Sons and Lovers Eaxamine the R

Sons and Lovers: Examine the Relationships Paul has with the Women in his Life. Paul Morel is the main character in DH Lawrence’s novel ‘Sons and Lovers’. The story charts his early life from when his parents married and the subsequent birth of four children, through childhood and early adulthood to the death of his mother. During this time three women have a major impact on his life, his mother, Miriam and Clara. Each has the most influence at different times in his life and can be attributed to his childhood, being a young man and early adulthood respectively; but each woman’s influence carries on to shape Paul into the man he becomes. From the very beginning there is a connection between Paul and his mother in that he looks like her with his dark hair and blue eyes. As a child ‘he seemed old for his years’, grave and serious like Mrs Morel. He is a quiet boy but spirited much like his mother and this increases with age as his other’s influence becomes more apparent. ‘When she fretted he understood, and could have no peace. His soul seemed always attentive to her’ is the way their attachment is described; their bond is very strong and very deep. As Paul grew older she never suffered alone for her husband’s faults and what she lacked in life because ‘her children suffered with her’. ‘It hurt the boy keenly, this feeling about her, that she had never had her life’s fulfilment’ so much so that it became his ‘childish aim’ to provide it. When he began to work ‘it was almost as if it were her own life’. ‘Paul almost hated his mother’ for this suffering when his father did not come home from work. He felt she should not waste herself on a man like his father when she could rely on her son. This stems from the jealousy Paul feels of his father because of his place in the household, in his