Organic unity: ‘slow, like growth’

Abstract

In the light of the history of Sons and Lovers criticism, it is important to insist on its artistic unity. A liberal-formalist reading of the novel must attend to the presentation of character in all its complexity; however, at one extreme of the critical spectrum Sons and Lovers is interpreted as an Oedipal novel, which records the inner working of its hero’s and his creator’s unconscious; while at the other extreme some critics offer a novel which is about a specifically realised historical society and one individual’s attempt to locate himself within it. The psychological case study and the historical form which these interpretations suggest are not, however, mutually exclusive. This is so partly because the psychological and the historical were aspects of Lawrence’s own experience of growing-up in the Eastwood community; but more importantly it is because as an artist Lawrence sought to reveal the whole truth about a complex human situation, by demonstrating the intimate interrelation between the unconscious and the historical; between the psychological and the social dimensions of experience. To a large extent this is where our sense of the unity of Sons and Lovers resides. The reader is involved emotionally with the inner life of Paul Morel through his Oedipal dependence on his mother and his frustrated efforts to free himself from her; but Paul is at the same time distanced from the reader to some degree by Lawrence’s acute awareness of the enveloping social circumstances in which he is caught. Lawrence sees Paul’s situation as both personally unique and also historically representative of the emergence after the Education Act of 1870 of a new educated working class.