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Literatura Inglesa IIi: Pensamiento y Creación Literaria en la

1.ª Mitad del Siglo XX
3º Grado en Estudios Ingleses: Lengua, Literatura y Cultura
Facultad de Filología
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
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Unit 4
Life is a Luminous Halo
THE NOVEL IN THE 20TH C., SONS AND LOVERS
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. 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 to explore the poverty of reality and the enormous power of art, of perspectivism,
and of form.
For Lawrence, the literary ideal to be pursued is a psychic ideal. By that, he means an
inner, intangible, relaxed but strong integrity and unity.
Notions such as the 'old stable ego' of character disappear and so does the traditional
unity and linearity of the plot. Lawrence was calling into question the belief in the ego's
stability. Thus, in 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, Lawrence was very English,
much closer in spirit and in his view of the novel to a George Eliot than to a Flaubert. He
is the novelist as moralist, or the moralist as novelist. The question of morality and the
novel should not be underestimated. The 19th C role of the novel took over the 18th, 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 18th was the century of the novel of
sensibility, where sensibility stood mainly for social manners and ethics. Among the
greatest examples of the 18th C. novel stand Samuel Richardson's novels, combining
the then much imitated graphic realism of its epistolary form with a strong moral
message. Richardson is in some ways the father of the British novel, along with Daniel
Defoe, Laurence Sterne, and Henry Fielding. 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 18th and
the beginning of the 19th centuries with the Gothic novel. Perhaps the most famous of
this novelistic genre is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
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 18th C. The Gothic novel offers a form of literary escapism from social
disillusion and the idea of literature as entertainment, the latter still prevails and is better
understood in 21st-century terms as the Hollywood film industry, from which we mostly
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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
and pushed the boundaries of the novelistic form. The Gothic novel would not last long
into the 19th C. 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 it did so because the public demanded it. Despite the
literary 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 with readers of novels 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.
Jane Austen’s first novel Northanger Abbey 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 19th century. She writes a farce of the Gothic novel by making fun of its literary
conventions: a naïve 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. Hers are generally comedies of manners that revert to the social sensibility of

the 18th 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 20th 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, Lawrence was preoccupied by the industrial and urban modern world,
and how it was transforming the human condition. This runs steadily through his novel
The Rainbow. 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 school, later to a teachers' training college, and finally to a fairly large
house in the new, red-brick part of Beldover.
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. With the clarity of the great artist he goes straight on o make
clear how a struggle against difficulties, a struggle indeed to overcome weakness, is
integral to his work.
Lawrence was much else besides a moralist: we think of him mainly as a novelist, but he
is equally influential as a poet and a writer of novellas and short stories.
He was also a writer of brilliant travel books and a literary critic, and his superb Studies
in Classic American Literature is particularly noteworthy. His eight plays have never
received much attention at all, 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 self-absorbed.
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Lawrence believed that industrialised Western culture was dehumanising because it
emphasised intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He
thought that this culture was in decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new
awareness of itself as being a part of nature.
It’s 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.
One aspect of this 'blood consciousness' would be an acceptance of the need for sexual
fulfilment. His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and
Women in Love (1921) concern the consequences of trying 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, was
intellectually and spiritually refined, high-minded, 'cut out'. 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 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.
Delicate health meant that D.H. Lawrence stayed close to his mother. He was often ill
and absent from school. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and in 1901,
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, 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.
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
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 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 and Sons and Lovers.
Regarding the male female interaction Lawrence believed that 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.
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.
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 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
could be read in these terms.
A final theme 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 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.

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 the most notable
autobiographical fiction and one of the most famous English novels of the 20th 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 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.
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 is grief-stricken. He feels a strong pull towards death. The life urge in him proves
stronger 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, novels that trace the
development and growth of the main character. Much of the time, the main character of
such a tale, 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. At the time, his mother was

mortally ill, 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 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.
In 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, 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 now we can
distinguish 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, 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 and he was also anti-Semitic. The
novels containing this theme, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, 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 comprises the first half of a story that will be carried on in the other half
Women in
Love. The Rainbow is a family chronicle, abounding in superb passages of broad realism
in the 19th 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 19th-
century English novel and offers a series of novels where basic sexual relationships are
examined. 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, 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.
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 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 themselves
from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society.
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 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.
Rupert Birkin 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 Ursul relinquishes 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
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 concluded that Lawrence's liberal approach
to sex was only apparent for in reality these supposedly liberated women were submitting
to the male desire.

