Lawrence's
masterpiece is "Sons and Lovers" (published in 1913). It tells about the
Morels, a family, living in a poor coal-mining villag 323h71d e, whose members were an
illiterate coal miner, a cultured woman and four children out of all them the older
are William and Paul. Unfortunately William gets pneumonia and dies so Mrs
Morel dedicates all herself in taking care of Paul: between the two rises a
strong relationship (typical of Oedipus complex). However, Paul falls in love with
Miriam Leivers (inspired by Jessie Chambers) but Mrs Morel goes against this
relationship because she is afraid she could be excluded from Paul's life.
Meanwhile Paul gets engaged with Clara Dawes (inspired by Frieda Weekley), but this time Mrs Morel doesn't go against this
relationship because it is just based on sex. Anyway Clara comes back to the
man she has divorced from and leaves Paul and meanwhile Mrs Morel gets ill with
cancer. Paul and his sister Annie, unable to see anymore their mother suffering,
decide to kill her causing her a morphine overdose. But Paul has to make a hard
decision about his destiny: following his mother by killing himself or going on
living; at the end, he decides to go on living. As we can clearly see the novel
has an autobiographical vein; the cultural differences between Lawrence's
parents and the strong relationship between him and his mother marked deeply Lawrence's adolescence. Besides
we can notice an important innovation: the introduction of low social class in
novels; Lawrence, through his works, makes the low class' conditions emerge
and, by doing so, he can be seen, from a thematic viewpoint, very close to
Italian literary movement of Verismo (Lawrence was so fascinated by Verga's
works, that he even dedicated himself in translating several Verga's
masterpieces like 'Mastro Don Gesualdo'). Anyway there are several innovations
introduced by Lawrence; one of these is the
language: Lawrence's
novels are very complex because of the presence of several figures of speech
and symbolisms. In any case Lawrence can't be
fully considered as a writer of Modern Literature because in his works there
are some features typical of Victorian Age; from a narrative point of view, Lawrence is really
descriptive and his novels make use of the third person narrator. So there's no
doubt in stating that in Lawrence's works Victorian and Modern features live
together; as demonstration of that, in his masterpiece, there is the emersion
of two antithetic figures: Miriam (representing Victorian Age) and Clara
(representing Modern Age).
The extract called "What is she?" (pages 269-270) deals with thoughts occurring
in Paul's mind while contemplating Clara who is swimming in the sea. The text
is based on one of the most important concept in Lawrence: relationship between man and woman.
According to Lawrence
woman represents nature meanwhile man is rationality and he can't really
understand woman's essence; consequently he feels inferior towards woman. Anyway,
the only one thing which can make man and woman get together is sex: man can
reach nature and a metaphysical dimension thanks to woman. Besides Lawrence sides even for a
primitive life, consequently he is for instinct instead of reason, nature
instead of industrialization and countryside instead of town. The text can be divided
into two parts: the first one describing Paul's thoughts about Clara (from line
1 to line 19); this part is dominated by the description of Clara swimming in
the sea; here Paul, who represents rationality, asks to himself "what is she?",
but he can't find an answer; consequently Clara is compared to a "large white bird toiling forward" (line 3), a
"big white pebble in the beach" (line 4), a "clot of foam" (line 5) a "grain of
sand in the beach" (line 9) a "concentrated speck blown along - a tiny white
foam-bubble" (line 10). Paul, unable to give a definition to Clara, sees her
getting smaller and smaller (it reaches a peak around line 10) and then, at the
end of the extract, she returns "even bigger than the morning and the sea"
(line 32). The second part (starting from line 20) is based on action; we can
immediately realise it thanks to the presence of verbs of action from line 21
("he undressed and ran quickly"). In this part Clara calls
Paul to join the swimming, he accepts but he's "a poor swimmer" (line 25) and
he feels inferior to her; anyway, in the sea the act of sex takes place ("she
heaved on a wave, subsided, her shoulders in a pool of liquid silver" in line
22); for the first time the author, by referring to sex, brakes with the Victorian moral code, but he
had to face censoring problems: in fact, a lot of Lawrence 's works were
considered obscene and they were banned. The text is even rich of figures of
speech; the most important are the antithesis in line 1 ("body moving with heavy grace"), another one in line 2
("She grew smaller"), an alliteration
of "s" (line 6) giving a sense of slowness (typical of thoughts), a metaphor
(line 23) comparing Paul's sperm to "a pool of liquid silver".
The text called "The wind-Swept Ash-tree" is taken by
"Sons and Lovers" and it tells about the violent relationship between Mrs and
Mr Morel. The father, in fact, comes back home completely drunk and treats his
wife violently; meanwhile, upstairs, children can hear anything happening
downstairs and, naturally, they're really worried about their mother. The text
is based on a parallelism: the cruel relationship between Mr and Mrs Morel is
compared to an Ash-tree swept violently by the wind. Mr Morel and the wind are
aggressive, as we can notice it thanks to expressions like "caught the houses with full force, and the tree shrieked again" (line 5), "booming
shouts" (line 16), "then the bang, bang of his father's fist" (line 18),
"fiercer and fiercer" (line 25). Meanwhile Mrs Morel and the Ash-tree can't
react against the violence they receive and we can see it by looking at the
expression in line 17 ("sharp replies"). The text is mainly based on the sense
of hearing especially from line 8 to line 28: here children are in the darkness
with "a feeling of night, of vastness, and of terror" (line 13) and the only
thing they can do is hearing what's happening downstairs; so the text is
dominated by terms linked to the sense of hearing: "demoniacal noise" (line 9),
"thuds" (line 15), "nasty snarling shout" (line 18), "piercing medley of
shrieks and cries" (line 20), "hummed, whistled, and shrieked" (line 26),
"trump upstairs in his stocking feet" (line 30), "they heard the water of the
tap drumming into the kettle" (line 31). The extract ends with the image of
children playing happily around "the lonely lamp-post" (line 35) which
represents Mrs Morel.
