UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

UNIT IV
«Life is a Luminous Halo»:
The Novel in the Twentieth Century, Sons and Lovers

Programme
1. PRESENTATION: Social Consciousness arrated: D.H. Lawrence's New Other
in Context

2. TEXT ANALYSIS:
2.1. Reality is in the Word: The Poetics of Narrative
2.2. Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

3. ACTIVITIES

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Learning outcomes
- To analyze changing concepts in the relationship between the sexes.
- To discern the strategies through which contemporary literature dealt with social
issues such as class (working class in particular) or sexuality.
- To pay attention to the influence of morality and the popular literary market on the
development of the novel form
- To be aware of the interaction between censorship and literature.
- To ponder the importance of psychoanalysis in narrative construction and character
building.
- To examine Sons and Lovers as representative text of tlllS specific time and spirit.

1. PRESENTATION:
Social Consciousness Narrated: D.H. Lawrence's New Other In Context

Of all the writers of the c20, D.H. Lawrence was the most impassioned and persistent in seeking to
diagnose some of the psychic dangers besetting his society and the potential sources of strength with which to
combat them. Thus, his position within the literary scene may be plotted easily enough. Besides this crucial aspect,
we can perceive, in the work of D.H. Lawrence, the evolution of another trait: his novels flee from material
realism. They do so not in order to convey consciousness or intensity, as is the case with Virginia Woolf or James
Joyce, but to explore the poverty of reality and the enormous power of art, of perspectivism, and of form. In the
following extract D.H. Lawrence criticises material realism, and exposes what novels should explore, namely,
misery:

I hate Bennett's resignation. Tragedy ought really to be a great kick at misery. But Anna of the Five
Towns seems like an acceptance -so does all the modern stuff since Flaubert.
(Letter to A.W. McLeod, 6 October 1912)

This is proof of Lawrence's revulsion of the French Realist tradition. Although he also criticises the Realism of the
Russian novelists, his indebtedness to their more spiritual Realism is shown in a letter to Catherine Carswell of 2
December 1916:

... don't think I would belittle the Russians. They have meant an enormous
amount to me; Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoievski -mattered almost more than
anything, and I thought them the greatest writers of all time.

For Lawrence, then, the literary ideal to be pursued is not material realism, but a psychic ideal. By that, he means
an inner, intangible, relaxed but strong integrity and unity. As early as 1914, D.H. Lawrence protested against «the
old-fashioned human element» and declared:
I don't so much care about what the woman feels -in the ordinary usage of the word.
That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is -what she IS-
inhumanly, physiologically, materially...
(in Aldous Huxley 1932: 198)

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Notions such as the 'old stable ego' of character disappear and so does the traditional unity and linearity of
the plot. Lawrence was thus calling into question the belief in the ego's stability. In this respect he continued his
letter in the following terms: «Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which
are copies of other novels.» Thus, in what is probably one of his best works, Women in Love (1920), the characters
are caught in all their disjointed wholeness; and the indecisive episodic movement, the abrupt shifts in the story
present the novel itself as achieving the same kind of disjointed unity as do the characters.

Both characterisation and the novel's structure seem to reveal Lawrence's personal style, yet it is more
than that. The abrupt transitions in the plot, the calculated disjointedness of plot and character, and the organic
kind of unity are common to much writing of the period, and have an affinity with the modes of organisation of
T.S. Eliot's Love Song of1. Alfred Prufrock or of James Joyce's Ulysses. However, if Joyce was a European writer,
heir to both the French Naturalists and the Symbolists, Lawrence was very English, much closer in spirit and in his
view of the novel to a George Eliot than to a Flaubert. As much as are Henry Fielding or George Eliot, he is the
novelist as moralist, or the moralist as novelist. The question of morality and the novel should not be
underestimated. The c19 role of the novel took over the c18, one which saw in the novel mainly a vehicle for
moral instruction, as social allegory, along with all the variations that this role implied. The eighteenth was the
century of the novel of sensibility, where sensibility stood mainly for social manners and ethics. Among the
greatest examples of the eighteenth century novel stand Samuel Richardson's novels, combining the then much
imitated graphic realism of its epistolary form with a strong moral message. Richardson (1689-1761) is in some
ways the father of the British novel, along with Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and Henry
Fielding (1707-1754). Both Henry James and Thomas Hardy, who represent a turning point into modernism, are
separated from this first wave of British novelists by the Romantic period in literature, which dominated the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries with the Gothic novel. Perhaps the most famous of
this novelistic genre is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).

This period moves away from the social realism of Richardson's novels of ‘sensibility’ and towards a
psychological ‘sensationalism’, where the social psyche turns inwards and projects itself on to a Gothic landscape
to find its expression. This change is partly due to an increasing disillusion with the Enlightenment or Age of
Reason, that had failed to produce the goods it promised, as evidenced by the French and American revolutions at
the end of the c18. The Gothic novel offers, equally, a form of literary escapism from social disillusion and the
idea of literature as entertainment, the latter still prevails and is perhaps better understood in twenty-first-century
terms as the Hollywood film industry, from which we mostly expect little more than a thrill. Yet there is something
very important about the Gothic novel and Romanticism in general: it legitimised the individual as the subject of
literature –it could be said to pre-empt psychoanalysis- and pushed the boundaries of the novelistic form. The
Gothic novel would not last long into the c19. Even if it did not produce great work of literature, the Gothic novel
would begin to redefine what we understand reality to be by questioning the relationship between the individual
and the world. It opened the doors for new ways of writing, and, more importantly it did so because the public
demanded it. Despite the literary –even moral- revolution the publisher's claw was still firmly on the writer's pen.

The rights of individual fancy, taste, opinion and belief to go each its own way and pursue each its own
subjective course of development had prevailed [so far], with readers of novels, so far as to allow their heroes and
heroines the prerogative of an interest enhanced by the very fact of their isolation. The effects of this and other
cognate characteristics of the romanticism which had long held the field had begun to show themselves in
imaginative literature at large by an increased monotony, by occasional self-satire, by the weakening of poetic
forms and by the predominance of lyric over dramatic or epic treatment of literacy themes (Ward and Trent 2000a:
3).
JaneAusten's first novel Northanger Abbey (written in 1798, but published in 1817) is a very good
example of the terminus at which the Gothic novel had arrived, as well as a new point of departure for the novel in
the nineteenth century. She writes a farce of the Gothic novel by making fun of its literary conventions: a naive
heroine prone to romantic fantasies, a castle, a mystery. Yet, Austen turns the farce into the serious purpose of
character development and moral catharsis, as the heroine's self-deception gradually turns into revelation and
comic resolution -i.e. a happy ending. Hers are generally comedies of manners that revert to the social sensibility
of the eighteenth century novel while using the psychological complexities which Romanticism had made
available. Yet we must not forget that Austen's novels had to sell, and their goal was the entertainment of a still
socially narrow literary circle: the increasingly leisured middle classes who were interested mostly in themselves.

Considering the development of the novel as an artistic literary genre in its own right at the turn of the
twentieth century, D.H. Lawrence has also a clear literary continuity with Hardy's less systematised and more
poetic conception of the novel; Lawrence shares the deep sense pervading Hardy's work of man's life as one with
its environment in nature. However, while Hardy was preoccupied with a rural world in decline, Lawrence was
preoccupied by the industrial and urban modern world, and how it was transforming the human condition. As will
be shown below, this runs steadily through his novel The Rainbow (1915). Little by little, the main characters of
this novel move out from a life bounded by the rhythms of the traditional farmer's year into more modern worlds:
they attend the local high school, then they go to London 'into a big shop' or to study art, to a working-class town

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school, later to a teachers' training college, and finally to a fairly large house in the new, red-brick part of Beldover
(<<a villa built by the widow of the late colliery manager»): «Out into the world meant out into the world.»

In Lawrence's fiction, the main character almost always originates from a partial or mechanical existence and
arrives at an organic wholeness; thus, for Lawrence, the novel appears as a religious art form in which he can
speak of and to the whole man.

This movement in the main character's search for the subconscious powers of mankind is original to
Lawrence. The quality of Lawrence's interest in life and in the powers of mankind justifies his claim: «Primarily I
am a passionately religious man». With the clarity of the great artist he goes straight on, in the same sentence, to
make clear how a struggle against difficulties, a struggle indeed to overcome weakness, is integral to his work:

My novels must be written from the depth of my religious experience. That I must keep
to because I can only work like that. And my Cockneyism and commonness are only
when the deep feeling doesn't find its way out, and a sort of jeer comes instead, and
sentimentality, and purplism.
(Letter to Edward Garnett, 22 April 1914)
Lawrence was much else besides a moralist: we think of him mainly as a novelist, but he is equally
influential (if not as highly regarded) as a poet and a writer of novellas and short stories. As a poet it can be
observed how:
traditional inspiration gives place, even before 1941, to a progressively freer verse style, to the
new, looser kinds of transition and unity ... and to a related overriding concern for the essential,
individual reality of living things ... The Preface which Lawrence wrote for the 1927 edition of
his poems shows him clearly as one who, from the point of view of the period, should be seen in
relation to Bergson, to Imagism (although it is an Imagism taken to new and transforming
depths), and in general to the new sense, both of life and of technique, which had entered English
poetry.
(Holloway 1983: 96-71)

He was also a writer of brilliant travel books and a literary critic, and his superb Studies in Classic
American Literature (1924) is particularly noteworthy. His eight plays have never received much attention at all,
however, and three were published only in the 1960s. Lawrence had this to say on the subject: «I always say, my
motto is, ‘Art for my sake’», meaning that he would become a master through the struggle to become master of
himself. He was, in this sense, self-absorbed, as shown in a letter he wrote regarding the effects of the First World
War in England and Europe, which he inevitably turns towards himself:
I will not live any more in this time... as far as I possibly can, I will stand outside this
time, I will live my life, and if possible, be happy, though the whole world slides in horror down
into the bottomless pit...What does it matter about that seething scrimmage of mankind in
Europe?
(Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 7 February 1916)

Lawrence believed that industrialised Western culture was dehumanising because it emphasised
intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in
decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a part of nature. In this
respect he wrote:

It is our being cut off that is our ailment, and out of this ailment everything bad
arises. I wish I saw a little clearer how you get over this cut-offness... Myself:
I suffer badly from being so cut off. But what is one to do?.. One has no real
human relations -that is so devastating.
(Letter to T. Burrow, 3 August 1927)

Above all, it is necessary to recognise that Lawrence's deep sense of how modern man may become cut
off from the proper springs of his vitality is not a calm and magisterial diagnosis of weakness in others, but a brave
and persevering response to the challenge of his own predicament:

We're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong... So I am
making up my mind to return to England during the course of the summer. I
really think that the most living clue to life is in us Englishmen in England,
and the great mistake we make is not uniting together in the strength of this
real living clue -religious in the most vital sense.
(Letter to R.P. Barlow, 30 March 1922)

One aspect of this 'blood consciousness' would be an acceptance of the need for sexual fulfilment: «We can go
wrong in our minds,» he wrote, «but what the blood feels, and believes, and says, is always true». His three great
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novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921) concern the consequences
oftrying to deny humanity's union with nature and instead emphasise the power of sexuality.

David Herbert Lawrence was born at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, in 1885, the fourth of five children of
coal miner Arthur Lawrence and his wife Lydia Beardsall. His parents' marriage was unhappy and the children
were brought up to see exclusively their mother's point of view: this struggle between his father and his mother
lies at the heart of Sons and Lovers. His father was practically illiterate, and often drunk, but possessed an
extraordinarily vivid comprehension of natural life and living; his mother, of a somewhat higher social class, was
intellectually and spiritually refined, high-minded, 'cut out', as Lawrence was to write years later, «to play a
superior role in the god-damned bourgeoisie». The unhappiness of their marriage killed something in the father.
The children were caught up in the clash between their parents.

 In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence is, apparently, on the mother's side. Later in life, Lawrence felt he had
treated his father too harshly in this novel. In his later novels, he went on to depict men like his father as heroic
figures. He made them symbols of the dark, instinctual, but potent side of life that opposes the dry intellectualism
and industrial mechanisation of modern life. Is this later acknowledged view on the father figure interwoven in the
narrative fabric of Sons and Lovers?

Delicate health meant that D.H. Lawrence stayed close to his mother. He was often ill and absent from school,
bullied by other boys for his delicacy. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and in 1901. When he left
school at the age of fifteen he found work as a clerk at Haywood's Surgical Garments factory in Nottingham. He
hated the work, not getting on with his fellow workers, and whilst working there he suffered his first major bout of
pneumonia. During his convalescence he met Jessie Chambers who became a close friend and mentor. By 1906 he
had saved the £20 fee to enable him to take up a teacher-training scholarship at Nottingham University. In 1908,
he became an assistant master at Davidson Road Elementary School in Croydon at a salary of £95 a year, but he
was lonely and unhappy there. The following year Jessie Chambers sent Lawrence's poetry to the editor of the
English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer, who began publishing Lawrence's work and gave him the opportunity to
meet other young writers such as Ezra Pound.

Ford Madox Hueffer also helped Lawrence to have his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), published.
After the death of Lawrence's mother in 1910, he became ill and was advised to give up teaching. The next year
marked Lawrence's break with Jessie Chambers.

2. TEXT ANALYSIS

2.1. Reality is in the Word: The Poetics of Narrative

It is useful to look at Lawrence's fiction by dividing it into three different moments or phases. The first
phase could be termed the ‘personal’ phase and it covers roughly the period from the year he started writing
(1909) until 1912. The White Peacock inaugurates the modern novel of creative autobiography, and in it Lawrence
first presents the theme that will dominate his later works: the mechanisms at work in the relationship between
men and women. This novel was followed by The Trespasser (1912) and Sons and Lovers. Regarding the male-
female interaction Lawrence believed, almost to the end of his life, a woman in love is a negative influence on the
man she loves, destroying his personality, and absorbing his being into her own. He believed this conflict came
from civilised women having become the desperate antagonist of men, drawing from them their greatest
possession, masculinity, and in turn feminising them and bringing them under the control of her will. The
following quote illustrates this vision and is a sentence from his novel Aarons Rod (1922): «Women are the very
hottest hell once they get the start of you: There's nothing they won't do to you. Especially if they love you.»

Another theme that appears in Lawrence's writings is the contest between a super-civilised man and an
inarticulate down-to-earth man, to win the love of a woman. In this respect it must be said that Lawrence deplored
the dualism of the modern person: the setting up of dividing barriers between mind and body, and brain and blood;
he protested against what he considered the grey idea of making the body prisoner of the mind: «l have always
inferred that sex meant blood-sympathy and blood-contact. Technically this is so. But as a matter of fact, nearly all
modern sex is a pure matter of nerves, cold and bloodless».

