Glossing Sons and Lovers

Paul Morel, the hero of D. H. Lawrence's autobiographical 1913 novel—he started writing it when he was just 24—is an artistic young man who frees himself from the love of three women so he can devote himself to his one true love: Paul Morel.

In the first half of the book, there is a slow unfolding of the experiences that shape Paul's development. We, along with the young Paul, watch his drunken working class father brutalize and humiliate his more refined, educated mother. But old Morel isn't all bad. While unconscious of "higher things," he enjoys simple, physical pleasures with gusto. He likes to get up early and, while the rest of the family is still in bed, make his own breakfast:

He made the tea, packed the bottom of the doors with rugs to shut out the draught, piled a big fire, and sat down to an hour of joy. He toasted his bacon on a fork and caught the drops of fat on his bread; then he put the rasher on his thick slice of bread, and cut off chunks with a clasp-knife, poured his tea into his saucer, and was happy.

Meanwhile, the mother's thwarted desires are channeled into her son. When one of Paul's paintings wins a prize, he brings it home to her and she exclaims, in tears:

Didn't I say we should do it!

Paul rather enjoys being a star. One day he has his mother, sister, and girlfriend all competing for his favor as he reads them a poem:

He was in very high feather...everybody thought it clever. He thought so too...he was master of the party; his father was no good.

This harem of admiring women makes him feel that he is someone extraordinary, someone important. Too important to waste his life on ordinary things:

Damn your happiness!—he cries—so long as life's full, it doesn't matter whether it's happy or not. I'm afraid your happiness would bore me.

Paul doesn't find the fullness that he requires from life in Miriam, his first girlfriend. Miriam's limits are foreshadowed in an early scene in which she cannot let herself go sufficiently to enjoy a swing in the barn:

"No higher!" she cries in fear as Paul pushes her. Her heart melted in hot pain when the moment came for him to thrust her forward again. But he left her alone. She began to breathe.

About half way through the book, Lawrence gets tired of showing and begins telling. Paul, for example, explains (via a subjective third person narrator) his fear of sex as a fear of hurting the woman—an attitude that, he says, resulted from his exposure to the violence in his parents' relationship:

He did not feel that he wanted marriage with Miriam. He wished he did. He would have given his head to have felt a joyous desire to marry her and to have her. Then why couldn't he bring it off? There was some obstacle; and what was the obstacle? It lay in the physical bondage. He shrank from the physical contact. But why? With her he felt bound up inside himself. He could not go out to her. Something struggled in him, but he could not get to her. Why? She loved him...she even wanted him; then why couldn't he go to her, make love to her, kiss her?

He looked round. A good many of the nicest men he knew were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them forever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person.

So sex equals marriage equals bondage equals torture and enslavement. Why struggle for freedom from parents, religion, and society, only to throw away that freedom by creating another family, another cycle of bondage?

Especially if the woman is afraid of sex too. A few pages later, it's Miriam's turn to explain why:

All my life...Mother said to me: "There is one thing in marriage that is always dreadful, but you have to bear it." And I believed it.

So what do two sexually frustrated young people do? Turn to religion?

As Paul was growing up, his churchgoing mother enjoyed an intellectual friendship with her pastor, but she was essentially rational. When the clergyman spoke to her about how love elevates a man's spirit, filling it with the Holy Ghost, so that "almost his form is altered," she would dismiss such ideas as "quaint and fantastic." Paul took after his mother—smart, loving any kind of an argument, no matter if it dealt with religion, philosophy, or politics—though when he was little, he had a "fervent private religion":

'Lord, let my father die,' he prayed very often.

But when, during his adolescence, he begins to spend a lot of time with Miriam and her family, Paul becomes intrigued—both attracted and repelled—by the mysterious religious atmosphere that Miriam and her mother exude, an atmosphere in which every emotion is intensified by its holiness. Partly through their inspiration, he begins to express an appreciation for "something in Nature," a kind of universal life force, a force that is the "shimmer" in the leaves that he tries to capture in his painting:

It's as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only the shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust.

He and Miriam spend a lot of time in the woods, swooning over flowers:

It was very still...in bosses of ivory and in large splashed stars the roses gleamed on the darkness of foliage and stems and grass... Paul looked into Miriam's eyes. She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him. His look seemed to travel down into her. Her soul quivered. It was the communion she wanted.

For Paul, this flirtation with mysticism is one more step away from the orthodox creed of the church. "He was setting now full sail towards Agnosticism," Lawrence writes. Paul discusses all of this with Miriam. He "bled her beliefs till she almost lost consciousness." His next step is to let religious questions fade into the background:

He had shoveled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realise one's God.

When the self becomes a God, it can yield to the universal life force without fear of losing its own power and identity. And so Paul moves on to Clara, to his "baptism of fire in passion."

Paul endured one such baptism, of a sort, when he suffered through his parents' quarrels as a boy. Then, as a young man, he looks for it again. He finds it, fleetingly, in sexual love—although the woman he uses as a vehicle turns out to be unimportant:

All the while the peewits were screaming in the field. When he came to, he wondered what was near his eyes, curving and strong with life in the dark, and what voice it was speaking. Then he realised it was the grass, and the peewit was calling. The warmth was Clara's breath heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than themselves that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars...

In the morning he had considerable peace, and was happy in himself. It seemed almost as if he had known the baptism of fire in passion, and it left him at rest. But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force.

Clara, conveniently, is a married woman. After Paul's fiery baptism, he returns Clara to her husband. About this time, Paul's mother begins a long, slow death from cancer. Paul is infuriated that she is no longer young and pretty. He gives her an overdose of morphine to hasten the end.

At last, Paul is free. Free from Clara. Free from Miriam. Free from...

"Mother!" he whispered—"mother!"

She was the only thing that held him up, himself, 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. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.