Sons and Lovers

“In her weariness forgetting everything, she moved about at the little tasks that remained to be done.”

During one fight, the drunken Walter locks his pregnant wife out of the house. When he finally lets her inside, he flees to bed in shame. Gertrude is so exhausted by her domestic life that her body reflexively returns to the chores that define her existence. Unable to fight, unable to expend any more energy, and unwilling to return to bed to sleep beside a husband she hates, she performs her household chores. The routine of the chores offers some comfort at a time when she faces abuse.

“She had dreaded this baby like a catastrophe, because of her feeling for her husband. And now she felt strangely towards the infant.”

Gertrude’s affection for her children functions in direct correlation to her hatred for her husband. She had feared the birth of another child, but the opportunity to love Paul provides her with the opportunity to rebuke her husband’s existence by loving the children as much as she loathes him. He must bear witness to the love he cannot have; through her children, Gertrude shows Walter the love he has denied himself through his abusive behavior.

“He had not even the courage to carry his bundle beyond the yard-end.”

Walter insists that he is leaving forever, but Gertrude finds his small bundle of possessions and knows that he will be back. She feels a sense of triumph at knowing that her husband is a coward, but this victory is hollow. Though she has triumphed over him, and though she knows that she is a much stronger person than him, she feels pained because she knows that at one time, she did love him, and, through their children, she is bound to him. She may have defeated Walter in this battle, but the loss reflects painfully back on her and denies her a sense of victory.

“She was afraid of her son’s going the same way as his father.”

When William starts to socialize, Gertrude is afraid that he is turning away from her and becoming something more similar to his father. To the mother who has invested so much of herself in her children, this represents the ultimate betrayal. She is so close to her son that the mere thought of him behaving like her husband is enough to make her afraid.

“She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.”

Gertrude lacks a social network in the small community. She has very few friends, and, confined to the house all day, she has no colleagues. Her children become her support, providing her with the strength and solidarity needed to live with her abusive husband. This is a double-edged sword, however, as the strength that they give her is matched by her knowledge that she is forcing them to endure a life of suffering alongside her. She loves them but hates herself for bringing them into such a cruel world.

“Every penny he had he had spent on them.”

On his first trip home, William brings presents for the entire family. This act of generosity demonstrates William’s love for his family but also shows how his emotions often overrule his pragmatism. Earlier, he had promised to send his mother part of his wages to help his struggling family. He has not done so, so each of the gifts that he brings represents a small amount that might have been spent on the family’s survival instead. William broke his word to his mother to fund a lavish display of affection, and each gift is infused with a reminder of this emotional form of decision-making.

“Already he was a prisoner of industrialism.”

As he plans for his future, Paul feels imprisoned by his social conditions. He was born the son of a miner and grew up in a mining town, so his working-class identity is fundamental to him. Despite this, Paul yearns for a form of artistic expression that is not permitted to working-class boys. He wishes to be a painter, but every job available is associated with some form of industry. The older he grows, the more Paul feels trapped by the circumstances of his birth and the less he is able to identify with the people around him.

“I’ve gone too far to break off now.”

William has grown up in the shadow of a loveless marriage. After he becomes engaged, he realizes that he does not love Lily. When he speaks to his mother, however, he refuses to break off the engagement, as he believes that he has invested too much in the relationship. The tragedy of William’s dislike of Lily is that he runs the risk of entering into a marriage as loveless as that of his parents, continuing the emotional cycle in which he has been trapped for his entire life.

“It was a good thing Paul was ill that Christmas. I believe it saved his mother.”

Paul and Gertrude share an important bond. This bond is strengthened by Paul’s near-death experience. His recovery is essential because it becomes the catalyst for Gertrude’s recovery. Her presence gives him the strength to overcome his pneumonia, similar to the way that an absence of people may have condemned William to death. Likewise, Gertrude is so relieved by Paul’s recovery that she is able to lift herself out of the pit of grief in which she has been trapped since the death of her eldest son. Paul does not recover alone; he and Gertrude help each other survive.

“But, perhaps, because of the continual business of birth and of begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse.”

Having grown up on a farm, Miriam cannot help but associate the physical act of sex with the animal world. Her understanding of sex—and, as such, any potential physical relationship with Paul—is conditioned by her childhood surroundings, so much so that she cannot bring herself to give herself to Paul in such a fashion lest she feel like nothing more than an animal. Miriam must associate sex with a deeper, profound, intellectual form of love before she can give herself to Paul; she must elevate the act and give it meaning.

“He hated her, for she seemed in some way to make him despise himself.”

Paul struggles to comprehend his own feelings. Amid the complexity of his feeling for his mother and his feelings for women like Clara and Miriam, he becomes lost in the chaotic churn of emotion. Because he cannot achieve clarity, he comes to resent the ones he loves for denying him emotional lucidity. Paul does not understand his own love, so he deflects his confusion by resenting those he loves for invoking such confusion within him.

“Morel was almost ashamed to go to his public-house that evening.”

