The Masculinity Constructions Of The Men In Sons And Lovers And D. H. Lawrence’s Men-related Complex

D. H. Lawrence is an eminent British writer in the 20 th century. His personal talent and his life experience make his works stand out. Sons and Lovers is his first famous novel. Its story happens in England with the new momentum of industrial production, and it is grounded in a mining community named the Bottom. It actually depicts the men’s condition both physically and mentally in the transitional phase between the Victorian era and the industrial age. This book superficially describes the family life of the miner Walter Morel and the growth experiences of his several children, while it mirrors Lawrence’s worry about men’s alienation. Scholars at home and abroad have studied the novel from various perspectives. However, most of the researches focus on psychoanalysis and textual analysis. Few papers are on the masculinities of the males. If any, these researches are limited to Paul Morel.However, Walter, William and Baxter are crucial characters deserved to be focus on.With close analysis and observation, it is enjoyable to find that the masculinity constructions of Walter, William, Paul and Baxter are the very reflection of the different types of Connell’s masculinity division: hegemonic masculinity, complicit masculinity, subordinated masculinity and marginalized masculinity. Morel experiences a frustrated and bitter history of masculinity. He is in the complicit masculinity but he has to defend his wife’s emasculation and his sons’ challenges to hold the patriarchal power in the family. William suffers a laborious and restless history of hegemonic masculinity constructing to get rid of the connection of complicit masculinity. Paul firstly has no ideal of constructing masculinity, and his gift in drawing gradually leads him to the marginalized construction of masculinity.Dawes lives in the complicit masculinity and his unhappy marriage makes him in subordinated masculinity. At last, the relation between Paul and Clara graduallystimulates him to hold his complicit masculinity.The description of the image of the men, including the male personality and the body, is a frequent topic in Lawrence’s novels. The short novels like Odor of Chrysanthemums(1909), The Shadow in the Rose Garden(1907), and the White Peacock(1911) are all the stories about the male characters. Sons and Lovers, based on the industrial civilization, shows us the sufferings of the men from the industrial productivity and the relation reconstruction between two sexes. These two reasons explains Lawrence’s intensified enthusiasm to reveal the conditions of the men and his firm complex upon the hegemonic masculinity and complicit masculinity. Other two reasons are his early life experiences and his remaining thoughts from the Victorian era. Lawrence assiduously criticized the inhuman capitalism and expected the men to release their natural manhood rather than live like a machine under social productive forces. From the novel Sons and Lovers onwards, Lawrence paid lots of attention to men’s living conditions and tried to find a solution for men’s salvage.Lawrence found the crucial causes and assiduously sought for solutions.However, his overt criticism of industry and his emphasis on the damage of the industrial have gone into a sort of hypercorrection. Capitalism exerted alienation upon men, but it also encouraged the independence of women, and most importantly,promoted the advance of the social productivity. His internal eagerness to rebuild the men’s power and authority, that is, the hegemonic masculinity and complicit masculinity, is a sort of ideal residue from the Victorian era, which manifests his confinement in the definition of manhood, as well as the confusion and anxiety of the people in his age.