An Anamolous Love
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An Anomalous Love
“Lawrence’s need to explore man’s nature below its surface
led him into far franker discussions of sex, religion, and psychology
then we find in any English novelist before him” (Niven 97).
No one could have anticipated that David Herbert (D.H.) Lawrence, this fourth child and third son of a miner, would become one of the most frequently studied English novelists of the twentieth century (Niven 87). In addition to his success as a novelist, he also became a “proficient poet and playwright as well as one of the most prolific literary correspondents of modern times, a combative essayist, and a uniquely atmospheric travel writer” (Niven 87). In one of Lawrence’s most widely read novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence reevaluates his childhood, his relationship with his mother, and her psychosomatic effect on his sexuality and experiences with women. Among the numerous influences affecting D.H. Lawrence’s work, the significance of his relationship with his mother, his formative years, as well as the complexities of his era have had the heaviest impact.
David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England (Niven 87). Lawrence was the fourth child (of a family of five) of a struggling coal miner, who was also a very heavy drinker. His mother was a former schoolteacher, and her education greatly outweighed her husband’s minimal schooling (online-literature.com 1). Lawrence’s childhood was based on poverty and extreme hostility between his parents (online-literature.com 1). “From boyhood he shared a close relationship with his mother and grew to hate the debilitating mine work he considered responsible for his father’s debased condition” (The Gale Group 1). Also when Lawrence was a young boy, his imagination was captured by the performances of Teddy Rayner’s traveling players who presented glory melodramas in their tented theater. Even as an adolescent, Lawrence became engrossed in the world of drama.
An outstanding student in school, Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School at the age of twelve (Walker 537). After graduating in 1901, he went to work for a surgical-appliance manufacturer in Nottingham. After working for three unhappy months, he became seriously ill with pneumonia (Slade 13). Following a slow recovery, in 1903, Lawrence found a position as a “pupil-teacher” at an elementary school in nearby Ilkeston, Derbyshire (Walker 537). “Two years there were followed by a third as an uncertified teacher in the Eastwood British School” (Walker 537). In 1906, he placed first among the whole of England and Wales for the King’s Scholarship Examination, and thus began a two-year course study for his teacher’s certificate at Nottingham University College (The Gale Group 3). “By 1908, he qualified to teach at Davidson Road School, a boys’ elementary school in the London suburb of Croydon, where he remained until 1911” (Walker 537).
“In the years of his young manhood Lawrence was not short of female company” (Niven 89). While Lawrence was seriously ill with pneumonia, he met Jessie Chambers, whose family lived on a small farm outside Eastwood (Walker 537). They became very spiritually and emotionally connected and Jessie and her family had one of the greatest influences on Lawrence (Niven 89). “Jessie probably exerted the greatest influence on him because she took the greatest interest in his early attempts at writing” (Niven 90). In the spring of 1912, Lawrence met Frieda Weekley, the wife of a Nottingham professor and shortly after they eloped to Germany (Walker 537). Frieda also had a great influence on Lawrence. “For the next six months, Lawrence wrote poems, stories, travel sketches, and his final revision of the autobiographical novel [Sons and Lovers]. This writing, particularly the metamorphosis of Paul Morel into Sons and Lovers (with which Frieda assisted him by discussing her own maternal feelings and the theories of Freud), marked the true beginning of Lawrence’s artistic maturity” (Walker 537).
“Many elements in Lawrence’s life story found their way into his writing, for he hardly every wrote about things he had not witnessed or about situations that did not ultimately derive from personal experience” (Niven 88). He liked to write about a network of relationships among a core group of people as well as personal occurrences he had. Lawrence enjoyed writing about various different things but a pattern was evident in a lot of his work. “Few writers in modern English literature have stirred up so much uncritical admiration, and vilification, and although this can partly be attributed to the personality of Lawrence himself, it is principally due to the subject which he chose for the basis of most of his novels, the last remaining taboo of our civilization” (Slade 7).
“Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex” (online-literature.com, 1). Never before was there a son more devoted to his mother and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, the young protagonist in Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. Never that is, except for Lawrence himself. “Sons and Lovers, his third novel, was the work that enabled Lawrence to come to terms, at least provisionally, with the traumas of his formative years” (Walker 541).
The novel opens with a description of the town of Bestwood (modeled on Eastwood). After the presence of the mining industry is exemplified, the story continues with an account of the early married life of Walter and Gertrude Morel, Paul’s parents. Even after Paul’s birth, the main emphasis remains on the aggressive relationship between his estranged parents. A large part of the novel is devoted to the Morel’s first child, William, whose sudden death and funeral conclude part 1 of the novel. “Directly or indirectly, the characters in the novel are entrapped by the materialistic values of their society, unable even when they consciously reject those values to establish true contact with one another” (Walker 542).
“The plot of the novel is outwardly simple and straightforward, describing as it does the married life of the Morels,