The Rainbow is a wonderful novel. The novel portrays the life of three generations of Brangwens. Tom Brangwen, the farmer of Cossethay, who marries Lydia Lensky; the Polish widow, Anna Brangwen, the daughter of Lydia Lensky, who marries Will Brangwen and Ursula Brangwen, the first child of Anna and Will Brangwen. The novel is wondrous in a sense. Its canvas is not the ordinary life of a family of the Marsh who go by the name of the Brangwens. The novel is about the yearning of an individual, for a mysterious, natural existence. It is about the incompleteness of love, war or religion in taking us nearer to the great mystery that is Nature.
It is about passion that has been glossed over by the stifling doctrine of religion, or by the maddening excitement of war, or by the noble sentiments of a Society or a Nation.
It is about an urge to live life more naturally or more spontaneously, partaking only in the bliss of the moment, being aware that the greatest bliss or joy exists only in Nature. And the realization of this tremendous force, momentous passion is nearly an impossible task because we are all so conveniently locked in our measure of life. The greatest privilege is to listen to what Nature speaks to you.
D.H. Lawrence is concerned about the transformation that civilization has wrought in people. His concern however is very personal. It is not the concern of a historian or a sociologist. It is the concern of a wounded poet. But none of this is direct. In fact the novel never addresses these questions directly except at one or the two places where the novelist makes a statement of sorts about religion or war.
The novel is about the sadness of convention and the inhumanness of tradition or morality. But the novel is not about promiscuousness or immorality. It is about the fragility of life when trampled upon by such overarching structures as discipline, convention, learning etc.
Ursula hates the inhumanity of religion. She cannot comprehend why religion should glorify the death of Christ. She would rather have Christ as a lamb. At school as an assistant teacher, she kills that part of her that is all for joy, exultation and love. She has to deal with the children impersonally to come to terms with her class. She has to give out a thrashing to one of the students of the class. She comes to the school like a young dove, open to a vision that she would treat the children like flowers, giving them all the love she could, and sing to them. But she cannot be that.
Lawrence is concerned about the emerging modern situation. Ursula can run away from bed, early in the dawn, leaving Skrebensky behind, to look at the white blossoms of a pear tree, in the dew of the morning. She is lost in the wilderness, feeling the strength of the great oaks, and wild horses.
Looking at the Moon she swoons with the realization, that the darkness of the ocean was encircling her loins, and the Moon was entering into her, transporting her to another realm, far beyond.
She is only apparently happy in the company of the people in the novel. But there is another part of herself, which is not living this social life, and which is responding only to the infinite.
Tom Brangwen lives like a man. Ursula calls her grandfather: the sturdy, hard, rocklike male. He has an infectious joyousness: a joie de vivre. He is the robust male. He sees through the changes in the marsh with an unchanging countenance, always drinking for good health and enjoying the pleasures of life. He and Lydia live, drawing an unacknowledged strength from each other’s presence.
Perhaps Tom Brangwen is the more insecure of the two. He is jealous and fearful of his little Polish woman who had seen another, different world, who had moved in social circles and who had been the wife of a doctor. But they have an indifferent assurance; he going about his activities in the marsh and she living in an abstract world of warm satisfaction. Anna loves her father. She loves him passionately and clings to life with him. But the arrival of her cousin Will Brangwen changes her life. She discovers that Will is attracted towards her. They become aware of each other. She understands a feeling of rapturous excitement when they are together. She had never known such a feeling before.
When they are married they live an abandoned, sensual life, lying in bed till mid afternoon and losing contact with the world. Will is guilty; guilty that he is not working. But when she sets down to work to give a house party, he is furious about her disturbance of their reckless solitude.
They live in mutual jealousy and suspicion. They are aware of the others’ psychological advantage and their struggle for control continues until the day they become aware of each other as a sensual being. This apprehension of sensuality, a certain animalism calms down their spirits and Anna Lensky enters a period of uninterrupted fecundity bearing nine children.
The novel shifts towards Ursula Bragwen. Ursula Brangwen grows up at Cossethay. She is a strong and proud girl. She cannot take any insult. She is her father’s best friend. But as she grows up, the void between them grows. Ursula listens to Lydia Lensky, her grandmother who talks to her and tells her stories of a far off country. She learns from her grandmother about a different life. She is curious to know whether anyone would love her.
In her childhood Ursula wants to be with her equals; but not by diminishing herself. She has an instinctive fear of petty people, says the novel. She wanted much to be perfect. Without spot or blemish, living the high, noble life. She is instinctive. If a thing did not come to her instinctively, she could not learn it.
Ursula is caught in a dilemma of choosing religious thought to reality.
‘Sell that thou hast and give to the poor.’ She feels there is something unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity. She rides in her pride, doing all kinds of valiant things imaginatively. But all along she quivers for the breast of man, where she should have refuge and bliss forever.
Skrebensky comes into the life of Ursula. He is strong, young and passionate. Ursula is instinctively attracted to this man of the outer world, irrevocable in his isolation. And he brings to her a world of passions and lawlessness. But all along it is only one part of Ursula, that has responded to Skrebensky, the essence of her being waits for something epiphanous, something like upheaval and a tremendous realization.
“Skrebensky had created deadness around her; Sterility, as if the world were ashes”.
Ursula on a moonlit night realizes the Moon. She feels the people are dross and she yearns to fling away her clothing and flee way, away from the dark confusion and chaos of people to the hill and the Moon. In her realization of the Moon, and the bountiful energy of Nature in her, Ursula subjugates the passion of Skrebensky. Skrebensky is crushed. The core of his male self is crushed. After this both of them remain attached to each other, but there is hollowness and deadness now, that has intervened in their relationship. When it is time for him to leave, Skrebensky behaves like an affable, usual acquaintance. He would return not to his fulfillment but as one who keeps an appointment.
Skrebensky is the eternal audience, the chorus, the spectator at the drama; in his own life he would have no drama. Ursula’s heart is dead cold.
In her next term at school Ursula meets Ms Winifred Inger; her teacher. She waits for her period and when the period did come, she would sit, as within the rays of some enriching Sun whose intoxicating heat [poured straight into her veins. An intimate psychical relationship develops between the student and the teacher.
But Ursula’s life is a fine, unquenchable flame, and in the Summer when Winifred Inger is not around, having left for London, the young girl’s mind revolts against this perverted conduct inflicting a deep shame upon her. Ursula becomes a school teacher. She understands bitterly that the great effort of every teacher must be to bring the will of the children into accordance with her own will. She dreads the harsh monotony, and to assume mastery over her class, she decides to kill that humane sensitive part of herself, which had so dearly wanted to love the children. She becomes a friend of Maggie Schoefield a colleague; a simple but harsh and austere person. “Ursula was staunch for joy, for happiness, and permanency, in contrast with Maggie, who was for sadness, and the inevitable passing away of things.”
The family moves away from Cossethay. At Scarborough, Ursula is enraptured by the sea. The college becomes a slovenly laboratory, and the life goes out of her studies. She realizes the permanent substratum of ugliness under everything.
Skrebensky comes back from South Africa. She is happy in the embrace of the strong darkness that he envelops around her. They are possessed by love, wanting time to be absolutely their own; thinking only of complete enjoyment.
But their passion contains a developing germ of death. Up on the downs one night Ursula experiences a mystic communion with Nature and feels the stars entering the unfathomable darkness of her womb. She realizes the blind, sordid, strenuous activity of man when compared to the glowing, beautiful, unsullied land.
Skrebensky’s date of going to India draws near. Ursula departs from his life. At home she realizes how proud and selfish she had been, and writes to Skrebensky. But Skrebensky gives her news of his marriage.
Ursula shares a new beginning, a new germination blowing out of the magnificent Rainbow; the brittle corruption of houses and factories being swept away by the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven.