Book Report of Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers is an autobiography written by D.H. Lawrence. After reading it,
I cannot help admiring Lawrence’s talents, the novel’s beautiful language, delicate
plots as well as the animated characters in it. This book arouses me a lot of thinking,
and now I’d like to talk about some of them.
Love is the permanent topic of our world, and it is almost included by every
novel. And Sons and Lovers is no exception. However, the love in it is quite different
from love in the other novels. There are mainly three kinds of love in this novel, and
through these loves, the author D.H Lawrence displayed us vividly the different
characters as well as their complicated relations.
The first kind of love is the love between Paul and his mother. Paul is the main
male character in this book, he is the portrait of Lawrence himself to some extend. His
character has changed and matured when he grew older, basically he is an introverted,
reserved, knowledgeable and intelligent person with a bit pride and shyness. He lived
in a poor and unhappy family, in which his mother and father did not get along well.
His mother Mrs. Morel, and educated woman, had lost her hope in her husband and
turned her love almost completely to her sons. When her eldest son William died, she
turned to Paul and relied on him. Paul loved her mother deeply.
“She was the only
thing that held him up, and was the prop and pivot of his life”. However, such love
between them is abnormal and led to bad consequences later. First, Paul’s love for his
mother made him unable to engage himself in loving other women; his mother always
came first in his mind. When he was with her, the other women shrank away. And
what he planned for his future is to live in a big house with his mother. Actually, the
relationship between Paul and Mrs. Morel is more like lovers, which we can see from
their conversations. Therefore, such love eventually led to Paul’s feeling of lost and
his own tragedy at last. Second, such kind of strange love made Paul cannot stand his
mother’s suffering after she fell ill, and made him decide to soothe her pains by
killing her with morphia.
The second kind of love is the love between Paul and Miriam. Miriam is a girl
living in a poor farm family. She was beautiful, shy and proud. She was not satisfied
with her positions in her family, as well as women’s positions in the world. At the
same time, she was strictly religious, believing completely in the Christianity
disciplines. She did everything she thought God asked her to do. For example, she
embraced “the other face principle”, and swallowed her brothers’ brutal abuses. she
also suffered a lot from Paul’s criticizes of her God. However, Paul can never devote
himself completely to her. On the one hand, Mrs. Morel always occupied the first
place in his heart; on the other hand, Miriam cannot satisfy Paul’s sexual desire, due
to her religious beliefs. Though they did have sex in the novel, still they could not
satisfy each other. Therefore, their spiritual love is destined to be a failure.
The third kind of love is the love between Paul and Clara. Clara is a beautiful
and sexy woman. She got married with a smith and then get separated with him
because she was not satisfied. At a time, Paul was drawn to her and wanted her
strongly. But that was only concerned with body and desire, she was shallow and
could not hold candle to his wits. It seemed that Paul only wanted her at night and in
the daytime wanted to get rid of her. Their relationship broke either. In the end, Clara
went back to her husband.
All these love are to some extend abnormal and have not ended well. And despite
the fact that Paul loved the three women ardently, at the some time, he hated them too.
He hated his mother because he loved her too much and did not want to see there be
anything wrong with her, he hated to see her mother become weaker and weaker; he
hated Miriam because she always wanted to take total control of his soul, and also
because she made his conscious suffer; he hated Clara because she did not understand
her and wanted to be with him every moment. From such complex feelings of Paul,
we can see that he indeed had some defects in Paul’s character as well as the three
women’s. It is such defects that led to their loves’ failures.
Besides love, the two women, Miriam and Clara showed us something different
from the other female characters. Miriam, on one hand is very religious; on the other
hand, she is a bit revolutionary. She despised men, but she wanted to be a man，and
wanted to be able to read like men did. As for Clara, there is kind of feminism in her.
“she had taken up woman’s rights”. She had in fact faced the same situation that
Paul’s mother had faced at that time or not, but she took the different action, from
which we can see her desire to be independent. I don’t know whether such
phenomenon is common or not I just think such kind of characters instill into the
novel some deeper meanings.
In spite of what I have said, there are still many other things that are worth
discussing, for example, what the environment and people’s lives like at that time in
England and how industry played its part in everyday life. Being able to contain all
these factors in a single novel, Lawrence is indeed a great writer