D. H. Lawrence’s Vision of the Novel and Sons and Lovers

Abstract

This paper concerns D. H. Lawrence’s idea of the novel manifested mostly in his Phoenix and Phoenix II and how such a novelistic vision is exemplified in his Sons and Lovers. As well known, the greatness of Lawrence’s literature has to do with, among other things, his literary pride in the “sacred” function of the novel and the novelist as distinguished from other art forms or other sciences or even religion. For Lawrence, it is only literature, especially, the genre of the novel that makes humans see beneath themselves and the materialistic universe, and that eventually makes human life worth living through inner revolution. To serve this purpose, Lawrence argues, the novel should have, for example, such three elements as being “quick,” “interrelated in all parts,vitally, organically” and most importantly “honourable” (Phoenix II). Accordingly, this paper explores how such a Lawrencean vision of the novel is reflected first in his most autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers. My argument is that in the novel it is the hero Paul that is rendered as the most central representative of Lawrence’s philosophy about being “quick,” about the importance of passionate inspiration far beyond the world of the conscious or self-conscious or all those social pretensions. Second, this paper also stresses that the novel is connected not by the structure of a conventional plot, but rather by a Modernist technique depending heavily on imagery and symbols. Also, Sons and Lovers is a good example where Lawrence imaginatively tests his idea of morality that is new to most of other novelists, especially to most of the early twentieth-century readers. Equating being “honorable” with being “moral” in the novel, Lawrence portrays the way such a character as Miriam is in her puritanical religiosity not honorable, compared to other characters like Paul acting more on his inspirational instinct and impersonal grasp with reality. For Lawrence, to be religious and to be moral is not a religion. Morality is, for him, only the subtle, trembling balance between self and circumambient universe. To reread Sons and Lovers in terms of Lawrence’s novelistic vision is a worthwhile business, a new opportunity to understand better the implication of the novel and also the novelist’s original idea of the novel-genre.