There is an urban legend that runs something like this. The prize: a surfboard. The challenge: do something obscene on stage. A seventeen-year-old girl called Constance is eager to win. With no word to her peers she strips naked and climbs on stage with a man she has plucked from the crowd.
For two minutes Constance and the unknown man perform anal sex in full view of the club. There are cheers, but also groans. Eighty or so years later it seems plausible that a couple could have anal sex in a public competition that urges the obscene, and not win. This is a facile comparison, perhaps. The girl in question would no doubt still be thought obscene by some, but the comparison does at least draw attention to what we perceive as obscene now and what was deemed obscene in Even when it was finally published openly in , it would probably have picked up the prize.
But what does the novel actually contain? What if our mythical Constance, fresh from her public failure to win a surfboard the night before, rolled out of her hotel room bed, wandered down to the beach and began to read a copy of that D.
Lawrence novel? Would she be shocked? Would she think it obscene? Would she feel anything at all? For a novel with a relatively simple storyline β Lady Chatterley, wife of aristocratic, crippled Clifford, falls in love with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper β D. Lawrence crams a lot into just three hundred pages. There is a fairly unsubtle portrayal of British class tensions that pits the working man Mellors against the landed Clifford Chatterley; there is the notable and lengthy description of a Derbyshire landscape raped by the greed of industry; and there are the bruised bodies of the Great War β of which Clifford is but one β shell-shocked, fearful and anxious for the future.
But surrounding everything in the novel is the overarching theme of sex. Constance Chatterley talks of sex from the word go, describing her seventeen-year-old romps in Dresden, prior to her marriage, and her subsequent attempts at chastity with the impotent Clifford.
