University of Novi Sad

Faculty of Philosophy

Department of English
language

The Unconventional Relationships in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover

Student: Supervisor:

Evelin Đilvesi Prof. Dr Zoran Paunović

Novi Sad, 2018

 UNIVERZITET U NOVOM SADU

FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET

Studijski program master akademskih studija

Engleski jezik i književnost

Evelin Đilvesi

ZAVRŠNI RAD

Nekonvencionalni odnosi u romanima Sinovi i Ljubavnici i Ljubavnik Lejdi Četerli D. H.

Lorensa

The Unconventional Relationships in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Lady

Chatterley’s Lover

Ovaj rad ne sadrži oblike prisvajanja ili zloupotrebe radova drugih autora.
Ovaj rad ne sme da bude predmet nezakonitog prisvajanja ili zloupotrebe od strane
drugih autora.

This thesis does not contain any form of illegal appropriation or abuse of other
authors' works.
This thesis must not be an object of illegal appropriation or abuse by other authors.

Novi Sad, 2018 Potpis studentkinje

2
CONTENT

CONTENT..................................................................................................................................3

ABSTRACT................................................................................................................................4

SAŽETAK...................................................................................................................................5

1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................6

1.1. THE VICTORIAN SOCIETY.........................................................................................6

1.2. D. H. LAWRENCE AND MODERNISM.....................................................................11

2. SONS AND LOVERS..........................................................................................................13

2.1. MR. AND MRS. MOREL.............................................................................................13

2.2. MOTHER AND SONS..................................................................................................18

2.3. PAUL MOREL’S ROMANCES....................................................................................26

2. LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER.......................................................................................35

2.1. LADY CHATTERLEY’S MARITAL LIFE..................................................................37

2.2. LADY CHATTERLEY’S AFFAIR................................................................................45

CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................................55

List of pictures:.........................................................................................................................58

References:................................................................................................................................58

3
ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the unconventional character relationships in D. H. Lawrence’s novels

Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sons and Lovers (1913) portrays the damaging
circumstances of the writer’s early life, while his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
introduces Lawrence's late philosophy. Both novels are built upon atypical social interactions
which are represented in the way characters behave towards each other. The author of this
paper provides a descriptive outlook on the late Victorian social and moral conventions. Both
novels can be depicted as acts of Lawrence’s rebellion against the moral hypocrisy of the
early 20th century. He dealt with the transparency of the strict social codes and the seeming
reality of the Victorian moral. Thus, the aim of this thesis is to study relationships between
men and women and find out to what extent these relations are unconventional. In order to
answer the previous question, it is necessary to shed a light on Lawrence’s life and personal
crisis which are intertwined in the depth of these two novels. Therefore, another purpose of
this study is to detect the autobiographical elements embroidered in both plots. Finally, this
paper takes into consideration Lawrence’s approach to human consciousness and presents the
way every character is seeking his or her own piece of sense in the world of hopelessness.

Keywords: Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, unconventionality, Modernism,

Oedipus complex, human consciousness

4
SAŽETAK

Predmet istraživanja ovog rada su nekonvencionalni odnosi u romanima Sinovi i Ljubavnici i

Ljubavnik Lejdi Četerli Dejvida Herberta Lorensa. Sinovi i Ljubavnici (1913) prikazuju
surove okolnosti piščevog ranog perioda stvaranja, dok njegov poslednji roman, Ljubavnik
Lejdi Četerli (1928), predstavlja Lorensova pozna shvatanja. Oba romana su zasnovana na
netipičnim međuljudskim odnosima koji dolaze do izražaja u načinu na koji se likovi
ponašaju jedni prema drugima. Na samom početku, autorka ovog rada opisuje društvene i
moralne norme iz kasnog viktorijanskog perioda, na osnovu čega se utvrđuje stepen
nekonvencionalnosti odnosa između likova. Oba romana se mogu smatrati vidom Lorensove
pobune protiv licemerja ranog dvadesetog veka. Naime, Lorens se bavio prozirnošću strogih
društvenih zakona i varljivom realnošću viktorijanskog morala. Prema tome, istraživanje
muško-ženskih odnosa u ovim romanima je sprovedeno sa ciljem da se utvrdi do koje mere su
ti odnosi svojevrsni i nesvakidašnji. Da bi se na to pitanje odgovorilo, potrebno je prikazati
Lorensov život i njegove egzistencijalne krize na kojima se temelje ovi romani. Dakle, još
jedan cilj ovog rada je da otkrije autobiografske elemente koji se prepliću u oba zapleta. Na
samom kraju, autorka uzima u obzir Lorensov pristup ljudskoj svesti i predstavlja način na
koji svaki od likova traga za sopstvenim komadom smisla u svetu beznadežnosti.

Ključne reči: Sinovi i Ljubavnici, Ljubavnik Lejdi Četerli, nekonvencionalnost, modernizam,

Edipov kompleks, ljudska psiha

5
1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. THE VICTORIAN SOCIETY

When approaching the Victorian essence, one can get easily get lost in the obscure jungle of
social and moral conventions of the late 19th century. This cultural period has many hidden
complexities and contradictions. The author of this paper will offer an insight into the blurred
social framework by describing its predominant values.

The chief characteristics of this age are the birth and the growth of science, the rise of a new
utilitarian society, the explosion of Liberalism and the questioning of Christian ethics.
Mechanization and rapid technological advances marked the intellectual prosperity. The scars
of industrialization can be seen in the grounds of modernist literature. Lawrence was among
the realistic and therefore, controversial authors, who wrote about the social turbulences of
their time. Victorians felt that Christian doctrines focused on personal salvation, encouraged
egoism and neglected social virtues. An elaborate analysis of the Victorian temper resulted in
vast contradictions. The people were materialistic but religious, they appeared highly
confident, but they shivered with their own insecurities.

″We are told the Victorians were a poor, blind, complacent people; yet they were torn by
doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They were crass materialists, wholly
absorbed in the present, quite unconcerned with abstract verities and eternal values; but they
were also excessively religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past, and ready to
forgo present delights for the vision of a world beyond.″ (Buckley, 2008: 239)

Even though they seemingly respected moral conventions, they were severe individualists
who did not adhere to the matrix of tradition and culture. Emotionally, they were constantly
split between the force of good and the power of darkness. Their contradictory spirit can also
be detected in the denial of physical love and the conservative attitude towards sexual matters.
When in fact, they extended families and displayed the realistic details of their physical
relationships in writings. Without any blue-penciling, Lawrence conveyed the most intimate
and passionate paralysis of his community by using masked words. In the midst of the
Victorian cloudiness, there was absolute adherence to social norms, exemplified behavior, and
formality. On the other hand, child labor and prostitution were highly prevalent at the same
time. Thus, all the Victorians can be gathered under the sky of moral hypocrisy and social
6
snobbery. From aristocracy to the working class, respectability was the central and topmost
value which governed everyone’s mind. Also, respectability meant different things for men
and women. Victorian men were committed and successful at work, whereas the duty of
women was to stay at home and looked after children. For both genders, being chaste, sincere,
and polite and following the rules of social order was very important. Proper language,
honorable appearance, and acceptable behavior could be the definitions of the Victorian
integrity (Houghton, 1957: 184). Not until one scratches beneath the surface of the people’s
psyche, can one spot the neurotic and contaminated personalities shaped by the shrinking of
morality. The color of this age would be hazel, as it is a mixture of two or three shades and
can look different on each individual. In the same way, the multicolored Victorians are unique
in their alienation from each other. This estrangement was the result of the materialism which
developed into a struggle between social classes, making a new socioeconomic order. Certain
unavoidable historical changes, such as the World War I, led to numerous mental shifts from
peace to violence, from happiness to loss and despair, from faith to pessimism and decadence.
However, there was a lessening gender gap between men and women. By the 1890s, many
women made their way in the public area and found jobs in local government and economics.
Still, they were paid less than the standard male pay rate (Buckley, 2008:143). Even though
women aspired to achieve social equality with men, married women had no separate legal
identity, they could not sue their husbands nor enter into debts. Women rebelled against the
social order in which they could not find their voice. The words of Bachofen, one of the most
outstanding anthropologists who fought for women’s rights, suggested that mother right
preceded father right:

"That the children of a man and a woman living together as husband and wife should be
subject to the mother's authority and not the father's, be named after her and not after the
father, be her heirs and not the father's is simply incredible; and it is surely not rendered
credible by the statement that these singularities were the direct consequences of women
having been victorious in a war with men.″1.

Female power remained questionable during the mid-decades of the 19 th century. The social
educationalist tried to establish the principles of accepted and suitable womanly behaviour. It
was suggested that women possess a moral superiority which was best handled within the
1

John Ferguson McLennan, Studies in Ancient History (London: Macmillan, 1886), p. 324.
7
borders of one’s home. ″Angel in the house″ was the idealized notion of a married woman
who is naturally attached to only one place - the home. According to the Victorian ideology of
femininity, women are characterized by passivity and compliance as opposed to the masculine
strength and determination (Reader, 1967:110). Also, female sexuality, unlike that of the male,
could be only connected to childbirth and the bed shared with one’s beloved. Sexual matters
could not break away from the molds of moral expectations set by the hypocritical society. All
these values contribute to the creation of the Victorian lady who is a quiet, fragile and
obedient individual, a self-sacrificing wife and a natural mother. Maternal instinct was
connected to respectability and the expected code of living. Poovey (1988:8) argues:

″Maternal instinct was credited not only with making women nurture their children, but also
with conferring upon them extraordinary power over men. Women may have been considered
physically unfit to vote or compete for work, but, according to this representation, the power
of their moral influence amply compensated them for whatever disadvantages they suffered.″

Another example of the position of women in marriage is stated by Tosh (1999: 47), ″The
husband was to govern, the wife to manage; the husband to provide, the wife to distribute; the
husband to inform, the wife to nurture.″ Women’s roles were defined by their relationships
with men: they were naturally dependant on their husbands.

Moreover, there was always a highly established difference between a middle-class ″lady″ and
a working-class woman. Respectable upper-class ladies were expected to identify themselves
within the realms of the prescriptive Victorian virtues. The popularity of feminine ideal
demonstrates the influence of social class on relationships between men and women. The
aforementioned patriarchal roles of men and women are summarized in a poem by Alfred
Lord Tennyson, The Princess (1847).

″Man for the field and woman for the hearth;

for the sword, and for the needle she;
Man with the head, and women with the heart;
Man to command, and woman to obey;
All else is confusion. ″

Victorian society was deeply religious and disciplined in its submissiveness to Christianity.
The people visited the church every Sunday and attempted to enlighten family life based on

8
Christian values. There were many attemps to spread Christianity. For instance, missionaries
write sermons, theological treatises, and hymns. The Victorian age is referred to as the age of
Puritanism which emphasized the "purification" of church and society. Many consider the
society of the Victorian era as the most religious that the world had ever known. Christian
symbols were displayed everywhere. Religion dictated the rules in every sphere of daily life
including politics, marriage, and even physical intercourse. However, the grounds of religious
codes were shaken by the progress of science and technology. From the middle of the century,
science and reason started to attract the attention of the masses. This event carried the first
implication of the birth of the contradictory temper of the Victorian era. The church and its
validity began to be questioned in 1859 when Charles Darwin explained his theory of the
evolution of the species. This caused a major change in society because it contradicted the
biblical beliefs. Moreover, spiritualism was the most influential movement that did not fit into
norms of the standardized religion because it showed a great respect for death. Opposing to
the religious truth as the genuine truth, spiritualism did not request anyone to have blind faith.
By 1870s, this scientific movement encompassed mostly the upper and middle-class women,
specifically those who believed in the aforementioned ideal of womanhood. Spiritualist
literature treated women as symbols of charm, grace and beauty. Women were supposed to be
the embodiments of the highest moral and domestic virtues. Still, they were controlled by
rigid social rules and they had no authority. Spiritualism appealed to the people because it
offered knowledge about the afterlife. It showed that there is survival after the physical death
of the body. People were inspired by this movement, perhaps, because it offered them new
horizons and met their need for changes.

Another important belief which is tangled into the Victorian antagonistic spirit is Nietzsche’s
theory of nihilism meaning the ultimate emptying of culture and meaninglessness. Human life
has no purpose and individuals have no intrinsic values. Nihilist existence is condemned by
rootlessness and pessimism. According to Nietzsche, people are lost in the abyss of emptiness
and their attempts to find purpose and sense are absurd. In addition, Lawrence’s novels can be
seen as his ’voice messages’ stored in numerous nihilistic writings.

Social anthropologies dating back from the 1890’s displayed a new portrait of the society. The
hidden forms of demoralization were exposed: the idealized family of the Victorian middle
class was governed by no law of nature, monogamous marriage was only one of the various
human sexual possibilities. Women did not necessarily have only domestic and submissive

9
role, as well. Family life was built on unconventional patterns. Relationships between men
and women were not natural. They were, indeed, results of social and evolutionary struggles.
Promiscuity and sexual exploitation illustrated this stage of human relations after the period
of monogamy in which women represented spiritualism, and men, materialism. At this point,
in the modern Victorian family, women were less assertive, but more gentle and weak, while
men held the social and political power. This degradation of women was best demonstrated by
the fact that little faith was put in the meaning of marital ″love″. No mistake is made when
said that beneath the Victorian skin, it was only plastic. ″Marriage was born in brutal violence
and unwilling submission, yet the very control of man over woman opened the possibility of
love between the sexes.″ 2

Moral insecurity, anxiety, fear of the subconscious, mere hypocrisy and inner struggle are the
distinctive characteristics of the late Victorian society. On the grand shores of this age,
footprints of humanity, compassion and traditional virtues are almost lost in the tides of
history. The public stage of the Victorian drama remains open to visitors who have the
freedom to create their own interpretations of the masked puppets.

22
Sir John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (London: Longmans Green
and Co., 1870), p. 73.
10
1.2. D. H. LAWRENCE AND MODERNISM

Modernism arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and questioned many
traditional beliefs about human nature. It came as the result of the loss of faith and breaking
away with social norms. Its exceptionality lies in its constant search for shreds of meaning
and chunks of truth. Modernism can be viewed as an escape from social reality, but also, as a
continuation of the Victorian past (McCurdy, 1940:181).

The role of consciousness in human personality occupied the field of central literary themes.
The subject matter, form and style of literary works rejected the traditional patterns and
focused on unconventional character relationships. Separation from the community,
alienation, and hatred towards materialism lead to the creation of eccentric literary
compositions.

A merely shocking and quite extraordinary writer of the modernist era, David Herbert
Lawrence, felt the need to convey the realistic image of the society to which he was an utter
stranger himself. This paper will trace Lawrence’s identity and attitudes in his third and last
novels, both of which deal with family, class and sexual relationships. Before approaching
Lawrence’s novels, it is essential to provide access to his own life and social background. He
was born on September II, 1865 in Eastwood, a Nottinghamshire mining village. He was the
youngest of five children, and the most delicate. Still, at the age of ten, he was sent to work in
the coal-pit. His mother was a teacher, the daughter of a respectable engineer, whereas his
father was an illiterate coal miner. Lawrence was more than just influenced by his mother, he
even wrote his novels in the form which would appease her. He was so deeply upset by her
death, that he lost his self-identity. However, he grew apart from his father, an angry and
drunken man who could not face reality. He and his siblings were affected by the discrepancy
between the social backgrounds of his parents. Besides poverty, the children were exposed to
violent quarrels and stressful scenes. His life circumstances made him develop a strong
disconnection between mind and body. His works witness the strange and uncommon events
which shaped him into one of the most unconventional writers of the Victorian arena. His
vivid exploration of the physical world and his preoccupation with interpersonal involvement
culminated in a bad reputation. He received immense negative feedback because of his

11
rebellious thoughts. All of Lawrence’s emotional tremors left hints in his controversial and
misanthropic writings which sealed him off from society.

He worked as a clerk before he received a teaching certificate at the British School in

Eastwood. There, he met his first love, Jessie Chambers, his intellectual companion. Another
important woman in his life was Frieda Von Richthofen, the wife of his professor Ernest
Weekley. They immediately fell in love and Frieda left her husband and three children so as to
run away with Lawrence to Germany. Eventually, they got married and returned to England
before the war started. They had a stormy relationship which was passionately described in
his works. In 1928, He wrote his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel had been
banned until 1960 because of its detailed description of sex and use of direct sexual language
(Kerr VI). Lawrence died in the south of France in 1930, when he was only 45 years old.

Lawrence’s works should be interpreted with regard to his liberalism and courage when
illustrating unconventional relationships between men and women which will be discussed
elaborately in the following chapters. Accordingly, Lawrence’s legacy is his new orientation
to the world which proves once again that late Victorian England did not have mercy for those
artists who were courageous enough to go over the fence and be free.

12
2. SONS AND LOVERS

This section of the paper will shed light on the biographical and psychoanalytical perspectives
on the character relationships in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. It offers a panorama of
the human interface within the industrial working-class of Eastwood. In this chapter, the
complex development of the interactions among the protagonists is covered from the very
first to the last page of the novel. Firstly, it reveals the details of Mr. and Mrs. Morel’s married
life. Secondly, it analyzes the prominent relationship between mother and son, whereas the
third part of this chapter deals with Paul’s relationships with Miriam and Clara.

2.1. MR. AND MRS. MOREL

A mother of four, an absolutely flawless and dignified puritan, Gertrude Morel was married to
a well-built, illiterate miner with a hearty laugh. He mesmerized her from the moment they
met.

″She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She
realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at
evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his daily life, and with gaiety. She looked at him,
with a touch of appeal in her pure humility.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:11).

This feeling was mutual, Morel was enchanted by her deep religiousness as he tried to break
through the enigma of her personality. ″Walter Morel seemed melted away before her. She
was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:10)

These two opposite personalities decided to take the same road. However, their ways split
because their lifestyles did not go in the same direction. The elated colors of their marriage
soon began to lose volume. Morel turned out to be everything that she did not expect. Out of
all of his weaknesses, the first one to set sail was the fact that he was not the real owner of the
house they lived in. Mrs. Morel did not bear in mind her inner voice which predicted the
collapse of their marriage. ″Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to
open her heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without understanding.

13
This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of fear.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:12)

This confirms one of the unconventional layers in which their marriage was covered up. Mr.
Morel’s authority and power seemed to fade as life was throwing its obstacles. Soon enough,
he stopped being the embodiment of male supremacy. He got chained to his habit of staying
late and drinking with the miners. The traces of a caring father, who is, according to the moral
norms of the time, present in every turn of his children were lost in the beer aisle. He was
simply absent.

″He was shut from all family affairs. No one told him anything. The children, alone with their
mother, told her all about the day’s happenings, everything. Nothing had really taken place in
them until it was told to their mother. But as soon as the father came in, everything stopped.″
(D. H. Lawrence, 1993:56)

Lawrence paints a picture of a man whose run was downhill: Mr. Morel did not follow the
social conventions according to which a husband should have a morally and mentally strong
state of mind. The daily fights caused by drunkenness, the rage attacks and clenching of fists,
the loud cries and bitter insults produced violent electricity between the married couple. These
negative sparks between Mr. and Mrs. Morel exploded on their children who were deprived of
the most valuable possession in a family life: peace.

″Walter Morel was, at this time, exceedingly irritable. His work seemed to exhaust him. When
he came home he did not speak civilly to anybody. If the fire were rather low he bullied about
that – he grumbled about his dinner; if the children made a chatter he shouted at them in a
way that made their mother’s blood boil, and made them hate him.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:35)

The previous excerpt witnesses Mr. Morel’s break up with the default moral ideas and the
fake family harmony set by the social constraints. Behind the closed Victorian doors, conflict
and division took the seats at the table. The home of the Morels encompasses the decay of the
artificial society to which they desperately try to conform to. Though they have failed at some
moments, the so-called religiousness and moral pride have had their gifts: the Puritan culture
supported child prosperity, so Gertrude Morel gave birth four times.

14
 ″In her arms lay the delicate baby. Its deep blue eyes, always looking up at her unblinking,
seemed to draw her innermost thoughts out of her. She no longer loved her husband; she had
not wanted this child to come, and there it lay in her arms, and pulled at her heart.″

Despite the brutal and irritable manners of her husband, Mrs. Morel could not leave him,
whilst she no longer loved him. She was remote and attached to him at the same time. Her
emotional state is perfectly depicted in the following words: ″Each time you happen to me all
over again.″ (Edith Warton, 1920: The Age of Innocence, Book II, Chapter XXIX). By making
her crawl back to her husband and settle for the little respect she receives, Lawrence makes us
aware of the weak and indecisive character of Gertrude Morel. Likewise, Lawrence presented
the character’s anxious moments because of their economic struggles. Morel’s reckless way of
handling his income made his family feel awfully insecure. At least twice a week he came
home penniless. One’s manner of acting measures his or her true character. This was one of
the notions according to which people framed their lives.

″On Wednesday morning, Morel was penniless. So, while his wife was down the garden with
the child, he hunted in the top drawer of the dresser where she kept her purse, found it, and
looked inside. It contained a half-crown, two halfpennies, and a sixpence. So he took the
sixpence, put the purse carefully back and went out.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:39)

″He had done so twice before. The first time she had not accused him, and at the weekend he
had put the shilling again into her purse. So that was how she had known he had taken it. The
second time he had not paid back.″ In contrast to Morel’s fallen spirit, the public view of
domestic men implied the ability to work through any hardships and provide financial
security. Money, a major shaper of human relationships, was just one of the tools that
converted this family into prisoners of misery. ″Money, much money, has a really magical
touch to make a man insensitive and so to make him wicked.″3

Based on his actions, Mr. Morel could not be placed among the traditional father and husband
figures of the late Victorian era. Above all else, the character of Mr. Morel fears reality. He
cannot bear evidence of his fury and remoteness from the people who should, according to all
conventions, be his closest ones. He does not seek any help, instead, he remains wrapped up
in himself.

3
Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press,
1981), p.245.
15
″He lay and suffered like a sulking dog. He had hurt himself most; and he was the more
damaged because he would never say a word to her, or express his sorrow. He tried to wriggle
out of it. ‘It was her own fault,’ he said to himself. Nothing, however, could prevent his inner
consciousness inflicting on him the punishment which ate into spirit like rust, and which he
could only alleviate by drinking.” (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:37)

″She would have felt sorry for him, if he had once said, ‘Wife, I’m sorry.’ But no; he insisted
to himself it was her fault. And so he broke himself.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:38)

Mr. Morel failed the aspirations of his entire family. No one believed he could make any
rational decisions. He stood speechless at the gates of his tremendous shame. ″No one spoke
to him. The family life withdrew, shrank away, and became hushed as he entered. But he
cared no longer about his alienation. He always ran from the battle with himself.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:38). This is how Morel became the exact copy of Victorian bigots who
ignored reality and built a selfish world of their own. One of the unconventional issues of this
novel lies in the aforementioned Morel’s solipsistic nature. He would only look after himself.
The children felt homey only when he was away. ″There was a feeling of misery all over the
house. The children breathed the air that was poisoned, and they felt dreary. They were rather
disconsolate, did not know what to do, what to play at.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:38) In line
with the socially accepted relationship between a father and his children, a father is
considered primarily a protector, then a provider and a superior. However, in Morel’s life
story, this was not the case. ″The children waited in restraint during his preparations. When he
had gone, they sighed with relief.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:39)

The turbulent flow of marriage deepened the fractures of Mrs. Morel’s soul. She was torn
between the hostility she felt towards her husband and the memory of their love. At certain
moments, she would gaze into the thought of him as a caring husband. Yet, she knew that
disillusion would sooner or later grab her away from her husband. ″One part of her said, it
would be a relief to see the last of him, another part fretted because of keeping the children,
and inside her, as yet, she could not quite let him go. At the bottom, she knew very well he
could not let go.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:40)

Gertrude stuck to her Puritan discipline even in her struggle and continued the daily fights
with her husband, treating him unmercifully, every time he would come home drunk. She put
her focus on the children. Specifically, all ″her thoughts turned to William″ of whom she was
very proud (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:43). Soon enough, William was a grown-up man who
16
moved to London and started a new life. ″He took nearly all himself away.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:50). Another example of the strange connection with her children is exemplified in the
following lines: ″From her the feeling was transmitted to the other children. She never
suffered alone anymore: the children suffered with her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:55).

