Article 1051

KIJELL/JAN-JUN2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A4 ISSN:2349-4921
IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 6.9071
KAAV INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
& LINGUISTICS
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS IN D.H. LAWRENECE’S

NOVEL SONS AND LOVERS
MS. MOHINI KAUSHIK

Net qualified
Assistant Professor
in AMM Bhiwani
ABSTRACT
David Herbert Lawerence 1885-1930 Novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic playwright and
essayist. He was born at Eastwood, Nottin ghamshire, and educated at Nottingham High School and
University college, Nottingham. His father was a coal-miner, his mother from a family with genteel
aspirations; emotional friction between the parents and Lawrence’s close relationship with his mother, left
important traces in his later writing. He was subject to illness, including lung infections, from a very early
age and ill health dogged him throughout his life culminating in his death from tuberculosis at the age of
44. In 1901 a number of his poems were submitted by his friend from youth, jessie chambers, to Ford
Madox Ford of The English Review and these were published in the November issue. His novel sons and
Lovers (1913), which draws on Lawrence’s childhood and contains a portrayal of Jessie chambers, has
always been one of his most popular books.
The novel is largely autobiographical and reflects Lawrence’s life at East wood, Nottinghamshire,
before he left home. The novel has two parts. The first part has six chapters. Part two has nine chapters.
The first chapter begins with the marriage of walter morel and gertrude. Soon Gertrude finds Morel coarse
and indifferent. She gets disillusioned. Her attempts to correct morel fall. He is irresponsible and given to
drinking. He is indifferent and falls to reciprocate the affection and devotion shown by his wife. The first
child is born. But Morel quarrels with his wife and after sometime the discord moves towards
estrangement. When the second child Paul is born. Mrs. Morel shifts her love and loyalty to her children.
She builds a small world of her own with her children. This makes Mr. Morel more brutal and antogonistic
towards his wife. Morel suffers from brain inflammation and is confined to his bed. Now Gertrude feels
her responsibility as a wife and attends on her husband. This brings the husband and wife together. This
results only in the birth of a third child Arthur. But this does not last long. Mr. Morel breaks away, Mrs.
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8

Morel once again becomes assertive and emotionally attached to her children. She saves her children from
the miserable collier’s life. The first son gets a decent job in London. This causes separation between
Gertrude and the first son William. Naturally Gertrude turns to Paul, her second son.
Lawrence one said, “one, sheds one’s sickness in books.” This is true of sons and lovers. All the
novels of Lawrence are more or less autobiographical as they deal with the events as well as the emotions
of his own life but sons and Lovers is the most autobiographical event of Lawrence’s novels. The first
draft of the novel was named ‘Paul Morel’ and the degree of the author in movement with the central
characters has led some critics to read the book as an apologia rather than a novel. The chief characters and
the central situation are quite clearly taken from Lawrence’s own early life. Lawrence senior was a minor
in Eastwood on the Nottingham. Shire Derbyshire border, uncouth and often drunk, with no formal
education but a certain openness of nature and zest for life which made him popular among his work
mates. He married a woman who was in many ways his direct opposite. She was a crucial rung above him
on the social ladders, belonging to the shabby-genteel lower middle class. Her religious outlook was that of
a narrow congregationalism quite at odds with his free and easy hedonism. Arthur Lawrence was not a
literate. His wife Lydia Beardsall was a school teacher. Her husband depised her middle class
respectability. The masculine social teacher. Her husband despired her middle class responsibility. The
masculine social life of a midland mining village into which he settled with genial acceptance with the new
atmosphere she tried with desperate resolution to realise vicariously through her children those ideals of
success, happiness and social esteem of which she herself had been thwarted. Her married life was a
constant battle with her husband. She found solace only in her children. After 25 years of married life, she
died of cancer.
The domestic background of the morels is drawn from life so to a very great extent is that of the
Leivers and willy farm. Jessie chambers is the Miriam in the novel. She was a very remarkable person in
her own right. She shared the intelligence and youthful appetite of Lawrence for literature and ideas. She
seems also to have had the capacity to bring out in him that almost subcutaneous sensitivity to experience
which in the hallmark of Lawrence’s writing. Much of ‘A personal Record’ is a moving account of the
real-life relationship between Lawrence and Miss chambers and it ends by showing how. Under the
dominance of his mother, Lawrence distorted the actual relationship between himself and the girl’. It is
impossible not to respond to the dignity and candour of Jessie chambers’ story or to remain unmoved by
the sense of betrayal which vibrates through it. It is quite understandable that the reader’s first reaction on
reading Jessie chambers’ memoir and the other evidence relating to the triangular relationshiping between
Lawrence, his mother and Jessie should be very similar to Jessie’s own. Lawrence’s responsibilities in his
private relationship are one thing, his responsibilities as a novelist are quite another. To equate the two is
to confuse the truth of history with the truth of fiction. The truth the novelist was trying to convey has to be
judged in terms of vividness, internal consistency and inclusiveness of his vision rather than by its
accuracy as a chronicle of what in fact happened at a given time and place. The account of the characters in
9

