THE THEME OF OEDIPUS COMPLEX IN D. H.

LAWRENCE’S SONS AND

LOVERS

By Lisbern Shawn Fernandes,

EG-1913,

MA-II, EGO122 (D.H. Lawrence as a Novelist)

Oedipus Complex was postulated by Sigmund Freud - it is a complex of emotions whereby a

child develops an unconscious sexual desire for his mother and secretly wishes to eliminate
his father. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers deals with this complex and it forms one of the
themes. However, Lawrence’s treatment of this complex is problematized in order to create
a dramatic effect.

The novel is about the relationship between Gertrude or Mrs. Morel and her children,
particularly her three sons, borne out of her disastrous marriage with Mr. Morel. Although it
is a love marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Morel, their marriage starts to go down the hatch,
no sooner than later Mrs. Morel finds Mr. Morel incompetent to be a good husband to her.
She is aghast at her drinking habits, squandering his earnings and loitering with his friends.
He also beats her in order to assert her dominion over her, even throwing her out of the
house on a chilly night, during one of her pregnancies. Naturally, Mrs. Morel feels “buried
alive” in this failed marriage.

As a result, Mrs. Morel transfers her love onto her children and here is the first
problematization presented by Lawrence in Oedipus complex, in that the relationship here
is reciprocal – the mother too loves the sons. The sons are more close to their mother as Mr.
Morel is an unsympathetic father, who returns late at night from the mines only to argue
with their mother. They naturally harbour a repressed desire to eliminate the menace that
is their father.

The oedipal relationship between William and Mrs. Morel is made explicit in the first
chapter itself. William, as a child, enjoys the wakes only with his mother and feels dejected
after his mother has left him. He shows his mother two egg-cups he won and gives them as a
present to her. Perhaps, Mr. Morel is aware of the deep attachment between mother and
child and hence, when he cuts William’s hair, Mrs. Morel takes it to her heart and grows
estranged from her husband. The role of Morel in the household is nothing but a
breadwinner slash squanderer – his significance wanes over the years to the extent that he
is considered a mere member of the family, his presence in domestic talks is not even
acknowledged. It is the relationship between the mother and the sons that continues to
grow and become more complicated.

Mrs. Morel gives birth to her second of three sons – Paul, when she was ill. As the baby was
brought into this world in a dire state, she vows to love Paul with “all her soul." There is
something about Paul’s weak and effeminate character that always melted Mrs. Morel
towards him. However, at this juncture, Mrs. Morel loves William more, as he is
synonymous to her image of knight in shining armour. Again, the instance of dedication of a
trophy or prize to one’s lover is brought here, when William wins a running race and he
gives the trophy to his mother.

One of the classical facets of love is jealousy and the oedipal relationships here are not
bereft of it. Mrs. Morel is particularly envious of the love letters William receives from
young girls and burns them, before he leaves to take up a job in London. This departure
puts a veil of sadness over Mrs. Morel’s face as she is now going to be distanced from her
lover. Mrs. Morel if further disappointed when William courts a girl in London. When he
brings her to his family, Mrs. Morel takes an immediate disliking for the girl. This is possibly
due to the reason that she sees the girl’s beauty as a competition for her own. Nonetheless,
the courting fails and even Mrs. Morel loses William as he dies at a young age.

