Paper 4, Module 7: Text

Role Name Affiliation

Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun Mukherjee University of Hyderabad

Paper Coordinator Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of

Balagovindan Kerala

Content Writer/Author Dr. Suja Kurup Institute of English, University of

(CW) Kerala

Content Reviewer (CR) Dr. Jameela Begum Former Head & Professor, Institute

of English, University of Kerala

Language Editor (LE) Prof. Hariharan Institute of English, University of

Balagovindan Kerala
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence

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. Sons 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 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.

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.

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.

E. Baker has observed that the novel “is of cardinal importance as a key to his intricate and

often paradoxical nature.”