Abstract
Beginning with the earliest reviews of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence has been indicted for his ‘inability to efface himself’ and for giving us a ‘narrative [that] reads like an autobiography’.1 Later, Mark Schorer’s provocative remarks about the confusion between Lawrence’s ‘intention and performance’ sharply focused critical attention upon the crucial relationship between voice and form in Sons and Lovers. Schorer argued that Sons and Lovers should be considered a ‘technical failure’ whose ‘artistic coherence’ has been destroyed by its inconsistencies. Specifically, he observed ‘the contradiction between Lawrence’s explicit characterizations of the mother and father and his tonal evaluations of them’; he also remarked upon the novel’s efforts both to ‘condemn’ and ‘justify’ the mother and both to expose and rationalize Paul’s failures.2
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Notes
Louis L. Martz, ‘Portrait of Miriam: a Study in the Design of Sons and Lovers’ in Imagined Worlds: Essays on some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, eds Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (New York: Methuen, 1968) p. 351.
One cannot dismiss Jessie Chamber’s perceptive complaint: Either he was aware of what he was doing and persisted, or he did not know, and in that case no amount of telling would enlighten him. It was one of the things he had to find out for himself. The baffling truth, of course, lay between the two. He was aware, but he was under the spell of the domination that had ruled his life hitherto, and he refused to know. So instead of a release and a deliverance from bondage, the bondage was glorified and made absolute. His mother conquered indeed, but the vanquished one was her son. In Sons and Lovers Lawrence handed his mother the laurels of victory. (Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: a Personal Record, by ‘E. T.’, 2nd rev. edn, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1965; repr. in Moynahan p. 482)
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© 1995 Daniel R. Schwarz
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Schwarz, D.R. (1995). Speaking of Paul Morel: Voice, Unity, and Meaning in Sons and Lovers. In: The Transformation of the English Novel, 1890–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379336_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379336_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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