English Language and Literature

Vol. 58 No. 3 (2012) 395-411

D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and

Sons and Lovers

Haeryung Yoon

〔Mrs. Morel〕said, “and wonderfully

“The world is a wonderful place,’’ she
beautiful.” (Sons and Lovers, 154)1

I
Despite D. H. Lawrence’s declining literary position and influence
these days, especially in the academia, he has continued to be claimed as
one of the most original and prophetic writers who have ever existed in
world literature.2 To take a few examples, D. H. Lawrence is, as well
known, a major writer in the Leavisean “Great Tradition” along with
such novelists as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph
Conrad. In the midst of all those attacks done on Lawrence in the name
of conventional morality, F. R. Leavis contends that Lawrence has great-
ly contributed to shaping the beautiful tradition of English mentality and
sensibility through his unique, literary vision that could have been mis-
understood and misinterpreted by immature, unliterary minds. E. M.
Forster in Aspects of the Novel also includes D. H. Lawrence as a major
writer on his “list of prophetic singers,” along with such writers as
Dostoevsky, Melville and Emily Brontë. As for Lawrence’s creative
process of prophetic songs, Forster thus explains:
D. H. Lawrence can describe a field of grass and flower or entrance into
Freemantle. Little things in the foreground seem to be all that the prophet

* This research is financially supported by Gachon University (2012-R096).

1
The words in each bracket in this paper are all mine supplemented for better
understanding. And hereafter, all the quotations of the text will be based on
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (Penguin Books, 1948).
2
Harold Bloom, one of the most important critics on Lawrence, notes him as
“an absurdly neglected writer, because of a feminist crusade that has largely
exiled him from the academies of the English-speaking world” (Novelists and
Novels, 18).
396 Haeryung Yoon

cares about at moments—he sits down with them so quiet and busy, like a
child between two romps. (124)

Moreover, for Forster, Lawrence is even “the only prophetic novelist

writing today,” “all the rest” being at best “fantasists or preachers.” As
“the only living novelist,” Lawrence creates the song that predominates
with its “rapt bardic quality.” According to Forster’s vision of “the
prophet,” she or he is someone who is “irradiating nature from within, so
that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could
not otherwise be obtained” (130-31). Aldous Huxley is also an important
critic in D. H. Lawrence’s canon, who sharply discriminates Lawrence’s
unique talent from other ordinary writers.’ Huxley, an original intelli-
gence himself, praises Lawrence as, among other things, “someone with
a gift for sensing the mystery of otherness” (10). In other words,
Lawrence’s gift is “an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth
called ‘unknown modes of being’” (7). In a quite recent book published
in 2005, Novelists and Novels, Harold Bloom also pays great attention to
what D. H. Lawrence achieved in literature. According to the master-crit-
ic, there are “only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature” and
they are “aesthetic splendor, cognitive power and wisdom” (13). Lawrence
is, for Bloom, a rare novelist satisfying all these criteria for imaginative
genius. Bloom also contends that Lawrence’s epiphanies revealing all
these three merits are unique and original, above all, in that they are “times
when elemental forces break through the surfaces of existence” (298).
Thus, apart from personal preference or distaste for Lawrence, it would
be hard to deny that he still needs our attention, in his original literary
mode and emphasis on the possibility of living, despite his occasional,
stylistic slips or narcissistic, male-centered philosophy. Among other
things, Lawrence strikes one with his special emphasis on the importance
of the novel. As to his being primarily a novelist, he once wrote: “I con-
sider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the
poet . . .” (Phoenix 535). He also said that “the novel is the highest form
of human expression so far attained” (Phoenix II 416). According to
Lawrence, the novel is, of all the art forms, the most perfect medium
through which man and life can be understood and, therefore, can be
given direction for life.3 Lawrence maintains that writers necessarily

3
One of the major American philosophers, Richard Rorty also, in his book,
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, argues that literature, especially, the novel
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 397

should come up with their new visions, new interpretations of the world
and through literature should convey “the passionate and emotional reac-
tions which are at the root of all〔 human〕thought” (Phoenix 350).
Although it is known that Lawrence made various comments on his
vision of the novel and of the novelist’s mission throughout his numerous
essays, especially his essays in Phoenix and Phoenix II, reality is that up
until now almost no essay on Lawrence’s novels has been written mainly
to explicate how his theory of the novel is reflected in his individual nov-
els. Accordingly, this paper aims to revisit with such a critical purpose
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the first of the so-called Lawrencean
Trilogy, including The Rainbow and Women in Love.

