Sons and Lovers. D. H. Lawrence

Collins Classics

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       Life & Times

      Post-Victorian Britain

      David Herbert Lawrence was a creative talent who consistently tested the boundaries of acceptability through his work. He viewed post-Victorian Britain as morally bankrupt due to the effects of industri-alization and the associated changes in social structure and was generally regarded as antiestablishment by his contemporaries. The sexual content of his literature was considered by many at the time as little more than pornography prose. While other writers merely implied instances of sexual encounter in their work, Lawrence wrote detailed descriptive accounts of his character’s sexual exploits. He also dared to suggest that class divides were crossed for want of sexual gratification and for that he became something of a social pariah.

      In his third novel; Sons and Lovers (1913), Lawrence explores the Oedipus complex – an unhealthy affection between a mother and her sons. The analytical psychologist Sigmund Freud had coined the term in 1910 and his work on psychology was very new and enticing during that period. Lawrence wrote the book, drawing upon and interpreting his own relationship with his mother. Sons and Lovers explores how difficult it can be for cosseted sons to escape the emotional ties of their mothers. The basic theme is that the protagonist, Paul Morel, always feels that his mother owns his soul even when he breaks away and takes a lover. He can therefore never fully give his soul to a lover.

      Lawrence was also reportedly sexually confused in his early life. He had intimacies with young men as well as women and although in the book there are no homosexual encounters, his use of the term ‘lovers’ does suggest that Lawrence was hinting at gender ambiguity. The book shocked polite society as it was, because the plot could be boiled down to being a contest between love and lust. The first son dies from the metaphorical crossfire between his mother and his lover, while the second is left emotional bereft and forlorn following his own battle.

      Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Lawrence married a German divorcee named Frieda Weekley. He also publicly voiced his anti-war views which were at odds with the majority of the British Public who displayed a strong fighting spirit and will to win. The German connection and his expressed contempt meant that Lawrence and his wife were treated with a good deal of suspicion. In addition to this, Lawrence was investigated for obscenity in his writing. Everything came to a head when he and his wife were accused of spying for the Germans. They lived on the Cornish coast and were accused of signalling information to German U-boats. By 1917 the Lawrences had been forced to relocate to central England, away from the coastline, with use of the Defence of the Realm Act.

      With the capitulation of the Germans in 1918 the war was ended and the Lawrences opted for voluntary exile abroad. In 1919 they moved to Italy and spent three years exploring southern Europe and a few years later in 1922 they emigrated to the US via Australia. Eventually Lawrence’s ill health forced them back to Europe where he received treatment for tuberculosis.

      Lady Chatterley’s Lover

      In his final years he drafted his most notorious novel; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was published in 1928, two years before his early death at the age of 44. The book caused an absolute outrage and was banned from publication in England until 1960. It was in the Sixties that Penguin publishing house took the case for its publication to court and a trial began which helped to redefine the British attitudes to sex and literature.

      Lady Chatterley’s Lover was considered entirely unacceptable because it broke a number of rules. Firstly, it had a working-class man indulging in coitus with an upper-class woman. Secondly, it went into explicit detail about their sexual intercourse. Thirdly it used words that were banned from print at that time. All in all, it was too lewd for the British to even consider reading.

      It has been suggested that Lawrence wrote his final novel as ‘one in the eye’ for the British in retaliation for his treatment during the war years. There is probably an element of this in his motive, but he also saw himself as a voice of truth. Having come from humble beginnings, he had a problem with the veneer of respectability that the British upheld in his day. So, his instinct was to tear it away in the only way he knew how: by deconstructing British society and exposing what he saw as the truth.

      Lawrence was one of the first novelists to realize that the ability to write brings power and the ability to commit one’s views to paper imbues them with potency. It is because the ownership of those views can be passed to others and disseminated to many more. What is more, they live on independent of their originator, as was illustrated perfectly by Lawrence’s untimely death.

      Lady Chatterley’s Lover demonstrated that the animal is still in us all, no matter how we may pretend to be above our instinctual urges. Our evolutionary success owes itself to our desire to procreate as organisms regardless of social factors and that is essentially the theme of the book. Lawrence felt that to address such a primal behaviour deserved the use of explicit and expletive language to drive the point home. The attempt to do this in the 1920s was perhaps Lawrence’s biggest mistake – it wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s that Britain was ready for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the jury at the trial decided after five days at court that the book did not subvert morals or religion. On its first day of publication, Lady Chatterley’s