Jizzakh state pedagogical intitute foreign languages faculty

Sons and Lovers

Lawrence’s first two novels, first play, and most of his early short stories, including such masterpieces as Odour of Chrysanthemums and Daughters of the Vicar (collected in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories, 1914), use early experience as a departure point. Sons and Lovers carries this process to the point of quasi-autobiography. The book depicts Eastwood and the Haggs Farm, the twin poles of Lawrence’s early life, with vivid realism. The central character, Paul Morel, is naturally identified as Lawrence; the miner-father who drinks and the powerful mother who resists him are clearly modeled on his parents; and the painful devotion of Miriam Leivers resembles that of Jessie Chambers. An older brother, William, who dies young, parallels Lawrence’s brother Ernest, who met an early death. In the novel, the mother turns to her elder son William for emotional fulfillment in place of his father. This section of the original manuscript was much reduced by Garnett before publication. Garnett’s editing not only eliminated some passages of sexual outspokenness but also removed as repetitive structural elements that constitutethe establishment of a pattern in the mother’s behaviour and that explain the plural nouns of the title. When William dies, his younger brother Paul becomes the mother’s mission and, ultimately, her victim. Paul’s adolescent love for Miriam is undermined by his mother’s dominance; though fatally attracted to Miriam, Paul cannot be sexually involved with anyone so like his mother, and the sexual relationship he forces on her proves a disaster. He then, in reaction, has a passionate affair with a married woman, Clara Dawes, in what is the only purely imaginary part of the novel. Clara’s husband is a drunken workingman whom she has undermined by her social and intellectual superiority, so their situation mirrors that of the Morels. Though Clara wants more from him, Paul can manage sexual passion only when it is split off from commitment; their affair ends after Paul and Dawes have a murderous fight, and Clara returns to her husband. Paul, for all his intelligence, cannot fully grasp his own unconscious motivations, but Lawrence silently conveys them in the pattern of the plot. Paul can only be released by his mother’s death, and at the end of the book, he is at last free to take up his own life, though it remains uncertain whether he can finally overcome her influence. The whole narrative can be seen as Lawrence’s psychoanalytic study of his own case, a young man’s struggle to gain detachment from his mother.