As Sons and Lovers shows, another topic is a determined antagonism towards the figure of the 'father' and
against any imposed authority. This is probably brought to the surface by his need to overcome his working-class
background and also shows his knowledge of psychoanalysis. His father represented, quite literally, his working-
class background. Lawrence suffered greatly for his social background which made him afraid of rejection in the
literary circles of the time. The rejection of the father in terms of favouring his mother (from a somehow middle
class) could be read in these terms.

A final theme, linked to the previous one, is the degradation of the man who abhors his own potentialities.
Lawrence was not an advocate of animalism, he did not idealise the morals of the farmyard, but his aim was to
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return to the primal energy of Eden before human consciousness became stained by the sense of sin, and before
man became 'womanised': hence his religion of the body, his worship of life in itself and in all its aspects. He
wrote:
For man, as for flower, beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in
the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is
ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.
(Apocalypse, 1931)

Beneath all these themes lies the dark subterranean world of the subconscious battling with the modern
world, its fellows and itself. Sons and Lovers is, together with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), the most notable autobiographical fiction and one of the most famous English novels of the twentieth
century. Published in 1913, it tells the story of the Morel family and, in particular, of Paul Morel. Gertrude and her
husband Walter Morel live in a village in the north of England. Gertrude is clever and competent. Walter, an
uneducated coal miner, drinks his money away and is often violent. Divided by class, the two do not understand
each other, and both Gertrude and Walter are bitterly unhappy. Gertrude pours all her love and ambition into her
four children and, in particular, her eldest child, William. William prepares to marry a very superficial girl, against
his mother's wishes. Then tragedy occurs; William falls ill and dies. With William gone, Gertrude's love and hopes
are pinned on Paul, who is talented and artistic:

'The tailor can make it right,' she said, smoothing her hand over his shoulder. 'It's beautiful stuff.
I never could find in my heart to let your father wear the trousers, and very glad I am now.' And
as she smoothed her hand over the silk collar she thought of her eldest son. But this son was
living enough inside the clothes. She passed her hand down his back to feel him. He was alive
and hers. The other was dead.
He went out to dinner several times in his evening suit that had been William's. Each
time his mother's heart was firm with pride and joy. He was started now. The studs she and the
children had bought for William were in his shirt front; he wore one of William's dress shirts.
But he had an elegant figure. His face was rough, but warm-looking and rather pleasing. He did
not look particularly a gentleman, but she thought he looked quite a man.
(Sons and Lovers, 1913 [1995]: 255)

At fourteen Paul finds a job in nearby Nottingham. He makes friends with a high-minded girl called
Miriam. From now on the story concerns Paul's conflict between his love for his mother and his need to grow up
and gain sexual experience. Gertrude is jealous of Miriam; a kind of war starts for Paul's love. Time passes. He
longs to leave home but feels he cannot leave his mother. Eventually he sleeps with Miriam, but the relationship is
unsuccessful. Paul embarks on another relationship with an earthier woman called Clara. With her he discovers
«the enormous power of passion». But Paul realises that Clara is not his soul mate. Meanwhile, Gertrude dies of
cancer. With his mother gone, Paul, now twenty-three, is grief-stricken. He feels a strong pull towards death. The
life urge in him proves stronger, though, and he sets off towards the «golden lights of the city», to begin life anew.

Sons and Lovers can be classified in the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, a German word meaning
'development novel'. Narratives such as James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sons and
Lovers are Bildungsroman, that is, novels that trace the development and growth of the main character. Much of
the time, the main character of such a tale, like Paul in Sons and Lovers, will grow up to be an artist, and the story
reveals all of the psychological and social developments that prepare the hero or heroine for his or her life's
calling.

Bildungsroman heroes are often overly sensitive and melancholy. Paul certainly has these traits, but he
also expresses a sincere liking for living. «It is morning again, and she is still here... » wrote D.H. Lawrence of his
mortally ill mother to a friend. «I look at my mother and think ‘O Heaven –is this what life brings us to?’ You see
mother has had a devilish married life, for nearly forty years –and this is the conclusion- no relief.» At the time,
Lawrence was in the painful process of writing Sons and Lovers, not exactly an autobiography but a
Bildungsroman type of novel where Lawrence fictionalized part of himself as Paul Morel and his mother, Gertrude
Morel.

His main character, Paul, is caught in the lawrencian man-woman labyrinth which in this case takes the
form of a pseudo Oedipal situation and, as a son-lover, he cannot bring fulfilment to himself and risk to lose his
masculinity for love of his mother. In striving for relationships with women Paul is a split being, seeking spiritual
attachment in Miriam and physical attachment in Clara. This inability to function as an integrated man is, as has
been said above, seen by Lawrence as the sterility of today's industrialised society.

 Frustration seems the keynote of this personal phase. In the next literary period Lawrence will seek a solution
to his disappointment.

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In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, nee von Richthofen, the wife of a professor who had taught him.
She was six years older than Lawrence and had three children. She found her marriage dull and had had several
affairs. She and Lawrence eloped and were married in 1914.

At this time the mood in Lawrence's fiction changes, it evolves and we can distinguish now the beginning
of a second literary moment. It could be called «Emotional adjustment to the modern era» and that covers, roughly
the years 1913-20. Lawrence's and Frieda's marriage was stormy and the War years were very unhappy for them.

Lawrence, opposed to the War, was twice called up for military service but declared unfit because it was
discovered that he had tuberculosis. Frieda's German nationality and Lawrence's outspoken criticisms of the War
led to their being suspected as spies by their neighbours. At the outbreak of the First World War the authorities,
too, became concerned that Fried was a spy. The couple settled at Zennor, in Cornwall, and local people reported
that the Lawrences were using the clothes on their washing line to send coded messages to German U-boats. After
searching their cottage, the authorities forced them to leave the area within three days. Their situation was not
helped by the fact that Lawrence began to have ideas that appeared close to Fascism (after the First World War
Lawrence began to believe that society needed to be reorganised under one superhuman leader) and he was also
anti-Semitic. The novels containing this theme, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926),
are all nowadays considered failures. He caught influenza during the pandemic in November 1918, and once again
early died. It was not until a year later that he was fit enough to leave England.

D.H. Lawrence was a very confused rebel. He felt that society made people lifeless and unreal, and that
the class system was pernicious. Lawrence believed in the 'life force', in nature, its beauty and its power. He also
believed passionately in man's natural instincts; he believed that sexual feeling between a man and woman was
natural and should be celebrated.

 D.H. Lawrence was the first novelist in Western culture to attempt to explore sexuality seriously and frankly.
Sexuality, already present in the writings of what we have called his first period, is the theme dominating this
second phase of his writing.

The Rainbow (1915) comprises the first half of a story that will be carried on in the other half Women in
Love (1920). The Rainbow is a family chronicle, abounding in superb passages of broad realism in the nineteenth-
century English tradition of the novel, Thomas Hardy's novels. However, its story traces essentially the changing
patterns of psychic relationships, as England is evolving from the rural to the urban.

 D.H. Lawrence's is the first novel to trace the influence of the social revolution of the past hundred years on the
passionate life of individuals.

Regarding human relationships, Lawrence ignores the set of rules of the late nineteenth-century English
novel, and offers a series of novels where basic sexual relationships are examined. Of course, at the time, explicit
allusion to sex or sexual intercourse was considered obscene and literary works were scrutinised by the censor.
The very year it was published, 1915, The Rainbow was seized by the police and declared obscene. Later attempts
to explore in fiction the complexities of human sexual behaviour were to follow the same fate. This was the case,
for instance, of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).

