I’ve been wanting to read more “classics” than I have been, so I took a break from my usual entertaining reads to tackle Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens and The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence. Dickens, as always, put me back into a reading mood, and I decided to use that momentum to take on The Rainbow, a novel I had attempted to get through back in college, but soon put aside as being far too boring for my tastes. This time around, I still thought the story was extremely dull; however, at least I possessed enough self-discipline to finish the darn thing!
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): The Rainbow follows the lives of three generations of the Brangwens, a middle-class family living in rural England in the early 1900s. Beginning with Tom Brangwen, the patriarch, the novel traces the sexual passions and marriages of three members of the family as they struggle to find meaning beyond their mere animal existence.
Tom marries a polish woman, and inherits a stepdaughter named Anna, with whom he becomes close. Anna in turn marries a distant Brangwen cousin named Will, and those two have a hot-cold relationship whose temperature depends on whether or not Anna is pregnant. When she is, she can barely stand Will, doing her best to push him away. When she isn’t, her baser passions dominate and she can’t get enough of her husband.
Anna and Will’s eldest child is a daughter named Ursula, and Lawrence chooses to focus the entire second half of the novel on her. He chronicles her childhood, and her young adulthood, which includes failed romances with a soldier and a female teacher.
As Lawrence finally brings his novel to a close, not much is settled in Ursula’s life — which is why her saga continues in the sequel Women in Love.
My Reaction: Let me just say at the outset here that I realize my summary of The Rainbow and this Reaction section are rather simplistic and unsophisticated. I know that I’m missing out on a lot of the larger themes in The Rainbow, but bear in mind that I didn’t read this book as part of a literature class. I just read it on my own, and therefore my reaction is going to be that of a casual reader who got through the novel without the benefit of a professor’s guidance.
That being said, I was bored to tears in so many sections of this book that I’m surprised I made it all the way to the last page. Many people refer to The Rainbow as a “psychological novel”, which of course means that NOTHING HAPPENS in it! The pages are just filled with the characters thoughts and feelings about what’s going on in their lives as they engage in endless internal debates about how to handle typical problems involving family, career, and love. Big deal. I mean, seriously, would this novel stand a chance of being published today if it came from a no-name author instead of D.H. Lawrence?
Sure, many of the passages are well-written; but many are simply a waste of space as the characters think the same things over and over again.
The novel has endured for so long because of its “frank” treatment of sexual themes, which, in 1915 led to an obscenity trial and the book’s ultimate banning in England. However, those themes are decidedly tame by today’s standards, making it hard for a modern (casual) reader to see any intrinsic merit in the work.
Please save your emails telling me about all of the themes I missed: power, passion, dominance, religion, patriarchal vs. matriarchal rule, women’s lib, etc. etc. I know those things are in there; I just didn’t think Lawrence said anything particularly profound about any of them.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend reading The Rainbow unless it’s part of the curriculum of a college lit course — or unless you’ve got a wicked masochistic streak in you. Nothing happens in this book, the characters are uninteresting, and it doesn’t have much to offer modern readers. If you really want to read something by Lawrence, do yourself a favor and go for Lady Chatterly’s Lover instead!