3.1.5 CLARA DAWES
Clara Dawes is sensuous older woman who comes to replace Miriam as the love interesting Paul’s life. It is with Clara that Paul learns the importance of
sex as humanity’s deepest link with nature and the cosmos. Clara is depicted as a new twentieth-century woman. She’s a feminist
before it was fashionable. Determined to be independent, she leaves her husband, earns her own living, and has an extramarital affair with Paul. Clara can be
viewed as representative of the many post-Victorian women who rebelled against the traditional image of woman as the “weaker sex.” Clara is extraordinarily
intelligent, with a good critical mind It can be seen quoted bellow:
Clara unlike Miriam, is bursting with a lusty, animal passion. She is Paul’s match for fearlessness, sensuality, and intelligence. At the same time, she
lacks Miriam’s spirituality and sensitivity.
‘It was exciting. And than sometimes he caught her looking at him from under her brows with an almost furtive, sullen
scrutiny, which made him move quickly. Often she met his eyes. But then her own were, as it were, covered over,
revealing nothing. She gave him a little, lenient smile. She was to him extraordinarily provocative, because of the
knowledge she seemed to possess, and gathered fruit of experience could not attain.’D.H Lawrence, 1913:324
‘Clara had always been ‘ikey’ reserved and superior. She never mixed with the girls as one of themselves. If she had
occasion to find fault, she did it coolly and with perfect politeness, which the defaulter felt to be a bigger insult
than crossness.’D.H Lawrence’1913:322
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It can be seen quoted bellow:
Their subsequent love affair gives them both a new, expansive sense of life. With Clara, Paul finds the sensual fulfillment he can’t have with either
Miriam or his mother. Paul awakens Clara’s sexuality, something she missed with her husband.
Clara is the least successful of the major character s in Sons and Lovers. They believe she comes across merely as a vehicle for Paul’s passion and as a
very shallow caricature of the “new woman.” It can be seen quoted bellow:
‘Clara was, indeed, passionately in love with him, and he with her, as far as passion went. In the daytime he forgot her
a good deal. She was working in the same building, but he was not aware of it. He was busy, and her existence was of no
matter to him. But all the time she was in her spiral room she had a sense that he was upstairs, a physical sense o his
person in the same building. Every second she expected him to come through the door, and when he came it was a shock
to her. But he was often short and off hand with her. He gave her his direction in an official manner, keeping her at bay.
With what wirs she had left she listened to him, she dared not misunderstand or fail to remember, but it was cruelty to
her.’D.H Lawrence,1913:427
‘You should have come in here to tea. He said. Miriam laughed shortly, and Clara turned impatiently
aside. D.H Lawrence,1913,395
‘But he didn’t go straight in. halting on the plot of grass he heard his mother’s voice, then Clara’s answer:
What I hate is the bloodhound quality in Miriam.’Yes,’ said mother quickly, ‘yes; doesn’t it make you hate
her,now’D.HLawrence,1913:396
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3.1.6 WILLIAM MOREL
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