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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“I was just going up to Cossethay,” he said.
She remained watching him.
“Why do you go?” she said.
His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.
“No reason particular,” he said, beginning to fill his pipe again, mechanically.
“Why do you go away so often?” she said.
“But you don’t want me,” he replied.
She was silent for a while.
“You do not want to be with me any more,” she said.
It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was his secret.
“Yi,” he said.
“You want to find something else,” she said.
He did not answer. “Did he?” he asked himself.
“You should not want so much attention,” she said. “You are not a baby.”
“I’m not grumbling,” he said. Yet he knew he was.
“You think you have not enough,” she said.
“How enough?”
“You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do you do to make me love you?”
He was flabbergasted.
“I never said I hadn’t enough in you,” he replied. “I didn’t know you wanted making to love me. What do you want?”
“You don’t make it good between us any more, you are not interested. You do not make me want you.”
“And you don’t make me want you, do you now?” There was a silence. They were such strangers.
“Would you like to have another woman?” she asked.
His eyes grew round, he did not know where he was. How could she, his own wife, say such a thing? But she sat there, small and foreign and separate. It dawned upon him she did not consider herself his wife, except in so far as they agreed. She did not feel she had married him. At any rate, she was willing to allow he might want another woman. A gap, a space opened before him.
“No,” he said slowly. “What other woman should I want?”
“Like your brother,” she said.
He was silent for some time, ashamed also.
“What of her?” he said. “I didn’t like the woman.”
“Yes, you liked her,” she answered persistently.
He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own heart so callously. And he was indignant. What right had she to sit there telling him these things? She was his wife, what right had she to speak to him like this, as if she were a stranger.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I want no woman.”
“Yes, you would like to be like Alfred.”
His silence was one of angry frustration. He was astonished. He had told her of his visit to Wirksworth, but briefly, without interest, he thought.
As she sat with her strange dark face turned towards him, her eyes watched him, inscrutable, casting him up. He began to oppose her. She was again the active unknown facing him. Must he admit her? He resisted involuntarily.
“Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you than me?” she said.
The turbulence raged in his breast.
“I don’t,” he said.
“Why do you?” she repeated. “Why do you want to deny me?”
Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely, isolated, unsure. She had seemed to him the utterly certain, satisfied, absolute, excluding him. Could she need anything?
“Why aren’t you satisfied with me?—I’m not satisfied with you. Paul used to come to me and take me like a man does. You only leave me alone or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again—so that you can forget me again.”
“What am I to remember about you?” said Brangwen.
“I want you to know there is somebody there besides yourself.”
“Well, don’t I know it?”
“You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing there. When Paul came to me, I was something to him—a woman, I was. To you I am nothing—it is like cattle—or nothing—”
“You make me feel as if I was nothing,” he said.
They were silent. She sat watching him. He could not move, his soul was seething and chaotic. She turned to her sewing again. But the sight of her bent before him held him and would not let him be. She was a strange, hostile, dominant thing. Yet not quite hostile. As he sat he felt his limbs were strong and hard, he sat in strength.
She was silent for a long time, stitching. He was aware, poignantly, of the round shape of her head, very intimate, compelling. She lifted her head and sighed. The blood burned in him, her voice ran to him like fire.
“Come here,” she said, unsure.
For some moments he did not move. Then he rose slowly and went across the hearth. It required an almost deathly effort of volition, or of acquiescence. He stood before her and looked down at her. Her face was shining again, her eyes were shining again like terrible laughter. It was to him terrible, how she could be transfigured. He could not look at her, it burnt his heart.
“My love!” she said.
And she put her arms round him as he stood before her round his thighs, pressing him against her breast. And her hands on him seemed to reveal to him the mould of his own nakedness, he was passionately lovely to himself. He could not bear to look at her.
“My dear!” she said. He knew she spoke a foreign language. The fear was like bliss in his heart. He looked down. Her face was shining, her eyes were full of light, she was awful. He suffered from the compulsion to her. She was the awful unknown. He bent down to her, suffering, unable to let go, unable to let himself go, yet drawn, driven. She was now the transfigured, she was wonderful, beyond him. He wanted to go. But he could not as yet kiss her. He was himself apart. Easiest he could kiss her feet. But he was too ashamed for the actual deed, which were like an affront. She waited for him to meet her, not to bow before her and serve her. She wanted his active participation, not his submission. She put
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