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Literature Essay on Body Politics and Feminine Apocalypse in The Rainbow

‘The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman’ [1]
Body Politics and Feminine Apocalypse in The Rainbow

‘The proper adjustment of material means of existence: for this the State exists, but for nothing further. The State is a dead ideal. Nation is a dead ideal. Democracy and Socialism are dead ideals. They are one and all just contrivances for the supplying of the lowest material needs of a people.’ [2] The two quotes above remind one of how diverse, intense and also serious D H Lawrence was. The Rainbow is a novel of myth, love, and a woman’s quest for understanding of her self. Yet, ‘Democracy’, an essay that reveals Lawrence’s ideal of a ‘free, spontaneous self’ in all its denunciations of any form of institution or government, makes it clear that The Rainbow, written before and during the first years of the First World War is not typical of this artist-polemicist’s vision. In fact, it becomes even clearer through the questioning of the validity of terms such as ‘individual’, identity’ and ‘ego’, that Lawrence questions not only the institutions of the democratic government of wartime England, but the very definition of the self in society. Yet, while he denounced idealism of any kind as ‘the real enemy of today’, his ‘greatest of fictions’ exists in ideals of marriage and sex roles. I have taken Kate Millett in this quote deliberately, as it is the feminist reaction to The Rainbow which I will be considering in this essay. However, my main concern will be on the question of ‘being’ in the novel, that is, the ideal of living spiritually, simply and sexually in total awareness of the body. This ideal, seen throughout Lawrence’s work, proves how, in spite of change in political thought, his solution remained to be found through the body. In looking at masculinism and feminism, I will be asking, does body symbolism shed light onto the issues of social and political institutions in the envisaged new world of The Rainbow?

The freedom of the self is seen in an image of fertility before the Industrial Revolution in the opening of the novel,
‘The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.’ (9)
The Brangwens’ close relation to the land contributes to the idea that the eternal cycle of nature is ‘unchanging’. This agrarian idyll is given an almost Darwinian evolutionary rhetoric in the characterisation of the assimilation of the men into nature,
'They were fresh, blond, slow-speaking people' (9)
The collective male sensuality of what Anne Fernihough calls a ‘quasi-biblical’ landscape’, [3] serves to contrast, in its natural evolution eternality, to the immediate moment of industrial revolution. This ‘mechanical’ progression is characterised not only by the individuality of women’s consciousness of a new world, but with the apocalyptic breakdown of the old world. The use of an idealised agrarian England is also used in the short story ‘England, my England’ [4] where the protagonist Egbert reflects through his mindless sensuality in gardening, a yearning for old agricultural England; in a similar way, the sensuality of the land deters the character from any social consciousness. Hugh Stevens writes of how, in this period, the changing landscape represents not only industrialism but war,‘the war was responsible for the passing of an old organic England, which is supplanted by modernity, an England of mechanised, inorganic alienation.’ [5]

Stevens remarks on how this alienation figures in terms of gender and it is this idea of bodily invasions representing social invasions that I found to signify strongly in The Rainbow.
