CARIBBEAN ADVANCED PROFICIENCY EXAMINATION
LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
SCHOOL BASED ASSESSMENT

CANDIDATE’S NAME: NIKKIESHA MOHANSINGH
CANDIDATE’S NO:
SUBJECT: LITERATURES IN ENGLISH
FORM: LOWER SIX
YEAR: 2013
NAME OF TEACHER: MRS. A. SERJARD – LYONS
SCORE:

BIOGRAPHY

David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence; born on the Haggs Farm in the small mining town of Eastwood, England. The house, in which he was born, in Eastwood, 8a Victoria Street, is now the D.H. Lawrence Birthplace Museum. His father, Arthur John Lawrence, was a coal miner, and his mother, Lydia Lawrence, worked in the lace-making industry to supplement the family income. Lawrence's hardscrabble, working-class upbringing made a strong impression on him and he later wrote extensively about the experience of growing up in a poor mining town. "Whatever I forget," he later said, "I shall not forget the Haggs, a tiny red brick farm on the edge of the wood where I got my first incentive to write." Lawrence's mother was from a middle-class family that had fallen into financial ruin, but not before she had become well educated and a great lover of literature. She instilled in young Lawrence a love of books and a strong desire to rise above his blue-collar beginnings. His working-class background and the tensions between his parents provided the raw material for a number of his early works.
As a child, D.H. Lawrence found it arduous to fraternize with other young men; He was physically frail and frequently susceptible to illness, a condition exacerbated by the dirty air of a town surrounded by coal pits. Contradictory to the other boys in his town, he was not athletically admirable and had no predilection to supersede his father’s footsteps as a miner. Instead, he matured into a brilliant student and in 1897, at the age of twelve; he became the first boy in Eastwood's history to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. At Nottingham, Lawrence once again struggled to make friends. He often fell ill and grew depressed and lethargic in his studies, graduating in 1901 having made little academic impression. Reflecting back on his childhood, Lawrence said, "If I think of my childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being."
In 1901, Lawrence took a job as a factory clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer called Haywoods. However, that However, that autumn his older brother William suddenly fell ill and died, and in his grief D.H. Lawrence also came down with a bad case of pneumonia. Post – recovery, he began working as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood. There he formed alliances with Jessie Chambers, who encouraged him to further his writing skills. His literature expertise was discovered by Ford Hermann Heuffer, who supported Lawrence’s enhanced intellectual ability. His career as a professional author now began in earnest, although he taught for a further year. Shortly after the final proofs of his first published novel The White Peacock appeared in 1910, Lawrence's mother died. She had been ill with cancer. The young man was devastated and he was to describe the next few months as his "sick year." It is clear that Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her death became a major turning point in his life, just as the death of Mrs. Morel forms a major turning point in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, a work that draws upon much of the writer's provincial upbringing.
In 1909, Lawrence received high merit when Jessie Chambers engineered the publishing of some of his poems in the English Review. However, in the spring 1912 Lawrence's life changed suddenly and irrevocably when he met Frieda von Richthofen Weakley, who was six years his senior. Frieda was already married, but she ran off with Lawrence to the Continent, leaving her children and husband behind. While traveling with his new love, Lawrence continued to write at a furious pace. It was in later 1913 that Lawrence promulgated his third novel, Sons and Lovers, a highly autobiographical story of a young man and aspiring artist named Paul Morel who struggles to transcend his upbringing in a poor mining town. The novel is widely considered Lawrence's first masterpiece and one of the greatest English novels of the twentieth century. D.H. Lawrence’s estranged romance with Frieda von Richtofen augmented and they married on July 13th 1914 in England. In 1915, Lawrence published The Rainbow, which was quite sexually explicit for the time. Critics harshly condemned The Rainbow for its sexual content and the book was soon banned for obscenity. Feeling betrayed by his country but unable to travel abroad because of World War I, Lawrence retreated to Cornwall at the far southwestern edge of Great Britain. However, the local government considered the presence of a controversial writer and his German wife so near the coast to be a wartime security threat, and it banished him from Cornwall in 1917. Until 1919 he was compelled by poverty to shift from address to address and barely survived a severe attack of influenza. After the traumatic experience of the war years, Lawrence began what he termed his 'savage pilgrimage', a time of voluntary exile. Lawrence abandoned Britain in 1919 and headed south, where he spent two highly enjoyable years traveling around Italy and writing. In late February 1922 the Lawrences left Europe behind with the intention of migrating to the United States. They arrived in the United States in September 1922, where he persisted his literature dexterity. In March 1925, he suffered a near fatal attack of malaria and tuberculosis, which left him dangerously ill.
There, in his last great creative burst, Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, his best-known and most infamous novel. Published in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover explores in graphic detail the sexual relationship between an aristocratic lady and a working-class man. Due to its graphic content, the book was banned in the United States until 1959 and in England until 1960, when a jury found Penguin Books not guilty of violating Britain's Obscene Publications Act and allowed the company to publish the book. The jury's decision to allow publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover is considered a turning point in the history of freedom of expression and the open discussion of sex in popular culture. Despite being increasingly hobbled by his tuberculosis, Laurence continued to write. In his last months he wrote numerous poems, reviews and essays, as well as a robust defense of his last novel against those who sought to suppress it. After being discharged from a sanatorium, he died at the Villa Robermond in Vence, France on March 2nd 1930 (at the age of 44) from complications of tuberculosis. Reviled as a crude and pornographic writer for much of the latter part of his life, D.H. Lawrence is now widely considered as one of the great modernist English-language writers. His linguistic precision, mastery of a wide range of subject matters and genres, psychological complexity and exploration of female sexuality distinguish him as one of the most refined and revolutionary English writers of the early twentieth century. Lawrence himself considered his writings an attempt to challenge and expose what he saw as the constrictive and oppressive cultural norms of modern Western culture. He once said, "If there weren't so many lies in the world... I wouldn't write at all.
SUMMARY OF THE NOVEL “SONS AND LOVERS” BY AUTHOR D.H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers (1913), containing many autobiographical details, is Lawrence’s masterpiece and also his most popular novel. It tells the story of a miner’s family-the Morel family. Mrs. Morel is disillusioned with her husband, a coarse and hard-drinking miner. Therefore, she places all her expectations on her sons, especially Paul. As Paul grows older, tensions develop in this relationship, until his passions for another two women involve him into a fatal conflict of love and possessiveness. This book has been regarded by critics as a brilliant illustration of Freud’s theory of Oedipus complex. The life of the Morel family is unhappy, tense and uneasy. The refined daughter of a "good old burgher family," Gertrude Coppard meets a rough-hewn miner at a Christmas dance and falls into a whirlwind romance characterized by physical passion. But soon after her marriage to Walter Morel, she realizes the difficulties of living off his meager salary in a rented house. The couple fight and drift apart, with Walter retreating to the pub after work each day. Walter Morel is an ill-tempered miner and he and his wife, Gertrude, have two children, William and Annie, and are expecting their third child. When their third child, Paul, is born, Mrs. Morel does not really want the new baby. After the birth of their fourth child, Arthur, the Morel family is complete. Mrs. Morel seeks comfort in her children, especially her sons. Upon the inception of the novel, Mrs. Morel eulogizes her eldest son, William. She molds him into a consort for herself, to substitute for the husband she oh so detests. She is upset when he takes a job in London, and even more appalled and disheartened when he returns home with a fiancé that she does not particularly approve of. When William falls ill and dies, Mrs. Morel is distraught and loses sight of all meaning in her life. This onslaught of depression distances her from all members of her family, only does she recovers from this state of oblivion when mortality threats her other son Paul. Paul now becomes the focus of her life, and the two seem to live for each other.
The sensitive and emotional Paul strikes a friendship with Miriam Leivers, which Mrs. Morel dislikes. She believes Miriam takes all of Paul’s energy, desire and feelings with nothing left of him for her. It becomes an internal battle within Paul’s soul, as to who he should bestow his love upon. Of course, he chooses his mother. It is quite plausible that Gertrude’s discommendation and rejection of Miriam may be the main reason for Paul’s inconsistency in his love for her and the eventual abandonment of her. Instead Paul captivates Clara Dawes, a friend of Miriam’s, who is actually married. Clara and Paul union over discussion of their failing relationships, and she insinuates that he should reconcile with Miriam. This he does, and they are briefly happy upon sleeping together. However, he subsequently decides she is not the one he wants to marry. Leaving her angry and bitter, Paul once more forsakes Miriam. He goes on to formulate an extremely passionate bond with Clara; howbeit, she has no concupiscence to divorce her husband, Baxter, so they can never be married. Mrs. Morel falls ill, and Paul renounces his affairs with these women, and entrusts his time to caring for her. Knowing that she is prolonging her death to live for Paul, Paul and Annie fear that she will live longer than she can emotionally survive. Paul and Annie cannot stand to see their beloved mother live in such pain that they give her an extra dosage of morphine and she dies. Following Gertrude’s death, Miriam once more pleas for the love of Paul, but he expresses no desire to marry her. The bond he shared with his mother dwells deeply in his mind, as their love is still alive even though she has passed. The novel ends with the peerless Paul, walking towards the gold phosphorescence of the city, which symbolizes his relinquishment of his dependency on his mother and his surrendering to a life of solitude.

