Sons and lovers criticism pdf

His nature was purely sensuous and, she strove to make him moral religious. She tried to force him to face things. He could not endure it, it drove him out of his mind. Morel remained harsh in dealing with her husband. In the circumstances of intoxication or squandering money, she adopts a relentless attitude whereas her husband opts for rage and indifference.

The episode in which Morel drives her out of house in the wintry night is an apt revelation of this; specially in the light of the fact that she was pregnant. It is more than obvious that Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel and the autobiographical elements are not manifest in terms of sexual strains and marital incompatibilities but the violent antithetic impulses between the lower and lower middle classes of the society also reflect here. The first part of the novel has very obvious strains of the class compartmentalization in the lower and lower middle classes of the contemporary society.

The recurrence of the class struggle is also a much prominent, though, ignored aspect of the fictional domain of D. Lawrence that acquires a much prominent role in Aaron's Rod published in The growing indifference between Walter Morel and Mrs.

Morel and Mrs. Morel's dislike for Jerry Purdy who was a bosom friend of Walter Morel have twin implications : one hand it reveals the vibrant strains between the husband and wife and on the other hand it reflects the antithesis within the society at various levels.

The views of Edmund Wilson invite our attention. He, in his celebrated article, "Marxism and Literature", comments :. Yet a man who tries to apply Marxist principles without real understanding of literature is liable to go horribly wrong. For one thing, it is usually true in works of highest order that the purport is not a single message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit; and the reader who does not grasp them artistically but is merely looking for simple social morals, is certain to be confused.

The relevance of Wilson's views are evidenced in the complexity of vision put to scrutiny and perception by Lawrence. The marital strains, sexual incompatibility and the class struggle are so completely fused that to isolate one from the rest is nearly impossible and the fusion leads to a composite perception of the complex vision of the novel.

William, the first born of Morels redefines the rhythm of the action with new strains. The growing indifference of Morel obliges Mrs Morel to pour all her love on her first born. The first major twist in the direction of Oedipal manifestation is observed with the birth of jealousy in the mind of the father for his son. Morel's act of clipping of the locks of William's hair when he was barely one year old illustrates the complex emotion pervading the universe peopled by the three : Waller Morel, Mrs.

Morel and William. The event also determines the course of action of the novel by aggravating the pore existing indifference between the couple and simultaneously the future of the mother and child and father and child relationship.

The birth of Paul is a starking instance of the irony of the real and desired. The use of irony also predicts the nature of action and experience of the novel. Morel didn't want the child but her motherly instinct shoot up meteorically and she resolves to produce the child. The birth of the child is aptly metaphorical to and illustrative of various forms of antithesis that define the dynamics of the plot structure of the novel.

The struggle between two classes, lower and lower middle, is recreated again in the childhood of the children. They grow up under the strict supervision of their mother who never allows them to play with the children of miners.

Morel's strict abnegation comes out with two fold implications : it reveals the struggle between the two classes and at the same time it also reveals the growing contempt of the mother for her children's father. Paul gradually acquires protagonistic stature. Lawrence narrates the family discord from the point of view of Paul, the new protagonist :.

Often Paul would wake up, after he had been asleep for a long time, aware of thuds downstairs. Instantly he was wide awake. Then he heard the booming shouts of his father, come home nearly drunk, then the sharp replies of his mother, then the bang, bang of his father's fist on the table, and nasty snarling about as the man's voice got higher. And then the whole was drowned in the piercing medley of shrieks and cries, from the great wind swept ash tree.

The children lay silent in suspense, waiting for a lull in the wind to hear what their father was doing. He might hit their mother again. There was a feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense of blood. They lay with their heart in the grip of immense anguish. The wind came through. The anguish of the children was shaped into by the mother for their father.

Whenever the mother returned home bitter and angry the children would surround their mother like tiny companions. Morel takes over William completely and when he secures employment as a clerk at some firm in London, she is glutted with inordinate pride and relief.

The strains pervading different corners of the miner's house are redefined when William, in London, falls in love with Miss Weston, and brings her home on Christmas. Lawrence intensifies the effect by cyclic recreation of time image. It is more than predictable that Mrs. Morel found the girl quite shallow and is least reluctant to show her dislike.

Morel William and Miss Weston creates an unusual love—triangle. It was a tormenting love triangle; William lived divided between love for his mother and infatuation for his girl friend. He was delivered only by death from the tormenting strain that owes its origin to the fragmented emotion of love. The story in the first part of the novel is narrated from the point of view of Mrs.

Morel; tale of woman's hunger for love and consequent perversion. Williams' death also paves way for the protagonistic stature of Paul, her second son.

It is an important observation that her intimacy with Paul is more subtle than with the first born. Paul, a promising student, with many prizes and scholarships against his name that, made her mother proud. When Paul secures a job in London's Surgical Appliances Factory, she was assured that her son was well on his way to prosperity.

It was also a latent desire of her mother that her son should marry wisely. She keeps an eagle eye on him. The action and experience latent in the novel is redefined and it results into the making of new strain. The views of Philip Hobsbaum invite our attention. He, on this phase of the development of the novel, remarks :. However, often Paul Morel, the Lawrence figure of the novel grows up, Sons and Lovers transmutes into what is virtually a different book.

The sympathy, the author enlists for Mrs. After William died, Paul was all she had left, Arthur being more like his father. Miriam is on the other hand, intelligent, spiritual, and willing to learn. There did seem to be a moment when Paul realized there were two female forces in life. The one of warmth and the one of inspiration. His mother of course is the one of inspiration. Miriam, being as religious as she is, shudders at the thought of consummating the relationship.

Miriam introduces Paul to Clara. Miriam loves Paul so much she sacrifices herself to him. Even though Paul loves Miriam, upon comparing her with his mother, he hates her. Finally, giving in to his mother, he breaks it off with Miriam. We get the impression that Miriam waits for Paul forever. It concretely ends when his mother dies and he leaves to find himself.

Sons and Lovers is a study of human relationships. 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.

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. 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. Her death leaves Paul devastated and alone. Although much time has passed, Miriam still wants to be with Paul, but he refuses. 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. These differences ultimately cause friction, leading to her hatred of him when the bungling Walter chops off the baby William's golden curls. Morel increasingly turns to the bottle for solace, and when drunk he strikes both his children and his wife.

At one point, during a drunken rage, he locks her out of the house; at another, he throws a chair at her. Domestic violence is matched in the novel by the psychological and physical violence of the world of work. Morel's tendency to drink can be mostly attributed to the tedium and the hardship of his job in the mines. Owing to what the narrator calls "his heedless nature" he is involved in several serious accidents, one of which leaves him lame for life.

Both Paul and William suffer physical hardship getting to and from their jobs, and from overwork; trying to better themselves, they study at night after grueling long workdays. Paul's job at Thomas Jordan's surgical appliances evokes the crippling and maiming of industrial accidents as well as wars.

The work is tedious—he copies letters. Paul's passion is his painting and his increasing success at it, even when he is quite miserable in other respects, offers a solution to his problem of adjusting to the work world. Unlike the satisfaction he derives from painting, his fulfillment with a woman is never resolved, but it does not seem as hopeless as some critics have asserted.

As in most autobiographical novels there is a tendency by critics to see the protagonist as so thinly disguised a version of Lawrence himself that they confuse author and main character, even to the point where episodes from the author's life are read back into the novel as if they held some mysterious key to the problems raised in the fiction. It is certainly true that because Paul was fixated on his mother he was bound to have problems with women, first with Miriam, then Clara.

There is also ironic interplay in the relationship between Miriam and his mother Gertrude; each accuses the other of trying to possess Paul in a suffocating way. All three women and Paul himself attempt to thwart commonplace social and family values. Gertrude obviously makes excessive demands on her sons by using William as a substitute for her husband. William's tragic death could have been a bridge to deeper mutual sympathy for the parents, but Gertrude turns to Paul, compounding the damage to her husband and her son by making him both a substitute lover and a surrogate for William much of the William story was cut from the edition.

Paul, afraid to commit to a full relationship with Miriam, who is so much like his mother, does not marry her. She then submits in an all too sacrificial way to an affair with another man, which is reprehensible not so much because of social taboo, but because it denies any sustaining social context for Paul's love for her. Their romance becomes degraded and unfulfilling. Paul turns to Clara Dawes, who provides a temporary safe haven for Paul from having to confront his problem: She does not really want to marry him and ends up going back to her husband Baxter, who, after all, beats up Paul for sleeping with his wife.