In the opening pages of The Rainbow, Lawrence uses a rhetoric of sensual ‘intercourse’ (10) that mirrors not only the body’s receptiveness to nature, but nature as a receptive female body. England culture ‘must be fertilised by the female’ [6] and in a letter written to Bertrand Russell, a fellow pacifist who would eventually disagree with Lawrence’s ideas, Lawrence states that his vision is not of the revolution of society through the state and the individual but through the ‘drama’ between ‘men and women.’ [7] We can surmise from Russell’s comment later, that Lawrence was considered dangerous for his ideas of blood-consciousness, ‘I did not know then that it led straight to Auschwitz’ [8], appearing politically hard-line in his letters, essays and in person. But it is the more metaphysical parallel made between sexuality and political autonomy in The Rainbow that proves Lawrence was still trying to make sense of the social changes happening around him. Hardly aware of alternative governments at this time, (apart from his peaceful ideal of Rananim, which was far from being a fascist regime), Lawrence, as it can be seen here, used body symbolism to pinpoint changes in history, to universalise, not divide people’s concerns,
‘About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly opened collieries of the Erewash Valley.’ (13)
The harsh alliteration, ‘canal’, ‘constructed’, ‘connecting’, ‘collieries’, imitates the sound of industry, which is absorbed into the psyches of the Brangwen men,
‘As they pulled the turnips in November, the sharp clink-clink-clink-clink-clink of empty trucks shunting on the line, vibrated in their hearts with the fact of other activity going on beyond them.’ (14)
The land as an image of a ravaged female soon appears, but the Brangwen men naturally absorb this technological intrusion suggesting they are not aware of its social implications. This attitude is seen in the character of Tom Brangwen, but significantly, it is his unconsciousness of a changing world, or more specifically, of a flood, that kills him. It is the consciousness of women that challenges the industrial world but it is precisely in the feminine apocalyptic rhetoric which does not apply to the female characters themselves that pinpoints the tensions in the text: that the power of the environment, asserting that the human being is vulnerable, are both feminised in the novel so that freedom is characterised by an idealism of sexual roles. This dichotomy appears in the last chapter,
‘time and the flux of change passed away from her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream, like a stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled by in transience.’ (454)
The individual female alienated from the feminised environment, reveals Lawrence’s idealism of feminine behaviour as a natural Darwinian process, both generative and degenerative. Essentially, it seems that the conflict of the female in The Rainbow, is not simply misogynistic, but tied up in conflicting concerns of industrialism and what Lawrence considered the real goal, the cosmos.
Before I investigate what Lawrence meant by the cosmos, it would perhaps be helpful to further explore women’s transcendence in the imagery of industrialism. The phrase ‘rolled by’, both a natural and mechanical image, is also seen in a short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ , [9]
'The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge' (88)
The image of trains reappears when describing the body of the woman herself as she attends to a domestic duty, 'leaving the drain steaming into the night behind her'; the imagery of trains is also continued later as 'she dropped piece after piece of coal on the red fire'. (92)
I suggest that domesticity paralleled industrialism in its drudging routine, but as industrialism had the idealism of serving the state attached to it, especially in the rise of weapon factories in the war period, women thought their work could be put to better use. Lawrence, who considered industrial work to delineate from his ideal of sensual ‘transience’, uses a transient rhetoric for the women’s belief in industrialism for ironic effects,
'the woman wanted another form of life than this…to discover what was beyond' (11)
This beyond, Lawrence believed, was to be found in the ‘cosmos’.

Transcendence, a term usually used to privilege the mind rather than the body, is used in Lawrence to define fulfillment of the body and the mind. This was in reaction to the mind/body split found in Western philosophies and more importantly, the industrial world. The form is found in apocalyptic moments of knowledge, particularly when a character is sexually aware. It is the feminisation of these moments, already seen in the land which charts women’s history, as it moved from the domestic sphere to the industrial forum, that comments on the political significance of the cosmos, as a suggested new relationship of the sexes, suggesting by implication, that the ‘old order’ in its masculinism, in Lawrence’s words, is ‘done for’. The subjection of the male by the female is indeed what appears in these cosmic relationships, calling into question now the role of men and the idea of masculinism.
