Paul Morel and the Sacrifice of Arabella

I.

Paul Morel was a pale, quiet child, slightly built, with reddish-brown hair, and highly attuned to the feelings of others (particularly his mother). As his elder brother, William, tended to ignore him, he transferred his affections to his sister, Annie, who was intensely fond of him. 

Annie also possessed a large doll "of which she was fearfully proud, though not so fond", called Arabella. One day, Paul accidently jumps on the doll and breaks her face; something that makes Annie cry and, consequently, makes Paul feel helpless with misery.

Seeing how upset he was - once her own tears dried - she immediately forgave her brother. A couple of days later, however, he shocks her with the following suggestion: '''Let's make a sacrifice of Arabella [...] Let's burn her.'''

Naturally, Annie is horrified - yet also, Lawrence writes with knowing insight into the cruelty of children - fascinated by the suggestion and keen to see what her brother would do once she (silently) gave consent to the proposal.      

"He made an altar of bricks, pulled some of the shavings out of Arabella's body, put the waxen fragments into the hollow face, poured on a little parafin, and set the whole thing alight. He watched with wicked satisfaction the drop of wax melt off the broken forehead of Arabella, and drop like sweat into the flame. So long as the stupid big doll burned, he rejoiced in silence. At the end, he poked among the embers with a stick, fished out the arms and legs, all blackened, and smashed them under stones.
      'That's the sacrifice of Missis Arabella,' he said. 'An' I'm glad there's nothing left of her.'"

Whilst the intensity of her brother's hatred for the doll disturbs Annie, she remains silent throughout and following the sacrifice. I think we, as readers, are obliged to say something, however ...


II.
   

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in much of the critical literature on Sons and Lovers, this scene, like so many others, is read symbolically from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Margaret Storch, for example, wearing her Melanie Klein hat, informs us that the sacrifice of Arabella reveals that what lies beneath the triangular oedipal structure is the more primary mother-child dyad and that whilst one might imagine this to be a relationship founded upon love, it can also manifest violent hatred at its core.

She writes:

"The 'sacrifice' is an act of desecration against a figure who should be revered. This is apparent in [...] the aura of 'wicked satisfaction' that emanates from defying a taboo. The body of the mother is, in fantasy, dismembered and destroyed, disintegrating in a flash of fiery consuming anger, and liquified into the wax and sweat of elemental fluids. When already blackened and 'dead', the fragments are retrieved with phallic curiosity by means of a poking stick, and then further pulverized into nothingness, not 'with' stones but 'under' stones, suggesting both a final horror that cannot be looked at and the gravestones that cover the dead [...]"       

Storch concludes that the scene is "a vivid depiction of a child's sadistic fantasy against the mother" - a fantasy that Paul shares with his sister Annie, whose presence and complicity is an essential component; for little girls too can (secretly) resent the suffocating love of a devoted mother and her moral authority.  

III.

As much as I admire this reading, I don't quite buy into it. Which is not to say that it isn't true, only that something else is also true; namely, that children like mutilating dolls and action figures simply for the joy of destroying things, or because they hate the toys themselves - not because they hate their parents (although they might).

Interestingly, researchers at the University of Bath discovered in a study of 2005 that many 7-11 year olds grow to dislike their toys so much that they physically assault them. And of all the products the children were asked about, Barbie aroused the most complex and violent emotions.

Various torture techniques were gleefully experimented with in an attempt to express ambiguous feelings about the figure and common forms of mutilation included decapitation, burning, and even microwaving. What's more, the children interviewed saw these things as belonging to perfectly legitimate play activity; i.e., good clean fun.

It's adults who often find such activity deeply disturbing. Perhaps because they read so much meaning into it. Or perhaps because it's they - not their children - who anthropomorphise cheap plastic figures and get ridiculously sentimental about inanimate objects.

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 82-3.  

Margaret Storch, Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence, (University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 98-100. 

Andrew McLaughlin, University of Bath Press Office, 'Barbie under attack from little girls, study shows', press release (19 Dec 2005): click here to read online.