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.
Lawrence felt that reality provoked in him dissatisfaction, exasperation and disgust.
Other novels such as Aaron's Rod appeared with a new subject matter influenced by
Nietzsche's theories. 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 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 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.
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. 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, and even his life-long
companion Frieda complained of this,
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,
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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 flourishes most strongly where the analysing, scientific intellect is least powerful, 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.
In general, Lawrence detested every appearance of professionalism and as a writer he
endeavoured to retain the mark of the amateur. He preferred a basic dynamic style,
passionate and energetic, to a sophisticated and elaborate one.
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.

In 1929 Lawrence, who by then was dying, moved to the south of France. There he wrote
a commentary on the Book of Revelation, Apocalypse. It was his final religious
statement.
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.
It’s 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:
This summary of the novel draws attention to the relationship between mother and son.
Other female characters are reduced, in this account, to mere symbolic characters with
only a secondary function in the main mother-son relationship.
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.
Lawrence 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 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.
Sons and Lovers is set in the British Midlands at the turn of the 19th 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. 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 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 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, easy-going 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, is Lawrence's treatment of class.
He is an author who can write with authority about class issues since 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.
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
20th century that he seems to have lost 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
whereas industrialisation, on the contrary, means slavery and restraint.
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 o 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.
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, 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.
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 new-born baby.
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, Mrs Morel tempts the children to her side and teaches them to hate their
father. Paradoxically, she is conscious of the 'idea' of the family.
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.
Many authors have noted how 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.
The three women referred to 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.
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.
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, Jessie 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 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 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 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. Nature, represented by
Willey Farm, links them. Miriam is idealistic also in the area of love. First, she feels as
God's sacrificed victim, 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.
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, she does so in a spirit of
self-sacrifice that disappoints both of them.
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.
However, spirit is not everything for Paul. He is looking for a different kind of relationship,
and so lets Miriam know. heir love is a failure. The realisation of their failure comes to
them during Easter time.
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 20th-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. 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 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 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).
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 because Paul cannot be hers completely, how there is
something she cannot reach.
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. 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.
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 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
Mrs. Morel dies, Paul's emptiness seems total.
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.- KEY TERMS
• Bildungsroman
• Censorship
• City
• Machine
• Nature
• Perspectivism
• Poetic language
• Science
• Sex
• Sexuality
• Women
• Working class
FULL ANALYSIS
Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence
1st World War
1913
Modernist
David Herbert Lawrence was born in a mining community in Northern England. Lawrence
loved the countryside surrounding his home and spent a great deal of time outside as a
child. He published his first novel, The White Peacock, in 1910 shortly before the death
of his mother. Lawrence was deeply affected by his mother’s death and based Sons and
Lovers on this experience.
Sons and Lovers is set in the early decades of the 20th century in an industrial mining
community. In the early 20th century in Britain, miners were considered working class
people and were generally uneducated and would work in the mines their whole lives.
There was a noticeable shift throughout the 20th century, as young people gravitated
away from these types of hard, menial jobs to take advantage of education and
employment opportunities in the growing towns and cities. This often led to class divides
within generations in the same families, a subject which is loosely touched on in Sons
and Lovers. The novel is set in a period when there is growing interest in women’s rights,
with the rise of the suffragettes, who protested frequently for the right to vote, and a
public interest better labour laws and better conditions for workers. There’s a brief
reference in the novel to the possibility of war in Europe. This demonstrates political
tensions at the time which would gradually escalate and erupt into WW1, which broke
out shortly after the novel was published.
Literary Fiction
The narrator is a third-person omniscient. This narrator knows everything about the outer

