Reclaim Clara Dawes!

I re-read Sons and Lovers recently, in order to enjoy the richness and descriptive sensitivity of DH Lawrence's writing, and telling myself it did not matter if I was annoyed by him. Being annoyed by Lawrence is an inevitable side-effect of reading his novels, for me, at least, and I believe I am not alone in this!

 

I did enjoy the writing - the opening to Sons and Lovers alone is marvellous, with that wonderful image of the development of the collieries, the donkeys circling the gin-pits, followed by the coming of the big industry and the railway. However, I got the annoyance, too. The man is such a chauve! It began with his attitude to Miriam Leivers - I did feel he was being 'rotten' as he would say himself, to her, and therefore to Jessie Chambers, who she was based on. So as soon as I had finished Sons and Lovers, I opened Jessie's own memoir.

 

I then got annoyed by Jessie! The woman was such a doormat. Lawrence would sit there telling her the most horrible things about herself, and she just put up with it.  Brrr!

So then I got a biography of Lawrence to read, to see how much of Sons and Lovers was fact, and how much was fiction, and that was very interesting indeed. I read the magisterial and impressive John Worthen The Early Years, the first volume of the Cambridge biography. I was irritated again to find that Lawrence did, apparently, have all the personal charm that he gives Paul in Sons and Lovers. I always thought his description of Paul was pretty smug. Still do.

Lawrence in 1906: Wikimedia Commons

 Leaving Miriam/Jessie aside (which I did with some relief in the end), I had always wanted to know if Clara Dawes was based on anyone real. In fact, she is not a complete portrait, but there must be something in her of Alice Dax, a married woman Lawrence is supposed to have had an affair with, and also there is surely something of Frieda Lawrence in her physique, if nothing else. Nevertheless, she is much more of a fictional construction than Miriam, so when I want to get indignant on her behalf I can do so without the real woman popping up and saying: 'Well, I enjoyed it really!'

Clara, like Alice Dax, but unlike Frieda, was into Women's Suffrage. Paul Morel is said to be 'interested' in this, but to Clara's face he reacts with patronising rudeness: 'she seems like a dog before a looking glass, gone into a mad fury with its own shadow,' he says of a woman who fights for her own rights. Lawrence, the author, underlines Clara's unhappiness 'the upward lifting of her face was misery, not scorn', and does a good job of suggesting that the only reason she wants the vote is because she is unsatisfied in her marriage. Though through her, Paul is said to get 'into connection with the socialist, suffragette, unitarian people in Nottingham',  Lawrence consistently refuses to show the thinking, intelligent side of Clara. In the end, she is only a sex symbol.

 Alice Dax was a highly intelligent and politically active woman, involved in the early days of the WEA, a writer of poetry and plays and 'almost completely uninhibited in an age when you weren't, kind, caring and a dedicated socialist. She was also plain, and everyone was surprised when she got married.

Maybe it was because Lawrence had his affair with Alice when she was a married woman that Paul Morel shunts Clara Dawes back to her stupid and violent husband. She is almost pathetically glad to have Baxter Dawes once Paul has ditched her, meekly reverting to the traditional female role.

 

 

Clara works with Paul in Jordan's Surgical Appliance factory, where he is the pet of the female staff, though they all respect him. In fact, when Lawrence briefly worked at Haywood's surgical garment making factory, in Castle Gate, Nottingham (the street pictured below, my photograph), he was tormented by the 'girls' who, shortly before the illness that ended his employment there, forcibly debagged him. Lawrence was a sensitive lad and unconfident, and it must have been a horrible experience to him, a form of abuse, even. I can't help feeling, though, that Paul's domination over Clara, her almost annihilation, in the end, is partly informed by Lawrence's desire for revenge over those girls.

 

 

I want to think that after a month or so Clara would get fed up with Baxter Dawes, and would head off to London, where she would get a job and take up with some interesting and sensitive Socialist man - or even with a woman. Though I would love to reach back into the plot and yank her away from the reunion with Dawes altogether.

 She represents what for Lawrence was intolerable; a woman whose sense of self, and enjoyment of life, was not totally dependent on a man and her sexual relations with him, but who had her own autonomous interests and occupations.

The photo of Sylvia Pankhurst is from Wikimedia Commons, derived from Netherlands National Archive.