Sons and Lovers as an Autobiographical Novel

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He had to endure great emotion tresses in youth and face many urgent personal problems. He was a tortured soul for full forty five years of himself and his writings are an expression of his inner suffering, frustrations and emotional complexes. They are all in the nature of personal revelations, some more, some less, but the autobiographical note runs through them all. The most striking feature of Lawrence’s characters is that they are projections of the novelist’s personalities, Paul morel in Sons and Lovers, is clearly a projection of him. It is a story of Midland miner’s son, Paul Morel, who is Lawrence himself; Walter morel and Mrs.

Morel are the father and mother of Paul, Lawrence’s alter ego. The father is an unrefined miner and the mother with refinement and culture, “a superior woman. ” The conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Morel and the reactions of children are all transcripts from life. Miriam is Jessie Chambers whom Lawrence met early in life, where he loved but with whom he failed to establish satisfactory relations, owing largely to the influence of his mother on him. His mother, too died of cancer like Mrs. Morel, the mother of Paul, and his brother Earnest Lawrence, too died early in life as William in the story.

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However, facts of life-reality has undergone a press of imaginative selection nd ordering and the whole experience has been reorganized and shaped for the purpose of art. And that is what Lawrence has done in his most autobiographical of his novels. It was for this reason that Jessie Chambers was shocked when Sons and lovers were published in its final form. She complained that justice had not been done to her, that the whole Paul-Miriam affair presented her in an unfavorable light and that the laurels of victory had been given to Mrs. Morel. She gave her own version of the whole affair.

She might be factually true, but she was certainly mistaken in taking the novel to be an autobiography. Lawrence had created a work of art and he as well within this rights to organize and interpret the facts in accordance with the requirements of art. Besides this, he has departed from reality in other respects too. While Lawrence married Frieda Weekly, the other woman, after the death of his mother and lived with her subsequently became a great writer, Paul fails to reach a satisfactory adjustment even with Clare the other woman in the novel and does not marry her.

However, through often false as to actual fact, Lawrence is undeviating true to emotional reality. Lawrence was never able to make a happy emotional djustment with other woman. The novelist was a tortured soul through out the full forty five years of his life, and what he suffered, and what he through and served under the stimulus of suffering can very well be guessed from a study of Sons and Lover. The novel faithful presents all his passions and frustrations. Owing to the mother fixation which was acute, the novelist could not make an agreeable and happy emotional adjustment with the other specimens of the fair sex.

The soul-corroding experience has been transmuted into the novel. His intense suffering, his passions and emotions, his deprivations have found an rtist and vivifying expression in the novel. The Oedipus complex with which was affected with in his private life in manifested in the novel also. The mother image or mother substitute marred his own life also. Although he married Frieda Weekly after the demise of his mother, Lawrence was never happy, failed to derive a real complacency and satisfaction in his married life. Paul moral, his prototype also suffered from similar emotional complexes.

His relationship with both Miriam and Clara is inadequate. Sons and Lovers is thus an imaginative representation of the facts of his life. E. Baker has observed that the novel “is of cardinal importance as a key to his intricate and often paradoxical nature. ” 2222 The opening of the book introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Morel whose marital discord sets the underlying cause of the unnatural bonding between Mrs. Morel and her sons William and Paul More I . Mr. morel’s untamed temper and his wife’s condemnation for his excessive drinking and idle nature create an unhealthy environment for their children who grow up despising their father.

Lawrence himself described his father as someone who “lacked principle as my mother would have said. “Their married life has been a carnal bloody fight. ” The growing hated of the sons and the mother towards Mr. Morel brings them together into a close relationship which has sexual undertones to it. Both sons are so emotionally bonded to their mother that they find it difficult to maintain normal relationships with the women in their lives. It’s as if their mother possesses their soul due to which they are split between their love for their mother and their love for the women they are involved with.

In the case of William, his relationship with Louisa Western comes to and ends when he senses his mother’s inherent disapproval for her. This is followed by his illness and consequent death Infect he eludes to his death several times post his break up which shows that he is unable to deal with his emotional turmoil in relation to his mother. After William’s death the mother’s fondness for her second son, Paul increases. Problems crop up in Paul’s life when he enters into adolescence. Again in his case the split occurs. He is full of a feeling of guilt when he starts dating Miriam, who again is disliked by Mrs.

Morel because she feels that Miriam is responsible for her son’s upset state of mind. But the fact is that Paul’s underlying sexual desires; owing to is adolescence do not get an outlet because he’s deeply attached to his mother and because Miriam confines their relationship to chaste love. Therefore, he is never able to be his true self and give his best to the relationship. Later he does consummate his love affair but it leaves him dissatisfied and his earlier disturbed self returns. He then ends his relationship with Miriam. Source: http://www. shvoong. om/books/1758990-sons-lovers/#ixzz2TZGXuvye Sons and Lovers is in some ways so directly autobiographical as to make it almost a confession. In both the book and in the story of Lawrence’s life, childhood is pent in the poorer parts of a Nottingham mining town. In both the book and Lawrence’s life, the mother and father are at odds socially and intellectually. In both the book and Lawrence’s life, the father drinks too much, distancing himself from his wife, whom he no longer understands. In both, the mother in turn invests all her emotional life into her children – but especially her sons.

In both, an older brother dies of erysipelas after being engaged to a stenographer called Louisa. In both, the mother is overwhelmed by grief, but finds herself emotionally alive again when the younger brother becomes ill and she can focus her love on im. In both, there is a strongly sexual element behind the relationship between mother and son, and a bitter and poisoned relationship with the father. In both, the development of a mature sexual life for the son is hampered by his affection for his mother, with two significant women being the possible means to adult freedom, yet ultimately failing because of that maternal attachment.

In both, the hero works in a surgical appliance factory. In both, there is an idyllic farm where the protagonist finds intellectual and emotional respite as well as stimulus. In both, the mother’s death is assisted by an overdose administered y the son. In terms of places, the only differences are in the spelling, with Lawrence’s home town Eastwood being given a sarcastic recasting as Bestwood, or – slightly more disguised – Jessie Chambers from Lawrence’s own life being turned into Miriam Leivers.

And there is much more that speaks directly from Lawrence’s own experiences with his parents, his background and his early relationships. The book is the story of a family, the Morels; and in particular the relationship between Paul Morel and his mother Gertrude (a name deliberately recalling Hamlet’s mother). She marries Walter, who at first is a vital and powerful an for whom she has a genuine passion. But she is intellectually far stronger than he, socially more ambitious; and as she retreats from him, so he becomes boorish and drunk.

Instead, the mother finds solace in her children, who in turn are devoted to her. The elder, William, can hardly enjoy himself without his mother’s approval. Perhaps sensing this, he goes to take up a job in London. But an infection kills him and leaves his mother bereft. Shortly afterwards, her second son Paul falls seriously ill (as Lawrence did) and is near death himself. This crisis brings the mother out of mourning, and she devotes herself to Paul. This relationship is at the heart of the novel.

Paul is a sensitive, artistic, slightly effeminate child – another close echo of Lawrence, who was so weak as a child that he could not play with the other boys at school – who shares every aspect of his life with his mother. When he becomes attached to a girl at a nearby farm, his mothers disapproval is as significant a factor in his relinquishing her as his own indecision, which is itself a product of his feelings for his mother. But Paul finds himself attracted to another woman and continues his struggle to – as Lawrence puts it – ‘realise’ himself as a man independent of his mother.

The friction created between the many conflicting desires of the characters is explored with Lawrence’s habitual combination of candour, depth and a vigorous mysticism about the relationships between the mind and the body, sex and love, religion and the soul, industrialisation and humanity, instinct and intellect. Lawrence examines these both overtly and covertly. There are whole passages discussing the nature of a relationship; elsewhere issues are hinted at in symbolic set- pieces (Walter cutting the hair of one of his children; Paul and Miriam going to look at a rose-bush).

Lawrence’s philosophy can also be seen in the structure f the work as a whole – Mrs Morel cannot find deep enough satisfaction from her husband, so the children become a conduit for her love; but this damages the growth of the child. The immediacy of the autobiographical aspects of the book gives it the impression of having been written quickly – there are sudden, unclear shifts of time or perspective, for example – but this is misleading.

Its descriptions of the scenery in the area are suffused with an almost ecstatic sense of the power of nature, allowing the characters inspired insights, or reflecting elements of their emotional state. Throughout the book, Lawrence uses the haracters’ responses to lowers and plants to illustrate aspects of their nature. He also uses events in ways that may be directly symbolic (such as picking cherries) or allows sensuality to seep into the descriptions of actions that are not specifically sexual. The characters themselves are painted with an honesty that early readers found unsympathetic.

They did not recognise that this was a means to greater understanding of the characters than could be afforded by the over-simplification and emotional manipulation of other writers. This extends to portraying Paul – a cipher for Lawrence himself – as pompous, misogynistic nd mother- ixated; and managing to make Walter – the drunken, violent, fearful father – movingly real. Lawrence started the book when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and died in 191 0, but it went through several rewrites and revisions; and even then he had a troubled time getting it published (something Lawrence would get used to).

His editor, friend and dedicatee of the novel Edward Garnett cut some eighty passages, and the book, Lawrence’s third, was published in 1913. Despite these excisions, the book deals with several topics that the critics of the day found repellent – mother / son lust (however epressed), descriptions of sex (however symbolic or tangentially expressed) and an unapologetic setting of the book among the working classes, dialect and all.

Lawrence may have escaped England for much of his life, but he could never find relief from the attacks on his works for their directness, their bold attempt to bring to literature what had never been examined in it before, and for their portrayal of the realties of life outside the literary, cosmopolitan or establishment circles who were responsible for censorship. David Herbert Richards Lawrence (known in the family as Bert) was born in 1885, and was a studious if sickly child.

He became a teacher and started to write short stories and poems, several of which were accepted by Ford Maddox Huefferfor publication in The English Review. Hueffer also recommended Lawrence’s first novel The White Peacock for publication, and his career as a writer could be said to have begun in 1912, when, with one novel out, another being published, a play completed and poems in print, he resigned his teaching post. His lived life – rather than his written one – also stems from that year.

He had been engaged, but had fallen in love with the married mother-of-three Frieda Weekley (the wife of a professor nder whom Lawrence had studied, and the cousin of Baron von Richthofen, a German air ace). They eloped, later to marry after her divorce. The marriage survived a difficult and peripatetic life, but was not without its crises. Lawrences sexuality was not always fixed. He had a homosexual affair when he was sixteen (something that he described as the nearest thing to perfect love in his life), and a brief affair with a farmer in Cornwall some years later.

Frieda also had a long affair with Angelo Ravagli, who lived with her after Lawrence’s death. But through all this, a pattern for Lawrence’s life was established. They travelled, he rote, they had very little money, he was often ill (tuberculosis haunted him and finally killed him in 1930). His books were rarely successful and sometimes only published in small, private editions because they fell foul of the censors.

Their travels were seldom straightforward, and he and Frieda were twice arrested for spying: once in Germany just before the First World War, and once in Cornwall during it, when her ancestry was a cause for much suspicion (the fact that they used to sing German songs when on walks probably didn’t help). But despite this questing (sometimes enforced) wandering, Lawrence produced novels that hanged the genre forever, as well as over 800 poems, several volumes of short stories, and literary, psychological and historical works.

His travel writing is so highly regarded that Sardinia offers an international prize for it in his name. Lawrence managed to become one of the greatest names in twentieth-century English literature by refusing to allow himself to be cowed despite extraordinary pressure, both socially and financially. He produced works that remolded the imaginative life of anyone who can read English, from The Rainbow to Sons and Lovers to Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.