Just as when Mrs. Morel is mourning, Paul falls ill with pneumonia and she realizes that she
should have "watched the living, not the dead.” With William gone, Mrs. Morel transfers her
love to her second son: “Mrs. Morel’s life now rooted itself in Paul.” Paul’s closeness towards
his mother is also palpable from an early stage. He stays home to be with his mother, draws
inspiration from her for his paintings and they discuss the shopping bargains. He is
uncomfortable in any situation distanced from his mother. For instance, he has a highly
nervous time waiting in a queue to receive his father’s payment. This brings into the fore,
the second facet of love and that is dependence. Paul is dependent on his mother even when
he appears for an interview at Thomas Jordan, as he needs her accompaniment. They even
have their little moments of romantic escapades, going about the town, buying things and
dining at restaurants, "feeling the excitement of lovers having an adventure together." Paul
shares Mrs. Morel’s anxiety about his father and he secretly wishes to eliminate him. When
Mr. Morel is hospitalized after a mine accident, Paul proclaims himself the man of the house
and dreams of living with his mother in a cottage, when his father dies.
However, this incestuous relationship would be an ignominy in the society, therefore Paul’s
emotions are repressed and it finds an outlet in his pursuit of a suitable life partner for him.
It turns out that the presence of his mother figure is all-prevalent and thus, it becomes
difficult for him to forge any meaningful relationship. His first attempt is with the pastoral,
Miriam, whom he considers more spiritually-inclined, although he loves spending time with
her at her farm. Mrs. Morel is envious of Miriam, possibly due to the reason that she sees
competition in the latter as she is also independent and free-willed. Mrs. Morel admonishes
Paul when he returns late from the Leivers farm and he is forced to cloak his relationship
with Miriam as that of friends. Paul feels torn between Miriam and his mother, and resents
Miriam because she makes his mother suffer. When Paul tries to confess his love for Miriam
to his mother, she hugs him, cries, and expresses her animosity toward Miriam, who she
believes will take Paul from her. Her interaction with Paul is full of intimate physical
contact. She says "I've never had a husband, not really." Paul's desire that she not sleep next
to Morel sounds like more than merely a son's concerned view. It also recalls Hamlet’s wish
for his mother not to sleep in his uncle’s corrupt sinful sheets. Co-incidentally, Hamlet’s
mother bore the name Gertrude, which is Mrs. Morel’s first name. Eventually, Paul decides
to abandon Miriam because he realizes that his mother “…was the chief thing to him, the
only supreme being.”

Paul takes on Clara Dawes, a middle-aged married woman who has been separated from
her husband for years due to some marital tensions. Paul is attracted to Clara’s physicality
as opposed to Miriam’s spiritual innocence. It is interesting to note that Mrs. Morel gets on
with Clara pretty well, due to the reason that she doesn’t see a rival in her like she did in
Miriam. Nevertheless, Clara is akin to a mother-figure for Paul but it is evident that their
relationship won’t last long. Paul gets into a brawl with Clara’s husband and the former
beats the later. This is considered to be his repressed energy of eliminating his father
coming onto its surface. Later, he makes truce with ailing Baxter and it can be interpreted as
his guilt operating for killing his father figure. This relationship with Clara also ends as she
cannot promise marriage to Paul and hence he has to leave her too.

Therefore, Mrs. Morel has an upper-hand control on Paul and its consequences are far-
reaching on him. Paul discusses love with his mother and says that perhaps something is
the matter with him and that he can’t love. She says that he has not met the right woman,
and he replies that he will never meet the right woman while she is alive. This is prophetic.
Not only does Paul never forge any relationship, his future also remains bleak.
A final problematization of the Oedipus complex is when Paul gives an overdose of morphia
as anaesthesia to end his ailing mother’s sufferings on her death-bed. Paul says that her
mother’s control over him is even strong on her death-bed: “And she looks at me, and she
wants to stay with me . . . She’s got such a will, it seems as if she would never go - never!”
Even though he says he wishes she would die, Paul’s strong bond to his mother remains. He
feels as though a part of him were dying also. After she dies, Paul still feels this connection:
“Looking at her, he felt he could never, never let her go.” When Paul visits Mrs. Morel's body
again at night, his near-necrophiliac kissing and stroking reveals his pent-up desires. He
wants her to be "young again" not only so she can be a youthful mother but the ideal
partner Paul could not find in Miriam or Clara.

Even after death, the echo of his mother’s love remains in Paul’s life. Paul doesn’t desire a
sacrificial marriage like that of Miriam or a sensual affair like that of Clara. He wants
someone like his mother who would claim him strongly with a love smothering, jealous and
destructive. Paul says of his mother that, “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.” His future without his mother is described as having an artificial feel of
freedom and hope in the image of the city’s "gold phosphorescence."

REFERENCES

 Lawrence, D H. Sons and Lovers. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.

 Ananthi, M. "The Oedipal overtones in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers" The Dawn

Journal 3.1 (2014). Web. 20 Oct. 2014. <http://thedawnjournal.com/wp-

content/uploads/2013/12/21-Ananthi-Devaraj.pdf>.

 SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Sons and Lovers.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes

LLC. n.d.. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.