The Rainbow is Lawrence's version of a social saga, spanning three generations of the Brangwen family. It is the women characters in this novel who remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings. The story concludes with the struggle of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselves from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society.

The Rainbow and Women in Love were originally intended to form one novel entitled The Sisters, which was begun in 1913 when Lawrence was living in Italy, but as the novel developed across 1913-14its scope grew so much that in the autumn of 1914 Lawrence decided to create two novels. The Rainbow is cl

No reader of The Rainbow and Women in Love can ignore the constant use of the words “dark” and “darkness” in these novels. One might draw comparisons with Nietzsche’s “Dionysian,” the “id” that Freud contrasts with the ego and superego, and more generally with humanity’s animal origins as revealed by evolutionary theory. The reader might at first be confused as to whether Lawrence takes a positive or negative view of the “darkness”: in some contexts it seems to be used positively, in others negatively. There appears to be an allusion to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Chapter 15 when Skrebensky says to Ursula: “I am not afraid of the darkness in England […]. But in Africa it seems massive and fluid with terror – not fear of anything – just fear. One breathes it, like a smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it really, the darkness.” He tries to draw Ursula into this darkness – “He seemed like the living darkness upon her, she was in the embrace of the strong darkness” – but she fears absorption by it. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz surrenders to the darkness with disastrous effect. The dark world he penetrates awakens “forgotten and brutal instincts,” and Marlow the narrator refers to the “colossal scale of his vile desires, the meanness, the torment, the tempestuous anguish of his soul.” Kurtz’s famous final words – “The horror! The horror!” – seem to embody a final mental transcendence of his degeneration though at the price of his life. Lawrence’s attitude is quite opposed to that which is suggested by Heart of Darkness. Whereas Conrad can be read as warning western civilization of the dangers of “darkness,” Lawrence sees its suppression or repression as having been disastrous. In The Rainbow “darkness” in itself is neither liberating nor destructive. Giving way totally to it can be destructive in different ways for men and women, as one sees in the novel. But equally to try to deny it can be even more destructive. Its denial has been particularly disastrous at higher cultural levels, as one sees in Women in Love in the character of Gerald Crich. The opposed attitudes to “darkness” on the part of Conrad and Lawrence point to an interesting tension within modernist writing.

With the third generation the focus is more on one character, Ursula, than on a couple. Being a modern woman, her male principle is much more dominant and demanding than it was in her mother and grandmother. But the scope for self-realization is limited for a woman: “How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become oneself? One was not oneself; one was merely a half-stated question” (Chap. 11). She experiments with religion and then with sexuality in her relationship with Anton Skrebensky. But like the earlier men, he’s really alive only in the female side of himself, the male side having atrophied and been taken over by conventional, dead ideas.

Some topics in this essay:
Tom Brangwen, Winifred Inger, Sons Lovers, Women Love, Midlands England, Conrad Lawrence, Rainbow Brangwen, Darkness Kurtz, , Skrebensky Ursula, heart darkness, rainbow women, women love, female principle, rainbow women love, relationships women, � fear, modernist writing, male principle, contact otherness, deals issues,