The Rainbow is Lawrence's version of a social saga, spanning three generations of the Brangwen family.
The women characters in this novel remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings. The most important
character in The Rainbow is Ursula, who represents the modern woman as imagined by Lawrence. Ursula is utterly
dispossessed of spirit and totally exploratory in the flesh. Her search becomes momentarily homosexual in her
adoration of Winifred Ingred, a mannish New Woman (see Unit 1) and later she becomes pregnant by Skrebensky,
a Polish officer in the British Army. Skrebensky is presented in the novel as the weak man lacking in values,
indicative of the time. Ursula loses her baby, but during convalescence she sees the rainbow in the sky; it stands as
a promise of a possible re-adjustment of human values to wholeness. The story concludes with the struggle of the
two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselyes from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society.
This is how The Rainbow has been seen by critic John Holloway:

Thus The Rainbow registers how a wider, looser, more complex, more ambitious pattern of life
came in; and recognizes also that the archaic springs of strength could no longer meet its needs. Most of
what Lawrence was to write after The Rainbow conducts the search, in fictional terms, for a new source
of vitality. What Lawrence, in fact, saw himself as discovering was that in any individual there is a unique
and inexpugnable source of vitality lying deep in the psyche; and his concern with the intimacies of sex is
best seen as a derivative from this belief, a conviction simply that in sex the central psychic forces can
most abundantly flow and most easily and naturally assume their uninsistent yet powerful kind of control.
Much of his outstanding later work may be seen as an exploring of the essential difference between the
sham strength of those who lack this kind of integration, and the essential reality of those who have it.

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Particularly is this true of the short stories: for example, St Mawr, The Captain's Doll, The Fox, Sun, The
Virgin and the Gipsy.
(Holloway 1983: 96)

Women in Love seeks the fulfilment of the promise foreseen by Ursula in the rainbow. The novel begins
where The Rainbow leaves off and features the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, as they try to forge new
types of liberated personal relationships. Because the men they choose are trying to do the same thing, the results
are problematic and often disturbing.

Many critics and readers regard this as Lawrence's finest novel, where his ideas are matched with
passages of superb writing. The locations combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax in the icy snow caps of
the Alps. In the five years that have elapsed between The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence's conception of
Ursula has been altered by the personality his wife Frieda. In Women in Love Ursula and her sister Gudrun are
now emancipated women. Ursula becomes involved with Rupert Birking, a young inspector of schools, and
Gudrun with Gerald Crich a wealthy man. Ursula and Rupert find fulfilment in marriage but Gudrun and Gerald
break further and further apart until, in the Alps, he disappears skiing away only to die from exposure. Gerald
Crich represents the epitome of the industrial tycoon who glorifies the machine, and the machine-god rails him.
His strength is mechanical, lacking the emotional depth necessary for genuine human relationships. Thus, his
death symbolises the suicidal path that the modern mechanical man is following. In the following excerpt a
disapproval of the modern world, seen as too mechanical, can be read:

The men were satisfied to belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it
destroyed them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had produced, the most
wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by belonging to this great and superhuman
system which was beyond feeling or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within
them, but their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald could never have
done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving them what they wanted, this participation
in a great and perfect system that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. It was a sort of
freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in undoing, the first great phase of
chaos, the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic
purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical
purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first
and finest state of chaos.
(Women in Love, 1920)
Rupert Birkin, on the other hand, stands as Lawrence's alter ego. Rupert feels a deep repulsion against the
entire mechanical folly of modern society. Rupert and Ursula's successful marriage is achieved only after
Ursulrelinquishes her advanced views; after a monumental opposition she realises that she must capitulate her
modern womanhood in order to come to come to terms with the great male god in Rupert Birkin. Women in Love
could not find a publisher in America or Britain, and did not do so until 1920 and 1921 respectively. When it was
finally published it was perceived as obscene and one critic in particular reviewed it under the headline ‘A Book
the Police Should Burn’.

 Many critics and readers regard these as Lawrence's finest novels, where his ideas are matched with
passages of superb writing. D.H. Lawrence became an icon of the sexual liberation movement started in the 1960s.
Yet, from the 1970s onwards the feminist movement became very wary as to the actual sexual emancipation
Lawrence's Women in Love, a cult, brought for women. Feminism came to the conclusion that Lawrence's liberal
approach to sex was only apparent for in reality these supposedly liberated women were, in fact, submitting to the
male desire. This viewpoint created an interesting on going literary debate which, from what has been said up to
now, seems pertinent to be considered here: Should our appreciation of literature as art be subjected to its author
political, social, moral, etc, perspective?

From this moment (around 1920) until Lawrence's death in 1930 a third literary phase can be identified. It is time
for the 'mystic prophet’. After all the hardships they had gone through during the Great War, finally in 1919,
Frieda and Lawrence left for Italy. They were always on the move around the world and always short of money.
Lawrence felt alienated from his own country: «the thought of England is entirely repugnant» he wrote in 1921.

 He never really abandoned this position and never returned except as a fleeting and dissatisfied visitor. Apart
from the difficulties experienced during the War years his working class background played an important role in
this decision for he always felt alienated from a strongly hierarchical social system such as the British one.

Lawrence felt that reality provoked in him dissatisfaction, exasperation and disgust, and his feelings are
echoed by the words of the Lawrentian hero, Mellors, of his novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928):

When I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy
beastliness, then I feel the colonies aren't afar enough. The moon wouldn't be far enough,
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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the
stars: made foul by men. Then I feel I've swallowed gall, and it's eating my inside out, and
nowhere's far enough away. But when I get a turn, I forget it all again.
(Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928)

Other novels such as Aaron's Rod appeared with a new subject matter influenced by Nietzsche's theories
(see Unit 1). A year later, his Australian novel, Kangaroo, was published. Frieda and Lawrence travelled to
Ceylon, Australia, the United States and also to Mexico where he wrote The Plumed Serpent (1926) along with
many short stories and poems.

In 1923, Frieda returned to England and Lawrence joined her later. He was miserable in England so, in
1924, they returned to Mexico where Lawrence hoped to set up his ideal commune, the Rananim commune. The
idea did not work. Lawrence fell ill, so they returned to Italy, finally settling near Florence. Lawrence had become
interested in painting and, in 1929, an exhibition of his work was held in London, which Frieda attended alone as
he was too ill to travel. The police confiscated thirteen of the pictures as obscene.

Lawrence's writing was revolutionary in that it stressed the importance of feelings. The plot was
important for the light that it threw on the inner events in a character. The individual, according to Lawrence, has
been divided in his completeness by the use of the mind to compel nature to his own purposes. Lawrence's travels
were a feverish attempt to find in more primitive men the wholeness and balance lost by civilisation.

 Lawrence's narrative style is often highly poetic. The intensity he uses in portraying the god he worshipped,
'life itself,' has led some critics to perceive him along the mystic literary tradition. Lawrence's preoccupation for
portraying his passion for life, 'natural' life, led to most of his novels being banned for a time. This force is genuine
and original in English literature and Lawrence's new approach to what should be told in a novel seems to be
behind his literary appeal and the reason why he became such an icon in the 1960s.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned for over thirty years in England and in America. The novel tries to
offer a solution to the burdens and constrictions of modern life. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is Lawrence's most
controversial novel, and perhaps the first serious work of literature to explore hum sexuality in explicit detail.
When it was finally published in Britain in 1960, the British publishers of the novel, Penguin, were prosecuted by
the Home Office for obscenity. The prosecuting counsel posed the notorious question to the jury: «Is it a book you
would wish your wife or your servants to read?» Penguin won and publication was resumed. Lady Chatterley’s
Lover features some of Lawrence's most lyrical and poetic prose style alongside the theme of class conflict: the
story of an English noblewoman, Constance Chatterley, who finds love and sexual fulfilment with her husband's
game keeper Mellors.

