s animosity towards English attitudes and bourgeois respectability developed and became more intense as his career developed, but even as early as his first novel The White Peacock, he was already pushing the boundaries of conventional morality in his writing. Marriage, perhaps the central bourgeois ideal, is largely represented in the novel as loveless and destructive. Emily Beardsall’s marriage at the end of the narrative is the only exception to this general principle among the novel’s protagonists, but even here the narrative lends some support to George Saxton’s bitter claim that “Marriage is more of a duel than a duet. One party wins and takes the other captive, slave servant” (TWP 301), since their relationship is described as one in which “She was the mistress, quiet and self-assured, he her rejoiced husband and servant” (TWP 323) – a description which clearly suggests a disturbing dynamic of subjugation and domination. Compared to Lawrence’s later work, The White Peacock is not especially controversial, but it is possible even at this stage to see Lawrence straining against conventional values. He would, of course, also place unhappy marriages at the centre of his next two novels The Trespasser and Sons and Lovers. This paper will highlight Lawrence’s early resistance to English bourgeois values and it will explore how censorship deepened his opposition to bourgeois norms, leading him to write with ever-greater forcefulness against the bourgeois standards which he hated and resisted.
5Another notable and recurring feature of Lawrence’s first novel is violence; the narrative is full of it, from the killing of cats and rabbits to the mysterious and sinister death of the gamekeeper, Annable, whose hatred of conventional society reflects Lawrence’s own growing resistance to bourgeois respectability. Although the violence of the novel is sometimes attributable to chance or the world of farm labour, it is in essence far more disturbing than this. There is a violent streak in several of the characters, a grim satisfaction in exercising power over life and death. In this respect, The White Peacock shares a common thread with Women in Love – a novel in which violence erupts everywhere and the drive to commit violent acts seems to be felt by all of the characters, in part, of course, because (in Lawrence’s formulation) the “bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (WL 485). However, this submerged violence is not only part of Lawrence’s critique of the state of England at war, but also an aspect of his critical analysis of the mindset that leads to war – a mindset guided, in Lawrence’s view, by a bourgeois morality which represses desire and individuality until people lash out with unpredictable violence. The White Peacock reveals the young Lawrence’s indebtedness to Hardy through its attack on the powerful codes of English middle-class respectability. It contains the early signs of Lawrence’s rejection of the values instilled in him by Eastwood and England.
- 7 Worthen, The Early Years, 136.
6The novel’s subversive narrative, which challenges both marriage and the bourgeois morality of the English middle class, no doubt influenced Heinemann’s request for Lawrence to expurgate the text. He was asked, for instance, to substitute the phrase “infatuated couple” for “passionate couple” and to remove a reference to one character’s bedroom (see TWP xxv). It probably also helps to explain why Lawrence’s mother, after reading an early version of the novel in which Lettie becomes pregnant outside marriage, remarked “to think that my son should have written such a story.”7
- 8 Potter, Obscene Modernism, 13-14.
7In his retrospective remarks on the prosecution of The Rainbow, quoted above, Lawrence referred not just to the “bourgeois” as a value system, but rather to “the bourgeois world” – to the ways in which that class-based value system dictated the standards set by the press and the publishing industry, as well as the readers they catered to. Lawrence’s reflection on the prosecution of The Rainbow identifies that it was not just a legal issue, nor solely attributable to the critical newspaper reviews which had been instrumental in the instigation of legal proceedings, but rather a reflection of the “climate of censorship” in Britain at the time, and of the ways in which, as Lawrence saw it, the English public and publishing industry had rejected him and his writing. Lawrence realised that censorship in the period was not simply a matter of obscenity prosecutions; instead, as Rachel Potter argues, “the agents of censorship were printers, postmen, publishers, vice crusaders, and circulating libraries. Rather than simply judges, lawyers, or policemen, the censorship of modernist literature was often enacted in the private decisions of individuals involved in the production and dissemination of texts.” 8
8The prosecution of The Rainbow was a turning-point for Lawrence. As this essay has tried to demonstrate in its brief analysis of The White Peacock, Lawrence was never a complacent adherent to the bourgeois norms of English moral life, but the rejection of him and his work embodied by the prosecution of The Rainbow in November 1915 forced him to come to terms with this fact. It made him realise the extent to which his vision of the world conflicted with the normative values of English society, something which was inevitably traumatic for a man who, only the month before the prosecution, had written to Lady Cynthia Asquith “I am English, and my Englishness is my very vision” (2L 414).
