Abstract
Lawrence’s letters during a confident stage in his composition of The Rainbow and The Lost Girl, in which he claims that his work is ‘not a bit visualized’ and ‘really a stratum deeper’ than the fiction of other novelists, suggest the importance of focusing on the internal emotional life of his characters.1 In his many comments on the fiction of this period, no evidence exists of an attempt to duplicate the pictorial documentations of England such as those in Sons and Lovers. Critics generally recognize the focus on emotional life in The Rainbow and properly relate it to that novel’s concern with habits of love and courtship through three generations. Yet relatively little attention has been drawn to the significance of such repetitive domestic struggles. Similarly, there has been insufficient discussion of the seminal theme of marriage in The Rainbow, a theme that Lawrence uses as a form of visionary ligature to integrate the pattern of repetition and to provide the doctrinal insistence so important to him.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
James T. Boulton (ed.), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 526.
There has been much discussion of the ‘special’ qualities of each generation in The Rainbow, and several essays deal with the recurrent motifs and images that unify the Brangwen saga; but critics rarely stress in an integrated fashion both Lawrence’s vision of marriage and the compulsions in his characters that inform the doctrine and structural repetitions. F. R. Leavis was among the first to note that ‘the effort of realization and discovery starts again in each generation… and it is an essential part of the undertaking of The Rainbow to deal with three generations’, in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 101. But Leavis isolates this pattern primarily to make his argument about class, English culture, and the tradition of the novel, while the correlative themes of marriage and instinctive need receive little attention from him. Leavis makes partial amends for such omission in his later essay when he examines the rainbow symbol to demonstrate Lawrence’s concern with the interrelationship of marriage and individual growth; Leavis shows ‘how the distinctive offer of The Rainbow is to render development concretely — the complex change from generation to generation and the interweaving of the generations’, in Thoughts, Words and Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 125. Julian Moynahan emphasizes that ‘the crucial relation in The Rainbow is between a man and a woman in marital and sexual experience’; Moynahan sees marriage ‘as the major recurring event in The Rainbow‘, and he stresses a doctrine of ‘individuation’ within the context of Lawrence’s depiction of marital struggle, in The Deed of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 43–4. Yet Moynahan’s analysis of the passionate scenes between the Brangwens underestimates the extent to which Lawrence documents an intrinsic, instinctive momentum in marriage toward reconciliation and compromise; Moynahan seems more concerned with Lawrence’s mystical ideas on salvation and transfiguration than with the tensions in the marital discord. H. M. Daleski integrates the marriage theme with both Lawrence’s doctrine and the structure of the novel. He maintains that The Rainbow is more than ‘a psychological study of marriage’, and he shows how it functions as the ‘first stage in an attempt to discover the necessary conditions for a meaningful life’. Although Daleski illustrates how ‘Lawrence deals with three generations in order to discover what is consistent in the lives of men and women’, he does not sufficiently explain the seminal relation of Lawrence’s use of the ‘unknown’ to the sense of primitive urgency that operates in many of the scenes Daleski discusses. See Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 75.
Lawrence, ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, in Harry T. Moore (ed.), Sex, Literature, and Censorship (New York: Viking, 1959), 105.
Reported by Harry T. Moore, in The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence, rev. edn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 197.
See Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 102–10;
Hilary Simpson, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press; London: Croom Helm, 1982), 37–42;
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970; London: Virago, 1977), 257–62.
Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), 107. Mailer first refers to himself as ‘left-conservative’ in The Armies of the Night (New York: New American Library, 1968), 185.
Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Grove, 1959; London: Heinemann, 1963), 373.
Lawrence, ‘The Crown’, in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Work by D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1970), 367.
Lawrence, ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) is also found in
Edward D. McDonald (ed.), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1972), 446–7. Mark Kinkead-Weekes provides significant criticism on the relation of Lawrence’s doctrine in ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ to both the theme of marriage in The Rainbow and the function of the novel’s tripartite structure. Kinkead-Weekes’s essay is based on the development of Lawrence’s thoughts about marriage and selfhood from the manuscript of The Wedding Ring to the completion of The Rainbow. His essay focuses on how Lawrence’s basic ideas on ‘male’ and ‘female’ principles in the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ provide insights into the complexities of characterization in The Rainbow. My major objection to that essay is the degree to which it relies on the dialectic in the Hardy study to corroborate (or initiate) the conclusions Kinkead-Weekes reaches about the revisions in Lawrence’s composition of the novel.
Although Kinkead-Weekes maintains that the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ is not a ‘skeleton key’ for The Rainbow ‘and must not be misused as one’, he does not clearly observe his own warning, in ‘The Marble and the Statue: the Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, from Ian Gregor and Maynard Mack (eds), Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honor of John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), partly reprinted in
Mark Kinkead-Weekes (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of ‘The Rainbow’ (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 110. Except for his interpretation of the Lincoln Cathedral scene, he does not subject his conclusions about marriage to a close scrutiny of relevant scenes in the novel.
George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (eds), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 191.
Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1961; London: Heinemann, 1954), 1. Page numbers in my text refer to the Viking edition.
Lawrence, Mr Noon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 212.
See Charles L. Ross, ‘The Revisions of the Second Generation in The Rainbow’, in Review of English Studies 27 (1976), 277–95, and The Composition of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), who builds on several of Kinkead-Weekes’s conclusions.
Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (New York: Viking, 1960), 28.
Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York: Viking Press, 1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 71.
Lydia Blanchard, ‘Mothers and Daughters in D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Selected Shorter Works’, in Anne Smith (ed.), Lawrence and Women (New York: Barnes & Noble; London: Vision, 1978), 75–100.
Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Viking Press, 1960; London: Heinemann, 1984), 305.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1989 Peter Balbert
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Balbert, P. (1989). ‘Logic of the Soul’: Marriage and Maximum Self in The Rainbow. In: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19889-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19889-4_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-19891-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19889-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)