Some feminist critics now claim this and other novels and short stories by Lawrence to be deeply
misogynistic; part of their argument is that Lawrence suggests women will reach true fulfilment only by
submitting themselves to men. Lawrence exposes the self-assertive determination one human being to dominate
another (particularly men as dominating women), and even his life-long companion Frieda complained of this:

Frieda says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude. I do think a woman must yield some sort of
precedence to a man... I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning
round to ask for permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women must follow as it
were unquestioningly.
(Letter to Katherine Mansfield, December 1918)

Lawrence wanted sex to be the source of the pure central fire of life. Clifford, Lord Chatterley and
Constance's husband, is impotent; his impotence is symbolic of modern mechanical man, and his growing concern
with business is a lust for power, while his wife is expanding her nature through the warmth and tenderness of
sensual love. In a familiar Lawrentian symbolism, Mellors, the gamekeeper, is the dark, sensual, full man set
against the blond, sterile, incomplete Clifford.

Life, for Lawrence, was essentially a mystery, and was not to be comprehended or explained in terms of
reason and logic, for that was the way to kill it. It could be experienced only by direct intuition, transmitted only
by touch; and the value of people, for Lawrence, consisted in the extent to which mystery resided in them, how far
they were conscious of mystery both in themselves and in others, and to what lengths they were prepared to go to
fulfil their passions. Since the mystery is killed by the analysing, scientific intellect, it obviously flourishes most
strongly where the analysing, scientific intellect is least powerful (in Mellors, gamekeeper in the forest), at the
instinctual levels of life, in sexual relationships, in the experience of death, and in the impulsive, non-rational
existence of animals and nature.

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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

In general, Lawrence detested every appearance of professionalism and as a writer he endeavoured to

The characteristic of his fiction can be summarised as follows: while the formal attributes of his novels are not
unusual, except for their lyricism and symbolism, the experimental quality lies in an unprecedented search not for
the outward manifestations but for the inner reality, the poetical quality of 'felt experience'. Lawrence's endeavour
was above all how to express emotion and feelings, as they exist far below the surface of gesture and are always
linked to bodily sensations. Lawrence was primarily interested not in the social man, but in that part of man that is
submerged and never seen, the unconscious, subjected to consciousness. This accounts for the difficulty readers
may experience on first reading Lawrence: they have to deduce emotion from gesture.

If Lawrence is one of the greatest English writers of the century it is largely because art feeds upon the
tensions in the artist as well as on their resolution; and the tensions hinted at by the above quotations are what help
to give Lawrence's characters their rich and flexible complexity and their astonishing vitality. Aside from this,
there is a recurrent tendency for the action of the books to become progressively divorced from what is most
seriously at issue in them, and to degenerate into a kind of slow moving and wooden intrigue (Holloway 1983:
99).

In 1929 Lawrence, who by then was dying, moved to the south of France. There he wrote a commentary
on the Book ofRevelation, Apocalypse. It was his final religious statement. After his death Aldous Huxley wrote
one of the best essays on D.H. Lawrence:

To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and
otherness... He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been on the brink of death
and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and
mysterious... A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvellously rich and significant
landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels. He seemed to
know, by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the
mysterious moon itself. He could get inside the skin of an animal and tell you in the most convincing
detail how it felt and how, dimly, inhumanly, it thought.
(Introduction to The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, 1932)

Lawrence died of tuberculosis France, in March 1930. He was buried there and later, in 1935, his ashes
were removed to Taos, New Mexico. The obituaries were largely hostile.

2.2. Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

It is useful to start this section by reading how Lawrence himself described his novel. What follows is part
of a letter written by Lawrence to his friend and patron Edward Garnett on 14 November 1912:
A woman of character and refinement goes into the lower class and has no satisfaction in
her own life ... As her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers –first the eldest, then the second...
But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in
their lives, and holds them... As soon as the young men come into contact with women there is a
split. William gives himself to a superficial woman and his mother holds his soul. But the split
kills him because he doesn't know where he is. (Paul) gets a woman who fights for his soul
(Miriam) –fights his mother. The son loves the mother –all the sons hate and are jealous of the
father... The son decides to leave his soul in his mother's hands, and like his elder brother, go for
passion (Clara). Then the split begins to tell again. But almost unconsciously, the mother realises
what is the matter and begins to die. The son leaves his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is
left in the end naked of everything, with the drift towards death.

This summary of the novel, written by Lawrence himself, draws attention to the relationship between
mother and son. Other female characters, such as Miriam or Clara are reduced, in this account, to mere symbolic
characters with only a secondary function in the main mother-son relationship. As Lance St John Butler notes
about this letter in his York Notes:
Further, it is a Paul-centred view of the novel only after being a Mrs Morel-centred view. This
can be taken as evidence that Lawrence saw his novel as a study of the Oedipus complex. This
psychological term was being employed by Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, at about the
same time as Sons and Lovers was being written. It refers to Freud's theory that all children are more or
less affected by sexually-based feelings about their parents: particularly, boys will always have some
form of desire for the mother and jealousy of the father. Clearly in Sons and Lovers Paul is very close
indeed to an incestuous relationship with his mother.
(St John Butler 1980: 45)

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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

It is worth pointing out that when Lawrence says Mrs Morel selects her sons 'as lovers', he does not mean
it literally. Lawrence is not writing about incest, but about a powerful emotional connection. Initially, Sons and
Lovers was rejected by Heinemann and Lawrence wrote to his friend Edward Garnett:

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the
miserable sodding rutters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering, palsied, pulse-less
lot that make up England today. They've got the white of egg in their veins and their spunk is
that watery it's a marvel they can breed.

In all his rage, he had clearly not foreseen the huge obstacles to publishing yet to come. Sons and Lovers
best exemplifies the Lawrentian idea of the modem situation of man and woman. It also presents the loneliness of
the individual, the lack of communication, the split between one's self and the self of others, the notion of harmony
and balance, the moral sickness in England, and the necessity for a new conception of life.

Regarding its style, Sons and Lovers presents a combination of realistic description and poetic images: the
realism is strongest in the first half of the novel, where the narrator describes the Morel family's day-to-day
existence. Lawrence's poetry comes to the forefront in his descriptions of nature, where, for example, vivid sunsets
and blazing rosebushes stand out against darkening skies. The poetic segments of Sons and Lovers seem to make
the common lives of its characters miraculous and heroic. Sons and Lovers is a masterpiece of technical brilliance
as Virginia Woolf noted at the time of its publication:

One never catches Lawrence –this is one of his most remarkable qualities- 'arranging.'
Words, scenes flow as fast and direct as if he merely traced them with a free rapid hand on sheet
after sheet. Not a sentence seems thought about twice; not a word added for its effect on the
architecture of the phrase. There is no arrangement that makes us say: 'Look at this. This scene,
this dialogue has the meaning of the book hidden in it.' One of the curious qualities of Sons and
Lovers is that one feels unrest, a little quiver and shimmer in his page, as if it were composed of
separate gleaming objects, by no means content to stand still and be looked at.
(Wool£, 'Notes on D.H. Lawrence', 1948)

Sons and Lovers is set in the British Midlands at the turn of the nineteenth century. This is a highly
industrialised region in central England. Factories, coal pits and ugly terrace houses are abundant. Yet, Robin
Hood's Sherwood Forest is close by the busy industrial city of Nottingham, where Paul works, and the River Trent
swirls its way from the city through the wide-open country hills and valleys. Sons and Lovers constantly contrasts
the sensuous, natural environment with that of the cold, drab monuments of industrial town and city life. In Sons
and Lovers the well-to-do families and the poor families each live in the valley ironically designated for them:
Bestwood for the well-to-do and slums of 'Hell Row' for the poor.

When Lawrence was growing up, few members of the working class in Great Britain had much chance of
lifting themselves out of poverty. Many were illiterate and were treated by the upper classes as little more than
beasts of burden (such was the case with Lawrence's father, Arthur). One of the only ways to better oneself was to
be bright and ambitious enough to earn scholarships to grammar school and university, as Lawrence himself did.
One could easily tell what class an individual belonged to by his speech. Notice in Sons and Lovers that Walter
Morel speaks in a local dialect, whereas his wife Gertrude speaks a crisp refined English.

The working class had suffered humiliation and sub-human living conditions for years but, finally, some
workers began to rebel. They started unions to improve their status, and socialism, a system calling for public
ownership of industry and land, became increasingly popular. The relationship between Lawrence's parents, Lydia
and Arthur, as did that between Gertrude and WaIter Morel, reveals the gulf separating the lower and middle
classes. Arthur, and most miners (also called colliers), worked twelve hours a day, exposed to grave dangers and
unhealthy working conditions. Miners' lives revolved around the colliery and the pub, where after an exhausting
day's work the men could forget their troubles with a pint or more of beer: alcoholism was a serious problem in the
mining community. Arthur Lawrence drank heavily, and the tragic effect of an alcoholic father on his family is
painstakingly depicted in Sons and Lovers. Lawrence's mother, Lydia, differed markedly from her uneducated,
easygoing husband. She came from a lower-middle-class family that had suffered an economic decline. Lydia's
father was humiliated by their fall in social status, and this shame was transferred to his daughter.

One of the most important aspects of Sons and Lovers, therefore, is Lawrence's treatment of class. He is
an author who can write with authority about class issues since, as has been shown above, class conflict was at the
heart of his family background. His depiction of working-class conditions in this coal mining community at the
turn of the century is accurate and moving as well as novel and authoritative, as ER. Leavis pointed out in his
essay 'D.H. Lawrence and Human Existence:'

To be born, with that genius, a miner's son at Eastwood in the eighteen eighties it is as if Destiny,
having given him the genius, had arranged also that he should be enabled to develop it to the utmost and

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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

qualified to use it for the purposes for which it was meant. If he had not been born into the working-class
he could not have known working-class life from the inside. As it was he enjoyed advantages that a writer
middle-class born could not have had: the positive experience and a freedom both from illusions and from
the debilitating sense of ignorance. On the other hand, gifted as he was, there was nothing to prevent his
getting to know life at other social levels.
(F.R. Leavis, ‘D.H. Lawrence and Human Existence’, 1951)

The contrast between city and nature parallels the lack of harmony between man and society. Man is so
satisfied with his social, political and economic achievements in the twentieth century that he seems to have los
the basic instincts and violence of the animal in him. But when the pressure of the social community is unbearable,
man escapes quickly to the boundary of civilisation, towards nature, to obey the rules of the 'spirit' and the flesh.
Lawrence presents nature as a kind of mother comforting people when they feel alone and as strangers in a hostile
world. The physical location in the novel is extremely important, since it represents a moral situation, too. The
dualism city/nature, or factory/country, represents another modem dualism the natural man versus the social or
industrialised man.

The novel opens with a description of the setting, but it is really an account of how civilisation and
financial ambition devour nature. Throughout the novel unconquered nature stands for freedom, instinct and
purity. Consider at this point the similarity of the descriptions of nature in some passages of the novel. Nature
allows passion and communion of the souls, as when Paul and Clara 'go down' to the river, following their instinct.
There, Paul starts talking in dialect, like his father, very much as a primitive man acting through instinct. Nature
involves peace and relaxation, even for Mrs Morel (as in Chapter Two) whereas industrialisation, on the contrary,
means slavery and restraint (as in Chapter Five).

 Industrial society is man's creation and it has turned against him, making man lose his identity as a natural
creature.

Lawrence proposes that, in order to overcome the opposition social man versus natural man, a rediscovery
of man through the flesh is needed. For him, the greatest obstacle to achieving this was the spirit, which confines
the spontaneous flame in man. For Lawrence the mind is the prison of the body, not the other way around, so they
present themselves as antagonistic forces. This confrontation is epitomised by the tensions between Mr and Mrs
Morel: she represents the ideas, he represents the senses. There is no balance and no communication between
them: «His nature was purely sensuous, and she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face
things. He could not endure it –it drove him out of his mind»
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 14).

Those who choose real life over intellectual social life break the rules of society and become outcasts, as
did Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers. As modern man searches for a life devoid of dangers, he sets limits on his
liberty to control and master his animal dimension in an attempt to destroy it completely. For Lawrence, though,
these limitations on the animal dimension should be rebalanced; his ideal reality is a harmonious balance between
the social and the natural man, complementary because we are social beings. Dorothy Van Ghent has this to say of
Mr Morel as a ‘natural man’:

In Sons and Lovers, only in Morel himself, brutalized and spiritually maimed as he is, does the
germ of selfhood remain intact; and, this is the correlative proposition in Lawrence, in him only does the
biological life force have simple, unequivocal assertion. Morel wants to live, by hook or crook, while his
sons want to die. To live is to obey a rhythm involving more than conscious attitudes and involving more
than human beings –involving all nature; a rhythm indifferent to the greediness of reason, indifferent to
idiosyncrasies of culture and idealism. The image associated with Morel is that of the coal pits, where he
descends daily and from which he ascends at night blackened and tired. It is a symbol of rhythmic descent
and ascent, like a sexual rhythm, or like the rhythm of sleep and awaking or of death and life. True, the
work in the coal pits reverses the natural use of the hours of light and dark and is an economic distortion.

(Dorothy Van Ghent, 'On Sons and Lovers', 1953)

 There are, we have seen, two ways to look at Walter Morel's failure to be a good husband, father and family
breadwinner. You can see him as a man broken by an uncaring, brutal industrial system and an overly demanding
wife. You can also see Walter as his own worst enemy, inviting self-destruction through drink and irresponsibility.

The end of the story is somewhat ambiguous: Paul has been searching for light throughout his life, but as
his mother dies he is slowly turning towards darkness. Now that he is alone, he must rely on his own possibilities,
on his own body and mind in perfect union. The choice is either to look for protection and join the forces of
darkness, the monster of social man or defy the monster and find the true reality of his being. He acts with
resolution for the first time in his life, and is prepared to begin anew, with his hands closed into fists like a
newborn baby.
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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

The first social nucleus, the family, lacks balance because there is no balance between man and wife. The
lack of communication and the degradation reaches the point of physical violence, which could well be a first step
to human annihilation. The couple's relationship is incomplete because there is no completeness within each
member. To feel stronger, to feel that she dominates the situation, Mrs Morel tempts the children to her side and
teaches them to hate their father. Paradoxically, though, she is conscious of the 'idea' of the family (Chapter Four).

 The relationship between Mrs Morel and her children is also very poignant: she loves what she can make of
them, not what they are. She is very possessive.