Finally, the story of inconsistent marriage is almost absolutely written based on Lawrence’s
childhood experiences. His father was divorced from his own life and his mother kept all her
faith in D. H. Lawrence. The bonds within his family were truly unconventional. The
connection between Gertrude and Walter Morel mirrors the contradictory instincts of
Lawrence himself. When speaking against social formulas, Lawrence set broad-minded, yet,
strangely religious outlooks which are a mixture of logic and emotion. The explanation for
this might be the fact that he was raised in such an atmosphere which dictated frustration and
self-centeredness. ″Each man was living in exile from his own past, struggling to make sense
of his own life.″4

One can find his or her inner self in identifying with childhood and family. After the death of
his wife, Walter Morel found grief and regret having left his family behind. Lawrence left the
door behind the question of whether he betrayed himself slightly open. ″To live, one must turn
back to men.” (Freeman, 1995:237)

4
Scott Sanders, D. H. Lawrence: The World of the Five Major Novels (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p.21.
17
2.2. MOTHER AND SONS

Lawrence towers over the typical mother-son relationships and glorifies the destructive
power of a woman over a man’s emotional and social life. From his early childhood, life
burdened him with the toxic quarrels of his parents. As a result, Lawrence came to view
relationships between men and women as forms of conflict. That is why disharmony and
unconventionality take such a gigantic part in Sons and Lovers. The hysterical and possessive
love of his mother changed his conceptions of love and sexuality. Additionally, the situations
unfolding between Gertrude and her sons are not always easy to explain. One of the aims of
this chapter is to critically analyze the unnatural feelings between a mother and her son. The
evaluation is conducted liberally and the analysis focuses on specific acts played by the
central characters of the novel. Also, it will detect the autobiographical elements concealed
behind the relevant scenes of the novel.

As life happens, the very first relation a person can have is with his or her mother. A mother’s
role carves the outlines of one’s manhood and she is responsible for her child’s growth as an
individual. If a mother criticizes her child and tells him ten times that he is an elephant, after
the eleventh implication that he or she is not good enough, the child will end up buying
peanuts. Additionally, one can assume that the Morel children lived parallel lives: one at
home, where they are strongly influenced by their mother, and the other one, in society, where
all they can think of is the urge to run back to the mother.

″He had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life. (…) And nobody else
mattered. There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the
place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent for
him, but she could not. It was as if the pivot and pole of his life, from which he could not
escape, was his mother.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:194)

When her marriage started collapsing, instead of trying to bring back her husband, Mrs. Morel
found refuge in her eldest son, William. After he died, every inch of her soul was devoted to
Paul. This situation among many proves Lawrence’s exploration of Freud’s notion of Oedipus
complex. Examples of this groundbreaking sexual theory are detected through the entire
novel. It is debatable whether Lawrence was actually inspired by Freud’s textbook or the
situation within his family. According to Lawrence’s claims, he ″had not read Freud″ while he
18
was writing his third novel, only ″had heard of him″. However, this opposes Frieda
Lawrence’s statement about her ″long arguments about Freud″ with Lawrence in 1912
(Hough, 1956:73).

Sigmund Freud and his theory of Oedipus complex are often discussed in modern psychology.
This outstanding psychologist used the story of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus
unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. According to Freud, all male children build
an erotic attachment to their mother and become jealous of the relationship between the father
and the mother. This complex results in difficulties in forming adult relationships with others
and in most cases children develop into a flawed adults (Freud, 1913:67).

Lawrence experimented with Freud’s theory and made a more complex version of it. In this
literary work, William and Paul fight for the affection of their mother. They both take the
lover’s place in her life from an early age. This sibling rivalry exists among children of every
age and it is not considered unusual to a certain intensity to which these hostile feelings can
grow. Yet, for both of the sons, the mother’s touch was the closest of all touches. Her touch
was one of those which had memories. It is crucial to say that the Oedipus complex in
William and Paul stems from the abusive relationship between the parents which causes the
boys to hate their father and be sensitive and protective towards their mother (Junjie,
2007:25). Gertrude Morel’s neediness is unconsciously shaping her sons in such a way so that
eventually they grow up to be a fine substitute for her husband. She feels lonely, so she keeps
her cup full by keeping her sons close to herself. Her favorite was William until he moved
away and made room for Paul, to fulfill the immense emotional gap the mother suffered from.

To begin with, ″Mrs. Morel’s intimacy with her second son was more subtle and fine, perhaps
not so passionate as with her eldest.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:62) Gertrude found herself
buried alive in her marriage with Walter Morel. In the vortex of a momentary passion, Paul
was born as an almost unwanted child.

″She could not afford to have this third. She did not want it. The father was serving beer in a
public house, swilling himself drunk. She despised him, and was tied to him. This coming
child was too much for her. If it were not William and Annie, she was sick of it, the struggle
with poverty and ugliness and meanness.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:7)

From an early age, Lawrence’s mind was occupied with the same contradictory feelings as his
characters, mostly Paul. Both Lawrence, and Paul wished to be free and independent from

19
mother, who consumed all their love. Also, both of them identified, yet, felt isolated from the
weak nature of father. ″Conversation was impossible between the father and any other
member of the family. He was an outsider.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:57)

Since Walter was ignorant and uninterested, Gertrude decided everything was her call.
Therefore, she drew sharp laser lines and patterned Paul’s emotional life. She taught him to be
mother-fixated as she implanted addiction into Paul’s consciousness. She did the same to his
older son, William, who was, unlike Paul, resolved to leave his mother’s realm. It is necessary
to mention that the Oedipal relationship between the mother and her oldest son differs from
the one with her younger son. In relation to William, Mrs. Morel seems nearly more
dependent on him than vice versa. ″William gave her the sense of relief, providing her at last
with someone to turn to if Morel failed.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:56) Perhaps, Lawrence
intended to play with the Oedipal tone in the case of William and made it reverse (Hinz,
1972:33). Before his death, William seeks her approval of getting married to a girl whose
presence is clearly rejected by Mrs. Morel. She is jealous of her son’s relationship with that
woman. ″She firmly believed William would never marry his Gypsy. She waited, and she kept
Paul near to her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:117) Evidently, the other woman was a threat to her
empire built within the walls of William’s life. It is questionable whether Mrs. Morel
perceived her eldest son as her lover. However, her words betray the bizarre mask under
which her true colors hide. ″She loved him passionately.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:73)

After deep analysis of Mrs. Morel’s personality, one can assume that she transfers her
dissatisfaction with one area of her life to another. Escaping from her marriage, she
destructively chases her sons’ attention. She needed to become the integral part of their
existence. Taking into account the theme of Oedipus complex, the premature death of William
is the turning point in the novel: Mrs. Morel projects her longing for William on Paul. In this
way, the theme of the Oedipus complex is continued till the very end the novel.

Tracing Lawrence’s attitude towards his mother shows the sickness of Paul Morel-his mental
enslavement and dependence on his mother. From his babyhood, he was absorbed by his
unusual intimacy with his mother. ″Paul loved the way she crouched and put her head on one
side. Her movements were light and quick. It was always a pleasure to watch her. Nothing she
ever did, no movement she ever made, could have been found fault with by her children.″ (D.
H. Lawrence, 1993:60) Here, obviously, the narrator sets the starting blocks of their unusual

20
relation: the Oedipal attachment. As the story unfolds, Paul gets lost in the maze of Oedipus
complex:

″Paul loved to sleep with his mother. Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it
is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from
the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its
healing.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:61).

Paul’s abnormal anxiety about fulfilling his mother’s expectation is displayed so vividly in his
search for blackberries: ″But he could not bear to go home to his mother empty. That, he felt,
would disappoint her, and he would have died rather.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:60)

Another important scene is the one which exemplifies the aesthetic pleasures they shared
(Paul brings Gertrude a gift): ″Then Paul fished out a little spray. He always brought her one
spray, the best he could find. ‘Pretty!’ she said, in a curious tone, of a woman accepting a love
token.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:62) It is evident that the mother’s reaction to the present is the
same as if it was given by a suitor. Paul responded in a similar fashion: only near his mother
and his paint set could he find peace and sense. ″His ambition as far as this world’s gear went,
was quietly to earn his thirty to thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near home, and then,
when his father died, have a cottage with his mother, paint and go out as he liked, and live
happy ever after.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:79) Lawrence frequently uses the Oedipal elements
even though they do not include the son’s desire of murdering the father. In Chapter V, the
passionate sparks between the mother and her son are more than electrifying: ″Suddenly their
eyes met, and she smiled to him – a rare, intimate smile, beautiful with brightness and love.″
(D. H. Lawrence, 1993:82) This inspired many critics who argued that the outrageous lies in
Paul’s conscious and pleasing manner of accepting his affair with his mother. He feels
comfortable and delighted instead of ashamed or guilty.

Paul was the orbit around which Gertrude’s life was circling. And he was grateful for that.
″His mother rose with gladness as he entered. (…) Then he told her the budget of the day. His
life-story, like an Arabian Nights, was told night after night to his mother. It was almost as if it
was her own life.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:99) Paul made a plan, set a goal. He worked toward
it and kept his mother content and satisfied. Everything he did was for her. But he forgot to
look around, he left himself miles behind. The world was ″wonderfully beautiful″ when
shared with his mother. Thus, Hu Junjie concludes that the mother’s abnormal maternity is
what Paul’s Oedipal characteristics are based on. ″Her personal abnormal emotion is the direct
21
factor for Paul’s Oedipus complex″. The atmosphere created between Mrs. Morel and her son
is over and above ecstatic.

″She had got a new cotton blouse on. Paul jumped up and went forward.

″Oh, my stars! ″ he exclaimed. ″What a bobby-dazzler! ″

She sniffed in a little naughty way, and put her head up.

″It’s not a bobby-dazzler at all! ″ she replied. ″It’s very quiet.″

She walked forward whilst he hovered round her.

″Well, ″ she asked, quite shy, but pretending to be high and mighty, ″do you like it? ″

″Awfully! You are a fine little woman to go jaunting out with! ″

He went and surveyed her from the back.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:107)

A descriptive look at the unconventional hints in their relationship is provided in the

following lines as well: ″The two knitted together in perfect intimacy. Mrs. Morel’ life now
rooted itself in Paul.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:124) It is not enough to say that Gertrude was
the guardian of her son’s soul, but also his muse.

″I can do my best things when you sit there in your rocking-chair, mother, ″ he said. ″I’m
sure! ″ she exclaimed, sniffing with mock skepticism. But she felt it was so, and her heart
quivered with brightness. (…) And he, with all his soul’s intensity directing his pencil, could
feel her warmth inside him like strength. They were both very happy so, and both unconscious
of it. These times, that meant so much, and which were real living, they almost ignored.″ (D.
H. Lawrence, 1993:139)

Despite the overwhelming passion between the two, the only physical contact they exchanged
were hugs and kisses on the forehead. Their innocent closeness remained somewhat platonic.
″He kissed her forehead that he knew so well: the deep marks between the brows, the rising of
the fine hair, greying now, and the proud setting of the temples. His hand lingered on her
shoulder after his kiss.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:142)

The story comes to a point where Gertrude Morel is forced to loosen the tight strings around
Paul’s emotional life. The appearance of Miriam brakes the compactness of their relationship
only for a short time. The amount of the mother’s hatred towards the ″new woman″ is

22
poisonous. The reason for this might be the intellectual bond Paul established with Miriam
which will be discussed in the next chapter.

″She exults – she exults as she carries him off from me, ″ Mrs. Morel cried in her heart when
Paul had gone. ″She’s not like an ordinary woman who can leave me my share in him. She
wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of
him, even for himself. He will never be a man if his own feet – she will suck him up.″ So the
mother sat, and battled and brooded bitterly.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:169)

As both women had a share of Paul’s devotion and time, the fights between the mother and
the son became more frequent. Gertrude felt her son slipping away from her and getting more
independent. She felt neglected. Yet, she would never think of letting his son do as he liked.
She reproached him for staying late every time he spent with Miriam. In the following lines,
the strange tone of Mrs. Morel’s disapproval shows her selfishness. Also, it gives another
example of the Oedipal complex.

″As he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his
shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice, so unlike her own that he writhed in agony:

″I can’t bear it. I could let another woman – but not her. She’d leave me no room, not a bit of
room – ″

And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly.

″And I’ve never – you know, Paul – I’ve never had a husband – not really – ″

He stroked his mother hair and his mouth was on her throat.

″And she exults so in taking you from me – she’s not like ordinary girls.″

″Well, I don’t love her, mother, he murmured, bowing his head and hiding his eyes on her
shoulder in misery. His mother kissed him a long fervent kiss.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:186)

What Lawrence tried to voice is Mrs. Morel’s ultimate power. In every aspect of Paul’s life –
she is there. That power of hers is closely related to egoism. For a mother, the fact that her son
is blissful with a woman should not be that much overwhelming. But for Gertrude, it is
mortifying. She does not recognize her son’s need for another woman. Listening is one of the
most important ways one can show empathy. Only for a moment, she thought of her son and
showed responsiveness. ″Perhaps, I’m selfish. If you want her, take her my boy.″ (D. H.

23
Lawrence, 1993:186) This was the first and the last time she actually cared for her son’s wish
or she plainly feigned it. After the momentary splash of reason, the circular current of the
Oedipal relationship continued stronger than ever.

″Wherever he went she felt her soul went with him. Whatever he did she felt her soul stood by
him, ready, as it were, to hand him his tools. She could not bear it when he was with Miriam.
William was dead. She would fight to keep Paul. And he came back to her. And in his soul
was a feeling of the satisfaction of self-sacrifice because he was faithful to her. She loved him
first, he loved her first. And yet it was not enough. His new young life, so strong and
imperious, was urged towards something else.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:194)

Of course he needed more. As a young men, he needed so much more than a self-interested
mother. Her honesty in ″she loved him first″ is rather debatable. She showed no signs of
compassion, yet, she knew how broken he was. Torn because of Mrs. Morel’s cruelty, Paul
was incapable of commitment. She could not admit his need of ″something else, something
outside, something he wanted″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:217). Perhaps, the reason why Paul
grew more and more distant from his mother was not because of other women. It was because
her. Her egoistic nature made open wounds and left them uncovered. Those wounds never
healed, only got deeper when Mrs. Morel was diagnosed with cancer. ″Paul and she were
afraid of each other. He knew, and she knew, that she was dying. But they kept up a pretence
of cheerfulness. Every morning, when he got up, he went into her room in his pyjamas. ″Did
you sleep, my dear? ″ he asked.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:334)

However, many scholars claim that mother-blaming is not to be found in the novel. It is
natural to expect much of one’s son and it is perfectly acceptable to find pleasure in his
achievements and success. The contemporary Oedipal theories have distorted Mrs. Morel as
an obsessive consumer of her son’s love.

Lawrence is breaking the fences of conventionality once more by using controversial

vocabulary in the dialogue between the mother and the son.

″Can’t you sleep, my pigeon?″ he said.

″No, I can’t,″ she wailed.

″Never mind, Little! he said, crooning. Never mind my love. I’ll stop with you half an hour,
my pigeon; then perhaps it will be better.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:340)

24
Paul hardly realizes that he has never lived outside his mother’s cavity and therefore has never
really lived. (Al-Ghadeer, 1999: 17) Denial is a defense mechanism in which one imprisons
oneself from the things he or she is afraid of. In the same manner, Paul denies the life he
could have lived only if he was strong enough. He could have resolved to become free of his
mother. It was something only he could have decided. ″He felt as if his life were being
destroyed, piece by piece, within him.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:336)

In the final stages of Gertrude’s illness, Paul and Annie decide to give her all the remaining
morphine so as to ease her unbearable pain. They both agreed on ending her prolonged agony.

At the time of her death, Paul could scarcely say his last words to her. ″He kneeled down, and
put his face to hers and his arms round her: ″My love – my love – oh, my love! ″ he
whispered again and again. ″My love – oh, my love! ″ There was only the cold response of
death. It was time to let go.

As months passed, Paul felt he had nothing to blame himself for, he had done all he could. He
was always attentive and observant of his mother, even at her death bed. ″All his life he’d
done the best for her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:349)

Ultimately, it was always her. She ran in her son’s bloodstreams. Everything started and ended
with her. This overemphasized solipsistic nature of Gertrude Morel might be Lawrence’s
protest against egocentrism. His remarkable illustrations of narcissism testify the modern
relationships between men and women. People of the twenty-first century quit humility and
joined self-centeredness. Individuals in every stage of life are grasping for balance and they
do not realize that they have become products of the contamination of mind. However sinful
Gertrude Morel may be labeled, she left a noble note to the entire world of trivia: ″Love
begets love.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:146)

25
2.3. PAUL MOREL’S ROMANCES

Although the relationship between the mother and the son is discussed in the preceding
chapter, the character of Mrs. Morel’s influences even this part of the thesis. One cannot avoid
the presence of Gertrude Morel in the moments spent between Paul and the two women:
Miriam and Clara. In this part of the analysis, the author of this paper came to the realization
that the influence of Mrs. Morel’s character is limitless. In the evaluation of Paul’s
relationship with either Miriam or Clara, one simply cannot avoid mentioning his mother.
This proves that all the women figures in this novel are complementary. The structure of the
novel proves that Miriam and Clara are only episodes, whereas Mrs. Morel is the inner core
based on which Paul’s life is sculpted. The first part of this chapter describes Paul’s spiritual
relationship with Miriam, and the second, his physical cross-currents with Clara.

Paul was sixteen when he met Miriam during one of his casual walks with his mother at
Willey Farm. Miriam stood out from the others. She was a fragile and romantic idealist, an
absolute daydreamer whose great companion was her mother. She was shy in her extreme
religiousness which cut her off from everyone around her. ″She seemed to be in some way
resentful of the boy. ″He thinks I’m only a common girl, ″ she thought, and she wanted to
prove she was a grand person (…) ″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:112) Miriam was the queen of
idealization. She was reserved and distant with everyone, except Paul. He knew how to
decode her sophisticated being. ″She resented that he saw so much.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:128) She felt transparent in his company and that made her shiver with tremor. ″And
Miriam also refused to be approached. (…) The girl was romantic in her soul. (…) She herself
was something of a princess turned into a swine-girl in her own imagination. And she was
afraid lest this boy, who, nevertheless, looked something like a Walter Scott hero, who could
paint and speak French, and knew what algebra meant, and who went by train to Nottingham
every day, might consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess
beneath; so she held aloof.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:125)

Mothers played a central role in the lives of both Miriam and Paul. ″Miriam was her mother’s
daughter.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:130) The most important thing they had in common, apart
from their world of seclusion, was the chain to their mothers. Both children were not capable
of building balanced human relationships due to the mothers’ supreme power over them.
Another bond which drew them close was their love for nature. ″So it was in this atmosphere
26
of subtle intimacy, this meeting in their common feeling for something in Nature, that their
love started.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:130)

It is fundamental to mention that Paul entered Miriam’s life before she became part of his. He
fascinated her and made her feel warm. As their relationship became more complex, Miriam
got near him, scanned his weaknesses and strengths and ″managed to find some meaning in
his struggling, abstract speeches.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:133) Paul found this paralyzing.
″Then sometimes he hated her. (…) Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal
plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:134) The controversial truth
these lines tell is that Paul saw his mother in Miriam. He disliked her intensity, hated her
modesty and fought with the sexuality she aroused in him.

The two children were intellectually compatible and they enjoyed discussing art, practicing
algebra and learning French. The imbalance on which their relationship was built can be seen
in Paul’s lecturing Miriam.

″But, in spite of himself, his blood began to boil with her. It was strange that no one else made
him in such fury. He flared against her. Once he threw the pencil in her face. There was
silence. She turned her face slightly aside. (…) She never reproached him or was angry with
him. (…) And because of her intensity to which she roused him, he sought her.″

He grew dissatisfied with Miriam because she had too much of his mother’s neediness. At this
stage of their connection, Miriam was ″ too lofty″ and Paul ″too sane″. They were not mature
enough for any physical contact.

″Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to
disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse. Paul took his pitch from her, and their
intimacy went on in an utterly blanched and chaste fashion. It could never be mentioned that
the mare was in foal.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:142) This fragment translates Miriam’s
aversion to the physical. She resents the ordinariness of the farm life. She is too much above
that kind of life. Lawrence expresses sympathy towards the misplaced character of Miriam as
he designs the spiritual and physical aspect of their relationship. He nonchalantly described
the lovers’ strong sensations. At the same time, he did not let those thrills stain the purity of
their contact.

27
It is normal for healthy adolescents to explore sexual feelings. However, in the personalities
of the two lost children, there was an unsolvable error. Only in their dreams did Miriam and
Paul expose their desire for higher intimacy.

″She searched earnestly in herself to see if she wanted Paul Morel. She felt there would be
some disgrace in it. Full of twisted feelings, she was afraid she did want him. She stood self-
convicted. Then came an agony of new shame. She shrank within herself in a coil of torture.
Did she want Paul Morel, and did he know she wanted him? What a subtle infamy upon her!
She felt as if her whole soul coiled into knots of shame.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:150)

Paul denied in his conversation with his mother that there was anything else, except a platonic
friendship between him and Miriam: ″We aren’t lovers, we are friends.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:151)

″Sometimes, as they were walking together, she slipped her arm timidly into his. But he
always resented it, and she knew it. It caused a violent conflict in him. With Miriam he was
always on the high plane of abstraction, when his natural fire of love was transmitted into fine
steam of thought. (…) he was wrestling with his own soul, frowning, passionate in his desire
for understanding. (…) she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first. Then, if
she put her arm in his, it caused him almost torture. His consciousness seemed to split. The
place where she was touching him ran hot with friction. He was one internecine battle, and he
became cruel to her because of it.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:151-152)

Paul insisted on friendship, while Miriam clearly showed signs of wanting something more,
but he was always so distant. As an almost adult male, it is exceptionally strange for Paul to
struggle with his fear of the unknown. The inner system of every human being is naturally
predisposed to seek physical closeness. Obviously, Paul was the exception to the rule. He was
petrified of ruining their high-spirited connection, but, if he would have tried to get across to
her, the lines of the novel would write a different story.

″The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a
shame.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:156) He could not kiss her even though he had the urge to do
so. His thoughts were on fire as his body became feverish in the presence of Miriam. His
impotency lied in his conviction that she wanted him to stay religious. ″He hated her, for she
seemed in some way to make him despise himself.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:157) Paul found
himself at the roundabout of his bipolar feelings. ″He was afraid of her love for him. It was

28
too good for him, he was inadequate. His own love was at fault, not hers.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:181)

He was nearly split between the joy and the misery he experienced when surrounded by
Miriam. Not surprisingly, the explanation for this might be found in his mother’s severe
negation of their friendship.

″Well, everybody else has been in long ago!″ said his mother as they entered.

″What does that matter! He cried irritably. I can go a walk if I like, can’t I?″

″And I should have thought you could get in to supper with the rest,″ said Mrs. Morel.

″I shall please myself,″ he retorted. ″It’s not late. I shall do as I like.″

″Very well,″ said his mother cuttingly, ″then do as you like.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:157)

Mrs. Morel hated Miriam for stealing his son away from her. She blamed her for Paul’s
depression and melancholy. It never came to her mind that her son might be distorted because
of herself. She was the one who put pressure on him which he could barely fight against.
Instead of facing his mother’s cruelty, he grew up feeling humiliated and ashamed by his
naturalness. In comparison to Paul, Miriam was aware of her true feelings. ″A deep pain took
hold of her, and she knew she must love him. And she had discovered him, discovered him in
a rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:145) She was a real
nature lover, a person who was blindly committed to religion, yet, she had enough space for
Paul, who was taken on the other side. ″He was angry with his mother. He knew it was merely
Miriam she objected to.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:167) Once more, he felt shattered because of
Mrs. Morel.

The peak of their nonphysical was marked by a strong argument between Paul and Miriam.
The following scene releases the acute struggle of the body and the mind which Lawrence
depicted remarkably.

″I wish you could laugh at me just for one minute – just for one minute. I feel as if it would
set something free.″

″But″ - and she looked up at him with eyes frightened and struggling - ″I do laugh at you – I
do.″

29
″Never! There’s always a kind of intensity. When you laugh I could always cry; it seems as if
it shows up your suffering. Oh, you make me knit the brows of my very soul and cogitate.″

Slowly she shook her head despairingly.