world of the book and also the characters' inner worlds.
Since Sons and Lovers is mostly about one character, Paul Morel, it would have made
sense for Lawrence to write the thing from a first-person perspective. But by choosing
an omniscient third person narrator, Lawrence positions the Morels' problems inside the
larger historical conflicts of modern industry.
Lawrence's internal insight into the book's characters allows us to witness the similarities
and differences between what is said and what remains unsaid. The third-person
omniscient narrator allows Lawrence to make us a little more sympathetic toward evil or
pathetic characters like Walter Morel, whom every other character seems to hate. And
for Lawrence, having a little compassion for any person is a good thing—especially in a
modern industrial world that does its best to make us hard and cruel.
Lawrence sets most of this book either in the Morel household or the beautiful English
countryside. Lawrence tends to contrast the natural aspects of his settings (i.e., flowers
and birds) with the unnatural aspects (i.e., coal mines and heavy machinery). In doing
so, he draws a clear distinction between the peacefulness and joy that can be found in
nature and the cruel, cold world of modern industry. Just as Paul's feelings of love are
always balanced by feelings of hatred, so the beauty of Lawrence's setting is always
balanced by the ugliness of the modern world and the coal mines that represent it.
GERTRUDE MOREL
Mrs Morel is reserved and religious, and also an extremely practical and determined
woman. She strives to make the best of her poverty and is proud and prepared to defend
herself when her husband is abusive to her. Mrs. Morel loves her children deeply and is
genuinely well meaning towards them. Unfortunately, the strength of her love for her
sons leads her to become jealous and possessive and she inadvertently restricts them
as they try to develop their own lives; they have such a strong relationship with her that
they feel guilty if they share their affection with another woman. Overall, Mrs. Morel’s life

is hard and unhappy, and the reader gets the sense that she has not been given the
opportunity to use her full potential. She is an intelligent, organized and industrious
woman, but the restrictions of her class and gender mean that Mrs. Morel misses out on
opportunities in work and education that later generations of women would benefit from.
MR WALTER MOREL
Mr. Morel is a coalminer and works in the mines from the age of thirteen onwards and
for the rest of his adult life. He is a sensuous, physical man but he is not inclined towards
conversation and is does not have the patience for serious ideas. He is uneducated and
does not know how to read or write well. He finds that he is incompatible with Mrs. Morel
and that he clashes with her severe, disciplined approach to life. In response to this, Mr.
Morel takes to drink and spends much of his time in the pub. He is unable to
communicate well or explain his emotions and takes out his frustration on his wife and
children. He feels hurt and rejected when Mrs. Morel pays more attention to the children
than to him and believes that he is not appreciated as the breadwinner of the family.
From time to time, he flirts with misogynistic ideas and attempts to dominate Mrs. Morel.
Mr. Morel is a cowardly man and never takes responsibility for the wrongs he has done
to his wife. Instead, after her death, he “dismisses” her by telling himself that he always
“did his best by her,” although this is not completely true.
WILLIAM MOREL
William Morel is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Morel and the elder brother of Annie, Paul,
and Arthur. He is a cheerful, popular, and athletic child and is his mother’s favourite.

William is extremely close to his mother as a child and cannot stand it if she is ill or
hurt. William is very ambitious and determined to get on in society. He takes a job in
London and shows himself to be capable of a great deal, both intellectually and
professionally. He is cruel and spiteful in his relationship with Louisa Lily Denys Western,
whom he openly considers to be stupid and shallow. Despite this, he will not break up
with her and seems to hold her responsible for the fact that he dislikes her. This shows
that William has learned some of his father’s abusive behaviours and this disappoints
Mrs. Morel. William’s reckless and self-destructive behaviour eventually brings about his
own demise, as he dies young after ruining his health for the sake of money and prestige.
PAUL MOREL
Paul is a serious and reflective child and Mrs. Morel worries about him extensively
because she feels he is fragile and because he is prone to “fits of depression.” However,
despite Mrs. Morel’s fears, Paul grows into a vigorous and intelligent young man. He is
very interested in art and ideas and is a talented painter. He is successful and popular
at work and is attractive to women. However, his tendency towards abstract thought and
his introspective temperament sometimes lead Paul into trouble. He is accidentally cruel
to his lovers, Miriam and Clara, because he cannot decide what he wants from them and
he tends to be self-absorbed and think about himself before he considers their feelings.
He feels uncomfortable about sex and is deeply ashamed of his desires. This often
makes him hate his lovers because he blames them for causing his shame. Paul is
extremely close to Mrs. Morel and wishes they were not related so they could be lovers
rather than mother and son. He plans his life and career around pleasing and supporting
his mother and prioritizes her over his girlfriends. Paul is devastated by his mother’s
death and loses all interest in life or his own future. He feels that his mother was his real
companion and has no desire to go on without her. Despite this, Paul is a determined
character and his love of physicality and the material world push him to survive even
when he is left desolate at the novel’s conclusion.
ANNIE MOREL
Annie is a practical girl and grows into a mature and sensible young woman. She sides
with Mrs. Morel against Miriam, Paul’s girlfriend, whom both the women dislike. Annie,

like Mrs. Morel, feels that Miriam is overly spiritual and refined and is a bad influence on
Paul. She is close to her mother and feels that, if she had been at home during the early
stages of Mrs. Morel’s illness, her mother would have confided in her and she could have
helped her get proper treatment. By the time of Mrs. Morel’s death, Annie is worn out
with her care and the strain of constantly seeing her mother in pain and is relieved when
Paul decides to poison his mother to end her suffering.
ARTHUR MOREL
Arthur is a happy, lively child and, out of all the Morel children, he gets along best with Mr.
Morel. One day he and a friend join the army. Arthur regrets this decision immediately
and asks his mother to pay his way out. This shows that Arthur is irresponsible and does
not expect there to be consequences to his actions. His time in the army disciplines him
and brings the optimistic and determined side of his nature to the surface. Arthur is very
comfortable in his body in a way that Paul is not. It’s insinuated that he is not ashamed
of his physical and sexual prowess and shows his body off when he is with Beatrice
before they become lovers.
MIRIAM LEIVERS
Miriam is the long-term girlfriend of Paul Morel. Paul meets Miriam when she is fourteen
and continues to spend time with her into her early twenties. Miriam is a deeply self-
conscious and spiritual girl. She is extremely religious, loves to feel pure, and is afraid of
physical sensation and experience. Her emotions tend to be very extreme and close to
the surface and she has trouble making light of situations and being friendly and familiar

with people.
Although she is in love with Paul, Miriam despises sexual contact and disapproves of
physical love outside of marriage, which she is afraid of and feels too young for. She
views sex as a “sacrifice” and is willing to sacrifice herself for Paul, in order to give him
pleasure. At times, Miriam tries to manipulate Paul into staying with her, but generally
she is confused by his erratic behaviour towards her and is hurt by his frequent rejections.
Despite this, Miriam is stronger than Paul and often dislikes him because he is so easily
swayed by his mother’s opinion. Miriam is hated by Mrs. Morel, who feels that she would
“suck the soul” from her son, and by Annie and Clara, who find her insipid and needy.
CLARA DAWES
Clara Dawes is the wife of Baxter Dawes, the daughter of Mrs. Radford, and Paul Morel’s
lover. Clara is estranged from her husband Baxter, whom she married young and found
that she could not get on with. She is a friend of Miriam and she lives with her mother.
Clara is a suffragette and is bitter and resentful about the way her marriage has worked
out. Paul and Clara have an extremely passionate and physical relationship, although
they do not have much in common intellectually. Clara is a strong, active woman, but is
very reserved and finds it hard to fit in with the factory girls when Paul gets her a job at
Jordan’s. Clara is independent and single minded because she is willing to live
separately from her husband despite the social disapproval this causes. By the end of
the novel, Clara is sick of Paul’s dithering between her and Miriam and feels that he is
unmanly because he has played with her and failed to commit to their relationship. She
gets her pride back after her failed marriage and s able to reconcile with Baxter, who has
been humbled and who now intends to treat her with respect.
BAXTER DAWES
Baxter Dawes is the husband of Clara Dawes and Paul Morel’s rival when Paul becomes
Clara’s lover. Baxter and Clara are separated, and Baxter is self-destructive and
miserable in the wake of her departure, despite the fact that he now lives with his
mistress. Paul and Baxter’s rivalry reaches a crisis when Baxter attacks Paul one night
and the pair have a brawl. After this, the two become friends when Paul visits Baxter in

