Introduction for Title/ Mother Son Relationship

“I wrote it again, pruning it and shaping it and filling it in. I tell you it has got form – form:
haven’t I made it patiently, out of sweat as well as blood… It is a great tragedy, and I tell you I
have written a great book.”

- October 30, 1912, Italy

D. H. Lawrence writes to editor and close friend Edward Garnett (husband of Constance)
regarding Paul Morel, a 400-page drama that, by the end of the year, would become Sons and
Lovers. At the time of the following letter, Lawrence was in Italy, having left England with
Frieda Weekley, the wife of his former university professor. Frieda was in an interesting position
to comment upon mothers and love. She brought to the project an appreciation of Freudian
psychoanalysis, which may have helped to convince Lawrence that what he was writing was not
simply a transformed version of his family history but an exploration of broader affective
dynamics akin to Oedipus Tyrannus or Hamlet. He came to understand the novel as ‘the tragedy
of thousands of young men in England’. In the course of this final rewriting, in October 1912,
Lawrence decided to rename the novel Sons and Lovers, shifting the emphasis away from his
main character to the timeless psychological dilemma his situation may be seen to reveal.

Introduction for Oedipus Complex

Oxford English Dictionary defines Oedipus complex as,

​feelings of sexual desire that a boy has for his mother and the jealous feelings towards his father

Characters of Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers share this outline. The novel has in its central
position Paul Morel who loves his mother more than anyone but that love generates jealousy for
his father Walter. Paul falls in love with women in whom he can see something of his mother but
never wants that love surpass his love for his mother. He often prays for the death of his own
father and later desires to kill Baxter Daws in whom he finds the reflection of his father.
Therefore the characters and the plot of Sons and Lovers cry for psychoanalysis but recent critics
like Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, have opined that Lawrence himself have
never read Interpretation of Dreams (1899) where Sigmund Freud for the first time introduced
the concept of Oedipus complex. This idea was completely inspired by Freida Weekely who was
an ardent devotee of Freud. However, this can never stop readers to interpret the evolution of the
plot and character in Freudian terms, which is starkly visible.
 Main Body

Gertrude Coppard, out of passion, gets married to Walter Morel. Clearly this does not last. The
wife came to know gradually that her husband differs a lot from how she had perceived him but
she has become a mother till then. The mother's disappointment in the father leads to the transfer
of her deepest feelings from him to her offspring, and particularly the male offspring, whom,
unconsciously, she begins to treat as substitutes for her husband. From this develops the
inhibitive influence - the excessive emotional demands interfering with the sons' own
development.

Lawrence is explicit about this transfer of feeling in Chapter 1. He sketches the process by which
Mrs Morel begins to find that her husband is a rather different man from the one she took him to
be. The birth of William is referred to in the following terms:

'His mother loved him passionately. He came just when her own bitterness of disillusion was
hardest to bear ... She made much of the child, and the father was jealous.'

To some extent such jealousy is a natural part of the change in a marriage which comes about
with the birth of a child, but what is ominous in this case is that the arrival of the baby coincides
with intense disappointment in the husband, with the result that:

'She turned to the child; she turned from the father'.

This shift of attention is dramatically illustrated by the hair-cutting episode in the first chapter.
As a reaction to the charming manner in which his wife dresses up the baby, and especially to her
delight in 'the twining wisps of hair clustering round his head', Morel cuts off all the child's curls.
This act of Morel comes from the resentment and jealousy towards the child that Mrs. Morel's
overattachmemt has caused but Lawrence writes this deed creates a permanent breach between
them.

As William, and more particularly Paul, grow up, this ambiguous quality in their relationship
with their mother becomes increasingly manifest. William's eager enjoyment of the fair is
incomplete without his mother; he wants to win the egg-cups with the moss-roses on them for
her sake, and when he gets her to accompany him he sticks close to her, 'bristling with a small
boy's pride of her'. When she leaves, he is torn between her and the wakes, split in his feelings as
he will be later. His first prize for running is given to her, and she receives it 'like a queen'.
However, when he goes dancing she is ridiculously haughty with the partners who come asking
after him:
 'I don't approve of the girls my son meets at dances'.

In the critical relationship between William and 'Gipsy' she plays no obviously hostile part. On
the contrary, it is Mrs Morel who defends the girl against the increasingly cutting remarks that
William makes about her; but the source of those remarks is, at least indirectly, the mother.

Paul's history is an extended parallel to William's and comes perilously near to producing the
same result. In him, too, we see the stimulating, yet also devastating effect of an exceptional
intimacy between mother and son. Their mutual fondness and sensitivity to each other's feelings
can be seen actively realised in some of the most lively scenes in the novel, including Mrs
Morel's return from Eastwood market with her purchases, their visit to Nottingham when Paul is
interviewed for the job at Jordan's and their later visit to Lincoln. But more even than with
William, there is something very like an erotic element in the mother's relationship with Paul.
When, for example, as a child he goes picking blackberries he also brings home a spray as a
special gift for her, which she receives with more than ordinary motherly affection:

'"Pretty!" she said, in a curious tone, of a woman accepting a love-token.'

When he is sick she comforts him, and helps to restore him to health by sleeping with him,

'Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved'.

There is also a corresponding hostility between father and son. When Paul is ill, his father's
presence, we are told, 'seemed to aggravate all his sick impatience'. In the battles between father
and mother he is uncritically on his mother's side; with childish extravagance he can even pray
that his father will die; and when the father is in hospital he takes pleasure in replacing him as
'the man of the house'. The quarrel which occurs in Chapter 8, and the events leading up to it,
again have sexual overtones. There has just been a flare-up of Mrs Morel's jealousy of Miriam,
followed by a very emotional scene in which the mother says:

'And I've never -you know, Paul - I've never had a husband- not really'.

After this she gives him 'a long, fervent kiss', and the son strokes her face, and kisses her, too.
This is the point at which the father returns, somewhat the worse for drink:

Morel came in, walking unevenly. His hat over one corner of his eye. He balanced in the
doorway. 'At your mischief again?' he said venomously."
The subsequent development of that relationship is mainly downhill. Mrs Morel continues to
have high hopes for Paul; and he, on his part, continues to love his mother, to draw sustenance
for his painting from her, and, as in the Lincoln excursion, to share new experiences with her.
But the latter, for example, is marred by Paul's greater awareness of his mother's age. 'Why can't
a man have a young mother?' he blurts out when he notices that she can hardly climb the hill up
to the cathedral.

Even when the fatal cancer takes hold; but now they serve only to prolong both her and Paul's
suffering. What was positive turns into something entirely negative, and, coupled with her rigidly
unforgiving attitude to her husband, it makes her death seem an appalling summation of a vitality
which has been blocked, perverted and ultimately converted into destruction.

Conclusion

It is the mother-son relationship that weaves the plot of Sons and Lovers. The Oedipal accent is
present in the title itself that Lawrence has unfolded critically in the novel through his characters.
The sons of Gertrude Morel turned out to be her lovers and at the same time the sons failed to be
lovers of other women when their mother was with them. This plan was made amply clear in a
letter Lawrence wrote to Garnett and we can say he has justly followed it in the novel.

“A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class and has no satisfaction in her
own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have
heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers-first the eldest, then the
second. The sons are urged into life by the reciprocal love of their mother-urged on and on.”