Marriage Conflict in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.

by

Manoj Kumar Maurya

MA (English)

Abstract: David Herbert Lawrence is so thoroughly autobiographical in his works that an

intimate knowledge of his works should be of immense help in understanding and appreciating
them. He is remembered as the pioneer of sexual and psychological description and his
reputation as a writer and notoriety of his books cannot be clearly separated. Subject matters of
his novels are anti-materialistic, increasingly outspoken in love, sex and marriage so he was
prolific writer. Lawrence understood that history is not simply a matter of abstract movements,
wars, revolutions, monarchies and governments, but that it is made the registered in the
practices of everyday personal life. Through his novels, Lawrence has tried to probe the minds of
his characters to discover the motives and desires hidden therein and thus coming nearer to
reality. Moreover, he has described the struggle through adolescence to adulthood, in all its
aspects of mental, spiritual, sexual, and the sensuous apprehension of human life. Instinct looms
large in his novels in all its biological, psychological and metaphysical relations. Instinct has
much to do with emotions than with intellect. To many, it was Lawrence's strong belief in
instinct, and sexuality as man's Path for salvation. Thus, in his novels sexuality, marriage,
family, friendship, and also work, education, art and even out relation with animals, all come
under the closest of scrutiny, constituting as they do the cherished values of civilization which
had thrown itself into mechanized carnage.
Keywords: Man and woman, Love, Sex, Marriage conflicts.

D.H. Lawrence‟s Sons and Lovers, published on 29 May 1913, appeared to the general
acclaim of reviewers who extolled it as a promising start to the career of a major artist.
Examining its prominent ideas, critics in the 1910s and ‟20s variously described the theme as the
degeneration of human relationships, the modern weakness and wastage of human potential, but
primarily as a portraiture of tragic sexuality. Its autobiographical tendency was also already
highlighted and the novel treated as a piece of “social history”.

In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence frequently breaks away from conventions in order to give us
a clear image about the protagonist‟s thoughts and feelings. The controversial issue is how a
possessive mother could cause a psychic tension for her son and leads him to turn out into
hopeless and futile relations with other women in his life and to what extent are character
relationships in D.H. Lawrence‟s Sons and Lovers unconventional. Thus, Lawrence‟s obscured
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contrast perceived between what we are told about the characters and their relationships and how
we see them behaving towards each other brings us a sense of unconventionality. In a letter to his
friend and adviser, Edward Garnett, on 12 November 1912, Lawrence described the book Sons
and Lovers as follows:

It follows this idea a woman of character and refinement goes into the lower
class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her
husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality.

Referring to his class-conscious writings, Lawrence developed a kind of hatefulness toward

modern civilization and to what it stood for materialism, repression and divorce from nature.
Hence, the central idea of Lawrence‟s Sons and Lovers is the shame felt by the modern man that
paralyzes his impulses and as a solution is to be ascribed to women „mothers, wives or lovers‟
who tend to bring about the dissociation between mind and bodies and should therefore be held
subordinate; thus, this could bring up the unconventionality that is presented in his novel Sons
and Lovers. F. R. Leavis champions Lawrence‟s novels; he affirms that Sons and Lovers is a
direct treatment of personal problems in a coal mining milieu that suffers from class distinction
issues and relationships conflict.

In this autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, Lawrence drew his parents at full length as
Walter and Gertrude Morel, and himself as Paul. Walter Morel, at the time of his marriage, was
happy and unreflecting, a great dancer, friendly with every one, uninterested in books and ideas,
but very clever with his hands, able to make or mend anything. Gertrude was serious and
puritanical, fond of discussions about politics and religion, contemptuous of dancing, and
subdued in her dress. For some months after their marriage they were very happy, but as the
glow faded Mrs. Morel began to be jarred by her husband, to whom she felt socially superior and
who was unable to discuss anything serious, though respectfully attentive when she talked about
matters beyond his understanding. Gradually she drew away from him, and he took to staying
out late, and sometimes returned the worse for drink. After the birth of their first child the
estrangement became complete, for Mrs. Morel, as Lawrence unconsciously shows throughout,
was the kind of woman who looks on her husband simply as an instrument for producing
children and aggrandizing the family. Morel stayed out more frequently and to later hours, and
when he came back his wife would flay him with her tongue, in a restrained sarcastic way which
intimidated him.

By the time Paul was coming, Mrs. Morel hated her husband, who still loved her and tried
clumsily to make up for his drinking and extravagance by doing odd jobs during her pregnancy
„He would bustle round in his slovenly fashion, poking out the ashes, rubbing the fireplace,
sweeping the house before he went to work. Then, feeling very self-righteous, he went upstairs ‟,
where he would be greeted less gratefully than he had hoped. Gradually Mrs. Morel and her
children formed a solid front against him. The Morels moved from their old home to a house on
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the brow of a hill, and during their first winter there the disputes between husband and wife were
unusually bitter:

The children played in the street, on the brim of the wide, dark valley, until eight
o’clock. Then they went to bed. Their mother sat sewing below. Having such a
great space in front of the house gave the children a feeling of night, of vastness,
and of terror. . . Often Paul would wake up, after he had been asleep a long time,
aware of thuds downstairs. Instantly he was wide awake. Then he heard the
booming shouts of his father, come home nearly drunk, then the sharp replies of
his mother, then the bang, bang, of his father’s fist on the table. . . .(S & L)

Conversation was impossible between the father and any other member of the family. He
was an outsider.‟ Of all the children Paul hated his father most. The seed of all action lies in the
dissension between the father and the mother whose marriage was built on two distinct modes of
life. This distinction is basically between educated and uneducated. They are unfulfilled, half-
people, prisoners of their own temperaments or circumstances. Anthony Beal says in the
introduction of Sons and Lovers, “They are alive and they develop, but their development is
towards a more intense narrowness and lopsidedness”. Mr. Moral, the father is confined to his
purely physical existence while Mrs. Moral is confined to her purely educational and spiritual
one. Mr. Morel, the miner, has a “sensuous flame of life”, but in his future wife from the
educated class this flame has been baffled “by thought and spirit”. Their lives are failures.
“Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man's sensuous flame of life that flowed off his
flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and grippled into incandescence by thought and
spirit.”

The conjugal happiness of Morel is wrecked by Mrs. Morel‟s persistent efforts to reform the
personality of her husband according to her own middle class ideals:

The pity was, she was too much his opposite. She could not be content with the
little she might be: she would have him the much that he ought to be. So, in
seeking to make him nobler than he could be, she destroyed him. (S & L)

Mrs. Morel represents the supremacy of the intellect while Mr. Morel represents the
supremacy of the instinct. The result is that the exaltation of the instinctive heart over the
abstract intellect can run to disturbing and sometimes sinister extremes. It is certainly one of the
chief pre-occupations of the author who examines, deplores and criticizes an attribute of
possessiveness in man-woman relationships. The desire for possessiveness is generally to be
found in women. All the relationships between the main characters fully illustrate the danger of
possessiveness. Mr. and Mrs. Morel have been lovers for some years, but then Mrs. Morel tries
to get rid of him because she has not got any real body, that she has no sensuality. Morel‟s
presence seems to be destroying her. She looks upon her husband as “unthinkable evil
obstruction”. She fails to achieve harmony in her relationships with her husband because she
 Marriage Conflict in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
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does not respect his “otherness” and tries to make him conform to her own ideals; the poor man
breaks in the process. She tries to refine him, but she succeeds only in destroying him.

Her hatred is the result of the terrible frustration that she has been experiencing in her
relations with Mr. Morel who no longer cares for her because her possessive attitude has created
disgust in his mind for her. The marriage of Morel and Gertrude, the wife, should have meant the
synthesis of instinct and intellect. The intellect tries to dominate and often drives the instinct
away from home and finally destroys it. It is true that there is much Coarseness and animality in
Walter Morel, but his animality is a sign of life, whereas Gertrude's sophistication suggests
death. Rajinder (2004) says in this regard “the two fail to bridge the widening gulf between
themselves and Mr. Morel leaves his wife's room without any satisfying communication with
her”. Lawrence says in this regard:

She fought to make him undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill his
obligation. But he was too different from her. His nature was purely sensuous,
and she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face things.
He could not endure it- it drove him out of his mind. (S & L)

Through this relationship, the male-character certainly wants a union with a woman, but at
the same time he wants that man and woman should retain and preserve their individuality and
their singleness. However, it seems to him that woman is always “so horrible and clutching”. A
woman, he feels, has a lust for possession, and a greed of self importance in love . She wants to
have, to own, to control, to be dominated. “Everything must be referred back to her, to woman,
the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded thing and to whom everything must
finally be rendered up”. Woman thinks because she gives birth to man, she has to claim him
again, soul and body, sex, meaning and all.

Mrs. Morel is a domineering sort of person. Her domineering nature is shown in her having
brought her sons under her rigid control. Mr. Morel finds her extremely unresponsive and cold,
while his passion is intense and uncontrollable. Mrs. Morel's attitude enrages him and he
develops a desire to desert or neglect her. He is unable, any longer, to keep his destructive
instincts under check. The destructive nature of the father-mother relationship is highlighted in
the novel, and the mutual attraction between the two becomes aggregative. Morel represents the
“will for chaos”. He feels himself empty and meaningless, his face seems to him like a mask, and
his eyes only “bubbles of darkness”. There are reasons for the failure of Mr. Morel's love.
Firstly, Mrs. Morel is aggressive and dominating and secondly, there is no passion in her. She
talks about spontaneity and about intellects. Her passion is a lie. It is no passion at all. She wants
to clutch things and to have them in her power, because she has got no real body. She has no
“dark sensual body of life”. She has only her “will and lust for power”. It is Mrs. Morel who
sucks him up, so that he is never a man on his own feet". Mrs. Morel is so domineering, so over
possessive, that she does not respect the 'otherness' of other individuals.
 Marriage Conflict in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
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She is very happy to find that she has a power over her husband. Her soul exults because
Mr. Morel would be helpless in his association with her. They are “implicated with each other in
abhorrent mysteries”. But she does not give up the idea of the combat. She does not surrender
herself to her husband. Her love is thus a mingling of selfishness, self-exaltation, indescribable
perversion and destructiveness. All her romantic dreams of material bliss are rudely shattered
and she is filled with extreme bitterness. Between them, the real emotion was not intimately
bound up with sensation, that the sense of touch, physical contact, can bring people together who
may be consciously indifferent or even anti-pathetic to each other.

Another marriage conflict, we can see between Clara and Baxter Dawes. Baxter wants to
confine Clara‟s independent and freelance thinking. Her lifestyle can be seen as offense to the
social norms she is actively protesting: she works in a factory and for a while at Jordan's; she is
the breadwinner in the house. She is politically active and speaks on platforms for women's
rights, and later she also goes to live with another man, Paul, while still married. All of these are
unacceptable notions for the society she is living in. As Clara is known to be a suffragette, it is
apparently within the norm of behaviour expected from her to 'walk about' with another man, not
with her husband. As she tells Paul, she does not regret what she has done and has already shown
herself defiant of the existing social standards that would cause people to talk.

Clara clearly thinks that all men share the same false ideas about women, such as that they
should stay at home doing 'womanly' work like darning stockings, and blames all men for the
opportunities women are deprived of. She clears her opposition to such unjust perceptions in
more public settings as well, such as in a gathering of family and friends at Willey Farm. During
a discussion there she objects to the notion that women should not be equal with men in the labor
market and that their work is deserving of less payment because they do not support a family.
Clara's actions also indicate that she has her own sense of right and wrong, and that she does not
give much weight to society's notions of morality. When her husband treats her brutally and is
unfaithful to her and she feels trapped, she thinks herself justified in leaving him although she
does not divorce him. Later, when she falls for Paul, she tells him that she does not feel as if she
has done something morally wrong in being with him:

“You don't feel criminal, do you?” She looked at him with startled gray eyes.
“Criminal!” she said. “No.” when he also asks if she feels they have been sinful,
she gives the same answer: ' “Not sinners are we?” he said, with an uneasy little
frown. “No,” she replied.' (S & L)

Of the characters analyzed in this study, it can be said that Clara is the most radical. She
breaks with conservative morality, takes up political activism and strongly defends women's
rights against her husband and the society. She may not have broken the law; but she certainly
defies all social norms and fixed notions about women by her behaviour, lifestyle, words and
even clothes. Bur comes to the end we see that Clara breaks up with Paul, and goes back to her
husband, Baxter. And as we know that a man or a woman is what they feel not as they are. What
 Marriage Conflict in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
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a woman feels is her conscious existence. The difference between what a woman feels and what
she is, maybe, illustrated from Sons and Lovers with reference to all the three principal female
characters- Mrs. Morel, Miriam and Clara.

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