8 D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Dr. Suja Kurup

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 in Nottinghamshire, England where his father was a miner. He was the fourth child of his parents. His father Arthur Lawrence was an uninformed, uneducated coal-miner, who barely knew how to write his name. Lawrence’s mother Lydia belonged to a middle class family. Her father George Beardsall was an  engineer by profession. His experience growing up in a coal-mining family provided much  of the inspiration for Sons and Lovers. Lawrence had many affairs with women in his life, including a longstanding relationship with Jessie Chambers (on whom the character of  Miriam is based), an engagement to Louie Burrows, and an eventual elopement to Germany with Frieda  Weekley. Son and  Lovers was      written  in 1913, and   contains    many  autobiographical details.

Lawrence was first sent to the local Board School. Though not exceptionally brilliant, he was fairly good at studies. He won a scholarship and was then sent to the Nottingham High School. D.H. Lawrence had fervent love towards his mother and she was a constant source of inspiration for his creative ventures. She fostered his interest in writing and painting. He had complex feelings about his mother which have found a fine expression in his novels, especially Sons and Lovers.

The Age of D.H. Lawrence 

A writer is always the product of his age. Often, he does nothing but sensitively transcribe from life. He reacts to the social, political, economic and religious conditions of his times and his works are a direct expression of this reaction. It is just not possible to make an accurate assessment of any writer in isolation; he has to be related to his age.

The Major Novels of D.H. Lawrence 

The White Peacock 

The White Peacock, the first novel of S.H. Lawrence was published in 1911and notwithstanding some harsh reviews that appeared in the United States, it was fairly well received in the London literary circles. It is Autobiographical in style. Its story is narrated by a sensitive young man Cyril Beardsall. The setting in the novel is Lawrence’s own country, Eastwood. All the places are identifiable. The atmosphere is beautifully described.

The Trespasser 

The Trespasser published in 1912, it is not an original work. It is an adaptation of a novel by Helen Corke, a friend of his London school-teaching days. The theme of The Trespasser is ‘failure of contact, lack of warmth, between people’. It describes the frustrated love affair of a thirty-eight years old violinist Siegmund and Helena, a school teacher of twenty six, to whom he has taught music for some time.

Sons and Lovers 

Sons and Lovers, originally titled Paul Morel, was published in 1913. It is largely autobiographical. Mrs. Morel, a lady of cultivated and refined taste, married to a miner, Walter Morel, is very unhappy with her marriage. Her Sons grow up, she selects them as lovers. It is the most popular novel of Lawrence. Its plot is well- knit and is free from all superfluities. The characters are seen from the outside as well as emotionally realised from within. A very striking feature of the novel is a faithful description of life in the mining village of Bestwood.

The Rainbow

The Rainbow is supposed to be the least autobiographical of Lawrence’s major novels. It discusses at length how an individual can find fulfilment through marriage. In addition, it traces the altering relations between the generations and the impact of modern civilization on human sensibility. The Rainbow traces the history of three generations of the Brangwens living on the Marsh farm.

Women in Love 

Women in Love, published in 1920, a sequel to The Rainbow and is perhaps the best of his novels to understand his philosophy of life. Women in Love is a study of the lives of Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun in relation to the two men Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, who are attracted to them. Birkin, who represents Lawrence himself, is an integrated human being. He has polarised within himself the two centres of consciousness, the blood and the brain.

Aaron’s Rod 

Aaron’s Rod, published in 1922 comes immediately after the two masterpieces The Rainbow and Women in Love but is a rather a disappointing work. The story begins on the first Christmas eve after the First World War with Aaron, dissatisfied in marriage, leaving his wife and two children and going to London, where he becomes a flautist and meets Lilly, a school Master.

Summary of the novel Sons and Lovers

The first part of the novel focuses on Mrs. Morel and her unhappy marriage to a drinking miner. She has many arguments with her husband, some of which have painful results: sometimes she is locked out of the house and hit in the head with a drawer. Estranged from her husband, Mrs. Morel takes comfort in her four children. William, her oldest son, is her favourite. When William sickens and dies a few years later, she is crushed, not even noticing the rest of her children until she almost loses Paul, her second son, as well. From that point on, Paul becomes the focus of her life, and the two seem to live for each other.

Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, who lives on a farm not too far from the Morel family. They carry on a very intimate, but purely platonic, relationship for many years. Mrs. Morel does not approve of Miriam, and this may be the main reason that Paul does not marry her. He constantly wavers in his feelings toward her.

Paul meets Clara Dawes, a suffragette who is separated from her husband, through Miriam. As he becomes closer with Clara and they begin to discuss his relationship with Miriam, she tells him that he should consider consummating their love and he returns to Miriam to see how she feels.

Paul and Miriam sleep together and are briefly happy, but shortly afterward Paul decides that he does not want to marry Miriam, and so he breaks off with her. She still feels that his soul belongs to her, and, in part agrees reluctantly. He realizes that he loves his mother most, however.

After breaking off his relationship with Miriam, Paul begins to spend more time with Clara and they begin an extremely passionate affair. However, she does not want to divorce her husband Baxter, and so they can never be married. Paul’s mother falls ill and he devotes much of his time to caring for her. When she finally dies, he is broken-hearted and, after a final plea from Miriam, goes off alone at the end of the novel.

Gertrude Morel, mother of Paul, was not happy with her family life; she hates her husband Walter Morel. So, she shifts her affection on her sons – William, Paul and Arthur. At the beginning, she had a passion for her first son William. When he died of disease, she takes to Arthur. He joined in the army and settled there. Finally, the affection of Gertrude falls on Paul who lives with his mother. Because of his deepest love for his mother, Paul did not marry anybody. This misplaced affection led Paul to mental suffering at the end. All the novels of Lawrence are more or less autobiographical. But Sons and Lovers is almost a carbon copy of the author’s life. The principal characters of the novel and the central situations are drawn from Lawrence’s early life. Like Paul Morel’s father, Lawrence’s father was a miner, uncultured and drunk. Like Paul’s mother, Lawrence’s mother was her husband’s direct opposite.

Sons and Lovers: An Autobiographical Novel

Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel, Lawrence was a tortured soul for the full forty-five years of his life. Being highly sensitive, he reacted sharply, suffered intensely. His parents never enjoyed conjugal felicity. The home atmosphere was embittered by their endless bickerings. Repelled, by the coarse brutality of his father, Lawrence developed deep attachment with his mother. She, too, frustrated in her marriage, leaned heavily on her children, in particular on Lawrence, for emotional fulfilment and for the realisation of her ambitions. Gradually, there grew an unhealthy inter-dependence between Lawrence and his mother, that rendered him unfit to establish healthy emotional relationship with other women. Lawrence grew into a self-conscious neurotic. At the age of sixteen, he had met Jessie Chambers. He liked and loved her. But the dark shadow of his Oedipal relation with her mother not let him attain emotional fulfilment through Jessie. They hung on to each other for nearly ten years, but finally broke off. The entire experience had been so painful that in order to work out of his catharsis, Lawrence had to relive it imaginatively and express it in artistic terms. The result was Sons and Lovers.

Lawrence believes in the law of polarity. If two characters coming in contact with each other in any form of mutual relationship can achieve ‘polarisation’, they can achieve happiness. There should be no attempt to ‘dominate’ or ‘possess’ the other partner. For a successful human relationship, the ‘divine otherness’ of the others has to be recognised and respected. Over-dominance by one results in the loss of identity of the other. And if one’s very identity id threatened, it saps one’s vitality and poisons the whole relationship. Then there is nothing to salvage it from total destruction. Lawrence does not deny the conflict, nor does he recommend its cessation. He simply suggests that when two opposites come together, they should endeavour to realise a state, “where conflict in transcended, a state of still tension, life-sustaining, life-creating, forbidding forever the merging of opposites, maintaining both in a state of mutual complementary balance”.

In Sons and Lovers, Mrs Morel fails to maintain herself and her husband in a state of ‘mutual complementary balance’. Her middle class values, very trivial and hollow in themselves, make her contemptuous of her husband. Her love of religion, philosophy and politics is only an accessory to her ambition of attaining social recognition.

The mutual incompatibility of Mrs Morel and her husband not only destroys the prospects of their personal happiness but also vitiates the lives even of their children. They come to despise their father and develop an unhealthy attachment with their mother. Mrs Morel too, frustrated in her married life, makes husband substitutes of her sons. She is jealous of the girls who come to see William. She makes no attempt to hide her hostility towards Gyp, the girl with whom William gets infatuated in London. Her open condemnation of Gyp makes William feel guilty of his love. He suffers from an acute mental conflict, but this is a conflict that cannot be resolved. He has developed such a relation with his mother that it can neither release him nor offer him any emotional fulfilment. He gets weary of the world and ultimately dies.

The Oedipus Complex 

The strongest influence in the life of D.H. Lawrence was that of his mother. After disappointment in marriage, she had turned to her sons as her lovers. Her second son Arthur was her favourite and she had pinned all hopes of a respectable future life on him. But he died in London at a very young age, and in order to fill the emotional void caused by this ultimately death, she turned to David.

Sigmund Freud’s most celebrated theory of sexuality, the Oedipus complex, takes its name from the title character of the Greek play Oedipus Rex. D.H. Lawrence was aware of Freud’s theory, and Sons and Lovers famously uses the Oedipus complex as its base for exploring Paul’s relationship with his mother. Paul is hopelessly devoted to his mother, and that love often borders on romantic desire. Lawrence writes many scenes between the two that go beyond the bounds of conventional mother-son love, Paul murderously hates his father and often fantasizes about his death.

But Lawrence adds a twist to the Oedipus complex: Mrs. Morel is saddled with it as well. She desires both William and Paul in near-romantic ways, and she despises all their girlfriends. She, too, engages in transference, projecting her dissatisfaction with her marriage onto her smothering love for her sons. At the end of the novel, Paul takes a major step in releasing himself from his Oedipus complex. He intentionally overdoses his dying mother with morphia, an act that reduces her suffering but also subverts his Oedipal fate, since he does not kill his father, but his mother.

Lyrical Elements in Lawrence’s Treatment of Both Background and Personal Relationships

The chief characteristics of lyric are intensity of emotion, spontaneity of expression and fluency of movement. A lyrical poet is personally involved in his experience. There is such an intensity and urgency in his feeling that, like Shelley’s ‘Skylark’, he bursts into ‘unpremeditated’ art. He writes because he must; hence there is spontaneity and directness in his expression. And the fluency of his style is just overwhelming. Judged by these characteristics, Lawrence’s style can, with perfect justness, be described as lyrical. Whether he is describing the nature background or writing of men and women and their relationship with each other, he displays great urgency and intensity in his writing. The following description of the sunset bears ample testimony to Lawrence’s descriptive powers as well as the lyrical nature of his language:

Every open evening, the hills of Derbyshire were blazed over with red sunset Mrs Morel watched the sun sink from the glistening sky, leaving a soft flower-blue overhead while the Western space went  red, as if all the fire had swum down there, leaving the bell-cast flawless blue. The mountain-ash berries across the field stood fierily out from the dark leaves, for a moment.

Only a poet could have written of ‘a soft flower-blue overhead’ or ‘the bell-cast flawless blue’ or ‘mountain-ash berries across the field’ standing ‘fierily’ out.

Significance of the Title 

It is now a recognised fact that D.H. Lawrence himself was the victim of a deep- rooted Oedipus Complex. His mother Lydia Lawrence had a very strong hold on him, and he too treated his mother like a lover. It was she who gave him life-warmth. His orientation into life and literature also depended on the inspiration she gave him.

