Customer Reviews

Sons and Lovers

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Sons and Lovers is a book that has been set for years in school for children to read. Somehow doing this usually means that most people emerge with a hatred of it but Lawrence's book is of such quality that it is able to survive.

It is about a woman who marries a coal miner someone who is below her class. While he is young there is some joy in her life but as she grows older the class differences create a wall between them. She lives for her two male children who she tried to keep out of the mines and to ensure that they can live middle class lives. As she grows older the children become more important to her. The death of the oldest means that she suffocates the younger son with a love that affects his normal development.

The story is told through the eyes of the younger son. There is little question that the novel is autobiographical and based on the early life of Lawrence. His life is almost identical to the events portrayed in the novel.

Lawrence was a prolific novelist and short story reader but this work is probably his most accessible. His later novels tended to be more about peoples relationships but without the social content.

Nowadays the class issues have receded a bit into the background. At the time of its publication the book would have been seen as revealing the divisions that operated in Britain. Most critics tend to focus on the relationship of Lawrence and his mother as the primary focus of the novel. To some extent this is true but the book is much more. It is a portrait of a society thankfully now gone. It is the portrait of a young man being propelled by his mother to escape his fathers destiny. Unlike Lawrence's other books which have tended to date this book is easy to read and still a classic.

Emotional manipulation and possessiveness are at the core of this most intriguing novel. D.H. Lawrence's SONS AND LOVERS greets the reader with the author's elegant prose while systematically immersing the story in a swirling cloud of tangled dysfunction.

Married to a drunken, rowdy coal miner in early 20th Century England, Gertrude Morel has neither a life nor a true love. Her only chance for happiness--as she sees it--is to live vicariously through her sons: first William, then Paul. Her subsequent possessiveness, her relentless interference in their lives, is smothering and destructive. When William dies, Gertrude devotes all of her attention--her manipulation--to Paul. Her son becomes a symbolic soulmate. . .lover. . .and Gertrude is unable to let him go to pursue his own relationships.

Torn between his love for his mother and his guilt whenever he harbors feelings of affection for another woman, Paul is anything but a suitable suitor. He falls in love with Miriam, but his emotional dysfunction all but dooms the relationship--a relationship constantly sabotaged by his mother. Needing a physical outlet, he has a brief affair with a married woman, Clara Dawes, but even then, his love for and devotion to his mother prevails. As his mother's health fails, Paul's existence becomes even more problematic, culminating in a transcendent death.

SONS AND LOVERS is not a "feel good" read, and Paul's inability to break free from the psychological bondage with his mother is frustrating and sometimes exasperating. Yet the true victim of this Lawrence classic is not Paul, but Miriam, who only wishes to love, and be loved in return. The man she has fallen in love with is incapable of such devotion: the tragic complexity of the story lingers long after this book has been put down.
--D. Mikels

The story is brilliant. It is about how a woman (the mother, Gertrude) takes her son (Paul) as her lover instead of choosing her husband. She did not have the will to love the husband, and instead turned that will on a child. The title is not "Fathers and Lovers" or "Husbands and Lovers." The father is capable of being loved, but in Gertrude's mind, she is too good for the husband. Therefore, she turns her lover's heart towards a child ("Sons and Lovers"). In modern psychobabble, Gertrude doesn't recognize boundaries. The child is defenseless to the emotional power which penetrates him. He is absorbed and becomes one with the mother's heart and goals. It is similar to molestation but instead of a physical penetration, there is an emotional penetration. When the boy starts to grow up and should, rightly, begin to become whole with a woman, he is not free to take that step. His sexuality drives him towards an appropriate lover, and seemingly makes him appear available, but his emotional heart cannot take another woman into himself. There is already a lover who has penetrated his heart (i.e. his mother). For a man to be complete in love, he has to be able to enter a woman physically at the same time he takes her into himself emotionally. Paul can't allow another woman in emotionally because his mother is already there. Hence, even though he is able to enter a woman physically, the whole experience is deeply unsatisfying to both Paul and all the women in his life. The mother is not really satisfied because she can't have her lover completely (i.e. physically and as her life's mate), and the other women in Paul's life (with whom he could have a physical relationship) are left unsatisfied because he wills not to take them into himself emotionally, and thereby deprives these women of the experience of wholeness which accompanies surrender in love. Hence, the women he should be able to complete himself with (i.e. those with whom he can complete the physical act), he eventually wears out. They give up because he is not available. His heart belongs to another. E.g. Claire goes back to her husband even though Claire's husband is less refined, because Claire would rather have all of a working man, than only part of an artist. There are scads of women today who are throwing themselves at this inpenetrable wall of the mother's inappropriate molestation of her son's emotions, not really understanding why and how to work with it. Lawrence sheds insight into that process. The cure is to exchange the will to love the mother for the will to love the lover. Go for it!

This work by D.H. Lawrence was rated number 9 on the top 100 list, and I think it's a fair rating. Sons and Lovers is a beautifully written and intricately drawn story of a young man. This actually serves as a pseudo autobiography as it mirrors DHL's life rather closely. There is a quality to this work that you do not find in contemporary novels. The characters are developed to an incredible depth and with great skill and precision. You find after reading this book that you feel you know some of the characters better than your neighbors. This is not a book about action or drama, it is about life. The focus here is not on the storyline, but on the people involved in it. As opposed to today's authors, Lawrence uses the storyline to define the character and personality of the participants. I think this book is so well written that it can make you look at your own friends and family and understand how little you really know of them. Many scholars talk about the idea of Lawrence introducing the Oedipal complex, but it's not really what this book is all about. While that psychiatrical phenomenon is a component of this work, the defining quality of this work is really about Lawrence's ability to capture the people in his story as eloquently and with such detail as he has. If you can appreciate good literature, this book is a must read for you.

This story of the Morel family begins with a dramatic portrayal of the effect industrialization has on human lives. Mr. Morel, a coal miner in turn-of-the-century Britain, lives a life of drudgery, anger and desperation. He takes his frustrations out on his wife Gertrude, while the real source of his unhappiness is his own low self-esteem. Gertrude is embittered by his hardness and so looks to her sons to fill all her emotional needs. This constitutes Part One of the novel, which to this reviewer's taste is the more satisfying section. The detailed descriptions of the arguments and even outright fights between the married couple are as powerful as anything in fiction, and bleakly dramatize how poverty can destroy the very hearts and souls of the working classes. Morel is oppressed by his employer, so he in turn oppresses his wife, who emotionally smothers her sons. Fight the power!

All of which is what makes Part Two such a disappointment. The entire second half of the book revolves around the second son, Paul, and how his closeness to his mother makes it impossible for him to engage in satisfactory relationships with other women. Miriam, the milquetoast who yearns for a transcendent, spiritual love, cares for Paul so much that she lets him walk all over her. The much tougher and independent Clara introduces Paul to a more physically satisfying relationship, but neither of them has any real attachment to the other. The weakness of this second half is not just that it all seems to take far too long; it's that over time, the characters become very unsympathetic. None of them have the strength of will to break away from their failing relationships, despite the fact that these failures cast dark shadows across their lives. And there's certainly nothing tragic about these young people mooning about, complaining that their relationships aren't what they'd like them to be; most especially in the context of Part One, which reminds us that there are people in this world who are really suffering.

Readers who are deeply interested in the internal subtleties of male-female relationships (and this probably includes a majority of young women) will love this book. If the two parts were published separately, this reviewer would unhesitatingly give Part One five stars, while grudgingly giving Part Two three and a half. For Mama's boys (and those who've seriously dated them) this book certainly rates five stars, but others will find these characters so annoying that even four stars may seem generous.

--Oh! Pardon me for that rather undignified opening. Although (yawn) when I get to reflecting back on this book it seems somehow an appropriate response. It is a book about selfish and spoiled people, about elitists imagining their ideas as somehow relevent to the larger world around them and about how a little bit of education can lead to a great deal of contempt for the society in which someone is raised.

