Trace out the Freudian concept of Oedipus Complex from your reading of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Laurence.

By Rabita Rahman Southi (Batch 40)

                                        “Alas! The Love of women!
                                          It is known to a lovely and fearful thing.”
                                                                           -Lord Byron (Don Juan, Canto 2,199)

Lawrence and his protagonist Paul Morel, from the novel Sons and Lovers, both has been contributed by, designed through, sprout from and curved by the love of the women of their lives, love that has attributed meaning to their existence, love that has made them . Their psyche has been enchanted and dominated by the perpetual obligation, devotion and willing suspension to the love that has constructed their beings, in this case specifically the love of their mothers. Sons and Lovers, being an autobiographical text, is the tale of sons that turned to be lovers for their mother, and couldn't ever take their turns as lovers for the other women of their lives, it’s the tale of a mother who turned to her sons for the love she has been craving for from the husband, it’s the tale of a husband who denied to love his woman enough and sunk into jealousy with his own sons within whom the wife did seek for solace. The father-mother-child triangle of familial bondage thus takes its flight into a transgression of the regular conception of a mother-son relationship through the reversal and replacement of role-plays that circles its fullest through continuous and final conformity by the son (Paul Morel in specific) to the “oedipal bond” and a psychological denial to be in bondage with any other woman, except the mother and thus the traces of the term “Oedipal complex”, coined and popularized by Sigmund Freud fashions its wings into the novel in a very expressive manner.

As the Freudian concept of Oedipal complex ascribes, in the book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the desire of the male-child to assert its possession over his mother through the replacement of the father-figure, who is regarded as a rival by the child, ultimately resolute itself by ending into subtle jealousy and an engraved anguish towards the father, we find Paul Morel’s development as an individual extremely influenced by the sense of possession and his crisis of locating himself within the family as the “only man” stands prior to his concerns. According to Freud, the interaction between the psychic expositions like id, ego and superego takes place through the confrontation of apocalyptic desire guided by the id, realistic knowledge of the ego that the father cannot be over-merged in terms of power and finally the contribution of the super-ego to the resolution of suppressing the id-dominated desire, the internalized perception of mother-son relationship meets its finality. In Sons and Lovers, Paul and other sons like Williams are haunted by their self-imposed vow of loyalty towards their mother which constructs their rejection of the patriarchal authority of their father, Arthur Morel and also their failure to sort out any successful love-affair with any other woman can be defined in the light of this psychoanalytic exposure.

From the very beginning of the novel, we are introduced to a husband-wife relationship which though started up with enough potential, tends to be a sheer failure, which is between Walter and Gertrude Morel. Turning from her own personal relationship Gertrude Morel takes refuge in their son Williams at the first hand and later in Paul more vividly. But we find the father, Walter Morel jealous of the baby Williams who serves as a shelter for his mother. Here comes the essence of rivalry in part of the father. The sons as well take on their freights of rivalry by their exclusive association and devotion to their mother and through their commitments to her. They are committed to their own mother; the way a lover becomes committed to his/her beloved. Walter Morel soon becomes an outsider in his own house where he is alienated by other family members, priory by Gertrude and feared by the assertions of his own children. He opts out for his escape in alcohol which makes him more vulnerable and less of an ideal father-figure consequently. Paul Morel, incapable of finding out the strong father-figure in Walter Morel, which is complementary to his formation as an individual and egoistic identity, fails to achieve a balanced structural unification with the mother and its basic tenets of being a didactic relationship; while the id-nurtured desire to possess over mother takes over the scene in turn.

Throughout the entire passage of the novel, we find Gertrude Morel as a mother whose self-assertion gets its way into the excessive sense of possession over her children. She lives through her children, especially her sons-Paul most of all in the later parts of the novel. The hollowness created by the death of William, is tried upon by Gertrude to be filled up through her more intimate association with Paul. She tries to reconnect herself to her idea of love and Paul becomes the medium while being desired by his own mother as a beloved rather than a son. Paul responds positively as well and even prays for and even fantasizes the death of his father. In Paul’s agile mind, his mother stands as the only lofty person. He cannot control himself and handle it successfully as a consequence of his serious subjugation with the notion of Oedipus complex and so he loses his ability to love other women.”He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to do depths of his soul. And now this purity prevented even their first kiss. It was as if she can scarcely stand the shock of physical love, even a passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and sensitive to give it”.  Confronted by other women like Miriam and Clara, Paul succumbs to a failure to establish himself within a successful love-affair and to a great extent conforms to the Freudian idea of “good girl”, resembling the mother.  His most passionate love has always been in dedication to his beloved mother. Neither Miriam, during the week at her grandmother’s cottage and not Clara, during their stay at Lincolnshire coast, can bring Paul more than ephemeral respite. The affairs provide no more than an occasional play of the beloved’s role and yield only momentary satisfaction- as his anger, anxiety, hatred, sense of betrayal toward his mother quickly returns after the encounter. His mother awfully complements this inability of him by her rejection of female entrances into his life. Paul cannot pull himself out of the belief that he has lost the power which supports and gives meaning to his life; his mother, after the death of Gertrude Morel. He cries again and again in his personal soliloquies and addresses his mother passionately as “My love, my love---oh, my love!” Paul seemed to suffer the loss of identity, unable to sustain existence without the duel authority of his mother and himself, which, in Paul Morel, takes the shape of an intricate and consistent mythicization of the female. Although he grows up, he can’t transcend the love between the baby and mother; he can’t build up a right super-ego concept to control his instinctive impulsion which goes against morality and ethics; and can’t make his emotional development healthily. Thus the mother-son relationship, though unable to consummate into physicality, remains vulnerable to the oedipal notion of a triangular family based complex.

Thus, Sons and Lovers, one of the most representative texts of the modern era, stands as an in-depth dissection of the psyche of the human mind and the formation it takes place through the influences of its catalyst factors. The way the Morel family and its sons came into their beings as lovers, as sons, as a persona is the way an individual takes his/her form on. The love of the mother or the love of a woman, as speculated by Byron and Lawrence himself as well, who himself said every sort of woman to be something frightening, as every man knows, serves as crucial to the construction of the lovers in the sphere of one single family, and in this case the woman is the mother. The text stands as an exclusive exploration of the psychoanalytic prospects of humane attributes and actions and among them the exposition of oedipal complex is prior to its concerns. The inter and intra-personal relationships within one single family, specially the mother-son one, leaves its readers with the greater prospects of analyzing through the psychic assertions of personalities.