An indifferent husband would not bother. Paul must achieve one objective before he can hope for emotional recovery: identifying the problem with his mother, by now a death wish, and put it behind him. This is precisely what he is doing in the final paragraph: "But no, he would not give in He would not take that direction to the darkness to follow her.

He walked toward the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly. Critic Julian Moynahan argues that Sons and Lovers edition has three formal orders or matrices which blend with each other, and enrich one another.

The first matrix is conventional historical narrative "articulated in terms of historical sequence," and practical cause and effect, more or less the one that develops the plot line. The second is based on Freudian psychology, which explains the reasons for Paul's inhibitions in trying to love Miriam.

The statement by the narrator about Paul's relationship with Miriam, "He wanted to give her passion and tenderness, and could not," participates as a statement of fact in the first matrix, but also in the second because Paul's inhibition is a neurotic symptom described by Freud in including the Oedipal complex.

Moynahan goes on to use the example of Walter's reaction to Gertrude's death as encompassing all three matrices. He refuses to look at Gertrude either while she is sick or laid out, then, with tears streaming down his face, brags to her relatives about what a good husband he has been. Later on, he is troubled by nightmares. These are two "ordinary sequences," one in the first matrix—Morel acting according to his character—and in the second, his anxiety during the aftermath of his wife's death.

But Moynahan continues: "the same sequence in the vital context. He never thought of her personally. Everything deep in him he denied. Paul hated his father for sitting sentimentalising over her. He knew he would do it in the public houses. For the real tragedy went on in Morel in spite of himself. The "larger indictment" against Morel is that he denies the life within him.

In the other contexts these are his experiences. In the vital context, the experience violates sanctions that may be mysterious but are also specific and real. The violation is a form of self violation and is a tragedy, according to the firm, although compassionate, view of the narration. Applying this analysis to the progress of Paul through the novel, Moynahan says: Paul is a passionate pilgrim whose every action and impulse is a decision for or against life and accumulates to a body of fate that quite literally spells life or death for him.

He refuses to join his dead mother and walks toward the town, which represents life. However, the town is not utopia and will probably provide the scene for the continuation of the same struggle. He is "on a quest for health and relatedness" that Lawrence's later novels will thematically address.

Lawrence embeds in a seemingly realistic narrative psychological concerns that other novelists like Proust and Joyce would write about in a more dreamlike mode. Another noteworthy technique is Lawrence's use of the natural world to balance and extend his characterizations, sometimes with a positive, sometimes with a negative spin.

He seems prompted in this direction by predecessors such as Thomas Hardy and even George Eliot. His renderings of nature are particularly vivid and compelling. Walter Morel's special being and integrity, for example, are revealed first as he eats breakfast and then as he chews a stalk from a hedge as he enjoys his early morning walk to the pits. At other times, natural images signal strife or separation among lovers, as when Paul notices the "brutal scent" of the purple iris right after he has decided to call off his relationship with Miriam.

Later, right before his breakup with Clara, he sees the swimming woman as "temporary as a bubble of foam. The world of the novel is difficult for the initially generous, warm hearted Walter Morel and his refined, highly principled wife, who sees her life sinking into poverty and whose successive pregnancies become more and more burdensome. The domestic strife of the embattled Morels takes its toll on all the children, and impedes their efforts to take their places in society and in a marriage.

It is an imperative in all Lawrence's work for any character he cares about to find a meaningful connection, not just to the superficial social world, but to some ultimate world, often suggested by images from nature.

Marriage, as in all his early work, is the crucial relationship which permits maturation, and it is the defense against dehumanizing forces in the social and political world. Paul's constant and often misguided strivings can be looked upon as efforts to mend the marriage of his parents. The Morels' lack of fulfillment thwarts not only Paul's but also William's efforts to find happiness with a woman.

William's very successful efforts to rise above his station in life are ironically thwarted when he ends up with Lily, or Gyp, whose empty brain and lust for fine clothing and jewelry take a financial and psychic toll on him. The materialistic Gyp is a mirror opposite of spiritual Miriam, suggesting that the sons choose divergent paths but in reaction to the same sense of maternal over possessiveness.

William's tragic betrothal is canceled only by his death from pneumonia, which appears to be partly occasioned by the stress of his relationship with Gyp. Although the free-spirited romantic side of Lawrence rubbed against the grain of social convention, the novel reflects a deeply religious sensibility and the desire to feel a part of the universal whole.