II
In Lawrence’s Phoenix II he diagnoses these three elements as “the
great merits of the novel”: “quick”; “interrelated in all parts, vitally,
organically”; and “honourable” (422-23). First, being “quick” in the novel
means that Lawrence values energy, vitality, in other words, blood phi-
losophy inherent in great novels and consequently, adores “man alive” as
opposed to “man dead inside.” Being a great prophetic singer, Lawrence,
as seen through his essays on human civilization, laments over, above all,
what he thinks is the collapse of the modern psychology. In many places
of Phoenix he points out that modern man has tamed his feelings and
impulses and in return has only increased his self-consciousness. Now
the mind didactically controls feelings and impulses. As a result, ironi-
cally enough, modern man has lost his capacity for command and his
whole direction at all. Thus, Lawrence is a great believer in the positive
force of the mysterious, “natural” man within man. “When a man
remains a man, a true human individual,” he says, “there is at the core of
him a certain innocence or naivete which defies all analysis . . .” (PX
540).4 Unless man proceeds to connect himself up with his own primeval
sources, he will only degenerate (PX 758). For Lawrence, it is right here,
the sensual, instinctive and intuitive body in man where God resides.

takes the most important position in change of the heart and the improvement of
society, possibly of all sciences and arts. According to Rorty, the best medium
for this purpose that has ever existed is the novel where readers get emotionally
involved in the pain of others, in suffering humanity.
4
Hereafter, Phoenix will be abridged as PX and Phoenix II as PX II..
398 Haeryung Yoon

“Religious faculty,” for him, only means “the inward worship of the cre-
ative life-mystery” (PX 608). Therefore, to educate ourselves in creative
feelings inside, Lawrence contends, it is the “real” novel that we should
turn to, where we can listen to “the dark cries in our body,” the “low,
calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their
destiny” (PX 759-60). In the novel characters do nothing but “live.” 5
According to Lawrence, in a great novel the hero is not any of the char-
acters, but “some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all” (PX
419). Lawrence interprets “character” only as “the flame of a man,”
which changes according to changing circumstances, while changing
itself continually, yet remaining as one single, separate being (PX II 423).
Consequently, in a real novel, Lawrence suggests, there are no such
things as villain-figures or angel-figures. The novel only helps us distin-
guish between man alive and dead man in life, the quick and the dead
(PX 537; PX II 419). For Lawrence the novel should be a kind of descen-
dent journey into the natural, organic man more than anything else. But
contemporary novels tend to put much less emphasis on man as human
flesh than on man as a social being. Lawrence laments that one of the
fatal, modern changes is the collapse from the psychology of the free
human individual into the psychology of the social being (PX 540). The
dominant note of the modern novel is, Lawrence criticizes, “the repul-
siveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh” (PX 270).
Good literature should provide readers with “physical feeling for life”
more than anything else. In modern novels, however, there is no “physi-
cal sympathetic flow,” which naturally connects a human being to anoth-
er human being. And this is the reason why modern novels, despite their
increasing stresses on man’s benevolence and social belief, only fail and
moreover, bring about the ironic result of stressing man’s repulsiveness
to man (PX 270). In his famous foreword to Women in Love, Lawrence
thus sums up his idea of “man alive”:

The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and
aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate which is our business to
fulfil. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a
false fate. (7-8)

5
George A. Panichas posits that Lawrence’s adoration of “everlasting wonder
in things” and of living to the full has to do with Greek influence (338, 346-47).
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 399