″I’m sure I don’t want to.″ she said.

″I’m so damned spiritual with you always!″ he cried. (…) ″You make me so spiritual!″ he
lamented. ″And I don’t want to be spiritual.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:165)

″She loved him absorbedly. She wanted to run her hands down his sides. She always wanted
to embrace him, so long as he did not want her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:165) The scene
discussed above showed that as time passed, both Paul and Miriam needed to advance their
relationship. However, they were trapped in the paralysis of lust and reason. That same
paralysis felt like a crime. Over the years, Miriam had an almost accurate intuition of the
accumulated negative energy in Paul. More and more often, he hurt her with savage insults.
″You don’t want to love – your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t
positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love,
because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:191) Paul’s intense
irritation with Miriam sets up a doubt in his love for her. Ultimately he told her to find another
man who could let her be herself. ″But he, ah! She loved his soul.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:193)

The division of psyche was created by the mother’s (un)conscious attempts to alter her son’s
emotional life. ″He fought against his mother almost as he fought against Miriam.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:194) Lawrence created a complete alien and let him wander in the valley of
despair. Eventually, he surpassed his inner obstacle- his attachment to his mother and gave a
chance to sexual initiation. Thus, Miriam did not resist as felt she had to sacrifice herself to
the man she loved. ″And he owed himself to her. Then, if they could get things right, they
could marry; but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in the joy of it – never. He
could not have faced his mother.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:242) Needless to say after his first
sexual experience, almost at the age of twenty-four, his thoughts whirl back to one person: his
mother. Paul had a confused sexual identity because he perceived all women as his mother.
Therefore, women were ″forbidden objects of love″ (Scott Sanders, 1973:131).

At moments, Paul does not belong to anyone, even though he was aware of the duality in
himself. ″Leave me alone – leave me alone!″ he wanted to cry; but she wanted him to look at
30
her with eyes full of love. His eyes, full of the dark, impersonal fire of desire, did not belong
to her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:249)

As the passage illustrates, he is in complete opposition to normality. His contradictory

thoughts lift him beyond every character of the novel. As the protagonist, Paul is much more
realistic than the social norms of the late nineteenth century would acknowledge. Lawrence
enables his readers to experience the direct conflict which is, in his own experience, an
enduring and absolute feature of a person’s existence. In 1910, aware of his mother’s
inevitable death, Lawrence wrote about the contrast between their parents and the supremacy
of his mother:

My father was a working man

and a collier was he,
at six in the morning they turned him down
and they turned him up for tea.

My mother was a superior soul

a superior soul was she,
cut out to play a superior role
in the god-damn bourgeoisie.

We children were the in-betweens

little non-descripts were we,
indoors we called each other you,
outside, it was tha and thee.5

Doubtless, Paul inherited Lawrence’s frustration. All the same, Miriam was modeled on
Lawrence’s great love, Jessie Chambers. Jessie and Lawrence were students at the time they
met and they came closer in literature.

They were both interested in nature, books, and flowers. For them, life was changed into a
suffering from the unphysical. Miriam’s rejection of the farm and her fear of being viewed as
ignorant is inspired by Jessie Chambers. In her memoir, she voiced her anxiety attacks when

5
These are the first three stanzas of ″Red-Herring″, Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, p.404.
31
her education was ended. Her hunger for knowledge and spirituality are criticized in Sons and
Lovers as the things that make Paul indifferent towards her. It is necessary to accent that
Miriam’s love for Paul was muted, it did not win, but it was invincible. ″He would come back.
She held the keys to his soul.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:194) Lawrence grew independent of
Jessie and decided to leave Nottinghamshire. He got a job as a tutor and said goodbye to the
Chambers family and to the farm. Their seven-year-old friendship was demolished.

Picture 1. Jessie Chambers (on the left) and Frieda Von Richthofen (on the right)

The third frustrated woman in Paul’s life was Clara Dawes. Behind her character, there was
Frieda Weekley with whom Lawrence spent time while finishing this novel. There are striking
similarities among the three women spinning around Paul. Clara was unhappily married to an
industrial worker, Bexter Dawes. She was superior and felt free of him, more than he of her.
Like Miriam, Clara tried to escape from her reality through education. What she was seeking
was a dignified place in the community. Despite the grids of the late Victorian mind prison,
the women figures nourished by Lawrence were scandalously independent. Clara was a true
feminist who fought for women emancipation. Upon meeting Clara, he was still very much
involved with Miriam and did not seem to be fastened to her as he had been to Miriam.
However, ″After leaving Miriam he went almost straight to Clara.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:263) From the start, their intimacy was not intellectual, but physical. Clara smoothly
awakened his manliness and he gave in to physical contact without any restraint. ″He had

32
touched her, His whole body was quivering with the sensation (…) His body acted
mechanically.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:263-264) There was something about her that made
him feel half alive, half frozen. Not even this woman could send away his thoughts which
were always in a state of armed conflict. ″Clara’s hand lay warm and inert in his own as they
walked. He was full of conflict. The battle that raged inside him made him feel desperate.″ (D.
H. Lawrence, 1993:284) He found himself at an already lost battlefront: his mother was dying
and taking half of his soul away with her. By that time, the other half was ripped out of his
chest. ″He had a life apart from her - his sexual life. The rest she still kept.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:300) The chaos he was living in, made him numb. He could neither think, nor feel.
Transiently, he span in a pool of happiness with Clara who felt she had finally got him for
herself, but the uncertainty always showed up.

″You know, mother, I think there must be something the matter with me, that I can’t love.
When she’s there, as a rule, I do love her. Sometimes, when I see her just as the woman, I love
her, mother; but then, when she talks and criticizes I often don’t listen to her. Yet she’s as
much sense as Miriam. Perhaps; and I love her better than Miriam. But why don’t they hold
me?″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:305) Judging from this, Clara suffers from the same, yet,
opposite kind of inadequacy as Miriam. She pleases Paul’s physical need, but she cannot fill
his inner emptiness.

It is impossible to move on without mentioning the recurrent Oedipal theme.

″But no, mother. I even love Clara, and I did Miriam; but to give myself to them in marriage I
couldn’t. I couldn’t belong to them. They seem to want me, and I can’t ever give it them.″

″You haven’t met the right woman.″

″And I never shall meet the right woman while you live,″ he said.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:305)

Clearly, the root of the misery lies in his contamination with ambivalence. Paul simply cannot
love in a cooperative and sharing manner. She wanted some more permanent, she wanted
absolute devotion. On occasions when he got tired of passion, Paul needed Miriam to guard
his soul. Paul became unknown to Clara and they started hating each other. ″Clara did not
know what was the matter with him. She realized that he seemed unaware of her. Even when
he came to her he seemed unaware of her; always he was somewhere else.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:320) This excerpt shows his ultimate characteristic in each of his relationships:
33
rootlessness. On the test of love, Paul failed once again. His affair with Clara was over.
Finally, she turned to her husband, and Paul to himself. The vicious circle of abnormal human
feelings led to total destruction of an enslaved personality.

″Paul was like another man. None of himself remained – no Clara, no Miriam, no mother
fretted him. He wrote to them all, and long letters to his mother; but they were jolly letters
that made her laugh. He was having a good time, as young fellows will in a place like
Blackpool. And underneath it was all a shadow of her.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:321)

″He only wanted to be left alone now. He had his own trouble, which was almost too much to
bear. Clara only tormented him and made him tired. He was not sorry when he left her.″ (D.
H. Lawrence, 1993:334)

The previously discussed relationships between characters are unnatural and very complex.
Each of them lives in a world of his own. But each of them lacks the capacity to love.
Lawrence used a set of unconventional paints in the making of the relationships in Sons and
Lovers. He did not deny the social conventions but created an implicit web of sinful desires.
He did not hesitate to uncover the tensions of some of his own attitudes (Scott Sanders,
1973:11).

34
2. LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER

The art of writing has the power to express one’s needs, yearnings, worries and
preoccupations that are not so easily communicated through the busy rhythm of daily life. In
this novel, Lawrence found a way to approach readers with important issues and problems of
the time. The object of the second part of this thesis is to descbribe the unconventionality
among the characters in Lawrence’s last piece of fiction. He was writing this novel while
tuberculosis was beating him up. In that state, he made three versions of this work due to
problems with censorship. The first title of the novel was ″Tenderness″ which alludes to the
union of the two lovers - Connie and Mellors. The second version was scrutinized as a fatal
expression of human sexuality. Only in the third version did Lawrence dismiss offending
words and it was finally published under its present title – Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Hough,
1956). It may have been offensive to a majority of the ″puritan″ readers whom Lawrence
railed against. He considered ″the so-called obscene words a natural part of the mind’s
consciousness of the body″, yet, his adult life was wrapped up with his ″struggle for verbal
consciousness″ (Scott Sanders, 1973:197-201). Literary criticism argues about the aggressive
context of this novel which, unfortunately, overshadows Lady Chatterley’s moral right to
emotional and sexual fulfillment. Therefore, this chapter attempts to defend Lawrence’s
unstoppable desire of making himself heard. He spoke up and shouted the answers to the
questions prompted in the life of every single individual. In this novel, Lawrence disclosed
the harsh reality of human selfishness and intended to make his readers aware of the
worldwide falseness.

Firstly, the author offers a descriptive analysis of Lord Chatterley and Constance Chatterley’s
marriage. Secondly, the focus is put on Lady Chatterley’s love affair with her husband’s
employee, Oliver Mellors. Several issues will be tackled: the interaction of marriage and
sexuality, the hypocritical crisis of the human spirit and the burden of the unconscious.
Another aim of this part of the paper is to voice Lawrence’s chief contribution to the world:
his demand for hope when it seems to be absolutely none at all. ″We’ve got to live, no matter
how many skies have fallen.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:2) As previously mentioned in the
introduction, hopelessness and the ruins of traditional ways of life are results of the industrial
changes which took place before the World War I. However, it is important to pinpoint the
historical circumstances under which Lawrence’s writings were almost left behind. There
35
were big changes in the cultural life of Europe: the rich were obsessed with money and the
poor with debts. As Lawrence writes, ″… even to be free to think you must have a certain
amount of money, or your stomach stops you.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:26) He neither feared
from the changes, nor did he adapt to them. He tried to show that the more things changed,
the more they stayed the same. And sometimes, a change was good. The concept of the New
Woman dates from the 1890’s and advocates the freedom and social equality of women. In the
early twentieth century, sexual difference between men and women started disappearing.
Women more persistently fought for their own rights and equality, which frightened the men,
who were for centuries assured of their own superiority and power (Buckley, 2008:156). This
explains why Lawrence’s down looking attitude towards men was found compelling and
outrageous. He treated men as sexual objects and glorified the predominance of women. He
even set a female character in the centre of the novel’s plot. Along with all of that, he exposed
the gaps of false friendliness in which people were constantly trapped. ″Connie wondered
what else they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard, shapeless,
and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:9) On that account,
this paper shows an insight into Lawrence’s neglectful treatment of moral duties. Affected by
the Great War, Lawrence attempts to enlighten the crisis of consciousness of his society and
display the emotional bruises of the modern age (Scott Sanders, 1973:186). He does not let
the social expectations eclipse what he wants to convey. His relentless force of revealing the
humankind’s darkest shades made this novel one of a kind.

″I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of
shameful. And this novel is the furthest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as
the naked self is.″6

Despite the strong currents of sexuality which are flowing through the novel, the author of
this paper emphasizes the deeper side of the story – the emotional emptiness as the integral
part of love relationships.

6
From an unidentified letter cited by Richard Hoggart in his introduction to the Penguin edition of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover (XV).
36
2.1. LADY CHATTERLEY’S MARITAL LIFE

The early years of Constance and Clifford’s marriage was overtinted with shades of the Great
War. A year after their honeymoon, Lord Clifford was sent home paralysed from the waist
down. Not only his body, but also certain part of his spirit was smashed by the machinery-
ridden battlefields. Lawrence hated the way industrialization and mechanization ruled minds
of the twentieth century humankind. The themes of social anger and the influence of the
industrial changes are the banks alongside which the plot of the novel flows. Beyond that, the
moral frame in which the characters are stuck is what this chapter analyses. One might
recognize the consequences of the overall greed for power in the crippled character of Lord
Clifford. However, his deficiency did not change so much in the early phase of their
relationship.

