SOURCE: "The Rainbow: Ursula's 'Liberation'," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter, 1976, pp. 24-43.

Why "liberated" women have found D. H. Lawrence so infuriating must puzzle those male, particularly modern, critics of The Rainbow who have interpreted Ursula's role in the novel as Lawrence's exploration of the value of self-realization, independence, and individualism. What more could a liberationist want than a positive treatment of "woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative"—as the theme of The Rainbow is supposed to be. There is, of course, that problem of the visionary ending of The Rainbow—Ursula's final contended surrender of herself to a "vaster power" and her happy willingness to "hail" the man whom it should send to her—but the ending of The Rainbow has also been criticized as one which is unprepared for by the development of the novel. Why, then, are the feminists so antagonistic to a man who has made the "maturely joyous independence" of a woman the focus of one of his greatest novels?

The question is mainly rhetorical, for I am directly concerned with the negative attitude of female liberationists toward Lawrence only insofar as it points to the necessity of reconsidering his attitude toward Ursula, the quest for self, and the conclusion of The Rainbow. In passing, though, I would like to suggest the ironic possibility that it is not merely the intellectual recognition that Lawrence is not sympathetic to the cause which explains the outrage, but rather the emotional recognition on the part of the modern woman of the accuracy of Lawrence's insights into the frustrated needs that motivate liberationist tendencies. If Lawrence were simply a male chauvinist he could be dismissed along with the others; because he is the emotional enemy within the ranks, he must be destroyed.

Now, The Rainbow is concerned with "woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative," and Ursula's role in the novel is to be the spokesperson for, and the final product of, this movement. But Ursula, as Lawrence repeatedly reminds us, is also a terribly confused and frustrated young woman: "She was dissatisfied, but not fit as yet to criticise," he cautions us on the eve of her career as a liberated woman; "But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance.… and there remained always the want she could put no name to," he explains in the middle of her development; "She could not understand what it all was," he warns just before she enunciates her conclusion that "to be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity." Only at the end of the novel does Lawrence consider her "fit to criticise," and there her "fundamental, organic knowledge" takes the form of her understanding that what she really wants is freedom from the compulsion to strive after liberation, freedom from pursuing the ideals of self-determination, individualism, and independence, the freedom that comes from the recognition that one cannot be other than that which eternity predicts—that one struggles equally foolishly "to be or not to be."

Furthermore, Ursula Brangwen is not presented as a young woman who is liberationist by nature. Indeed, her every move in her quest for independence is presented as a laceration and violation of her innately reticent being: "In coming out and earning her own living she had made a strong, cruel move towards freeing herself." The move is "cruel" not because of the suffering she has experienced at the hands of others but because "she had paid a great price out of her own soul, to do this." To make her way as a teacher in "The Man's World" she is forced to be "cruel" to others; but to be cruel to others is for Ursula to be cruel to herself.

Finally, if it is with a religious solution that Ursula's quest for liberation ultimately ends, it is also with a religious problem that it begins. Ursula becomes an advocate of self-determination and personal infinitude only after she despairs of finding a sanction for her feeling of, and desire for, a direct connection with the "vaster power" of the cosmos. Her turning to "The Man's World" is neither a happy nor a voluntary decision; her liberationist tendencies are consequent upon her religious frustrations and thus they are symptomatic of her religious despair. At the same time, however, Ursula's despair is also the result of the first of her many confusions and her limited point of view. Because the religion in which she has been raised fails in its rainbow role of asserting the perpetual and dynamic relationship between the individual and the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, it does not mean that the relationship has ceased; rather it means that the religion of her culture is a faulty one—and faulty not merely in the sense of decadent, but in terms of the premises from which it is derived. In turn, when at the conclusion of the novel Ursula is given a vision of "the rainbow" and senses the reality of the "vaster power," Lawrence is not advancing a "new" religious consciousness but a return to the kind of religious consciousness which preceded that of our culture, the kind Ursula originally experienced but felt forced to relinquish.