hospital, where he is sick and depressed. Baxter is a physical and proud man, but his
pride and confidence are shattered by his failed relationship with Clara. He feels sorry
for himself and regrets what has happened. After he recovers from his illness, he realizes
that he does not want to die and is humbled by the experience. This experience also
matures him, and he grows more responsible and emotionally communicative and is able
to reconcile with Clara, with Paul’s help, at the novel’s close.
FAMILY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

Many of the conflicts in Sons and Lovers are driven by underlying psychological forces,
which even the characters themselves don’t understand. Lawrence was interested in
psychology and loosely incorporates aspects of Freud’s Oedipus complex into the plot
of the novel. The Oedipus complex is the theory that infant children are attracted to their
parent of the opposite gender and that they become jealous of the parent of the same
sex. Lawrence’s blend of family drama and psychology suggests that people’s
unresolved childhood pain and confusion can, unfortunately, lead to lives in which many

of their emotional needs remain misunderstood and unfulfilled.
The Morel family is defined by conflict and division, which begin with the unhappy
marriage of Mr. Morel and Mrs. Morel. Their relationship quickly becomes volatile and
Mr. and Mrs. Morel never emotionally reconcile. Their children side with their mother
against their father, and the rift within the family foreshadows the conflicts that the
children, especially William and Paul, will psychologically inherit. This legacy of conflict
and division is continued by William and Paul in their relationships with women. Both
William and Paul rely on their mother well into adulthood for emotional guidance,
psychological support, and personal validation. When they try to build relationships with
women their own age, they are divided within themselves because they feel disloyal to
their mother.
This split is represented in Paul’s relationships with Miriam and Clara, which are depicted
as a “battle;” Miriam feels she owns “Paul’s soul,” while with Clara he experiences
physical passion. This divide between body and soul, stands in for the most significant
psychological tension in Paul’s life: his strong attachment to his mother. The force of their
bond means that Paul constantly feels that he must choose between her and his lovers
and her mother. The repetition of such toxic psychological patterns throughout the novel
suggests the power of early familial bonds and implies that these forces often direct
decisions made in later life.
Many of the psychological conflicts in Sons and Lovers take place unconsciously and
are not obvious to the characters. Paul and Mrs. Morel are driven by underlying needs
and desires rather than explicit knowledge of themselves. The novel’s overall theme of
twisted family psychologies is most prominent in the somewhat ambiguous relationship
between Paul and his mother. Although there is no explicitly sexual relationship between
Paul and Mrs. Morel, their relationship nonetheless reflects Freud’s theory of the Oedipus
complex. Paul and Mrs. Morel do not consider their relationship incestuous, but there are
several incidents which suggest that their relationship makes other suspicious.
The ending symbolizes Paul being forced at last to progress beyond the Oedipal phase
of his childhood in which he was trapped while his mother was alive. Just as Mrs. Morel
transferred her love from her husband onto her sons, Paul transfers his desire to sexually
fulfil his mother onto Clara and Baxter. However, this leads him to confusion and
desolation at the novel’s end. Through Paul’s fate, the novel suggests that one must gain
psychological insight into oneself.
CHRISTIANITY, PROPRIETY, AND PHYSICALITY
Christianity was an important aspect of life in Britain in the early 1900s, when Sons and
Lovers is set, and Lawrence uses frequent references to Biblical stories to underpin
much of the action of the novel. However, when paired with social notions of propriety,
Christian beliefs disrupt the lives of the characters by discouraging them from exploring
their physical urges and desires. Lawrence believed that physical sensation was a
manifestation of the divine, and that through bodily experiences human beings could
achieve spiritual transcendence which united them with God. Accordingly, the novel
argues that Christian belief, when it discounts the importance of the physical world in
favour of the purely spiritual, is a source of confusion and emotional pain rather than
fulfilment.
In contrast to Christian ideals, physical connection is a source of clarity and relief; it often
provides spiritual meaning within the novel. Paul enjoys his intellectual discussions about
books and art with Miriam, but his relationship with her always leaves him unfulfilled
because he cannot share a mutual enjoyment of physical life with her. Miriam admires
Paul’s physicality, but she cannot enjoy physical activity herself because she is naturally
cerebral and can never let herself go. In contrast, Paul finds that he is physically satisfied
with Clara, although their relationship leaves him intellectually unfulfilled. When Clara
and Paul have sex on the canal bank, Paul feels that he “almost worships” Clara, as
though she extends beyond herself into something abstract and spiritual. He feels that
their passion is not separate from, but rather “encompasses” the grass they lie on and
the birds they hear overhead. This moment frames sexual contact as something
spiritual and physical.

