Ron Granofsky
McMaster University, Canada
"His father's dirty digging": The Significance of Dirt in Sons and Lovers
Dirt is frequently associated with Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers and plays a pivotal role in the symbolic recuperation of the masculine ideal. Mary Douglas's explains that dirt is "matter out of place" and "essentially disorder." For Gertrude, order and cleanliness are necessary to protect her precarious sense of self, so Walter's habits are galling to her. When intoxicated, he upsets the order of the house just as his pit dirt sullies its cleanliness. The children internalize their mother's outrage at the dirty father, so Paul faces a dilemma as he reaches out to integrate a masculine component into his sense of identity. The text does the work of identification by indirect means through its imagery and dramatization of scenes such as Paul's burning of Annie's doll until its blackened arms resemble Walter's, or the "carbonizing" of the baking loaves. Very shortly after Paul feeds his mother poisoned milk to end her suffering, his father becomes the nourisher offering milk to his son, and Paul accepts. In Lawrence's later writing, the pattern of recuperation of the masculine through dirt is also evident as I will show by looking briefly at two poems and one scene in Women in Love.