A religious woman named Gertrude marries Mr. Morel, a charming coal-miner who woos her at a dance, but her life with this lower-class coal-miner doesn’t turn out as she imagined and turns into an unhappy marriage. Desiring a teetotaler, but ending up with a drunk, she decides to rectify her unhappy life by living vicariously through her children: William, Paul, Anne, and Arthur. William at first is very successful, but his over dedication to a spoiled superficial girl that he doesn’t really love brings on a sickness from overtaxing himself and an early death. Mrs. Morel heartbroken by the tragic death of her eldest son puts all her hopes on Paul. As Paul grows older he proves himself to be a talented artist and he develops a relationship with the prudish and religious Miriam through a shared love of his art, nature, and books. His mother dislikes Miriam, but he obstinately continues seeing her. He also meets Clara, a woman separated from her abusive husband who is at first cold to him and a hardcore man-hating feminist. He starts pursing a possible marriage with Miriam and convinces her to sleep with him, but finds himself frustrated that she treats their sexual encounters like a sacrifice and doesn’t find pleasure in them–rather she does it to please him. He then ends the relationship out of frustration over her lack of passion and starts a relationship with Clara who turns out to be an extremely passionate woman. At first, Paul reciprocates her passion, but ultimately he finds her desire to hug and kiss him every time they meet to be stifling. When Paul’s mother takes sick from a tumor, all his other relationships suffer. After his mother dies, he lives life in a trance, thinking about suicide, flirting with barmaids, gambling, and drinking into a state of complete dissolution. His relationship with Clara slowly dissolves, and he assists her in reconciling with her ex-husband. He meets Miriam again and invites her to dinner. They speak once again of marrying, but ultimately he deflates her hopes when he says he would marry her, but isn’t particularly excited about the idea, and rambles on about his mother, which makes Miriam realize that even in death its his mother that owns his soul. He contemplates suicide again in order to join his mother, but then decides to go on living and walks towards the city.

Lawrence almost certainly was aware of the Oedipus Complex from Freud’s work whose presence can be felt throughout the novel.  Paul finds himself unable to develop true intimacy in his relationships because of his dedication to his mother who fears losing him. The relationship he has with his mother is borderline unnatural. She controls his whole life, picking his job for him, telling him what women he should date, and what he should with his money. He does rebel at times, but ultimately gives in to her whims for his life. Even the language he uses to talk to his mother is bizarre, calling her his love, his darling–often epithet you’d expect to use with a significant other. At the end, he even starts passionately kissing her corpse and stroking its hair, not wanting to believe her dead.

Besides the unnatural relationship with his mother, Paul is a difficult for other reasons. He is a person that lives for the moment and has a fickle nature. Whereas his mother lives for the unrealized future that her sons might bring, he lives for transitory pleasures. In the end, when he contemplates suicide and his smallness in relationship to the vast darkness and void that seems to symbolize death, the afterlife, and the social world he lives in, he suddenly comes to terms with his smallness–the smallness of his life, the pointlessness of it all, the shortness of it. His mother believes he will do something important and make a genuine mark in the world. When he choses not to kill himself to join his mother in death, he also rejects this prediction of his mother by accepting his smallness; he is not destined to make a mark on the world. Nevertheless, despite accepting life is short, our loved ones die, and his life probably won’t be anything spectacular, he decides he wants to live anyway. Despite rejecting his mother’s false beliefs in his future, he parallels his mother’s tenacity in clinging to life at the very end of her sickness, even though, she hasn’t lived a very happy life with her poorly chosen husband.

Many of the characters make poor choices in partner. William chooses a superficial girl interested in materialistic commodities like gloves and theater seats, despite the lack of money, which leads to his death. Mrs. Morel choses a deceitful husband and gets a false impression of him that leads a miserable marriage and life that she must live through her children instead. Paul’s relationships occupy the second half of the novel. Miriam symbolizes spiritual love (that deeper love based on shared interests and an understanding of motivation). She understands Paul’s unnatural attachment to his mother, and believes his mother’s disapproval to be the major obstacle preventing Paul from marrying her. Clara represents physical love and passion (there is never depth to their relationship). Clara complains to Paul at one point that he hardly knows her, and she only knows him because his interest in her is all about the passion she represents and therefore is able to sense his shallowness in regards to her.  Paul’s willingness to marry Miriam in the end, but lack of enthusiasm parallels Miriam’s willingness to have a physical relationship with him without any real desire for it. The novel implies neither Clara or Miriam understand Paul’s inner life. Miriam can’t develop a truly intimate relationship with precisely because she has no passion and rejects the physical as important, while Paul only cares about Clara’s passion and not her ideas. In fact, Clara’s early feminist posturing that disappears suggests a falsity to those ideas; she doesn’t  have her own ideas, she has others’. Meanwhile, she affirms those feminist ideals when she finally returns back to her husband only after he is broken man and she can control him.

Love plays out like a complicated game of chess in the novel where people try to possess and dominate each other. While many find Miriam sympathetic and Paul cruel towards her; I can’t help at times but feel disturbed by her desire to possess him–own him. The novel almost has a cynical tone towards love between men and women. . To develop an effective marriage with another human being, one partner has to be dominant and the other needs to give them their soul. This is what Miriam wants Paul to do. Meanwhile, Clara returns to her husband only after he is defeated by life and broken. The novel implies that in order for a relationship to work a woman needs to dominate over her man and rule his soul. If that woman happens to be your mother, then it might stunt your ability to develop truly intimate relationships for the rest of your life.  The reason Mrs. Morel never has a satisfying relationship with Mr. Morel is that he refuses to give into her control and runs his life with a certain independence (going out with his buddies drinking, despite Mrs. Morel’s initial dedication to temperance).

I was originally planning to read through all Lawrence’s major novels (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover), but I’m putting those plans on hold. I found the first half of this novel kind of boring. I’m glad I stuck with it, though, because the last 150 pages picked up (when he starts up with Clara) and turned out to be a pretty good novel in the end, but that beginning crawled at a snail’s pace for me and I think I need a break from Lawrence.

Advertisement