About this title: Based very closely on D.H. Lawrence's own life, SONS AND LOVERS (1913) tells the story of young Paul Morel, son of the troubled union of an educated, upwardly mobile mother and an ill-tempered, unlettered coal miner father who speaks in a broad dialect. Although in later life Lawrence regretted his brutal portrait of his father, the hero of the novel is most definitely his mother's boy, becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his mean, impoverished home in a Nottinghamshire coal town. He is drawn to a young woman named Miriam (based on Lawrence's old flame Jessie Chambers), with whom he reads ...
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"Read my senior year of high school when I worked on a semester-long project researching Lawrence's life and writing a paper about this autobiographical novel. Lawrence blew my mind in those days and forever earned a spot among my most beloved authors. Lady Chatterley's Lover will always be my favorite of his books, but I had a particular appreciation for this one because he dug deep into his own life and his relationship with his mother and his spurned first love to write it, and didn't paint an altogether favorable portrayal of himself. I really must re-read this."
"Although it is perfectly clear that D H Lawrence, while writing Sons and Lovers, was heavily influnced by the mainstream movement of Psychological Realism that started to take shape in the early 20th century, he could not fully embody the soul of the movement into his novel.
Psychological Realism is simply shedding light on real aspects of life (events, characters.. etc) from a psychological point of view. However, that does not mean the work of art should turn into a blunt scientifically-put psychological analysis, ignoring all the aesthetic factors that make this "work" belong to "art." In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence completely engaged himself in delineating the minutest emotions and actions of his characters with a detailed description of the reason behind the occurrence of each, which leaves the reader completely lost in a huge psychological maze, making no heads or tails of the characters' true feelings and needs! Besides, the lack of events and Lawrence's exaggeration of using dry psychology have given the story an interminable effect that stickingly accompanies the reader throughout the novel.
Nevertheless, the novel is considered one of the most famous works in modern history that vividly manifest the well-known Oedipus Complex through the realtionship between Paul Morel and his mother which has clearly controlled the the young man's decisions and love relationships. Mrs. Morel to Paul is "a goddess"... the infinite portrayal of "the perfect woman." She is the reason why he lives everyday... why he pursues his dreams. Everything he does is just to please her. The other female characters are only fragments of women to him; Miriam is the soul lacking the body, while Clara is the body devoid of the soul. That's why the novel, which mainly tells the story of Paul's life, ends with the mother's death, as if Paul Morel's life itself has stopped... ceased to exist.
Bottomline, I can't call Sons and Lovers an enjoyable novel, yet it can be considered an indulgent autobiographical psychological analysis of the writer's childhood and youth."
"The first third of this book is terrific. The middle half(ish) of this book is painful. And the end is very good. On the whole the book is average and clearly very imbalanced. This was not the book I was expecting. I had this image of D.H. Lawrence as an idealized romantic like the poets. This book is not a tale of great and beautiful passion, but of the struggle to find that perfect love. The single most important word was "hate," and the most used phrase was some variation of "and s/he hated him for it." This was often used in reference to some characteristic of the the hater or some positive characteristic of the hatee rather than something actually bad regarding the person hated. For the majority of the book, this annoyed me greatly until I realized that this was the core. Hate, and therefore love, is more a reflection of us than something of the other person. Part I of the book gives an incredibly well done slice-of-life of the colliers of central England. The tale of the mother, in her less than ideal marriage, raising her children was an enjoyable read even as it was hard to watch her struggle. She is a fascinating and likable character. Unfortunately, as soon as the book shifted focus to her sons, not only was it less enjoyable, she was less likable. Paul is whiny, annoying, and for me hard to understand. Lawrence uses absurd imagery like "to her talking to him was like fingering the protoplasm of life." Fancy-sounding, but I have no idea what talking to him was like to her. Therefore, I couldn't follow his motivations and am still not entirely sure what his deal was. His mother fought him the whole time, but she seemed incapable of picking her battles making her less sympathetic. The beginning of the book is so good it got this book up to a 3."
"Sorry, I hated it. The writing is about as subtle as a sledgehammer (seriously, how many times can a character's 'eyes be filled with cruelty'?), and none of the characters is likeable or even compelling. When it was published, it was one of the first books to examine the lives of lower class people, and to discuss sexuality openly (parts of this read like a bad romance novel), but neither of things is novel in this day and age and, to me at least, the writing is just not fantastic on its own. The book is highly autobiographical, and perhaps DH Lawrence was thus too close to this story to demonstrate his characters' feelings with action or words, rather than just explicitly stating what is going on inside their heads. Though a hoarde of English profs may despise me for saying this, it read like lazy writing to me. Boring, and real slog to get through."
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