David Herbert Lawrence and Sons and Lovers, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica David Herbert Lawrence and Sons and Lovers e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! David Herbert Lawrence Life and Works D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood in 1885. His father was an illiterate coal miner and his mother was an ex-schoolteacher. She didn’t want her children to work in mines and Lawrence could attend school only thanks to a scholarship. At 15, he was forced to leave and work for his family. After a period of work he could afford to finish his studies for his teacher’s certificate. In this period he started writing poetry and short stories and published his first novel The White Peacock (1911). His famous novel Sons and Lovers was published in 1913 and the following year he made many friends in literary circles, the most famous was Aldous Huxley. In 1914 he married Frieda Weekly and published another novel The Rainbow (1915), that was banned for obscenity. The same happened for many of his following novels. After the war, he and his wife started to travel around the world: Italy, Ceylon, Australia, North America and Mexico. Those countries gave him the inspiration for his next novels. In Mexico he discovered he had tuberculosis and returned to Italy. Here he finished his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that was banned for obscenity for a long time (in England came out without censorship only in 1961). He died in Florence in 1930. The book of life His novels are more traditional in their form than those of Joyce and Woolf, but his exploration of unconscious is as deep as theirs. He is sure of the power of the novel to capture the totality of life’s essence. “Being a novelist I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book tremulation can do. The novel is the book of life.” Sons and Lovers The plot The novel is set in a Nottinghamshire coal-mining village. Walter Morel, an uneducated miner, has married a sensitive and high-minded woman but the marriage soon proves to be unhappy as Mrs. Morel begins to distance herself from her husband because of his lack of refinement and his drunkenness. Embittered, Mrs. Morel turns their marriage into a battle. In the war between them, the four children take the side of the mother and Mrs. Morel turns all her love towards them, particularly the two eldest sons, William and Paul. William goes to London to work as a clerk and Paul goes to work in a factory of surgical appliances but he has his mother’s artistic sensitivity and has ambitions to become an artist. William develops pneumonia and dies, and Paul too falls ill. Mrs. Morel nurses him back to health and invests in Paul all her hopes and the disappointed passions of her marriage. However, she discovers the rival in Miriam Leivers, a shy girl that Paul starts to see and with whom he reads poetry and discusses art. Mrs. Morel is afraid that Miriam will exclude her and does her best to oppose their relationship. Paul is disturbed by his mother opposition but at the same time begins to resent Miriam’s emotional demands on him. So he engages in a sexual affair with the independent Clara Dawes, a supporter of Women’s Rights who is separated from her husband. Mrs. Morel does not object to this relationship since it is purely physical, and poses no threat to her emotional possessiveness. But the affair runs out of stream and Clara returns to her husband. Meanwhile Mrs. Morel falls ill with cancer and Paul is devastated at the thought of osing her. At the end of the book, unable to bear her suffering, Paul ad his sister Annie decide to put an overdose of morphine in her milk. Paul is faced with a choice between going on living or surrendering to his desire to follow his mother into the darkness. With geat effort he choses to live. Features and themes Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical novel, based on Lawrence’s own early life, in particular his close relationship with his middle-class mother in comparison to his miner-father. Lawrence ha probably studied Freud and the book can be regarded as a meditation on the workings of the Oedipus complex. But this novel isn’t only a sort of autobiography, indeed Lawrence self defined it as a tragedy. The novel is set in the Midlands, during the period of transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one and it is the first to have a real working-class setting. None the less its main concern is the universal question of what is to be a man or a woman. It is divided into two parts: the first ends with the death of William and the second ends with the death of Mrs. Morel and the release of Paul from her control.