What sex tells us about society: Sally Rooney’s Normal People and DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

When fictional sexual relationships cross the class divide, how do they reflect the wider social norms? Erica Wickerson compares two examples of old and new high literature

The 1981 film adaptation of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, starring Sylvia Kristel and Nicholas Clay (Rex)

It is more than 90 years since DH Lawrence’s famously outrageous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was first published and times have certainly changed since then. Nowadays stories full of explicit eroticism, affairs and female pleasure are no longer labelled “obscene”. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Costa Novel of the Year 2018, revisits many of the issues and the ostensible plot of Lady Chatterley. Both raise the question: what can sex tell us about society?

Normal People is basically a romance, but it’s a romance that crosses class boundaries. Rooney has been called “Salinger for the Snapchat generation”. But the plot of Normal People is also a 21st century Lady Chatterley’s Lover: a rich woman having an intense sexual relationship with a poor man, a man positioned in a kind of servile relation to her. Also, as in Lady Chatterley, a man shown to be thoughtful, intelligent, and educated; a meeting of minds as well as bodies. The love story allows escapism, the class story says a lot about the age of austerity, both in Ireland, where the novel is set, as well as in the UK.

Lawrence’s work was infamous for its shock value. It was first published in Italy in 1928 and only appeared officially in its uncensored version in the UK in 1960. Its publisher, Penguin Books, was taken to court under the Obscene Publications Act. This was an age on the brink of the pill, sexual liberation, feminism, and yet explicit descriptions of sex in fiction still caused public outrage. Penguin Books was acquitted because the defence proved the literary merit of Lawrence’s writing, which elevated the book from “obscenity” to “art”. But what’s the difference? Normal People and Lady Chatterley are a far cry from Fifty Shades of Grey (also about “transgressing” class boundaries). But why?