Through free indirect style, Lawrence reveals the protagonist Paul’s visual perspective of his love interest Clara, noting ‘he saw the nape of her white neck…he noticed how her breasts swelled inside her blouse, and how her shoulder curved handsomely under the thin muslin at the top of her arm’ ( S&L, p.286). Lawrence’s writing focuses on close-up descriptions of bodily features, particularly of women. Consequently, physical experience and its creation of symbolic systems relating to natural settings and human emotions provides a basis for the novel’s structure. The images juxtapose for their contrasting associations with violence and peace, yet Lawrence reconciles them in a narrative style that merges seemingly distinct descriptions of human experience and nature. Mrs Morel’s physical being resounds in the natural environment she feels ‘seared with passion’ in the ‘great white light’ of the moon.

Keith Sagar in his introduction to the novel argues that Lawrence creates scenes which ‘open out into larger significance, link up with other symbols to provide a matrix which is…a formal grid for the novel’. The dreamy, inter-related nature of physical experience reflects in the lax prosaic style which is built around verbs denoting gentle action: ‘melted’ ‘swum’ ‘swoon’. After a time the child, too, melted with her in the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon.’ The bodily experience of Mrs Morel transcends individual experience to include a subliminal recognition of unity with her unborn child and nature. Except for a slight feeling of sickness, and her consciousness in the child, herself melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air. He notes how ‘Mrs Morel did not know what she thought. Early within the novel, he describes a pregnant Mrs Morel (mother of the protagonist, Paul).

He mixes nature and human consciousness to stress the importance of physical experience in connecting humans to nature. The structure is based largely around description related to sensation to suggest that bodily experience is privileged. Although the novel follows a chronological sequence, there is a lack of driving plot action. We may consider Hugh Stevens’ question of Lawrence’s novels: ‘can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern…relationship with nature and with our own bodies, and dissolve boundaries between the self and the world?’ įirstly, the presentation of bodily experience may be linked to the structure of Lawrence’s narrative itself. Despite exploring abstract notions of spirituality and the unconscious, Lawrence grounds his narrative in the experience of the body in a way that may be linked to his status as a ‘Modern’ writer. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers arguably attempts to forge a style of writing centred on sensation. Bodily experience often seems difficult to adequately portray in literature, given its subjectivity.

And lovers dh lawrence