SONS AND LOVERS Eten NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE: (\2 ‘ro 1, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS ‘There are so many parallels between Sons and Lovers and Lawrence's own life as the son ef an illiterate coal miner and his educated, socially aspiring wife, that the novel can well be called autobiographical. In an autobiographical novel, the events in the story are closely based on the author's life. Certain events are changed, minimized, or exaggerated, but the core of the novel is based on the author's own experiences. All the major themes, conflicts, and characters of Sons and Lovers have their real-life counterparts in Lawrence's own difficult childhood and adolescence. David Herbert (D. H.) Lawrence was born in 1885 in the poor, coal-mining town of Eastwood, on which the Bestwood of Sons and Lovers is modeled. Eastwood is near the industrial city of Nottingham in the central part of England known as the Midlands. This part of England is still rich in coal and is heavily industrialized 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 literate and were treated by the upper classes as little more than beasts of burden. (Such was the case with Lawrence's father, Arthur, the prototype for Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers. He was a coal miner who could barely read.) One of the only ways to better yourself was to be bright and ambitious enough to earn scholarships to high school and university, as Lawrence himself did. You could easily tell what class an individual belonged to by his speech. You'll 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 subhuman living conditions for years. Finally, some workers began to rebel. They started unions to improve their status, and socialism, a system calling for public ownership of industry and land, became increasingly popular. Rebelling against the male superiority that pervaded English society, Women known as suffragists or suffragettes demanded political equality with men. Clara Dawes in Sons and Lovers is one of the "new women" who demand voting rights, equal pay, and sexual freedom. The relationship between Lawrence's parents, Lydia and Arthur, like that between Gertrude and Walter Morel, reveals the guif separating the lower and middle classes. Arthur, like most miners (called colliers in England), worked a twelve-hour day underground, exposed to grave dangers and unhealthy working conditions. Miners’ lives revolved around the mine (colliery) and the tavern, where after an exhausting day's work the men could forget their troubles with a pint or more of ale. Alcoholismwas a serious problem in the mining community. Arthur Lawrence drank heavily, and the tragic effect of an alcoholic father on his family is painstakingly depicted in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's mother, Lydia, differed markedly from her uneducated, easygoing husband. She came from a lower-middle-class family that had suffered an economic decline. Lydia's father was humiliated by their fall in social status, and this shame Was transferred to his daughter, who vowed that her own sons would succeed, Lydia made ‘sure her children were devout churchgoers and tireless students. One of the mainstays of respectability in the mining community in Lawrence's time was the Congregationalist Church, This popular Protestant sect believed people were essentially evil and therefore should spend their lives striving for improvement, Working hard and climbing the social ladder were considered divine missions. Being Proud of one’s individuality was also a part of the creed. From this religious background and from his mother, Lawrence learned the virtue of hard work (he was an indefatigable writer) and perceived his role as writer as a personal messianic mission. While Lawrence was to reject organized faith as an adult, he always had deeply religious feelings which led him to see nature and human beings in a mystical and reverential way. To many, it was Lawrence's strong reaction against the sexually inhibiting and overmateralistic tenets of Congregationalism that led him to an equally strong belief in nature, instinct, and sexuality as man's path to salvation. Like Paul Morel, young Lawrence appeared to hate his father and worship his mother. In fact, most readers see Sons and Lovers as an extended eulogy to the beloved Lydia Lawrence. Later in life, Lawrence felt he had treated his father too harshly in this novel. In his later novels, Lawrence depicted 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 mechanization of modern life. Lawrence hated the industrialism and technology that he felt were responsible for the destruction caused in World War 1. He also despised the ugliness of the industrial environment and the workers’ surroundings. Like earlier British writers and artists, Lawrence believed that industrialism doomed the worker to a life of dehumanizing ugliness and servility. Through his art, he wanted to bring beauty into the workers’ lives. But he didn’t believe that art should deal only with the beautiful. He felt that art must have a social and spiritual purpose. He saw his work as a way to criticize, evaluate, and enlighten his times, Lawrence