Dirt for Art's Sake

[Dave Monroe]

Ladenson, Elisabeth.  Dirt for Art's Sake:
   Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.
   Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006.

In Dirt for Art's Sake, Elisabeth Ladenson recounts
the most visible of modern obscenity trials involving
scandalous books and their authors. What, she asks, do
these often-colorful legal histories have to tell us
about the works themselves and about a changing
cultural climate that first treated them as filth and
later celebrated them as masterpieces? Ladenson's
narrative starts with Madame Bovary (Flaubert was
tried in France in 1857) and finishes with Fanny Hill
(written in the eighteenth century, put on trial in
the United States in 1966); she considers, along the
way, Les Fleurs du Mal, Ulysses, The Well of
Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer,
Lolita, and the works of the Marquis de Sade.

Over the course of roughly a century, Ladenson finds,
two ideas that had been circulating in the form of
avant-garde heresy gradually became accepted as
truisms, and eventually as grounds for legal defense.
The first is captured in the formula “art for art's
sake”-the notion that a work of art exists in a realm
independent of conventional morality. The second is
realism, vilified by its critics as “dirt for dirt's
sake.” In Ladenson's view, the truth of the matter is
closer to “dirt for art's sake”-the idea that the work
of art may legitimately include the representation of
all aspects of life, including the unpleasant and the
sordid. 

Ladenson also considers cinematic adaptations of these
novels, among them Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary,
Stanley Kubrick's Lolita and the 1997 remake directed
by Adrian Lyne, and various attempts to translate de
Sade's works and life into film, which faced similar
censorship travails. Written with a keen awareness of
ongoing debates about free speech, Dirt for Art's Sake
traces the legal and social acceptance of
controversial works with critical acumen and
delightful wit.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4585

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