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‘Lolita’ and Censorship

The twentieth century’s two most infamous literary censorship cases – ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and ‘Ulysses’ were brought to trial ostensibly because of fears about the public’s exposure to obscene material. There were undoubtedly a number of other tacit reasons for prosecution bound up in the social, sexual and political economies of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the danger, in Britain and the US, was seen to lie in the textual representation of sexual acts thought to be either retrograde or simply the preserve of the private domain. In this context, Lolita would appear to offer the greater transgression because it represents not just a sexual taboo but takes as its theme a paedophilic relationship that was (and continues to be) illegal. However, Lolita was never banned in the United States and its publication in Britain was uncontested in 1959, three years prior to the ‘Trial of Lady Chatterley’. T...