SOURCE: "The Rainbow," in Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence, Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931, pp. 59-75.

In The Rainbow is [an]… intimate record of the experience confessed in Look! We Have Come Through! The correspondence is exact and unmistakable. The story of Anna Lensky and Will Brangwen is, in essentials, the story of [Lawrence's] poems; but the story is told more richly, and more fearfully. I know nothing more beautiful or more powerful in all Lawrence's writing than the opening of the long chapter ominously entitled "Anna Victrix." It describes their "honeymoon"; the rebirth of the shy and shamefaced man in a long world-forgetful ecstasy of passion with a carefree, beautiful, passionate, unashamedly physical woman.

She didn't care. She didn't care in the least. Then why should he? Should he be behind her in recklessness and independence? She was superb in her indifference. He wanted to be like her.

Lawrence's favourite image comes to him to describe his new felicity. "Suddenly, like a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience." He is surrendered to the woman utterly: he gives himself up into her keeping.

She got up at ten o'clock, and quite blithely went to bed again at three, or at half-past four, stripping him naked in the daylight, and all so gladly and perfectly, oblivious quite of his qualms. He let her do as she liked with him, and shone with strange pleasure. She was to dispose of him as she would. He was translated with gladness to be in her hands. And down went his qualms, his maxims, his rules, his smaller beliefs, she scattered them like an expert skittle-player. He was very much astonished and delighted to see them scatter.

We are, we have learned to be, afraid in Lawrence of that yielding of himself to the woman's leading. It is delightful, it is ecstasy; but it is also, to him, humiliation. We look for the reaction. It comes with sickening speed. "Shame at his own dependence upon her drove him to anger.… Driven by fear of her departure into a state of helplessness, almost of imbecility, he wandered about the house." And she is irritated beyond bearing by his helplessness, his clinging.

These followed two black and ghastly days, when she was set in anguish against him, and he felt as if he were in a black, violent underworld, and his wrists quivered murderously. And she resisted him. He seemed a dark, almost evil thing, pursuing her, hanging on to her, burdening her.

The struggle becomes nightmarish, and ends in a frenzied sexual consummation. It is the story of the poem "In the Dark," re-enacted in large. "He was not interested in the thought of himself or of her: oh, and how that irritated her … The verity was his connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, the Absolute." And as in the poem, Anna reacts in horror. "But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these."

What did she want herself ? She answered herself that she wanted to be happy, to be natural, like the sunlight and the busy daytime. And, at the bottom of her soul, she felt he wanted her to be dark, unnatural. Sometimes, when he seemed like the darkness covering and smothering her, she revolted almost in horror, and struck at him. She struck at him, and made him bleed, and he became wicked. Because she dreaded him and held him in horror, he became wicked, he wanted to destroy. And then the fight between them was cruel.

She began to tremble. He wanted to impose himself on her. And he began to shudder. She wanted to desert him, to leave him a prey to the open, with the unclean dogs of the darkness setting on to devour him. He must beat her, and make her stay with him. Whereas she fought to keep herself free of him.

As in the poems, he does foolish, frantic things. "Frantic is sensual fear," he asserts his rights as master and as male.

"Fool!" she answered. "Fool! I've known my own father, who could put a dozen of you in his pipe and push them down with his finger-end. Don't I know what a fool you are!"

He knew himself what a fool he was, and was flayed by the knowledge. Yet he went on trying to steer the ship of their dual life. He asserted his position as captain of the ship. And captain and ship bored her.… She jeered at him as master of the house, master of their dual life. And he was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame, how her father had been a man without arrogating any authority.

Then the story of The Rainbow departs from the naked facts of Lawrence's experience. Anna Brangwen is with child; she is fulfilled. But, since that is an imaginary fulfilment, the struggle goes on, ever more fearful, and always the same.

Then she turned fiercely on him, and fought him.… What horrible hold did he want to have over her body? Why did he want to drag her down, and kill her spirit? Why did he want to deny her spirit? Why did he deny her spirituality, hold her for a body only? …

Some vast hideous darkness he seemed to represent to her.

"What do you do to me?" she cried. "What beastly thing do you do to me? … There is something horrible in you, something dark and beastly in your will. What do you want of me? What do you want to do to me? …"

He hated her for what she said. Did he not give her everything, was she not everything to him? And the shame was a bitter fire in him, that she was everything to him, that he had nothing but her. And then that she should taunt him with it, that he could not escape! The fire went black in his veins. For try as he might, he could not escape. She was everything to him, she was his life and his derivation. He depended on her. If she were taken away, he would collapse as a house from which the central pillar is removed.

And she hated him, because he depended on her so utterly. He was horrible to her.. It was horrible that he should cleave to her, so close, so close, like a leopard that had leapt on her, and fastened.

He went on from day to day in a blackness of rage and shame and frustration. How he tortured himself, to be able to get away from her. But he could not. She was as the rock on which he stood, with deep, heaving water all round, and he was unable to swim. He must take his stand on her, he must depend on her.

What had he in life, save her? Nothing. The rest was a great heaving flood. The terror of the night of heaving, overwhelming flood, which was his vision of life without her, was too much for him. He clung to her fiercely, and abjectly.…

He wanted to leave her, he wanted to be able to leave her. For his soul's sake, for his manhood's sake, he must be able to leave her.

But for what? … The only tangible, secure thing was the woman. He could leave her only for another woman. And where was the other woman, and who was the other woman? Besides, he would be in just the same state. Another woman would be woman, the case would be the same.

"He could leave her only for another woman.… Another woman would be woman, the case would be the same." There is the adamantine fact, the grim and fatal destiny. He is ruthless in his self-knowledge. The naked confession goes on.

The only other way to leave her was to die. The only straight way to leave her was to die. His dark raging soul knew that. But he had no desire for death.…

A woman, he must have a woman. And having a woman, he must be free of her. It would be the same position. For he could not be free of her.

For how can a man stand, unless he have something sure under his feet? … And upon what could he stand, save upon a woman? Was he then like the old man of the seas, impotent to move save upon the back of another life? Was he impotent, or a cripple, or a defective, or a fragment?

It was black, mad, shameful torture, the frenzy of fear, the frenzy of desire, and the horrible, grasping back-wash of shame.

The quotation is long; but it cannot be avoided. It takes us, with pitiless intimacy, closer to the core of Lawrence's strange and fearful experience than anything he has yet written.

In the story, Will Brangwen escapes from the horror which, it seems, he cannot escape. Anna, at last, finds the oppressive darkness of his physical contact unbearable. She makes him sleep alone. He is so wretched, that she takes him back; and again it is too much for her. She sends him away again. "He went and lay down alone. And at length, after a grey and livid and ghastly period, he relaxed, something gave way in him."

So he reached a sort of rebirth. It consists in the fact that "he could sleep with her, and let her be." But it is claimed as a veritable rebirth.

He could be alone now. He had just learned what it was to be able to be alone. It was right and peaceful. She had given him a new deeper freedom. The world might be a welter of uncertainty, but he was himself now. He had come into his new existence. He was born for a second time, born at last unto himself, out of the vast body of humanity. Now at last he had a separate identity, he existed alone, even if he were not quite alone. Before he had only existed in so far as he had relations with another being. Now he had an absolute self—as well as a relative one.

But we cannot be deceived. This is the experience of the child who no longer sleeps in his mother's bed, but in a room alone. "To have learned to be alone," for a man, is an incomparably sterner experience; that death, for which "he had no desire." An absolute self is hardly to be had at a lesser price; and even in the story, the dawn is a false dawn. Will Brangwen cannot believe in himself, apart from Anna. In the end, he is as he was. "In the long run he learned to submit to Anna. She forced him to the spirit of her laws, while leaving him the letter of his own." The dark, destructive rage comes on him as before. "Their fights were horrible, murderous. And then the passion between them came just as black and awful." But a certain human wisdom arose between them. She left him alone in his rage, and he struggled to submit to her, "for at last he learned that he would be in hell until he came back to her."

But she has destroyed his belief in himself, and his belief absolutely. She has undermined his own separate creative purpose. He has lost faith in his own ideal, his own vital illusions. In their symbolic visit to Lincoln Cathedral, Anna deliberately shatters her husband's passionate ecstasy in the pure upsurge of the building by insisting upon the gargoyles. The mason, she said, had carved the portrait of his detested wife. "You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don't you?" And, of course Will Brangwen did hate to think it. The symbol of pure spirituality was degraded. "Yet somewhere in himself he responded more deeply to the sly little face that knew better, than he had done before to the perfect surge of his cathedral." The meaning of all this symbolism is patent. Through the woman, through sex, the spiritual ideal is destroyed; and it is good that it should be destroyed. For the spiritual ideal is partial and false. It is based on the negation of sex, of the mighty principle of life itself. But Will Brangwen, in whom the old spirituality has been thus, and rightly destroyed, cannot move forward to create and embody a new harmony. He lapses into the woman, lapses and rebels, and at last is content to lapse altogether.

At this point Lawrence's own destiny is distinct from that of his creation. Will Brangwen, so to speak, is a Lawrence who has given up the effort—the effort to make the spirit and the flesh dwell together into harmony. But Lawrence, who conceived and contained him, has not given up the effort. The effort is to find the rainbow—the bright arch that spans in beauty the conflicting elements. Both Will and Anna come to have a sense of the goal; but it is not they, but their child, Ursula, who will reach it. "The child she might hold up, she might toss the child forward into the furnace, the child might walk there, amid the burning coals and the incandescent roar of heat, as the three witnesses walked with the angel in the fire."

So the story passes to the next generation. Ursula grows, and her sister Gudrun. Their final history is chronicled in Women in Love. In the remainder of The Rainbow, Gudrun is nothing, simply a small girl. Ursula becomes the chief figure, with her lover, Anton Skrebensky. Once more the sexual struggle between them is a nightmare, a worse nightmare than the sexual struggle between Anna and Will. Anton is also a spiritual man, but of a lower (or later) order of spirituality than Will Brangwen. Will is an artist, with a direct creative purpose; Anton an engineer in the army, with a consciousness of his mission as the servant of the nation. Again, he is like Lawrence: not, indeed, so like him as Will Brangwen, who apart from his paternity and his final submission was Lawrence himself; but like enough. Ursula and he together meet a man and woman who live on a canal boat.

He was envying the lean father of three children for his impudent directness and worship of the woman in Ursula, a worship of body and soul together, the man's body and soul wistful and worshipping the body and spirit of the girl.…

Why could not he himself desire a woman so? Why did he never want a woman, not with the whole of him; never loved, never worshipped, only just physically wanted her. But he would want her with his body, let his soul do as it would.

The struggle begins, in these now familiar conditions. Ursula, unlike her mother, and unlike her essentially in only this, resists from the first. Not with any ordinary resistance, but with the instinctive will to entice and destroy her man. The scene in the moonlight, after the dance, becomes a phantasmagoria. Anton "was afraid of the great moon-conflagration of the corn-stacks rising above him. His heart grew smaller, and began to fuse like a bead. He knew he would die."

She was afraid of what she was. Looking at him, at his shadowy, unreal, wavering presence a sudden lust seized her, to lay hold of him and tear him and make him into nothing.… She tempted him.

