Family Relationship: Lawrence and Joyce Essay

Introduction

The novels of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce reflect mainly the family relationship as existed in their society; though they also embrace various other social, philosophical, and religious matters. They are the greatest novelists belonging to the twentieth century. Lawrence, a crusader against the conventional attitude to sex, is more forceful in depicting the blood relationship. The revolt of Stephen Dedalus begins in Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with his rejection of the blind religious attitude found existing in his family. With a focus on the novels, Sons, and Lovers and The Portrait, this paper makes a critical comparison to see how the novelists have handled the family relationships.

Sons, and Lovers and The Portrait

Sons and Lovers depict the growth of its central character, Paul Morel, through many negative experiences, mainly the experiences generating from his relationship with his mother. As a child, Paul witnessed a bitter quarrel between his mother and his father. The first part of the novel is about the “kitchen fight” between the father and the mother. The cause of the fight can be attributed to the meager income, but it is also due to their difference in their educational and cultural backgrounds. The conflict leads to a division in the family: “At last Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to the child; she turned from the father. He had begun to neglect her; the novelty of his own home was gone”, writes Lawrence. The children not only support their mother but also hate their father. Lawrence shows how this oedipal relationship affects Paul as he grows up. A very tender love relationship that springs naturally in Paul towards a beautiful and sensitive girl, Miriam, is ruined because of his attachment to his mother. “Always when he went with Miriam, and it grew rather late, he knew his mother was fretting and getting angry about him–why he could not understand. As he went into the house, flinging down his cap, his mother looked up at the clock. She had been sitting thinking …” Finally Paul drains his lust in a matured woman, a married woman named Clara, who, Paul finds, does not need his soul but is happy with his body.

Passion or warm impulse is what Lawrence always deals with in his novels. In Rainbow, the Brangwen sisters try to free themselves from the conventional relationship existing in Edwardian English society. D. H. Lawrence takes his readers through the love experience of several pairs of lovers in his novels to show that true equilibrium between the lovers is essential for a happy life in this world. Only Birkin and Ursula succeed in achieving this to some extent. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence highlights the role of sex through the character Connie by showing that a young woman cannot sacrifice her sex just to remain an honest wife with (sexually) a crippled husband. Lawrence seeks a balanced relationship between lovers or a husband and a wife.

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce wrote The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to highlight how the imagination of a boy gets stunted in a family which remains indoctrinated with religious beliefs. Stephen Dedalus, the central character in this novel, grows in such a family. The novel is about his struggles to liberate himself from this narrow world, represented by his family. Stephen, as he looks back, discovers that he was growing up in a “priest-ridden” society. The entire novel depicts the hero’s journey from “his boyish conception of the world” till he achieves his epiphany. He sums up his boyhood as a life amid “hollow-sounding voices”, the “constant voices of his father and his mother, urging him to be a gentleman”.

He realizes that instead of becoming a gentleman, he was becoming a useless man. Too much emphasis on sin, good, and bad only made his life utterly confusing. He was torn between the demand of his flesh and the demand of his soul. “His mother had told him not to speak to rough boys in the college”, remembers Stephen. As against the sinless soul, as desired by his parents, Stephen plunges himself into developing “a sin-loving soul”. The curious fact is that it is his sin-loving life that prepares him to become an artist. He learns, finally, what are beauty, art, and his place in this universe. He also understands that the real conscience of his race is not yet recreated in art. The voice he heard through his family and society was an “inhuman voice”, a call to stick to duties that can only lead to despair. “His soul had risen from the grave of boyhood, spurning his grave clothes”, says Joyce. Dedalus is an artificer now, who is capable of forging an “aesthetic philosophy”. A similar experience that Paul had is narrated by Lawrence: “Religion was fading into the background. He had shoveled away all the beliefs that would hamper him, had cleared the ground, and come more or less to the bedrock of belief that one should feel inside oneself for right and wrong, and should have the patience to gradually realize one’s God”. Now life interested him more.”

Conclusion

Both Joyce and Lawrence explain through their novels how lack of proper awareness in a family affects the growth of children. Lawrence gives stress to the need for awareness in blood relationships, and Joyce is interested more in the spiritual side. However, Joyce to is conscious that spiritual growth cut off from the body is never possible. The common feature in both these writers is their rejection of taboos imposed by religion in society. This can only pervert a boy, like what happened to Stephen, and not convert him.