Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The very beautiful depictions of the life of a coal-mining community and the factory are worth it. A great novel can take you to a place and time foreign to you.
The protagonist’s mother keeps him in a state of stasis. It’s a classic failure to launch. He’s also romantically suspended between these two women. He has a mental / aesthetic relationship with Miriam and he lusts for Clara.
(There’s a scene where Paul says to Clara, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust / If the Lord won’t have you, then the devil must” … and then stares at her bosom. The hidden rhyme, of course, is ‘lust’.)
The mother dies, and he comes to the major crisis of his life. He’s been completely devoted to her, tortured by that devotion but committed to it. He hasn’t been his own person. He’s existed, but he hasn’t lived.
It’s a long novel; but it ends too early.
Will he seize his own life? Choose one of the women and commit to her? Who knows? Whether he does it or not, it happens after the end of the novel.
And it would be fine to show Paul’s life after his mother dies. It would balance the very long section that happens before he was born.
It’s almost a novelistic illustration of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Miriam is Part 1; Clara is Part 2.
There’s a phrase early on in the book, “the rights of men and husbands.” It calls to mind right away the title, ‘sons and lovers’. Two classes of people in the plural, the second narrower than the first. Which suggests that the secret title is ‘the rights of sons and lovers’.
And my own idea is that the book is about rights. Does Paul have the right to disappoint his mother? Does he have to justify her life by succeeding in the things she wishes she could have done?
Does he have the right to disappoint these two women? Do they have the right to demand of him what they do? Does he have to be a permanent chaste French-language-and-art companion to Miriam? And what does Clara want from him anyway? Whatever it is, he clearly doesn’t have it available for her.
I should mention that the landscape descriptions are great. And that the prose is pretty navel-gazey. An awful lot of contemplation goes on, with not enough action to quite justify it.