Disability Culture Watch

When I was 13 or so, I would occasionally sneak my mother’s copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover down from a high shelf in her room, and take it to my favorite spot - the empty bathtub - the only place I felt safe from adult intrusion. I read selectively - really only the dirty parts and even more fervently all the love stuff that surrounded those torrid passages.

One of the premises of the book, published in 1928, is that Lady Chatterley’s life is dry and stultifying not only because of the claustrophobic nature of her privileged life, but because her husband, disabled as a result of an injury incurred in World War I, is supposedly incapable of being her lover. We are led to believe that her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper.

I’ve read five or six reviews of the recently released French film, Lady Chatterley. They all either ignore the figure of Lord Chatterley (The New York Times), or seem to accept uncritically that his injury obliterates his sexuality. The Village Voice says of the film’s Lord Chatterley that he is “Unmanned by his war injuries” and Lady Chatterley is “His love-starved wife.”

By the time I finally read through Lady Chatterley’s Lover I was in college, and six or seven years into the disability game. I was trying to find my way both in the intimate private sphere, and the public arena. I was managing, with considerable struggle, to be a socially and sexually active disabled woman. Yet my public persona was always a bit defensive - sure as I was that the world would not read me as a sexually viable being.

In the full reading of the book, I was torn between once again identifying with Lady Chatterley and her magnificent opening up, and identifying with Lord Chatterley, a wheelchair user like myself. Lawrence’s constricted vision of this man made him seem incapable of lust and abandon. It hurt and angered me to read Lawrence’s depiction of Lord Chatterley’s “impotence” juxtaposed time and again against the gamekeeper’s virility and power. The hurt seeped into my private struggles, and I worked hard to ward off the feeling that I was sexually impotent and inept.

While I understood theoretically that it was wrong to reduce sexuality to the mechanics of erection (and the more difficult to articulate female equivalent), I was still afraid that Lawrence might be right - that full physical functioning was the only way to be a fully sexual being. Moreover, the book was a reminder that disability is perpetually linked to asexuality in the public imagination. No matter how well I could manage to escape the shame of this notion in my private life, I was convinced, and still am to an extent, that other readers (and filmgoers) would see Lord Chatterley, and me by extension, as sexually unfit. Certainly, this is a premise that I had accepted uncritically as a non-disabled reader (albeit an adolescent reader).

The gamekeeper, Lawrence would have us believe, had what it took to free Constance from her dreary existence. But even more grandly, the lustiness and freedom embodied in this man’s working class, hyper-masculine, able-bodied persona, could free the nation (Britain) from its conventions, constrictions and constraints.

We can never underestimate the power of representation to work its way into our deepest feelings, as well as insinuate itself into the public consciousness. I don’t know at this point whether the current film, Lady Chatterley, perpetuates these tired and problematic stereotypes, or just several journalists reviewing the film. I can’t bring myself to see it.

Why does this matter now? Because veterans are coming back from Iraq, who, like the fictitious Lord Chatterley, have been wounded in the war. There are thousands of men and women with injuries that may affect genital and reproductive functioning. The message that they, and all the rest of us, need to hear is that sexuality is a great big grand thing that lives in all of us. It is not something that can be reduced to parts. Pleasure, love, tenderness, lust, surprise - it’s all there, it just may take some time to rediscover.

I am fond of calling disabled people The Mothers of Invention. Unfortunately, too many journalists, playwrights, filmmakers, and novelists are the Fathers of Convention.