If we explore Ursula's development as a liberated woman by beginning with her religious dilemma and by respecting Lawrence's repeated warnings that she is confused, then not only will we recognize the appropriateness of the conclusion of The Rainbow but we will also come to a better understanding of the meaning of that conclusion, of Lawrence's attitude toward religion and the self, and possibly of the factors which really lie behind the liberationist tendencies of the discontented modern woman. Lawrence's explanation of the nature of myth in his review of Carter's Dragon of the Apocalypse is a good point of departure, for Ursula's problem originates in the anti-mythic character of her Judaeo-Christian heritage, while the prevailing critical attitude is that the Bible plays a positive role in The Rainbow. Myth and allegory, Lawrence begins, have one thing in common: both are "descriptive narrative using, as a rule, images." But in allegory, "each image means something, and is a term in the argument and nearly always for a moral or didactic purpose, for under the narrative of an allegory lies a didactic argument, usually moral"; myth, in contrast, "is never an argument, it never has a didactic nor a moral purpose, you can draw no conclusion from it." What then is myth? "Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description." Therefore, though we "can expound" myth—historically, scientifically, anthropologically, or morally—"we can only look a little silly," because a myth "lives on beyond explanation, for it describes a profound experience of the human body and soul, an experience which is never exhausted and never will be exhausted, for it is being felt and suffered now, and will be felt and suffered while man remains man." To tamper with mythology is consequently to do ourselves the greatest harm: "You may explain the myths away; but it only means you go on suffering blindly, stupidly, 'in the unconscious,' instead of healthily and with the imaginative comprehension playing upon the suffering." It is precisely because her cultural-religious inheritance is one that has explained the myths away that Ursula suffers so much; and her suffering is blind because unlike Lawrence she does not see that the myths cannot be explained away.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition, as Lawrence explains it in terms of Ursula's frustrated response to the Bible, has demythicized religion in two major ways. Ursula's favorite book of the Bible is Genesis, and her favorite section is the passage describing how "the Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair." The passage, we realize, is one version of the hierogamy myth, the mating of the sky and earth. That she should have this experience herself, that she should move "in the essential days" is Ursula's greatest desire, and as a myth the experience is available to her. What ultimately blocks her, however, are the implications of that crucial phrase "in those days," in the passage in question. Though the phrase is of course the equivalent of the mythological formula, in Mo tempore, which is designed to establish the event in question as mythic—as something beyond time and eternally potential—the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made the phrase an historical one. Consequently, Ursula is confronted with the related theological questions: "Who were the sons of God? Was not Jesus the only begotten Son? Was not Adam the only man created from God?" The Old Testament, then, has explained the myths away by historicizing them—by presenting them as unique occurrences.

The New Testament, in turn, frustrates Ursula's religious yearnings because it is allegorical. Whereas myth speaks to the emotions and employs natural images which are meaningful in themselves, the New Testament subordinates the physical world to the role of vehicle in a moral and didactic argument. Ursula, for example, responds emotionally to the image of Christ's gathering his beloved to him: "So he must gather her body to his breast, that was strong with a broad bone, and which sounded with the beating of the heart, and which was warm with the life of which she partook, the life of the running blood." But her intellect reminds her that this is not the designed import of the biblical passage: "Vaguely she knew that Christ meant something else.… something that had no part in the weekday world, nor seen nor touched with weekday hands and eyes." Thus whereas the Old Testament insists that it is historically remote from the present, the New Testament insists that it is spiritually remote.

"As yet, she was confused, but not denied," Lawrence observes of Ursula in the early stage of her dilemma, for Ursula's first attempt to cope with the problem is to become schizophrenic: "She lived a dual life, one where the facts of daily life encompassed everything, being legion, and the other wherein the facts of daily life were superseded by the eternal truth." Lawrence's "As yet" prepares us for the inadequacy of this solution and thence for the time when Ursula's confusion will result in her feeling that she has been denied her desire to be taken by a strong and physical god and her consequent sublimated revenge upon the lovers whom she takes.

Before he moves to this second stage, however, Lawrence suspends his narrative of Ursula's development to place her problem into the kind of perspective which will enable us to recognize its cultural dimensions on the one hand, and his cosmic perspective on the other. Immediately following upon his observation that Ursula was "dissatisfied, but not fit as yet to criticise," Lawrence turns to a description of the Brangwen family as they prepare for Christmas—the coming of the Son of God into this world. After describing the way the natural world prepares for the sacred event—"Winter came, pine branches were torn down in the snow.… the wonderful, starry straight track of a pheasant's footsteps … birds made a lacy pattern"—Lawrence turns to the human preparations. First there is the practicing of "the old mystery play of St. George and Beelzebub"—the Christianized version of the ancient ritual of the slaying of the marine serpent or chaos; then, the learning of the "old carols"; but finally, and most importantly, there is the preparation of the church for the occasion: "The time came near, the girls were decorating the church, with cold fingers binding holly and fir and yew about the pillars, till a new spirit was in the church, the stone broke out into dark, rich leaf, the arches put forth their buds, and cold flowers rose to blossom in the dim, mystic atmosphere. Ursula must weave mistletoe over the door, and over the screen, and hang a silver dove from a sprig of yew, till dusk came down, and the church was like a grove."

As Lawrence's diction indicates, the girls have not merely transformed the church into a primitive place of worship, they have also evoked the presence of the pagan deity of incarnation and rebirth; for the "new spirit" which manifests itself in such miraculous bursting of stone into vegetable life is clearly the Dionysian rather than the Christian one. In Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Walter F. Otto relates the mythic narrative of the effect of Dionysus upon the ship in which he has been captive: "Vines with swelling grapes wind themselves around the sails, ivy grows around the mast, and wreaths hang down from the tholepins." Otto then goes on, "Miracles of this type also announce the imminence of the god to the daughters of Minyas. The loom on which they are working is suddenly overgrown with ivy and grape vines.…"

Lawrence's purpose in describing the Christmas preparations of the Brangwen family, then, is twofold: first, to suggest that Christmas is a pagan ritual in disguise and to evoke the pagan prototype for the Christian Savior; second, to demonstrate that the event which Christians commemorate at Christmas is really a mythic one, a recurring event rather than an historical one. Periodic regeneration, not eschatological redemption, is the reality, or as Lawrence explains in "The Middle of the World":

This sea will never die, neither will it ever grow old
nor cease to be blue, nor in the dawn
cease to lift up its hills
and let the slim black ship of Dionysos come sailing in
with grape-vines up the mast, and dolphins leaping.

Although we see Christ as having once descended and the Sons of God as having had their day, Lawrence sees

… descending from the ships at dawn
slim naked men from Cnossos, smiling the archaic smile
of those that will without fail come back again,
and kindling little fires upon the shores
and crouching, and speaking the music of lost languages.

In continuing his description of the Brangwens' preparations for Christmas, Lawrence further distinguishes between the Judaeo-Christian and the pagan concepts of the event: "The star was risen into the sky, the songs, the carols were ready to hail it… The star was the sign in the sky." But then he adds, "Earth too should give a sign." Like the rainbow in the sky, the star in the sky is a remote sign, and as a biblical sign, a sign of remoteness of the event: Christmas is a commemoration of the birth of the Savior. Lawrence demands that it be a celebration of the rebirth of the god, the cosmos, and man. Heaven and earth must equally attest to the event. And in the sensations of the Brangwens the regeneration does take place: "As evening drew on, hearts beat fast with anticipation, hands were full of ready gifts. There were the tremulously expectant words of the church service, the night was past and the morning was come, the gifts were given and received, joy and peace made a flapping of wings in each heart, there was a great burst of carols, the Peace of the World had dawned, strife had passed away, every hand was linked in hand, every heart was singing."

On the one hand, then, Lawrence has demonstrated that the mythic event has occurred—that the rebirth of the cosmos is an "experience which is never exhausted and never will be exhausted." Having done so, however, Lawrence immediately turns to the bitter afternoon consciousness of the Brangwens that Christmas has become a "domestic feast," a tame, civilized "sort of bank holiday," instead of an event with cosmic significance. Why was the world not changed as a result of the rebirth of the god; why did not the everyday world "give way to ecstasy? Where was the ecstasy?" In formulating the discontent of the Brangwens in this manner, Lawrence also implies the reason for it. "Ecstasy" is the definitive feeling which Dionysus, the god of divine madness, inspires and which is now absent: "Where was the fiery heart of joy, now the coming was fulfilled; where was the star, the Magi's transport, the thrill of new being that shook the earth?" The ecstasy, the transport, is gone because Dionysus is gone, or rather because he has been replaced for the Brangwens by Jesus—the helpless infant and the meek man. The thrill of new being is gone because the incarnation of the god has been interpreted as a unique occurrence, because the physical joy has been allegorized into something spiritual, and because the fulfillment has been pushed into a remote and unearthly future. Or as the long polemic on the nature of Easter and the Resurrection which follows Lawrence's dramatization of Christmas indicates, it is the historical and eschatological premises of Judaeo-Christianity which are responsible for the Brangwens' religious despair.

