A Critical Analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s Novel Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers, originally titled Paul Morel, was published in 1913. It is largely

autobiographical. Mrs. Morel, a lady of cultivated and refined taste, married to a miner,

Walter Morel, is very unhappy with her marriage. Her Sons grow up, she selects them as

lovers. It is the most popular novel of Lawrence. Its plot is well- knit and is free from all

superfluities. The characters are seen from the outside as well as emotionally realised from

within. A very striking feature of the novel is a faithful description of life in the mining

village of Bestwood.

Summary of the novel Sons and Lovers

The first part of the novel focuses on Mrs. Morel and her unhappy marriage to a

drinking miner. She has many arguments with her husband, some of which have painful

results: sometimes she is locked out of the house and hit in the head with a drawer. Estranged

from her husband, Mrs. Morel takes comfort in her four children. William, her oldest son, is

 her favourite. When William sickens and dies a few years later, she is crushed, not even

noticing the rest of her children until she almost loses Paul, her second son, as well. From that

point on, Paul becomes the focus of her life, and the two seem to live for each other.

Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers, who lives on a farm not too far from the Morel

family. They carry on a very intimate, but purely platonic, relationship for many years. Mrs.

Morel does not approve of Miriam, and this may be the main reason that Paul does not marry

her. He constantly wavers in his feelings toward her.

Paul meets Clara Dawes, a suffragette who is separated from her husband, through

Miriam. As he becomes closer with Clara and they begin to discuss his relationship with

Miriam, she tells him that he should consider consummating their love and he returns to

Miriam to see how she feels.

Paul and Miriam sleep together and are briefly happy, but shortly afterward Paul

decides that he does not want to marry Miriam, and so he breaks off with her. She still feels

that his soul belongs to her, and, in part agrees reluctantly. He realizes that he loves his

mother most, however.

After breaking off his relationship with Miriam, Paul begins to spend more time with

Clara and they begin an extremely passionate affair. However, she does not want to divorce

her husband Baxter, and so they can never be married. Paul’s mother falls ill and he devotes

much of his time to caring for her. When she finally dies, he is broken-hearted and, after a

final plea from Miriam, goes off alone at the end of the novel.

Gertrude Morel, mother of Paul, was not happy with her family life; she hates her

husband Walter Morel. So, she shifts her affection on her sons – William, Paul and Arthur. At

the beginning, she had a passion for her first son William. When he died of disease, she takes

 to Arthur. He joined in the army and settled there. Finally, the affection of Gertrude falls on

Paul who lives with his mother. Because of his deepest love for his mother, Paul did not

marry anybody. This misplaced affection led Paul to mental suffering at the end. All the

novels of Lawrence are more or less autobiographical. But Sons and Lovers is almost a

carbon copy of the author’s life. The principal characters of the novel and the central

situations are drawn from Lawrence’s early life. Like Paul Morel’s father, Lawrence’s father

was a miner, uncultured and drunk. Like Paul’s mother, Lawrence’s mother was her

husband’s direct opposite.

Sons and Lovers: An Autobiographical Novel 

Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel, Lawrence was a tortured soul for the

full forty-five years of his life. Being highly sensitive, he reacted sharply, suffered intensely.

His parents never enjoyed conjugal felicity. The home atmosphere was embittered by their

endless bickerings. Repelled, by the coarse brutality of his father, Lawrence developed deep

attachment with his mother. She, too, frustrated in her marriage, leaned heavily on her

children, in particular on Lawrence, for emotional fulfilment and for the realisation of her

ambitions. Gradually, there grew an unhealthy inter-dependence between Lawrence and his

mother, that rendered him unfit to establish healthy emotional relationship with other women.

Lawrence grew into a self-conscious neurotic. At the age of sixteen, he had met Jessie

Chambers. He liked and loved her. But the dark shadow of his Oedipal relation with her

mother not let him attain emotional fulfilment through Jessie. They hung on to each other for

nearly ten years, but finally broke off. The entire experience had been so painful that in order

to work out of his catharsis, Lawrence had to relive it imaginatively and express it in artistic

terms. The result was Sons and Lovers.

            Lawrence believes in the law of polarity. If two characters coming in contact with

each other in any form of mutual relationship can achieve ‘polarisation’, they can achieve

happiness. There should be no attempt to ‘dominate’ or ‘possess’ the other partner. For a

successful human relationship, the ‘divine otherness’ of the others has to be recognised and

respected. Over-dominance by one results in the loss of identity of the other. And if one’s

very identity id threatened, it saps one’s vitality and poisons the whole relationship. Then

there is nothing to salvage it from total destruction. Lawrence does not deny the conflict, nor

does he recommend its cessation. He simply suggests that when two opposites come together,

they should endeavour to realise a state, “where conflict in transcended, a state of still

tension, life-sustaining, life-creating, forbidding forever the merging of opposites,

maintaining both in a state of mutual complementary balance”.

            In Sons and Lovers, Mrs Morel fails to maintain herself and her husband in a state of

‘mutual complementary balance’. Her middle class values, very trivial and hollow in

themselves, make her contemptuous of her husband. Her love of religion, philosophy and

politics is only an accessory to her ambition of attaining social recognition. 

            The mutual incompatibility of Mrs Morel and her husband not only destroys the

prospects of their personal happiness but also vitiates the lives even of their children. They

come to despise their father and develop an unhealthy attachment with their mother. Mrs

Morel too, frustrated in her married life, makes husband substitutes of her sons. She is jealous

of the girls who come to see William. She makes no attempt to hide her hostility towards

Gyp, the girl with whom William gets infatuated in London. Her open condemnation of Gyp

makes William feel guilty of his love. He suffers from an acute mental conflict, but this is a

conflict that cannot be resolved. He has developed such a relation with his mother that it can

neither release him nor offer him any emotional fulfilment. He gets weary of the world and

ultimately dies. 

The Oedipus Complex

The strongest influence in the life of D.H. Lawrence was that of his mother. After

disappointment in marriage, she had turned to her sons as her lovers. Her second son Arthur

was her favourite and she had pinned all hopes of a respectable future life on him. But he

died in London at a very young age, and in order to fill the emotional void caused by this

ultimately death, she turned to David.

Sigmund Freud's most celebrated theory of sexuality, the Oedipus complex, takes its

name from the title character of the Greek play Oedipus Rex. D.H. Lawrence was aware of

Freud's theory, and Sons and Lovers famously uses the Oedipus complex as its base for

exploring Paul's relationship with his mother. Paul is hopelessly devoted to his mother, and

that love often borders on romantic desire. Lawrence writes many scenes between the two

that go beyond the bounds of conventional mother-son love, Paul murderously hates his

father and often fantasizes about his death.

But Lawrence adds a twist to the Oedipus complex: Mrs. Morel is saddled with it as

well. She desires both William and Paul in near-romantic ways, and she despises all their

girlfriends. She, too, engages in transference, projecting her dissatisfaction with her marriage

onto her smothering love for her sons. At the end of the novel, Paul takes a major step in

releasing himself from his Oedipus complex. He intentionally overdoses his dying mother

with morphia, an act that reduces her suffering but also subverts his Oedipal fate, since he

does not kill his father, but his mother. 

      Sons and Lovers is thus an imaginative representation of the facts of Lawrence’s life.

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

often paradoxical nature.”    

Reference: http://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/epgpdata/uploads/epgp_content/S000013EN/P001445/M013026/ET/1497345181Paper04%3BModule07,ETexts.pdf