Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence(1913)
Extract
She had a passion for him that nothing could extinguish.
The coal pit's headstocks stand against the Nottinghamshire sky, and in their shadow a mother pours all her thwarted ambition into her sons. D.H. Lawrence published this intensely autobiographical novel in 1913, transmuting his own upbringing in Eastwood into a study of love so close it becomes a cage. Gertrude Morel, married to a miner she has come to despise, binds her children to her with a devotion that is also a kind of violence. Paul, the artist son, cannot love any woman without betraying his mother, cannot love his mother without destroying himself. Lawrence writes the body as no English novelist had before, making physical sensation the language of the soul. The breaking free, when it comes, costs everything and saves everything.
If you loved this
Joyce draws the same portrait of a young man escaping his origins, but Stephen reaches for art where Paul reaches for women.
Salinger gives adolescent alienation the same raw nerve, but without the mother at the centre.
Lawrence returns to the same territory with more ambition, and the struggle between men and women has only intensified.