Significantly, Lydia’s sexual response to Tom is conveyed in an apocalyptic image,
‘and all the sky was teeming and tearing along, a vast disorder of flying shapes and darknesses and ragged fumes of light and a great brown circling halo, then the terror of a moon running liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before she plunged under cover of cloud again.’ (48)
The motif of the moon relates to the apocalyptic ‘land’ of the female body which Marianna Torgovnick writes of as the oceanic,
‘a dissolution of subject-object divisions so radical that one experiences the sensation of merging with the universe.’ [10]
It carries the idea of merging with a violent world that Lawrence writes of in one of his last works, ‘Apocalypse’ , [11]
‘We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts.’ (77)
However, he confirms,
‘We have lost the cosmos.’ (78)
For Lawrence, the cosmos could be attained through marriage, where conflict could become creative and in union two people could achieve their own individuation. However, this idea included Lawrence’s idealisation of sex roles, which suggested men and women must live within set roles as man and wife. Conveying the temerity of the social moment, apocalypse could predict the fall of an old order and the birth of a new one. As a literary framework it was used by modernists and feminists in this period suggesting how peoples’ minds dwelled on a hopeful future in what they thought was the ‘war to end war’. Sandra Gilbert writes of how a sexualised apocalypse consciously or unconsciously influenced Lawrence as
‘a visionary strategy that seems to be the literary consequence of a literalisation of the etymology of apo-kalyptos: the stripping of the nymph or virgin, the unveiling of the bride…the angel of history.’ [12]
It is ways of knowing that is key to The Rainbow, in the pursuit of truth through intellectual knowledge and also through the sexual biblical ‘knowing’ through the body.

However, the focus of Lawrence’s use of the apocalyptic is to emphasise that this violent feminised world subjects the man and glorifies the woman. Tom Brangwen’s change in status when his wife is pregnant alludes to the natural affinity women supposedly had to the cosmos when pregnant,
‘she was great with his child, it was his turn to submit.’ (62)
Kate Millett argues that ‘the power of the womb’ carries a more misogynistic outlook,
‘[The Rainbow] also contains the key to his later sexual attitudes; here is the explanation, and perhaps even the root of his final absorption in ‘phallic consciousness’ and his conversion to a doctrinaire male-supremacist ethic.’ (257)
But it seems rather that the master/ slave dichotomy conveyed here is linked to the idea of male potency, which although in marriage was still the dominant sexuality, in 1914 was somewhat threatened, if only in the unconscious. Suffragists for the first time had the majority in Parliament, and work meant women moved into a male world, threatening the sanctity and power of traditional male/female roles in the home, as politically women began to gain equality. [13]Sex roles were shifting.[14]
‘He felt like a broken arch thrust sickeningly out from support. For her response was gone, he thrust at nothing.’ (63)
These opposites are further explored when Anna dances naked and pregnant,
‘she had to dance before her Creator in exemption from the man.’ (170)
This image of femininity is criticised in Millett as a case of ‘womb envy’ for its idealisation in a mysticism that demeans women. However, it seems Lawrence is responding more to a slow feminisation of democratic England, which really began from the industrial evolution. It must be made clear here, however, that it is fertility not feminism, which was linked to industrial capitalism, that Lawrence yearns for. It is in the ritualistic qualities of Anna’s pregnancy, an alternative to the rituals of the machine, that Millett and others have reacted to. But, essentially, this need to return to a more primitive era intimidates the male, Will, and his conscious struggle for knowledge in Christianity, that creates Will’s non-being in this extract, is crucial to understanding Lawrence’s perception of the changing position of men,
‘it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying, uplifted to the Lord…He waited obliterated.’ (171)

The inherently self-destructive male is conveyed in the character of Will. At first the apocalyptic environment of the honeymoon explores Will’s ideas about social responsibility. His experience is that while as a bachelor ‘he lived with the world’ (135) and as a craftsman contributed to the industrial world, this cottage industry, almost a sign of the predominance of factories in this period, is given up, ‘leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience. He heard it in the huckster’s cries, the noise of carts, the calling of children.’ (135) Again, the apocalyptic imagery reappears in which the ‘hard shed rind’ is replaced by rebirth images of ‘the room…the naked kernel, that palpitated in silent activity, absorbed in reality.’ (135) Again, the industrial activity of this womb image acts as an alternative to the mechanical activity of industrialism that Lawrence abhors. Will experiences a new way to live,
‘And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he was sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everyone else buried, themselves two blissful survivors, with everything to squander as they would.’ (134)
Furthermore, Will suggests that marriage has broken down social order,
‘An earthquake had burst it all from inside.’ (139)
Will’s struggle for individuation within marriage is characterised by biblical rhetoric and imagery which projects another symbolic body,
‘he wanted to have done with the outside world, to declare it finished for ever…in the timeless universe of free, perfect limbs and immortal breast, affirming the old, outward order was finished.’ (140)
However, in contrast to the female body, the male body of Christ is represented as inward looking, then eventually almost degenerate and self-destructive.
Anna vocalises the problem with Will’s beliefs,
‘he had a soul- a dark, inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity.’ (148)
Lawrence criticises the idea of a Christian and democratic England through Will. This idea, more fully seen in the figure of Skrebensky, is conveyed here through the passive democracy of the eucharist. The fact that Will’s integration with the cosmos does not include the democratic Bible which, in its ‘law of the average’, makes abstract people’s material needs, elevates the idea of the aristocracy of the soul as superior. But more fundamentally, democratic Christianity, is seen as life draining,
‘they substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, everything else became abstraction, and the long slow death of the human being set in.’ (Apocalypse, 79)
Will’s approach to Christianity, in its non-conformity and aristocracy, compares to Anna’s individualism through her pregnancies. Both characters use the body to reveal their ambivalent political and social feelings by conveying a discourse of sex: the concentration on an innate spirituality in the cosmos makes defunct the Christian rhetoric and it translates instead as a secular discourse of the body. But, the fact that they are not satisfied together shows the idealism of the female is not reconciled with the actual woman. Millett criticises the cosmos as ‘a veritable hymn of the feminine mystique’ but I think Lawrence shows awareness of idealised femininity in this next extract, as if to convey the similarities between him and Christ, or author and prophet,

‘She is like a little marionette. Why is she so small? You’ve made Adam as big as God, and Eve like a doll.’
‘It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,’ she continued. ‘when every man is born of woman. What impudence men have, what arrogance!’ (162)

Indeed, this self-reflection of the power of the writer reveals the ironic stance Lawrence also takes, focussing on body symbolism as open to manipulation of interpretation. Essentially, the body in the pre-war and early war years was coming to terms with new interpretations of gender because of social change: not only the mixing of roles as women went out to work, but the traditional role of men, the soldier, was questioned as the war started. The effect of shell-shock, a new phenomena, caused Lawrence to examine what he called the ‘crisis’. It seemed masculinism, as well as feminism was being affected by the war. These, what are seen as ‘degenerate’ bodies, are what I will be considering in the next section.

Ursula, whose individualism, something which emerges as the Brangwen-esque ‘aristocracy of the soul’ is bound up in the idealism of the freedom of the individual. Crucially, however, Ursula is first characterised through a feminist discourse which tries to exist within democratic institutions. The obvious conflict here is that democracy primarily existed for men’s interests, and so the choice of a heroine provided Lawrence with food for political criticism. Ursula’s progression involves rejecting institutions so it is domesticity, the loci of the first half of the novel, that inevitably repulses her,
‘She was always in revolt against babies and muddled domesticity.’ (256)
Of course, Ursula’s progression represents the social changes that implicated women’s sexuality and the boundaries of their bodies beyond domesticity. This was the age of contraception. For the first time, women could decide whether the demands of child-bearing and rearing should control their lives and instead, with the job market opening to them, whether they should choose to work instead. So not only was marriage threatened but ipso facto so was the ideal of Victorian feminine sexuality, the Angel of the House. It also implied a more historical effect - what J. M Roberts calls ‘a real revolution’, as the advent of women’s rights,
‘threatened assumptions and attitudes which had not merely centuries, but even millennia, of institutionalisation behind them…there were complex emotions linked to deep-seated emotions about the family and sexuality.’ [15]
Characterising Ursula’s individuation through a political discourse with Skrebensky meant the tensions between sex roles and social roles could be developed. They are both representative of the ‘political’ body, these passages being centred in the period before the war, as they both demonstrate ideals and anticipation.
Skrebensky is a character who has achieved freedom outside the domestic realm which is what Ursula yearns for,
‘His soul stood alone’ (271)
He suggests that his self-possession comes from belonging to a place outside society, which is characterised as being natural and universal.
‘I must say, the outside world was always more naturally a home to be than the vicarage’
‘Do you feel like a bird blown out of its own latitude?’ she asked, using a phrase she had met.
He seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world, a sense of distances and large masses of humanity.’ (272)
However, the environment imagery in its cliched phrases, is a subversion of the fertile land of the cosmos. Lawrence again uses irony to reveal the ideologies behind the conquering of nature this time through the industrialism of Empire. He makes comment on this economic individuation of man’s will upon land, explored more fully in Women in Love, by using an ironic version of his own rhetoric of environment.
It is the nation that Skrebensky represents, and in their relationship he and Ursula contribute to the discourse of nation,
‘I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.’
Ursula disagrees that there is a nation, as she does not believe she is part of it, and asserts her free will to being an individual irrespective of institution,
‘Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself.’ (288)
Ursula’s individuality dominates stylistically over Skrebensky’s text whose voice is less spontaneous, taking on the rhetoric of nationalism. Significantly, the conversation ends by Ursula declaring his lack of individuality. Body symbolism again reappears.
‘It seems to me…as if you weren’t anybody- as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.’ (289)
These heated words from a lover resonating as Anna’s does to Will, is similar in the female’s accusation that the male is denying himself fulfilment through her, but in contrast to the Christ body of Will, it is rather an un-body that characterises Anton. Sandra Gilbert writes of the ‘un-men’ in the modernist novel who
‘suffer specifically from sexual wounds, as if, having traveled literally or figuratively through No Man’s Land, all have become not just No Men, but not men, unmen.’ [16]
It seems Anton’s ‘bodiless voice’ (306) which is only made flesh when Ursula touches him is aligned to the vagueness of his character in a text which argues against the autonomous collective of industrialism.

However, the critique of the war rhetoric and ideology also extends to an image of the male body in the short story The Prussian Officer [17], that is physical, not psychic in its suffering. The ‘orderly’, the servant of the officer, his master is described in what becomes a discourse of pain and illness. Adjectives like ‘sweat’, ‘sick’ and phrases such as ‘compressed his breath’ and ‘cold drops of sweat’ (174) convey a focus on the physicality and mortality of the body. More specifically, sickness is key to this body image,
‘he had a tight, hot place in his chest, with suppressing the pain, and holding himself in.’ (174)
This allusion to chest pains, resonating in autobiography, serves to portray in the universal discourse of illness, the effects of the labour of war on every body. Through this type of discourse, it individualises the orderly from the autonomous collective and so adds to the secularised discourse of sex, in its struggle to gain spirituality through the death-like fight for freedom in the war. The body represents the lack of liberty and equality in the very grounds of democracy, the war field, while also making another comment on the mixing of gender roles in this period.
Shell-shock, a previously unknown phenomenon, was found in the soldiers of the First World War, the most famous of literary sufferers being Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Male hysteria, not recognised as such for many years, as it made allusions to female hysteria, suggesting men were becoming more feminine, is precisely the same dichotomy Lawrence sets up in this short story. [18] However, in the master slave relationship between the officer and his orderly which is sexualised, Lawrence suggests that the degenerate world of war is more than about sex roles, but also the misuse of power. The corruption of people’s relation to one another, whether male or female or sexual or powerful becomes a criticism on the autonomous collective which assumes a democratic and Christian stance. The liberty with which the orderly attempts to resolve the inequality of treatment between him and the officer, through the murder, is characterised by his alienation from nature or the cosmos, which of course to Lawrence, represents the true belief,
‘There were bright green rents in the foliage. Then it was all pine wood, dark and cool. And he was sick with pain, he had an intolerable great pulse in his head, and he was sick.’ (189)
The discourse of sickness and suffering in the body culminates in the phrase ‘great pulse in the head’ which focuses on the Lawrencian concern: that intellect and sensuality must be connected for a fuller understanding of the cosmos.
