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Unit 23: D.H. Lawrence — Sons and Lovers: Themes and Characterization

Chapter 12: Passion Notes
Paul spends more time with Clara, telling her that he has split up with Miriam. The two are
extremely passionate with each other, and Paul invites her to meet his mother. Paul later
invites Clara and her mother on a trip to the seaside.

Chapter 13: Baxter Dawes

In this chapter, Paul encounters Clara’s husband, Baxter Dawes, numerous times, and the two
fight once, with Dawes injuring Paul. Paul remains torn between his love for his mother and
his desire to bond with other women. He realizes that he will not be able to marry while his
mother is still alive. At the end of the chapter, Paul discovers that his mother is ill with a
tumor.

Chapter 14: The Release

In this chapter, Gertrude Morel dies, after Paul—who cannot bear to see her suffer—and his
sister give her an overdose of morphine in her milk. Paul befriends Baxter Dawes, who is ill
with fever, and eventually facilitates his reconciliation with Clara.

Chapter 15: Derelict

Paul is despondent after his mother’s death and contemplates suicide. Miriam meets him for
dinner and proposes that they marry, but Paul turns her down. Clara returns to Sheffield with
her husband, so she is also now out of Paul’s life. Walter Morel sells the house, and he and
Paul take rooms in town. The novel ends with Paul’s recognition that he will always love his
mother, and he decides to stay alive for her sake.

23.4 Style

Sons and Lovers is structured episodically. This means that the novel consists of a series of
episodes tied together thematically and by subject matter. Structuring the novel in this manner
allows Lawrence to let meaning accumulate by showing how certain actions and images repeat
themselves and become patterns. This repetition of actions and images is part of the iterative
mode. By using this mode, Lawrence can blend time periods, making it sometimes difficult to
know whether an event happened once or many times. Lawrence is using the iterative mode
when he uses words such as “would” and “used to.”
Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud,
became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his
mother’s love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence’s young protagonist.
Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the
discordant loves that haunted him all his life—for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here
called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence’s
own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman’s grasp: “as her sons grow up she selects
them as lovers—first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their
reciprocal love of their mother—urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t
love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives.”
Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which
further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare
is immense. She loathes Paul’s Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl’s deep love

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