Now, of course, these are valid and even potentially interesting points, but the method Lawrence chose to tell this, what I gather is a deeply personal story, is basically condescention and self-absorbsion. After about 100 pages I started dreading what was to come, which was basically more of the same alongside some predictable, tacked on melodramatic tragedy.

The complication comes from Lawrence's genuine ability as a writer. There are lines--sometimes, albiet rarely, pages of pure beauty. These words came from a powerful and passionate writer who was too personally involved with the story he was telling to make it universial. I can appreciate the venting, the often conflicted outrage of the elitist scholar and budding psychoanalyist that Lawrence was later to become, but if this is a modelled story of the man's life it will ultimately take away some of the respect my reading of The Rainbow, Women in Love and a handful of his short stories had previously inspired. I can forgive the late, great author for this childish and selfish book, a mama's boy trying as hard as he can to show off how clever people have always told him he was, but I have trouble comprehending the innumerable critics and casual readers alike who boast and gloat over this story as if the triumph of personal arrogance related within somehow validated their own wavering sense of intellectual accomplishment.

Two and a half stars rounded up because of some pretty writing and the apparent lasting relevence of this mostly frivilous work--

This is probably the most autobiographical of Lawrence's novels, dealing with the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of the author. It is a brutally frank portrayal of the relationship betweem a domineering mother and the younger (and surviving) son, a relationship that colors every aspect of the protagonist's life, from his relationship with his father to his romantic relationships with two very different women. Lawrence paints this portrait with very fine brush strokes: an attention to descriptive detail and some of the best characterization in modern English literature. Although the reader might not like the characters in the novel, there is no doubt that these are real people - especially the mother, Mrs. Morel. The setting of the novel is the coal fields of Nottingham and Lawrence carries on the work begun by Thomas Hardy in writing of the English working class with realism and detachment, eschewing the English literary tendency to moralize and to judge.

When Lawrence began the novel he had only passing knowledge of the theories of Freud regarding the mother-son relationship that became the backbone of the psychologist's Oedipus Complex. Essentially the author was writing from experience: the psychic bond between Mrs. Morel and her son, Paul, was very similar to the bond shared by Lawrence and his mother. This bond between son and mother amounts almost to a husband and wife sort of love - without the sex - and prevents the son from ever achieving a fully satisfactory relationship with another woman because of the hold the mother has on the son's soul. It is not until the mother is dead that the son is able to begin to free himself from her hold. The novel, then, is the story of that struggle.

I have never been a great fan of Lawrence's literary style, finding it a bit too jerky and over edited - a criticism I find with this novel. True, there are passages of poetic beauty (especially some of the descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside) but I found the prose a bit too tedious and lacking spontaneity. This is probably Lawrence's best novel (far superior to the more popular Lady Chatterley's Lover) and the one on which his reputation is firmly based; also, a novel that should be read by every mother and every son.

I read this a long time ago and hated it with a passion. I was chuckling reading the one-star reviews here, because had the Internet been around when I first read this book, I would have given it a scathing, one-star review.

The first time around, I was bored to tears, and it took me forever to finish. This time, I was so moved by certain sections my tears were falling on the page, and it took me only a week (or maybe it was six days) to finish. And though I will never call this my favorite classic, I liked it so much that currently I am reading Lawrence's "The Rainbow."

Make sure you get an edition that helps explain the dialect. After a while, I was able to figure it out myself, and that was kind of fun -- almost like learning a new language.

D.H. Lawrence is a beautiful writer that goes deep into the human mind and soul to write. He is never satisfied with meer fiction, with mediocre descriptions or with plain verse. Lawrence loves to pick the mind and sexuality of both males and females. His books, though called dirty and shameful, interpret the minds of lustful and questioning young adults in a way that makes love and sex accepting and wonderful.

