when Mellors meets Connie’s father, the latter merrily and laughingly uses taboo words to describe his daughter (Lawrence, 321). Lawrence does not merely subvert these norms - he transgresses them all by including them in the novel.

Does he subvert literary norms? In some ways he does - the frequent use of taboo words had never before appeared in a novel by a recognized writer; adultery had been portrayed before (but never so graphically) and almost always between social equals or between a man of higher class than the woman. But all this is subversion and transgression merely at the level of lexis. Take away the taboo words and the graphic sex and we are left with an ordinary state-of-the-nation novel imbued with Lawrentian symbolism and significance.

Clifford Chatterley, crippled and impotent, is the old order which must be swept away if England is to improve and be re-born; even the chopped down part of the wood could be taken to symbolize the war; the mines are the sterility of modern life to which Lawrence was so opposed; and Mellors is the natural man, a descendant of the medieval Green Man, “the mythic fertility figure who will effect, along classical lines of death and re-birth, Connie’s regeneration.” (Humma, 92) Mellors’ first appearance in front of Connie is described aggressively by Lawrence. He looks as if he is about “to attack” Connie and Clifford with “swift menace” and he seems to have appeared as a “sudden rush of threat out of nowhere” (Lawrence, 51) As Humma says, Mellors “represents a direct challenge to Clifford’s way of life and Connie’s sterile existence.” (Humma, 93) Wuchina comments that Clifford is A basically insecure man who relies on his inherited class position, and later his wife, as defences. Clifford is not a man of signal character; he depends on his material class appurtenances. (Wuchina, 56)

Therefore, in literary terms Lady Chatterley’s Lover is actually a very traditional, didactic novel which promotes Lawrence’s philosophy of the religion of the phallus. Hughes summarizes Lawrence’s position well:

Perceiving the life of modern man as one of alienation and conformity in a mechanized environment, Lawrence developed a profound, almost religious belief in the importance of spontaneous and natural feelings, especially the sex drive (Hughes, 28).

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Despite the histrionic vilification that Lady Chatterley’s Lover received it is actually, in literary terms, a very conventional text, except on the level of lexis and ideas. Coetzee argues that Lawrence does transgress taboos through the language and subject matter of his novel, but he concludes that “the very existence and power of the novel depends on the existence of those taboos.” (Coetzee, 62).

Nabokov could hardly be accused of didacticism in Lolita. I find it ironic that their publication dates are so close and both novels were accused of being pornographic, when in terms of tone and overall effect they are so dissimilar. Lolita transgresses only one social and sexual norm in that it describes the relationship between an adult man and a pre-pubescent girl. Humbert Humbert is a paedophile, but even that fact is put into context by the bland and utilitarian Foreword by John Ray which makes it clear that what follows are the words of a “panting maniac” (Nabokov, 7). Furthermore, Humbert is Lolita’s step-father which raises the traumatizing idea of incest. However, almost everything about Lolita is deeply subversive - even Ray’s foreword - because it is such a deeply comic novel. At the same time, it creates empathy for its narrator, the child-rapist, step-father of Dolores Haze. Even this creation of empathy for a character so inherently loathsome is not unusual in literature: watching Macbeth we might sympathize with a mass-murdering tyrant; Satan in Paradise Lost is often seen by readers as a more sympathetic character than God. At the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie and Mellors are about to leave England. At the end of Lolita Humbert Humbert has been brought to trial and executed. As a morality tale, its message could not be clearer, but, more importantly, on the penultimate page of the novel Humbert stands on a hill listening to the medley of sounds coming from a school playground in the valley below and he realizes “that the most hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (Nabokov, 324). The next paragraph starts “This then is my story. I have re-read it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.” (Nabokov, 324). Tony Moore in ‘Seeing Through Humbert’ (Zunshine, 91-115) says of this passage that it is

One of the most illuminating moments in the book, calling for a decisive focal adjustment through retrospective re-orientation. His language is tasteful and reticent, devoid of the Humbertian trademarks of parody, self-parody, cynicism, satire, disdain,

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