In contrast but for the same ends, authorial comment in The Rainbow is used to explicate the collective ideal of industrialism,
‘the highest good of the community as it stands no longer the highest good of even the average individual when the statement of the abstract good for the community has become formula lacking in all inspiration or value to the average intelligence, then the ‘common good’ becomes a general nuisance, representing the vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level.’ (305)
Lawrence’s mathematical, scientific language serves to damn the idea of community. But individuality as the war-cry of marginalised groups also holds no bearing with him. The metaphorical parallel made between sexual degeneration and industrial society in The Rainbow has drawn much critical reaction, both of which I will now examine in the characters of Winifred and Ursula.
J. M Roberts writes how the rise of capitalism meant the job market opened to women. In Ursula’s case, teaching becomes a way in which to become a social being. Education, the ultimate way to progressive thinking and living could not be but thought of as a positive thing. However, in the chapter ‘Shame’ the figure of the teacher and feminist, Winifred Inger, presents an image of female sexuality that is represented through the alignment of the discourse of mechanicality and the discourse of degeneration that suggests Lawrence fervently disagreed with the factors that were liberating women. At first Ursula finds Winifred beautiful but, like Skrebensky, as soon as she realises she is tied to industrialism which is shown through her relationship with Tom Brangwen, the collier manager, finds her corrupted. Winifred symbolises the liberation of Ursula’s body in her lesbian relationship but more specifically the autonomy of the female body,
‘As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory.’ (318)
Marriage is seen to be economic exchange in Winifred’s eyes and pinpoints the tensions for women who have realised their economic empowerment which came through capitalism. The stability of the economy before capitalism rested on the very separation of women within society in the sphere of domesticity and the creative power women were seen to have through bearing children and keeping house was now seen as deliberate idealisation by patriarchal dominance. The inherent hierarchical idealisation of the sexes in Lawrence’s cosmos in marriage is part of the reason why the feminist in the novel is described as physically repellent,
‘and sometimes she thought Winifred was ugly, clayey. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and her arms were too thick…it has no life of its own.’ (319)
However, Lawrence shows his influence of the ideas of degeneration in Darwinism common in this period, which in its ideas of natural order, provides some clues for his own philosophy. Feminism was seen to be degenerate as Darwinism suggested that any ‘unnatural’ features in humans i.e. Effeminacy in men or masculinity in women suggested regression, and it is the labour of women in the workforce, added to the ‘feminine’ image of the orderly or the dissolution of the body of Skrebensky, that alludes to an overall sense of devolution in the text. Interestingly, however, the tracts of women’s rights in this period spoke in an apocalyptic rhetoric of how as bearers of future generations women should fulfil themselves in meaningful labour. This image is also reiterated on the book jacket of the first edition of The Rainbow. Ursula is described as ‘waiting at the advance post of our time to blaze a path into the future.’ Lawrence similarly uses apocalypse not to idealise women’s position, but to question it. Anne Fernihough writes of Lawrence’s use of apocalypse and aligns his use of the image to Olive Schreiner’s feminist tract Woman and Labour,
‘it is apocalyptic, quasi-biblical in its cadences, prophesying the dawn of a new age and the passing away of the old; but it is also a work of social realism, rooted in the rapidly changing social and material conditions of the time’ [19]
Of course, the social reality was that although women went out to work, women like Winifred who questioned issues of female sexuality were few. Women still got married and were loathe to question an issue that threatened the institution of the family, which like marriage, was fervently idealised in a destructive period which threatened the dissolution of institutions. This perhaps is key to the reasons why The Rainbow was banned: beyond the obvious sexuality, the text voices concerns for the personal institutions of family and marriage that Lawrence felt industrial capitalism, in its democratic stance was breaking down sex boundaries, and making men and women only interested in ‘sensation’, ‘thrills’, all part of the instant gratification of materialism that was produced from an almost god-like capitalism.
