The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) ๐
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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.
Lydiaโs 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 thirdโand perhaps most famousโpart 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 Brangwenโs 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 careerโa concept both new and frightening to her family, who are just a generation removed from the era when a womanโs 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 Ursulaโs 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 Lawrenceโs 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
Read book online ยซThe Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (novels for beginners .txt) ๐ยป. Author - D. H. Lawrence
โHowโs that?โ he asked.
But she would not enlighten him. Yet she promised, without promising, to be at the meeting-place next Saturday evening.
So he left her. He did not know her name. He caught a train and went home.
It was the last train, he was very late. He was not home till midnight. But he was quite indifferent. He had no real relation with his home, not this man which he now was. Anna was sitting up for him. She saw the queer, absolved look on his face, a sort of latent, almost sinister smile, as if he were absolved from his โgoodโ ties.
โWhere have you been?โ she asked, puzzled, interested.
โTo the Empire.โ
โWho with?โ
โBy myself. I came home with Tom Cooper.โ
She looked at him, and wondered what he had been doing. She was indifferent as to whether he lied or not.
โYou have come home very strange,โ she said. And there was an appreciative inflection in the speech.
He was not affected. As for his humble, good self, he was absolved from it. He sat down and ate heartily. He was not tired. He seemed to take no notice of her.
For Anna the moment was critical. She kept herself aloof, and watched him. He talked to her, but with a little indifference, since he was scarcely aware of her. So, then she did not affect him. Here was a new turn of affairs! He was rather attractive, nevertheless. She liked him better than the ordinary mute, half-effaced, half-subdued man she usually knew him to be. So, he was blossoming out into his real self! It piqued her. Very good, let him blossom! She liked a new turn of affairs. He was a strange man come home to her. Glancing at him, she saw she could not reduce him to what he had been before. In an instant she gave it up. Yet not without a pang of rage, which would insist on their old, beloved love, their old, accustomed intimacy and her old, established supremacy. She almost rose up to fight for them. And looking at him, and remembering his father, she was wary. This was the new turn of affairs!
Very good, if she could not influence him in the old way, she would be level with him in the new. Her old defiant hostility came up. Very good, she too was out on her own adventure. Her voice, her manner changed, she was ready for the game. Something was liberated in her. She liked him. She liked this strange man come home to her. He was very welcome, indeed! She was very glad to welcome a stranger. She had been bored by the old husband. To his latent, cruel smile she replied with brilliant challenge. He expected her to keep the moral fortress. Not she! It was much too dull a part. She challenged him back with a sort of radiance, very bright and free, opposite to him. He looked at her, and his eyes glinted. She too was out in the field.
His senses pricked up and keenly attended to her. She laughed, perfectly indifferent and loose as he was. He came towards her. She neither rejected him nor responded to him. In a kind of radiance, superb in her inscrutability, she laughed before him. She too could throw everything overboard, love, intimacy, responsibility. What were her four children to her now? What did it matter that this man was the father of her four children?
He was the sensual male seeking his pleasure, she was the female ready to take hers: but in her own way. A man could turn into a free lance: so then could a woman. She adhered as little as he to the moral world. All that had gone before was nothing to her. She was another woman, under the instance of a strange man. He was a stranger to her, seeking his own ends. Very good. She wanted to see what this stranger would do now, what he was.
She laughed, and kept him at armโs length, whilst apparently ignoring him. She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a stranger to her.
And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her. The little creature in Nottingham had but been leading up to this. They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.
Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.
He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one manโs capacity.
He lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some timeโ โit was a duel: no love, no words, no kisses even, only the maddening perception of beauty consummate, absolute through touch. He wanted to touch her, to discover her, maddeningly he wanted to know her. Yet he must not hurry, or he missed everything. He must enjoy one beauty at a time. And the
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