D. H. Lawrence(1885.9.11-1930.3.2) was one of the greatest English novelists in the early twentieth century. Also he is the most controversial figure in the English literature. Sons and Lovers, whose subject matter is taken from the experience of the author's early life, is an autobiographical novel. Lawrence was twenty-seven when he finished writing Sons and Lovers.
This thesis aims to study the conflicts among the characters in Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's early novel. The conflicts among the characters are surveyed by considering the process of the hero's character-building.
Sons and Lovers, the largely autobiographical story of Paul Morel, is the first piece of fiction that Lawrence completed in the new circumstances of his life with Frieda. Their relationship was the largest single aid in Lawrence's astonishing development from the level of apprenticeship in his earlier two novels, to the artfulness of his third book.
The unbalanced love of the parent prevents their children from forming their own ego and will make the children experience the spiritual and psychological instability.
For Lawrence, who went on to live the adventure that Paul approaches, the confusion of sexual roles remained critical in his development. He usually remained true to that delicate sensitiveness
which he noted in women, but he felt undermined as a man in society and threatened as a sexual being by his sense of femininity. It was nearly impossible for Lawrence to identify casually and satisfactorily with men.? The unsatisfied need for masculine identification enters all of Lawrence's works.?He pursues an ideal of maleness that he could never recognize in the circumstantial world and that his own divided nature could never wholly accept.? He proposed sacred fellowships at every level of man's experience, from "eternal" friendships to impassioned national parties and occult priesthoods. In his most ambitious efforts at self-integration, he tried to reorganize whole societies or to imagine new ones, in which his feelings and gifts would not appear inconsistent with manly powers.
As for Paul Morel's final reawakening to life, in the last paragraph of Sons and Lovers, we know that Lawrence himself must have re-awakened to life in the same way