Alfred Kazin
SONS, LOVERS AND MOTHERS
Sons and Lovers
was published fifty years ago.
In
these
fIfty
years how many autobiographical novels have been written by
young men about the mothers they loved too well, about their
dif–
ficulties in "adjusting" to other women, and about themselves as the
sensitive writers-to-be who liberated themselves just in time in order
to write their first novel? Such autobiographical novels-psychological
devices they usually are, written in order to demonstrate freedom from
the all-too-beloved mother-are one of the great symbols of our time.
They are rooted in the modern emancipation of women. Lawrence
himself, after a return visit in the 1920's to his native Nottingham–
shire, lamented that the "wildness" of his father's generation was
gone, that the dutiful sons in his own generation now made "good"
husbands. Even working-class mothers in England, in the last of the
Victorian age, had aimed at a "higher" standard of culture, and
despising their husbands and concentrating on their sons, they had
made these sons images of themselves. These mothers had sought a
new dignity and even a potential freedom for themselves as women,
but holding their sons too close, they robbed them of their necessary
"wildness" and masculine force. So the sons grew up in bondage to
their mothers, and the more ambitious culturally these sons were–
Frank O'Connor says that
Sons and Lovers
is the work of "one of the
New Men who are largely a creation of the Education Act of 1870"
-the more likely they were to try for their emancipation by writing
a novel. The cultural aspiration that explains their plight was ex–
pected to turn them into novelists.
Sons and Lovers
(which
is
not a first novel) seems easy to
