Human Relationship in D.H.Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

Human relationship always defined the dynamics of the action of Lawrentian novel. D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) is one of the greatest names in the history of English novel. He, along with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce is the man behind the form and function of the newly developed genre called Modern Novel.
Lawrence published his first novel The White Peacock in 1911. This period was defined in terms of severe emotional complexity. Lawrence endured the shock of his brother's death in 1901 and the shock was so strong that he fell it. His mother's illness was another factor that went on creating new strains and stresses that reverberated incessantly in the writer's mind. The White Peacock failed to earn critical acclaim but it predicts the birth of a genius the domain of novel writing. Despite being a failure, his first novel is significant for the portrayal of four characters, Letti, the peacock, who glorifies her vanity in her triumph over man and enjoys sadistic pleasure when she sees a man servile to her vanity and charm. In a sharp contrast with her is the Leslie Lempast, a man with conservative stamp of mind and mellowed by the stronger personality of his wife; George the son of the soil who makes a mess of his life who falls prey to the seductive charms of a belle dame but faith with her love and invites frustration, and then Annabel who enshrines two Lawrentian myths the superiority of the rich and the charms of the white peacock. It is a great thing to the credit of Lawrence that these four characters recur incessantly in the fictional domain of Lawrence right till the end.
Lawrence's second novel The Tresspasser appeared in 1912. It is the least known of all of his novels. It is also the reason why the publication of the novel was suspended for a fairly long period. The story lacked connectivity : the plot was too poor to speak about Hueffer, commenting on the novel frankly opined that it is 'a rotten book of a genius'. He concluded this assessment say that an 'erotic work must be a good art which this is not'.1 'There is, write Kenneth Young, a sense of erotic frustration'. Young further explains that the 'physical elimination is neither felt nor visualized'.2
Sons and Lovers published in 1913 is the most consummate form of the novel writing. The novel also marks the consummation of the first phase of the fictional writing. Lawrence started writing the novel when his mother was on the death–bed. It is obvious that mother fixation is one the prominent aspects of the thematic structure of the novel. The novel also offers reply to those who criticized him for his inability to write a well–framed novel. Horace Gregory rightly affirms :
The process of writing Sons and Lovers was a process of mastering the technique of the novel : please himself; to please Edward Garnett, to convince his friendliest of the critic of his control over the medium, it was necessary for his first important work to have the texture of a complete novel.3
It is thus clear from the Gregory's views that Sons and Lovers is the first novel of conventional plot–structure and the growth of the character which closely resembled the conventional plot–structure of a victorian novel.
Sons and Lovers, unambiguously makes the most celebrated example of the maestro's adherence to this theme and his fixation with the mother provides essential fictional value to the narrative. Lawrence, in a letter to Garnett explains :

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 a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grew up, she selects them as lovers, first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love for their mother–urge on and on. But then they come to manhood, they can't love because their mother is the strongest power in their lives and holds them. It is rather like Goethe and his mother, France Van Stein and Christian. As soon as the young man came into contact with woman, there is a split. William gave his sex to a fribble and his mother holds his soul. But they spin because he doesn't know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul, fights his mother. The son loves the mother, all the sons hate and are jealous of father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with son as object. The mother gradually proves stronger because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother's hand and like his elder brother, goes for passion. He gets passion then the split begins to fell again. But almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything with his drift towards death.4
It is clear from Lawrence's letter to his critic–friend that the sexual dissatisfaction of the woman is at the center of the theme and out of that sexual dissatisfaction, she nurtures the children with the passion of lovers and the passion in turn perverts the life cycle of her sons. There are two questions that form the extreme of the axis of the whole structure of the novel. The first important point is that a sexually dissatisfied woman as a result of the cool and well nurtured rage adopts her own sons as lovers. The second important point deals with the inextricable relationship between the mother–fixation and the sex–life of the sons.
Mrs. Morel is the protagonist of the first part of the novel and both the aspects of the theme discussed above are defined chiefly through her. She belongs to a lower middle class family and is brought up with high moral sense that makes her legacy of generations of puritans. She is deeply religious and loves ideas and considered very intellectual. The strain comes as a result of the two moods sharply at variance with each other. Paul on the contrary was a man purely of flesh that resulted into the strain making pivot of the dynamics of the novel :
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.5
Mrs. Morel remained harsh in dealing with her husband. In the circumstances of intoxication or squandering money, she adopts a relentless attitude whereas her husband opts for rage and indifference. The episode in which Morel drives her out of house in the wintry night is an apt revelation of this; specially in the light of the fact that she was pregnant.
It is more than obvious that Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel and the autobiographical elements are not manifest in terms of sexual strains and marital incompatibilities but the violent antithetic impulses between the lower and lower middle classes of the society also reflect here. The first part of the novel has very obvious strains of the class compartmentalization in the lower and lower middle classes of the contemporary society. The recurrence of the class struggle is also a much prominent, though, ignored aspect of the fictional domain of D.H. Lawrence that acquires a much prominent role in Aaron's Rod published in 1922. The growing indifference between Walter Morel and Mrs. Morel and Mrs. Morel's dislike for Jerry Purdy who was a bosom friend of Walter Morel have twin implications : one hand it reveals the vibrant strains between the husband and wife and on the other hand it reflects the antithesis within the society at various levels. The views of Edmund Wilson invite our attention. He, in his celebrated article, "Marxism and Literature", comments :
Yet a man who tries to apply Marxist principles without real understanding of literature is liable to go horribly wrong. For one thing, it is usually true in works of highest order that the purport is not a single message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit; and the reader who does not grasp them artistically but is merely looking for simple social morals, is certain to be confused.6
The relevance of Wilson's views are evidenced in the complexity of vision put to scrutiny and perception by Lawrence. The marital strains, sexual incompatibility and the class struggle are so completely fused that to isolate one from the rest is nearly impossible and the fusion leads to a composite perception of the complex vision of the novel.

William, the first born of Morels redefines the rhythm of the action with new strains. The growing indifference of Morel obliges Mrs Morel to pour all her love on her first born. The first major twist in the direction of Oedipal manifestation is observed with the birth of jealousy in the mind of the father for his son. Morel's act of clipping of the locks of William's hair when he was barely one year old illustrates the complex emotion pervading the universe peopled by the three : Waller Morel, Mrs. Morel and William. The event also determines the course of action of the novel by aggravating the pore existing indifference between the couple and simultaneously the future of the mother and child and father and child relationship.
The birth of Paul is a starking instance of the irony of the real and desired. The use of irony also predicts the nature of action and experience of the novel. Mrs. Morel didn't want the child but her motherly instinct shoot up meteorically and she resolves to produce the child. The birth of the child is aptly metaphorical to and illustrative of various forms of antithesis that define the dynamics of the plot structure of the novel. The struggle between two classes, lower and lower middle, is recreated again in the childhood of the children. They grow up under the strict supervision of their mother who never allows them to play with the children of miners. Mrs. Morel's strict abnegation comes out with two fold implications : it reveals the struggle between the two classes and at the same time it also reveals the growing contempt of the mother for her children's father. Paul gradually acquires protagonistic stature. Lawrence narrates the family discord from the point of view of Paul, the new protagonist :
Often Paul would wake up, after he had been asleep for 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, and nasty snarling about as the man's voice got higher. And then the whole was drowned in the piercing medley of shrieks and cries, from the great wind swept ash tree. The children lay silent in suspense, waiting for a lull in the wind to hear what their father was doing. He might hit their mother again. There was a feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense of blood. They lay with their heart in the grip of immense anguish. The wind came through.7
The anguish of the children was shaped into by the mother for their father. Whenever the mother returned home bitter and angry the children would surround their mother like tiny companions. Mrs. Morel takes over William completely and when he secures employment as a clerk at some firm in London, she is glutted with inordinate pride and relief.
The strains pervading different corners of the miner's house are redefined when William, in London, falls in love with Miss Weston, and brings her home on Christmas. Lawrence intensifies the effect by cyclic recreation of time image. It is more than predictable that Mrs. Morel found the girl quite shallow and is least reluctant to show her dislike. Mrs. Morel William and Miss Weston creates an unusual love–triangle. It was a tormenting love triangle; William lived divided between love for his mother and infatuation for his girl friend. He was delivered only by death from the tormenting strain that owes its origin to the fragmented emotion of love.
The story in the first part of the novel is narrated from the point of view of Mrs. Morel; tale of woman's hunger for love and consequent perversion. Williams' death also paves way for the protagonistic stature of Paul, her second son. It is an important observation that her intimacy with Paul is more subtle than with the first born. Paul, a promising student, with many prizes and scholarships against his name that, made her mother proud. When Paul secures a job in London's Surgical Appliances Factory, she was assured that her son was well on his way to prosperity. It was also a latent desire of her mother that her son should marry wisely. She keeps an eagle eye on him. The action and experience latent in the novel is redefined and it results into the making of new strain. The views of Philip Hobsbaum invite our attention. He, on this phase of the development of the novel, remarks :
However, often Paul Morel, the Lawrence figure of the novel grows up, Sons and Lovers transmutes into what is virtually a different book. The sympathy, the author enlists for Mrs. Morel is no longer opposed to her brutish husband. Rather it is set against an object who may seem considerably less legitimate as a focus for enmity, Paul's first love Mirium. Such enmity makes this second part into a bed story for Mrs. Morel.8
Paul's love for Mirium reverberates and revitalizes the strain in the narrative. Man–woman relation acquires new reverberations with a new unconventional love–triangle. Mirium was extremely sensitive, deeply religious. Mrs. Morel's reaction to the growing attachment of Paul towards Mirium is predictable. Her reaction to Mirium was that she was 'one of those who will want to suck a man's soul and till he was none of his own left'.8 Lawrence delineate Paul and Mirium with platonic inclination towards each other. They were sexually immature so their love is manifest at sentimental level. Even after teens their relationship does not acquire typical Lawrentian maturity. The tragedy owes its origin to Paul's mother fixation. He owes his mother a notion of faithfulness. His perplexed childhood made him incapable of loving a girl. Mirium loves Paul with body and soul but he could not enjoy the liberty of loving a girl as long as his mother lived :
The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into shame.10
Paul's fixation with his mother and obsession with Mirium tears him into pieces. The narrative has a balance of the two paradoxical strains : the protagonist's love towards his mother and his love towards Mirium. Joseph Warren Beach rightly analyses the strains in the narrative. He says :
Sons and Lovers is primarily the story of mother fixation. Paul's love for Mirium is a desperate attempt to free himself from his excessive attachment to his mother. But this he cannot do. He cannot give to Mirium what has already been made over to his mother; and thus comes about that torturing dichotomy between him and the woman who wants all his love and to whom he can give but half.11
Paul nearly wrecks when he confesses to Mirium :
I can only give friendship – it is all I am capable of, it's a flaw in my make up. The thing over balances to one side. I had a hoppling balance. Let us have done.12

Paul likes the divided love and this agony seeks expression when he, on twenty first birthday of Mirium writes to her :
You see I can give you split love. I have given it to you this long long time but not embodied passion. See you are a nun. I have given you what I would give a holy nun as a mystic monk to a holy nun.12
The piece of epistle written by Paul to Mirium aptly illustrates pulsations of love of Paul for Mirium and simultaneously, it also reflects the insurmountable burden of mother fixation. Paul, however, admits that 'there is some sort of perversity in' their 'souls' that makes them 'not want get away from the very thing they want'.13 The confession of Paul ratifies the simultaneous existence of both the antithetic vibrations.
The advent of Mrs. Clara Dawes is a significant event in the narrative that works and new twists and turns for the development of the theme. Sex instinct propell him fast towards Clara Dawes who, unlike Mirium, was a married woman. But instead of smooth sexual interaction, Paul falters again.
He was like so many young men of his own age. Sex had become so complicated in him that he would have denied that he ever could want Clara or Mirium or any woman whom he knew. Sex desire was a sort of detached thing for him that didn't belong to a woman. He loved Mirium with his soul. It grew warm at the thought of Clara, he battled with her, he knew the curves of her breasts and her shoulders as if they have been moulded inside him and yet he did not positively desire her. He would have denied it forever.14
There is little antipathy between Clara and Mrs. Morel. One wanted to possess Paul spiritually while the other wanted him physically. Paul too had no intention to possess Clara but she was instrumental in working out a relief. Paul realizes and reveals that he would not get the right woman until his mother survives. Mrs. Morel's spiritual ailment seeks a physical counterpart when he becomes a patient of cancer. Paul pities his mother's pains and resolves to free her from all pains. One day he gives her a large dose of Morphine and frees her from all her pains. It results into the extinction of the life flame. Mrs. Morel's death was as much a relief for her as for her son but Paul's fixation with his mother was so strong that his soul oscillated between life and death :
She was the only thing that held hours up amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her. But no, he would not give in sharply, his fists were shut, his mouth set for. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming glowing town quickly.15
The above quoted excerpt make it clear that to realize life it is necessary to realize death and vice–versa. The views of Dorothy Van Ghent invite our attention. She points out :
Sons and Lovers ends with Paul a derelict in a drift towards death, which Lawrence thought of as the disease syndrome of his time and of Europe. But the death drift or the death worship is for Lawrence a hideous distortion of the relationship of life to death.16
Dorothy Van Ghent makes it clear that for Lawrence death is as dynamic as life and life without death ceases to matter.
The novel, it is widely spanning ambit encapsulates as many as three different permutations of man–woman relation, however, all the three are defined in terms of one great force determining the nature and experience of these relations. The first important couple delineated to define human relation is of Walter Morel and Mrs. Morel. The love dies and soon after their conjugation is solemnized but the pain not only defines the human relation along sexual and spiritual dimensions, but it also brings into being the idea of class struggle, which is the factor responsible for twists and turns in the narrative and it is also the idea which reverberates with defining value in many other novels of the maestro.
The tragedy of William and Mrs. Weston owes its cause to the mother complex. There are critics like Harry T. Moore and Richard Aldington who opine that the novel is the first major representation of Freud's theories of psycho analysis. But it is important to note that despite evident similarities, the novel had little to do with the Freud's theories of psycho analysis. The tragedy of Sons and Lovers originates from the tragedy of author's life that pervaded the whole milieu for about one generation. It is aptly represented by the wrecking couples of William and Mrs. Weston, Paul and Mirium and to a great extent Paul and Claura, who possessed each other deeply but remained spiritually indifferent, and, have direct bearings upon the life of the author and simultaneously on life of his own generation.
1D.H. Lawrence, Letters to Edward Garnett (London : Green and Company, 1982) 15.
2Kenneth Young, D.H. Lawrence (London : Longman, 1952) 30.
3Horace Gregory, Pilgrim of Apocalypse, A Critical Study of the Writings of D.H. Lawrence (London : Martin Secker, 1934) 17–18.
4Lawrence, Letters to Edward Garnett, 76.
5D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London : Penguin Books, 1949) 33.
6Edmund Wilson, "Marxism and Literature", 20th Century Literary Criticism – A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London : Longman, 1989) 247.
7Phillip Hobsbaum, A Reader's Guide to D.H. Lawrence (London : Thames and Hudson, 1981) 49.
8Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 199.
9Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 221.
10Joseph Warren Beach (New Delhi : Kalyani, 1988) 379.
11Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 271.
12Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 307.
13Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 345.
14Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 337.
15Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 501.
16Dorothy, Van Ghent, The English Novel : Form and Function (London : Harper Torch Book, 1961) 261.
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New Delhi : Macmillan, 1988.
Allott, Mirium, Novelists on Novel. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.
Beach, Joseph Warren. The Twentieth Century Novel – Studies in Technique. New Delhi : Kalyani, 1988, Rev. Ed.
Gregory, Horace. A Pilgram of Apocalypse : A Critical Study of the Writings of D.H. Lawrence. London : Marity Seeker, 1936.
Hobsbaum, Philip. A Reader's Guide to Lawrence, D.H. London : Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Lawrence, D.H. The White Peacock. London : Penguin, 1950.
Lawrence, D.H. The Trespasser. London : William Heinemann Ltd., 1950.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. London : Penguin Books, 1949.
Lawrence, D.H. Aaron's Rod. London : Penguin Books, 1950.
Lawrence, D.H. Letters to Edward Garnett. London : Green and Company, 1982.
Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel : Form and Function. London : Harper Torch Book, 1961.
Young Kenneth. D.H. Lawrence. London : Longman, 1952.

Wilson, Edmund. "Marxism and Literature" 20th Century Criticism – A Reader. London : Longman, 1989, 241–252.