The polemic consists of a series of questions. As direct interrogatives they represent the cry of the soul of mankind in bondage, for each of them expresses a desire to which the biblical answer is no; but as the style of these questions indicates, they are also rhetorical and as such provide a positive and cosmic answer which is designed to demonstrate the limitations of the Christian perspective. Easter is the central feast in the Christian calendar, and Christmas merely a means to this end: "birth at Christmas for death on Good Friday." Nor is the Resurrection a rebirth of soul and body but the resurrection of a "dead body," an event promising not a new life but a spiritual future life: "What was the hope and the fulfilment? Nay, was it all only a useless after-death, a wan, bodiless after-death?" Furthermore, "A small thing was Resurrection compared with the Cross and death, in this cycle." The function of the ritual and rebirth in pagan mythologies is the abolition of historical time and the instigation of the new beginning; Christian liturgy apparently has an opposite function: "But why the memory of the wounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with healed hands and feet, sound and strong and glad? Surely the passage of the cross and the tomb was forgotten? But no—always the memory of the wounds, always the smell of grave-clothes?" It is the Christian concept of the Resurrection, then, that is the answer to the questions "Where was the ecstasy?" and "Where was the fiery heart of joy … ?": "Did not Christ say, 'Mary!' and when she turned with outstretched hands to him, did he not hasten to add, 'Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father.' Then how could the hands rejoice, or the heart be glad, seeing themselves repulsed."

The point that Lawrence is making, then, is that Judaeo-Christianity has turned the cycle of creation into a linear and incomplete action, into a half-cycle like the bow in the sky in the Noah story. The cycle itself has not ceased of course: "Year by year the inner, unknown drama went on in them, their hearts were born and came to fulness, suffered on the cross, gave up the ghost, and rose again to unnumbered days, untired, having at least this rhythm of eternity in a ragged, inconsequential life." Because their religious orientation provides no sanction for this emotional experience, however, instead of imaginatively comprehending the inner drama they experience it "blindly, stupidly, 'in the unconscious.'" Furthermore, because daily life in turn appears directionless and haphazard, there arises the need to establish one's own direction, to make something of one's self.

Thus immediately following the polemical excursus on Judaeo-Christianity, Lawrence returns to Ursula, and specifically to the beginning of her quest for self-realization. His purpose in speaking out at the end of this first chapter concerned with Ursula's development, it would seem, is to locate for us the cause of her dissatisfaction with the type of religious orientation she has inherited and to point to her liberationist tendencies as the direct and logical consequence of that dissatisfaction. At the same time his purpose is to emphasize the misdirected nature of her dissatisfaction—her confusion. Ursula cannot see beyond Jesus and the Sons of God to Dionysus, the physical god whom she so passionately desires; indeed, in true Judaeo-Christian fashion she fights against "any comparison of myths." As a result, when her schizophrenic accommodation of the Bible can no longer be sustained, she will reject "religion" altogether. In emphasizing her confusion in this first chapter, in short, through his demonstration that the mythic is neither a thing of the past nor a thing of another world, Lawrence is attempting to ensure that the conclusions which Ursula comes to in the succeeding stages of her development are not mistaken for his, but viewed as symptomatic of her problem.

"She became aware of herself, that she was a separate entity in the midst of an unseparated obscurity, that she must go somewhere, she must become something," we read at the beginning of the second chapter concerned with Ursula's development. Thus self-consciousness, a feeling of isolation, and a sense of the inconsequential and ragged character of life are related attitudes, and that they symptomize blindness rather than insight Lawrence emphasizes by describing them as the "cloud" which has gathered over Ursula. He suggests, furthermore, that this feeling of self-responsibility is something which is alien to Ursula's basic impulses, for he describes it as a painful feeling and as something which has been bequeathed to her: "This was torment, indeed, to inherit the responsibility of one's life." Ursula's quest for self-realization, then, is a burden placed upon her not by Lawrence but by her heritage—by the discontentedness and centrifugal aspirations of her maternal ancestors and by the failure of her culture's religion to connect the temporal with the eternal and to dispel the "cloud" which renders the universe an "obscurity."

Instead of concluding that it is her Judaeo-Christian heritage which is at fault, however, Ursula concludes that she is at fault: "Early in the year, when the lambs came, and shelters were built of straw, and on her uncle's farm the men sat at night with a lantern and a dog, then again there swept over her this passionate confusion between the vision world and the weekday world. Again she felt Jesus in the countryside." This "passionate confusion" makes her ashamed of herself, for she knows that the biblical "lamb" is a metaphor. Or again, when in response to Jesus' words "she craved for the breast of the Son of Man, to lie there. And she was ashamed in her soul, ashamed. For whereas Christ spoke for the Vision to answer, she answered from the weekday fact. It was a betrayal, a transference of meaning, from the vision world, to the matter-of-fact world. So she was ashamed of her religious ecstasy, and dreaded lest any one should see it." Rather than concluding that her "passionate confusion" is the sign of a true and vital religious response, Ursula becomes maddened by what she considers to be her carnality: "She hated herself, she wanted to trample on herself, destroy herself. How could one become free?"

