The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) 📕
Description
The Rainbow is an epic tale spanning three generations of Brangwens, a family of farmers living in Nottinghamshire around the time of the Industrial Revolution. The tale begins with Tom Brangwen, the very epitome of a rural English farmer leading the old way of life. We follow him as a youth easing in to the rhythm of rural existence. He soon falls in love with Lydia, a Polish immigrant he had hired as a housekeeper, and despite their vast cultural differences, the two marry. Their relationship is, in a word, satisfactory: the two face a language and culture barrier that prevents their minds from ever truly meeting, but they learn to be more or less content with their place in society and in raising their children.
Lydia’s child by her first marriage, Anna, becomes the focus of the next part of the novel. She was born in England, and has a fiery and demanding temperament. She falls in love with Will, a nephew of Tom, and the two begin a rocky and difficult marriage. Will, a craftsman and not a farmer, is self-absorbed, and wants nothing more than for them to live their lives only for each other. But Anna wants to strike out in the world and become a part of society. The two must reconcile their clashing personalities and desires as they raise their many children.
The oldest of their children, Ursula, becomes the focus of the last third—and perhaps most famous—part of the novel. Ursula is a deeply sensual being born in to the Victorian era, a time restrained in morality but exploding in energy and possibility, now worlds away from her grandfather Tom Brangwen’s quiet, traditional farming life. She leads a life unimaginable to her rural ancestors: indulging in travel abroad, waiting for marriage and pursuing her physical desires, and even taking on a career—a concept both new and frightening to her family, who are just a generation removed from the era when a woman’s life was led at home. Her unhappiness with the contradiction in this new unbridled way of living and the strict social mores of the era becomes the main theme of this last part of the book.
The entire novel takes a frank approach to sexuality and physical desire, with sex portrayed unashamedly as a natural, powerful, pleasurable, and desirable force in relationships. In fact Ursula’s story is the most famous part of the novel not just because of her unrestrained physicality and lust, but because she also experiments with a candidly-realized homosexual affair with one of her teachers. This unheard-of treatment of deeply taboo topics was poorly received by Lawrence’s Edwardian contemporaries, and the book quickly became the subject of an obscenity trial that resulted in over 1,000 copies being burned and the book being banned in the U.K. for eleven years.
Though its charged portrayal of sexuality is what the book is remembered for, sexuality is only one of the themes Lawrence treats. The novel stands solidly on its rich description of both rural and city life, its wide-angled view of change over generations, and its exploration of hope for the human spirit in societies that heave not gently but quickly and violently into new eras.
Read free book «The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) 📕» - read online or download for free at americanlibrarybooks.com
- Author: D. H. Lawrence
Read book online «The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) 📕». Author - D. H. Lawrence
Then he turned to look at her. She was dressed in black, was apparently rather small and slight, beneath her long black cloak, and she wore a black bonnet. She walked hastily, as if unseeing, her head rather forward. It was her curious, absorbed, flitting motion, as if she were passing unseen by everybody, that first arrested him.
She had heard the cart, and looked up. Her face was pale and clear, she had thick dark eyebrows and a wide mouth, curiously held. He saw her face clearly, as if by a light in the air. He saw her face so distinctly, that he ceased to coil on himself, and was suspended.
“That’s her,” he said involuntarily. As the cart passed by, splashing through the thin mud, she stood back against the bank. Then, as he walked still beside his britching horse, his eyes met hers. He looked quickly away, pressing back his head, a pain of joy running through him. He could not bear to think of anything.
He turned round at the last moment. He saw her bonnet, her shape in the black cloak, the movement as she walked. Then she was gone round the bend.
She had passed by. He felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality. He went on, quiet, suspended, rarefied. He could not bear to think or to speak, nor make any sound or sign, nor change his fixed motion. He could scarcely bear to think of her face. He moved within the knowledge of her, in the world that was beyond reality.
The feeling that they had exchanged recognition possessed him like a madness, like a torment. How could he be sure, what confirmation had he? The doubt was like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness, annihilating. He kept within his breast the will to surety. They had exchanged recognition.
He walked about in this state for the next few days. And then again like a mist it began to break to let through the common, barren world. He was very gentle with man and beast, but he dreaded the starkness of disillusion cropping through again.
As he was standing with his back to the fire after dinner a few days later, he saw the woman passing. He wanted to know that she knew him, that she was aware. He wanted it said that there was something between them. So he stood anxiously watching, looking at her as she went down the road. He called to Tilly.
“Who might that be?” he asked.
Tilly, the cross-eyed woman of forty, who adored him, ran gladly to the window to look. She was glad when he asked her for anything. She craned her head over the short curtain, the little tight knob of her black hair sticking out pathetically as she bobbed about.
“Oh why”—she lifted her head and peered with her twisted, keen brown eyes—“why, you know who it is—it’s her from th’ vicarage—you know—”
“How do I know, you hen-bird,” he shouted.
Tilly blushed and drew her neck in and looked at him with her squinting, sharp, almost reproachful look.
“Why you do—it’s the new housekeeper.”
“Ay—an’ what by that?”
“Well, an’ what by that?” rejoined the indignant Tilly.
“She’s a woman, isn’t she, housekeeper or no housekeeper? She’s got more to her than that! Who is she—she’s got a name?”
“Well, if she has, I don’t know,” retorted Tilly, not to be badgered by this lad who had grown up into a man.
“What’s her name?” he asked, more gently.
“I’m sure I couldn’t tell you,” replied Tilly, on her dignity.
“An’ is that all as you’ve gathered, as she’s housekeeping at the vicarage?”
“I’ve ’eered mention of ’er name, but I couldn’t remember it for my life.”
“Why, yer riddle-skulled woman o’ nonsense, what have you got a head for?”
“For what other folks ’as got theirs for,” retorted Tilly, who loved nothing more than these tilts when he would call her names.
There was a lull.
“I don’t believe as anybody could keep it in their head,” the woman-servant continued, tentatively.
“What?” he asked.
“Why, ’er name.”
“How’s that?”
“She’s fra some foreign parts or other.”
“Who told you that?”
“That’s all I do know, as she is.”
“An’ wheer do you reckon she’s from, then?”
“I don’t know. They do say as she hails fra th’ Pole. I don’t know,” Tilly hastened to add, knowing he would attack her.
“Fra th’ Pole, why do you hail fra th’ Pole? Who set up that menagerie confabulation?”
“That’s what they say—I don’t know—”
“Who says?”
“Mrs. Bentley says as she’s fra th’ Pole—else she is a Pole, or summat.”
Tilly was only afraid she was landing herself deeper now.
“Who says she’s a Pole?”
“They all say so.”
“Then what’s brought her to these parts?”
“I couldn’t tell you. She’s got a little girl with her.”
“Got a little girl with her?”
“Of three or four, with a head like a fuzz-ball.”
“Black?”
“White—fair as can be, an’ all of a fuzz.”
“Is there a father, then?”
“Not to my knowledge. I don’t know.”
“What brought her here?”
“I couldn’t say, without th’ vicar axed her.”
“Is the child her child?”
“I s’d think so—they say so.”
“Who told you about her?”
“Why, Lizzie—a-Monday—we seed her goin’ past.”
“You’d have to be rattling your tongues if anything went past.”
Brangwen stood musing. That evening he went up to Cossethay to the Red Lion, half with the intention of hearing more.
She was the widow of a Polish doctor, he gathered. Her husband had died, a refugee, in London. She spoke a bit foreign-like, but you could easily make out what she said. She had one little girl named Anna. Lensky was the woman’s name, Mrs. Lensky.
Brangwen felt that here was the unreality established at last. He felt also a curious certainty about her, as if she were destined to him. It was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.
A swift change had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had real existence. Things had all been stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before. Now they were actualities that he could
Comments (0)