their relation to each other and the fictional world they inhabit and the author’s attitude to them as it
appears in the details of the novel, not a measuring-off of the fictional characters against their real-life
counterparts. It should be remembered ‘Never trust the artist trust the tale.’
We may equate Lawerence with Paul Morel, his father with Walter Morel, his mother with
Gertrude, his elder brother William Morel, his sister Ada with Annie, Jessie chambers with Mirian but not
without a difference. Similarly, the geography and events can also be compared. There are many parallels
and identities between the real life events and those in the fictional world.
Jessie chambers in her book D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record confesses that sons and Lovers is
an autobiographical novel that has the story of his mother’s married life as focus. Lawrence had elected to
deal with the big and difficult subject of his family and the interactions of the various relationships. She
points out Lawrence’s strange obsessions with his mother. He wanted to make his mother Supreme and he
had to make many distortions. This had caused many deviations or differences between the real life of
Lawrence and his hero. But the novel definitely is autobiographical though there may be differences
between real life and art.
As middleton Muray says, sons and Lovers is an intimate life history of the youth of a genius, and
as a significant act. But we see the artist more than the son in the novel. In real life, his father was almost
the pure animal in the good and bad senses of the phrases-warm, quick, careless, irresponsible, living in
the moment and a liar. The mother was responsible and heroic. In sons and Lovers, Lawrence makes a
great effort to held the balance ‘fairly between them. He would have liked to excuse the father to make him
nobler than he could be she destroyed him. She injured and hurt and scarred herself, but she lost none of
her worth.
The mother withdrew from the father and the estrangement had happened before Lawrence was
born. But in the novel a lovely and tender passage describe the sudden birth of her devouring love for the
frail little boy with blue eyes like her own. The sudden resolve of her heart was fulfilled and lavishly, she
made it up in love a hundred fold to the child. As middleton murray says: “He became, as was inevitable in
such a case, abnormally sensitive. He expanded preternaturally in this warm atmosphere of love. His
capacity for experience was unusually great, so likewise was his shrinking from it. A hungry desire for
contact of the same intimate kind as that which he and his mother lavished upon each other was
counterpoised by an anguished fear of it. At fourteen, he was a rather small and rather finely made boy,
with clark brown hair and light blue eyes. His face was becoming … rough-feathered, almost rugged…
and it was extraordinarily mobile.’
Usually he looked as if he saw things, was full of life, and warm; then his smile, like his mother’s,
came suddenly and was very lovable; and then, when there was any clog in his soul’s quick running, his
10

face went stupid and ugly. He was the sort of boy that becomes a clown and a lout as soon as he is not
understood, or feels himself held cheap; and, again, is adorable at the first touch of warmth.
He suffered very much from the first contact with anything. When he was seven, the starting
school had been a nightmare and a torture to him. But afterwards he liked it. He grew with his soul
sensitized utterly to the determination and the suffering of his mother in the long, unending struggle with
her husband. The antagonism was manifest and voilent, more terrifying but less subtly disintegrating.
There were robursts of drunkeness and downright brutality on the father’s part and they were very fearful
but they belonged to a child’s world. The father does not come home from the pity his dinner waits, the
potatoes go dry. A hundred to one he has stayed drinking at the public house: but there is the agonising
chance that something bad may have happened in the pit. If he comes home with too much bear in him, it
will be bad; if he is brought home on a stretcher, or jolted off over the cobbles in the ambulance to the
hospital, it will be worse or perhaps, if the injury is not too bad, it may be better. For there is the club
money, and the ten shillings a weak that the men of his stall put aside, which together makes more than the
twenty-five shillings he has been giving lately. And, if it is beer, the worst won’t happen, for he is in his
heart afraid of mother. But then, once or twice, he has done evil things-cut her head open by flinging a
drawer at her. There is stil the fear. The children listen, with indrawn breath and thumping hearts, to the
angry voices contending, one hot, one could in anger, mingled inextricably and for ever with the shrieking
of the ash-tree in the wind.
A fearful childhood, judged from one point of view but from another how rich in the elemental
drama that a child could understood and a man never forget. They cloaved like champions to their mother.
They despised their father. His father slunk away. Inevitably the mother’s starved spirit sought satisfaction
through her sons. When the eldest died, the youngest son became her man. Paul Morel decides “she is to
live the life, of which she had been cheated, through him; he would bring the spiritual fulfilment she
longed for.” He had no ambition for himself but all for her.
Thus we can say that Sons and Lovers is the story of Paul Morel’s desperate attempts to break
away from the tie that was strangling him. All unconsciously his mother had roused in him the stirrings of
sexual desire. She had, by sheer intensity of her diverted affection made him a man before his time. For
example when Paul fall sick, he had the first realisation thus:
“Paul was very ill. His mother lay in bed at nights with him; they could not afford a nurse. He
grew worse, and the crisis approached. One night, he tossed into consciousness in the ghastly, sickly
feeling of dissolution, when all the cells in the body seem in intense irritability to be breaking down, and
consciousness makes a last flare of struggle, like madness:
‘I s’ll die, mother !’ he cried, having for breath on the pillow.
She lifted him up, crying in a small voice;
‘oh, my son- my son !”
11

Work cited:
• Butler, Lance St. John. D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. Essex: Longman, 1980.
• D.H. Lawrence: A collection of critical Essays. Ed. Mark Spilka. U.S.A. Prentice-Hall, 1963.
• D.H. Lawrence: A critical study of the Major Novels and other writings. Ed. A.H. Gomme. U.K.:
The Harvester Press, 1978.
• Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers. U.K. York Press, 2004.
• Salgado, Gamini. D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers. U.K. : The camelot press, 1966.
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KIJELL/JAN-JUN2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A4 ISSN:2349-4921

IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 6.9071

KAAV INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS IN D.H. LAWRENECE’S

MS. MOHINI KAUSHIK

She lifted him up, crying in a small voice;

‘oh, my son- my son !”

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