As to the relationships between Paul and women, they are similarly incomplete and unsatisfactory. The
mind, the spirit and the body are represented by three separate women. The spirit and the mind may exist as long
as they do not interfere with the expression of the body and are fully integrated in it:

For Christianity the flesh receives its sanction and purpose from a life of the spirit which is
eternal and transcendent. For Lawrence the life of the spirit has its justification in enriching and glorifying
the life of the flesh of which it is in any case an epiphenomenon.
(G. Hough, The Dark Sun)

Many authors have noted how, structurally, Sons and Lovers moves rhythmically in the treatment of
different characters' relationships: first that of Walter and Gertrude Morel, then Paul and his mother, later Paul and
Miriam, and finally that of Paul and Clara:

Sons and Lovers moves along a structural pattern determined by the nature of its human
relationships. A wave-rhythm distinguishes, in beat and counterbeat, the major involvements of the
characters: those of Walter and Gertrude Morel, Paul and his mother, Paul and Miriam, and Paul and
Clara. In each of these relationships, separate episodes focus –in dramatically enacted dialogue,
description, and action –aspects of each character- interconnection. Each event is a successive wave, and
the movement of the relationship is the full tide which is its consummation. After that consummation,
there are wavelike returns to the achieved tension in that relationship, but now each wave shows a
diminishing strength and intensity. The reader of Sons and Lovers soon comes to anticipate the rhythmic
returns and finds himself attuned to the Lawrencean mode. He doesn't ask for the conventional climactic
development.
(Betsky, 'Rhythm and Theme: D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers', 1953)

The three women referred to above as representing the mind, the spirit, and the body, are Gertrude Morel,
Miriam, and Clara respectively. The first impression we have of Gertrude Morel is that of a middle-class,
determined and intellectually alert character. The impression grows stronger when she is compared to her husband,
a working class, uncultivated, careless man. Immediately, the reader perceives that theirs (Mr and Mrs Morel's) is
a confrontation between her mind and his instincts, which is likely to cause many problems. Gertrude Morel
married her husband because she could not do better and she admired in him everything she did not have; at the
same time, she wanted to change him and make him more like her, although he would not let her. As the following
passage testifies, Morel and his wife have had one of their many arguments. He resents what he considers her
accusations:

'I'll may yer pay for this,' he said, pushing back his chair in desperation. He bustled and got
washed, then went determinedly upstairs. Presently he came down dressed, and with a big bundle in a
blue-checked, enormous handkerchief.
'And now,' he said, 'You'll see me again when you do.' 'It'll be before I want to,' she replied; and
at that he marched out of the house with his bundle...
When she went down to the coal-place at the end of the garden, however, she felt something
behind the door. So she looked. And there in the dark lay the big blue bundle. She sat on a piece of coal-
in front of the bundle and laughed. Every time she saw it, so fat and yet so ignominious, slunk into its
corner in the dark, with its ends flopping like dejected ears from the knots, she laughed again. She was
relieved.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 44)

They cannot accept each other for the way they are. Mrs Morel is a divided being, presented as a broken
entity, because she is a woman, a wife and a mother. As a wife she admits her failure, as a woman she still feel
some passion for Walter, and as a mother she is selfish and unnatural: "She had a great belief in him, the more
because he was unaware of his own powers. There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with
promise. She was to see herself fulfilled.» (236)

Miriam represents the spirit. Miriam Leivers, Paul's teenage friend and sweetheart, was modelled after
Lawrence's own young love, Jessie Chambers. When Lawrence was working on Sons and Lovers (1910-12), Jessie
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Chambers contributed many specific details, since the novel was so closely based on their own difficult, intimate
relationship. There are documents proving that some passages of the novel were written in Jessie's own
handwriting (they appear in the final work much expanded by Lawrence) and some comments by Jessie on
Lawrence's own work. These are known as the 'Miriam Papers', first analysed by Harry T. Moore in his book D.H.
Lawrence: The Man and His Works (1969), and are, in fact, documents relating to the original of 'Miriam' (Jessie
Chambers) and to her involvement with the writing of Sons and Lovers. It is clear from these papers that, although
Jessie often protests that Lawrence is changing the past in writing his novel, the basic plot, many incidents and
many details, at least of the Miriam sections, are true to Jessie's memory. The fact that Lawrence was able to
incorporate Jessie's own writings into the novel, in some cases without change, proves the point.

 From a critical point of view the 'Miriam Papers' provide a warning: Jessie never realised that fiction is a
different kind of writing from history or biography. This is why it is important to distinguish autobiography as a
genre and the autobiographical details that can be trace in a fictional writing such a Sons and Lovers.

From the beginning, Miriam Leivers is described as a 'romantic heroine' and the reader gets a picture of a
shy, religious, dreamy, intense, spiritual girl. The ordinary is too ugly for her. Paul, being equally sensitive, enjoys
life for what it is on earth. Mrs Morel believes that Miriam is not an «ordinary woman, who can leave me my share
in him. She wants to absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his
own two feet –she will suck him up» (193). Nature, represented by Willey Farm, links them: «So it was in this
atmosphere of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their common feelings for something in nature that their love
started». Miriam is idealistic also in the area of love. First, she feels as God's sacrificed victim: «But Lord, if it is
Thy will that I should love him, make me love him- as Christ would, who died for the souls of men», and later on
she will make an ultimately romantic gesture: letting Paul go with Clara, for she believes in the untouchable bond
that links her to Paul. She tells herself in Chapter Twelve:

If he must go, let him go and have his fill-something big and intense, he called it. At any rate,
when he had got it, he would not want it- that he said himself; he would want the other thing that she
could give him. He would want to be owned, so that he could work. It seemed to her a bitter thing that he
must go, but she could let him go into an inn for a glass of whisky, so she could let him go to Clara, so
long as it was something that would satisfy a need in him, and leave him free for herself to possess.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 318)

Miriam does not react to her secondary role and submits to Paul's dominance. There are two sides at war
in Miriam: her love of Paul More!'and her resistance to her sexual feelings towards him. Her mother taught her
that sex is one of the burdens of marriage, and although she does not want to believe it, she cannot help but listen
to the woman who has shaped her life. When Miriam finally gives in to Paul (in Chapter Eleven), she does so in a
spirit of self-sacrifice that disappoints both of them:

She would submit, religiously, to the sacrifice. He should have her. And at the thought her whole
body clenched itself involuntarily, hard, as if against something; but Life forced her through this gate of
suffering, too, and she would submit. At any rate, it would give him what he wanted, which was her
deepest wish.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 284)

Miriam's inability to enjoy sex makes her an incomplete person in the Lawrentian world, where sex as
well as spirituality is necessary to an individual's fulfilment. Clifford Chatterley, in Lady Chatterleys Lover, has a
similar response to Miriam's towards sex: «No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was
merely an accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own
clownishness, but was not really necessary.» However, spirit is not everything for Paul. He is looking for a
different kind of relationship, and so lets Miriam know (309). Their love is a failure. The realisation of their failure
comes to them during Easter time:

It made him mad with restlessness. She saw this, and wished bitterly that Miriam had been a
woman who could take this new life of his, and leave her the roots. He fought against his mother almost
as he fought against Miriam.
It was a week before he went again to Willey Farm. Miriam had suffered a great deal, and was
afraid to see him again. Was she now to endure the ignominy of his abandoning her? That would only be
superficial and temporary. He would come back. She held the keys to his soul. But meanwhile, how he
would torture her with his battle against her. She shrank from it.
(Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 222)

 At spring time they feel queer, awkward and uneasy, and it is quite fitting because spring symbolises mating
and development while they are always stagnant in their ideal love.

