Matthew Gaughan
University of York, UK
Individual Experience and the Industrial Community: The Personalized Realism of Sons and Lovers
In this paper, I consider the manner in which Lawrence drew upon his working-class community in Eastwood to forge a realism that conforms to the social reality only in ways that follow Lawrence's thematic intentions. The experience of Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers is shaped by social, regional, and cultural dislocations. Lawrence incorporates these dislocations into Sons and Lovers in order to give a realist presentation of an industrial community in the process of radical transformation due to the advance of modernity. I argue, however, that Lawrence's focus on individual experience affects the realist presentation of the novel and undermines the novel's reliability as a social document. This tension between realism and modernism is emblematic of the crises of modernity present within Sons and Lovers: the divide between the rural and the industrial; tradition and the modern; social representation and individual experience. I explain that Lawrence deliberately does not resolve these conflicts in order to subvert the traditions of realism and to explore the volatility of personal experience.