Sons and Lovers—Personal and Impersonal Love

Ever since the dawn of consciousness, when man first became aware of the distinction between the self and the not-self, he has been subject to the concomitant desires for individuation and for union—i.e., the desire to preserve and develop his individual identity, and the desire to merge himself with something greater than and outside himself. The theme of Lawrence’s men and women is the eternal will to belong, and the fear of being submerged. Lawrence formulates the contradictory desires in his description of the dual nature of love:

There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering the beloved.

For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. Knowing

the breach between us, the uncloseable gulf, I in the same breath realize her features. In the first mode of the upper consciousness there is a perfect surpassing of all sense of division between the self and the beloved.

In the second mode the very discovery of the features of the beloved contains the full realization of the irreparable, or unsurpassable gulf. (PU 38)

Thus, for Lawrence, falling in love is the chief temptation to self-diffusion and also the hope for self-definition. It is love that makes us intuit the unlimited potentialities;

it is also love that makes us aware of our own limits by making us conscious of the strangeness, the otherness of all that lies outside ourselves. Naturally, it is fatal to identify oneself totally with the other or the universe; it is equally fatal to try to exist as a wholly separate, discrete creature. Hence proper love will preserve in delicate tension the isolate self and the oceanic self.

In fact, despite Lawrence’s widely-known attack on fusional love, notion of interfusion can be found in his earlier fiction. For instance, in The Trespasser, Siegmund speaks of his beloved Helena as a perceptual nerve connecting him to the cosmos and he did find utter fulfillment and commitment in single moments of fusion:

“Suddenly she strained madly to him, and drawing back her head, placed her lips on his, close, till at the mouth they seemed to melt and fuse together. It was the long, supreme kiss, in which man and woman haveonebeing”(T 64). A conviction that lovers can and ought to merge their beings in each other forms part of the romanticism of this novel: “Gradually, with a fine, keen thrilling, she melted down on him, like metal sinking on a mould. He was sea and sunlight mixed, heaving, warm,

deliciously strong”(T 84). Yet, that happy moment had itself been shadowed by the immediateassociation with thebat’swing, red against the sun. Now it is becoming purely hopeless, and is succeeded some pages later by this: “The rosiness died out of the sunset as embers fade into thick ash”(T 92). The momentary abandonment is

conveyed in terms which we learn to read as danger signs. The will to “melt down”

and “to fuse”is, for Lawrence, a dangerous will. It is a moment in which the passion conceals the lovers’incompatibility. In “Love Was Once a Little Boy,”Lawrence described eloquently the essence of loving:

Love, as a desire, is balanced against the opposite desire to maintain the integrity of the individual self. Hate is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is individuality. We live in the age of individuality, we call ourselves servants of love. That is to say, we enact a perpetual paradox. (RD 167)

Lawrence here describes how the desire of relating things which otherwise are incommensurable is the reality inside love. His adoption of the vampire metaphor reveals his conception of love as diabolism and destruction. The vampire threatens individual’sautonomy by itsphysicaland spiritualaggressions. Totalidentification symbolically annihilates the love-object as other in the process of its incorporation.

Thedesireto “devour”brings forth the outcome of a continually threatened autonomy, which is especially manifest in Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers. The relationship between the Morels manifests how injurious the fanatical imposition of an ideal can be to living human relationships:“She could not be content with the little he might be; she would have him the much that he ought to be. So in seeking to make him nobler than he could be, she destroyed him”(SL 25). Lawrence shows that Gertrude’s desire is to mold Walter according to her pre-conceived ideal of manhood and “good husband”that she has modeled upon her own father:

She fought to make him undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill his obligations. But he was too different from her. His name was purely sensuous, and she strove to make him moral, religious. She tried to force him to face things. He could not endure it—it drove him out of his mind. (SL 23. Emphasis added. )

Mrs. Morel remains insensitive not only to the injury she causes to Walter, but also to the damage she does herself in deliberately suffocating his spontaneous warmth and her own under her Puritanical preconceptions. “She injured and hurt and scarred herself, but she lost none of her worth. She also had the children”(SL 26). And thus, while she turns all her attention to her sons, leaving her husband alone, the result is not a respect of otherness but the deadly “indifference”:

Now, with the birth of this third baby, her self no longer set towards him, helplessly, but was like a tide that scarcely rose, standing off from him.

After this she scarcely desired him. And, standing more aloof from him, not feeling him so much part of her self, but merely part of her

circumstances, she did not mind so much what he did, could leave him alone. (SL 62)

She then upholds her own motherhood as another ideal to be imposed upon her children. Already sheiscasting herson’sfutureimagein theidealofmanhood that her husband has failed, or refused, to live up to. Undeniably, as I’ll discuss in Part Three, Mrs. Morel has been constrained by some social and economic factors, but her mode of loving has indeed caused some damage to both her husband and her sons.

The idea of “crippling effect of love”is worked strongly into all parts of the novel, within a context of conflicting voices. For instance, Paul is dissatisfied with his relationship with Miriam because in it he can never relax and leave himself to “the greaterhungerand impersonality ofpassion ...thedark,impersonalfireofdesire” (SL 347). For Paul, what is missing from his relationship with Miriam is the “real, real flame of feeling”(SL 243) which he believed existing between his parents.

Lawrence expands upon the general significance of Miriam’s failure in love in his later writing:

Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the

setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because (like Miriam) we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. (SLC 109)

In other words, Paul is not comfortable with the communion Miriam wants because she attempts to thwart his deep male instinct to be loved, impersonally, as a man, rather than as a mind or soul or personality. Mrs. Morel provides an explanation for Paul’suneasiness:

She could feel Paul being drawn away by this girl. And she did not care forMiriam. “Sheisone ofthosewho willwantto suck aman’ssoulout till he has none of his own left,”shesaid to herself;“and heisjustsuch a baby as to let himself be absorbed. She will never let him become a man;

she never will.” (SL 160)

The question which immediately arises is whether this is an expression of Mrs.

Morel’spossessiveness,ofan inadequacy in Miriam,orofan inadequacy in Paul. Lawrence structured the novel mostly from Paul’spointofview,which some critics regard as constituting a conspiracy between theauthor’sunconsciousmotivation and his artistic arrangement of his material.²⁰ Accordingly, the reader should be

especially attentive to the way in which the novel seemingly tells us one thing, but shows us another. The discrepancies between the narrator’sinterpretationsand ours createatension thatbecomesan intrinsicpartofthenovel’sform. Paul adopts his mother’spointofview ofMiriam’sinstinctforpossession,which springsfrom a fundamental weakness: “You don’twantto love—your eternal and abnormal craving isto beloved. You aren’tpositive,you’renegative. You absorb, absorb, as if you mustfillyourselfup with love,becauseyou’vegotashortagesomewhere”(SL 274).

Miriam’s approach to nature is here presented as the key to the dissembling of their love: she loves Paul as she loves flowers, she worships him as she worships them, and Paul feels suffocated by such adoration (SL 280). However, the flowers are seen to have a very different function once the scene is read in conjunction with the narrative point of view and the symbolism of the daffodils. While Paul stands condemned for his inability to be drawn into the wonder of the flowers, Miriam’sresponseto the daffodils is to caress with her warm hand the cheeks of the flowers which are described as “greenish with cold”(SL 281). Miriam’sintoxication isnotwith possession, but with the magnificent otherness of the flowers, which she defines otherwise than her own humanity.

Therefore, as has been pointed out previously, the reader should not adhere unproblematically Paul’s labels to Miriam. Take another example. While Paul accuses Miriam of being romantic, spiritual, and over-sensitive, he himself is also presented as introspective, as mystical as Miriam, always pondering and fretting.

Miriam is labeled by Paul as a “nun”—“shehad no body, only a voice and a dim face”

(SL 293, 328). But earlier the reader is shown how Paul is disturbed to see his unacknowledged desires mirrored in Miriam. Paul has never been able to tolerate her physicality, even such slight examples as her clutching her young brother (SL 257).

While Miriam longs to touch him, it’s Paul who will not let her: “if she put her arm in his, it caused him almost torture”(SL 210). Whenever she gets “near”and “rouses him,”he quickly becomes enraged at her without understanding why. Paul’s contribution to the failure of their love affair is partly through Miriam’s insensitivity during their love-making. He is hurt that she has not been with him during their union. And yet the reader is made aware that neither has Paul given himself away:

“Hehad always,almostwillfully,to putheroutofcount,and actfrom thebrute strength of his own feelings. And he could not do it often, and there remained afterwardsalwaysthesenseoffailureand ofdeath”(SL 352). In other words, even

when Paul does accuse Miriam justly, his accusations against her often apply equally well to himself. In such a way, Lawrence continually remindsusofPaul’scapacity for self-deception. It seems that, contrary to Paul’s accusation of Miriam for

“making”him spiritual, it is Paul who needs Miriam to remain virginal. While anxious of giving himself away in his union with Miriam, Paul is occupied by the equally terrible fear of doing so, and by the will to hold himself back.

