The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [50]
The idea that a work of literature should have an identifiable “social value” to “redeem” it from the charge of obscenity ran counter to much thought about what art was and was not. Such an idea spoke, and speaks, to the continually problematic question of use. If use in this case was synonymous with “having social value,” what kept the claim from being merely tautologous, or a matter of taste, whether lay or expert? The defense against the charge of obscenity was, to a certain extent, a defense against the idea that the author’s intent had been to create a bad object, something that could be used (or misused, or abused) to generate lustful thoughts and even lustful actions. What was the proper, nonabusive, nonmisusing use of a novel? Was reading a sufficient use? Was it a social value? None of these novels has been at the forefront of social change or social improvement, except if we include—as maybe we should—a change in cultural taste or cultural norms. But this idea, that risky (and risqué) writing should push the envelope of community standards, was not the social value that the Justices had in mind. The notion of redemption, with its religious ring, further complicates the matter: is the sinner in this picture the work, or the author, or the reader?
As is often the case with sin, these putative acts of bad behavior on the part of works of literature seem to have required, or inspired, their foes to wallow in them in order to make their sinful nature clear. Thus, for example, in 1930 U.S. Senator Reed Smoot of Utah undertook a public reading of blue passages from “foreign literature” that brought crowds of spectators to the Senate galleries. Smoot had piled up a stack of works by non-American authors, works he thought should not be permitted to pass through customs. They included Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, Balzac’s Droll Tales, the poems of Robert Burns, the memoirs of Casanova—and perhaps inevitably, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Smoot decried the books as “lower than the beasts” and averred that he would rather have a child of his “use opium than read these books.” He was succeeded at the podium by Senator Bronson Murray Cutting, who represented New Mexico but had been born in New York and educated at Harvard. Cutting suggested that such liberties were often taken by works of literature: “the first page of King Lear is grossly indecent; the love-making of Hamlet and Ophelia is coarse and obscene; in Romeo and Juliet the remarks of Mercutio and the Nurse are extremely improper,” and so on. “There may,” he said, “be people whose downfall and degeneration in life have been due to reading Boccaccio, but I do not know who they are.” Moreover, Cutting accused Smoot of having drawn attention to Lady Chatterley’s Lover by his attacks, suggesting that Smoot had thereby made the book a “classic.” This thrust brought Smoot back to his feet. “I resent the statement the Senator has just made that Lady Chatterley’s Lover is my favorite book!” he said. “I have not read it. It was so disgusting, so dirty and vile, that the reading of one page was enough for me … I’ve not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!” In support of Smoot’s position on censorship, Senator Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina rose to say that his priority was “the womanhood of America” and that “the virtue of one little 16-year-old girl is worth more to America than every book that ever came into it from