9Lawrence had been censored from the beginning of his career, with external pressure forcing him to remove “all the offensive morsels, all the damns the devils and the sweat” (1L 158) from his earliest work. However, the prosecution of The Rainbow was a completely different form and degree of censorship compared with these other instances; it was, to a certain extent, what Lawrence’s earlier editors and publishers had been trying to avoid through careful editing, and it was a frankly world-shattering event for Lawrence not only because it was a complete rejection of his artistic freedom and creative vision but also because it crippled his finances at a critical stage of his career as a professional author, when he depended on the expected income from the novel to support himself and his wife. As Lawrence would later say during a 1925 interview with Kyle Crichton “They were robbing me of my freedom then.”9
10Even before the seizure and prosecution of The Rainbow, Lawrence had been planning to leave England if he was able to, on account of the First World War and the ways in which this war was (in his view) destroying the life and spirit of England. In a letter to Harriet Monroe of 15 September 1915, he declared: “the muse has gone, like the swallows in winter […] This is the real winter of the spirit in England. We are just preparing to come to fast grips with the war. At last we are going to give ourselves up to it – and everything else we are letting go” (2L 393). For Lawrence, it must have seemed that The Rainbow was the perfect novel for this time – a narrative in which each successive generation finds it harder to come to grips with a world which is increasingly hostile and alienating, yet a novel that ends with the promise of new life and rejuvenation in the eponymous symbol of the “rainbow.” The novel was rejected by legal authorities as “a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action” and Lawrence concluded that there was “no future” in England, “only decomposition” (2L 438).10 He repeatedly expressed a desire to shift both himself and his readership to America, in the hope of finding a receptive audience in a country which was not at this time involved militarily in the First World War.
- 11 See WL xxxvii and FWL xxiv-xxv.
- 12 See 1L 275-276.
11Despite this powerful desire to leave his home and transplant himself to America, it was not until November 1919 that he was finally able to leave England. In the intervening years, in which the government prevented Lawrence and Frieda from travelling abroad, and expelled them from Cornwall under the Defence of the Realm Act, Lawrence lived in great poverty and was frequently reduced to relying on charity which he deeply resented. These years were particularly painful for Lawrence, personally, professionally and financially, because the prosecution of The Rainbow made it practically impossible for him to have any of his fiction published in England. Understandably, given the fact that the war had hit the publishing industry so hard, publishers were unwilling to risk exposing themselves to the financial and reputational damage of another obscenity prosecution.11 Even Martin Secker, who had been interested in publishing Lawrence’s work since 1911, required some persuasion from Compton Mackenzie to publish Women in Love in 1921, and requested that Lawrence “change the provocative title of Women in Love to the quiet, even dull one of The Sisters,” because he thought it was important from Lawrence’s point of view “to be as unprovocative as possible in order to get the book taken anywhere” (WL xliii).12
12For Lawrence, therefore, the war years following the prosecution of The Rainbow were a kind of excruciating limbo. His three-book deal with Methuen was, although not officially revoked, obviously no longer valid. Methuen even requested that he pay back the advance they had sent him for The Rainbow, since he had not provided them with a book that they could actually sell.13 This rejection of Lawrence by legal authorities and all of the “bourgeois world” that controlled “press, publication and all,” combined with poverty and forced confinement in a country he wanted to leave, left a mark which is clearly visible in his fiction of the early 1920s.
- 14 Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity 7.
13Women in Love was not published until 1920, but it was a book conceived and, for the most part finished, during the war years. It is almost certainly the most iconoclastic novel Lawrence wrote before Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it attempts to challenge the bourgeois norms of Lawrence’s home country even at the fundamental level of language. It is a novel in which dialogue is foregrounded, yet what is often most clearly apparent within all this dialogue is the inarticulacy of the characters and the importance of what is not said or of what cannot be said. The novel frequently returns, for instance, to the eponymous topic of “love.” The Lawrence figure, Birkin, attempts to re-define and re-shape it through the concept of “star-equilibrium” (WL 319. See also WL 146-148), yet he is unable to convince Ursula of his new way of approaching their relationship and he is reluctantly forced to concede, later in the novel, that he does indeed “love” her (WL 251). This brings somewhat of an end to the debate between them on the topic, but it does absolutely nothing to resolve Birkin’s dissatisfaction with “love” or his objections to it; he is simply forced to concede because he has been unable to articulate an acceptable alternative to the ubiquitous term for a complex human emotion. There remains a sense that there are issues which have been left unresolved and unsaid, and the novel’s narrative voice, inflected through the perspective of Birkin, asks “What was the good of talking, any way? It must happen beyond the sound of words” (WL 250). Although the “Moony” chapter of the novel acts as a kind of partial resolution on the subject of “love” for Birkin and Ursula, this is far from the end of the debate about “love” in the novel. One particularly revealing scene comes near the end, in a conversation between Gudrun and Loerke in which the latter remarks that he hates love “in every language,” before adding “Women and love, there is no greater tedium” (WL 458). It is, of course, ironic that a character in a book entitled “Women in Love” should be so scathing about “Women and love.” But it is also entirely appropriate that a novel which so consistently undermines the integrity and expressive power of language should also undermine its own title, which is deceptively conventional, as well as subtly provocative, given that the prosecution of The Rainbow had centred on Lawrence’s depiction of female same-sex desire. Gudrun’s response to Loerke’s remarks is complex; we are told that “She was slightly offended. And yet, this was her own basic feeling. Men, and love – there was no greater tedium” (WL 458). There is, in the first place, the contrast between Gudrun’s instinctive reaction, which is to be offended, and her own fundamental agreement with Loerke’s remarks, which highlights the importance of straining against conventional bourgeois values. Gudrun and Loerke are not, of course, particularly sympathetic characters, but in this scene their interaction suggests a persuasive point which Lawrence would later make himself in a slightly different context in his 1929 essay Pornography and Obscenity – namely, that taking offence on the grounds of morality is not really the considered response of an intelligent individual, but is rather an instinctive reaction which comes when a person encounters something shocking. As Lawrence puts it, “When it comes to so-called obscene words, […] The first reaction is almost sure to be mob-reaction, mob-indignation, mob-condemnation. And the mob gets no further. But the real individual has second thoughts and says: am I really shocked? Do I really feel outraged and indignant? And the answer of the individual is bound to be: No.”14 In this scene between Gudrun and Loerke there is also a subtle but important distinction between the characters’ comments which is evident in the punctuation of the respective sentences, since the comma in the free indirect discourse tracing Gudrun’s thoughts separates “men” and “love” and suggests that whereas Loerke is bored by the association of “women and love,” Gudrun is bored of both men and love, separately.
