Scratching the surface of misandry and other insecurities
Paul Morel, the young man in D.H. Lawrence’s novel,
Sons and Lovers, caught between his mother’s possessiveness and fear of losing
him to Miriam and his own feelings of inadequacy, struggles mightily with his
feelings and his decision about whether or not to marry Miriam.
Lawrence writes these words:
With the spring came again the old madness and battle.
Now he knew he would have to go to Miriam. But what was his reluctance? He told
himself it was only a sort of overstrong virginity in her and him which neither
could break through. He might have married her; but his circumstances at home
made it difficult, and moreover, he did not want to marry. Marriage was for
life, and because they had become close companions, he and she, he did not see
that it should inevitably follow they should be man and wife. He did not feel
that he wanted marriage with Miriam. He wished he did. He would have given his
head to have felt a joyous desire to marry her and to have her. Then why couldn’t
he bring it off? There was some obstacle; and what was that obstacle? It lay in
the physical bondage. He shrank from the physical contact. But why? With her he
felt bound up inside himself. He could not go out to her. Something struggled
in him but he could not get to her. Why? She loved him….Why , when she put her
arm in his timidly, as they walked, did he feel he would burst forth in brutality
and recoil? He owed himself to her; he wanted to belong to her. Perhaps the
recoil and the shrinking from her was love in its first fierce modesty. He had
no aversion for her. No, it was the opposite; it was a strong desire battling
with a still stronger shyness and virginity. It seemed as if virginity were a
positive force, which fought and won in both of them. And with her he felt it
so hard to overcome; yet he was nearest to her, and with her alone could he deliberately
break through. And he owed himself to her. Then, if they could get things
right, they could marry; but he would not marry unless he could feel strong in
the joy of it---never. He could not have faced his mother. It seemed to him
that to sacrifice himself in a marriage he did not want would be degrading, and
would undo all his life, make it a nullity. He would try what he could do.
And he had a great tenderness for Miriam. Always, she
was sad dreaming her religion; and he was nearly a religion for her. He could not
bear to fail her. It would come out alright if they tried.
He looked round. A good many of the nicest men he knew
were like himself, bound in by their own virginity, which they could not break
out of. They were so sensitive to their women that they would go without them
for ever rather than do them a hurt, an injustice. Being the sons of mothers whose
husbands had blundered rather brutally through their feminine sanctities, they
were themselves too diffident and shy. They could easier deny themselves than
incur any reproach from a woman; for a woman was like their mother, and they
were full of the sense of their mother. They preferred themselves to suffer the
misery of celibacy, rather than risk the other person. ( D.H. Lawrence, Sons
and Lovers, from three great novels, JG Press, 1933p. 703-4)
The ‘Oedipus
Complex’ constitutes a psychological problem and this forms the
nucleus of the novels, Sons and Lovers. The possessive character of Mrs. Morel
was great stumbling block in the life of Paul, the hero of the piece. She was
terribly dissatisfied with her married life and then subsequently. She exerted her influence on
the life of Paul who could not liberate himself from the mother-fixation.
Mother’s influence was so preponderant and so overweening assertive that Paul
could not get a balanced emotional life. He failed to establish a becoming relationship
both with Miriam and Clara. The mother-image was deterrent to the emotional
life of Paul who himself was also a highly sensitive person and in his
attachment with mother we notice the warmth and passion of a lover. This
complex psychological problem has been treated or delineated by Lawrence with
the consummate art of a poet and an unfailing observation and insight of a true
psychologist. (From A.D.’s Literature website)
It is not a physical attraction of Paul to his mother
that is at issue in this novel, although that may have been one of the interpretations
emerging from the novel. It is the overweening influence of the despondent,
dependent and even desperate mother on the son that blocks his achievement of a
balanced emotional life. And the resulting dependence on the mother’s
tyrannical emotional imprint leaves the young son wallowing, if not actually
drowning in the murky waters of his mother’s own imbalance and unfinished
emotional work. Wrestling with what seems like a spider’s web of enmeshment
with the mother, Paul vacillates between a healthy impulse of “wanting” and
moving toward Miriam, and an unhealthy impulse of avoiding and withdrawing from
Miriam, in his early twenties. His vacillation signals a kind of impotence, powerlessness, indecision and emotional limbo. Others, caught in a similar web might, and often do, fall into the trap of over-compensating violence and bullying. Excessive deference and/or excessive bullying, two inappropriate emotional and psychological impulses on the part of men, in their relationship with women, play an inordinate role in contemporary culture, to the detriment of both genders, and certainly to the demise of many relationships.
