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.
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- Author: D. H. Lawrence
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“You are not poor, are you?” she said.
“Poor in money? I have about a hundred and fifty a year of my own—so I am poor or rich, as you like. I am poor enough, in fact.”
“But you will earn money?”
“I shall have my pay—I have my pay now. I’ve got my commission. That is another hundred and fifty.”
“You will have more, though?”
“I shan’t have more than £200 a year for ten years to come. I shall always be poor, if I have to live on my pay.”
“Do you mind it?”
“Being poor? Not now—not very much. I may later. People—the officers, are good to me. Colonel Hepburn has a sort of fancy for me—he is a rich man, I suppose.”
A chill went over Ursula. Was he going to sell himself in some way?
“Is Colonel Hepburn married?”
“Yes—with two daughters.”
But she was too proud at once to care whether Colonel Hepburn’s daughter wanted to marry him or not.
There came a silence. Gudrun entered, and Skrebensky still rocked languidly on the chair.
“You look very lazy,” said Gudrun.
“I am lazy,” he answered.
“You look really floppy,” she said.
“I am floppy,” he answered.
“Can’t you stop?” asked Gudrun.
“No—it’s the perpetuum mobile.”
“You look as if you hadn’t a bone in your body.”
“That’s how I like to feel.”
“I don’t admire your taste.”
“That’s my misfortune.”
And he rocked on.
Gudrun seated herself behind him, and as he rocked back, she caught his hair between her finger and thumb, so that it tugged him as he swung forward again. He took no notice. There was only the sound of the rockers on the floor. In silence, like a crab, Gudrun caught a strand of his hair each time he rocked back. Ursula flushed, and sat in some pain. She saw the irritation gathering on his brow.
At last he leapt up, suddenly, like a steel spring going off, and stood on the hearthrug.
“Damn it, why can’t I rock?” he asked petulantly, fiercely.
Ursula loved him for his sudden, steel-like start out of the languor. He stood on the hearthrug fuming, his eyes gleaming with anger.
Gudrun laughed in her deep, mellow fashion.
“Men don’t rock themselves,” she said.
“Girls don’t pull men’s hair,” he said.
Gudrun laughed again.
Ursula sat amused, but waiting. And he knew Ursula was waiting for him. It roused his blood. He had to go to her, to follow her call.
Once he drove her to Derby in the dogcart. He belonged to the horsey set of the sappers. They had lunch in an inn, and went through the market, pleased with everything. He bought her a copy of Wuthering Heights from a bookstall. Then they found a little fair in progress and she said:
“My father used to take me in the swingboats.”
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“Oh, it was fine,” she said.
“Would you like to go now?”
“Love it,” she said, though she was afraid. But the prospect of doing an unusual, exciting thing was attractive to her.
He went straight to the stand, paid the money, and helped her to mount. He seemed to ignore everything but just what he was doing. Other people were mere objects of indifference to him. She would have liked to hang back, but she was more ashamed to retreat from him than to expose herself to the crowd or to dare the swingboat. His eyes laughed, and standing before her with his sharp, sudden figure, he set the boat swinging. She was not afraid, she was thrilled. His colour flushed, his eyes shone with a roused light, and she looked up at him, her face like a flower in the sun, so bright and attractive. So they rushed through the bright air, up at the sky as if flung from a catapult, then falling terribly back. She loved it. The motion seemed to fan their blood to fire, they laughed, feeling the flames.
After the swingboats, they went on the roundabouts to calm down, he twisting astride on his jerky wooden steed towards her, and always seeming at his ease, enjoying himself. A zest of antagonism to the convention made him fully himself. As they sat on the whirling carousal, with the music grinding out, she was aware of the people on the earth outside, and it seemed that he and she were riding carelessly over the faces of the crowd, riding forever buoyantly, proudly, gallantly over the upturned faces of the crowd, moving on a high level, spurning the common mass.
When they must descend and walk away, she was unhappy, feeling like a giant suddenly cut down to ordinary level, at the mercy of the mob.
They left the fair, to return for the dogcart. Passing the large church, Ursula must look in. But the whole interior was filled with scaffolding, fallen stone and rubbish were heaped on the floor, bits of plaster crunched underfoot, and the place reechoed to the calling of secular voices and to blows of the hammer.
She had come to plunge in the utter gloom and peace for a moment, bringing all her yearning, that had returned on her uncontrolled after the reckless riding over the face of the crowd, in the fair. After pride, she wanted comfort, solace, for pride and scorn seemed to hurt her most of all.
And she found the immemorial gloom full of bits of falling plaster, and dust of floating plaster, smelling of old lime, having scaffolding and rubbish heaped about, dust cloths over the altar.
“Let us sit down a minute,” she said.
They sat unnoticed in the back pew, in the gloom, and she watched the dirty, disorderly work of bricklayers and plasterers. Workmen in heavy boots walking grinding down the aisles, calling out in a vulgar accent:
“Hi, mate, has them corner mouldin’s come?”
There were shouts of coarse answer from the roof of the church. The place echoed desolate.
Skrebensky sat close to her. Everything seemed wonderful, if dreadful to her, the world tumbling into ruins, and she and he clambering unhurt, lawless over
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