Sons and Lovers: A Psychoanalytic
Criticism
Psychoanalysis
is a psychological approach that focuses on the concepts of Sigmund Freud and
helps us to understand human behaviour. D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913)
is a text that cries out for a psychoanalytic interpretation. One of Freud’s
most famous theories is the Oedipus complex, which deals with a child’s
emerging sexuality. Freud used the story of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to help
illustrate his theory. In the story, Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and
marries his mother. According to Freud, all male children form an erotic
attachment to their mother and are jealous of the relationship the father has
with the mother. The male child fears he will be castrated by the father so he
represses the sexual desire for the mother and waits for his own sexual
experience. However, if the boy does not fulfil these steps, then he will
carry the oedipal complex with him into adulthood (Dobie 52-53). As a result,
having this complex makes it very difficult to form adult relationships with
others. In other words, if the child never grows out of this type of behaviour,
he will be dysfunctional in adulthood.
The Oedipus complex theory attracted attention in 1910 when psychoanalyst
Ernest Jones published Hamlet and Oedipus. Freud had already applied his theory
to literature, but this was the first time the Oedipus complex had been
emphasised in a major literary work such as Hamlet. The character of Hamlet
shows signs of having a repressed Oedipus complex in the relationship he has
with his mother (Guerin 161-162). In Sons and Lovers, Gertrude Morel has a
dysfunctional relationship with her two sons, William and Paul. Therefore, the
text is conducive to this type of analysis because the Oedipus complex and other
psychoanalytic concepts are displayed so vividly in their
relationships. The beginning of the Oedipus complex appearing in William
and Paul is exemplified in the relationship between the parents. The boys
witness an abusive marriage in which Walter Morel often comes home drunk after
squandering the family’s income gambling. All of this causes the boys to hate
their father and be sympathetic and protective towards their mother.
In their mother, the children see someone who is good and pure. She, in turn,
keeps her sons all to herself and sheltered from their father. By this act,
Gertrude Morel is unconsciously molding her sons into what she wants, so
eventually they can take the place of her husband. She is clearly unhappy in
her marriage, so she tries to live vicariously through her sons. This is the
stimulus that allows the oedipal attachment to form in the two boys. William is
the oldest son and the mother’s favorite. He does everything he can to please
her. Sibling rivalry exists between William and Paul as they compete for their
mother’s affection. Mrs. Morel becomes jealous of William’s female companions
and he eventually moves to London. William’s moving to London was his
unconscious way of trying to break free from the oedipal attachment to his
mother. In London, William meets a girl by the name of Lily. They become
engaged but William is not happy. He has a misogynistic attitude towards her.
It is very clear Lily does not possess the good qualities he sees in his mother
and it angers and frustrates him.
William
exhibits classic symptoms of displacement. When William voices his
dissatisfaction with Lily, his mother asks him to reconsider marrying her. He
responds, “Oh well, I’ve gone too far to break it off now (Lawrence 130). These
conflicted feelings that William is experiencing are a sign of his apparent struggle
to rid himself of the oedipal fixation and the reader is not surprised when
William eventually gets sick and dies. After William dies, Paul takes his place
as his mother’s favorite. By her actions, one would think she thought of him as
a suitor. This is evident when she accepts a bottle of perfume spray from him.
“Pretty!” she said in a curious tone, of a woman accepting a love-token
(Lawrence 69). As Paul reaches adulthood, it is quite evident the Oedipus
complex has taken him over. His relationship with his father is strained and he
becomes jealous of him. He even asks his mother not to sleep with the father
anymore (Lawrence 215).
Paul meets Miriam Leivers and although he likes her, he repeats the same
misogynistic behavior as William did with Lily. He feels he would be betraying
his mother by being with her. However, the idea that Paul is interested in
someone other than his mother shows an attempt to break the oedipal fixation he
has. But, the mother foils this attempt by making him feel guilty for wanting
to be with Miriam. She says, “I can’t bear it. I could let another woman – but
not her. She’d leave me no room, not a bit of room. And I’ve never – you know
Paul -- I’ve never had a husband, not really” (Lawrence 212). This same
behavior the mother exhibited with William, by being jealous of his female
companions, is now being inflicted on Paul. She reinforces the Oedipus complex
that is within Paul by suffocating him and in a subtle way asking him to
replace her husband. Paul’s relationship with Miriam is reduced to friendship.
He has to repress any romantic feelings that he might have for her, so she will
not replace his mother.
