Modernism and the theater of censorship

Adam Parkes

In November of 1915, British authorities invoked the 1857 Obscene Publications Act to suppress D. H. Lawrence's novel, The Rainbow. This was the first in a series of obscenity controversies that took place in Britain and the United States during the next decade. Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, were censored in both countries; in 1928 the British courts banned Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of these controversies. Situating modernism in the context of censorship, he examines the relations between such authors as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public scandals generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. Locating "obscenity" at the level of stylistic and formal experiment, such novels as The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, and Orlando dramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises of their censors. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.