This is a book of poetry masquerading as prose. It is a book short on dialogue and long on imagery, both external and of the characters’ internal emotion-scape. The book came out in 1915 and was banned shortly thereafter in Britain for 11 years.
The novel covers three women from the same family over a period of 65 years starting in 1840 and ending in 1905. This is roughly the Victorian era. This is a period of great change just after the Industrial Revolution in which England was changing from a mostly rural based culture to an urban based society. Along with technological advances and migrating populations, it was a time of changing social mores, including sexuality and of the relationship between men and women. It was Lawrence’s graphic depiction of sexuality (for the times) that resulted in its banning.
It struck me that Lawrence saw the relationship between a man and woman as more of a contest than any sort of synergistic union. A passage from the middle of the book really brought home this concept to me. The first kiss foreshadows the final disruption of the relationship of Ursula and Anton Skrebensky. Both reinforce the concept of competition within a sexual relationship.
“But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallized with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more.”
The first relationship detailed is that of Lydia and Tom Brangwen. Lydia is a widow and Polish. She is from a family of minor Polish nobility and her deceased husband was a doctor. Due to his political activities they ended up in England and had fallen from their prior status. Tom Brangwen is from a rural English family of well to do farmers. As the book progresses the family becomes even more prosperous. Tom is taken with Lydia’s beauty. Lydia has resolved that any port in a storm is acceptable so she marries him. Compared with the other two women in the book, Lydia’s sexuality is not explored deeply. While it was a marriage of convenience for her, there is affection and respect between Lydia and Tom if not of deep love. It seemed to me that it was the most satisfying of the relationships chronicled.
Anna Victrix is the daughter of Lydia and Lydia’s first husband. As such she is somewhat exotic for the English countryside. She marries Will Brangwen, the son of Tom Brangwen’s brother. This struck me as a relationship that worked well in the bedroom, and was functional but not good elsewhere.
Anna especially sought to tear Will down. Sometimes this was a bold, frontal attack, more often it was the proverbial thousands of small knife cuts.
Will had an absolutely, overwhelming passion for church architecture especially that of grand cathedrals. At one point the couple visits Lincoln Cathedral. Will is in a trance as they look around. Anna was also beginning to be overcome with wonder and awe. She wrenches herself back by noticing the faces on the carvings, and decide they are all of the same person, somebody’s wife.
“It’s a man’s face, no woman’s at all—a monk’s—clean shaven,” he said.
She laughed with a pouf of laughter.
“You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don’t you?” she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she laughed with malicious triumph.
She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter—but dead, dead.
His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand, without one belief in which to rest.
And she would go on throughout their marriage, tearing down those things that he loved. Yet at night it was as if it was a different universe.
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 man’s capacity.
He lived in a passion of sensual discovery with her for some time—it 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 multitudinous beauties of her body, the many little rapturous places, sent him mad with delight, and with desire to be able to know more, to have strength to know more. For all was there.
He would say during the daytime:
“To-night I shall know the little hollow under her ankle, where the blue vein crosses.” And the thought of it, and the desire for it, made a thick darkness of anticipation.
So their marriage went on producing 9 or 10 children (l lost count). Anna found her meaning in the children. Will found his in restoring the little church next to their house and in his workshop. They both found satisfaction in bed. Eventually Will leaves the job he hates and begins to teach woodworking and the family is on a better economic footing.
The first two relationships were in some ways only a preamble the last woman, Ursula, the oldest child of Will and Anna.
Ursula can best be described as unsatisfied, or perhaps she is looking for something she cannot quite describe. Uneasiness relates to possible careers, relationships, and just life in generally. She is unhappy at home as the house is so filled with young children. While she is her father’s favorite, both her parents see parenting more as a role applied to younger beings. Will sees his role with the teenage Ursula as applying the brakes to her as needed. Both her parent’s lifes center on home and children, and they do not understand Ursula wanting something beyond that. She however persists despite their misgivings and her fears.
The first block laid in the Ursula story is the beginning of her relationship with Skrebensky. Skrebensky is the son of another Polish immigrant and his second, English wife. He comes to the Marsh, the ancestral home of the Brangwen’s, as a friend of Ursula’s Uncle Tom. There seems to be an immediate attraction between the two, and a relationship of sorts develops. Skrebensky is in the Army and sent to South Africa. While they correspond sporadically the relationship essentially sputters for several years.
Ursula is 17 and about to finish her secondary education. She becomes aware that she is attracted to her female teacher. Spoiler alert… her teacher is attracted to her. Ursula, however, does not recognize the sexual nature of this attraction. The teacher, Miss Inger, does and eventually seduces her. There are many sections of the book that resulted in it being banned in 1915, but certainly the presentation of this relationship was one of the top ones. While mild by today’s standards, it is still very erotic.
“I think I shall go and bathe,” said Miss Inger, out of the cloud-black darkness.
“At night?” said Ursula.
“It is best at night. Will you come?”
“I should like to.”
“It is quite safe—the grounds are private. We had better undress in the bungalow, for fear of the rain, then run down.”
Shyly, stiffly, Ursula went into the bungalow, and began to remove her clothes. The lamp was turned low, she stood in the shadow. By another chair Winifred Inger was undressing.
Soon the naked, shadowy figure of the elder girl came to the younger.
“Are you ready?” she said.
“One moment.”
Ursula could hardly speak. The other naked woman stood by, stood near, silent. Ursula was ready.
They ventured out into the darkness, feeling the soft air of night upon their skins.
“I can’t see the path,” said Ursula.
“It is here,” said the voice, and the wavering, pallid figure was beside her, a hand grasping her arm. And the elder held the younger close against her, close, as they went down, and by the side of the water, she put her arms round her, and kissed her. And she lifted her in her arms, close, saying, softly:
“I shall carry you into the water.”
[Ursula lay still in her mistress’s arms, her forehead against the beloved, maddening breast.
“I shall put you in,” said Winifred.
But Ursula twined her body about her mistress.]
Winifred Inger is a bit of dike, but she is also a feminist and very well educated. Ursula adopts many of Inger’s positions, especially in regards to women and their role in society. This new awareness sets the stage for the next portion of Ursula’s life. Strangely enough, the affair ends when Ursula introduces Winifred to her Uncle Tom, Skrebensky friend. Both of the older people are aware of Ursula’s intentions to arrange a marriage. The two do marry, forming yet another relationship based on something other than love.
Ursula is at loose ends, but she knows she does not want to stay in the home. Another former teacher suggests that she teach at the lower level for a couple years, and then she would be eligible for a scholarship to a teacher’s college. She initially seeks a position away from home, but her father is having none of that. He concedes that she is going to do this, and he manages to find her a position as a teacher in a school close to home. However, the school is in a bad section, overcrowded, and run by a tyrant. She nearly does not make it there, but she perseverates. She even gains the grudging respect of her colleagues by the end of her tenure.
Next stop is the teacher’s college which is also close to home. She does well in some subjects, but struggles in others. She becomes disillusioned with the whole process and its scope within the new, industrial, urban society.
But during this year the glamour began to depart from college. The professors were not priests initiated into the deep mysteries of life and knowledge. After all, they were only middle-men handling wares they had become so accustomed to that they were oblivious of them. What was Latin?—So much dry goods of knowledge. What was the Latin class altogether but a sort of second-hand curio shop, where one bought curios and learned the market-value of curios; dull curios too, on the whole. She was as bored by the Latin curiosities as she was by Chinese and Japanese curiosities in the antique shops. “Antiques”—the very word made her soul fall flat and dead.
The life went out of her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naiveté of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer’s shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually the perception stole into her. This was no religious retreat, no perception of pure learning. It was a little apprentice-shop where one was further equipped for making money. The college itself was a little, slovenly laboratory for the factory.
A harsh and ugly disillusion came over her again, the same darkness and bitter gloom from which she was never safe now, the realization of the permanent substratum of ugliness under everything. As she came to the college in the afternoon, the lawns were frothed with daisies, the lime trees hung tender and sunlit and green; and oh, the deep, white froth of the daisies was anguish to see.
For inside, inside the college, she knew she must enter the sham workshop. All the while, it was a sham store, a sham warehouse, with a single motive of material gain, and no productivity. It pretended to exist by the religious virtue of knowledge. But the religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success.