Instead of concluding, as Lawrence rhetorically encourages us to do, that the answer is to liberate oneself from the mentality which is occasioning her confusion, Ursula decides to give up her desire for a passionate love affair with the visionary world and to become a seeker of pure passion: "She wanted to become hard, indifferent, brutally callous to everything but just the immediate need, the immediate satisfaction. To have a yearning towards Jesus, only that she might pander to her own soft sensation, use him as a means of reacting upon herself, maddened her in the end. There was then no Jesus, no sentimentality. With all the bitter hatred of helplessness she hated sentimentality."

It is at this point in her development that Ursula meets Anton Skrebensky, and as the logic of the episodes would suggest, this relationship constitutes her attempt to assert her independence and revenge herself for the helplessness she has experienced in her desire for a godly lover. Ursula is not interested in a sexual relationship with Anton, but rather with using him and sex to establish her separateness and her individuality. "She laid hold of him at once for her dreams," Lawrence observes, and the operative phrase is "laid hold of him." Similarly, it is not Anton but herself with whom Ursula is in love. Earlier Ursula had been in love with a vision of something beyond the temporal; now, "for the first time she was in love with a vision of herself: she saw as it were a fine little reflection of herself in his eyes."

As much as she was maddened earlier by her feeling that she was using Jesus to pander to her own soft sensation, now she is ruthless in her use of Skrebensky to discover the extent of her power. For the purpose for which it was designed—by Ursula—the relationship does succeed: "he asserted himself before her, he felt himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted herself before him, and knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence infinitely strong." The reason it is unsatisfactory is not Skrebensky's fault, as we so often hear, but rather that it is not what Ursula herself really wants: "after all, what could either of them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life? Wherein was something finite and sad, for the human soul at its maximum wants a sense of the infinite."

"Nevertheless, it was begun now, this passion," Lawrence explains, "and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him." Under the moon, the night of her uncle's wedding, Ursula does discover her own maximum self, and the process involves her annihilation of her lover as well as the annihilation of the lover in her self. For as Lawrence explains in Apocalypse, individuality and love are mutually exclusive: "To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be 'free' and individual … And the modern man or woman cannot conceive of himself, herself, save as an individual. And the individual in man or woman is bound to kill, at last, the lover in himself or herself." So as much as Ursula succeeds in defining herself through Skrebensky, so much "she had bruised herself, in annihilating him." The "nothingness" that accompanies her triumph is the chasm which surrounds the individual.

There remains one last connection to be broken, however, and this is effected the morning after her "mad" encounter under the moon, when Ursula for a last time turns her attention to the Bible. The particular biblical passage is the Noah story, and the point of her criticism is suggested in the term used to describe that story: "But Ursula was not moved by the history this morning" (emphasis mine). She approaches the story of Noah as history, rather than as myth; she approaches the story, that is, in the way the Judaeo-Christian mentality demands, and in doing so she comes to the conclusion that it is a tale of power politics and material greed.

In the first place, the announcement that "'the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth'" leaves her quite cold, for what is it but "man's stock-breeding lordship over beast and fishes." The Lord's promise that he will never again destroy all flesh by water leads her to wonder, "why 'flesh' in particular? Who was this lord of flesh? And after all, how big was the Flood?" And by way of answering these questions and suggesting that the biblical story indicates a very limited and self-conscious point of view, she imagines how an outsider would relate the episode: "Some nymphs would relate how they had hung on the side of the ark, peeped in, and heard Noah and Shem and Ham and Japeth [sic] sitting in their place under the rain, saying, how they four were the only men on earth now, because the Lord had drowned all the rest, so that they four would have everything to themselves, and be masters of everything, sub-tenants under the great Proprietor." The Bible history then is not the vision world to which she feels a tie, and having looked at it from a larger perspective, Ursula now feels freed from it: "What ever God was, He was, and there was no need for her to trouble about Him. She felt she had now all licence."

License, of course, is not liberty; nor is Ursula's dismissal of the Bible as narrow political history the final answer. She has looked at the Noah story from a broader perspective and has placed it into a larger context, but this broader perspective is not a more positive one. It is instead an indifferent one. The episode, therefore, marks the beginning of the third phase in her questioning of her heritage, the atheistic and scientific phase, which is given explicit expression in the philosophy of religion which she formulates under the influence of her third love affair, her lesbian relationship with the "liberated" Winifred Inger in the chapter "Shame."