In Sons and Lovers the hero Paul Morel represents “the creative, spon-
taneous soul” as contrasted with his lover Miriam Leivers (although this
theme is to be extended further in Lawrence’s later novels like The
Rainbow and Women in Love). Being Lawrence’s first attempt of an auto-
biographical hero (although the degree is still debatable), Paul in the
novel strikes one with being faithful to, above all, his passionate feelings
and sensibilities. Like other Modernist heroes, he just observes life and
the world and copes with what has happened to him intuitively and vital-
ly. Of course, in the first part of Sons and Lovers, where the focus is
mainly on family predicament with the structure of potential love-trian-
gle among the hero, his mother and father, this theme—Paul as an
embodiment of the Lawrencean vision of vital humanity, is hidden under
the surface of the novel’s main plot.6 But by and large, the rest of the
novel most concerns how the young hero confronts things happening
around him and despite all these, never stops appreciating all those little
things and every moment in the dark, mysterious universe. In the novel
nothing significant enough ever happens in terms of conventional plot.
The novel starts with the history of Paul’s birth and ends with his deter-
mination to leave his place after his mother’s death. But the greatness of
the novel lies in that every part in the novel is connected so organically
and aesthetically that readers could be easily indulged in the novelistic
world in spite of its lack of conventional plot. The novel revolves around
the hero as Lawrence’s embodiment of “man alive” in the process of
mystic growth toward a potential artist like the novelist himself.7 In a
sense the novel is mainly about a young man’s struggle with his own
soul, independently from what has been happening around him. In his
letters, Lawrence keeps saying about the importance of soul:

One has a certain inviolable in one’s soul (Selected Letters 103)

One should stick by one’s own soul, and by nothing else. In one’s own soul,
one knows the truth from the untruth, and life and death. And if one betrays

6
For this reason, some critics tend to see the novel as more social than aes-
thetical in Lawrence’s canon. For example, Harold Bloom in Novelists and
Novels interprets the novel as rather unique in its potential indictment of socio-
economic inequality—as at least, the most social novel in Lawrence’s canon. (298)
7
Many critics have agreed on this point, including Dr. Phil Joffe, who inter-
prets Sons and Lovers as “Lawrence’s affirmative portrait of the questioning
artist as he seeks to enlarge the possibilities available to the self” (61).
400 Haeryung Yoon

one’s own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors . . . (Selected Letters

115).

In the novel Paul often comments about the relationship between

“one’s own soul-knowledge” and possibility of living. To take an exam-
ple, Paul thus say to his soul-mate, his mother:

‘So long as life’s full, it doesn’t matter whether it’s happy or not. . . . So
long as you don’t feel life’s paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn’t
matter, happiness or unhappiness.’ (315)

Living to the full by “soul-knowledge” is for the hero the most impor-
tant business, other things being just inessential and artificial. And this is
the reason why the novel often seems to be so foreign and the hero so
incomprehensible. Frank Kermode comments that the novel is “so
unselfish and unsentimental” (24) whereas Harold Bloom interprets as
“the principal defeat of Sons and Lovers” Paul’s character that does not
always seem “energetic or sympathetic enough to sustain our interest”
(297).
In the novel Miriam Leivers is portrayed as Lawrence’s target of subtle
criticism. Throughout the novel Paul feels Miriam not so much as a lover
of his wish, but rather as his “conscience,” his better, higher part that,
however, occupies only one quarter of himself. Paul thus explains his
double, ambiguous and even inhuman treatment of her:

She was his conscience; and he felt, somehow he had got a conscience that
was too much for him. He could not leave her, because in one way she did
hold the best of him. He could not stay with her because she did not take
the rest of him, which was three-quarters. So he chafed himself into raw-
ness over her. (307)

At least she gave no living warmth. She was never alive, and giving off life.
Looking for her was like looking for something which did not exist. She
was only his conscience, not his mate. (357)

In Lawrence’s philosophy the word “conscience” is not used as a very

positive meaning as usual. The world of “conscience” encodes, for him,
something contrasted with the dark, unconscious and impersonal world
he adores throughout. “Conscience” rather symbolizes the “conscious”
life of human civilization that he thinks is the source of modern man’s
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 401

unhappiness. In his letter he makes a vehement comment on modern civi-

lization:

. . . the conscious life . . . is no more than a masquerade of death: there is a

living unconscious life. If only we would shut our eyes; if only we were all
struck blind, and things vanished from our sight, we should marvel that we
had fought and lived for shallow, visionary, peripheral nothingness. We
should find reality in the darkness. (91)8

In Sons and Lovers, Miriam represents “the conscious life” that is

deceptive, unrealistic and narcissistic as opposed to the energetic, real
and impersonal world that Paul represents. In many places of the novel
Lawrence lets the reader glimpse Miriam’s character in her attitude
toward her lover, sex and religion. First, in the novel Miriam is seen to
make Paul retreat physically and keep distance from her unconsciously.
“With her” he constantly feels as if “bound up inside himself” (340) and
he “can’t physically〔love her〕 any more than〔he〕 can fly up like a sky-
lark. . .” (272). Her attitude toward sex is an obvious sample of
Lawrence’s denunciation of Victorian notion of sexuality, which he
thinks is too personal, artificial, and even hypocritical. For Miriam, phys-
ical love is nothing any more than a ritual of spiritual love, only some-
thing that she should go through involuntarily. In their sex-scene of the
novel she is seen to sacrifice her body for her lover: “She only realized
that she was doing something for him” (353-54). Sex, is for her just “one
thing in marriage that is always dreadful but 〔that we〕have to bear” as
her mother has kept saying to her (355). Moreover, Miriam always
dichotomizes spirit and body, “higher” and “lower” things in man. To test
Paul’s sexual vulnerability, in the scene of their stay at Strelley Mill
Farm, Miriam tries to give him a chance to see Clara Dawes there, to
whom she knows he feels sexually attracted. For Miriam, his giving in to
Clara the object of his sexual desire only means his choosing the “lesser”
side. Lastly and most importantly, Miriam is characterized as deeply reli-
gious in the sense of conventional Christianity. She believes that “one
should be religious in everything, have God, whatever God might be,
present in everything” (307). Accordingly, her routines are all colored
with religious spirit, even her attitude toward nature like flowers is seen

8
This part reminds the reader of Shakespeare, who lamented that “our little
life is rounded with a sleep” (The Tempest).
402 Haeryung Yoon

as sensual and affectionate only in a religious way, which naturally

annoys Paul throughout the novel (214; 267-68). Christian sacrifice and
renunciation are, among other things, the values that Miriam adores
most. Lawrence thus describes her:

. . . in sacrifice she was proud, in renunciation she was strong for she did
not trust herself to support everyday life. She was prepared for the big
things and the deep things, like tragedy. It was the sufficiency of the small
day-life she could not trust. (265)

For Paul, she reminds of “Mary Queen of Scots” and for readers, she is
Lawrence’s satirical version of Victorian heroines like Dorothea or
Maggie in George Eliot’s novels. Paul, Lawrence’s obvious mouthpiece
here, criticizes Miriam’s religion and values in many different terms.
Paul regards her life-attitude as “negative” in essence (268) and her soul
as of “self-mistrust” (271). About Miriam’s religion, Paul thus talks back:

‘It’s not religious to be religious. . . . I reckon a crow is religious when it

sails across the sky. But it only does it because it feels itself carried to
where it’s going, not because it thinks it is being eternal.’ (307)

Thus, Lawrence’s characterizations of the hero and the heroine in Sons

and Lovers can be interpreted, among other things, as an artistic medium to
convey his life-philosophy and to perform the sacred mission of the novelist.

III
The second point that Lawrence made among the three merits of great
novels is that the novel should be “interrelated in all parts, vitally and
organically.” In Sons and Lovers nothing very significant in terms of
conventional plot happens, the novel is only connected with fragments of
small episodes and images although “the novel has force of narrative” as
Harold Bloom well observes (298). In the novel all the major symbols of
nature such as the moon, flowers, darkness and night are marvellously
orchestrated and are treated as more important, or at least as important as
human life. In other words all the impersonal presences and forces exist-
ing in the universe are paralleled with human psychology, quite unlike
such as Romantic Fallacy where nature is rather predominantly romanti-
cized. As Dorothy Van Ghent early observed, among all English novel-
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 403

ists Hardy and Lawrence probably have “the most faithful touch for the
things of nature and the greatest evocative genius in bringing them
before the imagination.” Moreover, Lawrence’s touch of nature is “multi-
ple rather than dual,” everything having its own separate otherness and
all these being connected creatively for each other (12-13).
The major characters in Sons and Lovers are uncommonly sensitive
about the elements of nature around and experience creative communion
with nature. To take some examples, for Mrs. Morel, nature, especially
flowers, is a constant source of solace in the middle of all those life-
struggles, Whenever she has had a violent fight with her husband, she
gets relieved and refreshed spiritually and gets back to herself again after
she has been in nature. In the great fight-scene with her husband, she
feels mysterious peace in the midst of the magnificent moon and night
and white lilies and rosebush that have suddenly loomed in her garden
(34-35). Also, in the text what she has wished most to have is “a new
garden with flowers” (202-30). And the scene of the path to Willey Farm,
where Mrs. Morel and her son Paul feel great ecstasy, enjoying all those
beauties of nature (154-55, 160), is in the novel portrayed as a little cli-
max, a moment of Lawrencean epiphany, which balances the novel’s ten-
sion throughout and reminds the reader of the “Rananim” world.9 Miriam
is also described as a child of nature. Her friend, companion and lover
are not human relations, but such things as “the declining sun,” “the
dusky, cold hedgerows” or “some red leaves” (205). Her intimacy with
Paul is most possible in the landscape of nature. It is Paul in nature that
Miriam’s soul most desires him and shares his loneliness. In Lawrence
love without nature is almost unplausible, nature always being another
partner for people in love.
For the hero Paul, too, nature is the center of his life and the great
source of his imagination and wisdom. Especially, the image of night and
darkness, as the symbol of being, death and immortality, is what Paul
most identifies with himself throughout the novel. For him, night is both
a terrifying and comforting presence (510) and darkness and night are
eventually “the realist thing” (499) and are the closest to truth that has
ever been revealed to humans. Lawrence thus writes,

To him now, life seemed a shadow, day a white shadow; night and death,

9
“Rananim” means a Lawrencean version of imaginary utopia as contrasted
with barren modern civilization.
404 Haeryung Yoon

and stillness, and inaction, this seemed like being. To be alive, to be urgent
and insistent—that was not-to-be. The highest of all was to melt out into
the darkness and sway there, identified with the great Being. (350)

For Paul, in a piece of painting, too, what interests him is “the shimmer-
ing protoplasm” that is “real living” rather than “the stiffness of the shape”
that is only “a dead crust” (189). And also, this is the reason why, after
having tasted the beauty of the night—the moon, the scent of lily and dark-
ness, Paul finally determines to “break off with Miriam” as his mother
wishes (358-59). And it is only through night and darkness that in the end
Paul comes to understand the reality of his mother’s death and decides to
go out into the world—into the world of night and darkness (510-11).
Thus, in Sons and Lovers, image and symbol play a far more important
role than plot or characterization does and as many critics also have
observed, image and symbol are alternatively objective correlatives for
concrete idea. For example, Diane S. Bonds observes that in the novel
“the concrete seems to absorb the abstract, and the abstract seems to
absorb the concrete” (91). More recently, Jack Stewart in analyzing
Lawrence’s writing style, also makes a similar point:

Lawrence’s expressive writing . . . reflects the imagistic movement of his

thought, in an alternating rhythm of a-b-a-b-a/b-a/b〉n,, where a stands
for abstract idea, b for concrete image, and n, for epiphany. (165-66)

In Lawrence an abstract idea is explained through a concrete image and

then the idea and the image merge into an aesthetic experience—into a
Lawrencean epiphany. Accordingly, Lawrence’s novels are generally
unplanned and unpredictable as he keeps saying, “never trust the artist,
trust the tale.”

IV
The third prerequisite to become a great novel for Lawrence is to be
“honourable” in itself. In the history of literature Lawrence is remem-
bered as, among other things, a vehement critic of Victorian morality and
as a person who definitely defines morality, being “honourable” in the
way that he thinks it should be, and explicates how the novel should per-
form its sacred mission to distinguish between the moral and the immoral
in a totally new way. In numerous places of his Phoenix and Phoenix II,
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 405

especially, Lawrence makes diverse comments on morality in his sense

and the novel’s mission related to this theme. For Lawrence, idealism or
absolute values is meaningless. For him, everything is relative, changing
according to time, place or circumstance. For example, morality is sim-
ply the delicate, trembling balance between man and his circumambient
universe (PX 528). “Moral character” only means, Lawrence suggests, “a
good sense of proportion, a knowledge of the relative effects of certain
acts or influences, and desire to use that knowledge for the promoting of
happiness” (PX II 221). Accordingly, everything is in constant flux so
that things can be true or right only in their own living relatedness to
their own circumambient universe. “Relatedness” is really one of the
key-words in understanding Lawrence’s vision. For him, things can be
explained only in terms of relatedness. Lawrence defines “the business of
art” as “to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient uni-
verse at the living moment” (PX 527). And “of all the art forms, it is only
in the novel that the subtle balance of the relation is given full play.”
“The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow
of our living relationships” (PX 532). A great novelist always comes up,
Lawrence contends, with new relationships between man and the uni-
verse. According to Lawrence, the novel should be essentially future-ori-
ented, it should give readers a new world, a new mode of human exis-
tence (PX 520). And this new relationship between man and the universe,
only as long as it is a true and vivid relationship, can be counted as a new
morality. According to Lawrence, human life consists in achieving this
pure relationship between self and the living universe, which eventually
leads to the vision of eternity and perfection (PX 528).
Thus, “the beauty of the novel” is created, Lawrence argues, when
everything it is seen true in its own relationship (PX II 422). A true nov-
elist should not attempt to go any further than this aim. If a novelist tries
to nail things down in his novel out of his predilection for a special emo-
tion, or tries to balance the novel according to his own conception of
morality or view of life, the novel becomes unnatural, ugly, and even
immoral. No emotion is supreme, or exclusively worth living for all
emotions only go to achieving of a living relationship (PX 529). And
only in the novel, he says, can the trembling instability of the balance of
the relationship be presented and preserved to the end, unlike in religion
or science, which aims to get a stable equilibrium eventually. For
Lawrence, in this sense “the novel is the highest example of subtle inter-
relatedness that man has discovered” (PX 528). Of course, a novelist can
 406 Haeryung Yoon

put his metaphysic or philosophy into his work, but only under the condi-
tion that it will not be used for didactic purpose or interfere with the
work itself. And the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic pur-
pose beyond the artist’s conscious aim in his work, so that it may be pre-
vented from falling merely into something like a treatise (PX 479). A
true novelist always comes up not so much with a narrow metaphysic or
a didactic purpose, but with “a large philosophy.” What Lawrence means
by “a large philosophy” is ideas based on man’s passionate inspiration.
The modern novel is, Lawrence laments, full of such narrow didacticism,
which is utterly divorced from human passional inspiration. Any idea
rendered in a novel that is not associated with human passional inspira-
tion is unimportant and lifeless (PX II 417-18). And also, in a work of real
art, Lawrence contends, the morality it adheres to must contain its criti-
cism or its essential conflicts, however hard it may work toward its final
reconciliation. This “sense of conflict contained within reconciliation” is
prerequisite to all great art. And the degree to and the way in which any
work of art makes its morality or metaphysic submit to criticism, deter-
mine the work’s value and satisfaction (PX 476). Consequently, the nov-
elist is usually “a dribbling liar” (PX II 426). What the novelist can do is
to show things in their true relation to other things. And as long as he or
she reveals true and vivid relationships, his or her work is a moral work.
The novelist cannot show or be expected to show in his work the whole
and persistent vision of the truth of life.
In Sons and Lovers the theme of morality again revolves around the
characterization of Paul. The hero’s treatment of the three women
around him makes him loom as a completely new and unique character,
especially from Victorian standard of morality. First, Paul is the one
who is almost the closest to his mother in all the previous English nov-
els. Regardless of whether Lawrence was really influenced by Freudian
psychology (it is known that he himself denied such an influence), the
hero is struck as uncommonly empathetic toward his mother and her
predicament. In the novel Lawrence boldly deals with all those sensual
moments of the mother and the son—the scenes of kissing, stroking and
pleading as if between lovers, which could look very revolutionary for
contemporary readers (262). Paul throughout knows that “he still love
〔s〕his mother best” although the love is “the bitter peace of resignation”
(264). His mother is, for him, “one place in the world that〔stands〕solid
and〔does〕not melt into unreality” and she is “the pivot and pole of his
life from which he〔can〕not escape” (273). Moreover, such an excessive
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 407

emotional tie functions as the major source of Paul’s inner conflict and
strife in his relation with Miriam. His incomprehensible, ill treatments
of the innocent girl Miriam also have much to do with his unresolved
emotions with his mother.10 It is only after the mother has passed away
that he first starts to think independently and to come to understand his
feelings with the women—Miriam and Clara. The physical love
between Paul and Clara is also obviously a part that defies and calls into
question conventional morality expected in literature. In the novel
Paul’s physical attraction to Clara is described as something unavoid-
able, something “impersonal” and on her part the young man’s physical
affection as a sacred chance to find herself back—to become herself
again in the middle of life-struggles (430-31). Accordingly, in
Lawrence’s hands, even the relation between Paul and Clara’s ex-hus-
band, Baxter Dawes, is romanticized as a thing transcending conven-
tional morality. Even in their violent duels they see “the elemental man
in each” and feel at once hostility and attachment toward each other,
especially through their physical contact—through the moments of
Lawrence’s “physical sympathetic flow” (415-16, 461).11 For Lawrence,
the significance of the sexual world is in “the expansion of the passion-
ate, vital self” (Joffe 55).
Thus, in Sons and Lovers Lawrence also stresses his philosophy that
not being true to oneself, to one’s inner emotion and passion is a thing
immoral for his moral standard. Although Paul can be seen as neither
energetic nor sympathetic for critics like Harold Bloom, the novel has
such magical power as to merge all the conflicting elements and
immoral stuffs into a new ethic, a new morality and a new religion as
many critics also have observed from different angles.12 For Lawrence,
“the essential feeling in all art is religious” (Apocalpyse 155). It is not
religious to be religious. Aldous Huxley probably best summarizes
Lawrence’s concept of morality: “His ethical principle . . . is not to
attempt to live above his human station, or beyond his inherited psycho-
logical income” (12).

10
About Paul’s frequent, self-centered and cruel treatments of Miriam. Louis
L. Marz defends Miriam, suggesting that Paul could have led Miriam (who is a
Persephone figure) to a normal lover, if he had been a whole man (67).
11
Jackson interprets these fight-scenes as a Lawrencean moment “to create a
fiction of the vital, constant present” (25).
12
Harold Bloom also never denies that Lawrence is hardly a libertine, having
“the radically protestant sensibility” (294).
408 Haeryung Yoon

V
As seen above, Lawrence’s greatness as a novelist and literary critic
lies in, above all, that he was a person who took literature more seriously
than most of other writers and who felt deeply aware of what literature,
especially, the novel could do to human beings (although all the literary
efforts should, he would argue, be done so naturally and unconsciously).
First, Lawrence seems to have tried to explore and emphasize the signifi-
cance of every vital moment, of every immediate experience rather than
that of external forces, of all those influences of non-self. Accordingly,
his concern was more with the dark universe, all those elemental forces
unknown as yet, but more important than environmental factors or social
relationships. When Lawrence diagnoses his Sons and Lovers as “a great
tragedy” (Selected Letters 48), he means a tragedy about man’s inner
desire of feeling and passion, not a conventional tragedy mostly about
the relation between man’s desire and frustrating environment (which is
typical in Greek and Naturalist tragedies).13 This is why Lawrence in his
letter also says that “tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery” (45).
Miseries from outer elements could be overcome. In this sense Paul’s
predicament is rather that of “a vital hero who struggles to free himself
from the forces of circumstance, environmental and hereditary, in search
for an enlargement of life’s possibilities.” And the hero embodies
“Lawrence’s faith in continuing, onward-moving development” (Joffe 49).
Lawrence’s idea of the novel having to be “honourable” also makes the
reader rethink about the essence of morality, about the potential of
hypocrisy in what we normally think is morality. For Lawrence, not to
listen to dark cries, impersonal desires in the human flesh, not to pay
attention to the vital, mysterious universe, is rather a sin, an act of
immorality, at least, in his higher metaphysics. As many critics also have
observed, his faith in the body as well as the spirit and his sacred adora-
tion of the secret universe, could be interpreted as an attitude of honour
toward the eternal, immortal world, as a form of religion, however it may
be differentiated from Christianity in which he was brought up. As Harry

13
Generally, critics regard British novels as more social than most of
American novels, the focus of which is more on self. The theme of social rela-
tions has more weight in British novels, especially the novels up to the nine-
teenth century. In this respect, Lawrence’s novels have affinity with American
novels and have significance as the early Modernist novel.
 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 409

T. Moore summarizes Lawrence’s philosophy in his book, the Priest of

Love, Lawrence always saw life itself as “a religious manifestation,” and
was accordingly “one of the most religious men who ever wrote” (38).
He only had “a religious awareness of moments of happiness” (190). On
the whole Lawrence impresses one as a person who firmly believed in
the final affirmation of life. In his essay titled “The Reality of Peace,” he
writes that “we only know that the end is the heaven on earth” (PX 669).
And for Lawrence the novel is a perfect medium through which this goal
could be achieved; indeed “the novel is one bright book of life” (PX 535).
Lawrencean aesthetics of the novel and his notion of morality are, of
course, always open to debate and criticism, especially, when one thinks
of the potential danger of self-centered philosophy in terms of transform-
ing literary vision and also of social responsibility. But still, one thing is
clear. The novel, Sons and Lovers well reflects Lawrence’s novelistic
vision (although not enough as in his later novels, The Rainbow and
Women in Love), and the early novel still remains as a novel that has
made our life a little more wonderful, a little more beautiful in this rapid-
ly-changing world where mere survival of paper-books is constantly
threatened.

Gachon University

Key Words: D. H. Lawrence, the Vision of the Novel, the Novelist, Sons
and Lovers, Phoenix, Phoenix II , Morality

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Novelists and Novels. New York: The Readers’ Subscription,
2005.
Bonds. Diane S. “Narrative Evasion in Sons and Lovers: A Metaphysical
Unsettling.” Sons and Lovers. Ed & Intro. Rick Rylance, New York: St.
Martin’s, 1996.
Ghent, Dorothy Van. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York:
Penguin, 1953.
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novels. Ed. & Intro. Stallybrass. New York:
Penguin, 1974.
Huxley, Aldous. Intro to Selected Letters by D. H. Lawrence. New York:
Penguin, 1978.
Jackson. S. H. World ‘Intertwining among Itself’: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and
410 Haeryung Yoon

Lovers.” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 21.2

(1994): 21-27.
Joffe, Phil. “Sons and Lovers” The Growth of Paul Morel,” CRUX: A Journal
on the Teaching of English 20.3 (1986): 49-62.
Kermode, Frank. “The Writing of Sons and Lovers.” Sons and Lovers. Ed &
Intro Rick Rylance. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. New York: Penguin. 1976.
______. Foreword to Women In Love. New York: Penguin, 1976.
______. Phoenix. Ed. & Intro. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Penguin, 1978.
______. Phoenix II. Ed. & Intro. Warren Roberts & Harry T. Moore. New York:
Penguin, 1978.
______. Selected Letters. Intro. Aldous Huxley. New York: Penguin, 1962.
______. Sons and Lovers. New York: Penguin, 1948.
Marz, Louis L. “Portrait of Miriam.” D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Ed. &
Intro. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.
Moore, Harry T. The Priest of Love: a Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York:
Penguin, 1954.
Panichas, George A. The Reverent Discipline. Knoxville: The of Tennessee, 1974.
Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP,
1996.
Stewart, Jack. “Lawrence and the Creative Process.” Style 37.2 (2003): 160-76.

*Received: April 30, 2012. / Accepted: June 10, 2012.

 D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers 411

Abstract
This paper concerns D. H. Lawrence’s idea of the novel manifested
mostly in his Phoenix and Phoenix II and how such a novelistic vision is
exemplified in his Sons and Lovers. As well known, the greatness of
Lawrence’s literature has to do with, among other things, his literary
pride in the “sacred” function of the novel and the novelist as distin-
guished from other art forms or other sciences or even religion. For
Lawrence, it is only literature, especially, the genre of the novel that
makes humans see beneath themselves and the materialistic universe, and
that eventually makes human life worth living through inner revolution.
To serve this purpose, Lawrence argues, the novel should have, for
example, such three elements as being “quick,” “interrelated in all parts,
vitally, organically” and most importantly “honourable” (Phoenix II).
Accordingly, this paper explores how such a Lawrencean vision of the
novel is reflected first in his most autobiographical novel, Sons and
Lovers. My argument is that in the novel it is the hero Paul that is ren-
dered as the most central representative of Lawrence’s philosophy about
being “quick,” about the importance of passionate inspiration far beyond
the world of the conscious or self-conscious or all those social preten-
sions. Second, this paper also stresses that the novel is connected not by
the structure of a conventional plot, but rather by a Modernist technique
depending heavily on imagery and symbols. Also, Sons and Lovers is a
good example where Lawrence imaginatively tests his idea of morality
that is new to most of other novelists, especially to most of the early
twentieth-century readers. Equating being “honorable” with being
“moral” in the novel, Lawrence portrays the way such a character as
Miriam is in her puritanical religiosity not honorable, compared to other
characters like Paul acting more on his inspirational instinct and imper-
sonal grasp with reality. For Lawrence, to be religious and to be moral is
not a religion. Morality is, for him, only the subtle, trembling balance
between self and circumambient universe. To reread Sons and Lovers in
terms of Lawrence’s novelistic vision is a worthwhile business, a new
opportunity to understand better the implication of the novel and also the
novelist’s original idea of the novel-genre.