Later
in the novel, Paul does become physically intimate with Miriam, but it is
short-lived because Paul will not marry her. This also shows that Paul suffers
from a fear of intimacy as he continues to remain emotionally detached from
Miriam. Once again, Paul succumbs to the oedipal attachment for his mother. However,
Paul does have an affair with a married but separated woman by the name of
Clara Dawes. Paul allows himself to have this relationship because he knows
that realistically this relationship can never go anywhere. She would never
divorce her husband. Therefore, Clara is not a threat to Paul’s oedipal
fixation to his mother. There is no danger of her taking his mother’s place.
Paul’s mother becomes ill. Since she is bedridden and in pain, Paul gives her
morphine. However, he administers an overdose of morphine to her, which leads
to her death. While this might be seen as euthanasia, it seems equally likely
that killing his mother was Paul’s unconscious way of releasing himself from
the Oedipus complex once and for all. Her death leaves Paul devastated and alone.
Although much time has passed, Miriam still wants to be with Paul, but he
refuses. It is clear that even after his mother’s death, he is still not free
from his attachment to her because he chooses to remain alone.
The
dysfunctional relationship with his mother is still present in Paul’s life and
it appears the Oedipus complex is still intact. By applying psychoanalytic
criticism to Sons and Lovers, one can gain a better understanding of the text.
What may at first look like unbelievable behaviors can be understood and
recognized by using this type of criticism. Psychoanalysis adequately explains
the relationships within the Morel family. It also allows us to see the Oedipus
complex, which is so blatant throughout Sons and Lovers.
Chris Semansky
In this essay, Semansky considers Lawrence's
novel as a Bildungsroman
Sons
and Lovers is an example of a Bildungsroman, an autobiographical novel
about the early years of a character's life, and that character's
emotional and spiritual development. The term derives from German novels of
education, such as Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,
which details the experiences of an innocent young man who discovers his
purpose and passion in life through a series of adventures and
misadventures. Lawrence offers up a rendering of his own first twenty-five
years of life in more or less chronological order, showing how Paul Morel
must negotiate the pull of family and culture to cultivate his individuality.
By writing a novel that is predominantly based on people and times from
his own life, Lawrence implicitly invites readers to treat the work as
non-fiction. This has often led to confusion, however, as some of the events in
Sons and Lovers have no factual basis in Lawrence's life but rather are
symbolic dramatisations of his key emotional struggles. The character in the
book that has occasioned the most controversy is Miriam Leivers, whom
Lawrence based on Jessie Chambers, a friend from his youth. Chambers
encouraged Lawrence to rewrite the novel after he had sent her a draft.
She was disappointed in the revision as well, because she felt it did
not accurately portray their relationship. Chambers attempted to tell the
"real" story of her relationship with Lawrence in her own
memoir, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. The relationship between Paul
and Miriam that Lawrence describes fulfill ls the conventional criteria of
the Bildungsroman, which often includes a detailing of the protagonist's
love affairs. Critic Brian Finney is even more specific in his description of
the genre's criteria in his examination of the novel D. H. Lawrence: Sons and
Lovers when he writes, "Normally, there are a least two love affairs, one
demeaning, and one exalting." In this scheme, Miriam, of course,
represents the "demeaning" relationship. Although she gives herself
to Paul sexually, she does so reluctantly, sacrificially, and without passion.
Finney describes other criteria of the Bildungsroman: The child protagonist is
usually sensitive and is constrained by parents (the father in particular) and
the provincial society in which he or she grows up. Made aware of
wider intellectual and social horizons by schooling, the child breaks with
the constraints of parents and home environment and moves to the city
where his or her personal education begins—both in terms of discovering a
true vocation and through first experiencing sexual passion. Paul certainly
fulfil ls the criterion of being sensitive. Lawrence describes him as
"a pale, quiet child" who "was so conscious of
what other people felt. “However, the primary constraint on his
development is his mother, rather than his father. It is Mrs. Morel that Paul
resembles and loves and who forms the psychological barrier that Paul
repeatedly comes up against in his drive to know himself. Mrs. Morel, though,
is also a facilitator in Paul's development, as she attempts to shield him
from her husband's vulgar habits and rescues him from a life in the mines.
Mrs.