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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

Lawrence completed the novel in 1913, while mourning his mother's death and under yet another female
influence, that of the independent and sensuous Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, his future wife. Much of Frieda's
personality can be seen in the passionate Clara Dawes, Paul Morel's other love. Jessie felt that her portrayal as
Miriam was unflattering. She broke off all ties with Lawrence and even wrote her own version of the relationship
in order to vindicate herself.

Clara stands for the body, the senses, the flesh that Miriam seems to lack. She is presented as heavy,
blonde, and defiant. She strikes the reader as being a modern woman, owner of herself and of her destiny. Clara is
depicted as a new twentieth-century woman. She is a feminist before it was fashionable. Determined to be
independent, she leaves her husband, earns her own living, and has an extramarital affair with Paul. Clara can be
viewed as representative of the many post-Victorian women who rebelled against the traditional image of woman
as the 'weaker sex.' Clara is extraordinarily intelligent, with a good critical mind. But Lawrence gives little
demonstration of this aspect of her personality, since the story concentrates on her physical attractiveness to Paul.
Nevertheless, since she left her husband, nothing seems to have happened to her in terms of love and affection. In
a way, she is like a dead flower (Sons and Lovers 1913 [1995]: 295). Paul thinks that flowers are there to be
enjoyed. Their own beauty entitles people to pick them and appreciate them. Curiously, Gertrude Morel and
Miriam are also frequently connected to flowers in the novel: in Chapter Seven, Gertrude can hardly believe that
some beautiful flowers have come out in her garden, Miriam, every time she picks flowers, seems to devour them,
to smell the life out of them, just as she wants to do with Paul. The rose bush Miriam shows to Paul eerily signifies
their relationship. That Miriam is intensely loving and warm towards the beautiful, white roses and that Paul feels
strangely 'imprisoned' by them symbolises their feelings for each other and toward sex with the other. Miriam
would devote herself to Paul, who would feel smothered by her intensity. Mark Spilka noted in 1955 that the
women in Sons and Lovers are frequently identified with flowers and gardening (Miriam tends to smother flowers
with her religious adoration, while Mr Morel nurtures them to become healthy and strong):

As these thoughts indicate, flowers are the most important of the 'vital forces' in Sons and
Lovers. The novel is saturated with their presence, and Paul and his three sweethearts are judged, again
and again, by their attitude toward them, or more accurately, by their relations with them. The 'lad-and-
girl' affair between Paul and Miriam, for example, is a virtual communion between the two lovers and the
flowers they both admire.
(Spilka, 'How to Pick Flowers', 1955)

Following this flower symbolism, Clara is like a beautiful flower that has become forgotten: she is there
both for someone to have her and to have someone herself. In spite of the loathing and contempt she feels for men,
the reader senses that she is not cut out to be alone. Her detachment and self containment are extraordinarily
attractive to Paul. She is like a goddess in possession of the ultimate secret of a body, of a human relationship. Full
of a life to be expressed, she is linked to Paul in a non-spiritual way. In Chapter Twelve Clara and Paul make love
and their relationship reaches its high point in their sexual fulfilment. By having his body near she seems to come
back to life again, and as she wants someone who needs her she starts to move back towards her husband, Baxter.
Clara notices why Paul cannot be hers completely, how there is something she cannot reach: «She felt as if
something almost tangible fastened her to him; yet he seemed so easy in his graceful, indolent movement, so
detached as he tied up the too-heavy flower branches to their stakes, that she wanted to shriek in her helplessness»
(387).

Besides, the special tie between Miriam and Paul is something which Clara will never have. She is honest
enough to admit it and even to push him back to Miriam. Lacking that particular quality, she can just feel
resurrected, alive again, by having a man. Paul, in return, loves the woman but does not feel consecrated to her:
«But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any
nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force» (422). There is no unity between the two
selves: Lawrence seems to be saying that it is no use being available for sex, as is Clara, if there is no communion
of the souls, too. As Paul watches Clara swim in the sea, he thinks to himself, «'She's lost like a grain of sand in
the beach –just a concentrated speck blown along, a tiny white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning.
Why does she absorb me?'» (358).

The fulfilment of one's personality is achieved when the senses express the reality of the inner self. If no
tenderness governs or accompanies the flesh, then, Lawrence says, we go back to our animal nature and the human
instinct is lost. That is what happens in the relationship between Paul and Clara: they lack full understanding.
Clara and Baxter Dawes get together again. He needs her now for him to come back to life, to regain his lost
manhood, and she knows it. She has not been able to reach into the deepest part of Paul, and now with Baxter she
has the chance of being accepted as a whole woman, in such a way as she has never been with Paul. The only
woman to whom Paul has ever felt himself given up is his mother. Sometimes he feels he is not entire, for a
mother cannot replace sexual love. However, as a whole, his mother is his comfort, his peace, the warmth of
childhood, the steadiness, the person who understands him perfectly well and who is always beside him. It is for
him a very easy way of loving for him: pleasant and without complexities, rewarding and satisfying. Of course, it
is not a completely fulfilling love, but it is far better than those he receives from either Miriam or Clara. When
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UNIT 4 «Life is a Luminous Halo»: The Novel in the c20, Sons and Lovers

Mrs. Morel dies, Paul's emptiness seems total. «She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this.
And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her. But no, he
would not give in... He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her» (420). When Paul kisses his
dead mother, he feels emotions he had never experienced from her: cold and harsh, unreceptive and loveless. He
does not want to let his mother go from his life. As much as Paul wants his mother to be with him, he decides that
he cannot follow his mother. Even though her spirit will guide him if he allows it to, but he decides to break away
from her. He knows he must separate himself from her to become a man of his own instinct and will. At the end of
the novel Paul walks away from the dark, uninhabited country fields and towards the bright city lights. Some
readers see this act as Paul's walking away from death and towards life. Paul has been both blessed and cursed
with such an extraordinary mother.

3. ACTIVITIES

3.1. Test yourself

3.2. Overview questions

3.3. Explore
1. The sentences below have been quoted from Chapter Ten, the final chapter of Sons and Lovers. Read them, go
to the novel and place both sentences in context, explaining why Paul's life had fallen into pieces and who is that
'her' he is not going to follow. What do you think Paul is going to do next with his life?:
a) 'Paul's life had fallen to pieces'.
b) 'He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her'.
2. Write a short essay (450 words) comparing D.H. Lawrence's life to that of his character Paul paying particular
attention to the fictionalization of facts that make possible the building of Paul as a fictional character.

3.4. Key terms

Bildungsroman
Censorship
City
Machine
Nature
Perspectivism
Poetic language
Science
Sex
Sexuality
- Women
- Working Class

4. BIBLIOGRAPHY

CALLOW, Philip. 1975. Son and Lover: The Young D.H. Lawrence. New York: Stein and Day.
DRAPER, R.P. 1969. Profiles in Literature: D.H. Lawrence. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
FARR, Judith, ed. 1970. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Sons and Lovers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
HOLLOWAY, John. 1991. 'The Literary Scene' in From James to Eliot. The Pelican Guide to English Literature
Vol. 7, edited by Boris Ford. London: Penguin.
TEDLOCK, E.W. Jr., ed. 1965. D.H. Lawrence and Sons and Lovers. New York: New York University Press.

Web Sites
- D. H. Lawrence resources at The University of Nottingham http://mss.library.nottingham.ac.ukldhl_home.html
- D. H. Lawrence index page http://web.ukonline.co.uklrananim/lawrence/
- D. H. Lawrence page http://www.cswnet.com/-erin/lawrence.htm 210
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