《儿子与情人》主要人物及分析

《儿子与情人》主要人物及分析

［Key words］Sons and Lovers,D.H Lawrence,characters

[WTBZ]

I. Introduction to the Author’s Biographical Facts

D.H Laurence was born in a village in Nottingham shire. His father was a coal miner with little education; but his mother, daughter of a middle class family, thought that she had married beneath her and desired to have her sons well educated so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers.

As a working-class boy Lawrence underwent a social dislocation. In his opinion those profit-seeking capitalists crazily worshipped the materialism and made use of the mechanisms of matter to inflict the workmen, the society and the earth. Human beings are turned into inanimated matter. It is the agonizing concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence’s writing.

As the leading character, the picture of Paul’s childhood is as

accurate and detailed a picture of Laurence’s own boyhood. Like Paul, Lawrence was intensely attached to his mother, Lydia Lawrence. His father, Arthur Lawrence, and his mother fought constantly, so children produced frightening shades. In their hearts Lawrence liked painting and exhibited other signs of creativity and extraordinary intelligence. And like Paul, Lawrence fell in love with the farm Haggs and half in love with the girl, who lived on it, Jessie Chambers, who became the Miriam in the novel.

The story starts with the marriage of Paul’s parents. Mrs Morel is a strong-willed, intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner, Walter Morel. After an initial stage of happiness in their marriage, the class difference between them starts to estrange them from each other. The disillusion in her husband makes her lavish all the affections upon her sons. Thus, the sons gradually come under the strong influence of the mother in affections, aspirations and mental habits and see their father with their mother’s eyes.

Paul’s psychological development is traced with great subtlety, especially his emotional conflicts in the course of his early love affairs with Miriam and Clara. Paul depends heavily on his mother’s love and help to make sense of the world around him. But in order to become an

independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions. However, Paul is proved to be incapable of escaping the overpowering emotional bond imposed by his mother’s love. So he fails to achieve a fulfilling relationship with either girl. Finally his mother has died and he is left alone in despair. But the book ends with Paul’s rejection of despair and his determination to face the unknown future.

Ⅱ. Brief Reviews on Sons and Lovers

Graham Hough, in his thorough 1956 study of Lawrence, thinks “the Paul and Miriam chapters are the essential core. Adolescent love has been treated in fiction both before and since, tenderly or ironically; but never with such penetration….”\[1\]82 He notes the works will remain Lawrence’s Masterpiece.

Anthony Beal feels that the Miriam section is the most strained part, and the depiction of the Morel family is the most dazzling achievement in the book.

Ronald Draper, the most recent surveyor of the Lawrence canon, writes “Mrs Morel is given over sympathetic treatment. The intense love that Lawrence felt for his own mother is probably responsible for a disequilibrium in a presentation of Paul’s mother and father which is harmful to the main theme.”\[1\]83