T H E S I S

18
that Lawrence, the artist, tried to be free from this influence,
from this wrong idea of “purity1* through the composition of Sons
and Lovers.
There is an interesting passage about "purity11 in
that novel, when Paul is talking to Miriam:
“ ’And I don't know1, he repeated. ’Don't you think we
have been too fierce in our what they call purity? Don't
you think that to be so much afraid and averse is a sort
of dirtiness?» “(SAL 3*+3)
As Aldington says, “complete purity meant complete ignorance“
(PGB 80), and Lawrence certainly began to understand that
at the same time he wrote Sons and Lovers and was seemingly released
from his mother’s “ingrained puritanism“.
H.M» Daleski also
remarks that “viewed in the light of Lawrence's future development,
however, the ultimate significance of Sons and Lovers is
that it was a catharsis.“(TFF 73)
So Lawrence’s incestuous love for his mother, which certainly
provoked in him many “repressions“, made him psychologically
aware of his mother’s puritanism, that kind of puritanism
he would blame later on as “perverse“ and dirty in A Propos of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
“Keep your perversions if you like them - your perversion
of Puritanism, your perversion of smart licentiousness,
your perversion of a dirty mind*“(SLC 87)
#o#’
“Like a real prude and Puritan, I have to look the other
way*“(SLC 65)
Contradictory as these passages may seem, they are not.
The “real“ puritan that Lawrence became killed the old dirty puritan
Lawrence, after the release from his mother, who died in
1910, the year he wrote the first draft of Sons and Lovers. And