Morel also attempts to mitigate the effects that the society in which
they live have on her children. Bestwood, a thinly-veiled version of
Eastwood, where Lawrence was born, is the setting of the novel, and
in the opening chapter Lawrence recounts the history of the Midlands
countryside, Mrs. Morel's childhood, and the time when she met and married
Walter Morel. This narrative strategy of describing the factors that
contributed to Paul's conception allows Lawrence to foreground the influence of
Paul's environment and family life on the development of his
character. Paul was born in "The Bottoms," a six-block area of
housing for miners. Life in "The Bottoms" is largely one of ongoing
despair. After a day in the mines, the men drink and cavort, while
their wives tend to domestic chores such as cooking and cleaning. Mrs.
Morel is unlike the other wives in that she comes from a higher social
station and had expectations for a better life. In The Dictionary of
Literary Biography, Kingsley Widmer describes Mrs. Morel primarily as a
destructive figure in Paul and William's lives, writing: Her Protestant ethos
of self-denial, sexual repression, impersonal work, disciplined aspiration,
guilt, and yearning for conversion-escape, not only defeats her already
industrially victimized coal-miner husband but also contributes to
the defeat of several of their sons. Paul’s "defeat," however,
is only possible because Paul knows the difference between success and failure.
Without his mother's sour but demanding presence and her daily disillusionment
with the world, Paul might not have developed his love for painting
or his desire to transcend his provincial roots. Paul's tortured
relationship with his mother actually allows him to develop his own ideas about
the meaning of individuation and fulfilment. By having to balance his need
to please her with his need to have a healthy sexual and emotional
relationship with a woman, Paul arrives at an understanding about himself and
what he can and cannot control. This self-understanding, a crucial phase of
character development in a Bildungsroman, entails the knowledge that there
is less in life that Paul can control than his mother has taught him. Mrs.
Morel believes that through hard work, will power, and self-denial one could
move up the social ladder and find contentment. What she does not grasp is
the extent to which the self-suffers from such desires. Paul discovers
through his relationship with Clara that the temperament he has inherited
from his mother is destroying him. He comes to realise that attempts to
deny passion or to manage the contents of his consciousness are doomed to
fail. Critic Helen Baron claims that Lawrence embeds his own understanding
about human consciousness not only in Paul’s character but also in the very
style of the writing. In her essay, "Disseminated Consciousness in Sons
and Lovers," Baron writes that Lawrence tests readers' assumptions that
the will can control what the body feels and the mind thinks, claiming
Lawrence represents consciousness as something that cannot be
contained. "Lawrence's exploration of consciousness," Baron writes,
“is so strongly embedded in the narrative tissue that the very words
themselves are treated as cells with permeable boundaries. “In addition to
Paul's "education" in the ways of love and human consciousness, he
also develops his talent for painting, even selling a few paintings. Paul's
passion to paint stands in for Lawrence's own passion to write, and,
by describing Paul's growth as an artist, Lawrence participates in
the literary tradition of the Kunstler roman, which is a novel that describes the
early years and growth of an artist. James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man is another such novel that is both Bildungsroman and Kunstler
roman
.
The
nature of these two sub genres almost demands that they follow the literary
tradition of realism, which Lawrence does as well. Realistic novels
portray character, setting, and action in are cognisable and plausible
way. They are located in a specific time or historical era and in a
specific cultural milieu. Authors of realistic novels often rely on the
use of dialect and concrete details of everyday life to compose their
stories, and they make clear the motivations of characters' actions,
emotions, and thoughts. Often, such novels depict the working class. Although
written just a decade into the twentieth century when literary modernism was
emerging, Sons and Lovers belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century
realism in its attention to detail and locale, and its attempt to
accurately depict a way of life. Because it has straddled the border
between fiction and fact, Sons and Lovers has become a lightning rod for a
number of Lawrence critics seeking insight into the writer's growth as an
artist. As a Bildungsroman, the novel offers clues as to how Lawrence
viewed his emotional and aesthetic maturation. Like Lawrence, Paul has to
overcome the death of his mother and enter a world he has to remake in order to
survive. Fighting the impulses to destroy himself, Paul sets his mouth tight
and marches off to town to start anew. The year after this novel was
published, Lawrence married Frieda Von Richthofen Weekly, the upper-class
ex-wife of a university professor; Lawrence had been involved with her since
1912.Like Paul's mother and Lawrence's own mother, Lawrence chose a mate
outside of his own class. The two would remain together until Lawrence's death.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on
‘Sons and Lovers’, in Novels for Students, Gale, 2003.