As with many artists, the fabric of connections between the everyday and the sublime is crucial to Lawrence, and even in this early novel spirituality that sacrifices the everyday world is deeply suspect. Miriam's otherworldly spirituality is an other reason, besides Gertrude's possessiveness, for her failed relationship with Paul. That sort of spirituality, to be critiqued at length in The Rainbow ; see separate entry , is also the cause of Paul's increasing dissatisfaction with the church.

At one point, Paul talks to Miriam endlessly about his love of horizontals: How the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire meant to him the eternity of the will: Just as the bowed arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where: into contradiction to the perpendicular lines, and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leaped up to heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself into the divine.

Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was Gothic. The issue of sexuality is another crucial theme. The orthodox view of sex as a means to an end is a doctrine that Miriam's mother has instilled into her, and even though at times it seems that Miriam wants to shake this view, it interferes with her relations with Paul, who is portrayed as guilty of not doing more to break down this barrier.

It is obvious that Lawrence provides no coherent view as to the role of sexuality in human life, neither in the depiction of Miriam nor Clara.

Yet there is revealing irony in that Clara and Baxter Dawes are the only reconciled couple at the end of the novel, occasioned not by Clara's bowing to social convention, but her knowledge that Baxter loves her more steadily and truly than Paul.

The Dawes's relationship suggests that Paul has neither achieved the maturity necessary to a genuine marriage, nor met the right woman. Relations among men are also of consequence in the book. William, socially suave and charming, is a foil to the more reserved Paul, but the social climbing quality of his relationships contrasts with Paul's quest for more fulfilling relations with men.

Paul is fascinated by, and reaches a genuine friendship with Miriam's brothers, at first just the younger two, and then the more reserved Edgar.

He is cordial with the men at his work place. Upon the death of his mother, he seeks the fellowship of men in bars. The most interesting relationship with a man, however, is the one between Paul and Baxter Dawes, who has beaten him up, but later in the novel falls on hard times, is hospitalized, and then visited by Paul, who gives him money.

In fact, Paul is the agent for reuniting Baxter and Clara, for he tells Clara of her estranged husband's whereabouts. Lawrence makes this explicit in his descriptions. For example, when Paul begins to look in the newspapers for work, the narrator writes, "Already he was a prisoner of industrialism. He was being taken into bondage. His freedom in the beloved home valley was going now. Morel, who believes she is morally better than the miners, is disgusted by what mining has made of her husband, and she pushes her children away from that work.

She finds jobs for both Paul and William so that they will lead better lives than their father. The sons have difficulty making choices of their own. They are so driven to please their mother that they sacrifice their own pleasure and needs to satisfy hers. Neither can develop emotionally healthy relationships with women, and both struggle to balance their own wants with those of their mother.

Another character who suppresses her will for the needs of another is Miriam Leivers, who sleeps with Paul to please him, even though she feels little sexual passion for him. Class Lawrence's characters illustrate the class contradictions at the heart of modern industrial society. Capitalism pits classes against one another and even pits individuals of the same class against one another.

Lawrence develops this theme by depicting conflicts among various groups and characters. For example, William feverishly climbs the social ladder, only to discover that he is more alienated from his family the further up he climbs. His girlfriend, Lily, a pretentious and snobbish Londoner, holds herself above the working class and condescends to the Morels, treating them as "clownish" people and hicks. Even Mrs. Morel, a former teacher, has contempt for the work of her own husband and is disgusted by his miner friends, whom she considers lowly.

The starkest contrast between classes, however, is illustrated in the relationship between Thomas Jordan, the capitalist factory owner, and his workers, whom he patronizes and quarrels with. This means that the novel consists of a series of episodes tied together thematically and by subject matter. Structuring the novel in this manner allows Lawrence to let meaning accumulate by showing how certain actions and images repeat themselves and become patterns.

This repetition of actions and images is part of the iterative mode. By using this mode, Lawrence can blend time periods, making it sometimes difficult to know whether an event happened once or many times.

Lawrence is using the iterative mode when he uses words such as "would" and "used to. Sons and Lovers is told mostly from a third-person omniscient point of view, as the narrator has access to the thoughts of the characters and moves back and forth in time while telling the story. The first half of the novel focuses on Gertrude Morel and the second part focuses on Paul.