″Clifford married Connie, nevertheless and had his month’s honeymoon with her. It was the
terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship.
He had been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were
so close, he and she, apart from that. (...) Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his
′satisfaction′, as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than
that. And sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic
processes , which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though
Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law Emma. But early in
the 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:8)

Evidently, the wife and her husband denied the opportunity of a complete married life. It was
only Connie who enjoyed their sexual intercourse. For Clifford, the marital relation was just
closeness relation. He wanted an intimate relation but not necessarily the physical contact.
″Of physical life they lived very little.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:12) Lawrence tried to
emphasize that marriage or any love relationship was not limited only to spiritual union, but
included emotional compatibility and sexual enjoyment as far more important conditions for a
successful relationship. ″He was not in touch. He was not in actual touch with anybody…
Connie felt that she herself didn’t really, not really touch him; perhaps there was nothing to
get at ultimately; just a negation of human contact.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:11)

37
However, according to traditional beliefs, one of the factors that encourage marriage is love.
This same love, the construction which holds a marriage is rather disputable in the case of the
Chatterleys. Lawrence implicitly raises the question whether their love is a romantic one or
just a desire for security and piece of certainty. In addition, Clifford, a member of aristocracy
was rebellious enough to marry Constance who was not equal to him in terms of social class.
″Clifford was more upper-class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was
aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:5) Connie was an educated
and prosperous lady who despised the parasitic nature of the upper-class. Similarly to the
Morel couple, Lord Chatterley and Lady Chatterley were the opposite sides of the same coin.
He was defenseless and inward, whereas she was assertive and triumphant. Lawrence
sketched their family portrait in an atypical manner. The woman was genuinely independent,
the man was more hesitant and afraid even of his own class. Undeniably, the couple had a
mental attraction. ″Connie and he were attached to one another, in the aloof modern way. He
was much too hurt in himself, the great shock of his maiming, to be easy and flippant. He was
a hurt thing. And as such, Connie stuck to him passionately.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:11)

In absolute contradiction to the typical conventions of the society Lawrence lived in, Lord
Clifford became more and more dependent on his wife. Even though he was big and strong,
he needed her every moment. ″But alone he was like a lost thing. He needed Connie to be
there, to assure him he existed at all.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:11) Despite the loss of his
masculinity, he could still absorb and keep his wife’s attention. Behind his dark and twisty
moods, he was ambitious. He enjoyed writing stories. Lawrence’s insecurity as an author is
recognized in the character of Clifford, who fights hard to achieve recognition in his literary
career. In 1927, he wrote in a letter: ″I myself am in a state of despair about the Word either
written or spoken seriously,″7. His shaking identity as a writer, his loss of meaning and his
melancholy are expressed in the marriage between Lord and Lady Chatterley. Their daily life
was full of different meanings of silence. They rarely spoke. ″But their silence also signifies
defeat by the world of man.″ (Scott Sanders, 1973:196). Suddenly, their marital life amounted
to his books and the literary gatherings he held at home. At her own home, Connie looked so
small, almost hammered. While Clifford’s books kept him hostage, Connie found escape in
listening to his ideas. Both of them were hiding from the potential clash of their marriage.
″What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t exist.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:13) Another example of unconventional family relationships can be seen in the
7
Letter to Aldous Huxley, CL 1020. 14.xi.27.
38
following statement of Connie’s father. He noticed the vagueness and dissatisfaction in her
eyes. No more could she play on broken strings. ″Her father warned her again: ″Why don’t
you get yourself a beau, Connie? Do you all the good in the world.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:15) In the early twentieth century, it was unthinkable for a respectable Victorian father
to propagate adultery. The parent’s discussing his daughter's sexuality with the gamekeeper,
has been criticized as vulgar. Once again, we witness Lawrence’s rupture of the long-
established moral criteria. Perhaps, his final visit to Nottingham in 1926 is what moved him to
write about the hopelessness and misery of his people (Hough, 1956:231-2).

Just as Connie’s mind was clinging away from her husband, she met an Irish playwright,
Michaelis, an outsider who dipped into the aristocratic world. He was one of her husband’s
employee. He was self-assured and different from the rest. ″There was something about him
that Connie liked. He didn’t put airs to himself; he had no illusions about himself.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:16) Opposite to Lord Chatterley, he did not need audience to boost his self-
pride. He thought there is nothing in popularity. ″Connie felt a sudden, strange leap of
sympathy for him, a leap mingled with compassion, and tinged with repulsion, amounting
almost to love. The outsider! The outsider! And they called him a bounder! How much more
bounderish and assertive Clifford looked! How much stupider!″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:18)

″She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance.″ (D.
H. Lawrence, 1993:19) When taking into account Michaelis’ reaction to this, it is enough to
say that his feelings were mutual. ″Michaelis knew at once he had made an impression on her.
(…) He was estimating her, and the extent of the impression he had made.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:18)

″Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her
personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up.″
(D. H. Lawrence, 1993:19) Basically, that is all the Chatterleys’ marriage is originally made
of: insecurity and ignorance. In their artificial relationship, both hide their fears and problems
from each other. Clifford finds satisfaction in literature, he simply ignores the needs of his
wife. The aforementioned excerpt proves how alienated the married couple is – the husband
has not even seen his wife’s room. He feels the urge to share only his writings with her. She,
however, keeps everything to herself. Clifford is not aware of his beloved. He is occupied
with his fear of the outer life. Perhaps that gives a reason for his need to dominate both his
and her life by all possible means. ″Yet the unscrupulousness of Michaelis had a certain

39
fascination for her. (…) In his way he had conquered the world, which was what Clifford
wanted to do.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:21

Sooner or later, Connie cheated on her husband. More than that, she fell in love with
Michaelis’ strangeness. For him, isolation was a necessity. Again, she could not find her voice
and fill the silence between them. Their affair was brief because Michaelis lost himself in the
abyss of despair. Connie was not the one who could lift his heavy soul up. He looked only at a
woman’s physical features. He only felt and did not think. Michaelis was left to fight the
battles of his misery alone, as Connie resigned from their monotonous physical
consummation. ″Michaelis couldn’t keep anything up. It was part of his very being that he
must break off any connection, and be loose, isolated, absolutely lone dog again.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:24) She felt their relation was not really personal. She was just a female to
him.

Connie was going old at twenty-seven, the only sparks she felt were the ones of ignorance.
She was immensely polluted with her husband’s indifference towards her existence.
Subconsciously, she was still comparing Michaelis with Clifford. The first one was not her
companion by law, but he had far more need of her. ʺMichaelis was a heroic rat, and Clifford
was very much of a poodle showing off.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:61) The multiple strands of
being needed is what makes the wire of Connie’s character from the beginning till the end.
One might say she is diagnosed with an aching emotional hunger. Moreover, her resistance
against the injustice she was locked in was supported by one of their guests, Lady Bennerley
who was briefly staying at their house. Before her, no one really noticed Connie’s clinical
depression.

ʺYou’re a quite wonderful, in my opinion,ʺ she said to Connie. You’ve done wonders to
Clifford. (...) Look at the way you are shut up here.ʺ

ʺBut Clifford never denies me anything,ʺ said Connie.

ʺLook here, my dear childʺ (...) A woman has to live her life, or live to repent not having lived
it. Believe me!ʺ

ʺBut I do live my life, don’t I?ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:61)

Apparently, Lord Chatterley was not spoon-feeding his wife. No, quite the opposite. ʺHe was
never really warm, nor even kind, only thoughtful, considerate, in a well-bread, cold sort of

40
way! But never warm as a man can be warm to a woman (...)ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:60) She
stood away from herself and needed badly someone to turn to. Someone who would hold her.
Someone, anyone who could hear her. Clifford was there, constantly chasing, but never ready
to catch her. ″Yet other men seemed to mean nothing for her. She was attached to Clifford. He
wanted a good deal of her life and she gave it to him. But she wanted a good deal from the life
of a man, and this Clifford did not give her; could not.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:24) Here,
Lawrence represented the modern view of physical relationships. The character of Michaelis
is very important in understanding the personal relationship which rest only on functional sex.
For Connie, his machine-like nature was just a tool to satisfy her basic needs.

″I’m sorry we can’t have a son,″ she said.

″It would almost be a good thing if you had a child by another man,″ he said. ″If we brought it
up at Wragby, it would belong to us and to the place. I don’t believe very intensely in
fatherhood. If we had the child to rear, it would be our own and it would carry on. Don’t you
think it’s worth considering?″

Connie looked up at him at last. The child, her child, was just an ′it′ to him. It…it…it!″

″But what about the other man?″ she asked.

″Does it matter very much? Do these things really affect us very deeply?″

(…) ″And wouldn’t you mind what man’s child I had?″ she asked.

″Why, Connie, I should trust your natural instinct of decency and selection. You just wouldn’t
let the wrong sort of fellow touch you.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:36)

As identified in the fragment above, Lawrence remarks the ultimate tragedy of human
relationships. It is widely accepted that trust is the foundation of a stable and peaceful
relationship. Does the passage above face an act of love or does it confirm human
wickedness? Whatever it is, it shows the characters’ unwell relations and their idle way of
walking away from themselves. Behind the Victorian stage curtains, the edges of the society
were bounded by immoral gravity. Yet, on the scene, under the big lights of reputation
everyone was acting with large gestures and changing colors.

″It’s the lifelong companionship that matters. It’s the living together from day to day, not the
sleeping together once or twice. You and I are married, no matter what happens to us. We
have the habit of each other. And habit, to my thinking, is more vital than any occasional
41
excitement. (…) That’s the real secret of marriage, no sex; at least not the simple function of
sex.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:36)

Throughout the novel, Lawrence expressed thoughtful amount of sympathy and even
identification with character of Lady Chatterley. She is a simple woman who decided to be
happy and do something about her dissatisfaction with the passivity of her husband. Having
ended her affair, Connie made a round trip and arrived finally at the doors of reality. Her
reality was his husband’s struggling helplessness and she was strong enough to grin and bear
it. ″Perhaps the human soul needs excursions and must not be denied them. But the point of
an excursion is that you come home again.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:36)

″She knew he was right theoretically. But when she actually touched her steadily-lived lie
with him she…hesitated. Was it actually her destiny to go on weaving herself into his life all
the rest of her life? Nothing else?″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:37)

There were only very few sparkling moments when her affection towards Clifford flourished.
Almost immediately, it faded away because of his disconnection to the whole world.
Clifford’s tendency to think only about his wants built a blocking skyscraper which outshined
his wife and left her vague. She felt his physical and mental paralysis, like a death punch, was
reaching her at last. It ″A strange, weary yearning, a dissatisfaction had started in her. Clifford
did not notice: those were not things he was aware of. But the stranger knew. To Connie,
everything in her world and life seemed worn out, and her dissatisfaction was older than the
hills. ″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:39)

″As the years drew on it was the fear of nothingness in her life that affected her. Clifford’s
mental life and hers gradually began to feel like nothingness. Their marriage, their integrated
life (…) became utterly blank and nothing. The only reality was nothingness, and over it a
hypocrisy of words.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:42)

The whirlwinds of their unusual relationship sharpened Connie's will of quitting the personal
care she was providing to Clifford. He owed her time for herself after years of taking care of
him. ʺClifford, however, inside himself, never quite forgave Connie for giving up her personal
care of him to a strange hired woman. It killed, he said to himself, the real flower of the
intimacy between him and her. But Connie didn't mind that.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:70) In
this statement of Clifford’s, Lawrence accented the unreality he was convinced of. He was
unaware or he pretended to be, that his detachment caused the leaves of ʺthe flowerʺ of their

42
intimacy to rot. As a result of his isolation, Connie started living the same alien life. She
became a product of remoteness. She was glad she did not have to talk to him. ʺShe was
thankful to be alone. (..) And Connie felt herself released, in another world, she felt she
breathed differently. But still she was afraid of how many of her roots, perhaps mortal ones,
were tangled with Clifford's. Yet still, she breathed freer, a new phase was going to begin in
her life.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:70-1)

In the example above, that ʺapartnessʺ is applied to the marriage between Clifford and
Constance, but it can be traced in the present-day relationships of the modern civilization. The
spatial size of the superficial universe of the twenty-first century is unknown. The spaceships
of humanity are wrecked into the abyss of nonsense - the same absurdity in which Lawrence’s
heroine went missing.

ʺConnie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What is more, she felt she
had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no passion in it. But a profound physical
dislike. (...) But of course, she had married him really because in a mental way he attracted
her and excited her. He had seemed, in some way, her master, beyond her. (...) She wished
some help would come from outside.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:82)

Mrs Bolton, an elderly caretaker, was to more or less Connie’s salvation from her marital
duties. She replaced Connie and helped Clifford in his daily needs.

ʺShe liked handling him, She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to the last
menial offices. (...) There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word of love. (...) But no wonder Clifford was caught by the
woman! She absolutely adored him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his
service, for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:84-5)

The atmosphere created in this exercpt portrays the Oedipal theme in both Lawrence's novels
which reveal the most secret places of life: those subconscious that are beyond one's control.

ʺIn one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie kept him apart, and
made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs Bolton made him aware
of the outside things. (...) He was not aware of how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did
not know how much he depended on her. ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:92-3) Obviously, Clifford
was under Mrs Bolton's power. Lawrence gives one more example of the ill-spirited
happenings in a respectable Victorian marriage. One would never think of an honorable
43
upper-class gentleman falling for his elderly attendant. ʺOnly when he was alone with Mrs
Bolton did he really feel a lord and a master (...) But this astute and practical man was almost
an idiot when left alone to his own emotional life.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:93-4)

As life accumulated different situations in the marriage between Connie and Clifford, they
seemed to have little enthusiasm and did not make any effort to take off their masks and open
to each other. ʺThere was nothing between them. She never even touched him nowadays, and
he never touched her. He never even took her hand and held it kindly. (...) She fled as much as
possible to the wood.ʺ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:95-6) They starved themselves, then came the
anger and hatred with the dissatisfactions they faced.

Lawrence depicts the falseness of the perfect marital bliss. In this novel, as well as in the one
discussed previously, the place of the ʺhappyʺ marital union is taken by the egoism of each
partner. Lawrence’s purpose of unmasking a camouflaged Victorian marriage might be to
teach his readers a valuable lesson: a true relationship is the one which gives space for change
in each partner’s personality. It is accredited with toleration and empathy. It is a synergy
which requires both sides to work for the same team.

44
2.2. LADY CHATTERLEY’S AFFAIR

In the strong rotating winds of her own worthlessness, Connie was introduced to Mellors who
was set on the position of a gamekeeper. Mellors was ten years older than Connie and ″he was
a thousand years older in experience starting from the bottom.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:124)
On their first meeting, he was dressed in green, the color of faith, as a reference to the
possibility of hope and regeneration. When introducing Mellors, Lawrence creates a contrast
between the images of the two male characters: Clifford ʺseemed like the Midlands
atmosphere, haze, smoky mist“, as opposed to the luminous hue of Mellors. The gamekeeper
belonged to the natural world, to the wood, the perfect place for the beginning of Connie’s
mental and physical rebirth (Scott Sanders, 1973:116). She was feeling awfully unwell,
becoming thinner and sickly. Her deterioration came to the point when she could not decide
on her own. Clifford was physically disabled whilst Connie had an emotional dystrophy. She
was nearly a corpse which was dragged across the floors of Wragby. Oliver Mellors arrived
just in time. ″Connie had received the shock of vision in her womb, and she knew it; it lay
inside her. But with her mind she was inclined to ridicule. A man washing himself in a back
yard!″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:56)

″The gamekeeper, Mellors, is a curious kind of person,″ she said to Clifford; ″he might almost
be a gentleman.″

″Might he?″ said Clifford. ″I hadn’t noticed.″

″But isn’t there something special about him?″ Connie insisted.″

″I think he’s quite a nice fellow, but I know very little about him. He only came out of the
army last year, less than a year ago.″

″But don’t you think there is something special about him?″ she asked.

(…) He disliked any suggestion of a really exceptional human being. People must be more or
less at his level, or below it.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:57-8)

Clifford spends his whole life thinking about hierarchy among people and most importantly,
he always picks himself. In general, dialogues are rarely conducted in this novel, especially
between the married couple. Mostly, it is because of Clifford’s self-absorbed understanding of

45
life. In the prior extract, the readers are again presented with the weird background melody of
their relationship. Connie talks about her amazement with her husband’s employee, as if
Clifford was her best friend. And he does not show any sign of jealousy. Once again, he is
unaware of her mind slipping away from him. He does not even suppose that such an ordinary
person like a gamekeeper can steal his wife away. But things are always changing. Fate is the
home of our deepest fears and wildest hopes. When it finally reveals itself, the future is never
the way we imagined it.

Connie, an elevated lady from a respectable family, never assumed she would betray her
spouse and engage in infidelity. She was molded according to the Victorian moral
expectations. Looking from another angle, she did choose happiness. She radiated it nobly.

″Then she wondered, just dimly wondered, why? Why was this necessary? Why had it lifted a
great cloud from her and given her peace? Was it real? Was it real? (…) And she knew, if she
gave herself to the man, it was real. ″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:100) ″He lay there with his arms
round her, his body on hers, his wet body touching hers, so close. And completely unknown.
Yet, not unpeaceful. His very stillness was peaceful. She knew that, when at last he roused
and drew away from her. It was like an abandonment.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:100)

After having sinned, neither of them was troubled by the sense of wrong. Mellors was afraid
of society, not of himself, whereas Connie felt comforted. ″There was something, a sort of
warm naive kindness, curious and sudden, that almost opened her womb to him.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:104) Yet, Connie wondered what would Clifford’s reaction be if he had found
out about her rendezvous with the servant. ″But Connie was preoccupied with her affair with
the keeper.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:111)

″I said I’d come. Nobody knows.″

″They soon will, though,″ he replied. ″An’ what then? (…) Think what if folks find out – Sir
Clifford an’ a’ – an’ everybody talkin’ -″

″Well, I can go away. ″

″Where to?″

″Anywhere! I’ve got money of my own. My mother left me twenty thousand pounds in trust,
and I know Clifford can’t touch it. I can go away.″

″But ’appen you don’t want to go away.″

46
″Yes, yes! I don’t care what happens to me.″

″Ay, you think that! But you’ll care! You’ll have to care, everybody has. You’ve got to
remember your Ladyship is carrying on with a gamekeeper. It’s not as if I was a gentleman.
Yes, you’d care. You’d care.″

″I shouldn’t. What do I care about my ladyship! I hate it really. I feel people are jeering every
time they say it. And they are, they are! Even you jeer when you say it.″

″ (…) But I’ve got nothing to lose,″ she said fretfully. (…) ″But are you afraid of yourself? ″

″Ay!″ he said briefly. ″I am. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid o’ things. (…) Thing!
Everybody! The lot of ‘em.″

Then he suddenly bent down and kissed her unhappy face.

″Nay, I don’t care,″ he said. ″Let’s have it, an’ damn the rest.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:107)

47
Both of them were aware of the dangerous affair they were involved in. Anyhow, Mellors
seemed to be more fearful of injuring Connie’s reputation, than she was. The previous
dialogue showed Mellor’s mental observation of her attitude towards the scandal that might
have occurred because he wanted to protect himself from the possible threats their
relationship could bring on him. Connie was not shaken by his questioning and she stood for
what she had done. Neither was she concerned with her status of a respectable married
woman being left in mud. Inevitably, Connie’s wifely duties at Wragby became even more
meaningless in the time she was profoundly drawn to the wood and the gamekeeper. As she
committed adultery, she was willing to accept the responsibility for her deed and live with the
consequences of her unusual choices. In Connie’s character, Lawrence challenged the notion
of the ideal Victorian woman. He satirizes the historically established idea about women and
sexuality. She did what she wanted – kept looking for light in the darkest of places. And by
doing so, she could be considered an unconventional heroine. Lady Chatterley represents all
the unsatisfied women in the world in terms of her restrained emotional and sexual needs for
almost twelve years before she met Mellors. Furthermore, Lawrence linked Connie’s
confusion to Paul Morel’s distortion between himself and the world. Connie finally found her
haven of love and serenity, however, the emotional shelter Mellors’ provided was not
sufficient. ″He was encompassing her somehow. Yet she was waiting, waiting. (…) She felt
herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault. She willed herself into this
separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:108)

Her feelings towards the gamekeeper were marked by opposite extremes. Her bipolar nature
can be seen in the following lines.

″It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had
always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much,
then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a
savage woman. (…) ″Another self was alive in her, burning molten and soft in her womb and
bowels, and with this self she adored him. She adored him till her knees were weak as she
walked.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:107)

In a similar, yet, different manner, Mellors was trembling with fear because of his little
income and his subdued position. His stream of unspeakable thoughts were trying to help him
find a way to offer a proper life to the woman he desired so much. ″ (...) even if they got clear,
what were they going to do? What was he, himself, going to do? What was he going to do

48
with his life? For he must do something. He couldn’t be a mere hanger-on, on her money and
his own very small pension.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:124)

It seemed that both Mellors and Lady Chatterley were born ahead of their times. Somewhat,
they discovered balance in their outlawed relationship which could only exist away from the
community. However, their story did not look like a fairy-tale. Both beings were united in
their emptiness, isolation and the inescapable problem of personality. As much as they felt
their souls embracing each other, the electric shocks of reality were hiding behind the joy of
the present moments. Return to reality is what follows every escape.

″You’ve got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At
times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your
life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to
come. You can’t force them. (…) There must be a coming together on both sides.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:127)

Mellors believes in the harmony of body and life, as opposed to the mechanical sex which is
duplicated in the character of Michaelis. On the contrary to Connie’s previous experience with
men, Mellors becomes the first person to be capable of a tender sexuality. Connie says he is
the only different and true man in the world because of his tenderness.

″Shall I tell you?″ she said, looking into his face.

″Shall I tell you what you have that other men don't have, and that will make the future? Shall
I tell you?″

″Tell me then,″ he replied.

″It’s the courage of your own tenderness, that's what it is like when you put your hand on ray
tail and say I've got a pretty tail.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:245)

Many critics support the idea that Lawrence stands behind the character of Mellors.
Lawrence’s trained puritanism by his own mother can be traced in the rootless personality of
the gamekeeper. Mellors is tender because he only observes Connie's physical appearance and
most of all her tail. Lawrence finds difficulties in adjusting his puritan morality with a healthy
sexuality. As implanted in moral conventions, a real puritan would not permit the supremacy
of the body over the mind. Once more, Lawrence neglects the frivolity of the Victorian moral
indication and creates a ″more direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal

49
being″ (Scott Sanders, 1973:197). The theme of sexuality is running through the entire novel
as a proof of Lawrence’s open-mindedness. Many argue that the novel treats sexual
relationships as important as the intellectual bond a man and a woman can develop. ″But a
warm relationship between a man and a woman, the novel insists, must be based on sex and
not sex which is casual or frivolous but deeply serious.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:XXIII)

Lawrence tried to step inside the human mind and made the physical contact available to
anyone who found pleasure in the striking manner of his writing. As one of his letters show,
he recognized the importance deeper sense of intimacy in a loving relationship.

″This is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully,
completely, honestly and cleanly…Now our business is to realize sex. Today, the full
conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself. ″8

″I believe the consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of sex,
and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the glimmering edge of our awareness
and our field of understanding, in the endless business of knowing ourselves.″9

Continuously, Connie was drunk with passion which resulted in the birth of her maternal
instincts. She thought of the bliss of having a child to a man ″whom one adored in one’s
bowels and one’s womb″. (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:117) Being married but wanting another
man’s child was severely unconventional in keeping with the Victorian code of ethics. It was
believed that marriage was sacred and was designed to inspire people to become holy. With
her impure act of adultery, Lady Chatterley booked the first row at the theatre of the
condemned.

″I told Clifford I might have a child.″ (...) ″He’d be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be his.
″ She dared not to look up at him.

″No mention of me, of course?″ he said.

″No. No mention of you,″ she said.

″ (...) That was why you wanted me then, to get a child?″

″No. Not really,″ she said.

