| Title | : | The Rainbow |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0451530306 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780451530301 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 544 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1915 |
D. H. Lawrence's controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization - the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of existence symbolized by the persistent, unifying motif of the "rainbow". Lawrence's fourth novel, a prequel to Women in Love, is an invigorating, absorbing tale about the undying determination of the human soul.
The Rainbow Reviews
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D.H. Lawrence was one of the first who has begun to write openly about the awakening of sexual consciousness.
So they were together in a darkness, passionate, electric, for ever haunting the back of the common day, never in the light. In the light, he seemed to sleep, unknowing. Only she knew him when the darkness set him free, and he could see with his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark. Then she was in a spell, then she answered his harsh, penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke up, electric, bristling with an unknown, overwhelming insinuation.
By now they knew each other; she was the daytime, the daylight, he was the shadow, put aside, but in the darkness potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness.
And he wrote about sexuality very poetically and desire in his novels turned into a life force, becoming a momentum of living…
And desire was encompassed by nature and it turned into its center and became a focal point of creation.
And those who are emotionally complete will reach a rainbow and it will belong to them. -
”The situation was almost ridiculous.
‘But do you love him?’ asked Dorothy.
‘It isn’t a question of loving him,’ said Ursula. ‘I love him well enough--certainly more than I love anybody else in the world. And I shall never love anybody else the same again. We have had the flower of each other. But I don’t care about love. I don’t value it. I don’t care whether I love or whether I don’t, whether I have love or whether I haven’t. What is it to me?’
And she shrugged her shoulders in fierce, angry contempt.
Dorothy pondered, rather angry and afraid.
‘Then what do you care about?’ she asked, exasperated.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ursula. ‘But something impersonal. Love--love--what does it mean--what does it amount to? So much personal gratification. It doesn’t lead anywhere.’
‘It isn’t supposed to lead anywhere, is it?’ said Dorothy, satirically. ‘I thought it was the one thing which is an end in itself.’”
When I think of epic masterpieces, I think of something of Tolstoyian length, an 800 to 1200 page monster that will consume your life for a month or two. My Everyman’s Library edition of The Rainbow weighs in at 460 pages, a rather modest number to achieve such a distinction as epic. And yet here I am declaring this an epic masterpiece.
It has been decades since I’ve read D. H. Lawrence. I was reading The Unexpected Professor by John Carey, and he talked about a lot of books, but in particular, it was his discussion of spending a summer reading all of Lawrence’s works that inspired me to consider returning to Lawrence. Carey wrestled with Lawrence, not of the homoerotic desire type, but with his structure and style. He couldn’t really say he enjoyed him or liked him, but he couldn’t stop reading him!
Aye, I understand that perfectly. I would read a big chunk of this book and set it aside, only to return to it a few days later and read another big chunk. I finally became exasperated with myself and decided to devote myself to Lawrence. In a flurry of hot reading, where I was completely immersed in the damp, black soil and the twisted sheets of the sexual revolution happening in the Nottinghamshire countryside, I finished the book, leaving myself completely spent, completely satisfied, wishing I smoked because I was in desperate need of something to settle down my hammering heart and my frayed emotional psyche.
This is a story of three generations of the Brangwen family. We have Tom and Lydia, then Anna and Will, and finish with Ursula and her torturous relationship with Anton Skrebensky. Through these characters, Lawrence explores the larger concepts of what relationships really are and our expectations for them. Certainly sex is a part of it, but what is more interesting for me is the emotional reactions that people have to one another. The misunderstandings, the misplaced passions, and ultimately with Ursula, a rejection of the need to submit to the suffocating baggage of a permanent, committed relationship.
Tom is the second husband for Lydia, which unbalances the relationship. Tom is caught up in the grand passions of his desire for his wife, but she doesn’t gulp her passions like he does. She sips them. She is more measured because she, in so many ways, has been made older from her past experiences in more than just years.
”It was not, he had to learn, that she would not want him enough, as much as he demanded that she should want him. It was that she could not. She could only want him in her own way, and to her own measure. And she had spent much of life before he found her as she was, the woman who could take him and give him fulfilment. She had taken him and given him fulfilment. She still would do so, in her own times and ways. But he must control himself, measure himself to her.”
How many times do relationships fail because we try to change the person we are involved with into who we want them to be, or maybe we want to cocoon them as they are so that they never change from the person we first fell in love with?
Lawrence is adept at hitting the reader with these great moments of understanding when everything that had been so murky becomes so clear.
”She did not know him as himself. But she knew him as the man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her: an impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite.”
Anna Lensky, who is Lydia’s child by her first marriage but was raised by Tom Brangwen, marries Will Brangwen. Like most of us, she is swept up in the romance of the courtship when desire supersedes all else. That time when the possibilities are endless. Once the reality of marriage hits and she can see the halcyon days of her childhood disappearing forever in the mists of the past, she starts to rebel. She is sensitive and assumes much from Will’s inability to always express himself in terms of reassurance. She lashes out at what he loves, wanting him to share her growing misery.
Tom, for all intents and purposes her father, really puts a fine point on exactly what is driving Anna to make Will so miserable.
”’You mustn’t think I want to be miserable, ‘ she cried. ‘I don’t.’
‘We quite readily believe it,’ retorted Brangwen. ‘Neither do you intend him to be hopping for joy like a fish in a pond.’”
It is quite a shock to settle into quiet domesticity. Anna wants for little, but for all that, there is certainly something missing. The fresh linen feel of the courtship faze has been replaced by sheets that have been washed and washed again. It is a question we all reach at some point in our lives, sometimes many points in our lives,…Is this all there is? Will is crazy about her, but doesn’t always know how to tell her, and she takes maybe too much pleasure out of torturing him about his beliefs, but the fury this inspires does eventually prove to be an aphrodisiac.
So this all brings us to Ursula Brangwen, the oldest daughter of Will and Anna. She has opportunities that no female has ever had before in her family. She goes to college. She holds down a job outside the home. She experiences a level of independence almost equal to what she would have had if she had been born a man. This isn’t just given to her. She has to fight her family for it. As she feels herself become mired in the same marriage traps that her grandmother and mother surrendered to, she can’t let herself submit. She must escape. She wants to exist independently, not only from a husband and her family, but from everyone. She wants to always have choices and options to be who she wants to be without hindrances and to be able to seize the day without considerations. She wants to be loved without commitment and love without being subjugated.
This was heady stuff to be published in 1915.
Lydia submits to a marriage, but with her eyes wide open, and refuses to become what her husband wants her to be. Anna, in many ways spoiled with too much freedom, rebels and tries to break her husband, only to discover that the cost to both of them is too great. Her rebellion is short lived, and she gives herself over to her children, but in Ursula we can see the joining of her grandmother and mother in questioning the strictures of a society imposed submission to a man.
Why must she?
Lawrence considered this, rightly so, to be a feminist novel. Barbara Hardy, in the introduction, gives this thought an intriguing twist. ”Ursula is the first woman in English fiction who is imagined as having the need and courage for a sexual odyssey.” Ursula rails at one point, Why can’t I love a hundred men? Why must I choose one? The adventures of Ursula continue in Women in Love. I will, of course, be continuing my wrestling match with Lawrence. I would say, at this point, it might be a draw. I can only hope he is as spent as I am and will be content to lie a bit and stare at the sky and contemplate the odysseys of these women before we have to grapple once again.
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This is a three-generation family saga, set in Nottinghamshire, starting in Victorian times and ending before fears of WW1 loomed. Except that it isn’t that: the brief Introduction summarises all the key characters, careers, couplings, births and deaths.
Events are mere tools and waypoints, not the purpose or destination, because this is not primarily a story: it’s an experience of passions, clothed in elliptically floral, fiery, watery imagery, stained deep with Biblical themes.
But these are not conventionally Christian people: they seek and submit to the forces of nature, their physical desires, free of guilt and shame. They marvel at creation, and worship it and each other through the medium of their mingling, tingling flesh. A deep, true sacrament. (Yet when this was banned shortly after publication, it was on the grounds of obscenity, rather than blasphemy: lesbianism alluded to, though nowadays, any outrage comes from the fact that .)
This is a profoundly sensual, sexual book, but it’s not at all explicit: the most intimate encounters are described in terms of flowers and flames, rather than human anatomy. I’m not one for florid language or euphemisms, but I was first seduced, then bewitched, and finally intoxicated by the surreal erotic lyricism that is often more poem than prose.
Reading this was a total emotional immersion. I opened up to receive Lawrence's words: I burned in the fire, dusted the ashes from my lips, and drowned in the waters.
Reliving it now, I melt and burn and dissolve and yearn all over again. I quiver and shiver, even as I wave and drown, licked in the flames of Lawrence’s passion.
Lawrence’s Words
I am too much in the thrall of this book to write more words of my own:
• “Outside, the rain slanted by in fine, steely, mysterious haste, emerging out of the gulf of darkness.”
• “The pure love came in sunbeams between them, when she was like a flower in the sun to him… feeling the radiance from the Almighty beat through him like a pulse, as he stood in the upright flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation.”
• “Then softly, oh softly, so softly… his lips touched her cheek, and she drifted through strands of heat and darkness.”
• “His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth, soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins burst with anguish of thankfulness, his heart was made with gratefulness, he could pour himself out upon her forever.”
• Plum trees, “All glittering and snowy and delighted with the sunshine, in full bloom under a blue sky. They threw out their blossom, they flung it about under the blue heavens.”
• “But to him, she was a flame that consumed him… till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.”
• "Now, ah now, she was swimming in the same water... The girl moved her limbs voluptuously, and swam by herself, deliciously, yet with a craving of unsatisfaction. She wanted to touch the other, to touch her, to feel her."
• “She would… feel her blood running, feel herself lying open like a flower unsheathed in the sun, insistent and potent with demand.”
• “She laid hold of him for her dreams.”
• “He was the warm colouring to her dreams, he was the hot blood beating within them.”
MORE quotes… I have saved many more quotes, grouped loosely by theme,
HERE, along with a (very) few observations about the story, and the change of tone at the end.
But that is not the review; this one is.
Ursula's story (plus Gudrun's) is continued in Women in Love, which is remarkably different style - in some ways. See my review
HERE.
Image: Georgia O’Keeffe “Blue Flower” 1918,
http://whitney.org/image_columns/0026... -
Nowhere else within the broad realm of literature have I come across such beauteous turns of phrase devoted to exploring the many dimensions of sexual desire. In fact, I cannot cease to wonder how Lawrence manages to convey the intensity and intimacy of a kiss and a caress so effectually without deploying any explicit terms. His men and women are often capricious creatures of instinct and restless, stubborn adherents of their inexorable self will which causes them to be in conflict - even if tenuously - with the world circumscribing them. And carnal love emerges as the only authentic religious force capable of exalting the unsatisfied, solitary halves to a state of spiritual communion and fulfillment.
His pride was bolstered up, his blood ran once more in pride. But there was no core to him: as a distinct male he had no core. His triumphant, flaming, overweening heart of the intrinsic male would never beat again. He would be subject now, reciprocal, never the indomitable thing with a core of overweening, unabateable fire. She had abated that fire, she had broken him.
Multigenerational family sagas usually employ some common thread that binds together the disparate story arcs and subplots - presumably some long suppressed odious family secret, the effect of the altering milieu on evolving family dynamics, the denuding influence of time on family fortunes. And yet Lawrence's account of the Brangwen family is refreshingly free of any such cliched thematic glue.
Instead, the narrative sprawls across a wide swath of years, leisurely routing its way through the rituals of marriages, motherhood, and ambivalent father-daughter bonds to eventually usher us into Ursula Brangwen's vibrant inner world which serves as the site of a perennial dispute between indefatigable individualism and the urge to live up to societal expectations. Even though the sexual politics of Tom and Lydia and Will and Anna Brangwen's marriages are flayed open and dissected with a psychoanalytic precision, it is not until heroine Ursula steps into the embrace of nubile adolescence that I was able to determine a common running theme of an existential tussle between the sexes for supremacy and control.The men placed in her hands their own conscience, they said to her "Be my conscience-keeper, be the angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and my incoming." And the woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly in her, receiving her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger, rebeling and storming, but never for a moment really escaping in their own souls from her prerogative.