However, although Lawrence strives to create a narrator that is impartial and presents material in an objective manner, the narrator occasionally makes editorial comments on the action, as he does in the first part of the novel after Mrs. Morel has been thinking that her life will be one of continued drudgery. The narrator intrudes, saying, "Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

When he shows, he simply describes the characters' action and lets them speak for themselves. When he tells, he summarizes scenes and sometimes comments on them. The narrator's presence is most evident in the latter instance. During that time, British miners battled their capitalist bosses for better pay and safer working conditions. However, large swings in demand for coal contributed to industry instability, and it was common for miners' unions to be rewarded a raise one year and presented with a cut in salary the next.

As the rate of industrialization increased, so did the gap between rich and poor. Nowhere was this gap more apparent than in the difference between how the miners lived and how the owners of the mines lived. Lawrence's father, on whom Walter Morel is based, began working in the mines when he was ten years old. A typical week for him consisted of six twelve- hour days, with only two paid holidays a year.

One way out of the danger and poverty of the mining life was through education. The Education Act of , which attempted to provide elementary education for all children, gave hope to the parents of many working-class children. The act allowed local school boards to levy and collect taxes. Elementary schooling, however, was not entirely free until the s, when "board" schools could stop charging fees. Before that, parents were expected to pay between one and four pence per week per child.

William, Paul, Clara, and Miriam all went to school, which significantly increased their chances of finding better work. At this time, there was also a difference between public and private schools.

Public schools were more expensive than private schools, as private schools often received their funding from an endowment or from a corporation, which ran them or hired a board of governors to do so. Social class was, and remains, intricately entwined with education.

Schools not only provided students with the basic skills to obtain jobs, but they also offered students the chance to form friendships and alliances with other students and their families.

Gaining admission to the better schools, however, depended on the student's family's resources and connections. As a result of the Education Act, industrialization, and urbanization, more positions in skilled and semiskilled labor became available during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The number of clerks, for example, quadrupled between and , with the British government, particularly the Post Office, employing the bulk of them. Vocational schools gradually replaced apprenticeships, and quasi-professional fields such as photography, bookkeeping, and librarianship emerged, providing additional choices for those with the desire or wherewithal to make better lives for themselves. There were more opportunities for men; however, women, especially unmarried women, found work as typists, secretaries, and telephone operators.

While Lawrence was lambasting industrialization and the loss of humanity's bond with the land, rural people were pouring into cities throughout the nineteenth century, seeking a better life. The agricultural depression of the s further depleted the number of farmers, and by the turn of the century more than 80 percent of Britain's population lived in cities.

The "faintly humming, glowing town" toward which Paul walks at the end of the novel is full of telephones and buses, trams, automobiles, and subway trains. A writer for the The Saturday Review, for example, gives the novel this backhanded compliment: "The sum of its defects is astonishingly large, but we only note it when they are weighed against the sum of its own qualities. In these works, Gregory argues, Lawrence's "febrile and tortured genius flows richly and turbulently.

Every passing stir upon his sensitiveness is passionately or beautifully recorded. This approach, like many of Freud's theories themselves, was later widely attacked as being reductive.

More recent criticism of the novel has drawn on the theories of Jacques Lacan, among others. Earl Ingersoll, for example, in his essay, "Gender and Language in Sons and Lovers," argues that a Lacanian approach to the novel is more productive than the Freudian psychoanalytic approach critics such as Kuttner have taken.

Exploring the relationship between language and the characters' interactions, Ingersoll charts Paul's maturation as a movement from "the text of the unconscious associated with the mother to the empowerment of metaphor associated with the Name-of-the-Father. 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 dramatizations 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. Lawrence: A Personal Record. The relationship between Paul and Miriam that Lawrence describes fulfills 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. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers when he writes, "Normally, there are at least two love affairs, one demeaning, and one exalting. 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 fulfills the criterion of being sensitive. Lawrence describes him as "a pale, quiet child" who "was so conscious of what other people felt. It is 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. Morel also attempts to mitigate the effects that the society in which they live have on her children.

Bestwood, a thinly-veiled version of East-wood, 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.

Morel is unlike the other wives in that she comes from a higher social station and had expectations for a better life. 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 fulfillment.

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.

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 realize 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. 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 Kunstlerroman, which is a novel that describes the early years and growth of an artist.

The nature of these two subgenres almost demands that they follow the literary tradition of realism, which Lawrence does as well. Realistic novels portray character, setting, and action in a recognizable 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 Weekley, the upper-class ex-wife of a university professor; Lawrence had been involved with her since