8
A Propos, PII 489-90.
9
Letter to Morris L. Ernst, CL 1099. 10.xi.28.
50
″ (...) It’s as your Ladyship likes. If you get the baby, Sir Clifford’s welcome to it. I shan’t
have lost anything. On the contrary. I’ve had a very nice experience, very nice indeed!″ -and
he stretched in a half suppressed sort of yawn. ″If you’ve made use of me,″ he said, ″it’s not
the first time I’ve been made use of; and I don’t suppose it’s ever been as pleasant as this
time, though of course one can’t feel tremendously dignified about it.″

″ (...) But I didn’t make use of you,″ she said, pleading. (...) ″I liked your body.″

″Did you?″ he replied, and he laughed. ″Well then, we’re quits because I liked yours.″

″Would you like to go upstairs now?″ he asked her, in a strangled sort of voice.

″No, not here. Not now!″ she said heavily, though if he had used any power over her, she
would have gone, for she had no strength against him.

″I want to touch you like you touch me,″ she said. ″I’ve never really touched your body.″

″(...) How do I touch you?″ he asked.

″When you feel me.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:147-8)

This dialogue between Mellors and Connie suggests that any love relationship should be
based on a deep connection, need for tenderness and primarily, a healthy mindset. These two
people lack mental stability as they are almost blown away by the winds of their insecurities.

″Therefore, again, she was divided between two feelings: resentment against him, and a desire
to make it up with him. (…) It was from herself she wanted to be saved, from her own inward
anger and resistance. Yet how powerful was that inward resistance that possessed her!″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:149)

As their affair moved on, Connie was possessed by her ambivalent impulses. ″I can't love you,
″ she sobbed, suddenly feeling her heart breaking. (...) She wept bitterly, sobbing. ″But I want
to love you, and I can't.″ Yet, as he was drawing away, to rise silently and leave her, she clung
to him in terror. ″Don't go! Don't go! Don't leave me! Don't be cross with me! Hold me! Hold
me fast!″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:150-1) Judging from these lines, Connie was strong, but not
enough to stand alone. She needed someone to whirl around her all the time without getting
dizzy. Mellors did everything she wished for, held her whenever she needed, but at times, he
felt hazed. He was pushed to the breaking point.

51
″Where are you?″ she whispered to him. ″Where are you? Speak to me! Say something to me!
″

He kissed her softly murmuring: ″Ay, my lass!″

But she did not know what he meant, she did not know where he was. In silence he seemed to
lost to her.

″You love me, don’t you?″ she murmured.

″Ay, tha knows!″ he said.

″But tell me!″ she pleaded. (...) ″You do love me!″ she whispered, assertive. (...) ″Say you’ll
always love me!″ she pleaded.

″Ay!″ he said, abstractedly. And she felt her questions driving him away from her.

″And do you care for me?″

He kissed her without answering.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:153-6)

Connie’s dependence shifted from her marriage to her affair. This introduced the issue of
divorce. The unfolding plot is similar to the one in Sons and Lovers where one female
character can not exist without the other one. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the relationship
analysis cannot be performed without the presence of both male figures. Lord Chatterley and
Mellors were ″as hostile as fire and water. They mutually exterminated one another.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:168)

″For the first time, she had consciously and definitely hated Clifford, with vivid hate: as if he
ought to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And it was strange, how free and full of life
it made her feel, to hate him and to admit it fully to herself. ″Now I’ve hated him, I shall
never be able to go on living with him,″ came the thought into her mind.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:168)

″I can tell Clifford I must leave him. And you and I can go away. They never need even know
it is you. We can go to another country, shall we? To Africa or Australia. Shall we?″She was
quite thrilled by her plan.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:189)

Their affair moved gradually until Connie was determined to quit her Wragby life. Connie
rarely spent time with her husband, who enjoyed the company of Mrs. Bolton. Mellors was
also married, even though he did not live with his wife, Bertha. His emotional chaos was a
52
result of his unhappy marriage in which Bertha had the ultimate power. Contrary to common
women, she was overly independent. She demanded sexual domination in a brutally selfish
manner. The only thing she craved for was the sexual act. By dealing with the assertion of
female will, Lawrence steps over the social conventions once more. Bertha is situated in a
similar position as Connie since they are both dissatisfied with sexual life in their marriage.
However, neither Bertha nor Clifford wanted to give divorce to their legal spouses despite
their vain marriages. Not once did Connie regret having cheated on her husband. In the
conversation with her sister, one can sense a small amount of Connie’s pride of her parallel
life with Mellors.

″And how would you like to be Mrs Oliver Mellors, instead of Lady Chatterley?″

″I’d love it.″

″(...) You see, Hilda, you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and if
you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:212)

Connie’s relationship with Mellors moved a huge step forward when she announced she was
expecting a baby. His fear of the worlds and his mistrust of the future were flashed upon by
hearing the news.

″I can’t stand the twaddling bossy impudence of the people who run this world. That’s why I
can’t get on. I hate the impudence of money, and I hate the impudence of class. So in the
world as it is, what have I to offer a woman?″

″But why offer anything? It’s not a bargain. It’s just that we love one another,″ she said.

″(…) So I’m a bit of a waste ticket by myself. (…) A man must offer a woman some meaning
in his life, (…) ″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:245)

This passage shows Mellors inadequacy of the natural happiness one feels when hearing one
is to become a father. Even in the harsh time of their illegal relationship, he is profoundly
sincere, a real Puritan, one might say.

″I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings,″ he said to himself, ″and
the touch of tenderness. And she is my mate. And it is the battle against the money, and the
machine, and the insentient ideal monkeyishness of the world. And she will stand behind me
there. Thank God I’ve got a woman! Thank God I’ve got a woman who is with me, and tender
53
and aware of me. Thank God she is not a bully, nor a fool.Thank God, she’s a tender, aware
woman.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:247)

The world dictated its own rules. At this point, both Connie and Mellors were determined to
fight against the hardships of the moralist society in the Puritan tradition. They were resolved
that their ways would not part. ″But the ways and the means were still to settle.″ (D. H.
Lawrence, 1993:247)

Connie’s assertion was represented in her letter to Clifford. ″You didn’t really care for me
personally. So do forgive me and get rid of me.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:255) Tangled in his
own wounds, deep down he knew his wife had left him a long time ago. Weeping, he felt
betrayed. This caused him to shed more than a few tears.

″I want my wife, and I see no reason of letting her go. If she likes to bear a child under my
roof, she is welcome, and the child is welcome: provided that the decency and order of life is
preserved.″

″(...) But don’t you see,″ said Connie. ″I must go away from you, and I must live with the man
I love.″

″(...) And do you mean to say you’d marry him? – and bear his foul name?″ he asked at
length.

″Yes, that’s what I want.″

″(...) I shall never divorce you,″ he said as if a nail had been driven in.″ (D. H. Lawrence,
1993:262-4)

Clifford and Connie’s interdependent lives were dissolved, as stated above. In spite of having
been cheated on and ridiculed in front of the whole household, Clifford would keep his wife
close to him. It can be argued whether his real intention was to seek revenge or he was too
rooted to her presence. Suddenly, Clifford’s life was made up of choices. To fight or to give
in. And it was all in his hands.

For those who built an indestructible home out of anything, that home was made of the people
they filled it with. Even Mellors, an alienated creature whose soul was carrying all the weight
of his time, who was absolutely refusing to believe in people, finally admitted. ″But of course
what I live for now is for you and me to live together.″ (D. H. Lawrence, 1993:267) Connie
and her counterpart refused to take part in the plays of the hypocritical society in which every
54
character was a deception. Burnt by the social and moral flames, they proved that what was
previously hurt, could be eventually healed.

55
CONCLUSION

Modernist literature inherited the corruption and the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. As a
writer, Lawrence was not under the delusion that human relations are perfectly harmonious.
He refused to idealize enthusiastically relationships between men and women. On the
contrary, he had the compulsion to reveal the dirt of his age, but also to praise the little doses
of human truthfulness. "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." (D.
H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1993:VI). Biographically, the discussed novels are
results of Lawrence’s pristine self-consciousness about the deceits of a morally and
emotionally counterfeit society. According to many literary critics, Lawrence was highly
successful in bringing together his philosophy and poetry. In both novels, he fought hard and
managed to destroy the imposed social and moral conventions of his time.

Firstly, Sons and Lovers deals with Paul Morel’s inability to form any kind of functional
relationship with women because he is strongly bonded to his mother. The Oedipal theme is
what makes Lawrence’s third novel exclusive. However, the novel is not about incestuous
affection, but rather about a mother’s possessiveness. Through his own life experiences,
Lawrence wants to show his own tragedy of being raised by a suffocating mother. It clearly
reveals the selfish control of a mother and demonstrates the effects of the emotional toxins she
released in the life of her son. Her strong influence upset even her son’s career and his
abnormal social relations.

Secondly, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, married couples suppress their desires and longings,
which later emerge in extra-marital relations. Here, all characters speak the language of the
body. Their communication is mostly physical. What both novels have in common is silence.
It is present in vast amounts - in the marriage between Gertrude and Walter Morel, as well as
in the one between Connie and Clifford. However, it is important to mention that there is not
so much communication in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as it is in Sons and Lovers. By this,
Lawrence represents the weight of the appalling human relationships in fifteen years’ time.
The writer’s anger towards the emotional invalidity of people burst out in both novels.
Alienation followed by despair underlies each of the stories. It can be concluded that men and
women are lost in their tangible marital relationships which contain nothing except
egocentrism. Thus, another string which connects the two novels is selfishness. Apart from

56
being self-centered, characters in both novels can be depicted as low-spirited and depraved.
Also, they are emotionally crippled but cleverly functional modern men. Lawrence was
disturbed by the plasticity of the human soul, and therefore, attempted to purify relationships
through the sex relation. He supported the idea of "a democracy of touch, instead of a
democracy of pocket" (Krook, 1957:54). As written in one of his letters: ″We have no
language for the feelings.″ (Scott Sanders, 1973:196). Lawrence’s notion of human
relatedness is perfectly described in his essay 'Morality and the Novel':

″(…) life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living
universe about us. This is how I 'save my soul', by accomplishing a pure relationship between
me and another person, me and other people, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and
the animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me and the skies and sun and stars,
me and the moon; an infinity of pure relations, bit and little, like the stars of the sky (...)″ 10

In this respect, both novels cherish ageless truths and moral worthiness and demonstrate
Lawrence's worldview and his cry for solidarity. Some of the most important themes shared
by the two novels discussed in this thesis are egocentrism and mental loneliness as parts of
human consciousness. Lawrence investigated the seriously damaged areas of the human mind
and questioned the ability of men and women to be aware of one another. His description of
personality elements owned by each of his characters can be detected in the modern times.
The twenty-first century has to be filled in with empathy and understanding because people
live their lives dimly. They are seldom aware of each other. This might be Lawrence’s prime
contribution to the modernized world dominated by various forms of loneliness. The egoistic
characters of these novels can be easily transferred to real life. Choosing hypocrisy instead of
openness and sincerity in marriage still happens even in our times. After all, the incomplete
relation between men and women is seen as a characteristic of his major works.

This thesis represents the theme of the unconventionality in character relationships, which
underlines Lawrence’s own attitude towards the dark side of human nature. He portrayed
people’s sufferings from the same emotional and mental unbalance which he himself found
hard to live with. As a future perspective, this study could be a starting point for further
research in relation to Lawrence’s last novel. Since this thesis focuses only on the third
version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, an additional analysis of the moral ambivalence in all the
three versions of this novel can be done henceforth.
10
D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (London Grafton
Books, 1986), p.15O. (Lawrence's emphasis).
57
Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the products of Lawrence’s creative
imagination and personal burdens are very important instructions on how to live a life of
awareness, not ignorance. These works teach us that what is the best for one person, does not
have to be the worst for the other. Also, people in love relationships spend most of their time
building up something, and there comes a point when that exact thing brings them down.
Lawrence did not let the ill-spirited industrialist society wipe out his chance to change the
future. For that reason, we, latecomers, cannot forget to seize the moment and live in it. We
can learn from Lawrence’s writings but we cannot undo his legacy, not when he is not here to
give his side of the story.

58
List of pictures:

1. Picture 1. Jessie Chambers (on the left) and Frieda Von Richthofen (on the right)

References:
Primary sources:

1. Lawrence, David H. Sons and Lovers. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited,

1993. Print.

2. Lawrence, David H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions

Limited, 1993. Print.

Secondary sources:

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