Sons And Lovers And Hamlet–Oedipal Tales Or Freudian Fantasy?

Much has been made of the Oedipal/Freudian dynamics of ‘Sons and Lovers’, not Lawrence’s first work but certainly his first accomplished novel and the first of a series – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover- to explore sexuality.  Lawrence, while not the most distinguished writer of English prose (Joyce was a contemporary and Conrad a literary rival by a decade) and whose language and style are cribbed and bare by comparison, nevertheless was on the crest of the new 20th century zeitgeist of confessional prose, Freudian interpretation, and interior dialogue.



Sons and Lovers has been characterized by many as the first Freudian novel, one which tells the story of the intimate relationship between a young man and his mother and how her desperate love and his dependence on it frustrates his emotional maturity and disables any normal sexual relationship with women.  Intimacy with anyone but his mother is betrayal and abandonment, and even the most Platonic relationship signifies a breach of faith, responsibility, and love for her.

The novel has all the hallmarks of the Oedipus myth.  Paul Morel does indeed love his mother and hate his father and wishes to kill the former and bed the latter.  He not only is incapable of forming natural relationships with women, he hates them for their seduction.  Comparisons with Hamlet are obvious.  Hamlet’s hatred of his uncle for having murdered his father, the king, comes only second after his hatred for his mother for having bedded the new king so quickly after the murder of her husband.  She is is too quick to want sexual satisfaction, deliberately blind to her murdering brother-in-law, and too quick to want to restore her position and authority.  She, like all women, cannot be trusted. 



Hamlet cannot turn his anger towards the woman he loves – his mother – and so displaces it to another woman, Ophelia, a young, innocent, trusting, and loving girl.  Hamlet hates her because he is drawn to her.  She is the woman who would fulfill his sexual desires but in so doing would displace his mother.  Cruelty is Hamlet’s way of driving Ophelia away.

Laurence Olivier’s production of Hamlet is all about Hamlet’s incestuous desires. and how his overweening love for his mother distorts his reason, encourages delay and prevarication, and deforms his feelings for Ophelia.   As directed by Olivier the scene between Hamlet and his mother in her bedchamber is unmistakably that of a desperate lover.  Unlike Gertrude Morel who returns Paul’s affections, Hamlet’s mother has no such attachments.  She is a strong, confident woman who has married to survive and prosper, and in her sexual certainty never suspects the real reason for her son’s anger. Here Hamlet makes his reasons clear.

Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers' oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: heaven's face doth glow:
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.

 

What act? wonders Gertrude who still has no suspicion of Hamlet’s real intentions and cannot believe that she is responsible for his hatred.  Hamlet replies:

You cannot call it love; for at your age
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble,
And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment
Would step from this to this? Sense, sure, you have,
Else could you not have motion; but sure, that sense
Is apoplex'd; for madness would not err,
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd
But it reserved some quantity of choice,
To serve in such a difference. What devil was't
That thus hath cozen'd you at hoodman-blind?
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.

O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,
And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn
And reason panders will.

For both Hamlet and Paul Morel, where did this incestuous love come from?  In Hamlet’s case there is no suggestion of an overprotective, demanding mother; no smothering, debilitating love; no sexual exclusivity.  How was it that he became so attached to an indifferent, independent mother? Why were his sexual feelings and ambitions so distorted.  How was it that Paul had an immoderate love for and attachment to his mother when his brothers who were under the same mother’s influence did not?  In both cases it must have from the men’s own particular, peculiar, and very individual makeup.  

Who was more responsible for Paul’s dysfunctional attachment to his mother? She or he? Paul’s brother, William, the first born never felt the same obligation to or irreplaceable love for his mother despite her laments.  Arthur, the youngest, was independent, sexually mature at an early age, and indifferent to his mother’s ambitions.  Only Paul felt a complementary need.  If his feelings were indeed Oedipal, they originated within himself and only encouraged by his mother.  Only Paul hated his father so viscerally, and only Paul had trouble with women. 



Hamlet had developed an exclusive, abnormal love for his mother; but the reasons for such attachment are not suggested by Shakespeare.  It is only clear that his mother did not initiate the intimacy. His like Paul Morel’s problem came from within.

While according to classic Freudian theory the Oedipal attachment need not have a mother’s complicity or initiation but it helps.  The incestuous complicity – the natural desire of a mother to sleep with her son and vice-versa – makes an Oedipal relationship particularly powerful, but a son may have incestuous feelings with no encouragement from his mother as in the case of Hamlet. The son’s disorder is Oedipal nonetheless. 

What exonerates Gertrude Morel even more is her selfishness, her idealistic ambitions, her class-conscious dismissal of her husband, and her frustrations as a woman living in a severely patriarchal society.  Her attachment had far more to do with her own personal disappointments and dissatisfactions than any real latent sexual feelings for her son.  It is Paul who is the protagonist in the sexual drama.  He is the one with unhealthy and damaging attachments to his mother.

But is this really Freudian? A complex struggle among id, ego, and superego and one which begins at birth and a boy’s first physical intimacy.  Is Paul really such a classic Freudian case?



Perhaps, but another scenario is equally likely.  Paul and Hamlet were born timid, uncertain, and dependent.  They both had the disadvantage of too little intelligence to understand the difference between intellect and emotion; and too much to be unaware of the nature of ideas and of sexual dynamics.

Paul’s confused, frustrated, cruel, and often hateful relationship with Miriam was ostensibly about his obligations to his mother, but his inability to square a normal sexual relationship with the respect, duty, and responsibility due to a parent was because of his character.  He had no moral compass to guide him - to know that he was using Miriam as an audience for his immature intellectuality and that his cruelty derived from his own frustrations and emotional confusion.  

His sexualization of Clara was as immature and naïve as his intellectualizing of Miriam.  Women were either-or never simply women.  Both Clara and Miriam appreciated Paul for the man he was.  They never loved him for what he intended but for what they saw was a characterizing essence – the way he walked, gestured, talked, and moved.  It was Paul who was locked within an impossibly resistant character flaw.  His problems were less Freudian than they were psycho-social.

Worse, they were predictable and ordinary.  Many young men have difficulty sorting out what they want in a woman – sexual object, caring female, or wit and intelligence.  As they mature they understand that they must settle, make a choice, and live with it.  Paul had an ignorant and arrogant sense of himself as something special for whom love was especially made and who should be immediately and unquestionably satisfied.

Paul was a product of nature more than or as much as nurture. Hamlet’s mother never encouraged such affection; and Paul’s brothers, although under the same demanding maternal compulsion, easily resisted.  Both men were born timid, uncertain, and with not enough intelligence or will to sort intellect from emotion.  Paul’s aesthetics – shallow, predictable, and uninteresting – were his way of compensating for his sexual indecisiveness.  His inability to take either Miriam or Clara as individual women and not expressions of himself was part of his naïveté. 

If one is categorically Freudian, it is not hard to sympathize with Paul.  He came under the influence of a smothering, emotionally demanding mother and so his inabilities to form mature relationships with women were understandable and forgivable.  If one keeps Freud on the shelf and simply looks at Paul’s relationships with his mother, Miriam, and Clara, it is hard to be sympathetic.  He is ignorant of women, blind to sexual nuance and diversity, and imprisoned by severe, irrational sense of responsibility and duty.  His dysfunction has little to do with Oedipus or id, ego, and superego but immaturity, slowness, selfishness and cruelty.

Nor can Hamlet be excused by his irrational love of his mother and his immoral cruelty to Ophelia or given leeway for his indecision and parabolic reasoning.  Freud is no excuse for timid, if not cowardly doubt and hesitation.