That Lawrence chose to re-create the persisting friction between one's individuality and the need to fit into some generic pre-ordained role set aside for one by society from a predominantly female perspective is evident from the discernible narrative focus on wonderfully humanized female characters. It is the Brangwen women who shield their private inner lives from external interference with a zealous certitude, sometimes even at the expense of emotionally alienating their fathers and husbands. They are unafraid to seek personal sexual gratification both in and out of wedlock. Lydia's faltering attempts at making peace between an irreconcilable past and present, Anna Brangwen's pertinacious rejection of her husband's religiosity coupled with her unabashed celebration of her own fecundity and the bildungsroman-ish account of Ursula's first acquaintance with sexual love and adult responsibilities complement Tom and Will Brangwen's and Skrebensky's viewpoints to create a picture portraying the truth of men and women locked in a contest of self assertion. A battle in which either adversary is eventually conquered by a desire for spiritual consummation transcending the individual's need for validation.So it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life spoiled, ruined, desolate and laid waste. The next day it was all marvellous again, just marvellous.
That I have refrained from giving this the full 5 stars can in part be attributed to the raw lushness of Lawrence's prose and excessive reliance on florid metaphors which often suffocated me, dulling my desire to continue reading. Besides Ursula and Gudrun's stories remain to be told in entirety. Only after
Women in Love can I decide on a final comment on the Brangwen saga. -
Farty proto-fascist flapdoodle served up with a twist of hippy bollocks and garnished with enough of a patina of feminist sympathy for it to goosestep rapidly under some people's radar. Yes DH Lawrence could write. Somebody should have stopped him though.
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“She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.” (268)
Re-reading "The Rainbow" after so many years has been like a shattering force of nature. A rampant flood that has washed me anew, a piercing light that has blinded my eyes but stimulated my senses bringing back all the reasons that make of D.H. Lawrence one of my favorite writers of all times.
His falling from grace within the literary circles in recent years led me to take this novel with wariness and apprehension, lest I would be obliged to dethrone one the literary idols of my teenage days.
There was no need for fretting. I met Lawrence again, gasped trying to catch my breath in gulps of stupefaction and drowned in the blissful confusion of Lawrence's engulfing narrative, which was consistently censored during his time for its “obscene and blasphemous" approach to sexuality and for the inherent reproval of the institution of marriage in the corseted post-Victorian society.
Setting the story in the span of three generations of the Brangwen family, Lawrence echoes the opposing rhythms of continuity and change of the rural world of Midlands in the 1840s towards the industrialization of the 20thC and projects the shifting social circumstances onto its characters, which co-exist in ceaseless conflict with their inner male and female groundings and the inexorable breach that separate individuals who instinctively crave for spiritual unity.
The social ideal of marital union appears fractured in front of the sexual experience, which is given the dimension of religious mystery, whereas love surfaces as the “means” and not the “end” in itself to cross the bridge of strangeness between independent beings that will steer them towards the so much desired sacred consummation.
It is in the second half of the novel where Ursula, the main protagonist and the third generation of the Brangwen women, epitomizes the combative terrain of human relationships in dark, fluid and almost metaphysical eroticism that transcends gender, class or any other categorization, setting the foundations for the sequel to this novel “Women in Love”.
“Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea”, so they embrace themselves.” (288)
Lawrence's prose is the result of a bewildering compendium of biblical allusions, pagan and natural imagery and a profound grasp of the synaptic connections that trigger desire, yearning and the irrepressible urge to abandon the safety of one's individuality to leap into the unknown abyss of another being, to lose grip of self-dominance in favor of frenzied carnal and spiritual lust and to withstand the tempestuous battle of wills inherent in any relationship.
His writing is lyrical but not soothing and saturated with many ongoing contradictions that materialize in rhetorical repetitiousness, alliterations and dense passages reflecting the labyrinthine crevices of the human psyche, combining the realistic tradition, the classic mysticism and a modern diction assimilating the stream of consciousness technique.
From the magnetic lure of the erect church to the pond trembling with the glitter of the full moon, Lawrence seduces and repels, exults and smothers, fuses and tears the reader’s soul apart with his dialectical opposites in constant generative antagonism. And so light upon darkness, fecundity upon death and gloom folded music upon silence draw a vivid, magnificent rainbow as a promise of universal rebirth, wherein love and death burn and melt leaving only the ashes of an indomitable passion. A passion for living. -
The Rainbow was published in 1915 and was the prequel to Women in Love (1920). It is set in rural England in the early 20th century, and is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family. It deals with themes like love, relationships, family, homosexuality, social mores, religious rebellion, just to name a few. It was originally banned in England for it's frank portrayals of sex in nontraditional manners, something that Lawrence would encounter throughout his career.
I read Women in Love first and became enthralled with the character of Ursula, and I think this enhanced my enjoyment of The Rainbow. The Brangwen family history starts in the mid 19th century with young Tom Brangwen. Tom falls in love with and marries a polish immigrant, Lydia, who already has a daughter, Anna, from a previous relationship. Anna is adopted by Tom and the story progresses through Anna's growth and her eventual marriage to Tom's nephew, Will Brangwen. The birth of Anna's and Will's daughter, Ursula, is when the novel really comes to life. Her vibrant personality and unique views of love, sexuality, and religion make her one of literatures most interesting characters.
Some readers struggle with it, while some critics consider it a work of genius. Either way, you have to acknowledge the quality of Lawrence's writing. It's uniqueness puts it in a category of it's own and may be more appreciated today than it was a century ago. -
I first read D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow in Professor Peter Oppewal’s British and American Novels class when I was 19, and it was one of the books that led me to become an English major. It was a perfect book for someone my age, susceptible to both lush romanticism and some harsh social criticism. As I saw it, it focused on the young individual, longing to be free, versus the constraining, soul-killing society.
"Self was a oneness with infinity"--Ursula
And especially for me, it even featured a young teacher, just as I had also decided to teach. I thought then and think now that this is one of the great novels, and quite possibly his best, but I will have to reread Sons and Lovers and Women in Love to make that determination with greater confidence.
A 1915 publication, The Rainbow is a multi-generational historical saga set in the late nineteenth century featuring three generations of the Brangwen family, mainly focused on women struggling against (male) society. The first two sections are largely idyllic, passionate, lusty, working-class, nature-centric; in other words completely romantic, and the Church comes in for some criticism for not being anything like that list. The third section ramps up the social critique with the advent of the industrial revolution, which threatens to permanently mar the Edenic England Lawrence (and his women characters, especially) loved. Images of gaunt and nearly emaciated colliers stand against the beauty of the countryside. In addition to the Church, other institutions such as schools and other workplaces are targeted for criticism as inhibiting the individual, the self, perhaps most symbolized by love (and/or sex):
“Maggie said that love was the flower of life, and blossomed unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it was found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.”
All the Goodreads romance readers should read this book! Here’s a couple samples where Lawrence brings the heat:
“His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth, soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins burst with anguish of thankfulness, his heart was made with gratefulness, he could pour himself out upon her forever.”
“She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.”
The moon! The flames! After a Victorian age known for sexual repression, Lawrence in 1915 is unapologetically Dionysian; some words/themes that recur: The necessity for a spirituality/religion that embraces the body, sexuality, desire, instead of harshly renouncing it; Lawrence loves words such as fecund/fecundity, passion, ecstasy. Also soul. Instinct trumps reason and deliberation. Thought shapes society, but it also has the potential to undermine the growth of the self. The earthy working-class body!
One can see how my generation—the sixties—fell in love with Lawrence’s call to go back to the garden, to liberate oneself from society’s strictures. So this may sound to you like a cliché, but I can assure you the rich writing of Lawrence in this book is powerful, beautifully written, sensual. It may seem now to be hopelessly optimistic in its modernist embrace of a future lovefest utopia that will somehow turn back the industrialist tide, but it is gloriously so. The Rainbow was banned in its time for its frank treatment of sexual love, and for years he was dismissed by the literary establishment as a mere pornographer, but by today’s standards, he is almost tame (see Goodreads romance, JR Ward, and so on). Lawrence wrote novels of radical social reform, and most of the characterizations of women here are strong and independent, especially for the times.
The novel is largely devoted to schoolteacher Ursula, in her struggle to find fulfillment for her passionate, spiritual and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society around her. She struggles with the battle of the classroom, and the need—against her nature—to assert control over her students. One emotionally fraught scene involves her actually caning one of her students. Has she joined the other side? Another memorable scene involves her encounter with wild horses who would seem to trample her. Ursula, whose story is continued in Women in Love, struggles with her relationship to the conventional soldier Anton Skrebensky—the male-female romantic relationships usually involve epic battles in this book—but needs to be free, to forge her own self.
"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of truth, fitting to the overarching heaven." -
These were the precursors to having a book banned:
1. Talk about lesbian love
2. Mention love between cousins
3. Mention sex
4. Have independent-minded women, you know, those who didn't believe that they were put on this earth simply to procreate?
Speaking of women and societal expectations, even in these modern times, some believe that a married woman is supposed to act according to a prescribed norm that is different than a married man (which way, I dare ask sometimes - is she not supposed to have a voice; is she expected to be void of personality? Do tell.), and she is expected to have two or three kids at her hip. Oy.
To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron.
Give me a banned book any day, especially if it's from Lawrence.
At the close of every year, Lawrence and I have had this affair going on. I snuggle up with his words to bring in the new year, and I'm enlightened by his feministic approach in literature, particularly given the century. I can't help it, I love men who view women as equals; in fact, I married such a man eight years ago and I'm proud to call him my best friend and partner.
But anyway, on to other ramblings…
Before this, there was
Sons and Lovers, which is still my favorite, and
Women in Love, which is part-philosophical in its approach to life and love. Out of the three, I would say this book, The Rainbow, has Lawrence's best prose style, so far. Don't take my word for it, however, because I'm still working my way through his works. I've read
Lady Chatterley's Lover in snippets somewhere in undergrad or grad school, when you read a book and sometimes find yourself skimming the material just to get through the list, so that doesn't count. Now I'm reading for pleasure (most times not even bothering to include books I read for work on GR), sipping words like warm espresso on a cold spring morning, feeling the boldness of black print on my tongue as I read aloud.
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.
The story traverses generations, starting with the Brangwens, a family of farmers. It's quite possible to dislike the women at first, because of characterization, but with reading patience, it's easy to see the portrait that Lawrence paints. Each husband (or lover) has some feeling of helplessness because he is with a woman who is independently driven, or psychologically unavailable. Until he gets to understand her or appreciate her individuality, there is the normal drama of the love affair or drunkenness. And then there is the moment they connect, both on a sexual and mental level, when their bond suddenly is so strong that even their children fight to penetrate it.
He wanted to live unthinking, with her presence flickering upon him.
Yes, I would say that seeing the story unfold through characterization is why I enjoyed this novel. It is a psychological journey of self discovery and of recovery from mental trauma. Even when the middle drags a bit and a few pages seem like they could have been edited to make characters sound less whiny, Ursula comes on board and she makes everything else seem trivial.
Make no mistake, all this leads to Ursula. Ursula is a main character in Women in Love, so if you haven't read Lawrence, I would suggest reading this before reading Women.
All this stir and seethe of lights and people was but the rim, the shores of a great inner darkness and void. She wanted very much to be on the seething, partially illuminated shore, for within her was the void reality of dark space.
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The Rainbow is a brilliant novel, one which I admired a bit more than I enjoyed reading. At times D.H. Lawrence astounded me with the lushness, beauty and depth of his prose but at other times I felt that the writing was overwrought and overwritten. The latter made reading this novel more of a chore at times, rather than a pleasure. This is the same problem I had with Mothers and Sons; too much of a good thing.
Lawrences uses the natural world for its beauty and for its symbolic power. The use of metaphors and allusions to the natural world abound suggestive of Biblical, religious/spiritual, psychological, sexual and other meanings. His prose are more like poetry, long on imagery of both the external and the internal (emotional) landscape.
This novel is written on a grand scale, spanning a period from the 1840s to 1905, a time of great change in societal norms and industry. We follow the changing patterns of love and marriage in 3 generations of the Brangwens. Lawrence also weaves in religion, sexuality, the natural world, industrialization, homosexuality and women’s rights, to name a few.
This novel is about many things but more than anything else what stood out were the strong women. In each of the three generations of Brangwens it is always the women who are strong and central to the story. Lydia, Anna and Ursula, you come to know very well. The character portrayal of these three women are exceptional. Lydia and Anna are happy producing baby after baby. Ursula’s story is different. It is one of psychological awakening and the struggle that requires. Her relationship with her lover is "ambivalent;" she both hates and loves him at the same time. She pulls him in and soon after pushes him away. She hates him while having sex with him. She loves him but hates what he represents to her - conventionality. (Ambivalence is a concept borrowed from Freud whose ideas can be found elsewhere in this novel). Ursula is the first Brangwen to ask herself what she wants out of life and to wrestle with this question:
“Why, oh why must one grow up, why must one inherit this heavy, numbing responsibility of living an undiscovered life? Out of the nothingness and the undifferentiated mass, to make something of herself! But what? In the obscurity and pathlessness to take a direction! But whither? How take even one step? And yet, how stand still? This was torment indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one’s own life.”
Sensuality and sexuality are suffused throughout the The Rainbow. Descriptions of nature are infused with sensuality and the most intimate and emotional encounters are often described in terms of nature and the elements. In fact, nature and sexual love are entwined for Lawrence. Lovers often have sex outdoors, surrounded by trees, under a bright moon, etc.. Lawrence beautifully conveys desire, love and passion as well as the intensity and intimacy of a sexual encounter without ever writing explicitly about sex. He doesn't need to as these quotes show:
“She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now forever, hidden away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.”
“Their flesh was one rock from which the life gushed, out of her who was smitten and rent, from him who quivered and yielded.”
“The lovers become one dual movement, dancing on the slippery grass….It was a glaucous intertwining, delicious flux and contest in flux. “
“His blood beat up in waves of desire….if he could come really within the blazing kernel of darkness, if really he could be destroyed, burnt away till he lit with her in one consummation, that were supreme, supreme.”
The novel ends with the vision of a rainbow, a sign of hope and regeneration for Ursula who has been through a lot in the course of this novel. (Her story continues in Women In Love).
"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of truth, fitting to the overarching heaven.
I listened to this novel on an audio recording narrated by Tony Foster, one of Librivox’ finest narrators. His narration was superb. -
Oh Lord, this book.
Let me start with the good stuff. The writing is amazing, I'll give it that. I love the flowery language and the metaphors. I even understand that this is some groundbreaking feminist idea in old world Europe. I understand all that.
I detest this book. I loathe this story. I gnashed my teeth on every page and every scene with these monstrous characters. I read this entire damned story and hated it the whole way. The language and ideas could not keep me from hating every character and relationship in this book.
I know this is a classic and I see people like this book. I even see it's merits, but I couldn't read this. It's not a book for me. I even understand it's rather true to life and there are people in relationships like this, but it's not me and what I want to experience. I have no interest in main characters like these. They could have been secondary characters and that might have been ok, but there was little redeeming about them.
3 generations in a family is the focus of this story. The parents love each other and take pleasure in causing their lover as much pain as possible. That's what I couldn't stand. Yes, I am single and have been for years, but in my 4 year relationship, there were hard times, but never did I want my lover to suffer and to cause him pain. I just couldn't stand the coldness of the characters and the pleasure they took in hurting one another.
The daughter was a hot mess and a crazy maker. She is very self-centered and that's ok. She had to be to rebel against such an extreme patrimony. I hated her relationship with her beau and I was glad he got some sense in him and married someone else.
I know this has a lot to say about the time it was written. I understand that it portrays British people in a fully humanized dimension. I get all that and still, I could not get past my loathing of these characters and everything they did. Nothing could save it for me.
I am not glad I read this in any way. I would love to get that time back. I forced my way through this and it felt like getting slimed by these people. The world can have D. H., but the writing is not for me. I need some hope, some spark of hope in my story. Oh lord, someone save me from this. -
Roy G. Biv, the Birds and the Bees
*4.4 stars*
This D.H. Lawrence novel, published in 1915, was almost immediately banned as obscene and the first printing of over 1,000 copies were seized and burned. It was not available for purchase in Britain for the next 11 years.
No doubt, this book treated sexual desire as candidly as most books theretofore published. While it is relatively mild by today's standards over a century out, it handled sensuality in a way that is true to life as a natural and spiritual force in humans, the passion to consummate the desire for intimacy and the love of another.
Frankly, this is one of the only literary novels that animated my appetite for affections, with passages such as:His body trembled as he held her. He loved her till he felt his heart and all his veins would burst and flood her with his hot, healing blood. He knew his blood would heal and restore her. ... His head felt so strange and blazed. Still he held her close, with trembling arms. His blood seemed very strong, enveloping her. And at last she began to draw near to him, she nestled to him. His limbs, his body, took fire and beat up in flames. She clung to him, she cleaved to his body. The flames swept him, he held her in sinews of fire. If she would kiss him! He bent his mouth down. And her mouth, soft and moist, received him. He felt his veins would burst with anguish of thankfulness, his heart was mad with gratefulness, he could pour himself out upon her for ever. When they came to themselves, the night was very dark. ... They lay still and warm and weak, like the new-born, together. And there was a silence almost of the unborn. Only his heart was weeping happily, after the pain. He did not understand, he had yielded, given way. There was no understanding. There could be only acquiescence and submission, and tremulous wonder of consummation.
The focus is on three main characters: Tom Brangwen, Anna Brangwen (his Polish adopted daughter who married Tom's nephew, her first cousin by law, not blood) and Anna's daughter Ursula Brangwen. It spans about 65 years from the 1840s to 1905. Tom married a Polish refugee/widow named Lydia who had a 10-year-old daughter Anna. Tom (a farmer) and Lydia as well as Anna and Will (a wood craftsman) are happy enough to live in Nottinghamshire in the east Midlands of England. Yet, as time goes by, England becomes more industrialized and urbanized, and Ursula seeks an education to become a teacher.
A little over half of the novel covers the first 2 generations, while the remainder focuses on Ursula and her passions. Ursula falls in love with Anton Skrebensky, a British soldier of Polish ancestry, but he is conscripted to go to Africa.She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.
After Anton's departure, Ursula has a sexual relationship with her female teacher which she breaks off long before Anton's return a few years on. Yet, things are not so clear with Anton. At the book's end, Urusula dreams of a rainbow towering over the Earth:"She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven."
The story of Ursula and her sister Gudrun continues in a sequel published in 1920 called "Women in Love," which I intend to read.
-
Modern Library List Reads with Axl - Book # 1
Axl and I decided to chip at a few of these books on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list that has works from the 20th century. Always good to have an excuse to work on the great unread works and to do so with a friend.
I am in awe of lots of long, free-flowing sections in this book. So much so that despite leaning toward a 4-star rating, I will settle with a 5 anyway. It really is gorgeous prose, making you think of the realities of life in an England (and a world) making the transition into more modern landscapes.
It’s impossible to miss the overtly biblical allusions in the book, in the opening pages and its parallels in the closing passages. The Rainbow is a generational saga, following the Brangwen family and leaving off with Ursula Brangwen, who will be one of the main characters in Lawrence’s Women in Love. It’s also hard to miss Lawrence’s use of repetition. Not only on the level of form, but also on a sentence-by-sentence basis, where he repeats the same word several times in a small paragraph. I interpreted this as an attempt to come at the repetition of themes and motifs throughout the lives of each successive generation – to paint a picture of humanity through different landscapes, no matter the surroundings and the time period. Reading James Wood’s beautiful introduction to the book afterward, I saw that he had an additional take, seeing this as Lawrence’s attempt to “describe” the feelings that we all know so well deep in our souls, but which are hard to put into words. So, he didn’t, really. Use words, that is. Or use different words. He used the same word in different contexts, packed close together, demanding a closer read and deep thought.
A good portion of these feelings were about sexuality and the consummation of the sexual relationship – the heart on fire, the head in the clouds, the pure ecstasy of first touch, the sometimes hollow post-coital feeling. As the patterns unfold, we have a discussion of sexual awakening in Ursula, who leans into and explores same-sex relationships, in a chapter that (I found out after) was the catalyst for a trial on the book, aimed at the destruction of available copies. I won’t reveal much, but will let Harold Bloom help out a bit.
“And yet The Rainbow permanently illuminates what Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy understood too well: women are sexually superior to men. Adam was God’s initial molding out of the red clay. Eve, quarried out of the human, was better made.”
And I’ll do my bit and include a few quotes from James Wood’s introduction:
“The Rainbow, written between 1913 and 1915, was Lawrence’s attempt to blend at least three literary elements: biblical myth, of the kind found in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy; historical realism, of the kind found in such nineteenth-century examples as Anna Karenina and Middlemarch; and a new form of fiction-telling, in which the young modernist writer attempts to explode the norms of realist writing, and plunge into the self in ways not comprehended even by the likes of Flaubert and Henry James. It recounts the passage of three generations of Brangwen family, from about 1840 to about 1905, and from pastoral idyll to modern, urban complication.”
“Lawrence’s religious language can sound merely religiose, and his attempts to describe the indescribable can lapse into ponderous, melodramatic floridity, as people wince through their wombs, swoon into helplessness, and feel flames of nausea in their bellies: ‘His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb’.”
“But Lady Ottoline [Morrell] went on to add that ‘there were also passages of such intensity and such passionate beauty that they never leave one’s memory’, and Beckett, after all, a very different writer from Lawrence, did appreciate the latter’s ‘lovely things’. It is Lawrence’s misfortune that this highly doctrinal and metaphysical writer is more often discussed doctrinally and metaphysically than aesthetically. The Rainbow is indeed full of ‘lovely things’, yet it is rare to find detailed advocacy on behalf of its many verbal beauties. Lawrence is famous for his desire to capture the ineffable, to put into words the shifting ecstasies, both negative and positive, of the human soul in flux. His reputation for ‘obscurity’ is founded on such efforts. But at bottom he is an extraordinarily acute noticer of the world, human and natural, and The Rainbow abounds in moments of stunning exactitude, as words strange yet precise are finely marshalled.” -
I cannot explain it myself but I feel and have always felt, DH Lawrence's novels to be enormously tedious. I have read them out of a sense of duty to Literature with a capital L and have always been pleased when the ride was over. It is not that I am unsympathetic to the man or his ideas. Quite the contrary. I met someone once who said that they intensely disliked what Lawrence was trying to say but admired Larence's novels as great literature. With me it is exactly the opposite. I strongly approve of what he is saying but am half bored half repelled by the way he is trying to say it. I find the Leavis "discovery" of DH Lawrence contrived. I think it is the earnestness and gravitas of the novels which I find wearying and uninspiring. I am simply uninterested beyond words in his generations and families and his grave pronuncments about their feelings and fates, but why, when I find, say, Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks", comparable as the history of a family, with "The Rainbow" enthralling? One answer may lie in the inherent purtianism of Lawrence's view of the world, yes puritanism, the smell of church, the ponderous finger wagging. Nevertheless, I award these two stars in sadness and envy rather than disagreement with those who award four or five.
-
My actual review is
here. It’s a brief, emotional response, rather than a traditional review.
What follows below is just a collection of quotes, grouped loosely by theme, plus a (very) few comments about the change of tone at the end (not spoilers, as the events I’ve alluded to are made plain in the book’s Introduction).
As 2014 crossed into 2015, I was reading Stoner for the first - and second - time.
As 2015 crossed into 2016, I was reading Lawrence for the first time in so long it might have been the first time.
Utterly different, but equally, achingly, wonderful styles of writing.
I had thought I liked disliked florid prose (as in
The King of Elfland’s Daughter), preferring the sparse beauty of books like
Stoner and
Plainsong. I’m so glad the hypnotic yet arousing words of Lawrence widened my horizons.
It's surprising to note that Kate Chopin was writing of flames and flowers in Lawrencian ways when Lawrence was only 13 years old! For example,
The Storm.
Spoiler tags are for easy scrolling, not because of actual spoilers.
Nature as Nature
Nature as Sex
Sex as Sex
Flames, Fire, Ash
Touch
Tension of Opposites
Repetition
Bible and Christianity
Rainbows
Women, Men, and the Ending
Other Quotes
Bordering on Parody?
Beauty in Ugliness -
The most inflated Lawrence, plump with more histrionic overreactions in people’s bowels and embittered scowls than most novelists crowbar into their entire canons, and deep-dives into psyches that range from captivating to tedious. The chapter exploring Ursula Brangwen’s teaching in a deprived school is on a par with Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter for belts-and-braces horror-realism and the horns of her dilemma as a super-intelligent protofeminist in a world that hasn’t invented the term protofeminist is the more interesting part of the novel (and the usual focus in TV adaptations). The lure in Lawrence comes in the novel’s passionate autopsies of its personnel, expressed with styleless repetitions and overlong longueurs, always with a manic vigour and desperate search for human understanding.
D.H. Lawrence RANKED -
Well. Golly. If I fell in love with Lawrence’s prose style reading
Sons and Lovers, what do I call myself now? Besotted--there’s a word. It sounds like you’re drenched in something luscious, which about sums up how I felt reading this.
“He loved any one who could convey enlightenment to him through feeling.”
Me too, apparently. This is what Lawrence does, with his delicious, descriptive, poetic lines. He evokes intense feelings, but with a purpose of conveying deep and fascinating thoughts. For me, anyway, it felt like he was uncovering these rarely-spoken but universal observations in his words. His lines have the aura of something recounted under hypnosis.
The story is about three generations of the Brangwen family in the English Midlands, but it focuses mostly on what they felt and yearned for. Tom Brangwen is a bachelor farmer who meets and marries a widow Lydia, a refugee from Poland with a young daughter Anna. Their marriage was beautifully depicted, as they struggled to get used to each other and create a family.
“And it was torture to him, that he must give himself to her actively, participate in her, that he must meet and embrace and know her, who was other than himself.”
We follow Anna into her marriage to her cousin, another Brangwen. She is a case! She’s very stubborn and very, well, fertile, having I think nine kids.
Her oldest child is Ursula, and it is Ursula, a marvelous character, who carries the second half of the novel. She has the feistiness of her mother Anna, but she’s deeper. To say she has a lot going on inside is an understatement. She sees herself apart.
“This strange sense of cruelty and ugliness always imminent, ready to seize hold upon her, this feeling of the grudging power of the mob lying in wait for her, who was the exception, formed one of the deepest influences of her life.”
In the background, the world is changing. We see it in the amazing descriptions of the landscapes, the attitudes from one generation to the next, and in changing desires too.
“Was it not enough for her, as it had been enough for her mother?”
We follow Ursula through school and work and her romantic relationships. Nothing explicit, but oh, so passionate.
“She waited, and again his face was bent to hers, his lips came warm to her face, their footsteps lingered and ceased, they stood still under the trees, whilst his lips waited on her face, waited like a butterfly that does not move on a flower.”
The story doesn’t end. We’re given a gorgeous dream of possibility that I’ll be contemplating until I read the sequel,
Women in Love. Soon, I hope.
D.H. Lawrence is a remarkable artist. What he does with words is astounding. The style may be over-the-top for some, but if you like sensuous prose, I bet there is nothing to match
The Rainbow. It will leave you breathless.
“'Bodies and souls, it’s the same,’ said Tom.” -
The Rainbow follows three generations of the Brangwen family. Starting in 1840 and ending before the First World War, the setting is Nottinghamshire, located in the east Midlands of England. The family members are farmers and craftsmen and one, Ursula, will become a teacher. The backdrop is the change in social norms that occurred at the turn of the 20th century.
What stands out, what makes this book different from others? First and foremost, the writing. Emotions, and even more, sensations, come to the fore. The touch of a hand is felt, both the pressure and the movement. Life itself, pulses in the writing. Sexual relations are drawn sensually, not graphically in terms of body parts. You not only know but also feel what the words imply. There is a vibrancy to the language that is exceptional, one of a kind.
The women are strong. It is their relationships with men and other women that takes centerstage. As does feminism, not so much in topic, but in how female characters behave. What they do, the choices they make and what they feel exhibit both strength and independence. In each generation, the reader comes closest to another female Brangwen—first Lydia, then her eldest daughter Anna and finally Ursula, who is Anna’s eldest daughter. The book is first and foremost about women. Lydia, Anna and Ursula, you come to know very well. One reads the book for the character portrayal of these three women.
I would not say one reads the story for plot, except that it is through the well-constructed plot that the characters come alive.
Religion is returned to over and over again, although not in a preachy or didactic manner. Religion is drawn as a search process, as a means by which understanding and acceptance of life may be achieved. For a non-believer, one can equally well equate religious beliefs with a search for moral guidelines. D.H. Lawrence was a passionately religious man.
D.H. Lawrence’s writing is passionate too.
Maureen O’Brien narrates the audiobook extremely well. There is not a doubt in my mind that the narration performance deserves a whopping five stars. She uses different voices for different characters. Absolutely all are perfect. None are overdone. The elderly and the young, men and women, all sound exactly as they should sound. O’Brien expertly switches from one intonation to another sentence by sentence.
I believe it is very important in a book such as this, where the language verges on prose poetry, that the audiobook's narration is well done. The beauty of the prose would be destroyed otherwise. I wondered at times if my appreciation of the book was partially due to O’Brien’s wonderful narration.
Women in Love is the sequel to
The Rainbow. D.H. Lawrence originally planned them as one book. Due to banning, they were not published as one.
***************************
*
Sons and Lovers 1 star
*
Lady Chatterley's Lover 1 star
*
Love Among the Haystacks 3 stars
*
The Rainbow 4 stars
*
The Virgin and the Gipsy 5 stars
*
The Ladybird 5 stars
*
Women in Love TBR
*
The Lost Girl: Cambridge Lawrence Edition TBR -
I cried because of how much I did not want to read this book. (Read it for class! I'm such a happy English major, haha!)
-
This was not an easy read. It took me quite some time to go through the first sections. I did enjoy more the last part, basically the part about Ursula.
-
Wow, I loved this! Beautifully written, it follows three generations of the Brangwen family, and their lives and loves. It also shows the changes in society, attitudes and freedoms. A wonderful read.
-
I was worried about reading this, so much so that I put it off for at least 25 years. I've read Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, some of his other pieces on Lawrence, watched and listened to Anthony Burgess, Rachel Cusk and TS Eliot, among others, rhapsodise about him, all of which served to intimidate rather than encourage. He couldn't be that good, could he?
He is that good, and he puts you through the wringer. You can't read this book lightly; it gives you a going over every time you pick it up. I had to step back a bit from time to time (when I wasn't rereading some passages a half-dozen times in awe). This is a book that often shouts, rather than speaks, and sometimes feels like a giddy satyr's sermon. A bit overwrought at times? Definitely. A possibly useful partial parallel might be the films of Terrence Malick (who has certainly read and enjoyed Lawrence). OK, there's much more blood and thunder in the latter, but there are so many other similarities, and on many occasions it was impossible not to reconsider scenes from Days of Heaven, Badlands or The Tree of Life.
Anyway, if you don't like the following, what's the matter with you? but also, it isn't all like this (but plenty of it is).
'Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.
She too was overcome with wonder and awe. She followed him in his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life, the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day. Here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life’s day would blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound immemorial silence.
Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in silence, dark before germination, silenced after death. Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and transitation of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great, involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts, the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will embrace again.
Here in the church, “before” and “after” were folded together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light. Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after death. Then between-while he had pushed open the doors of the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darknesses, the hush of the two-fold silence, where dawn was sunset, and the beginning and the end were one.
Here the stone leapt up from the plain earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated.
And there was no time nor life nor death, but only this, this timeless consummation, where the thrust from earth met the thrust from earth and the arch was locked on the keystone of ecstasy. This was all, this was everything. Till he came to himself in the world below. Then again he gathered himself together, in transit, every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch.' -
‘’The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates' Court on 13 November 1915, as a result of which 1,011 copies were seized and burnt. After this ban it was unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the United States.’’
I like reading banned books. I need help.
Don’t fuck your relatives. Thank you.
I wanted to keep notes to write a review but I forgot because I suck. Anyways, long story short I didn’t really expect to like this but I did. Will get the sequel when I finish the pile of books I’m currently reading. -
Why must one climb the hill ? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one's way up the slope? Why force one's way up and up, when one is at the bottom? Oh, it was very tiring, very wearying, very burdensome. Always burdens, always, always burdens.
-
The fecund fecundity of Lawrence's fecund verbosity is enough to drive anyone to distraction. Paragraphs upon paragraphs describing a sunrise (or was it a sunset? I forget) apparently is the moment two protagonists make love in a field. You need the notes to tell you that. So much for the man who wrote the infamous 'Lady Chatterly'.
Almost as tedious a read as George Eliot. -
I’ve heard DH Lawrence called a misogynist, and I can’t think of anything more absurd. I can’t name another man author who writes women more like people than DH Lawrence— of the Edwardian or modern era. His female characters, on the whole, are intellectually brilliant and intensely independent (there’s even a woman physics professor). You won’t find many frilly-headed little husband-hunters here (hi, Jane Austen).
Lawrence has a gift for pulling out scenes that give you this under current of feeling, indescribable impressions that are straight out of real life. Conversations or arguments between people, where it’s difficult to articulate what they’re really talking about, subtextually, but you absolutely feel what they’re saying.
Also, sex. Everything, every emotion, has an undercurrent of sexual energy, even the most innocuous of things. Even the description of the architecture of a building is absurdly erotic:
Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, the meeting and the consummation… this timeless consummation, where the trust from earth met the thrust from earth and the arch was locked on to the keystone of ecstasy.
… I need a cold shower after looking at that building (a church, no less!).
------------PLOT SUMMARY------------
She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a loving fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.” -
Was woman made of man, or man of woman?
Is life numinous or are we mere automaton?
If the latter, then what keeps the ‘forces’ unified?
So, no, it’s consummation: Being multiplied
Infinite times, so oneness with the infinite;
These are the themes ‘The Rainbow’ holds within it.
Ursula’s mental independence, elicited,
Makes her reject her pervert teacher Winifred,
As well as the women’s movement, brought to life
Solely by men’s weakness. Yet no wife,
She can’t find a man who’s free of stale bureaucracy;
And so she grows to bitterly hate democracy. -
D. H. Lawrence bores me to tears. It's unfair, I know. He suffered a lot for his art. He contributed greatly to modern literature. He dabbled in taboos, such as women liking sex and not necessarily marriage. He wrote about same sex relationships. But he's just so darned redundant that I always want to hurl the book across the room before I fall into another Lawrence-induced-sleep-stupor. (Someone really needed to give the man a thesaurus. Honestly, I never want to see the word "fecund" again in my lifetime.) BUT...
I listened to the Librivox audio recording done by Tony Foster, who did a thoroughly outstanding job, making it possible for me to 1) finish the book, 2) appreciate what was good about the writing, 3) fall into a restful sleep with out damaging furniture via book trajectory. If you're going to go Lawrence, go audio. -
Wow! What can I say about D.H. Lawrence? I finished this book on the train from Montreal to New York and I think it left a greater impression upon me than my entire trip. The first chapter is tremendous. The next couple of hundred pages was difficult for me to read--a testiment to the impossibility of ever really connecting with someone you love. Lawrence is an amazing writer, despite the reputation. It was an interesting experience reading this after Women in Love and knowing what was in store for Ursula, knowing her relationships in this book would end. Difficult but a great experience.
-
I have to slightly disagree with EM Forster on what he wrote for D.H. Lawrence's obituary, is that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of that particular generation. For me, I'd say Woolf shares that position with him, as both pushed the boundaries of words and the art of the novel, and at the same time, they each had a completely different style of prose, and frankly, I adore both.
Lawrence has always written about sexuality and desire with a certain devotion, and he has openly explored every dimension possible, and I believe this is clear to any reader, especially if one has read 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' the most controversial of Lawrence's works. 'The Rainbow' is no different, but I'd say the sexual intimacy could be easily missed, as I found it was masterfully intwined with nature at times, just like this;
"It was as if the stars were lying with her and entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb, fathoming her at last. It was not him.”
I love nature, and I found Lawrence made use of it regularly in order to cause a fire in one's heart and then made multiple waves to put it out; the man knew what he was doing, and he did it well.
I read parts of this book whilst out in the woods on some beautifully warm May days, and I'm glad I did so as I found it rather fitting to some of the chapters. I think some authors are meant to be read outdoors.
Lawrence writes about people with such intensity and pleasure that is it's difficult not to be swept away in the language and love. The characters within these pages had sometimes vile complexities but could love deeply. This reads like a family saga, but Lawrence ensures that the Brangwen family are the kind of characters one wouldn't want to forget.
“She turned, and saw a great white moon looking at her over the hill. And her breast opened to it, she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light. She stood filled with the moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon.”
I enjoy the themes Lawrence explores, one of which he does so in each of his works, that being the societal norms and expectations of women, and therefore, the terrible conundrum of women having voices. I mean, is a woman supposed to be still, be expressionless and be silent? Lawrence does not make this so, and I believe that this book was banned in England not just for the open sexual content, but because it contains strong-willed, thinking women that didn't just want to marry and have children with haste. The feminist approach to his writing is an art.
(I'll read any of Lawrence's books, especially if they were banned at one time.)
Lawrence always delivers and never disappoints, and I'll always recommend him to those that appreciate the beauty of language.
