The Theme of Love Used in “Sons and Lovers” by D. H. Lawrence

In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence treated love more unconventionally than the novelists of earlier phases, who also practiced the matter of love to a great extent.

In Lawrence’s treatment of love, there is a clash between emotion and intellect – there is an inevitable contretemps between man’s passion and intelligence.

The emotional crisis finds no consolation – the emotional disease admits no intellectual care. The modern world seems to Lawrence to have corrupted man’s emotional life; the world is now set up over the furnace of materialism, devoid of passion, feeling, love and emotion.

Sigmund Freud influenced Lawrence, and Freud and his followers have rightly established that neurosis and other signs of abnormality result from repressed sex instincts. It became evident that man’s intellectual communications realize his emotional needs.

Walter And Gertrude Contrast Each Other in Love’s Perception

In Sons and Lovers, love and sex are almost identical, one seems impossible without the other. Love and sex are two basic themes. Still, the conflict between emotion and intellect serves the novel’s primary purpose.

Walter Morel and Gertrude Morel come closer by the urge of their instinctive forces, forces that arise from the unconscious mind and shape human activities. Walter Morel is a miner and represents the ordinary people, devoid of intellectual content, full of physical life, in touch with the earth, and rejoicing in the life of nature.

In contrast to him, Gertrud Morel is proud of her middle-class inheritance and does not condense to mix with the uneducated women of the place. She fails to see any vitality in the spontaneous life of Morel and strives hard to reform him.

Gertrude’s desire to prove herself an intellectually superior woman with refined taste and finer sensibility wrecks her married life. The passion of Walter Morel comes into sharp conflict with the intellectual superiority of Mrs. Morel. Thus the class of emotion and intellect throws them to two opposite distant poles.

Walter and Gertrude are two opposites who are brought together due to their hasty decisions taken at the Christmas party, where they met for the first time.

Paul Morel’s Love Is Torn Between Personal And Motherly Affections

Paul Morel, a hypersensitive intellectual young son of Mr. and Mrs. Morel, also falls into an emotional crisis. Paul Morel has become neurotic and suffers from depression for the uncongenial atmosphere and anguishing circumstances of a conflicting relationship with his parents.

There is a hint of the Oedipus complex between Paul and his mother; Paul’s mother over possesses Paul, and as a result, Paul fails to develop his normal and natural love relations with the other two girls.

Paul cannot strike an adequate relationship with Miriam due to the intense struggle between Miriam and Mrs. Morel. Mrs. Morel wants to possess Paul partly due to Paul’s inner intellectual conflict resulting from his utter need for Miriam and his over-dependence on his mother.

Clara Dawes is another girl who makes a physical relationship with Paul to satisfy his sexual urge, but she cannot satisfy Paul’s soul. The relationship between Paul and Clara does not last long. It is due to the conflict between Paul’s hypersensitive introvert and his importunate physical desires.

Paul wanted to liberate him from the bondage as he was chained and bestowed – he tried to free his usual passion but failed at last. He turns his life into glue and frustration.

Lawrence Attempts to Resolve Emotional Crisis in Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers to resolve his deep emotional crisis by projecting it in fiction and thereby seeing it more clearly and acutely. In this novel, the eldest son of Morels, William Morel, feels the vacuum of emotional crisis.

William also falls victim to his mother’s claustrophobic love, and it is a painful realization to him that his life is rooted in his mother, and he cannot wrench himself away from her.

William Morel falls in love with Gyp and wants to marry her, but since the mother disapproves of her, he is foolish enough to let go of her. He is torn between his hankering and adult sexual relationship and his little boy relationship with his mother.

Final Words

So, the love and tension between intellect and emotion among the principal characters constitute the novel’s plot.

Sons and Lovers shows Lawrence’s attitude of love or sex and their complexities in the material society during the war-time and post-war periods. 

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