D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers": The Centenary Conference

• Published in: The D. H. Lawrence review 2014-10, Vol.39 (2), p.1-10
• Main Author: Kaye, Richard A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Forster, E M (1879-1970); Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928); Lawrence, D H (1885-1930); Trollope, Anthony (1815-1882)
• ISSN: 0011-4936

Perhaps because of this ample range of critical optics, the essays offer a number of productively divergent interpretations of Lawrence's novel. [...]in a reading that builds on a long tradition of psychoanalytic understandings of the novel, Howard Booth's essay, '"They had met in a naked extremity of hate, and it was a bond': The Later Chapters of Sons and Lovers, Psychoanalysis, and Male-Male Intimacy" meticulously delves into the heated, unresolved relation between Paul Morel and Baxter Dawes. According to Cushman, throughout Sons and Lovers Paul's efforts to realize his God are analogous to Freud's quasi-religious notion of "oceanic" feeling, a connection that suggests why the novel is permeated with potently visionary scenes, large and small, in which Paul seems to experience unity with the universe. [...]Miller tempers a sense of Lawrence's boldness in the novel by pointing out that the author of Sons and Lovers follows the characteristic pattern established in Edwardian fiction whereby rebellious females figures ultimately are contained by men, as Clara arguably is in being "returned" by Paul to her husband and her unsatisfying marriage. A politically progressive newspaper with a distinguished history as an organ of the nineteenth-century Abolitionist movement, the paper included a regular Literary Review section that welcomed modernist achievements, most memorably with Edmund Wilson's 1922 essay on Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Eliot's The Waste Land, in which Wilson famously defined modernism as not as a New Classicism but as establishing new forms of subjectivity.2 The newspaper had long demonstrated intense interest in Lawrence's writing.