Is this the essence of the excerpt from chapter 9? Express your agreement or disagreement and add a few words of your own to support your idea.
2. “Sons and Lovers” is a distinctly autobiographical book. Paul Morel is a miner’s son. His father and mother do not get on well together. Paul and his mother are deeply attached to one another. The mother becomes jealous of Paul’s first love Miriam with whom he formed a friendship in boyhood. Miriam calls him to a kind of worship of nature, which he both understands and resists.
Give a summary of the excerpts beginning with the last sentence of the above-given piece of information.
3. Lawrence is a poet of human feeling. For him emotion dominates reason. He gives us emotion from the time it emerges up to its terrible decline through a period of painful climax. Perhaps, there is something artificial about the feeling. It lacks spontaneity because the character is working himself into an emotional state.
Speak of Paul's and Miriam's relations and the stages of their emotion from the point of communion to their ugly quarrel. Illustrate your analysis by examples.
For instance, what attitudes and emotions do the following quotations betray:
a)"Aren't they magnificent?" she murmured. - "Magnificent? It's a bit thick - they are pretty."
b)"It was the communion she wanted. He turned aside, as if pained.
Or, for instance, what quotations could illustrate the following statements:
A) Paul feels that Miriam's attitude to beauty robs it of the main quality - freedom.
B) In fact, Paul is in a far more complex emotional tangle than Miriam.
4. Lawrence’s method of concentrating upon the interplay of the feelings makes Lawrence at his very best in separate scenes, and it is in separate scenes, too, that the poet of nature in him makes its full effect. Lawrence is superbly successful at finding a landscape, beasts and flowers, objective equivalents for emotion.
Show the interplay of feeling in the given scene. Does Lawrence really manage to convey a scene of natural beauty and the flow of natural feeling at the same time? Explain.
5. Interpret the following excerpt. Speak of the character's relations:
... Then sometimes he hated her. Her youngest brother was only five. He was a frail lad, with immense brown eyes in his quaint, fragile face.... Often Miriam kneeled to the child and drew him to her. "Eh, my Hubert!" she sang in a voice heavy and surcharged with love. "Eh, my Hubert!"
And fondling him in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love.
"Don't", said the child, uneasy - "don't, Miriam". "Yes, you love me, don't you?" she murmured deep in her throat, almost as if she were in a trance, and swaying also as if she were swooned in an ecstasy of love.
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"Don't", repeated the child, a frown on his clear brow.
"You love me, don't you?" she murmured.
"What do you make such a fuss for?" cried Paul, all in suffering because of her extreme emotion. "Why can't you be ordinary with him?"
She let the child go, and rose, and said nothing. Her intensity, which would leave no emotion on a normal plane, irritated the youth into a frenzy. And this fearful, naked contact of her on small occasions shocked him. He was used to his mother's reserve. And on such occasions he was thankful in his heart and soul that he had his mother, so sane and wholesome.
How is love treated in the excerpts: as a mixture of devotion and antagonism? as fire that burns the lovers to ashes? as a delicate serene flow of gentle feeling? Explain.
7. Lawrence uses the word "cruelty" twice. What does he understand by it? Does it characterise the situation adequately? Explain, support your answer by quotations.
8. One seems to pay attention to how Lawrence uses colour. You never forget anything that is connected with it.
A) Explain HOW Lawrence achieved this effect and WHAT he used colour FOR.
b) WHAT OTHER ASPECTS of his manner of writing challenge the eye as soon as you start reading Lawrence?
Rendering: Hand it in of course legible handwriting!
«Сыновья и любовники» (1913) – широкое, многоплановое, в значительной степени автобиографическое повествование о двух поколениях семьи Морелей, живущей в шахтерском посёлке Бествуд близ Ноттингема. До Лоуренса английская литература практически не знала произведений такого масштаба, посвященных повседневному существованию английского рабочего класса. Верность Лоуренса классической реалистической традиции нашла воплощение в подробном жизненно достоверном воспроизведении бытия горняцкой семьи. Первая часть книги повествует о детстве и отрочестве главного героя Поля – персонажа, в наибольшей степени воплотившего черты самого Лоуренса. Мальчик растет в атмосфере напряженного конфликта между отцом – трудолюбивым и жизнерадостным, но склонным к пьянству человеком, и матерью – натурой властной, втайне неудовлетворенной простонародными привычками мужа и мечтающей о лучшей доле для своего сына. В центре внимания автора оказывается углубленно-психологическое изображение ожесточенной борьбы за влияние на Поля, развертывающейся между его матерью, М-с Морель, и первой любовью юноши Мириам Лейверс – девушкой, живущей на ферме неподалёку от Бествуда, под знаком общения с которой проходит духовно-эмоциональное воспитание героя. С течением времени отношения между Полем и Мириам обостряются до предела и заканчиваются разрывом. М-с Морель побеждает в борьбе за своего сына; однако вскоре она умирает от рака, и Поль, выброшенный в холодный и неуютный «взрослый» мир, чувствует, что вместе с матерью ушла лучшая часть его самого.
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