RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

In spite of the importance William has in his mother's
life, he is not the key to the role of dominance presented by
Lawrence in Sons and Lovers.
Neither William, nor his father:
Paul Morel, the third son, is this key.
He is the one who has
the most intrinsic and sick relationship with his mother, in
whose hands lie the definition of a contradictory, self-repressive
personality.
William dies.
It is in Paul that the mother's life centers when
It is he who most concentrates the exasperating
love for his mother.
And although the reverse is also true, it
must be said that Gertrude Morel did love her first son best, and
in fact Paul was jealous of this, and aware that he was 'second-
best'.
Paul's relationship with his mother matches Freud's
theory of Oedipus Complex (the symptoms are clearly stated by the
author throughout the novel).
Paul's birth, as I have already pointed out, is the most
troublesome.
His mother has rejected him even before he was
born.
This fact implies that the child will have the sequels
(either good or bad) arisen through his mother's rejection.
The
child has all the elements to become a mentally disordered one.
His health is weak and hence he depends too much on his mother's
attention and care.
hypersensitiveness.
I think that his illness, if it is, is
Paul is the son who is able to share his
mother's pains much more than the other children, and because of
this 'quality' he is also the one who suffers more.
His character
goes from one extreme to the other:
at one moment he is all love
and soon after he is transformed into a flood of anger; at another
moment he is all nervous, soon after he is as calm as a day
without wind.
That is Paul Morel: he concentrates all feelings
at once without distinguishing them clearly.
Up to the end of
the novel he cannot be said to know with determination what he