After Arthur joins the army, Walter disowns his son. The grandiosity of this statement, however, is evidently hollow. For all the declarations of disavowal, Walter does not even feel strongly enough to skip one evening in his local pub. Arthur is eventually returned into the family, further proving that Walter’s words are utterly vacuous.

“You’re old, mother, and we’re young.”

As the intensity of the conversation rises, Paul becomes lost in a midst of insults and truth. He should not need to point out that he and Miriam belong to a younger generation than his mother; her status as his mother is evidence enough of this. However, by separating himself and Miriam from Gertrude in this way, Paul unwittingly creates an impassable barrier between himself and his mother. No matter how much he loves her, she will never be able to reverse her aging. They are both keenly aware of this, but until this point, they dared not speak the words aloud for fear of undermining their love.

“We agreed on friendship.”

Paul defines the nature of the relationship between himself and Miriam, but the definition is direct and unilateral. Though Miriam has consistently turned down his proposals, she has not agreed with Paul that they are only friends. Paul unilaterally imposes this definition on Miriam, an example of the ways in which he exerts control over their relationship.

“I don’t want the corpses of flowers about me.”

Clara’s great effect on Paul is that she forces him to see the world differently. The older, more jaded, more experienced woman points out to Paul that the little tokens of his affection are corpses. By picking the flowers, Paul has killed them. Clara compels Paul to think about the effect his love has on others, though he discards this introspection as quickly as he discards the flowers.

“And as she smoothed her hand over the silk collar she thought of her eldest son. But this son was living enough inside the clothes. She passed her hand down his back to feel him. He was alive and hers. The other was dead.”

The intensity and the immediacy of Gertrude’s love for Paul is directly proportional to the grief she feels for William’s loss. She loves Paul all the more intensely because she lost her first son, and she is determined not to lose another. Whether Paul is happy is nearly inconsequential to Gertrude’s happiness; all that matters is that he is alive to receive her love.

“He thought she gave a feeling of home almost like his mother; and no one could look more beautiful, with her tumbled curls, when she was flushed from the fire.”

Paul’s most tender period with Miriam is one in which he is able to play the role of husband to Miriam. This moment allows Miriam to fill the role of Gertrude, becoming an abstract, idealized version of Paul’s mother whom he can love both romantically and platonically. In this arrangement, Paul is able to replicate his parents’ marriage with himself in the husband role, allowing him the opportunity to create a more loving and successful domestic environment. He is able to right his father’s wrongs.

“I don’t want another mother.”

Paul states that he does not want “another mother,” which is both correct and incorrect. Paul does not want another, different mother. Instead, he wants the same mother—Gertrude—to live forever. Miriam or Clara will never be able to fill Gertrude’s role because they cannot replace her, simply because they are not her. Paul does not want a mother; he wants his mother.

“‘T-t-t-t!’ he went with his tongue, like his mother.”

Paul’s conception of love is so completely based on his relationship with his mother that when he begins to express his love for Clara, he subconsciously mimics his mother’s behavior. He introduces Gertrude’s habits as signs of affection in his romantic relationship, imitating his mother’s gestures as an unspoken way of keeping her in his current relationship.

“And I shall never meet the right woman while you live.”

Paul is rarely so explicit with his feelings, but his rebuke to his mother is built on a foundation of tragic truth. Paul and his mother love each other so much that their relationship threatens to eclipse any other relationship in Paul’s life. The horror of him saying this out loud is that they both recognize it to be true but do not want to admit it to be so. When Paul says these words, he forces them both to consider a time when Gertrude may not be alive.

“‘I mustn’t lie here,’ he said; ‘it’s silly.’

But still he did not move.

‘I said I was going to get up,’ he repeated. ‘Why don’t I?’”

As he lies bleeding on the ground after being attacked by Baxter, Paul’s thought pattern is emblematic of his entire personality. He knows what he should do, but he notes that he is not doing it and cannot comprehend why. Thus far in his life, due to his relationship with his mother, none of his relationships have prospered. He knows that this is true, and has said as much to himself, yet he cannot imagine himself doing anything about it. His self-awareness is matched by his inaction.

“For they had both come to the condition when they had to make much of the trifles, lest they should give in to the big thing, and their human independence would go smash.”

Paul and Gertrude live in the shadow of her cancer, terrified of discussing anything too profound for fear of acknowledging the limited time that they have left. The “big thing” in question is Gertrude’s fleeting mortality; her death will destroy Paul, something they are both keenly aware of. They fill their conversation with trivialities as a mode of self-defense, refusing to acknowledge the imminence of their destruction, either through cancer or through grief.

“There was a good deal to do, letters to write, and so on.”

Gertrude once encouraged Paul to seek a job that involved copying out letters. This was Paul’s first real job and the moment at which he began to separate from her. The sign of his growing maturity is that, in the wake of her death, he is responsible for writing the important letters to the world announcing her death. The same action that began their separation ends it, though this time, Paul must invent the words for himself rather than copying someone else’s letters. The act of writing gives Paul a chance to escape into unthinking action, even though he refuses to acknowledge the symbolism of his matured responsibility as head of the household, even with his father still alive.