WOMEN’S WORK AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Throughout the novel, Paul’s attitude towards women is defined by his love for his
mother, which leads him to compare his female lovers with her. Since Paul’s love for his
mother is rooted in idealism and not in reality, the other women in his life cannot compare
with Paul’s romantic idea of how women should be, and they find themselves cast aside
by Paul as they fail to live up to his impossible expectations. The story is set in the early
20th century, during a period in which rights for women and societal expectations placed
on women were gradually changing. Paul’s inability to understand the women in his life
mirrors society’s failure to respect women during this period. Through Paul and his
relationships with women, the novel suggests that social attitudes need to change so
that women can find fulfilment in life and equality in society and relationships.
Since Mrs. Morel shows such affection towards Paul and such investment in the pursuits
of his life, he believes that she lives happily through him. This belief mirrors social
attitudes towards women at the time, which insisted that, rather than cultivating interests
or passions of their own, women should be happy to live through their male family
members to achieve society’s standard of ideal womanhood. The harsh reality of Mrs.
Morel’s life suggests that Paul’s attitude towards his mother, and by extension all women,
reflects society’s idealized, unrealistic belief that women should be completely satisfied
by domestic life.
Miriam and Clara enter society under a different set of social conditions. Although it
would be a long time before progress was made in gaining equal rights for women, the
early 1900s saw the rise of women’s suffrage and an increase in women entering the
workplace and education. This new trend is demonstrated in Miriam and Clara; Miriam
is highly intellectual and interested in books, and Clara is a working woman, a member
of the suffragettes, and has separated from her husband because he has been abusive
towards her.
Lawrence’s sympathetic portrayal of Mrs. Morel reveals that the reality of women’s work
and women’s rights is far different than social norms suggest. Meanwhile, his depiction
of Paul as a confused and disillusioned young man at the novel’s close suggests that

old-fashioned and idealized depictions of women aren’t in the best interests of either
women or of men. Paul’s story demonstrates how men who expect women to be fulfilled
by living vicariously through them, will be left behind by the social changes beginning in
this period.
DEATH, GRIEF, AND SELF-DESTRUCTION

Life and death are closely interlinked throughout Sons and Lovers, and grief has a
palpable and lasting impact on the lives of the characters. Sons and Lovers was
concluded in the aftermath of the death of Lawrence’s own mother, and his experiences
with grief shape the events of the novel. Death is portrayed as an ever-present force in
the novel, something which is both terrifying and, at times, terribly seductive. Throughout
the novel, Lawrence demonstrates the ways that people often walk the tenuous line
between life and death, and the novel argues that fixating on the past can turn this
constant threat of death into full-fledged self-destruction.
Danger of death was a perpetual threat in mining communities where the book is set,
and Lawrence’s own experiences inform his portrayal of day-to-day life in this setting.
Mining was an extremely dangerous profession in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Although conditions did gradually improve, the risk of death or serious injury meant that
mines suffered many fatalities, and that early death or widowhood was a common
concern in mining communities. Since industrial mining towns were built for the explicit
purpose of housing miners and their families, there was little alternative work nearby,
and Paul and William must travel to the nearby cities to find paid work. The dangerous

