The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence

In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence asks the question, ‘How to become oneself’. The narrative takes the reader through three generations of the Brangwen family, and finally comes to focus closely on Ursula Brangwen, a universal feminist character that poses the great questions of modern humanity.

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) were both originally written as one novel, but split into two at the suggestion of his publisher. Upon publication, The Rainbow quickly got itself into hot water for its candid descriptions of love, sensuality and the body. An obscenity trial ensued, causing a five year delay before Women in Love could made its appearance.

The Rainbow, if one were looking for a conventional description, would call the novel a family saga. Three generations of the Brangwen family, their marriages, love, hates and turbulent inner lives, are described in Lawrence’s abundant, cornucopian prose-poetry. Lawrence is renowned for his mammoth literary output: letters, novels, plays, short stories and poetry. Words came tumbling out of him like a great running river.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence's literary consciousness is so large and powerful it almost overflows even the novel’s huge capacity. Every page teems with ideas, complex psychology and a poetry of the body and nature. His subject matter is individual consciousness and the friction caused when it rubs up against society, twenty-first century progress and changing gender roles. In this Lawrence is unique and completely modern. Conventional literary forms could not contain him, and hence he comes virtually born into literature as a complete self-invention. He seems to have no literary antecedents.

The Rainbow has many feminist aspects. While the first half concentrates on the generations of the Brangwen family, the second half comes to focus on the eldest daughter of Will and Anna Brangwen, Ursula. The portrait of Ursula is something that Virginia Woolf could only have dreamt of writing. We come to experience Ursula as a young woman facing all of life’s big questions: marriage, love, economic independence, the place of women in society. In the end Ursula turns her back on conventional marriage and chooses her right to self-discovery. On the way to this fraught decision, she poses some extraordinary questions. Arguably, of all male writers, only Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence could write such deeply complex and intellectually compelling women characters. Both Shakespeare and Lawrence seem the least sexist of writers, the most intellectually and spiritually bi-gendered, if it can be put like that.

Here Lawrence describes Ursula Brangwen’s crisis of identity:

“How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become oneself? One was not oneself, one was merely a half-stated question. How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of oneself, when one was merely an unfixed something – nothing, blowing about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated.’

D. H. Lawrence’s novels are as difficult to interpret and understand as the most ambiguous poetry. The reader can’t approach The Rainbow with the expectation of easy answers and pat explanations to life’s dilemmas. Lawrence’s capacious mind and imagination constantly breaks all bounds and conventions. Lawrence, as a writer who asked ‘How to become oneself’, invented his own literary form, a prose poetry that examines heart, soul, individual consciousness, nature, art, gender and society.

D. H. Lawrence is considered one of the great moderns of twenty-first century literature, yet there is a timelessness about him that ensures his work will last for as long as people read, think and feel the world around them. His sense of fate and tragedy, of the permanence of the self, recalls the writers of antiquity, like Homer and Sophocles.

The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141441382