Popular Culture
Lawrence wanted his writing to be widely read, but he also wanted it to be an antidote to the problems he thought were exacerbated by popular culture. This chapter examines cinema in The Lost Girl (1920) and music in St. Mawr (1925), where Lawrence's ideas about the harmful effects of popular culture share much with T. W. Adorno’s arguments about how repetitive popular cultural forms constrain critical thinking and the desire for social change. Pornography and Obscenity (1929) contains Lawrence's most direct attack on popular culture, which he claims transmits repressive ideas about sex to the public and limits people’s capacities for independent thought. In the aftermath of the censorship of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929), Pornography and Obscenity asks its readers to engage in dialectical thinking: could things that are sanctioned and approved - like popular culture - in fact be harmful?