Sexual Salvation in Lawrence

In his fascinating Erotic Faith , Robert M Polhemus argues that the vulgarity of D. H. Lawrence’s novels aimed at a kind of sexual redemption. Lawrence believed that modernity “has brought the deadly glorification of abstractions on the one hand (nationalism, progress, and civilization), and, on the other, inanimate matter (minerals, weapons, money).” These abstractions were not just intellectual mistakes, but came to horrific political expression in the trenches of World War I. His solution was to turn toward the least abstract reality, “the history of particular lovers’ flesh.”

Part of this aim was linguistic. In Lady Chatterley , the rich and well-off Connie has an affair with the low-born Mellors. At first the difference of dialect between them makes communication difficult, but the cross-class lovers and the harmonizing of their languages aims at a kind of social redemption, the union of Britain’s divided classes.

As Polhemus puts it, Lawrence’s “gradiose linguistic reclamation project is to wed body and soul, bridge the class gap, make dirty words clean, bring down the artificial Victorian wall between male and female discourse, and point the way to a potential new wholness for humanity.”

“Make dirty words clean” – that is not only evident in the characters’ speeches to each other, but also in Lawrence’s own style, dotted with sexual vulgarities: “For Lawrence, being able to f*** warmheartedly, the redemptive act of life, is inevitably related to breaking through taboos and being able to say and think about the forbidden word with pride and joy. He is like a semantic missionary going to to save f*** from damnation and redeem it as a living word of love.” Unless he were successful, Lawrence thought, abstractions and euphemisms concerning sexual love would continue to wreak their havoc. If sex was not going to be overwhelmed in abstraction, the bodiliness, the messiness, of actual intercourse had to be admitted and celebrated.

With Lawrence’s war on abstraction I have a great deal of sympathy. With his particular transgressive strategy I have none. One problem with Lawrence’s program was pointed out by CS Lewis in a short essay on “Prudery and Philology.” Lawrence might wish it were not so, but words do carry a freight of historical meaning that cannot simply be shed by repeating vulgarities in polite company or in artsy novels. As soon as you seek to describe the human body or sexuality in words, as opposed to rendering it in a painting or drawing, Lewis says “you will fin that you have only four alternatives: a nursery word, an archaism, a word from the gutter, or a scientific word.” In short, “willy-nilly you must produce baby-talk, or Wardour Street, or coarseness, or technical jargon . . . . The words will force you to write as if you thought it either childish, or quaint, or contemptible, or of purely scientific interest. In fact, mere description is impossible. Language forces you to an implicit comment.”

Obscenities have their own history that cannot be dislodged without drastic effect: “It is the words, not the things, that are obscene. That is, they are words long consecrated (or desecrated) to insult, derision, and buffoonery. You cannot use them without bringing in the whole atmosphere of the slum, the barrack-room, and the public school.” Lewis admits that it may be possible for modern writers to “introduce into serious writing . . . a total liberty for the pen such as has nearly always been allowed to the pencil,” but says that they will not only violate obscenity law but “rip up the whole fabric of the mind.” It’s possible, but “the attempt is perverse.”

The result of Lawrence’s evangelism has, of course, been less than redemptive. Instead of consecrating the f-word and surrounding it with the whole aura of connotations associated with passionate, tender sexual love, it has demeaned all discourse about sex. It still brings with it the “whole atmosphere of the slum”; it can enter “polite society,” but the result will be to transform the latter into a slum.