Image: Miranda Vandergriff via Unsplash
Harry Vavasour on why, while the solitude of lockdown offers a unique chance to work through the unopened classics on our bookshelves, one might be best leaving Sons and Lovers to lie.
Like watching a great sculptor at work on his latest masterpiece, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers reveals the artist’s precision and skill. Yet, the process is so prolonged that, like a chisel on marble, the progress seems tediously slow. Presented with the final creation the viewer can appreciate the figure’s fine curves only in the time which has been taken to produce them. So Lawrence’s novel emerges, the delicacy of his spidery prose dragging the burden of his sedentary plot until they are little more than a painfully plodding shadow. The plot which inhibits Lawrence’s skilful prose draws heavily on the experiences of his own childhood, charting the lives of a young mining family in Nottinghamshire from the marriage of the beautiful, young Gertrude to the burly Morel through to their children’s adulthood. Yet, the novel’s true focus is on the abnormally close relationship that Mrs Morel holds with her sons, the talented, but tragic, William and the ambitious Paul, whose love affairs provide the novel’s greatest tension.
As Mrs Morel’s marriage diminishes to little more than cohabitation, with passion’s flame extinguished by her husband’s abrasive nature, her love becomes invested solely in her children, whose talents and intelligence offer hope of an escape. At first, these hopes are invested in her eldest, William, whose career sees him move to the glamour of London. Yet, despite his success, William struggles for happiness, spending his money chasing a one-sided relationship with the much-desired Gyp instead of sending it home for his mother. The two become engaged, but as Gyp’s shallowness is made evident by trips to the family home, in which Lawrence expertly conveys the separate existences of two classes unable to understand each other’s ways of life, William realises he is trapped in a relationship with someone he cannot love. His tragedy is then confounded by a sudden death, which marks Paul’s transition into favourite son, carrying the hopes of his mother and the novel.
However, Paul’s jaunts into love achieve little more success than his brother. His high opinion of himself, the overarching judgment of his mother and his underlying contempt for women combine to make his relationships ultimately doomed. The novel’s second half maps Paul’s adventures as he attempts to choose between the doting Miriam, who first claimed his heart with her intellect and innocence, and the older, yet more alluring Clara, whose striking beauty stirs an uncontrollable passion. Each relationship is surveyed by the jealous eye of Mrs Morel and her desire to protect her son, assessing the girls and highlighting their faults through whispered doubts into Paul’s ears.
The tension between Paul and the three women offers the novel’s central theme, yet is undermined by the pejorative positing of the extradiegetic narrator, who seems intent on justifying the actions of the mother and son while underlining the faults of their victims. Such shaping of the narrative grinds against the plot, with Morel’s lack of education appearing as the primary cause of his wife and children’s disgust for him, just as Mrs Morel’s harshness is justified by an overwhelming love, so that the characters that are presented favourably are those that seem most heartless. Perhaps it is the closeness of Lawrence’s own biography to the story that makes it impossible to remain detached, but his unfounded judgements jar the narrative to make his protagonists spiteful.
As such, the tenderness with which he writes fades into the backdrop, lost among the improbability and tedium of its subject. Just as Paul struggles to find a balance between familial and romantic love, Lawrence struggles to marry plot with picturesque prose, leaving his centreless sculpture little more than a deflated balloon.
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