In a letter written a few months after the publication of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence made an admission

that suggests that “art for my sake” could have been a cathartic as well as a heuristic function. “One
sheds one’s sickness in books,” he wrote, “repeats and presents one’s emotions, to be master of them.”
Sons and Lovers, his third novel, was the work that enabled Lawrence to come to terms, at least
provisionally, with the traumas of his formative years. The more than two years he spent working and
reworking the book amounted to an artistic and psychological rite of passage essential to his
development as a man and as a writer.

The novel spans the first twenty-six years in the life of Paul Morel. Because of the obvious similarities
between Paul’s experiences and Lawrence’s, and because the story in part concerns Paul’s
apprenticeship as an artist—or, more accurately, the obstacles he must overcome to be an artist—the
novel has been seen as an example of a subspecies of the bildungsroman, the Künstlerroman.
Comparison with James Joyce’s APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) suggests, however, how
loosely the term applies to Lawrence’s novel. Where Joyce scrupulously selects only those scenes and
episodes of Stephen Dedalus’s life that directly contribute to the young artist’s development (his first
use of language, his schooling, his imaginative transcendence of sex, religion, and politics, his aesthetic
theories), Lawrence’s focus is far more diffuse.

The novel opens with a conventional set-piece description of the town of Bestwood (modeled on
Eastwood) as it has been affected by the arrival and growth of the mining industry during the last half
century. This is followed by an account of the courtship and early married life of Walter and Gertrude
Morel, Paul’s parents. Even after Paul’s birth, the main emphasis remains for many chapters on the
mother and father, and considerable space is devoted to their first child, William, whose sudden death
and funeral conclude part 1 of the novel. Paul’s interest in drawing is mentioned halfway through part 1,
but it is not a major concern until he becomes friends with Miriam Leivers in part 2, and there the
companionship itself actually receives more attention. Though the comparison does an injustice to the
nature of Lawrence’s real achievement in the novel, perhaps Sons and Lovers more nearly resembles
Stephen Hero (1944), the earlier and more generally autobiographical version of Joyce’s novel, than it
does the tightly constructed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

When, in the late stages of revision, Lawrence changed his title from Paul Morel to Sons and Lovers, his
motive was akin to Joyce’s when the Irishman discarded Stephen Hero and began to rewrite. The motive
was form—form determined by a controlling idea. The subject of Sons and Lovers is not simply Paul’s
development but his development as an instance of the pattern suggested by the title; that pattern
involves the Morels’ unhappy marriage, the fateful experiences of Paul’s brother William, Paul’s
frustrated relationship with Miriam, and his later encounters with Clara and Baxter Dawes, as well as
Paul’s own maturation. For Lawrence, the pattern clearly had wide application. Indeed, in a letter to
Edward Garnett, his editor, written a few days after completing the revised novel, Lawrence claimed that
his book sounded “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England.”

This claim, along with the change in title and the late revisions designed to underscore a theme already
present in the narrative, was probably influenced by the discussions that Lawrence and Frieda had in
1912 regarding Freud’s theories, of which Frieda was then an enthusiastic proponent. (There is no
evidence of Lawrence’s awareness of Freud before this.) In a more general sense, the “tragedy” was
rooted historically, as the novel shows, in the disruption of natural human relationships that was one of
the by-products of modernization. Directly or indirectly, the characters in the novel are entrapped by
the materialistic values of their society, unable even when they consciously reject those values to
establish true contact with one another. Instead they tend to treat one another as objects to be
possessed or manipulated for the purpose of self-gratification.

Thus Mrs. Morel, frustrated by her marriage to her coal miner husband, transfers her affections to her
sons, first to William, the eldest, and then to Paul after William’s death. Walter Morel, the father,
becomes a scapegoat and an outcast in his own home. Whether consciously or not, Mrs. Morel uses her
sons as instruments to work out her own destiny vicariously, encouraging them in pursuits that will
enable them to escape the socially confining life that she herself cannot escape, yet resenting it when
the sons do begin to make a life away from her. Paul’s fixation on his mother—and his hatred of his
father—contributes to a confusion of his sexual identity and to his inability to love girls his own age in a
normal, healthy way. In the same letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence characterized this inability to love
as a “split,” referring to the rupture in the son’s natural passions caused by the mother’s possessive
love.

The split causes Paul to seek out girls who perform the psychological role of mother surrogates: Miriam,
an exaggerated version of the spiritual, Madonna-like aspect of the mother image; and the buxom Clara
Dawes, who from a Freudian viewpoint represents the “degraded sex object,” the fallen woman, equally
a projection of the son’s prohibited erotic desires for his mother. Because Paul’s feeling for Miriam and
Clara are thus compartmentalized and unbalanced, both relationships are unfulfilling, a fact that only
reinforces his Oedipal bondage. At the same time, part of the responsibility for the unsatisfactory
relationships belongs to Miriam and Clara themselves, both of whom exploit Paul to help them fulfill
their own private fantasy lives. The world of Sons and Lovers is populated by isolated, fragmentary souls
not unlike the inhabitants of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land (“We think of the key, each in his prison/
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”).
A decade after the appearance of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence declared that of all his books, it was the
one he would like to rewrite, because in it he had treated his father unfairly. By then, of course, he was
overtly committed to finding embodiments of “whole man alive” and, in retrospect, his father seemed
to offer such an embodiment. When he wrote Sons and Lovers, however, he had not yet fully come to
appreciate the importance of his father’s unaffected male vitality. Although occasionally Walter Morel
appears in a favorable light, the novel generally emphasizes his ineffectuality as a husband and father.
The Oedipal conflict on which the story hinges perhaps made this unavoidable. In any event, the struggle
to attain wholeness is centered in Paul Morel.

Because Paul’s mother is “the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not escape,” her death
amounts to the great crisis of the novel. The terrible spectacle of her agony as she lies dying slowly of
cancer torments Paul until, by giving her an overdose of morphine, he commits a mercy killing.
Unconsciously, the act seems to be motivated by his desire to release her from her debilitating
“bondage” as wife and mother, the roles that have made her erotically unattainable to Paul. Her death is
followed by an eerie, Poe-like scene in which the shaken Paul, momentarily imagining his mother as a
beautiful young sleeping maiden, stoops and kisses her “passionately,” as if to waken her like the
handsome prince in a fairy tale, only to be horrified by her cold and unresponsive lips. It is a key
moment, adumbrating as it does the writer’s subsequent shift in allegiances to the “sensuous flame of
life” associated with his father. For Paul, however, the loss of his mother induces a period of deep
depression (interestingly enough, guilt is not mentioned) in which his uppermost desire is to reunite
with his mother in death. This “drift towards death” was what Lawrence believed made Paul’s story
symptomatic of the times, “the tragedy of thousands of young men in England.”

Nevertheless, the novel does not end tragically. Paul, on the verge of suicide, decides instead to turn his
back on the “immense dark silence” where his lover/mother awaits him and to head toward the “faintly
humming, glowing town”—and beyond it, to the Continent, where he plans to continue his artistic
endeavors (just as Lawrence did). Some readers have found this last-minute turnabout implausible, a
breakdown in the novel’s form, but Lawrence anticipates Paul’s “rebirth” by having him realize, after his
mother’s death, that he must finally sever his ties to both Miriam and Clara. For him to have returned to
them then for consolation and affection would have meant that, inwardly, he was still cherishing some
hope of preserving the maternal bond, even if only through his mother’s unsatisfactory substitutes.
When Paul effects a reconciliation between Clara and her estranged husband Baxter Dawes, who has
been presented throughout in terms strongly reminiscent of Walter Morel, he is (as Daniel A. Weiss and
others have observed) tacitly acting out a reversal of the original Oedipal conflict. If the primary
emphasis of Sons and Lovers is on the tragic split in the emotional lives of the Morels, its conclusion
finds Paul taking the steps necessary to begin to heal the split in himself. Only by so doing would Paul,
like Lawrence, be able to undertake a quest for vital wholeness. That quest would become the chief
subject of the novels following Sons and Lovers.