If for Paul his relationship with Miriam is all about personality and premeditated ideas, his contact with Clara is all sensual passion, with very little intellectual rationalizing entering into it. The passional transcendence of self

experienced by Paul, and possibly by Clara, is fundamental to the later novel, as is the image of the “stranger”focusing the otherness to which the relationship gives access.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than themselves that he was hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars. (SL 353)

Paul and Clara have merged with the universe but not with one another. They gain themselves through their sexual communion only because they do not deny the impersonality of the experience. For Paul, Miriam as a lover is trapped in the desire to bring the distant world into the sphere of personal dominion. While Miriam calls Paul back to the littleness and the personal relationship, Clara helps him attain in their physicallovetheimpersonality oftrueaestheticexperience,“something strong and blind and ruthless in its primitiveness”(SL 430).

The word “impersonal”occurs centrally in the subsequent account of Paul’s

reaction to this moment: “After that the fire slowly went down. He felt more and more that his experience had been impersonal, and not Clara”(SL 354). Lawrence is at pains to show how this impersonality is not reductive to either of them. Rather, he suggests that it is the opposite; instead of being limited to the mortal and terrestrial dimensionsof“Paul”and “Clara,”they feelelevated to aprimeval,cosmic realization of themselves. In other words, Paul regards it as the true aesthetic experience which goes beyond the boundaries of external personality: “It was not Clara. It was

something that had happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agentsofagreatforce”(SL 431). Clara eschews all attempts to analyze their feelings, or rationalize the effort of loving each other. Here too is the first sign of the vision of love which Lawrence would later develop. “Effortless”is what Paul demands his love to be. The scene anticipates what in Women in Love Birkin tells Ursula about the new mode of

togetherness: “Iwantusto betogetherasifitwere aphenomenon,notathing we have tomaintain by ourown effort”(WL 250). While“maintain”evokesthespecter of fragile identificatory structures, in constant need of repair and renewal,

“phenomenon”conjuresup anaturalforce,already in place,into which the loverscan tap without self-assertion or stress. As lovers, Clara and Paul come together as

strangers, yet meeting. They respect the distance between their separate selves, and do not try to absorb one another.

But Paul and Clara do not for very long sustain the balance between their personal needs and impersonal desire. The lack of personal emotion begins to ruin even theirsex. “Gradually somemechanicaleffortspoils theirloving”(SL 391).

Clara tries to replicate the awe and mystery of the initial experience through artificial stimulation and eventually forces or fakes her response. As a result, Clara is soon dissatisfied with such kind of impersonal love, wherein Paul expects her “to be something shecould notbe”(SL 431), and she is for Paul no more than an

anonymous presence of Woman, rather than a clearly defined and delineated

personality. While her love relationship with Paul offers them a“higher”experience than the mere union of two people, Clara gradually finds that she desires not the

universe but a man. In other words, Clara is not content with apprehensions of the

“tremendousheaven thatlifted every grassblade”(SL 433); she wants what Miriam wanted— i.e., the human connection. PaulneveroffersClarahis“real”self:“Even when he came to her he seemed unawareofher;alwayshewassomewhereelse”(SL 437).²¹ She prefers Baxter in the end, because he “is there”at least; however flawed, he is someone to encounter concretely. Although Paul has found a new self or a new center of consciousness through his love with Clara, his new self is fragile in the mundane world. Clara finally chooses the domestic world and decides to be back to her husband. Clara’s final choice undercuts the self-serving distortion inherent in Paul’s conception of love.

Besides, Clara’s point of view is employed by the author as a further corrective to oursympathy forthenovel’shero,asheisjudged and found wanting by an

independent and mature woman who loves him. Paul’spointofview isby no means the only one in the novel and hence his version of the truth of his story is endlessly qualified by other competing perspectives. Instead ofregarding Miriam’sloveas suffocating and suffused with religious worship, Clara discerns in Miriam a normal, healthily possessive love, the kind that she herself comes to feel that Paul is unable to give. Clara tells Paul in very plain termsthatMiriam “doesn’twantany ofyoursoul communion”(SL 338). In a later scene, Paul analyzes his own relationship to both Miriam and Clara: “He saw none of the anomaly of his position. Miriam was his old friend, lover, and she belonged to Bestwood and home and his youth. Clara was a newer friend, and she belonged to Nottingham, to life, to the world. It seemed to him quiteplain”(SL 340). Clara’s judgmentofPaul’sdangerously naïve self-absorption is corroborated by the presentation of Paul’s inner thought, which is

placed in a severely ironic perspective.

Though widely regarded as realist fiction, this novel is not so much a chronicle ofayoung man’sprogressasan exploration ofthe various values which have shaped his life. These values are explored by making the characters living through them in all their contradictions, which is manifest in the struggle between the desire of

Though widely regarded as realist fiction, this novel is not so much a chronicle ofayoung man’sprogressasan exploration ofthe various values which have shaped his life. These values are explored by making the characters living through them in all their contradictions, which is manifest in the struggle between the desire of