Review: A wasted life because of one's  abnormal love for his mother
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 8, 2012
Sons and Lovers is the first novel of D. H. Lawrence's that I have ever read and now, after I've finished it, many things begin to make more sense than before.The book is divided in two parts: part one includes six chapters and part two includes nine chapters.In the first part we meet the Morels and the narration revolves around Gertrude Morel. She lives a harsh and unsatisfayingy life because of her husband Walter, who gets drunk and abuses her and their children.In the second part, the main character is Paul, the third child of the family and probably the one who would have had potential to become a remarkable protagonist, due to his capacity to work hard and due to his creativity.However, Lawrence shows us an extreme case of Oedipus complex. Since Paul was a baby, Mrs. Morel treated him in a special way that had led in time to a pretty tight bondage between them.  The mother-son love pushes the normal limit of familial affection, becoming almost erotic. The interesting fact is that both of them are jealous of each other's relationships: Paul hates his father - almost wanting to murder him - and Mrs. Morel hates Miriam and Clara, inoculating the idea that her son hadn't found the right woman, whom he ought to marry.As well as Gertrude's marriage with Walter, Paul fails in both his relationships, after swinging for several times (annoyingly for the reader) between Miriam and Clara. In truth,  he doesn't want to marry neither of them, because he secretly loves his mother more than the two.The narration is a bit slow because of the descriptions and the characters' thoughts towards the others.Paul Morel is not a protagonist that I might like, because he is very confused, his thoughts are often contradictory and he doesn't know what he really wants from life. His love for his mother has devastating consequences for both of them in the end.I think that Lawrence exaggerates when he pictures Paul as a spiritually and mentally mutilated man. If the protagonist had had a strong personality, he would have avoided the deplorable situation in which the reader finds him in the last pages of the novel.