It is at this point that Skrebensky reenters her life. He is back in England for a few months furlough before shipping out to India. A torrid, physical love affair begins. Ursula forgets her studies. While she sits for her examination she fails them as she had avoided her studies for several months prior.
The couple travel a little, pretending to be man and wife as they stay at various inns. Ursula is ambivalent about the relationship, but Skrebensky is still suffering from the first burning kiss when she captured his soul. Skrebensky asks her to marry him several times. She refuses, but eventually accepts. She is never truly committed to the idea, and she has her reservations about moving to India. The intramural struggle continues:
“You think the Indians are simpler than us, and so you’ll enjoy being near them and being a lord over them,” she said. “And you’ll feel so righteous, governing them for their own good. Who are you, to feel righteous? What are you righteous about, in your governing? Your governing stinks. What do you govern for, but to make things there as dead and mean as they are here!”
“I don’t feel righteous in the least,” he said.
“Then what do you feel? It’s all such a nothingness, what you feel and what you don’t feel.”
“What do you feel yourself?” he said. “Aren’t you righteous in your own mind?”
“Yes, I am, because I’m against you, and all your old, dead things,” she cried.
She seemed, with the last words, uttered in hard knowledge, to strike down the flag that he kept flying. He felt cut off at the knees, a figure made worthless. A horrible sickness gripped him, as if his legs were really cut away, and he could not move, but remained a crippled trunk, dependent, worthless. The ghastly sense of helplessness, as if he were a mere figure that did not exist vitally, made him mad, beside himself.
Now, even whilst he was with her, this death of himself came over him, when he walked about like a body from which all individual life is gone. In this state he neither heard nor saw nor felt, only the mechanism of his life continued.
He hated her, as far as, in this state, he could hate. His cunning suggested to him all the ways of making her esteem him. For she did not esteem him. He left her and did not write to her. He flirted with other women, with Gudrun.
They break up at one point, but things move forward.
They are visiting friends. While they do not share a room, they do sneak together every night. Sometimes they liaison on the shore. Then there is that finally fateful night.
Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy’s kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew away and looked at him—looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took her by the hand and led her across the foreshore, back to the sandhills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow.
“No, here,” she said, going out to the slope full under the moonshine. 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.
He seemed to swoon. It was a long time before he came to himself. He was aware of an unusual motion of her breast. He looked up. Her face lay like an image in the moonlight, the eyes wide open, rigid. But out of the eyes, slowly, there rolled a tear, that glittered in the moonlight as it ran down her cheek.
He felt as if as the knife were being pushed into his already dead body. With head strained back, he watched, drawn tense, for some minutes, watched the unaltering, rigid face like metal in the moonlight, the fixed, unseeing eye, in which slowly the water gathered, shook with glittering moonlight, then surcharged, brimmed over and ran trickling, a tear with its burden of moonlight, into the darkness, to fall in the sand.
He drew gradually away as if afraid, drew away—she did not move. He glanced at her—she lay the same. Could he break away? He turned, saw the open foreshore, clear in front of him, and he plunged away, on and on, ever farther from the horrible figure that lay stretched in the moonlight on the sands with the tears gathering and travelling on the motionless, eternal face.
He felt, if ever he must see her again, his bones must be broken, his body crushed, obliterated forever. And as yet, he had the love of his own living body. He wandered on a long, long way, till his brain drew dark and he was unconscious with weariness. Then he curled in the deepest darkness he could find, under the sea-grass, and lay there without consciousness.
The relationship ends. Skrebensky has a brief courtship with his Colonel’s daughter, marries her, and they move to India. Ursula goes back home, only to find herself pregnant. She writes a letter to Skrebensky telling him of her situation. She receives back a terse cablegram, “I am married.” She miscarries.
The final scene has her wondering in a rainbow. I suppose this was meant to be hopefully, to demonstrate that life had washed her slate clean and a new beginning was possible. Perhaps Lawrence needed to end the novel that way. After all that is what we humans do to survive life, we find hope.
This book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free.
Audio book from LibriVox.org The Rainbow
e-Book from Gutenberg.org: The Rainbow
The Rainbow – 1989 movie starring Sammi Davis, Amanda Donohoe, Paul McGann
The Rainbow 1988 mini-series starring Imogen Stubbs, Martin Wenner, Jane Gurnett