was also an admirer of the Romantic Poetry of William Wordsworth and John Keats and the treatises of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher of Romanticism. These writers prized nature, Instinct, and emotion over _— rationality and —_sophistication After World War I, Lawrence fled England and embarked on a lifelong quest for aitures still Intouch with. thelr. «= natural figins.When Lawrence was in his teens, he became acquainted with the Chambers family, which is represented as the Leiverses in Sons and Lovers. Their nearby farm, called the Haggs, came to be the Willey Farm of the novel. Lawrence found the Chambers homestead a pastoral haven. There he could escape the drab, dirty tenements of Eastwood, the violence of his drunken father, perhaps even the overprotectiveness of his domineering mother. The Chambers treated Lawrence like one of the family. He roughhoused with their boys and grew close to their daughter Jessie. Like her fictional counterpart Miriam, Jessie loved Lawrence and spent hours walking through the sparkling green countryside with him, where they often stopped to read to one another either poetry or the latest novel by the French author and social critic Emile Zola, Few British authors wrote as frankly as Zola of the horrific conditions of the modern working classes, From Zola, Lawrence may have also gotten the courage to write more explicitly about sex, something that few “respectable” British novelists dared to do. OR Though D. H. Lawrence's third published novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) is largely autobiographical. The novel, which began as "Paul Morel," was sparked by the death of Lawrence's mother, Lydia. Lawrence reexamined his childhood, his relationship with his mother, and her psychological effect on his sexuality. The roots of Sons and Lovers are clearly located in Lawrence's life. His childhood coal-mining town of Eastwood was changed, with a sardonic twist, to Bestwood. Walter Morel was modeled on Lawrence's hard-drinking, irresponsible collier father, Arthur. Lydia becameGertrude Morel, the intellectually stifled, unhappy mother who ‘lives through her sons. The death by erysipelas of one of Lawrence's elder brothers, Efnest, and Lydia's grief and eventual obsession with Lawrence, seems hardly changed in the novel. (Both Ernest and his fictional counterpart, William, were engaged to London stenographers named Louisa "Gipsy" Denys.) Filling out the cast of important characters was Jessie Chambers, @ neighbor with whom, Lawrence developed an intense friendship, and who would become Miriam Leiver in the novel. His mother and family disapproved of their relationship, which always seemed on the brink of romance. Nevertheless, Chambers was Lawrence's greatest literary supporter in his early years, and he frequently showed her drafts of what he was working on, including Sons and Lovers (she disliked her depiction, and it led to the dissolution of their relationship). Lawrence's future wife, Frieda von Richtofen Weekly, partially inspired the portrait of Clara Dawes, the older, sensual ‘woman with whom Paul has an affair. To be fair, Lawrence met Frieda only in 1912 at Nottingham University College, and he started *Paul Morel” in 1910. - EPISODIC NARRATIVE The novel is arranged in a series of episodes, not necessarily In chronological order. This type of narrative is called episodic. One effect this technique has Is the blending of different time periods. Another element that contributes to the blending of time periods is the use of the iterative mode, which causes confusion about whether events happened one or many times. |. CHAPTER TITLES Chapter titles play reveal information about the story.SHIFTING NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVES Shifting narrative perspectives present different character’s point of view to give story a balance TWO PART DIVISION The division of the novel into two parts serve: the first part of the novel focuses on Mrs. Morel and the second part focuses on Paul. OEDIPAL READING Sons and Lovers was one of the first British novels to deal explicitly with sexual matters. One of the first "Freudian" novels, it deals with the so-called Oedipus complex, or the sexual childhood attraction of a young boy for his mother. At the time Lawrence was developing as a writer, Sigmund Freud, a Viennese neurologist and the father of psychiatry, was revolutionizing the way the world looked at sexuality. Freud believed that children naturally have sexual drives, and the first focus of these feelings is the parent of the opposite sex. In Sons and Lovers some readers find an abnormally passionate attachment between Mrs. Morel and her sons. Lawrence was familiar with Freud's theories, and they probably influenced his writing of Sons and Lovers. Since the novel's publication, many critics and psychologists have considered it a penetrating study of the sexual dynamics of son/mother love and the way this love might destroy the man who cannot transfer such feelings to a mate. There is evidence that Lawrence was aware of Sigmund Freud's early theories on sexuality, and Sons and Lovers deeply explores and revises of one of Freud's major theories, the Oedipus complex. Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was @ son more indentured to his mother’s love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power jn their lives." Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense, She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to ‘come home to you.”The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. 7. RELIGIOUS ELEMENTS Miriam’s notions of sacrifice and of “baptism of fire in passion”. 8. LANGUAGE: communication Morel speaks in a dialect throughout the novel. Lawrence have chosen to make Morel use a dialect to set him apart from the other characters. 9. LANGUAGE: images Lawrence's characters also experience moments of transcendence while alone in nature, much as the Romantics did. More frequently, characters bond deeply while in nature. Lawrence uses flowers throughout the novel to symbolize these deep connections. However, flowers are sometimes agents of division, as when Paul is repulsed by Miriam's fawning behaviour towards the daffodil. BONDAGE Social Bondage Lawrence discusses bondage, or servitude, in two major ways: social and romantic. Socially, Mrs. Morel feels bound by her status as a woman and by industrialism. She complains of feeling “buried alive," a logical lament for someone married to a miner, and even the children feel they are in a “tight place of anxiety." Though she joins a women's group, she must remain a housewife for life, and thus is jealous of Miriam, who is able to utilize her intellect in more opportunities, Ironically, Paul feels free in his job at the factory, enjoying the work and the company of the working-class women, though one gets the sense that he Would still rather be painting Romantic Bondage Romantic bondage is given far more emphasis in the novel. Paul (and William, to a somewhat lesser extent) feels bound to his mother, and cannot imagine ever abandoning her or even marrying anyone else, He is preoccupied with the notion of lovers "belonging" to each other, and his true desire, revealed at the end, is for a woman to claim him forcefully as her own. He feels the sacrificial Miriam fails in this regard and that Clara always belonged to Baxter Dawes. It is clear that no woman could ever match the intensity and steadfastness of his mother's claim. Jealousy Complementing the theme of bondage is the novel's treatment of jealousy. Mrs. Morel is constantly jealous of her sons’ lovers, and she masks this jealousy very thinly. Morel, too, is Jealous over his wife's closer relationships with his sons and over their successes. Paul frequently rouses jealousy in Miriam with his flirtations with Agatha Lelver and Beatrice, and Dawes is violently jealous of Paul's romance with Clara.CONTRADICTIONS AND OPPOSITIONS Love vs Hate Lawrence demonstrates how contradictions emerge so easily in human nature, especially With ove and hate. Paul vacillates between hatred and love for all the women in his life, Including his mother at times. Often he loves and hates at the same time, especially with Miriam. Mrs, Morel, too, has some reserve of love for her husband even when she hates him, although this love dissipates over time. Body vs Mind Lawrence also uses the opposition of the body and mind to expose the contradictory nature of desire; frequently, characters pair up with someone who is quite unlike them. Mrs. Morel initially likes the hearty, vigorous Morel because he is so far removed from her dainty, refined, intellectual nature. Paul's attraction to Miriam, his spiritual soul mate, Is less intense than his desire for the sensual, physical Clara The decay of the body also influences the spiritual relationships. When Mrs. Morel dies, Morel grows more sensitive, though he still refuses to look at her body. Dawes's illness, too, removes his threat to Paul, who befriends his ailing rival SYMBOLS ‘The ash-tree: The ash-tree is located outside the Morels' second home, The children come to aseociate the ash-tree with the dark, forbidding footsteps of their father coming home in y grunken fit. The children hate the tree; Morel loves it. Paul Is frightened by the shrieking noises the tree makes at night. Mrs. Morel's umbrella:William gives his mother an umbrella for Christmas the first year he ig in London. Mrs. Morel cherishes the umbrella deeply. Later, Paul and his friends go for a walk when one of his friends breaks the umbrella Bird's nest: Mrs. Leivers insists that Paul see this nest made by a jenny wren. Mrs. Lelvers is intensely fascinated by this nest, but Miriam loves it all the more when Paul admits that the nest is striking. Miriam's swing: Miriam finally faces her fear of Paul's rejection and asks him if he wants to gee the ewing on her family's farm. When Paul rides it happily, Miriam sees how his face is fushed and his eyes are sparkling. She offers to let him ride again- it is the first time she gets to spoil a man. Miriam's rose-bush: Miriam shows Paul the beautiful rose-bush she finds in the woods. She becornes so absorbed in the beauty and the fragrance of the roses that Paul cannot stand to see her so emotional and passionate. Clara's wedding ri Jara absentmindedly takes her ring off and spins it. Paul watches her spin the ring with fascination.