RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

prefers to think of death instead of a way to mend the situation
He knows his mother's suffering because of Walter's drunkeness,
but his way of solving the problem is different:
he wishes
his father's death.
This thought lives within his inner heart
and belongs to his daily prayers.
As he cannot make his father
stop drinking, he pleads with God to help his parents:
Paul hated his father. As a boy he had a fervent
private religion.
'Make him stop drinking,' he prayed every night.
'Lord let my father die,' he prayed very often. 'Let
him not be killed at pit,' he prayed when, after tea,
the father did not come home from work (p.79).
What is strikingly moving here is that Paul is only a little boy
yet has such a feverish consciousness of problems.
His weak
constitution implies the total abstraction of the outer world and
its problems in his mind.
Despite having a weak body, his mind
is like a giant on comprehending the other's (his mother's)
suffering.
His suffering seems bigger than his own mother's and
the children's together.
When Paul gets sick for the first time in the novel, it is
accompanied by the mother's sense of guilt.
This asserts once
more the idea that Mrs Morel MUST commit herself entirely to her
son.
It is her fault if he is weak; his suffering is her fault:
Again rose in her heart the old, almost weary
feeling towards him. She had never expected him
to live. And yet he had great vitality in his
young body. Perhaps it would have been a little
relief to her if he died. She always felt a
mixture of anguish in her love for him (p.85 - My
underlining).
Paul's illness may be explained by the fact that the little boy
feels impotent to improve his mother's unhappy life.
He cannot
help; he cannot make it up.
Therefore, he psychologically
becomes much weaker in his impotence and allows illness to take
his body: