Reflective Questions:

1. What is censorship?
2. Is censorship ever necessary in the public domain – can it ever be justified?
3. Do we have freedom of expression? Can we ever obtain freedom of expression?
4. Is literature capable of damaging or corrupting us?
5. Who defines the moral values that govern society?
6. Does literature have the power to change the world?
7. Is Tess in Tess of the d’Urberville’s responsible for her own demise?
8. In reference to ‘Candour in English Fiction’ where Hardy explains the need to write honestly about the catastrophe of sexual relationships, how is this candour reflected in Tess of the d’Urberville’s?
9. Peter Balbert suggests that Lawrence associates his culture’s more liberal, post-war attitudes towards passion, gender roles, courtship, and marriage with a deadening mechanization (a ‘mentalizing’, as he often puts it) of the instinctive sexual impulse: ‘The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no one is this more true than of the free and emancipated young. Above all, their bodies are the bodies of trained dogs’ (Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ 232). How do you read Lawrence’s characterisation of Mellors and Connie’s sexuality?
10. Kate Millett berates Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a chauvinistic illustration of Lawrence’s alleged belief that ‘sex is for the man’. (Sexual Politics, 240) Do you agree? Is Connie portrayed as passive and Mellors active?
11. Although notoriously known to be a book about sex, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is also a novel about work and the alienation of industrial labour. The industrial landscape is portrayed as embodying social and ethical meaning. It dominates the lives of those who work in it turning them from human flesh to soulless mechanisms. How are the themes of work portrayed in relation to sexuality? How are the characters of the novel portrayed in relation to work and class?