D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow

The notion that there is no kindness or tenderness in D.H. Lawrence's characters cannot be supported by a careful reading of The Rainbow, though it may be accurate to say that the shape of tender feeling expressed by the characters lacks the ease and comfort of familiar sentiment. The distinction between tenderness and sentimentality is an important index of the complex characterization that marks the novel. Set as it is in northern agricultural England, among people who are hardly cosmopolitan, The Rainbow may seem an unpromising vehicle for characters who convey something of the vagaries of the human heart. Equally, the narrative is an examination of encounters in tension and suspense, chiefly though not exclusively in respect of physical relationships. And the whole narrative unfolds in a context of the permanent arrival of modernity, which are literally and figuratively redefining the green and pleasant land. Such relationship dynamics, manifest in a context of a more far-reaching transformation, constitute the action of the novel. Within that scheme of action there emerge moments of tender physical and emotional expression that are loaded with implication and ambiguity but that nonetheless--or for that very reason--illustrate the range of feeling that marks, enriches, and sometimes savages the human heart.

A minisaga of the Brangwen family, The Rainbow quickly sets the stage for action in a context of strangeness. The family itself is something of an alien in the Derbys

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became shy when he tried to communicate it" (149), and that is true not only of his verbal skills but also of his artistry. He, meanwhile, manifests resentment and fury at Anna for depending emotionally on her, and she snaps at him for being underfoot when she does housework. In other words, people get tense in the minutiae of everyday life, and only when they make love "to transport again, passionately and fully" (167) does the tension abate. Anna's anxiety about the stability of the relationship is a recurrent idea throughout the text. She worries about not being able to reach Will's "darkness . . . which he could not unfold, which would never unfold in him" (210) are actually an expression of love, though this is love figured as ambiguous and troubling rather than completely satisfying in the mode of romantic comedy. Whereas Jane Austen's novels progress to the point of the marriage celebration as the apotheosis of human relationships and one is to presume that, say, Darcy and Elizabeth on one hand and Emma and Mr. Knightley on the other live happily ever after, The Rainbow explores the content of the life after the wedding. Austen's characters work out their difficulties before deciding to marry; in The Rainbow, the characters

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