The Beeb’s making a big boob in hiding Lady C’s naughty bits

The BBC is putting on its own new version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover next Sunday with Constance (Connie) Chatterley played by Holliday Grainger and the gamekeeper by the Game of Thrones star Richard Madden. In the words of Jed Mercurio, the director, they will be “putting Lady Chatterley at the centre” of the story.

The BBC is getting in early before Hollywood comes up with its blockbuster Lady Chatterley’s Lover, reportedly pitched to producers as “a cross between Downton Abbey and Fifty Shades of Grey”.

In addition, from October the National Theatre will be staging Husbands & Sons, a production of not just one Lawrence play but three all together in one evening. The theatre is emphasising that its production will focus on “the women of the village, wives and mothers” as they “struggle to hold their families and their own souls together in the shadow of the great Brinsley pit”. In the words of Lawrence’s wonderful, frighteningly powerful matriarch Mrs Gascoigne — about her own husband and sons in his play The Daughter-in-Law — “Children they are, these men.” The men are just damaged weaklings who play around the Gascoigne feet.

What we are now seeing is a long-overdue realisation that Lawrence’s writing about women is some of the strongest in the early 20th century. This year there was a review of Sons and Lovers in this newspaper that emphasised above all Lawrence’s ability to describe “an emotional conflict so succinctly that it almost takes your breath away”. That is the side of Lawrence in which women rejoice: his ability to concentrate on and articulate what actually happens within us and between us. And if Lawrence’s men regularly insist, his women almost always fight back.

So it’s not actually surprising in this new climate that Lawrence is also being rediscovered as an exciting and exceptional writer about women. Of his novels, a woman is the central character in five (The Trespasser, The Rainbow, Women in Love, The Lost Girl and The Plumed Serpent) and a woman is also being made the central character of a sixth, Lady Chatterley.

Although Lawrence has often been regarded as an irretrievably male writer, his male characters are always uncertain and troubled behind their confident, sometimes domineering exteriors. Think of Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, terminally unable to escape his mother’s influence; or Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, out-manoeuvred by Hermione Roddice; or even Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley, unable to get over the trauma of his own first marriage and incapable of saying to Connie, “I love you”, even though he does.

Millett, like others, made the classic mistake of thinking that anything assertive that a fictional character says or does is precisely what the author also thinks or wants to assert. In fact, as more than one feminist critic has pointed out, Lawrence created very well the kinds of male inadequacy from which Mellors suffers and the ways in which he desperately attempts to compensate for them.

Lawrence courted controversy because throughout his writing career he insisted on exploring the sexual and emotional webs that men and women weave around each other; and in Lady Chatterley he also left himself open to misrepresentation as a pornographer. But his Lady Chatterley novels — for my money, the best is the second version — were among his most daring attempts to show what people really go through in a relationship.

Unfortunately, in the process of reviving Lawrence the BBC seems in danger of sugar-coating him. Just because we are finally realising there is more to Lawrence than misogyny and male assertiveness, that does not mean we are at liberty to emasculate his work or take out the shock factor.

Mercurio has stated that the new version will not have any “explicit nude scenes” and Lawrence’s four-letter words will not feature because they are “not groundbreaking any more”. The text has also been rewritten to make Connie “a much more thinking person, much more decisive”, while her war-damaged husband, Clifford, is going to be seen with the sympathy we know should be extended to the wounded.

Marina Hands in the sex-centred 2006 French film of the novel

Trying to make Lawrence politically correct, though, is to miss the point. His Clifford is not only unfeeling but genuinely nasty, and his Connie Chatterley is an entirely modern woman who, after teenage love affairs and an initially happy marriage, decides to live her own sexual and emotional life discreetly alongside her unhappy marriage until she has to leave after Clifford turns on her.

Remarkably, all this was written in the early 1920s. Connie is already portrayed as a thinking woman who never lacks decisiveness. Her strong-mindedness does not need to be artificially accentuated.

If the BBC really is going to show a non-shocking Lady Chatterley, it is making a terrible mistake. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as Lawrence himself said, is “frankly a novel about sex, direct sex”. The 2006 French film of the book, directed by Pascale Ferran, with Marina Hands and Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, was (among its many virtues) about sex; sex taking place in real time, too, making it an especially long, drawn-out, fumbling and awkward business. Perfectly right. Gamekeepers are not used to ladies of the manor, and vice versa (especially vice versa, as it turns out).

To emasculate Lawrence’s work by turning it into something lesser, for reasons of political correctness and the etiquette of television, would be a small act of cultural vandalism. It is not often we might look to a new Hollywood adaptation for a more accurate version of a book, but in this case we may have to: one with lashings of sex (not only in the Fifty Shades sense) and a genuinely shocking version of a failing marriage and the acquisition of an inappropriate but exciting lover. For Lady C’s sake, we can only hope that is the case.

John Worthen has written biographies of DH Lawrence, Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth