Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita (review)

Few among us have Elisabeth Ladenson's productive relationship with our e-mail programs. In her case, a warning issued by Eudora's "Moodwatch" sent the author on a quest to discover how obscene works became classics over the course of the twentieth century. In Dirt for Art's Sake, she follows the censorship histories of seven books (and their respective film adaptations) to argue that transformations from "dirt" to "art" gradually occurred as "art for art's sake" and "realism" acquired widespread cultural acceptance (xiii and xv). Indeed, subversion and transgression became positive values during the twentieth century (xx), which led to the production of such strange heroes as a Sade without sadism (235). The strength of Ladenson's study lies in her comparative project, which reveals new aspects of Western censorship by working across national boundaries. At the same time, the book relies heavily on secondary sources; those familiar with the subject will desire more original material about the cases treated here.

After a prologue that points out the many paradoxes of literary censorship, Ladenson's chapters focus on specific works: Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Joyce's Ulysses, Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Nabokov's Lolita. Other works by each author come under brief scrutiny, but for the most part, individual chapters trace the initial suppression of a text, film adaptations that also confronted censorship, the gradual "legalizing" of the work, and the heroizing of the author. For example, Ladenson analyzes the Bovary trial to demonstrate that both sides of the case made the same arguments about the social role of literature although they disagreed about the specific effect of Flaubert's book (21). This chapter also examines the changing fortunes of "realism," a pejorative term in Flaubert's day that came to acquire positive connotations (23). Films of Bovary reveal the contortions undergone by those who wanted to valorize Flaubert in a public forum: while such movies criticize the fact of the trial, they generally omit the same scenes and characters that the prosecution criticized in 1857. For example, Bovary's blind beggar does not appear in Vincente Minnelli's 1949 film, nor does the failed operation Charles Bovary performs on the club foot of the servant Hippolyte (44). These and other omitted scenes demonstrate the parallels between Flaubert's censors and the Hays Code: while the Bovary trial as such was bemoaned by an apparently enlightened twentieth-century filmmaker and audience, the reasons for suppressing the book remained current (45). In cases where later films did not "clean up" the image of a censored text, Ladenson looks at critical works that performed a similar function. Joyce's Ulysses, for example, was thoroughly purified by Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses (100). The key difference between Gilbert's study and Minnelli's film is that the "clean-up job effectively precedes the novel itself, rather than following it after a lapse of almost a century" (101).

Each chapter of Ladenson's study places the featured work in dialogue with the "dirt for art's sake" motif. While early chapters show authors positioning themselves in relationship to the concept of "l'art pour l'art"—a defense that was not nearly as available or popular as subsequent generations have assumed (20–22)—writers like Henry Miller rejected this argument. His Tropic, in spitting "on the notion of art for art's sake," showed "that this ideal had become not merely a cliché but state policy" (164).

Ladenson's argument is at its best when she teases out significant differences between specific examples. The transgressive texts of Flaubert and Baudelaire, for instance, share a great deal in the details of their trials, but Baudelaire's was the more difficult work to defend as "by virtue of its genre [it] had...