Sons And Lovers–D.H. Lawrence’s Tale of Too Much Motherly Love

Sons and Lovers has often been characterized as the first expressly Freudian novel.  Many of the well-known psychoanalytic paradigms are present in the book – an obsessive mother-son love, the hatred of the son for his father., and the inability of the son to form mature adult sexual relationships because of his dependence on his mother.  Paul Morel can find sexual and emotional satisfaction neither with Miriam nor Clara.  His intimacy with Miriam always remains intellectual and physically pure; and although he is tempted by her sexually, he represses these feelings, preferring to love only in a chaste, even spiritual way.  His most intimate moments with Miriam have nothing to do with physical presence or desire and are only reflections of the chaste beauty of form, line, color, and texture.  He is most at peace when he is with her by moonlight in a summer garden – romantic Victorian moments which only serve to protect the more powerful and sublimated sexual feelings that have originated with his incestuous feelings for his mother and which he refuses to confer or transfer to any other woman.  Miriam is like Paul’s mother because she is sensitive, appreciative of art and beauty, and open to sensuousness and spiritual awareness.  

Gertrude Morel is nothing of the sort. She is a woman of airs, exaggerated sense of status, value and self-worth, and is only socially and intellectually refined by comparison with her husband – a miner from the age of ten, with little schooling or education, rough manners, and basic needs.  Yet there is a natural affinity between Paul and his mother, a relationship which has as much to do with genetics as it does with the character, intent, and responsibility.  Paul was a delicate, sensitive child who would always have been needy and dependent on the warmth and affection of his mother even if she had not been so insistent on her love for him.  His on-off relationship with Miriam can easily be seen without a Freudian lens.  An overly sensitive boy who had neither the male confidence, sexual ambitions or physical independence and needs of his brother William or even his father, who was intimidated by women, overly guided by his intellectual bearings, and unable to square natural sexual impulses with an overwhelming sense of duty and responsibility.

If his brothers William and Arthur easily and quickly developed their own distinction and individuality, were able to avoid their mother’s smothering attention and to deal with their abusive but equally dependent and intimidated father, then why couldn’t Paul?  Why must one assume such a Freudian interpretation? Is this not simply a case of an unsure, weak, and indecisive boy who needed guidance, direction, and security rather than a mother to bed?

There is no doubt that there are enough incestuous allusions in the book to expect a Freudian interpretation above all; and the literary critic Blake Morrison concurs:

The sexual bond between mother and son is established early on. "Paul loved to sleep with his mother," we're told. When she accompanies Paul to the interview for his first job, at Jordan's factory, she behaves "like a sweetheart" and both of them feel "the excitement of lovers having an adventure together". "Why can't a man have a young mother?" he exclaims, "I'll never marry while I've got you." The incestuous undercurrents come to the surface in chapter eight, with a "long, fervent kiss".

If we're unsure what to make of the kiss, the drunken Walter Morel, returning home, leaves us in no doubt: "At your mischief again?" he snarls. In the aftermath, father and son nearly come to blows. But Mrs. Morel forestalls them by fainting, and while Paul comforts and revives her Walter stumbles off to bed. "Don't sleep with him, Mother," the son pleads, and in doing so recognizes that "he still loved his mother best". All this is unashamedly autobiographical. As Lawrence told a friend when his mother lay dying: "We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love." Jessie Chambers similarly reports him saying: "I've loved her, like a lover. That's why I could never love you."

Many other critics have compared Sons and Lovers with Hamlet. Hamlet despised his mother for marrying his uncle even more than he hated his uncle for murdering his father.  His sexual feelings are most evidently expressed in Laurence Olivier’s film version of the play.  Olivier cut the long four-hour play for reasons of brevity (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are absent) but also for purpose.  He felt that Hamlet’s actions could be best understood through his relationship with his mother; and the scenes of them together were unmistakably sexual.  As importantly, Hamlet’s love-hate relationship with Ophelia derives from his frustrated feelings for his mother.  In classically Freudian terms, it isn’t Ophelia he hates but himself for his inability to shed his sexual submission to his mother and transfer his feelings to another woman.

Paul Morel is no different.  Not only does he have strong incestuous feelings for his mother, but has destructively ambivalent feelings about Miriam.  The text is filled with references to his hatred of Miriam because she interferes with his relationship with his mother; and yet the girl is as innocent, simple, devoted, and honest as Ophelia.  Paul is the problem just as Hamlet was.

It is less easy to understand Hamlet’s attachment to his mother in Freudian terms.  There is nothing in the play that suggests overly affectionate or demanding maternal attention.  The play opens too late in Hamlet’s life for any intimating looks into his childhood.  So looking at his relationship through a Freudian lens may be the worst kind of ex post facto analysis.  In fact pre-Freudian literary critics found plenty in Hamlet’s own, distinct character to criticize.  He like Paul Morel was indecisive, confused, tentative, crossed in his responsibilities, jealous certainly of the confident male presence of his uncle and angry enough at his mother dishonoring and disrespecting the legacy of his father, but no castrated male, neutered by his mother.

From birth, Paul is over-mothered; but again, if Freudian lenses are left aside, there are many other good reasons for her affections.  She was living with an abusive, intolerant, ignorant husband in an age where patriarchy and male dominance was the rule.  Few women could escape marriage in Victorian Europe and found their own ways to deal with their husbands and to make their own arrangements.  Ibsen’s strong, defiant women – Hedda Gabler, Hilde Wangel, and  Rebekka West – used intelligence, craft, and will to extract what they needed from powerful men.  Shakespeare’s heroines three hundred years earlier bested men at every turn despite an even more constricting and patriarchal age.

Gertrude Morel saw personal fulfillment and satisfaction through her children, especially William and Paul.  When William died and her hopes for reflected tribute gone with his death, she turned her attentions exclusively to Paul.  He was more like her than any of her other children – sensitive, naturally refined, and intelligent – and saw in his future a vindication of her motherhood and a defiant success despite her ignorant husband.  The transference of ambition from mother to son was neither uncommon nor surprising.

When Paul comes of sexual age and begins to become interested in Miriam, Gertrude’s most deformed, selfish, and abusive desires are expressed.  It is not enough for her to promote, counsel, and encourage her son, but to ensure that he will never leave her; and through whining self-pity and and crass manipulation of her son’s feelings, she is determined to keep him all to herself.  He will never be shared, nor share his love for her with another.

This again is not necessarily Freudian but an expression of an unappealing, destructive, and dangerous woman.  Although Paul must take responsibility for who he is and not confer all blame on his mother, she did indeed encouraged his timidity, overweening sense of responsibility and duty, and unique devotion to her.  She played him, manipulated him, and destroyed any hope of his sexual or emotional maturity.

Although Lawrence wrote and published a few works before Sons and Lovers, it is really the first book in a series which progressively and more deeply discuss sexual dynamics.  The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover all deal with sexual will, sexual identity, and sexual purpose.  Sons and Lovers only begins to explore these themes but provides the foundation for understand his later work. 

There are no women like Gertrude Morel in his succeeding books.  His women are all strong and determined but also mature; and their relationships, while often fragile and unsatisfying, are never overly demanding or punitive.

Sons and Lovers is far more than a Freudian tale because it exposes the damaging nature of too much love.  Love according to Lawrence was incidental and even irrelevant to the resolution of sexual dynamics.  Women and men both use love to dominate, manipulate, secure advantage, and control; and it should be suspect.  Romantic love was invented by Petrarch in the 14th century and the legacy of romantic ascription to sexual needs persists.  Playwrights from Shakespeare to Albee have repeated this theme and have dismissed the idea of idealistic love.  The best Albee was able to suggest was accommodation.  George and Martha (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) flay each other to the marrow working out their own sexual dynamics and at the end of the play, both beaten, helpless, and tired can only hope that with this complete annihilation of selves, there might be a chance of rebuilding their marriage.   Shakespeare ends all his Comedies with a happy marriage, but no one is fooled.  The women all married badly did so for security, status, and position.  If there were divorce, they would have been the first in court.  Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov were no optimists when it came to love; and their women were realistic and resolute about how to secure a reasonable future.

There is indeed such a thing as too much love, and Lawrence’s story of the Morels is a good example.