He loves his mother deeply, but at times hates her for her antagonism toward Miriam. The disparity weighs heavily on his psyche.

He has to reconcile himself to her excessive spirituality, but he demands fleshly love of her. Paul’s love for Miriam is a desperate attempt to free himself from the excessive attachment to his mother. The ability to look deep into his own consciousness cannot compensate for his inability to grow as an independent individual. He cannot help his mother’s soul-sucking love. But this remains suppressed owing to the inability to establish a sane human relationship. Paul is a young man of an artistic nature. Lawrence comments on his plight at the Jordan’s-“ Charles I mounted his scaffold with a lighter heart than did Paul Morel as he followed his mother up the dirty steps to the dirty door”. To him, the touch of any external reality-school, rustic and vulgar manners of the miners, his interview at the Jordan’s, library, etc. He thus proves to be an introverted and self-conscious personality. Paul suffers from utmost diffidence, shudders to face the outer world, and eventually leans on his mother more for the warmth of life. “ His neurotic refusal of life is the direct result of his parents’ failure.” To see them fighting bitterly, Paul is overpowered by the “ horror of the sudden silence, silence everywhere.” His tortured soul is soothed, only when he hears them coming up, together. Disharmony in his parents’ marital life produces in him a neurotic strain and makes him hypersensitive. Right from the dawn of life, Paul is prone to depression. Too sensitive and nervous to find joy in the external world, he finds self-fulfillment in the world of art and nature. He is an artist, and speaking psychologically, we may say that in art he finds compensation for his psychological traumas.

The same psychology is evident in Paul Morel, the hero of the novel. He was a tortured soul throughout the full 45 years of his life, and what he suffered, and what he thought and observed under the stimulus of suffering can very well be guessed from a study of “ Sons and Lovers”. Middleton Murry has emphasized that owing to what is called mother fixation, Lawrence himself was never able to make a happy emotional adjustment with other women. In it, he transmutes autobiography into objective fiction and organizes his accounts of a potential artist from infancy to maturity by racing the growth of his dual self-both artistic and human. “ Sons and Lovers” is “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman” by D.H.Lawrence.

Sons and lovers