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The central emphasis of D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers 20 devolves on the mutual symbiosis between Gertrude Morel and her sons. Mrs. Morel, a deeply religious, puritanical woman who taught before her marriage, shrank from the working class milieu her husband's occupation plunged her into, and was sick of the “struggle with poverty and ugliness and meanness,” though she sought to make the most of what she had for the children's sakes. She had hoped to marry a young man she grew up with, a would-be minister turned businessman, who subsequently married his landlady, a woman twice his age “with property.”
Instead she became attracted to Walter Morel's
sensuous flame of life that flowed off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was.20a
He had been in the mines since he was ten; at first she thought this noble, risking his life daily. Her bitterness and disillusionment toward her husband began when she discovered he had lied to her and was heavily indebted to others for their home and household belongings.
Because of her mounting antipathy toward her husband, whose weaknesses she could not accept, Mrs. Morel turned to William, her eldest son, for emotional sustenance and general rescue. Mr. Morel, self-indulgent and sensual, a drinking man, in her eyes was morally debased. Furthermore, despite his dexterity with his hands and with nonintellectual matters in general, he remained uneducated, spoke in dialect.
They barely communicated: