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The factory had a homely feel.
- Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel's greatjourney from his small Bestwood home to Mr. Jordan's Nottingham factory in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) is not the decisive break with home diat either he fears or his mother Gertrude expects. Paul is terrified at the thought of becoming a "prisoner of industrialism" (127), and Gertrude imagines him "in the world," in one of "the great centres of industry" (127). The tensions between "the business world, with its regulated system of values, and its impersonality" (115) and Paul's home world - between factory and home, and by extension, town and country, dirtiness and purity, body and spirit - remain in a delicate state of precarious balance yet irresolution throughout die novel.1 But the factory soon takes on a "homely feel" (141) for Paul. Much more than he realizes, it approaches a re-creation of his Bestwood home and his major childhood relationships.
Although they are sketched only briefly, Paul's co-workers are described in resonant language so similar to that used about the Morel parents and Miriam Leivers that the parallels are clear and noteworthy. With the factory serving as a virtual extension of Paul's home, Polly is comparable to Gertrude, and Fanny and Connie, taken together, comprise an analogue to Miriam. Even the men at the factory with whom Paul has contact - Mr. Pappleworth, Mr. Jordan, and Baxter Dawes - so strikingly represent different aspects of Walter Morel as to seem incarnations of distinctive sub-personalities of him. Lawrence may not have explicitly intended diese parallels, and Paul is certainly unaware of the underlying implications of his "homely" factory and its connections to his past and future. Yet the comparisons arise from the novel's rich organic fabric nonetheless.
The less conspicuous strands of that fabric illuminate Lawrence's art as they reveal the nature of the identities between Paul's home and factory. The aim is not, however, simply to point out the relative continuity between Paul's childhood and early manhood. Rather, attention to these parallels casts light upon the progress of Paul's growth and the role of the factory women in that development. Gertrude, Miriam, and Clara Dawes are often viewed as "the three women" in Paul's life as son...