For twenty-first century readers, this whole story may
seem as if it belongs in the ash-heap of ancient history. After all, there is
no mother of sons today whose dependence on her son, given her desperation in
her own unfulfilled, and unfulfilling marriage, distorts the son’s capacity to
understand his own complex emotions, and to penetrate them into an enlightened
and confident sense of his self!
Right?
Wrong!
There is, today, a mountain of narrative evidence of
women who complain, justifiably, about the abuse they experience at the hands
of inappropriate men. And there is a concomitantly inordinate number of men
whose imbalance in their emotional development, especially as it regards the complexities
of choosing a female life partner, impedes their healthy emotional development.
Are these the men who are and have been perpetrating
injustices on women? Is Paul a clairvoyant, if fictional, canary in the coal
mine of gender issues? Is his mother, while never mentioned in the front-page
stories that saturate the current debate over relationships between men and women,
casting a dark shadow over these fractured and fractious, debilitating and
demeaning encounters of powerlessness/overpowering among men and their women
colleagues and former friends, especially of those men in the public telescope?
While the #MeToo and the #Time’sUp initiatives are
diagnosing and exposing the experiences of demeaned women, much of it outside
the bounds of a legal framework, men continue to refuse (not merely refrain!)
to seek help in the conundrum of their emotional and professional and domestic
vortex. Who, after all, would contest that emotional eunuchs, especially those
who do not, or cannot, comprehend their emotional DNA, would be the most likely
perpetrators of sexual abuse?
And while it seems paradoxical, and to the women complainants
irrelevant, to attempt to parse the male’s emotional DNA, especially as it can
deliver only inappropriate attitudes and behaviour (see pornography, strip
clubs, locker room talk, and the current U.S. president) we can most likely
also agree that powerlessness, and the feeling of impotence, no matter how it
is incarnated or seeded, will very likely generate inappropriate behaviour,
both for the agent and the victim. Mothers of young boys clearly have a responsibility
for their own emotional health, including the management of their marriages,
and the culture of the family in which they are attempting to raise, educate
and launch a healthy son.
Any notion of beginning from the point of view that it
is “pointless” for a wife/mother to begin a conversation with a male spouse who
is not living up to the expectations of his wife, on any matter, be it fiscal,
physical, sexual, intellectual, social, parental or even spiritual, is a
non-starter, sabotaging itself from the get-go! “He won’t (doesn’t) get it!” is
a phrase uttered at this moment in thousands of rooms across this continent.
And the voices in that choir are exclusively female!
Misandry, a dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained
prejudice against men or boys, unfortunately takes many shapes and forms. And
while the contemporary culture is fixated on the empirical, the physical
evidence in any matter, there are other signs and “substantial” pieces of
evidence of misandry in the debate. Emotional withdrawal, that “passive
aggressive” charge for which men are infamous, can and is also a potential
attitude from disaffected women. Even an emotional “stance” that positions the
woman as “knowing” and “discerning” and having
“superior, emotional intelligence” as compared with men is a mean-spirited
face, voice, arms and heart of misandry. Even hugs engaged in such a mental
state are meaningless, for both the man and the woman. And anything beyond
hugs, under an umbrella of female “emotional superiority,” is merely another play-acting,
with ultimately dire consequences.
And men, whether they come from emotionally
domineering mothers, or cheer-leading mothers, or insecure mothers of any sort,
and also whether they come from dominating fathers, emotionally frozen and/or
absent fathers, or ‘driven’ fathers, or other forms of male insecurity, will in
too many cases be unable (that is very different from unwilling!) to discern
their complex emotions, and how they impact their female partners, especially when
those relationships get “serious” and “intimate”.
Is it not past time for this century’s enlightened and
sophisticated, educated and informed, sensitive and sensible men and women to
remove the mask of fear and insecurity, in whatever form it manifests itself, and to acknowledge our vulnerability as
individual human beings, to open to the possibility that we are deeper, more
worthy, more open to see new insights even if they might be at first
threatening and frightening (to both genders)?
Perhaps a re-reading of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
might help even those who hate reading, in a century in which (reading) literacy
is another of those species threatened into extinction (along with emotional
literacy), like the 60% of the animal world that has disappeared, according to
the World Wildlife Fund.
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