Therefore, through Winifred’s collaboration with the homosexual Tom in marriage, the mechanisation of the individual is finally presented as degenerate, which in an apocalyptic image of societal disorder is seen as growing out of the destroyed industrial environment ‘subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery.’ The couple are ‘the great prehistoric lizards’ (325) and Tom’s homosexuality is described as something horrific, adding to the nightmare of the scene. He hides a ‘putrescence’ under ‘the clasp of his hand’ that is ‘so soft, and yet so forceful it chilled the heart.’(322) Capitalism is seen as destructive as war in its representation of environment, at last alienated by man, and also in the similarity in description to the orderly in The Prussian Officer who, like Tom and Winifred is ‘inert. He crawled about disfigured…disembowelled.’ (182) Degenerate and dissolute figures in the novel represent the democratic individual who while has full control over his destiny, does not fulfil his spiritual relationship towards nature but instead destroys it.
Peter Balbert suggests that the female characters before Ursula are representative of the ‘pure, unmechanised self’ [20] , free from political and social frameworks which can limit a person’s selfhood. This theory that freedom from social constraints liberated women from mechanization and so from conflict is helpful insofar as understanding why the characters who do live under industrialism are represented as degenerate sexually. Sexuality can only be pure if ‘unharnessed’ from ‘man-made’ constructs’, according to Lawrence, and this idealised view of marriage seen as not man-made is what creates tensions in the text. Ursula, at the end of the novel, becomes a culmination of the strains of mixed sex roles in the text as she takes on the characteristics of the feminised man, the shell-shocked man in her physical and psychical journey across the apocalyptic landscape,
‘Sometimes she lost touch, she lost her feeling, she could only know the old horror of the husk which bound in her and all mankind.’ (458)
The hope of a new world in the light of The Rainbow envisages people with ‘new, clean, naked bodies [that] would issue to a new germination’ (459): The integration with the cosmos is possible, but as Lawrence seems to accept in this last chapter, the superstructure of marriage is not necessary,
‘If there had been a child, it would have made little different, however. She would have kept the child and herself, and would not have gone to Skrebensky.’ (457)
This ambiguous conclusion to a novel of sexual idealism conveys how Lawrence was open to the changing sex roles. But it was not without some fear of the loss of the pure self that explain the crisis of The Rainbow as the struggle of the individual in a world that harboured inherently conflicting metaphysical and mechanised beliefs.

1. Letters Vol.2, Lawrence, 294.[Return]
2. ‘Democracy’, Lawrence.[Return]
3. Introduction to The Rainbow, Fernihough, xiii.[Return]
4. Selected Short Stories, Lawrence, 231.[Return]
5. Stevens, Cambridge Companion, 50.[Return]
6. Letters Vol. 2, 218.[Return]
7. Letters Vol. 2, 294.[Return]
8. Portraits from Memory, Russell, 107.[Return]
9. Selected Short Stories, Lawrence, 88.[Return]
10. Torgovnick,[Return]
11. Apocalypse, Lawrence, 77.[Return]
12. Cambridge Companion, Gilbert, 235.[Return]
13. -----[Return]
14. Millett, 258.[Return]
15. Penguin History of the World, Roberts,[Return]
16. ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women,, and the Great War’, Signs 8, Gilbert, 423.[Return]
17. Selected Short Stories, 174.[Return]
18. The Female Malady, Showalter, 167.[Return]
19. Introduction, Fernihough, xiii.[Return]
20. The Phallic Imagination, Balbert, 58.[Return