working conditions in the mines caused many potential problems for miners and their
families and meant that death was an ever-present factor in these communities.
Due to the constant proximity of death within the novel, grief also has a large impact on
the progression of the characters’ lives. William’s death nearly kills Mrs. Morel because
her grief destroys her will to live. It is also insinuated that her health problems begin after
William’s death, because of the physical toll that grief takes on her. In turn, Mrs. Morel’s
grief impacts the direction Paul’s life takes. Shortly after William’s death, Paul is struck
down by pneumonia and is close to death himself. William’s death sets off a chain of
grief that reverberates for years. Then, just as Mrs. Morel was almost destroyed by
William’s death, the end of the novel finds Paul reeling from Mrs. Morel’s own demise
and he ends the novel in darkness, walking across a field at night. This image potently
conveys the emotional experience of grief and underscores the ways in which grief has
altered the course of Paul’s life and made it difficult for him to leave the past behind.
Despite the devastating effects of loss and grief, many of the characters are drawn
towards death and self-destructive behaviour throughout the novel. Paul’s and William’s
unconscious attraction to death is also reflective of their relationship with their mother.
By focusing on their love for their mother, rather than moving on emotionally to new
relationships, the young men reject the possibility for new life. Their futures contains the
inevitable loss of their mother, and Paul and William are so fixated on the past and their
mother that they reject this future. An unhealthy fixation on the past, the novel suggests,
leads to a lack of hope for the future, which can cause individuals to be self-destructive
and careless with their own lives.
NATURE AND INUSTRIALISM
Lawrence uses nature and the natural world to represent the inner lives of the characters
throughout Sons and Lovers, suggesting that human beings are not separate from the
natural world but rather extensions of it. Lawrence indicates that the closer and more
harmonious the relationship between humans and the natural world, the happier and
more fulfilling human lives will be. The further the characters travel from the natural world,
the more unstable and unhappy their lives become, as the links between humans and

their environment are weakened by processes such as industrialism, mass production,
and the materialism of modernity.
Nature is a source of beauty, inspiration, hope, and human connection in the novel. The
characters in Sons and Lovers are depicted as being at their best when they are
surrounded by nature which has not been interfered with by the modern world.
Some industrial practices, such as mining, are still closely linked to nature in the novel,
even though they represent human interference with the natural world. Although mining
is an industrial process and relies on technology and machines, mining is still associated
with nature because it is a process which extracts natural resources, and which relies on
the land rather than producing something external to the natural world. The mining
communities which the Morels are part of, are totally reliant on natural resources for their
own survival. For the miners and mining communities, life is dependent on nature and
on natural ecosystems, even if the result of this process is ugliness and pollution. The
miners are also shaped by their environment, in the same way that Paul is shaped into
an artist by his contact with nature. Mr. Morel prefers to sit in darkness even in the
daytime because he is so used to operating in the natural darkness of the mine. Similarly,
the bodies of the miners, reflect the idea that people’s external environments play large
roles in their internal lives.
The contrasting fates of William and Paul reflect both Lawrence’s philosophy—that
connection with the natural world is the healthiest and most fulfilling way for people to
live—and the real-life conditions in cities in the early 20th century, in which air pollution,

