Week 3 (23-29.03) Forbidden Texts

Ever since mankind learned how to speak and write, people felt an irresistible need to express their thoughts and ideas verbally, manifest their opinions as well as to give voice to their imagination and creativity. However, sometimes certain works do not meet with general approval of the rest of the society. Why? For either they are considered too progressive and shocking or they do not comply with commonly accepted norms. Such books meet with incomprehension and intolerance because people always fear of the unknown. They evoke anger and disgust because they are dangerous for the world order and one’s outlook. They fill people with anxiety because they might poison one’s mind, deprave him and drive him towards immorality. Nevertheless, these texts seem to be intriguing and mysterious. They arouse curiosity and fascination, which cannot be easily satisfied since these books are perceived to be evil incarnate and as such are not widely available. They gain in fame and power, become almost a legend, a myth, a forbidden text, which like forbidden fruit is desired even more just because it is not allowed.

Forbidden texts are works which once were either banned or not allowed to be read, trialed for improper content or simply disapproved by the “pious” majority of the society.  Those are novels, short stories, poems, essays, all kinds of written works which for certain reasons had a very bad reputation.

Source:

https://ifyougiveagirlanovel.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/lcl.jpg

The Obscene Publications Act of 1959 made it possible for the publishing houses to print books and escape the conviction if they proved that those books were of literary merit. So Penguin Books decided to take advantage of this law and published Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The publishing house printed 200, 000 copies and sent twelve of them to the Director of Public Prosecutions challenging him to take the company to court. Nevertheless, the decision to prosecute Penguin Books was a great surprise to many since there were other books, some of them much in the news, that had seemed more likely targets.

The trial began on 27 October 1960 and lasted six days. The jury consisted of nine men and three women. The defence called 35 witnesses, including bishops and leading literary figures, such as Dame Rebecca West, EM Forster and Richard Hoggart. The prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones was unable to make a substantial case against the novel although he could have won the trial easily. Among famous love scenes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover there is one which if mentioned during the trial would have tipped the balance in favour of the prosecution. In this particular scene Connie Reid and Mellors are having anal sex which according to Lawrence constitutes the apex of sexual experience.

In order to understand why introducing this excerpt to the court would have changed the result of the trial, one has to be aware of the fact that in United Kingdom at that time anal sex was a sodomy and was strictly forbidden by law. In many countries existed sodomy laws which defined certain sex acts as sex crimes. In England and Wales sodomy was called buggery and referred usually to an anal intercourse between two males or between a male and a female. Buggery was made a felony by the Buggery Act in 1533, during the reign of Henry VIII. Until 1861 a person convicted of this crime was to expect the death penalty whereas an “attempted buggery” was treated as a lesser offence and a person guilty of it was punished by 2 years of jail and some time on the pillory. Anal sex was legalized in England and Wales in 1967 due to the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in which it was stated that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.’

Source:

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01750/Chatterley_1750261c.jpg

Therefore, for the prosecutor it would have been enough to tell the judge that the book contained sodomy scenes and the publishing house would have lost the court case. It is interesting to note that it remains unclear whether the prosecutor did not notice this particular sex scene or he did not understand that in this excerpt Lawrence was writing about anal intercourse. It is also possible that the prosecutor did notice the above-mentioned scene but he was too ashamed and embarrassed to talk about it in an open forum. Regardless where the truth lies, the prosecutor did not quoted this particular passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Nevertheless, this was not the only reason for his losing the case. During the trial Mervyn Griffith-Jones shocked the jury by asking them whether this was a book they wished their wife or servants to read. The question was totally inappropriate and unacceptable and might have been the proverbial final nail in the coffin. First of all, the prosecutor seemed not to notice that three persons in the jury were women so they could not have probably had a wife. Secondly, the jury was created from ordinary, average people who did not have any servants because either they could not afford it or they did not need one. Therefore, by asking one     ill-considered question Mervyn Griffith-Jones ultimately squandered his chances for winning the trial. Penguin Books won the right to publish. They jury decided in favour of Penguin Books and within a year the company sold over two million copies.

 Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscene_Publications_Act_1959

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments