Sons and Lovers (Barnes & Noble Classics - D. H. Lawrence [3]
Lawrence was born in 1885 in a lower-middle-class town in Nottinghamshire during a time in English history characterized by repressive social mores, strict morality, and austere, even ascetic, religious practices. In other words, the author was born at a time and in a place particularly inclined toward priggishness.
Lawrence chaffed under the yoke of Victorian England. His gift of perception, which told him that life was a vast mystery and wonder, also told him that his country was ruining itself with its industrialization, its mechanization, and its impulse toward war. As he grew up, he grew intolerant. “Curse you, my countrymen,” he wrote to Edward Garnett, his publisher and friend, in a letter dated July 1912, “you have put the halters round your necks, and pull tighter and tighter from day to day. You are strangling yourselves, you blasted fools” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1, edited by James T. Boulton). To borrow Lawrence’s own phrase, England suffered under a “Thou Shalt Not” mentality.
Lawrence longed for the implied permission of the “Thou Shalt,” two words that promise not only freedom but also free will. The purpose of life, Lawrence wrote, was not simply to live, but to live vitally and at the edge of the great mystery of existence. This will to live—or, perhaps more correctly, the will toward life—was, in a characteristically Lawrencian sense, mixed up with a philosophy of sex. With more emotion than logic, Lawrence felt that “Thou Shalt,” when murmured by a partially clothed woman, promised not only sexual union but also spiritual union. His philosophy is not simply, as future critics would categorize it, “sex in the head.” What Lawrence wanted was not crude, not base, not purely sexual. “It’s a pity that sex is such an ugly little word,” Lawrence wrote in an essay titled “Sex Versus Loveliness.” “While ever it lives, the fire of sex, which is the source of beauty and anger, burns in us beyond our understanding.... Sex and beauty are one thing, like flame and fire. If you hate sex, you hate beauty.” Lawrence wanted, through sex, to understand beauty and through beauty, mystery. It was this understanding that Lawrence defined as intuition, and it was this intuition that Lawrence felt to be his prime talent as a writer.
And it is a pity that sex was such a dirty little word in Victorian England, though for admirers of Lawrence it would be hard to wish it otherwise. The most subtle, almost sublime, tensions in his writing owe much to the war between his second-natural will to live and his natural desire to obey. Sons and Lovers is the work of a confused man, one who could not figure out which impulse to follow. As in life, so in fiction. In Sons and Lovers, the two impulses are represented on the one side by Paul Morel’s relationship with his mother and on the other side by his relationship with first Miriam, then Clara. In a much-quoted letter written to Edward Garnett dated November 1912, Lawrence defends the idea of the book, succinctly illuminating its themes.
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,