How do you leave a mother who associates her life’s meaning and fulfillment to you and your achievements, without breaking her heart? How do you surrender all your passion to a lover while leaving some for the woman who gave birth to you, reared you, and loved you? Should a man give greater love to his mother or his lover? How do you achieve balance between the women in your life? D.H. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers displays the pendulum of a young man’s love swinging to-and-fro from his deep bond with his mother to his passionate relationships with his lovers. It is a fragile pendulum that slowly cracks and inevitably breaks. “And in the same way she waited for him. In him was established her life now. After all, the life beyond offered very little to Mrs. Morel. She saw that our chance for doing is here, and doing counted with her. Paul was going to prove that she had been right; he was going to make a man whom nothing should shift off his feet; he was going to alter the face of the earth in some way which mattered. Wherever he went she felt her soul went with him. Whatever he did she felt her soul stood by him, ready, as it were, to hand him his tools. She could not bear it when he was with Miriam. She would fight to keep Paul.”It is often said that young men unconsciously look for the qualities of their mother in a spouse. I do not know whether or not this is true, but if it is, this primal instinct is the definitive sign of the maternal clutch that holds us so, that a man never truly leaves his mother, that a wife is, in a way, only her substitute. Much in the same light that a woman would look for qualities of her father in a partner, this shows the strong influence of the family unit in our romantic compass. At the same time, it can also be seen as a deeply embedded desire for harmony between the abandoned family and the newly established one. But these are all just conjectures. It is often the case that a man would leave his mother for his wife, and forget about her altogether. Mothers are often relegated into a secondary role, often only visited during holidays, usually abandoned at elder’s homes. But then isn’t that the way it is? But should that be how they are treated when their love for you is much more than a lover can ever give you? How do you satisfy both women’s need for your love? And if you do satisfy them, what then is left for you?The novel starts with a wife and a husband. Gertrude Morel, the wife, the mother, I believe, is one of the greatest female figures in literature. Her fortitude despite a slovenly, drunken husband and her defiance towards him is an impressive feat in itself. Her unfailing love and devotion to her children makes her a champion greater than any female-lover character. Granted, there may be flaws in her character, yet her wisdom, her strength and her abiding maternal love makes these flaws insignificant. The story starts off with the difficulties and relationships of the family, then morphs into focus the second son, Paul, and his relationship with his mother and, later on, his lovers. It scrutinizes how he traverses the tightrope between his love for the woman who brought her into this world, and the women who make his world go round. A significant highlight of the novel, aside from the mother-son relationship, is the conflict in Paul’s heart between Miriam and Clara. These two women give face to the different sides of loving. Miriam, a friend since childhood, embodies the deep love that pierces the soul and being. They understand each other perfectly, soulmates, as they call it. She loves Paul to the very core, yet no passion arises in her. She considers love-making as something she must endure because she loves him, herself a sacrifice. Clara, on the other hand, is the very flame of passion. A beautiful older woman, her affair with Paul is one of desire and physicality. Her love is that of a wild carnal storm that reduces both into total abandonment. Yet they are two very different beings only united by an animal need, and nothing deep takes hold. They give Paul two different things, but none of them ever truly takes his heart. “But no, mother. I even love Clara, and I did Miriam; but to give myself to them in marriage I couldn’t. I couldn’t belong to them. They seem to want me, and I can’t ever give it them.‘You haven’t met the right woman’And I never shall meet the right woman while you live, he said.”Ever since he was born Paul has always had this deep awareness of his mortality, a melancholy attitude that was drawn to the surreptitious darkness around. He was always keenly aware of their poor standing in life. His empathy for his mother’s suffering when he was young might have been the driving force of his intense love for her. And as a young man he developed an existential crisis that made him unable to really love another woman. It was as if his deep love for his mother exhausted all his reserve, and made him empty. His life was grounded on his mother, as she had grounded her life on him. So when the inevitable happened, he was shattered.“Now she was gone, and forever behind him was the gap in life, the tear in the veil, through which his life seemed to drift slowly, as if he were drawn to death.”Therein lies the danger of such an intense proportion of love. He gave away all, pouring between his mother and his lovers that none was left for him. His melancholy character enabled him to empty himself, to abandon his preservation. He forgot that before one can be a son or a lover, one should be a man. Before one can be a daughter or a partner, one should be a woman. As such one should always remember that you must also hold enough love for yourself, to rationally love another. Otherwise the love consumes and is foolish. “he was in such a mess, because his own hold on life was so unsure, because nobody held him, feeling unsubstantial, shadowy, as if he didn’t count for much in this concrete world”“Not much more than a big white pebble on the beach, not much more than a clot of foam being blown and rolled over in the sand…”In Sons and Lovers, a young heartbroken D.H. Lawrence throws a pebble into the sea, not to see it hit the water, but only to feel the freedom of its release. He doesn’t aim to shed light in the darkness, but rather only to defy it. “His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her.”This novel is the nostalgic lamentation of an empty young man abandoned by love, and numb to it, a young man who feels loss in every sense of the word, blindly going forward. Go forward.
Of all the major writers in the canon, DH Lawrence is the horniest. Lots of people write about sex, but Lawrence writes exclusively about it, entirely about it. He's consumed by sex. Sex motivates everything that happens in his world. It can draw people together like in Lady Chatterley's Lover, or drive people apart. (Its energy in Sons and Lovers is not super positive.) He thinks there's real communication to be had about what sex is like and why. He wants to talk about how sometimes it's not as fun for the woman, and how one might help change that. He wants to discuss how sometimes it gets boring and then you have it in public just to spice it up. And he wants to talk about how sometimes you want to fuck your mom, which brings us to Sons and Lovers.Paul Morel wants to fuck his mom so bad it ruins every relationship in his life. Everyone can see it. His dad, catching them at a "long, fervent kiss" late in the kitchen, nearly fights him for it. The two women in his life - passive Miriam who says "Yes," and Clara of the body - both know that they're competing with his mother and that they can't win. They're both willing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of his overwhelming horniness - "Let me be the sheath to you," says Miriam hopefully - but it's not enough.And this is, by the way, Lawrence's autobiographical novel. He told Jessie Chambers, the real-life Miriam, "I've loved [my mom], like a lover. That's why I could never love you." Nice, DH.For context, here we are near the beginning of the century. Here are prudish Virginia Woolf and shitting, twitching James Joyce, careening into modernism, changing the face of literature - and Lawrence, this son of a coalminer, off on the side doing something totally different: writing about sex, over and over, with a persistent urgency that's just as radical. It's not that it's dirtier; Ulysses is dirtier. It's that it's more serious. Joyce is doing it to shock you. Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer (1934) was only a little after Lady Chatterley (1928), is much more shocking - but Miller isn't writing about sex, he's just jerking off while mumbling to himself. Lawrence isn't dirty, or at least not consistently (Lady Chatterley has its moments), but he's erotic. He's horny. That scene where he comes downstairs late at night to find a certain someone "kneeling naked on a pile of white underclothing on the hearthrug, her back towards him, warming herself" - that's, I mean, it's hot stuff.Also it comes right after a scene where Paul (view spoiler)[stealthily tries on a lady's stockings, (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Sons And Lovers (1999)?
In realtà non l'ho finito e non credo che lo farò. Lawrence ha un bellissimo stile, ma è "vecchio" (non perché scriva tra il XIX e il XX secolo, era vecchio pure allora). Le situazioni interiori dei personaggi e gli intrecci familiari sono straordinariamente dipinti, ma stancano. Troppe, troppe pagine spese a parlare del nulla che avanza nel cuore della madre, della rabbia che cresce in quello del figlio, delle violenze del padre, ecc. Di certo interessante dal punto di vista psicanalitico, ma come ogni cosa che ha che fare con la psicanalisi si perde in chiacchiere di cui meno della metà della metà sono realmente significative.
—Sara
I formed a negative opinion of Lawrence from Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Virgin and the Gypsy but I really liked this, though I can see Lawrence is the same writer in all of them. It's more down to earth or something, less trying to sell me something, which meant that I enjoyed the writing more. Part of what I liked about it is that it hasn't got a lot of plot, and I've seen several people commenting that, like me, they liked the first section best, which has the least plot of all and is about the marriage of Paul Morel's parents. It's an explanation of a situation. Something I liked about the book is that it's about an impoverished family with domestic violence that doesn't lose the feeling of everyday family life to a stage setting; I've noticed that the ability to do this is something I appreciate. It feels much more genuinely lived without having to mean toning it down. It was interesting too to see what the literary working classes were into. Flowers, mainly. I like flowers, so that was alright, but still a little odd the way taking each other to see notable flowers apparently formed such an important part of social life.Paul Morel gets his intellectual and artistic bent from his indomitable mother, who apparently keeps him so emotionally busy he hasn't much time for other women. I never really bought the all-consuming side of their relationship, actually. I know there's a lot of fondling and darling-ing but mother-son relationships in old books are weird like that anyway. Paul gets away from his mother enough to have an interminable romantic friendship with Miriam, an exhaustingly intense and spiritual girl. He likes discussing his feelings and his art with her but then again sometimes he gets bored of it. Eventually he gets away from her to start a thing with Clara, a separated woman a few years older than himself, who is cool and rigidly dignified because she's a little damaged by her marriage. Paul warms Clara up and then he gets bored of her. All this stuff about the cycle of infatuation and ennui was skating on the thin ice of my Lawrence tolerance but just about managed not to break through. Then Paul's mother dies and he feels destroyed by it but he decides to carry on somehow.
—Leonie
“I have been reading ‘Sons and Lovers’ and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had been killed after writing that book he’d still be England’s greatest novelist.”- Philip Larkin in a letter to a friend, aged nineteen.It’s late, and I haven’t written any reviews for this site up until now, but here goes nothing. Considering the relatively abysmal ratings that Lawrence’s novels seem to have here, I figured I should at least add my two cents and say a couple things about what I feel is one of the better novels I’ve read. Published in 1913, Sons and Lovers was D.H. Lawrence’s third novel, and is today generally considered to be his first ‘major’ work. An autobiographical Bildungsroman, S&L documents a time in the author’s life that was filled, in the words of Lawrence himself, with much “writhing and shrieking.” This work is often regarded as the first great modern Oedipal drama, and indeed it is the story of a mother who, stuck with a brute for a husband, turns her sons into something like surrogate lovers. No, that doesn’t mean that there is any incest in this book (if you’re looking for smut, look elsewhere; Lawrence’s reputation as a pornographer is undeserved), but it does mean that these sons, in particular Paul (the Lawrence character), end up finding it immensely difficult to get out from under the shadow of their mother and connect with the women they establish relationships with outside of the family. It seems that most of the complaints about this work are along the lines of “it was too boring” or “I didn’t like any of the characters.” It is true that most of the conflict in the book is internal rather than external, but I’m unable to see how one could be anything but in awe of Lawrence’s command of the English language, as well as his understanding of the mechanics of human emotions. But if you need action, this book has its share: sickness, death, a killer fight scene, sex, temper tantrums…you name it. If the feelings or the relationships of the characters are not cut-and-dried, it is not a fault of the work. Lawrence succeeds in capturing the humanity of these characters, and for that reason I always felt sympathetic towards them. Granted, this is a painful book to read; no book has yet succeeded in making me cry, but this one may have come closest :_( . It is an excellent coming-of-age tale, and now sits alongside Joyce’s Portrait…as likely the most rewarding Bildungsroman I’ve yet read. Pity they couldn’t stand each other ha ha!P.S.I have the Oxford World’s Classics edition (which features a lovely painting by C.R.W. Nevinson on its cover), and in David Trotter’s introduction I discovered that the version I read was the Cambridge University Press version. This version, though far and away the most widely recognized, features extended cuts made by Lawrence’s friend and mentor Edward Garnett. The endnotes of my copy make reference to some of these cuts, including a lengthy one wherein Paul and Miriam meet at a library. Lawrence approved Garnett’s edits, but Trotter seemed to suggest that the original manuscript version is also in print. I've been unsuccessful in my search to find out more about this, but does anyone know if it is possible to obtain an unedited 'manuscript' copy? I know the Penguin edition is also the Cambridge version.
—Matthew
