Sexual Consciousness and the "New" Lady Chatterley (Critical Essay‪)‬

The years have not been kind to Lady Chatterley. Nor for that matter have the movies. Scandalous in her day, the sexual adventuress of D H Lawrence's best-known novel has matured into something of a pop-culture joke, remembered less as a symbol of erotic liberation than a soft-core staple of late-night cable. (Lim 2) D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover insisted on the possibility for human regeneration and fulfillment through a celebration of carnal desire, a Utopian ideal which disengaged guilt from sexuality and thereby constituted a conspicuous deviation from the prevailing puritanical ideologies of the author's time. Since the mid 20th century, a number of film adaptations have invoked Lawrence's once contentious observations on sexual pleasure and love in a bid to entertain and provoke modern audiences. With notable exception to the excessively prim and evasive Allegret version released in 1955, many of the films seem to reduce Lawrence's complex vision to a distinctly tawdry and ultimately ineffectual tale, entertaining and thought-provoking only insofar as its capacity to sexually titillate the viewer. The combination of a particular breed of chic pornography and a Hollywood-inspired visual cliche of sexual love found in the likes of films by Just Jaekin (1981) and Ken Russell (1993) arguably serves to perpetuate a more contemporary brand of sexual repression. In her incisive publication, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture, Gail Hawkes claims that this repression manifests itself in the phenomenon of "confection sex" inspired by traditional male-oriented pornographic images that trivialize sex and render it a mere mode of entertainment (162). Moreover, the prevalence of such images is inclined to encourage what could be called a formulaic and fetishised sexual conformity. Although it is perhaps over-determined and certainly problematic to consider how successfully or otherwise filmmakers might capture the "essence" of Lawrence's vision in relation to sex and sexuality, one might reasonably denounce the failure of such modern adaptations to execute the transgressive potential of a re-telling of Lawrence's novel for contemporary audiences. Indeed, such films are marred by a tendency to disregard the intrinsic complexity of sexual relationships, ultimately diminishing what they purulently represent. This inclination seems particularly exasperating given the novel's insistence on a reclamation of genuine sexual pleasure and desire, a sentiment arguably as radical today as it was in Lawrence's time. Perhaps the only film adaptation to date with the facility to question and indeed agitate modern sexual consciousness is director Pascal Ferran's recent release, Lady Chatterley (2007). While much has been said in the past about the significant impact of Lawrence's bold ruminations regarding human sexual thought and behavior in relation to the sexually repressed society' in which his novel was received, the current investigation seeks to examine how Ferran's representation of sex and sexuality in her filmic adaptation of the novel holds the propensity to serve a similar purpose, albeit in response to a very different cultural/sexual milieu.