| David Herbert Lawrence is one of the greatest and most controversial English novelists of the 20th century, and perhaps is the greatest from England proper and from a working-class family. During his life-long literary career, he had written more than ten novels and several volumes of short stories. Besides being a great novelist, Lawrence is also a proficient poet, a combative essayist, an atmospheric travel-writer, and a prolific literary correspondent. Furthermore, he extends his talents to book-reviewing, translation, photographic discourse and painting. But it is in the novels that his true greatness lies, and on them that his reputation rests. Lawrence was recognized as a prominent novelist only after he published his third novel Sons and Lovers, in which he began to extend the boundaries of the novel into its virgin territory. Eastwood, Lawrence's hometown, provides the social and historical background for his early novels; and the reader is struck by the wayward description of nature, of the rambling landscapes, and the atmosphere of the hills and dales of his native Nottinghamshire.This paper intends to interpret D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers from the conflicts between rationality and sensuality. Some critics employ Freud's theory of Oedipus Complex to explain the relationship between the protagonist and his mother . In this thesis, some evidence shows reading the novel in the light of Oedipus Complex is somewhat misguiding.. The reason why the protagonist Paul Morel can not love properly does not lie in the fact that he has a kind of somewhat abnormal attachment to his mother, but because the influence and the dominance coming from the society and his mother are so strong that he is unable to keep the balance of rationality and sensuality deep in his inner heart. He puts more emphasison rationality while ignoring sensuality, thus making him suffer a lot------He feelslike loving, but does not know how; he wants to stop loving, but only finds out thatVit is in vain.Sons and Lovers, Lawrence's first major work, was written between 1910 to 1913. With the mining land at Victorian age as its background, much of the story is taken from Lawrence's own early life in the midland coal mining village of Eastwood. It tells about the conflicts in a coal miner's family. The story starts with the marriage of Paul's parents. Mrs. Morel, daughter of a middle class family, is a strong-willed, cool, intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner, Walter Morel, and married beneath her own class. While Mr. Morel is uncouth and often drunk, with no formal education, but a certain openness of nature and zest for life, who pursues natural enjoyment of life by sensual impulses and instincts, Mrs. Morel, who has been a school master, regards herself a crucial rung above her husband on the social ladder and has high pretensions to middle-class respectability, tries every means to change her husband so as to rise in society. The disillusion in her husband makes her lavish all her affection and hope upon her sons. Her overwhelmingly strong influence brings about a splitting personality in her sons, which in turn produces paralyzing effects on their relationship with other women and makes them suffer miserably.In his works, Lawrence aims at exposing the suppression and distortion that modernindustrialized society forces upon the natural exhibition of human instincts; revealing the destruction of the harmonious relationship between people which is caused by the industrial civilization; and digging up the instincts and impulses which are deeply rooted in man's inner heart. The highly industrialized society has made man depend more and more on his rationality, will and intellect so as to obtain higher social status, to achieve acknowledgement and success. Therefore, consciously or unconsciously, man constrains and neglects his demand for natural and sensual life. However, man is gnawed from time to time by the secret longing rooted in his innermost consciousness for...
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