Gertrude Morel, a fanatically moral and religious woman, at twenty one, marries a warm, sensuous and indulgent miner, Walter Morel who had a rich, ringing laugh and a red, moist mouth. The first few months of their married life are extremely happy but gradually the feeble bond of their poetised passion snaps and Mrs Morel feels disgusted with her husband’s habitual drunkenness, his indulgent and shiftless ways and his temperamental dishonesty. As her eldest son. William also instinctively responds to her. Once, when he is seven, he brings for her, form the fair, the egg-cups with moss roses on them and presents them to her ‘almost like a lover’. When he brings home the first prizes he has won at school, she receives it almost ‘like a queen’. But she is so over-possessive that as William comes in contact with other girls and goes dancing with them, she finds it difficult to tolerate them. In fact she expresses her hostility towards them in rather crude and jarring terms. Later, when William falls in love with a passionate girl called Gyp and brings her home on a short visit, she is vehemently critical of her. Under her influence, William finds it difficult to strike a balanced emotional relationship with Gyp. Torn with conflict between his love for his love for his mother and his infatuation with Gyp, he suffers from terrible spiritual anguish and finally dies.

Sons and Lovers as a Psychological and Emotive Analysis 

Throughout his life Lawrence returned to his native Midlands for the themes of his novels and stories. But Sons and Lovers is unique, for it is completely founded in his own early experience in his native mining village of Eastwood. It is, therefore, completely rooted in the soul of his youth. The two main aspects that this novel has are the social study of the miners and the beginning of an exploration into the tangled and inexplicable relations between men and women.

Coming to the psychological and emotive analysis which the novel provides, we find that the principal figures involved in different, intricate relationships that form the basis of this analysis are Mrs Morel, Paul Morel, Miriam and Clara Dawes. Of the three women who seem to form a triangle, Mrs Morel is at the strongest end, and she exerts the greatest attraction on her second son, Paul Morel. The relation between them presents the Freudian Oedipus imbroglio in almost classic completeness.

Mrs Morel’s Mythicization and Paul’s Self-Narration

Mrs. Morel is central to Sons and Lovers and it is fascinating to observe how Lawrence mingles and presents the different facets of her personality ranging from the bright, young and delicate woman captured by the vibrant animal magnetism of her dark, earthy husband, to the unhappy wife, the woman trapped in an environment hostile to her impulses and wishes, the caring mother who also makes huge emotional demands on her sons, the constant sufferer and the relentless tormentor. The woman trapped in a marriage that fails to be what it should – the sacred union in the flesh – will become a familiar Lawrentian theme, but this trapped woman will never break free, will not even try to, except indirectly through her children, and so will remain deeply unhappy and consequently make all her nearest and dearest unhappy, despite her best intentions.

Nature and flowers

Sons and Lovers has a great deal of description of the natural environment. Often, the weather and environment reflect the characters’ emotions through the literary technique of pathetic fallacy. The description is frequently eroticized; both to indicate sexual energy and to slip pass the censors in Lawrence’s repressive time.

Lawrence’s characters also experience moments of transcendence while alone in nature, much as the Romantics did. More frequently, characters bond deeply while in nature.

Lawrence uses flowers throughout the novel to symbolize these deep connections. However, flowers are sometimes agents of division, as when Paul is repulsed by Miriam’s fawning behaviour towards the daffodil.

The novelist was a tortured soul throughout the full forty five years of his life, and what he suffered, and what he through and served under the stimulus of suffering can very well be guessed from a study of Sons and Lovers. The novel faithfully presents all his passions and frustrations. Owing to the mother fixation which was acute, the novelist could not make an agreeable and happy emotional adjustment with the other specimens of the fair sex. The soul-corroding experience has been transmuted into the novel. His intense suffering, his passions and emotions, his deprivations have found an artist and vivifying expression in the novel. The Oedipus complex with which was affected with in his private life in manifested in the novel also. The mother image or mother substitute marred his own life. Although he married Frieda Weekly after the demise of his mother, Lawrence was never happy, failed to derive a real complacency and satisfaction in his married life. Paul Morel, his prototype also suffered from similar emotional complexes. His relationship with both Miriam and Clara is inadequate.

Sons and Lovers is thus an imaginative representation of the facts of Lawrence’s life. Baker has observed that the novel “is of cardinal importance as a key to his intricate and often paradoxical nature.”

Reference

• http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/sonsandlovers
• http://www.gradesaver.com/sons-and-lovers/study-guide
• Worthen, John and Andrew Harrison, eds.   D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: A Casebook. Oxford U P, 2005.
• Lalal, D. S. A Critique of D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. New Delhi, IVY Publishing House. 2005. Print.