Sons and Lovers can be considered Lawrences autobiography, because of the events and places that were used in the book resemble much of the writer's own life. It gives, therefore, an interpretation of how close Lawrence and his mother really were. D.H. Lawrence has written a woman's thoughts better than many female writers have and spectics have always guessed that he has been able to understand women so well because of his mother's raising. This book will give proof to this idea. Lawrence is very vulnerable here because he not only exposes himself as the son, but also inevitable as the lover.

I loved this book not only for it's intuition, but also for it's ability to keep me entertained and excited throughout the events of the lives of the characters. Again, D.H. Lawrence is taking his place as one of my favorite authors of all time!

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence. Recommended.

Sons and Lovers is said to be the most autobiographical of D. H. Lawrence's novels; according to the introduction by Benjamin DeMott, some critics have found it too flatly so. Like the protagonist Paul Morel, Lawrence was born to a coal miner and a woman who has married beneath her class, and his older brother died young, DeMott notes. Many other details coincide as well.

Unlike some of Lawrence's other works, such as Women in Love, in which Lawrence explores lofty themes in a philosophical and often grim tone, Sons and Lovers is as down to earth as Paul's rough, violent, yet congenial father Walter. Despite his many apparent and iterated flaws, Walter Morel is shown as a whole person rather than a fictional creation, with a gentle, content, industrious side, at least when he's sober. Perhaps his "smallness" is a function of where he is and who he is expected to be rather than who he could be. He's so tied to his lot in life, the mining life, that it never occurs to him that his more gifted sons could aspire to more. That they achieve more is a source of both pride and derision for Walter Morel. Although Walter is a background character (to both reader and to the Morel family), it is he, "an outsider," who forges the bond between Gertrude Morel and her sons, first William, then Paul.

Gertrude Morel is not the first woman to try to live her life through her children, but her hold over her sons dooms their relationships with other women to failure and leaves them deeply unsatisfied and unhappy. Her motivations may be questionable, but she is sometimes right. William's fiancée Lily would have cost him dearly, emotionally and financially, had he lived to marry her, and Mrs. Morel sees her own mistake of a marriage in his future. Although she makes her beliefs known, she seems willing to let William make his decision and suffer the consequences.

Having learned from the experience with William, Mrs. Morel takes a different approach with Paul, who seems to be her last, best hope for justifying her own life. Her relationship with Paul becomes overtly sexual. When they go out together, they behave like lovers on a date. "He stroked his mother's hair, and his mouth was on her throat." When Paul tells his mother that he doesn't love Miriam (how can he?), she "kissed him in a long, fervent kiss. 'My boy!' she said, in a voice trembling with passionate love. Without knowing, he gently stroked her face."

It would be too easy to attribute all this to an Oedipal complex, but it is more complicated, as life is. Paul serves as Mrs. Morel's alter ego, pseudo-lover, and breadwinner. Everything she did not or cannot have must be Paul's. She is savvy enough to know who is a threat to her hold and who is not. She recognises in Miriam a woman much like herself-intelligent, thwarted, let down by men, hungry for a kindred spirit or soul mate. Paul, too, is aware of this and hates Miriam for it-and for the fact he does, indeed, love her, making him unfaithful to the woman to whom he owes his fidelity. There are spiritual overtones as well, as the religious Miriam tries to sacrifice herself for Paul, whom she sees as a "Walter Scott hero." This sacrifice repels Paul ever further.

Mrs. Morel rightly perceives that Clara Dawes is not a threat to her-she is fascinating, attractive, enigmatic, and sensual, but she lacks the ability to be more to Paul than a diversion from Miriam, Mom, and himself. Knowing that nothing of importance will come of this affair, Mrs. Morel even encourages it. It cannot divert Paul from her, and it fails as a result.

In the end, the only intimacy Paul is capable of is with his mother. She has come between him and his own consciousness-and he has allowed her. Everything is filtered through her. How she has achieved this is not always clear, as she uses more than rhetoric and conscious effort to mold Paul. When he wishes her dead, there is hope that then he would begin to live. "Mother!" he whimpered. "Mother!" Then: "He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her." With the past buried, there may be a future for him. Only Lawrence knew as he wrote this most human of his novels...