| It
is a truth universally acknowledged that all progress, whether social,
intellectual or spiritual develops painfully only after passing
through an indefinite number of hardships and eventually, of relative
failure. The problem appears when those who experience these hardships
and this failure feel incapable (and perhaps, sometimes, even unwilling)
to go beyond them and reach a stage of superior understanding, revealing
the possibility of meaningful human relationships.
Yet, no meaningful relationship is possible before a realization
of one’s own sense of identity, for the acknowledgement of
identity in others (the only real basis for the achievement of true
relationships, in D. H. Lawrence’s view) rests largely on
a capacity of constructing it on a personal level. Moreover, neither
the sense of individuality, nor that of community can exist without
a deeply felt integration into a larger universe, which transcends
psychologically or socially constructed categories. We felt therefore
the need to proceed in our thorough analysis of the characters,
on two mutually interdependent levels: the personal level (or the
level of individuality/selfhood) and the social level.
These levels will be taken and analysed together because there is
a very close interconnectedness between them. In fact, they largely
depend on each other, insofar as any construction of identity depends
upon the acknowledgement and respect of alterity (which is, as we
have seen, clearly D. H. Lawrence’s own view of the mechanism
of authentic interpersonal relations); and given the fact that the
establishment of any authorised opinion about the characters (coming
from the reader or an abstract reader-function) is, almost always
in D. H. Lawrence’s case, dependent upon the perception of
the degree and quality of the relationships they enter in, it becomes
redundant to further stress the importance we should be giving to
a pertinent and (we hope) complete analysis of the above-mentioned.
According to Lawrence’s own account, Sons and Lovers 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. But as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers –
first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life
by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on.
But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their
mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them...
As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s
a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds
his soul. But the split kills him, 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 the father. The battle goes on between the mother
and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves
stronger, because of the ties of blood. The son decides to leave
his soul in his mother’s hands, and, like his elder brother,
go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again.
But almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter
and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his
dying mother. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the
drift towards death.1
Mrs Morel’s behaviour and mental structure are heavily imprinted
and ‘trapped’ by the social milieu she comes from as
well as by her education based on rigid moral principles (Puritanism),
excessive intellectualism, a yearning for sensuality (her reason,
in fact, for marrying Morel) which she finally denies and stifles;
therefore, she’s never able to live a well-rounded, natural
psychic (and physical) life – because she is too stubborn,
powerful and unyielding. Her unhealthy tendency is towards domination
and she exerts this proclivity of hers on whoever is around her
(her husband, her sons), thus making futile any attempt of theirs
(the extent of her success, however, is debatable as we shall see
further on) to come to terms in a personal way with reality.
In Walter Morel’s case, she simply cannot let him ‘indulge’
in a life which to her appears not only ‘in-authentic,’
but alien (“she stove to make him intellectual...”2)
and therefore she constantly forces upon him (or rather attempts
to do so, because Walter Morel remains, in most of the cases, ‘immune’
to her attacks) a degree of consciousness and morality that he not
only doesn’t possess, but that he cannot even comprehend.
This obviously produces the adverse effects in Walter Morel, and
much of his ulterior, despicable, behaviour, derives from this constant
imposition of his wife and her stubborn refusal to incorporate in
her psychic life any of Walter Morel’s attributes –
which, of course, finally leads to the widening of the original
existing gap between them and makes all prospects of communication
and understanding impossible.
For Mrs Morel, her husband is nothing but a drunkard and a bully,
a man with whom she shares neither intellectual, nor moral or religious
sympathies, so it is natural that she should loathe him. However,
what the book plainly shows, time and again, is that the Morels
are at least equally responsible for the failure of their marriage;
and yet Morel is here presented as feeling that the ruin is of his
making. Indeed, if ultimate responsibility for the ruin must be
fixed, then, on the objective evidence offered by the book, it is
Mrs Morel who has the most to answer for. The moments of rare marital
harmony depicted in several passages illuminate the nature of her
responsibility. Body counts for more than she realizes, and through
failing to make the most of Morel’s physical glow, she has
forfeited not only the loveable husband that he is shown to be but
her own transfiguring blaze of passion, which for a moment lights
her up in middle age:
She
still had her high moral sense, inherited from generations of Puritans.
It was now a religious instinct, and she was almost a fanatic with
him, because she loved him, or had loved him. If he sinned, she
tortured him. If he drank, and lied, was often a poltroon, sometimes
a knave, she wielded the lash unmercifully...
...The pity was, she was too much his opposite. She could not be
content with the little he 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. She injured and hurt and scarred herself,
but she lost none of her worth. She also had the children.3
Thus, it is clear what Mrs Morel has lost, and it is to make up
for it that she turns possessively, and as relentlessly as she ruined
her husband, to her sons. As a result of this, the children get
alienated from their father, whose personality degenerates gradually
as he feels his exclusion; the mother more and more completely dominates
her sons’ affections, aspirations, and mental habits. Urged
by her toward middle-class refinements, they enter white-collar
jobs, thus making one more dissociation between themselves and their
proletarian father. As they attempt to orient themselves toward
biological adulthood, the old split in the family is manifested
in a new form, as an internal schism in the characters of the sons;
they cannot reconcile sexual choice with the idealism their mother
has inculcated into them. This inner strain leads to the elder son’s
death.4
In William’s case, we’re witnessing just the incipient
form of an imposition, which will become painfully visible and crippling
in Paul’s case. The difference however, rests largely on the
strength of the two sons to assert themselves. Thus, we have a paradox
concerning this strength of the characters: although William is
presented as both physically and mentally stronger, with a more
evident (but less deep, we are to understand) desire of independence,
it is he who fails completely to adjust to a world which appears,
without his mother, insecure and uncomfortable.
The same motif is repeated in the case of Paul, the younger one.
In Paul’s case, the extent of his mother’s influence
is huge. She prevents him from achieving any degree of “healthy”
sexual and emotional maturity by twisting his fragile psyche (as
an adolescent) away from the natural attraction for girls of his
age towards herself, as a mother (and, ideatically at least, as
a lover as well). As a result, he is incapable of sharing either
physically (Miriam) or emotionally (Clara) with the women in his
life.
She also hinders, in a far subtler way, and totally unwillingly
(to blame her for his difficulties in this particular area would
mean to grossly exaggerate, but it’s quite obvious that the
consequences of her other ‘impositions’ turn, as a “law
of diminishing returns,” even against that which she so much
cherished in her son — the artistic impulse; in other words,
her desire to aestheticize and feminize Paul robs him of a share
of vitality without which any work of art is doomed to be a failure)
Paul’s development of an independent artistic consciousness
(she hinders, but she cannot stop). Thus,
by
thrusting ‘success’ imperiously upon her sons for her
sake, she imposes on them an almost ineradicable sense of guilt
in their progress through a difficult world. Moreover, by sharing
intimately their developing ideas, their crises, their deepest affections
and hatreds at the most impressionable times of their lives, she
possesses them as individuals and defeats them, almost, as lovers
defrauding them of life.5
Mrs Morel is a failure, finally, because she projects all her unfulfilled
dreams and desires, forcefully, upon her children, and thus fails
to enter an authentic (in Lawrentian terms) relationship with them.
This relationship is flawed from the very beginning by her unhealthy
desire to possess and at the same time to impose. This means that
she not only becomes a failure in terms of human understanding and
behaviour (although, to be sure, D. H. Lawrence makes all the efforts
he can to present her sympathetically; however, we should take his
own advice: “Never trust the artist, trust the tale,”)
but she is also to blame for William’s desperate, and finally
meaningless quest for identity (which she undermines mentally) and
for Paul’s painful efforts to establish meaningful relationships
with other women and for his ambiguous status as an artist figure
throughout the novel. To put it more bluntly: because she has failed
in constructing the identity she aimed at, she (unwillingly, we
have to grant her that) obstructs her sons’ search for their
own identity by trying to impose upon them a borrowed one (her own).
Furthermore, because she has failed in achieving even a reasonably
acceptable degree of communication with her husband (and, to a larger
extent, with the whole community to which he belongs naturally and
intrinsically), she prevents her sons’ entering a meaningful
human contact with their father (which does not mean she completely
succeeds; on the contrary, and despite the surface appearances of
the novel, Paul at least, does get into a meaningful – though
largely unconscious, it is true - contract with Walter Morel) and
their achieving true relationship with girls of their age (William’s
apparent independent erotic life only couches a desperate attempt
to gain a freedom which is finally denied him because he finds the
girls – or rather the girl, Gyp – in his life just inadequate,
incomplete and worthless imitations of a far superior being, which
is his mother).
William’s failure is, as we have seen, a direct consequence
of his mother’s excessive domination upon his adolescent self,
which left deep imprints upon his further development as an adult.
It is true that he yearns for independence; nevertheless, that which
he finally achieves (on an economical, financial level only) is
not a true one, in the sense that the hold his mother has upon him
never ceases, despite the physical distance, which exists between
them. This hold is quite obvious in his incapacity to sympathize
emotionally with anybody else than his mother. We might have the
illusion he has managed to escape her influence when we read about
his relationship with Gyp, but it soon turns out that he doesn’t
even love her (not even as much as Paul “loved” Miriam)
– he despises her (for obvious reasons – she is rather
stupid, narrow-minded, shallow, she cannot understand his own deeply
troubled spiritual life); yet we feel that this contempt has at
its roots Gyp’s failure to mould on the image of the ideal
woman, who is, for William, his own mother. We might even speculate
that he chose Gyp precisely because she was so much his mother’s
inferior, for fear that he might know a girl, who, incidentally,
might be ‘better’ than his mother in all respects: intellectually,
as well as, of course, physically.
To that extent, William does have his own share in his failure to
construct a satisfactory identity. Being, at least in terms of distance,
so far away from the influence of his mother, having known a different
world, which could have offered him multiple perspectives and choices,
he sticks, spiritually, to the old world of his adolescence and
hesitates to come to terms with a thoroughly different reality.
London could have provided him with the necessary degree of independence,
but he refuses it even in such small gestures as sending most of
the money he earns to his mother (of course, this is an interpretation
that suits our purpose, it might very well be that he sent that
money with the laudable intention of helping out his family). He
is socially still an outsider precisely because, spiritually, he
has condemned himself to being one.
Paul’s case, however, is much more complicated. We cannot
really term him a failure, because he actually is not – the
end of the novel, although very ambiguous in itself, makes it clear
that we are to expect a hard-won, painful, but real independence.
However, the road leading to it is by far more complicated than
one would expect.
The one overwhelming shaping influence on Paul’s early manhood
is clearly his mother. Initially, her feelings for Paul derive from
a complex of guilt (for she brought him into the world revulsively,
as an unwanted and all-too present evidence of the degradation which
her love for Walter Morel had turned into), and she somehow wants
to atone for this initial rejection, which symbolically is quite
clearly illustrated by Paul’s fragile physical constitution
and his precocious inwardly directed and sensitive nature. Yet,
she is not totally dedicated to her younger son as long as William
is still alive and this reticent attitude of hers is immediately
sensed by the deeply intuitive child. So, unwillingly, she produces
that feeling of inadequacy and rootlessness, which seems to characterize
Paul’s adolescence. He does not fit in the community any more
than his mother does (we shall be analysing this larger sense of
social failure a little further on). Furthermore, she makes him
incapable of ever turning to somebody else, either for physical
attachment or spiritual fulfilment. He attempts to break free, but
the relationships he develops with the women in his life (Miriam
and Clara) are always tenuous, unsatisfactory and, ultimately, unfulfilling.
Any commonsensical view of Paul’s character and psychology
will not fail to notice that there is a huge split both in his emotional
make-up and in his consciousness of it, between, on the one hand,
his aspiration towards affective fulfilment on the spiritual level
(which is partly offered to him by his mother – but only partly)
and the “call of the flesh,” as it were, the natural
(and in Paul’s case) long-repressed erotic desire.
If we apply a Freudian pattern of interpretation to Paul’s
relationship with his mother, the mechanisms of his inner psychological
dependency upon her become obvious. All the early formative influences
in Paul’s life radiate from his mother. His admiration for
her knows no bounds. Everything he does, he does for her, the flowers
he picks as well as the prizes he wins at school. Even the painting
that he does is to a large extent somehow ‘dedicated’
to his mother. That is why the critic A. B. Kuttner, for example,
in one of his articles on D. H. Lawrence, “A Freudian Appreciation,”
considers that Paul never becomes a real artist. Paul, Kuttner argues,
uses his painting “to please his mother and to court his women,
but in the crises of his life his art means nothing to him either
as a consolation or as a satisfying expression.”6
Thus, Paul has no friends and he doesn’t feel part of the
community the way Walter Morel does, or his brother Arthur does
(one relevant scene is when he goes to get his father’s wages,
and he feels out of place and humiliated among the simple, unpretentious
and coarse miners). One reason explaining this behaviour is his
mother’s whole emphasis upon making Paul interested in some
other occupation than his father’s dirty digging, as a protest
against the sordidness of life that she herself has been compelled
to lead with him. As a result of this, Paul feels estranged and
alienated from his father, whom he rejects precisely because his
mother herself rejects him (yet, as we shall see, the rejection
is much less complete than it is apparent). To put it bluntly, his
whole identity finds expression in the wishes and desires of his
mother: “In the end, she shared everything with him without
knowing... She waited for his coming home in the evening, and then
she unburdened herself of all she had pondered, or of all that had
occurred to her during the day. He sat and listened with his earnestness.
The two shared lives.”7 He himself seems to have no ambition.
All that he wants is “quietly to earn his thirty or thirty
five shillings a week somewhere near home, and then, when his father
died, have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out as he liked,
and live happy ever after.”8 That is the real seed of Paul’s
difficulties and of his need of breaking free. This he attempts
to do by centering his affections upon some other woman.
The first woman to attract Paul is Miriam Leivers, but he approaches
her indirectly: through his art and as her teacher. Both methods
are really self-defensive; they are barriers that he erects against
Miriam to prevent anything too personal from arising between them,
to keep his real self (or his mother’s?!), as it were, inviolate.
He resists every intimation that he is falling in love with Miriam.
He indignantly repudiates his mother’s intimation that he
is courting and hastens to assure Miriam: “we aren’t
lovers, we are friends.”9 He can do nothing with her love
because he cannot return it. Love seems to him like a “very
terrible thing.”10 He even feels hatred for her, at times,
because of the reproaches of his mother. He stands divided between
his two loves: “And the felt dreary and hopeless between the
two.”11 There’s a failure of true communication between
the two, and one reason accountable for his failure is the lack
of true physical passion (in D. H. Lawrence’s system of values
the body plays a very important part, a vital one, in any true relationship).
Their intercourse is, finally, a failure when at last he tells her
that he does not love her, that he cannot love her physically: “I
can only give friendship – it’s all I’m capable
of – it’s a flaw in my make – up ... . Let us
have done.”12 And finally he writes: “In all our relations,
no body enters. I do not talk to you through the senses –
rather through the spirit. That is why we cannot love in common
sense. Ours is not an everyday affection.”13
Thus, he tries to spiritualise their relations out of existence.
He would persuade himself about his own impotence. At this point,
Paul begins to turn to another woman, Clara Dawes. She exerts a
frankly sensual attraction upon him without having any of that mystical
unattainableness about her, which he felt so strongly with Miriam.
Since she is a married woman, he doesn’t feel committed in
any way. And yet he is still inhibited: “Sex had become so
complicated in him that he would have denied that he ever could
want Clara or Miriam or any woman whom he knows. Sexual desire was
a sort of detached thing that did not belong to a woman.”14
The full flood of his passion turns to Clara and he tries to wear
it out on her in the same impersonal way, and for a time lives in
sheer physical ecstasy. With her at last he has had some relief,
chiefly because his mother has not stood so much between them (which
doesn’t mean she approves of his relationship with her, it
only means she partly tolerates it). But it is only temporary; he
cannot give himself to Clara any more than he could give himself
to Miriam. Thus, he rehearses his old difficulties with his mother:
“I feel sometimes as if I wronged my women, mother.”15
However, he does not know why:
‘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.’16
A
classical Freudian interpretation would run as follows:
Paul
cannot expand towards the universe in normal activity and form an
independent sex interest because for him his mother has become the
universe; she stand between him and life and the other woman. There
is a kind of bottomless about him; life in a pretty house with his
mother – the iteration sounds like a childish prattle. Miriam
feels it when she calls him a child of four, which she can no longer
nurse. Nor can Clara help him by becoming a wanton substitute for
his mother. Only the one impossible ideal holds him, and that means
the constant turning in upon himself which is death. Paul goes to
pieces because he can never make the mature sexual decision away
from his mother, he can never accomplish the physical and emotional
transfer.17
His
giving up both Clara and Miriam, thus, represents for Graham Hough
“the climax of his nullity, and invites the final condemnation
of his neurotic refusal of responsibility for his own existence.”18
But this is only one side of the coin. Something good emerges, after
all, from these painful experiences. They have definitely brought
about a marked change in his attitude towards his mother. It is
as if he realized at last that she is destroying his life’s
happiness. When she is ill, mingled with his love and his anguish
at her suffering, a new feeling emerges: the wish that she should
die. The feeling that he cannot live a life of his owns as long
as she is alive, run side by side. However, when the death which
he himself has hastened overtakes her, he cries with a lover’s
anguish: “My love –my love – oh, my love!”
he whispered again and again. “My love – oh, my love!”19
Critic A. B. Kuttner is of the opinion that death has not freed
Paul from his mother, but that it has completed his allegiance to
her. For death has merely removed the last earthly obstacle to their
ideal union; now he can love her as Dante loved his Beatrice.20
He avows his faithfulness to her by breaking off with the only two
other women who have meant anything to him. He is completely resigned;
life and death are no longer distinguished in his thinking. Life
for him is only where his mother is and she is dead. So why live?
He cannot answer, life has become contradictory: “There seemed
no reason why people should go along the street, and houses pile
up in the day-light. There seemed no reason why these things should
occupy the space, instead of leaving it empty... He wanted everything
to stand still, so that he could be with her again.”21 But
life in him is just a hair stronger than death: “He would
not say it. He would not admit that he wanted to die, to have done.
He would not own that life had beaten him, or that death had beaten
him.”22
Beyond a Freudian approach however, Paul’s relationships with
the two young women are much more complex. They can be basically
seen as Paul’s attempt at breaking free. Even in his relationship
with Miriam, beyond the obvious Freudian overtones, there lies something
deeper. What he shies from, clearly, is her intrinsic possessiveness,
which denies the substance of his very attempt at breaking free.
The end is ambiguous: on the one hand, if we accept D. H. Lawrence’s
final words, then Paul is clearly left spiritually and affectively
broken after the death of his mother.
There
was no Time, only Space. Who could say his mother had lived and
did not live? She had been in one place and was in another; that
was all. And his soul could not leave her, wherever she was. Now
she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still. They
were together. But yet there was his body, his chest that leaned
against the stile, his hands on the wooden bar. They seemed something.
Where was he? – one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than
an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every
side, the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark,
into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct.
Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars
and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round
for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness
that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much,
and himself, infinitesimal, at the core nothingness, and yet not
nothing.
‘Mother!’ he whispered – ‘mother’.23
Nevertheless,
the novel is open-ended and reinterpretable. It is a release, even
if a hard-won and painful one.
Walter Morel is a very interesting character to whom criticism has
devoted, we feel, much less attention than he deserves. He is in
no way as ‘complex’ psychologically as Mrs Morel is,
but his way of life, his integration into the community, his enjoyment
of the small but extremely important pleasures of life, his whole
organic existence, all point to a complexity which transcends psychological
categories to rise to larger, cosmic levels. Yet we cannot completely
ignore his own role in the failure of their marriage and his lack
of responsibility as regards the education and the maturing of his
children. His “sin” is partly motivated by his incapacity
to rise, intellectually, to his wife’s level, an incapacity
easily explainable by the social background and class to which he
belongs, by his lack of education and ultimately, by a completely
different scale of values. With all this however, although at times
he makes desperate efforts to understand Gertrude, he never fully
realizes the extent to which his social condition and his being
so poignantly different from her have managed to produce her estrangement
and bitter disillusionment. He has disappointed her aspirations,
he has failed to fulfil the initial promise of his youth and vigour,
he has enclosed her, albeit unwillingly, in a spiritually stifling
space which has thwarted not only her ambitions, but her real possibilities
as well. He never gets to truly understand that what she needs is
far more than he could ever possibly give her and his frustration
at what he feels to be her rejection of him manifests itself violently
and brutally. At one point in the novel, the hidden authorial voice
states bluntly that “he has denied the God in him,”24
and indeed, to the extent to which he could have offered her, if
not spiritual fulfilment, at least an affectionate and understanding
protection, this is true. He feels guilty whenever he hits her,
but this obviously cannot function as an excuse for a brutality
that is, principially, inexcusable.
As regards his attitude towards the children, we might perhaps mildly
characterize it as a kind of ‘un-responsible love.’
It is quite clear that he loves his children, (this is fully proved
in those – though rare – passages in which he is presented
as involved in making all sorts of toys and little trifles for them)
but his love never rises to the status of responsible love. As everything
else that he does, his love is purely instinctual – the fatherly
feeling – but he never seems to be aware that his children
need something more from a father than his mere physical presence.
His degree of ‘irresponsibility’ is clearly illustrated
by the fact that he quarrels with Gertrude and even hits her, despite
the presence of the children. He also fails to perceive that such
an apparently harmless (and, from a practical point of view, quite
normal) gesture as the cutting off of Paul’s childlike locks
might cause a deeper spiritual injury to a sensitive person as,
beyond the shadow of a doubt, Gertrude was. The result is an utter
failure of achieving a meaningful and complete communication with
his two most sensitive children (William and Paul) – though,
as we shall see there is something between them which could be characterized
as an intuitive understanding, beyond words – and a rather
scantily described relationship with the other two (except for Arthur,
who is so much like him).
All in all, however, he is perhaps the most ‘naturally redeemable’
character in this novel, precisely because he possesses that which
all the others seem to lack: an organic relationship with the true
sources of life and a basic (although entirely unconscious) connection
with them.
Miriam’s case is in many ways similar to that of Mrs. Morel,
especially in her inhibiting and unhealthy possessiveness. She falls
in love with Paul on a purely spiritual level, yet she claims a
kind of “ownership” that he shrinks from precisely because
this is what he is running away from. She fails Paul because she
re-enacts the same attitudes that caused his attempt at breaking
free from the influence of his mother. She understands Paul intuitively,
she is an intelligent and sensitive young woman, but just like Mrs.
Morel, she represses the natural bodily functions of her organism
and tries to sublimate them, unnecessarily, in a kind of religious
and pathetic fervour which Paul cannot help but hating. Her attitude
is a self-sacrificial, ‘Christlike’ one, but it is precisely
this imposition of her ‘self- sacrifice’ that Paul hates
so much, because it compels him, morally, to a similar renouncement
to his own instinctual nature (which demands a breach that his relationship
with his mother does not allow). He does not want to sacrifice himself,
he wants to find himself, and although in many ways Miriam helps
him do that, at the level of intellectual and artistic development,
she fails him on the very level on which he feels the sorest need
for fulfilment.
A more recent critic, Mark Spilka, finds that the chief split between
Paul and Miriam comes from the abstract nature of their love and
not, primarily, from the mother’s hold upon the young man’s
soul. And the final responsibility for this split belongs to Miriam.
She gives Paul, at the crucial stage of his development, much-needed
intellectual stimulation – she is “the threshing-floor
on which he (threshes) out all his beliefs”25 – but
what she gives in this way is vitiated by her “sucking of
his soul”:
He
felt that she wanted the soul out of his body, and not him. All
his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel,
which united them. She did not want to meet him, so that there were
two of them, man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him
into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness, which fascinated
him, as drug-taking might.26
As Keith Sagar insightfully remarks, this unnatural intensity “the
clenched will of Miriam”, relates her unmistakably to Hermione
Raddice of Women In Love, even in her physical manifestation, a
heaviness, almost a clumsiness in her movements:27
Her
body was not flexible and living. She walked with a swing, rather
heavily, her head bowed forward, pondering. She was not clumsy,
and yet none of her movements seemed quite the movement. Often,
when wiping the dishes, she would stand in bewilderment and chagrin
because she had pulled in two halves a cup or a tumbler. It was
as if, in her fear and self – mistrust, she put too much strength
into the effort, over charged, closed in on itself.28
The same physical inhibition prevents Miriam from enjoying the swing.
When her turn comes, she grips the rope with fear, resisting the
forces which tend to carry her. As for her attitudes towards sex,
they are to be closely associated with this physical inhibition,
and they all stem from her religious indoctrination by her mother,
whom she imitates, thus repressing the surge of life and ultimately,
of ‘separateness’ in herself. Mrs. Leivers is a woman
who “[exalts] everything – even a bit of housework –
to the plane of a religious trust,”29 and her influence on
her daughter is far-reaching. It results, for one thing, is the
unnaturally high pitch at which Miriam habitually lives, and it
is her emotional intensity that so often irritates Paul –
though, in this respect, he no doubt dislikes in her a quality he
distrusts in himself. The lovers are too like one another ever to
be wholly at ease. Mrs Leivers’ influence accounts, too, for
Miriam’s shrinking from sex. At the crisis of her relationship
with Paul she says, “Mother said to me, ‘There is one
thing in marriage that is always dreadful but you have to bear it.’
And I believed it.”30 The combined effect of animadversions
such as this and of inculcated concepts of ‘purity’
is to distort her view of life. ... Miriam’s sacrificial submission
to sex is at once the crux and the climax of her relationship with
Paul.31 And like Mrs Morel, who does not tell the doctor about the
lump in her side, she too is masochistically self-destructive in
her self-sacrifice, for it is she who deliberately provokes Paul’s
affair with Clara. She does so ostensibly, to ‘test’
him, but that she can regard his going to Clara as equivalent to
his going to an inn for a glass of whisky is yet another indication
of her incomprehension of the significance of the sex act. If Paul
fails to break down her frigidity, she, in her anguished martyrdom,
fails as decisively to liberate him:
Since the fire has failed in me,
What man will stoop on your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?32
In Clara’s case, the failure is different only in the way
it manifests itself, not in its quality. It is, basically, the some
self-sacrifice D. H. Lawrence so much abhors because, in his view,
it thwarts individuality and a sense of personal integrity, which
is precisely what Paul seeks for. Her self-sacrifice is a measure
of her refusal to be more than just an ‘instrument’
of Paul’s sexual liberation. Although she is endowed with
intelligence and intuition, she never tries to go deeper into the
personal motivations of Paul’s choices. She is satisfied with
a purely carnal relationship and doesn’t want (and perhaps
doesn’t even need – although Paul does) more.
Paul’s relationship with Clara is the obverse of that with
Miriam. He is attracted to Clara, of course, precisely because she
is so different from Miriam, but though Clara satisfies his physical
needs for a time; she does not give him the fulfilment he is seeking:
She toiled to his side. Arriving there, she looked at him heavily,
dumbly, and laid her head on his shoulder. He held her fast as he
looked round. They were safe enough from all but the small, lonely
cows over the river. He sunk his mouth on her throat, where he felt
her heavy pulse beat under his lips. Everything was perfectly still.
There was nothing in the afternoon but themselves. When she arose,
he, looking on the ground all the time, saw suddenly sprinkled on
the black wet beech – roots many scarlet carnation petals,
like splashed drops of blood; and red, small splashes feel from
her boson, streaming down her dress to her feet.
‘Your flowers are smashed ‘, he said.
She looked at him heavily as she put back her hair. Suddenly he
put his finger-tips on her cheek.
‘Why dast look so heavy?’ he reproached her. She smiled
sadly, as if she felt alone in herself. He caressed her cheek with
his fingers, and kissed her.
‘Nay!’ she said. ‘Never thee bother!’33
The
scarlet petals, it should be remembered, are ‘‘like
splashed drops of blood’’ and splash, like blood, from
Clara’s bosom; they are, we should say, an emotional equivalent
of the bleached cherry-stones, which hang like skeletons, rather
than a sign of renewal. They are, that is to say, a similar intimation
of the likely failure of the relationship, and what they point to
is its exclusively carnal nature. Clara smiles sadly, we notice,
“as if she felt alone in herself,” and indeed from the
outset she resents the impersonality of Paul’s attitude to
her.34 Nor is it exactly “a baptism of fire in passion”
that Paul is seeking. He wants that, even desires it urgently after
his failure with Miriam, but what he is searching for and finds
neither with Miriam nor Clara is the more lasting satisfaction of
a union both of soul and body. And as the affair with Clara runs
its course, Paul comes to realize that passion alone is not enough:
“it was not she who could keep his soul steady.”35
Before he breaks with Clara, Paul tries to assure himself that he
loves her, but it is a heavily qualified love: “Sometimes,
when I see her just as the woman, I love her, mother; but then,
when she talks and criticizes, I often don’t listen to her”
and “in the daytime he (forgets) her a good deal.”36
It is only a matter of time before the fire consumes itself and
he begins to ‘feel imprisoned’ in her presence. In the
end, the effect she has on him is not dissimilar to the feeling
of suffocation he has when he is with Miriam. It is Paul, we feel,
who is largely at fault with Clara, but she fails him too –
and in a way that relates her failure to that of Miriam:
She
caught him passionately to her, pressed his head down on her breast
with her hand. She could not bear the suffering in his voice. She
was afraid in her soul. He might have anything of her – anything;
but she did not want to know. She felt she could not bear it. She
wanted him to be soothed upon her – soothed. She stood clasping
him and caressing him, and he was something unknown to her –
something almost uncanny. She wanted to soothe him into forgetfulness.
And soon the struggle went down in his soul, and he forgot. But
then Clara was not there for him, only a woman, warm, something
he loved and almost worshipped, there in the dark. But it was not
Clara, and she submitted to him. The naked hunger and inevitability
of his loving her, something strong and blind and ruthless in its
primitiveness, made the hour almost terrible to her. She know how
stark and alone he was, and she felt it was great that he came to
her; and she took him simply because his need even if he left her,
for she loved him.37
Middleton
Murry has shrewdly remarked that “at the crucial moment, we
cannot distinguish between Clara and Miriam.”38 Clara, in
her submission, fails Paul. If Miriam is unable to respond to him
sexually, Clara can cope only with his physical need of her: she
is always “only a woman” to him and she gives up trying
to comprehend him; she does “not want to know.” Both
women ineffectually attempt to ‘soothe’ him by sacrificing
themselves. But it is against just this sort of self-sacrifice that
Paul pits himself, and, finally, he engineers Clara’s return
to her husband. Dawes, it becomes evident, is more receptive to
her pity: “she wanted now to be self-sacrificial.... So she
kneeled to Dawes, and it gave him a subtle pleasure.”39
What is even more disturbing about Clara is that she fails herself
as well, by renouncing her hard-won independence in the end, only
to return to the husband whom she has formerly rejected. This gives
us a measure of the weakness which, beyond all appearances, is still
the dominant feature of her character. What redeems her, however,
is precisely her capacity of rejoicing over the true essences of
life, which, with D. H. Lawrence, have always very much to do with
the animal instincts and basic bodily drives, on a metaphysical
level, with the vital core of one’s selfhood.
The characters’ struggle for individuation (which is the crux
of the whole novel, in fact) – whether conscious or unconscious
– and at the some time the attempt at establishing meaningful
human bonds on the basis, always, of an acknowledgement of the alterity
in the others, are always presented in conflict with the drive towards
possessiveness and the thwarted desires and ambitions which produce
frustration and impinge on the very effort of building an authentic
identity. The extent to which the characters fall prey to this unhealthy
possessiveness provides us with the degree of their failure.
Notes:
1. Ronald P. Draper, D. H. Lawrence. (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1964), 42.
2. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers. (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 18.
3. Ibid., 16.
4. Dorothy Van Ghent, “On Sons and Lovers” in Sons and
Lovers - A Casebook. A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. Gamini
Salgado (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979), 113.
5. Seymour Betsky, “Rhythm and Theme,” in ed. Salgado,
op. cit., 134.
6. A. B. Kuttner, “A Freudian Appreciation,” in ed.
Salgado, op. cit., 73.
7. D. H. Lawrence, 101.
8. Ibid., 125.
9. Ibid., 171.
10. Ibid., 75.
11. Ibid., 175.
12. Ibid., 176.
13. Ibid., 246.
14. Ibid., 272.
15. Ibid., 320.
16. Ibid.
17. A. B. Kuttner, “A Freudian Appreciation,” in Sons
and Lovers - A Casebook. A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. Gamini
Salgado (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979), 89-90.
18. Graham Hough, “Adolescent Love,” in ed. Salgado,
op. cit., 156.
19. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 346.
20. A. B. Kuttner, “A Freudian Appreciation,” in Sons
and Lovers - A Casebook. A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. Gamini
Salgado (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979), 81.
21. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 364.
22. Ibid., 262.
23. Ibid., 365.
24. Ibid., 46.
25. H. M. Dalenski, The Forked Flame — A Study of D. H. Lawrence
(London: Faber and Faber. 1965), 66.
26. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 239.
27. Keith Sagan, “The Bases of the Normal,” in Sons
and Lovers - A Casebook. A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. Gamini
Salgado (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979), 208.
28. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 133.
29. Ibid., 182.
30. Ibid., 355.
31. H. M. Dalenski, The Forked Flame — A Study of D. H. Lawrence
(London: Faber and Faber. 1965), 70.
32. Ibid.
33. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 271.
34. H. M. Dalenski, The Forked Flame — A Study of D. H. Lawrence
(London: Faber and Faber. 1965), 72.
35. Ibid., 73.
36. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 226-227.
37. Ibid., 269-270.
38. John Middleton Murry, “Son and Lover,” in Sons and
Lovers - A Casebook. A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. Gamini
Salgado (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979), 102.
39. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (London: Wordsworth Editions,
1993), 325.
40. Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop, Notes on Modern British Literature, (Sibiu:
Editura Societatii Academice Anglofone din Romania, ULBS, 1997),
39.
41. Ibid.
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