Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 437

We are also struck by the fact that this story of a boy's love for his mother does not offend, while the incestuous love of the man, Paul Morel, sometimes repels.

It's easy to see why.

This love belongs to childhood ; ;

we accord it its place there, and in Lawrence's treatment we are given the innocent fantasy of a child, in fact, the form in which oedipal love is expressed in childhood.

And when the child dies in Lawrence's story in a delirium that is somehow brought on by his mania to win and to make his mother rich, the manifest absurdity of such a disease and such a death does not enter into our thoughts at all.

We have so completely entered the child's fantasy that his illness and his death are the plausible and the necessary conclusion.