D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow is a frustrating book. I have a suspicion that it was probably supposed to be. Following the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family in Nottinghamshire in the 19th century, it is primarily the story of their struggles to assert themselves and their identities. While the older generations have only limited success, Ursula, the granddaughter of our original Brangwen hero Tom, is able to achieve something closer to what she wants for her (emotional) life.
That she does so is a little ironic. The Brangwens may be progressing financially and socially in the story, but it is clear that for Lawrence the world around them in late 19th and early 20th century England is not. Rather, it’s becoming increasingly more awful as continues to industrialize and modernise. What complicates this situation is that it is precisely the progress Lawrence dislikes – economic, educational, and social – which allows Ursula the chance to be herself in the way she thinks she ought. Otherwise, I think this might have been quite a one-dimensional book.
The Rainbow was my first full-length Lawrence, after a few of his poems and his well-known short story, “The Odour of Chrysanthemums”. The best compliment I can give him, not that I think he’d necessarily care for my feedback even if he weren’t dead almost a hundred years, is that he certainly has his own distinctive approach. The characters of The Rainbow only ever experience strong feelings. The best way to describe them for one who hasn’t read him is that they are like jugs of emotions just sloshing about more than real people. Regularly, the feelings pour over the brim and make a mess on the carpet.
Central to these emotions are love and hate, and the frustration that leads to their regular alternations. Anna Brangwen, the adopted daughter of Tom Brangwen, imagines her premarital life as like a torture cell where she could “neither stand nor lie stretched out, never.” She escapes her home by marrying Will Brangwen, son of one of Tom’s brothers. At first, things are good: “Gradually a low, deep-sounding will in him vibrated to her, tried to set her in accord, tried to bring her gradually to him, to a meeting, till they should be together, till they should meet as the sheaves that swished together.”
Then, just as quickly, things are bad. First, she’s crying, and then he is. They are unable to talk to each other, and Will takes up drinking – the men in The Rainbow are always going up to the village to get drunk alone, and Will quickly joins their number. When they visit a cathedral – Will likes them as a kind of hobby – Anna decides to ruin his faith through mockery and doubt and largely succeeds, leaving him miserable. They then make up just as suddenly, and it almost seems as if Lawrence approves of this destruction because he suggests it leads to better sex. At another point, Will tries to seduce a stranger and when he returns home the result is the same – better sex. Both he and Anna no longer feel obliged to be good or obey or social norms, and their passion for one another reaches a new height. (I lost track of how many babies she has throughout the novel, or how many fallings-out.)
The only child who matters within this book, however, is Ursula, the eldest daughter. On the first page of The Rainbow we learn that the Brangwens are all born with a look of “expectancy” on their faces, and it is with Ursula that we get closest to fulfilment. In the background of the book’s several hundred pages, modernity has crept into the story. By the time of Ursula’s section, we have the occasional motor car and the Boer War to help us date things, while the suffragettes are trying to get women the right to vote. The Brangwen family has also grown. At first, they were reasonably well-off farmers, but the growth of towns nearby thanks to coal mining makes them more money and allows them to climb a little socially.
Most directly for Ursula, this helps her to become a teacher and try to live an independent life. She also then goes to college to actually train to be a teacher, which perhaps she should have done before doing the teaching. In between all this she has her experience of first love with the son of a friend of her mother’s, an extremely homoerotic experience with a female friend, and through her other acquaintances she also comes across such ideas as the cause of the suffragettes.
In general, however, and as I mentioned at the beginning, Lawrence seems very hostile towards the modern world. The corporal punishment Ursula has to mete out to her children at the freshly-built new school seems as demeaning to her as it is to them, while the teaching itself is unstructured and primarily rote-learning. The suffragettes are criticised for thinking about ideas rather than actual human fulfilment, and as for the growth of towns and urban spaces Lawrence memorably describes them as “a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease”. People everywhere seem to be turning into machines, and Lawrence is no fan.
His own ideas are much more timeless, or at least timeless-seeming. There’s an emphasis on personal freedom and self-assertion, but mainly through passionate sex rather than upending society. In fact, there’s no real sense of society at all – Lawrence’s characters are all monstrous egotists only brushing against each other when their blood is pumping. The greatest moments are moments of nakedness – Anna dancing in her bedroom nude, or Ursula running on the beach naked. That’s the fulfilment everyone wants here and not the vote. But we might also notice, unsurprisingly, that even if a partner is present, these are moments of self-fulfilment rather than of joint, let alone of collective fulfilment. The men observing feel left out, alienated. (I am not sure Lawrence liked men who were not himself.)
Lawrence uses religious language and symbols to give his work a kind of mythic edge and his ideas the stamp of Truth. Early moments of love are described as “the light of the transfiguration”; at one point Ursula is compared to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; and cathedrals play a reasonably prominent role. The clear delineation between and essentialising of men and women, a sense of cyclicity (Brangwens on their first illicit strolls with lovers always seem to find the same paths to tread), and biblical images like a flood and the rainbow of the novel’s title, all make Lawrence’s narrator seem like someone presenting some timeless discovery, as if he has gone back to the root of things to find their real essence.
It is not so, of course. Lawrence may attempt to cloak himself in the Bible, but his main influences seem to be the classic German thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. When we read that “she felt his will fastening on her and pulling her down, even whilst he was silent and obscure,” we think of Schopenhauer’s idea of a fallen humanity controlled by clashing wills. When we consider Lawrence’s rejection of modernity (“I hate democracy”, Ursula cries embarrassingly) and his love of the body, there’s more than a touch of Nietzsche and his successors in the Lebensphilosophie movement, while Freud is also here in much of the more detailed psychological assessments of the effects of modern society on the individual soul.
One is allowed to be influenced by others, of course, and Lawrence not being a real prophet does not devalue his ideas necessarily and certainly not his book as a whole. In fact, The Rainbow was banned in the UK for some years after its initial publication, which is generally a sign that it did reflect a certain truth. A truth about sex in particular – this is, undoubtedly, the sexiest book I’ve read which does not mention the male member once. Like de Sade, there’s a sense that even if Lawrence has a limited view of female empowerment, it’s one that still undermines the view that women exist only to be caregivers and dolls.
Overall, the ideas are actually reasonable enough; the problem is that, wishing to convince us of their Truth, Lawrence takes the easy option of disallowing debate or counterargument to exist. Characters are either sellouts to modernity who become like machines and are dropped by Ursula, or they are having great sex. I suspect there may be more to the matter than that. Anna has fifty babies, while Ursula gets engaged, goes on a mad one, and then breaks the whole thing off. The life of the body is good and fun, but I dislike the way Lawrence completely devalues the mind. I suppose once we accept he is right about everything we are supposed to stop thinking, if we were supposed to think at all.
One figure I thought of regularly while reading The Rainbow was Dostoevsky. Both he and Lawrence can only write characters whose emotional states are strained so taut you can hear the thrumming as soon as they leap onto the page; both he and Dostoevsky could have done with a better editor; both he and Lawrence have their own visions of how things are. But of the two, only Dostoevsky actually places his ideas against those of his enemies in such a way that even today, many readers can be quite convinced that he wasn’t really a toady old reactionary Christian nationalist. With Lawrence, you’d need to be an idiot to miss what he’s on about. Which altogether just makes him seem naïve and a bit silly, even before we start thinking about the ideas themselves.
Yet this is not a bad book by any stretch. One reason why this is so is the tension I noted at the start on the subject of modernity. Ursula goes to a better school than her parents, she is able to get a job where her mother gets none, and I might even suggest that her willingness to have sex while ultimately backing out of marriage indicates that she was not entirely deaf to some of the more radical ideas her suffragette friends may have been mentioning. In other words, her choices do not come out of nowhere – the world may be getting worse, but it is also opening up new opportunities for achieving the kind of self-realisation that Lawrence definitely loves.
There’s an irony in all that which he may have noticed himself. Such an irony, and the question of how much self-fulfilment Ursula will actually get within that world, makes her part of the novel by far the most interesting. Indeed, it even sustains itself into a sequel, Women in Love, which I will probably read at some point. This, and the occasional richness of the sloshing-about of these characters’ sensual emotions, makes The Rainbow quite the sensual experience. Just one that I will not rush to return to until I have gone outside and first touched the grass.