A REVIEW OF THE NOVEL “SONS AND LOVERS” BY AUTHOR D.H. LAWRENCE

Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel, much of which is taken from Lawrence’s own early life in the midland coal-mining village of Eastwood (the experience of Lawrence and Paul overlaps a lot). In the novel, Lawrence showed us a picture of coal-miners’ life in the English Midlands according to his life experience which conveyed the historical and social atmosphere in that period. Paul is more delicate and quiet than the other children; hence his illness tends to further his mother’s love upon him still more. Initially, she wanted to reimburse her second son for her lack of want for him during her pregnancy, but this only foreshadowed the mental dependency she would later develop for her son. Paul is very conscious of what other people feel, particularly his mother. This delineates the bond that they possess. When she frets, he can understand her, and can’t keep himself calm at the same time; his attention seems always to be centralized to her.
Paul’s passions upon his mother and the mother’s upon him are quietly mutual. When he is together with his mother, his love spews like a fountain, and his inspiration flashes like a flame. Both the flowers he plucks and the rewards he gets are to be devoted to his mother, only for herself. They tell each other their feelings from their innermost world, and share the happiness and grievance with each other. This kind of emotion which excesses the normal one between mother and son reaches a climax when Mr. Morel is in hospital as a work accident. For example, he even says to his mother with joy: “I’m the man in the house now.” They learned how perfectly peaceful the home could be, and almost regretted their father was soon coming back. The disappointment and fear Paul experiences upon his father’s return portrays his strong desire to be the sole breadwinner, and his hunger to take care of his mother.
Paul is nearly 20 years old, but his affection is completely controlled by his mother. He is hostile to his father, and often prays “Lord, let my father die.” When he grows older, he even treats his father with fists. However, his mother is the most important and the only lofty person in his mind. Facing the intense conflicts between mother and Miriam, Paul thinks his most passionate love belongs to his beloved mother. Paul always worries a lot when he gets along with the other women because of the effects from his mother. He bonds so closely with Miriam and so often that makes the relationship with his mother more complex and brings new problems and trouble to him. He can’t control himself and handle it successfully as his Oedipus complex is severe; hence he loses the ability to love other women.
The woman who will stay with him in his mind is only his mother instead of his later wife, as he even goes as far to say to his mother: “But I shan’t marry, mother. I shall live with you, and we’ll have a servant.” In his eyes, his mother is his only beloved woman. Paul’s friend Miriam and Mrs. Morel have many similarities in their personalities. Just as Mrs. Morel, she is not only educated, but also full of confidence and independent spirits, and at times keeps Paul in a subordinate position. Since Paul considers her as the substitute of his mother, he can’t have a normal relation with Miriam. He hates her because she makes him contempt himself in some way. When he stays with Miriam, he misses his mother. His deepest love belongs to his mother. When he feels that he hurts her or hurts the love devoted to her, he can’t bear. His mother looks like a magnetic pole that prevents him getting away from her. Paul can’t help missing his mother for a long time after her death, because he loses the power which supports his life. He ever struggles in order to break away from his mother’s controlling, but he fails. Although he grows up, he can’t transcend the love between the baby and mother; he can’t build up a right superego concept to control his instinctive impulsion which goes against morality and ethics; and can’t make his emotion develop healthily. The complex love from the son to his mother has existed to the end of the novel.
Sons and lovers reveal two quite different kinds of relationships that can’t be separated from each other. The identity of a son indicates a family relationship which relates the boys to their parents by blood relationship; while the identity of a lover indicates a special human relationship, which reflects the emotion between men and women. In the novel, Paul is not only a son but also a lover, who has an Oedipus complex, but he dates with the other two women still. Paul has a resistant consciousness on the problem how to deal with the relationships of his beloved mother and the two loves. But this consciousness only exists in a few words or phrases. For example, when he and Miriam have a further development on the love affairs, he doesn’t know what and how to do again. He feels depressed and finally he returns to his mother yet. When he keeps contact with another woman, Clara, his mother quarrels with him angrily. This possession and control that Gertrude has on her son prevents him from breaking away from the maternal dependency that young children have for their mothers.
Upon the death of his mother, Paul seemingly dawns upon the realization that he never lived by his own will and his own way, he never led a real life for himself. He not only feels that he can’t live without her but also acknowledges that if she lives, he can’t live independently. But when he accelerates his mother’s death personally, he seems to be unable to come to terms with it. His acceptance of his confinement and detachment from such personal and intimate relationships at the end of the novel portrays the full extent to which his Oedipus complex intoxicated him, as without his mother’s company, he gave up complete hope of falling in love and finding a wife.