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Book Review
| Elizabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. 236. $29.95 (ISBN 978-0-8014-4168-4).
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| This nicely imagined study, by a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, highlights the common past of a select group of literary texts: At one time or another, prosecutors in France, Great Britain, and the United States hauled all of them into court. The initial chapters, drawing on Elizabeth Ladenson's expertise in French literature, offer particularly strong accounts of the legal and literary trajectories of Madame Bovary (1857) and Charles Baudelaire's poetry. Foregrounding "irony, paradox, and absurdity" (xiii), this study sees legal prosecutions helping to expand, rather than to constrict, the fame of works such as Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861) and, later, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934). All of these dirty books under Ladenson's scrutiny now regularly appear on post-secondary reading lists. |
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Surveying the "acceptable indecency" of the post-Sixties, post-obscenity era, a broadly framed "Epilogue" elaborates on the book's recurring claim that many scandalous texts of the past, such as those by the Marquis de Sade, have largely lost their threatening aura. They now circulate "in edulcorated form," signaling that the dominant literary culture "has shed the pointless repressions of the past" and embraced "subversion, as long as the ideas subverted are other than our own" (236). Rejecting "chronological chauvinism," Dirt for Art's Sake portrays our prosecutorial-minded forebears as more than thuggish censors of literary works that "we [who] live in more enlightened times" have declared "timeless classics" (xv, 45). Similarly, it cautions against reading texts in reverse and failing to appreciate how works such as The Well of Loneliness (1928), Radclyffe Hall's cautious defense of lesbianism, could have once engendered so much legal and cultural controversy. |
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How does, then, Art for Dirt's Sake construct the intersection of legal and cultural forces? Calling on the usual secondary suspects, such as Charles Rembar's The End of Obscenity (1986) and Edward De Grazia's Girls Lean Back Everywhere (1992), it reprises fairly familiar legal-constitutional discourses. And despite invoking Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (1985), Ladenson's study never directly addresses recent accounts of "censorship"—especially those dealing with Hollywood's Production Code system—that triangulate relationships among law, culture, and power through Foucauldian frames. Still, this book's individual case studies—and the connections drawn among them—should likely interest readers, whatever their theoretical allegiances, of this journal. |
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Art for Dirt's Sake sees "basic ideas," such as the desirability of employing law's power to "protect" certain types of readers re-appearing across both time and space but with the precise "terms of debate" constantly changing, especially as different audiences and new media enter the "battlefield of representation" (xix, 192). During nineteenth-century prosecutions, for example, appeals to "literary merit" carried little or no legal weight. Subsequently, as the 1933 U.S. decision on James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) suggested, matters of authorial artistry could count more heavily. One hundred years after the successful prosecution of Madame Bovary, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court took another, somewhat confusing approach to Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Roth v. United States (1957)—which involved a book ironically penned by an author who judged parts of Ulysses as "obscene"—held that even some avowedly dirty expression could merit some degree of legal protection from obscenity prosecutions. |
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In addition, Ladenson's superbly inter-related chapters also excavate, and then critically assay, the different kinds of dirt deposited in what now qualifies as elevated literary ground. Nineteenth-century French authorities, for instance, found the depiction of adultery in Madame Bovary dirty enough to justify branding the book as an indecent affront to religious and moral values. Subsequently, prosecutions for obscenity involved dirty words and allegedly lust-producing representations of sexual activity, the variety of dirt for which British jurists in 1868 devised the "Hicklin Rule." In contrast, the prose in Ulysses, by "employing obscene language toward non-sexual, even anti-sexual ends," could almost make it seem as if Joyce intended to "flout the very definition of obscenity" encapsulated in the Hicklin test (91). The vivid portrayals of the operation of bodily functions in Ulysses challenged prevailing standards, both literary and legal, for depicting defecation. "In serious literature before Joyce, food had ... gone in, but it tended almost never to come out" (84). Later, Lady Chatterley's Lover pointedly employed dirty words to detail various sexual performances, while Lolita (1955) recalled Madame Bovary. The subject matter of Lolita, nympholeptic passion, seemed to qualify, even without any dirty language or overtly sexualized passages, as literary dirt. |
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Imaginatively argued and deftly written, Art for Dirt's Sake should interest, inform, and also challenge historians of law and culture, particularly those inclined to dig more deeply into the different forms of literary filth that have run afoul of the law. |
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| Norman Rosenberg
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| Macalester College |
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