overcrowding, and poor sanitation made for unhygienic and hazardous places to live and
work. The literal nature of Paul’s work mirrors Lawrence’s belief that modernity and
manufacturing jobs alienated people from each other and from their work, unlike the
miners who are so defined by their work that they almost become part of the rural
landscape. This modern isolation is taken to its logical conclusion through Clara: after
she loses her job, she must produce lace alone in her house and is miserable as a result
of this alienation from society. Lawrence was deeply opposed to modernity’s interest in
materialism and the manufacture of consumer goods. He favoured a more natural
lifestyle in which people had a closer bond with the environment and with natural sources
of production. The novel argues for Lawrence’s belief that the further humans travel from
their connection with nature, the more essentially alienated they become from each other
and themselves.
Throughout the text, the narrator manages to present the characters with a sympathetic
tone. This generosity is evident in the snippets we see of Walter Morel's perspective,
even as his alcoholism and abusiveness turns his family against him. The book manages
to sympathize with Morel's downfall without ever excusing the fact that he's a pretty bad
husband and father.
For Lawrence, it's really important for modern folks to maintain their humanity. After
all, bosses love to work their employees to the bone for no money. And this cruelty seems
to infect all of society with a sense of emotional coldness.
The title Sons and Lovers is ambiguous, suggesting that a woman's son might become
the lover of another woman or that a son might become an incestuous lover to his mother.
This second interpretation provides a nod toward the novel's oedipal theme, based on
the myth of Oedipus, who was cursed to marry his mother and kill his father. The
characters of William and Paul Morel might be viewed as both Mrs. Morel's sons and
lovers.

FLOWERS
Flowers symbolize femininity and female sexuality in Sons and Lovers. Women are
referred to as flowers or compared with flowers throughout the novel. When William
describes his many female admirers to Paul, he describes them as different flowers that
live “like cut blooms in his heart.”
Elsewhere in the novel, flowers signify female sexuality and incidents with flowers come
to represent the different women in the novel and their attitudes towards sex.
THE MOON
The moon is associated with motherhood in the novel and represents the oppressive
bond that exists between Mrs. Morel and Paul. When Mrs. Morel is pregnant with Paul,
she has a fight with her husband and is thrown out of the house. She goes into her
garden and is surprised to find herself bathed in light from a full moon overhead. The
presence of the moon soothes her and calms the child, Paul, and this represents the
love that Mrs. Morel will develop for Paul and her hopes for the future that she will invest

in him.
Later in the novel, this bond between Mrs. Morel and Paul becomes problematic because
it infringes on Paul’s ability to form a romantic relationship; he is so close to his mother
that they are almost like lovers and she possesses him in a way his lovers cannot. This
is reflected again using the symbol of the moon in the scene in which Paul sees the large,
orange moon above the beach when he is with Miriam and finds himself unable to
understand or express the physical desire that she arouses in him. The moon is
traditionally associated with femininity and this connects the moon to the idea of
motherhood.
The moon does not create light but takes light in and reflects it back. This represents the
circular and destructive nature of the love between Paul and Mrs. Morel. Paul’s bond
with his mother does not help him create new life, through reproduction with a partner,
but instead flows backwards into his mother, who dies at the end of the novel and with
whom Paul can create no future.
DARKNESS
Darkness represents hidden or unconscious desire in the novel. When Miriam and Paul
have sex for the first time, Paul leads Miriam into a dark place among some fir trees and
says that he “wishes the darkness were thicker.” This suggests that his true intentions
and feelings towards her are unclear to him and he is ashamed of his attraction to her or
is ashamed of the way he treats her. Similarly, when Paul brings Clara home to meet his
family, he walks her to the train in the dark and is suddenly overcome with rage when
she tells him she wants to go home. This suggests that he privately wants to dominate
Clara but is not comfortable with this side of himself and will not force her to stay with
him. Finally, at the end of the novel, Paul wishes to die himself after Mrs. Morel’s death.
Although he is aware of his destructive tendencies, he is not explicitly aware that he
wants to kill himself and, instead, walks into the dark, unsure what he plans to do. He
ultimately rejects darkness to follow the light back to the town, which suggests that he
rejects death and chooses to live instead.
Sons and Lovers examines the emotional dynamics of the Morel family and charts the
gradual decline of the middle son, Paul Morel, as he navigates tensions between his
romantic life and his family life.

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Literatura Inglesa IIi: Pensamiento y Creación Literaria en la

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THE NOVEL IN THE 20TH C., SONS AND LOVERS

1.- PRESENTATION: SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NARRATED: D.H.

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2.- TEXT ANALYSIS

It is useful to look at Lawrence's fiction by dividing it into three different moments or

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Sons and Lovers

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FAMILY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

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DEATH, GRIEF, AND SELF-DESTRUCTION

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