MIRIAM LEIVERS Major Characters

It can be seen quoted bellow:

3.1.4 MIRIAM LEIVERS

Miriam Leivers, Paul’s teenage friend and sweetheart, was modeled after Lawrence’s own young love. Miriam is Paul devoted helpmate in his artistic and spiritual quests. Although beautiful, she takes no pleasure in her physical attributes. Her whole life is geared toward heaven and mystical sense of nature. She loves him more than he loves her. Paul gets frustrated and furious with the way she absorb everything in her soul and cannot fathom why she has to treat everything with so much depth and intensity. Most of Paul’s families and friends feel put off by Miriam. She’s too intellectual and otherworldly even to know how to hold an ordinary conversation. She lack of normalcy and plain fun is one of the things Paul hates bout her. There are two warring sides to Miriam her love of Paul Morel and her resistance to her sexual feelings toward him. Her mother taught her that sex is one of the burdens of marriage, and though she doesn’t want to believe it, she can’t help but ‘Morel turned round to him. ‘Have you my boy? What sort of competition?’ ‘Oh, nothing – about famous women.’ ‘And How much is the prize, then, as you’ve got?’ ‘It’s a book.’ ‘Oh, indeed ’ ‘About birds.’ Hm - hm ’ And that was all. Conversation was impossible between the father and any other member of the family. He was an outsider. He had deniedthe God in him.’D.H Lawrence.1913:82 Universitas Sumatera Utara listen to the woman who’s shaped her life. When Miriam finally gives in to Paul, she does it in a spirit of self-sacrifice that disappoints both of them. Miriam’s inability to enjoy sex makes her an incomplete person in the Lawrentian world, where sex as well as spiritually is necessary to an individual’s fulfillment. It can be seen quoted bellow: Miriam is very complex character. At times you feel that Lawrence himself is trying to understand exactly what she’s like. The narrator, like Paul, fluctuates between pitying and condemning her. But because there are so many opposing elements to Miriam, you have an opportunity to figure out who she really is and what she wants, through your own investigation and interpretation. It can be seen quoted bellow: ‘She could feel him falling and lifting through the air, as if he were lying on some force. . . For the moment he was nothing but a piece of swinging stuff: not a particle of him that did not swing.’ D.H Lawrence,1913 :191 ‘She was very quiet, very calm. She only realized that she was doing something for him. He could hardly bear it. She lay to be sacrificed for him because she loved him so much. And he had to sacrifice her. For a second, he wished he were sexless or dead. Then he shut his eyes again to her, and his blood beat back again.’ D.H Lawrence,1913:354 ‘She looked up at him, and her eye dilated with anger. ‘Then,’ she said, if it’s true, it’s a great shame.’ D.H Lawrence,1913:505 Universitas Sumatera Utara

3.1.5 CLARA DAWES