Sons and Lovers
"Bildungsroman, a form of fiction which allows the novelist to recreate through the maturing of his protagonist some of his own remembered intensity of experience" (Nivin, Alastair; pg. 34) D.H. Lawrence re-created his own life experience through the writing of Son's and Lovers, an intensely realistic novel set in a small English mining town, much akin to the town in which he was raised. The son of a miner, Lawrence grew up with a father much like the character of Mr. Morel in Son's and Lovers. Morel (as the father is called) is an ill tempered, uneducated, and rather crude man. A man with little ability to express his feelings to his wife and family, who love him dearly despite the fact that he was seldom cordial to any of them. "Lydia (Lawrence's mother) was high-minded and pious. She had been a schoolteacher and had written poetry. She hated dirt and drink and poverty." (Segar, Keith; pg.11) Lydia met her husband Arthur at a family function and they married only a year later. "It was an attraction of opposites which could not last. Arthur was irresponsible and poor." (pg.11) While the two loved each other dearly, their differences caused many of the problems that arose later on in Lawrence
9) that ran down Victoria Street, where Lawrence was born. " Both Lawrence and Paul suffered the similar consequences of turning from their father, allowing themselves to be completely absorbed and obsessed with their mother. And in his desperation Paul capitulated and gave into Miriam's affection by asking her to marry him; but Miriam declined his proposal. 28)The other woman in Paul's life is Miriam, who is an extremely ideal woman, "presented as a mother surrogate" but Paul rejects her because she is not exactly like his mother. The latter of course never were given the chance to live down Paul's ideals about his mother, who appears to be almost saintly in his eyes. From the various sources that I encountered it was obvious that Lawrence felt that he had some sort of strong tie to his mother that would cause him to write a character like Paul, who it seems is a vaguely obscured and a little exaggerated version of himself. It also allowed Paul to embrace manhood, which until that time he had been protected by his mother skirts, this was a frightening fact to accept, as newly abandoned man, feeling much like an orphaned child of three. "The bottoms consisted of six blocks of miners' dwellings, two rows of three, like the dots on a blank-six domino, and twelve houses in a block.
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Acceptance Essays