Miss Inger "had had a scientific education. She had known many clever people. She wanted to bring Ursula to her own position of thought," which is, that religion is merely the projection of man's aspirations and needs: "Winifred humanised it all." Whereas earlier Ursula had fought against the "comparison of myths," she is now brought around to the comparative approach: "Religions were local and religion was universal. Christianity is a local branch." And what religion consists in, she is taught, is "two great motives of fear and love." Both operate according to a principle of identification: fear makes for submissive identification and takes the form of reverence; love consists in delight in identification and creates the sense of triumph.

Religion, therefore, is not a response to something outside man but an externalization of his desire for power and self-preservation; thus Ursula is "brought to the conclusion that the human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling." And consequently, "there is really nothing to fear" because there is nothing beyond man to be afraid of. Fear, therefore, is the sign of an unenlightened mentality; the reverence it begets, the submission it involves is "base, and must be left to the ancient worshippers of power, worshippers of Moloch. We do not worship power in our enlightened souls." Again, this attitude is not Lawrence's but the problem he is exploring needs emphasis, and Lawrence provides it by emphasizing that these conclusions are Ursula's and that they are conclusions explicitly resulting from her limited experience of limited religions: "Gradually it dawned upon Ursula that all the religion she knew was but a particular clothing to a human aspiration" (emphasis mine).

Her new religion, as Ursula subsequently defines it, is at once an anti-Christian and an enlightened one. She cannot help "dreaming of Moloch" but she dreams of him not in the reverential way of the "base" primitives but in the enlightened sense of a projection of her own aspiration; it is the strength, pride, and self sufficiency to which she aspires which will constitute her god. As a result, whereas both the Christian and the primitive religions operate upon the principle of identification, Ursula's will be based upon the principle of separateness; whereas the "base" religions are concerned with man's relationship to the cosmos, Ursula's is concerned with distinguishing herself from it, with the "knowing herself different from and separate from the great, conflicting universe that was not herself." She will, in short, be a god unto herself.

A better expression of an egotistical attitude would be hard to find, and hence it is at this point that one should consider the letter that is invariably introduced into discussions of The Rainbow—the famous diamond-carbon letter. In that letter Lawrence announces that he is done with the "old-fashioned human element" in characterization and what he is interested in is what a woman, for example, "is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception." He does not care, he writes, about what the woman feels, for "that presumes an ego to feel with." Don't, he warns, "look in my novel for the old stable ego—of the character." Lawrence is, of course, talking explicitly about technique, but we must either conclude that this technique is innovation for the sake of innovation or that the technique is a consequence of his attitude toward ego-orientation in life itself. But if it is the latter, then Ursula's relegation of religion to the human scheme and her self-conscious concept of identity are, from his point of view, limitations to be explored. Such an interpretation, therefore, would solve the problem which this letter poses for many critics of The Rainbow—that it is only during certain ritual scenes and at the conclusion of The Rainbow that Ursula's personality is dissolved and that she appears as a non-individualized psyche.

That this is indeed the case, that Ursula's new religion of self is not Lawrence's solution to the limitations of the Judaeo-Christian scheme, is demonstrated negatively in the next three chapters of The Rainbow and positively in the last. Whereas the first three chapters devoted to Ursula's education were replete with biblical issues, in the next three there is a conspicuous absence of biblical allusions. In these last three chapters, then, we find Ursula attempting to live without a vision world and in accordance with her own credo.

In "The Man's World," Ursula attempts to put her theory of personality and self-sufficiency into practice. She becomes a teacher, thus financially independent and equal rather than subordinate to man, and in her teaching she tries the "personal" approach. The personal approach is an utter failure, and so to remain "free," ironically, she must follow the demands of the system; she must become an instrument and abnegate her personality. She becomes the type of teacher demanded by the system; she becomes the type of woman demanded by the times, a suffragette. At the same time that Ursula realizes her aspirations, therefore, she gradually begins to realize the meaninglessness of her success and of the need of a different way to realize one's self. Despite her material success, "She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not free.… For once she were free she could get somewhere"—not to some geographical place or some distant future goal—not to go to a temporal or spatial somewhere but to "the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her." Evocative as this is of Ursula's earlier dilemma of wanting to reject the Sunday world and yet feeling a "residue" of it "within her," this chapter is designed to suggest the rightness of Ursula's old desire and the wrongness of her current attempts to satisfy it. As earlier, when "she was dissatisfied, but not fit as yet to criticise," so now "her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance."

It is this intuitive appreciation that the somewhere-something she desires is more than a place or object which is involved in Ursula's "involuntary" refusal of the "Garden of Eden" that Anthony Schofield offers her in the second "Widening Circle." To accept the "proffered licence suggested to her" would not be to find liberty; to turn primitive is not the solution to civilized man's "inconsolable sense of loneliness." Ursula must find a different way to recover Paradise. Right as her intuitions are, however, her idea of how this should be accomplished is wrong. The first half of "The Widening Circle" concerns her relation to Anthony; the second half centers upon the move of the Brangwens to Beldover and "higher" cultural status, and upon Ursula's plans for college. This move, as Ursula sees it, will be the agent of her release: "Come college, and she would have broken from the confines of all the life she had known."

But what she discovers, is that college is merely her former classroom writ large: "It pretended to exist by the religious virtue of knowledge. But the religious virtue of knowledge was become a flunkey to the god of material success." Learning was to have been her new religion, education her redemption; now "she was sick with this long service at the inner commercial shrine. Yet what else was there? Was life all this, and this only? Everywhere, everything was debased to the same service." Self-realization and independence were to have been her god, but instead of realizing herself she has merely been the link between a series of events—in "a history": "In every phase she was so different. Yet always she was Ursula Brangwen. But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know who she was." Instead of positive development, "she seemed always negative in her action." Having "freed" herself from the past and all extra-human frames of reference, she finds herself left with a meaningless present and future.

Disillusioned, then, Ursula comes to realize that the direction she has taken has been the wrong one: "This world in which she lived was like a circle lighted by a lamp. This lighted area, lit up by man's completest consciousness, she thought was all the world" but now "she felt the strange, foolish vanity of the camp, which said 'Beyond our light and order there is nothing' … ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with half-revealed shapes lurking on the edge" (emphasis mine). It is in this mood that she becomes "fascinated by the strange laws of the vegetable world. She had here a glimpse of something working entirely apart from the purpose of the human world."

Reminiscent as this is of Lawrence's statement in the letter quoted earlier that his concern is with the nonhuman element, this allusion suggests that in rejecting her earlier restriction of life to humanity in favor of a recognition of an extra-human concept of order, Ursula is on the right track. But that the conclusion she comes to is premature is suggested by Lawrence's warning, "She could not understand what it all was"; and that its inadequacy resides in its ego-orientation is demonstrated by her unsuccessful attempt to put the theory into practice. Her conclusion is that self is "a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity." Thus inspired, she leaves her microscope to meet Skrebensky, with and through whom she plans to realize her individual infinitude.

She sees herself before him "no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality?" What she discovers, however, through this second unsuccessful love affair with him, is that as an individual she is limited to her individuality. And this knowledge comes to her in two ways: first, in her experience in Rouen that the cathedral and the monumental peace of the town represent "something she had forgotten and wanted," and second, in her recognition at the seashore that there is something beyond herself, something beyond self-consciousness and humanity, that alone is infinity.

The error in Ursula's penultimate perspective is her conscious grasping after the infinite and her belief that the individual can become commensurate with the cosmos. It is, in short, what Lawrence would call her Whitmanesque error of "The One Identity." In the essay, "Democracy," Lawrence observes that Whitman's concept of a "Great Consciousness" as the principle of "One Identity" in the sense in which the "Whole is inherent in every fragment" is "very nice, theoretically"; but he goes on, "when you have extended your consciousness, even to infinity, what then? Do you really become God? When in your understanding you embrace everything, then surely you are divine? But no! With a nasty bump you have to come down and realize that, in spite of your infinite comprehension, you are not really other than you were before: not a bit more divine or superhuman or enlarged. Your consciousness is not you: that is the sad lesson you learn in your superhuman flight of infinite understanding." The lesson one must learn then is that one's relation to the cosmos cannot be comprehended consciously and that man is an instrument rather than an agent of cosmic forces. As he observes in the essay "Life": "There is an arrival in us from the unknown, from the primal unknown whence all creation issues. Did we call for this arrival, did we summon the new being, did we command the new creation of ourselves, the new fulfillment? We did not, it is not of us. We are not created of ourselves."

In "The Rainbow," the ultimate chapter of the book, Ursula does come to this knowledge of herself and of her relation to the cosmos. The coming to utterance of her "fundamental, organic" knowledge takes place in three stages. First, in her encounter with the horses in the rain she experiences directly the "wheeling" movements of the cosmos. Further, she feels the weight of these black forces as something not only outside her, but also as something within. Finally, she realizes the power of the horses, she fears them, and is aware of her fear. And from her fear of their power comes her own power to save herself from them: "Then suddenly, in a flame of agony, she darted, seized the rugged knots of the oak tree and began to climb.…She knew she was strong. She struggled in a great effort till she hung on the bough. She knew the horses were aware.… She was working her way round to the other side of the tree. As they started to canter towards her, she fell in a heap on the other side of the hedge." As the symbolic imagery would suggest, the Crucifixion and the Edenic fall are here made coincident. And the episode therefore is designed to suggest negatively that the "fall" is synonymous with the Judaeo-Christian concept of religion and time, and positively that history is cyclic in the sense that ends and beginnings are coincident. The tree is the bridge between life and death, night and day, the world and the cosmos, and the tree is the oak tree, the emblem of Dionysus.

The second stage in Ursula's perception of the reality at the heart of things occurs significantly when her mind is in abeyance—during her delirious dream, and again using a Dionysian symbol, the "acorns." Preparatory to her dream is her repudiation of her lineage, of her social identity, and of her "'allocated place in the world of things.'" And thus historically disengaged, "to her feverish brain, came the vivid reality of acorns in February lying on the floor of a wood with their shells burst and discarded and the kernel issued naked to put itself forth." And in this image she finds not only a new identity—"She was the naked, clear kernel"—but also a new perception of the nature and direction of life—"to create a new knowledge of Eternity in the flux of Time." What she discovers, in short, is the dynamic way in which the past is related to the present, the eternal to the ephemeral, the individual to the cosmos. The eternal never changes but it manifests itself differently every time because it manifests itself in time. History is the record of past manifestations; the present is a current manifestation; sterility results from a clinging to the old form; alienation and anxiety result from an inability to recognize the eternal beneath the forms. Each kernel must burst from its husk in order to put forth its new shoot; but in doing so it is at once demonstrating its own originality and an eternal law of nature. It is in this paradoxical rather than egotistic sense that "Self is a oneness with the infinite."

The final prelude to Ursula's vision of the rainbow is precipitated by a message from Anton, from the past, and consists in her recognition of the rightness of her earlier intuition occasioned by her grandmother's unique "Bible" of "the tiny importance of the individual, within the great past." "It was not for her to create, but to recognise a man created by God. The man should come from the Infinite and she should hail him. She was glad she could not create her man. She was glad she had nothing to do with his creation. She was glad that this lay within the scope of that vaster power in which she rested at last. The man would come out of Eternity to which she herself belonged." If next to this perception of Ursula we place an observation by Lawrence from a letter of 1914, a letter written while he was completing The Rainbow, exactly how we are to interpret this conclusion to Ursula's liberation will be self-evident: "Then the vision we're after, I don't know what it is—but it is something that contains awe and dread and submission, not pride or sensuous egotism and assertion … Behind in all are the tremendous unknown forces of life, coming unseen and unperceived as out of the desert to the Egyptians, and driving us, forcing us, destroying us if we do not submit to be swept away." Ursula has discovered, in short, not "joyous independence" but the joyousness of dependence.

What the vision of the rainbow finally signifies, therefore, is Ursula's archetypal perception of man's relation to the cosmos and of the ultimate truth embodied within the many attempts to portray this relation. The rainbow she sees is a mythic one—a real rainbow at the same time that it is an echo from the past. Its significance lies in its ability to span time and place. It is a promise—not that something will never happen again but of eternal recurrence.

The best summary of Lawrence's treatment of Ursula in The Rainbow is therefore, ironically, the description of the educational procedure against which she set herself because "she believed entirely in her own personality":

Children will never naturally acquiesce to sitting in a class and submitting to knowledge. They must be compelled by a stronger and wiser will. Against which they must always strive to revolt. So that the first great effort of every teacher of a large class must be to bring the will of the children into accordance with his own will. And this he can only do by an abnegation of his personal self, and an application of a system of laws, for the purpose of achieving a certain calculable result, the imparting of certain knowledge.

Ursula had thought "she was going to become the first wise teacher by making the whole business personal, and using no compulsion." Lawrence's method is to make her see the wiser methods of the impersonal rule, the dignity of surrender to a stronger will, the true meaning of liberation.