Here is a critical analysis of the relationships in D. H. Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers'.
D. H. Lawrence's perpetual search for the archetypal human relationship affects all his fiction and particularly Sons and Lovers, his coming of age novel. It is here that his preoccupation with the love ethic and the profound split caused by the imbalance or "power cast," of most relationships are so nakedly revealed.
The incomplete and imperfect relationships of Sons and Lovers are among the most discussed and analyzed in English Literature. Paul Morel's imprisoning relationship with his mother cripples all his other relationships. Early on it is evident that Mrs. Morel substitutes attachment fir her sons for the broken connection with her husband, and what results is her certain domination over Paul in particular. What begins as a warm, wholesome attachment between mother and child later becomes shaded with incestuous overtones and ends as the controlling force in Paul's life.
When Paul is born his has already turned away from physical responsiveness to her husband, and indeed to everything, except for her love of flowers and the flowers of her womb, her children. The movement of the mother away from normal relationships lies heavily on Paul, and caught, as it is in the life cycle of blooming and dying vegetation, seems doomed toward death. The result for Paul seems to be the inability to respond to the women in his life both sexually and unself-consciously.
With Miriam, his first love, Paul's primary contact is spiritual and cerebral, and the once mutual attraction crumbles into bitterness, hurt and rejection, because neither can respond to their "physical life force" or integrate it into their attempted communion of souls. Part of the difficulty in this relationship, Lawrence seems to be implying, is that Miriam's attraction to Paul is attracted, that she rejects the spontaneous physical response available to them and prefers "the higher level of affection and spiritual communion and intellectual interchange." This obstruction seems a consequence of her sex, class and environment resulting in a kind of liberalization of womankind through education, a theme which Lawrence continues to treat in later novels.
When Paul, physically aroused, finds no natural response in the girl who seems to love him, he is confused, helpless, and becomes even cruel. Unable to assert himself, or even to accept as natural his unquenched longings he is unable to continue in the mental/spiritual relationship with the girl""because his mother alone already owns his soul. The relationship is ruptured, Paul's personality suffers a kind of tearing or splitting, another favorite image in Lawrence, and in his next relationship Paul realizes at some unconscious level he must leave his soul somewhat free for his mother and participate on a kind of detached physical level.
Thus, in his relationship with Clara, it is the primarily bodily maleness of Paul bonding with the primarily bodily femaleness. Obviously the danger is to oversimplify the Paul/Miriam and Paul/Clara relationships. It is true that the contact with Clara puts Paul at least temporarily into richer contact with his own body, his phallic consciousness, as Lawrence would say, whereas in his sterile relationships with his mother and Miriam Paul has had to forego this fuller consciousness. Now he experiences what he believes is a kind of paradisiacal kind of love and fulfillment. After lovemaking he refers to coming "out of some dark current of unconsciousness" to be "carried by life" in love.
Yet, a novice, Paul fears the powers Clara has over him and finally lets their relationship wither as the demands of a sick and dying mother call him home. At this time in his life, when Paul seems most aware of his mother's hold on him, when he himself is apparently sucked into the drift toward death at her side, he is drawn into another relationship perhaps as fruitless and death-signifying, the one with Baxter Dawes.
Is this relationship with Dawes Paul's initiation in homosexual love? It seems so only in the most general sense. True, Paul fights bodily with Dawes, often a metaphor for homosexual bonding: an accepted kind of surrogate sexual experience between men. The bloody and almost unconscious participation in the fight does seem to initiate him into a more vital awareness of his own physical presence. After Paul recuperates from this violent loss of a virginity of sorts, a kind of courtship with Dawes begins, with Paul visiting the ailing man, bringing gifts, even showing affection and setting him up in new lodgings and a job.
Frank O'Connor sees the Paul/Dawes relationship as possibly one in which Paul Morel reencounters the father of his life, and thus his own masculinity through the presence of a virile, less spiritual person in whom the "dark consciousness" reigns. This analogy seems plausible considering Paul's efforts at reconciling Dawes and his wife, a kind of substitution for reconciling his own mother and father.
But this aspect of the relationship, Paul as reconciler, becoming almost passive and non-participant in the ensuing relationship seems one more way Lawrence symbolizes a true coming together of persons, as if only through Paul can the broken relationship come again to be melded together.
In any case, all the relationships in Sons and Lovers seem to involve power struggles:Mrs. Morel wrenches power from her husband by turning from his sexual presence and then dominating, even emasculating her sons; she controls Paul's devotion through the imposition of her values and aspirations and thus weights down that relationship.
Miriam, apparently passive and devoted to Paul, is in effect constantly trying to assert her will over his. To possess him, he fears, and that love disintegrates. Clara accuses Paul of controlling how much of himself he will give to her or take back of her in return, complaining that he can't or won't "come out" to her. And Paul controls their relationship timewise, dissolving it when it seems superfluous to him.
He also initiates the relationship with Dawes, except for the older man's early attempts to engage him in combat, thus drawing him out of passivity and finally only allowing him to reassert his rights with Clara under his (Paul's) domination.
The balance of power in relationships sees to be an essential concern of D. h. Lawrence, since it is appears over and over again to be responsible for the death of love. Lawrence's men and women will not be controlled, possessed or lost in another individual's reality. Relationship to them must not be a mere matter of perfect blending with the resultant loss of selfhood, they are telling us. Nor can strong relationships be wrought of outright possession of one by the other, but rather, through a delicate balance, achieved somehow in terms of recognition of otherness and of the primal selfness. Which itself can only be recognized, even shaped, in encountering the other, unencumbered, and free.
Lawrence's life itself would illustrate the struggle to achieve balance in relationships, and definition of the self as wrought against the outlines of another being. But that is material for another essay, surely with its own echoes of Sons and Lovers.