14Women in Love is a novel which frequently complicates and subverts language, as it does in these scenes. It is a novel, in many ways, about the difficulty of expression and the often inescapable limits which the bourgeois mindset and conventional English attitudes place on the individual and, by allegorical extension, the limits they place too on authors. Even its ending, in direct contrast to the optimism of The Rainbow, is yet another debate about love between Ursula and Birkin which ends on a note of irresolution with Birkin’s statement: “I don’t believe that” (WL 481).
15Although it would be reductive and unconvincing to claim that this focus on silence and inarticulacy was solely a response to censorship, there is an obvious connection between the two. The idea that language was restricted and that there was some limit to people’s freedom to express themselves and to live productively was forcibly impressed upon Lawrence by the prosecution of The Rainbow, and he himself directly linked this prosecution to a denial of freedom. Lawrence would explicitly address the difficulties he had with saying what he needed to say in his 1928 essay “The ‘Jeune Fille’ Wants to Know,” where he remarked that “If you are a writer, nothing is more confusing than the difference between the things you have to say and the things you are allowed to print.”15 This difference would never have been clearer to Lawrence than it was in the period following the prosecution of The Rainbow. Lawrence’s impression of his home, and his deep bitterness and pessimism towards it and his English readership following the prosecution obviously influenced the bitterness and the silences of Women in Love. He was forced to confront the consequences of his alienation from, and opposition to, the bourgeois moral norms on which he had been raised, and which he had undermined, questioned, and deliberately subverted from the very start of his career.
16In Lawrence’s other work from this period, including the novels The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence’s bitterness towards English society and his desire to escape from it is likewise very apparent. The prosecution of The Rainbow had shown him the impossibility of succeeding in England against the context of a censorious moral climate which rejected him and his artistic vision. As he wrote in a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith of 9 November 1915, three days after he had found out about the police seizure of The Rainbow: “It is England – my God, it breaks my soul – this England […] My life is ended here: I must go as a seed that falls into new ground” (2L 431-432). The characters in Lawrence’s post-war novels reflect this same desire to escape England and the claustrophobia of home, something which is perhaps especially clear in Aaron’s Rod, in which the eponymous character leaves both his domestic and national home to go on a long journey with no pre-ordained purpose or destination.
17Nevertheless, neither Lawrence nor any of his characters manages to entirely break free from England. In Women in Love, there is some discussion of starting a new life away from England, but no sense that this will really solve anything; in Aaron’s Rod, many of the characters leave England, but they fail to arrive at any sense of contentment or purpose. Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl manages to leave England, only to feel a strong desire to return again which is brushed aside by her ambivalent conclusion that “It was not her affair” (TLG 339) where she lived as long as Ciccio returned to her from the war.
18Lawrence’s own escape from England was arguably more complete than that achieved by any of his characters. After leaving in 1919, he never again lived for an extended period in England and only occasionally visited. Only with the posting of the copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in July 1928 did he offer readers another novel set predominantly in England. And yet, Lawrence was right to say that he was English and that his Englishness was his very vision. Even in the letter to Cynthia Asquith in which he expressed his desire to leave England, he still referred to it as “my country” and concluded by saying “it is so awful, the being gone from it altogether, one must be blind henceforth” (2L 431-432). As an author he was still inextricably tied to England, despite all his attempts to escape it. Like his characters, he would carry England with him. Even in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, two novels set far away from England, there are central characters with strong links to Britain, with memories of it and an identity in many ways created and defined by it. And Lawrence would, of course, return imaginatively to England with a final novel which takes his very strongest stand against its censorious bourgeois morality. What he had said in a letter to Arthur McLeod of 23 April 1913 a propos of Sons and Lovers he might just as aptly have said a propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “I do write because I want folk – English folk – to alter, and have more sense” (1L 544). For Lawrence, having sense meant being willing to see, contextualise and reject the insular values of the “British bourgeois public”: to think, as Lawrence thought, freely and creatively despite the kinds of social pressures which attempted to silence him.