And timorously, his hands went over her, over the salt, compact brilliance of her body. If he could but have her, how he would enjoy her! If he could but net her brilliant, cold, salt-burning body in the soft iron of his own hands, net her, capture her, hold her down, how madly he would enjoy her! … Obstinately, all his flesh burning and corroding, as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison, still he persisted, thinking at last he might overcome her. Even, in his frenzy, he sought her mouth with his mouth, though it was like putting his face into some awful death.…

She took him in the kiss, hard her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight. She seemed to be destroying him. He was reeling, summoning all his strength to keep his kiss upon her, to keep himself in the kiss.

But hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallised with triumph, and his soul was dissolved with agony and annihilation. So she held him there, the victim, consumed, annihilated. She had triumphed: he was not any more.

The experience, as one might expect, is fatal. Though Ursula is horrified at what she has done or at what has been done through her, and is kind to him thereafter, Anton's "core is gone," it has been irreparably destroyed. "His triumphant, flaming, overweening heart of the intrinsic male would never beat again.… She had broken him." Rather strangely, he seems to forget about it, when he has gone off to fight in the Boer war. But we are given to understand that the killing of the intrinsic male in him, and his unhesitating acceptance of service to the state, are complementary. One nullity is corollary to the other.

With Anton's return, six years later, the struggle becomes more intense and ghastly, for now the need for physical union is upon them both. The record is difficult to follow, because it is beyond the range of ordinary experience, and also because it seems to be in itself inconsequent, without the convincing inevitability of the story of Anna and Will. At first, Anton and Ursula seem to be happy as lovers, in spite of her destruction of his "intrinsic male core" six years before. But, Lawrence insists, they are happy like two wild animals, outlaws and enemies of the light of social day. Ursula goes about "in a dark richness, her eyes dilated and shining like the eyes of a wild animal, a curious half-smile which seemed to be gibing at the civic pretence of all the human life about her"; while Anton "watched as a lion or a tiger may lie with narrowed eyes watching the people pass before its cage, the kaleidoscopic unreality of people." Both live "in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time." So for a few weeks they live together in London. Suddenly, Ursula has a desire to leave England. She insists on staying at Rouen.

For the first time, in Rouen, he had a cold feeling of death; not afraid of any other man, but of her. She did not want him. The old streets, the cathedral, the age and monumental peace of the town took her away from him. She turned to it as if to something she had forgotten. This was now the reality; this great stone cathedral slumbering there in its mass, which knew no transience nor heard any denial. It was majestic in its stability, its splendid absoluteness.

To judge by the symbolic significance of the cathedral in the history of Will and Anna, Lawrence must have meant by this that Ursula at this crucial moment has a recoil from the sensual sub-consciousness to spirituality. From this time onward both have a premonition of "the death towards which they are wandering."

Ursula returns home. And, when she leaves him, a cold horror takes possession of Anton. "He went mad. He had lived with her in a close, living, pulsing world, where everything pulsed with rich being. Now he found himself struggling amid an ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity, dead walls and mechanical traffic, and creeping, spectre-like people." She is his one salvation from "the horror of not-being which possesses him." To marry her, "to be sure of her"—that is all. He writes to her desperately, she answers easily: his agony means nothing to her, really. But she believes she loves him. They are together again for a few days.

She owned his body and enjoyed it with all the delight and carelessness of a possessor. But he had become gradually afraid of her body. He wanted her, he wanted her endlessly. But there had come a tension into his desire, a constraint which prevented his enjoying the delicious approach and the lovable close of the endless embrace. He was afraid. His will was always tense, fixed.

Suddenly she declares open war upon his "idealism," his democratic humanitarianism. "I'm against you, and all your old, dead things," she caries in fury. He "felt cut off at the knees, a figure made worthless." She does not esteem him. He tries to make her esteem him by flirting with other women. Then, the secret is out.

In passionate anger she upbraided him because, not being man enough to satisfy one woman, he hung round others.

"Don't I satisfy you?" he asked of her, again going white to the throat.

"No," she said. "You've never satisfied me since the first week in London. You never satisfy me now. What does it mean to me, your having me—"

She lifted her shoulders and turned aside her face in a motion of cold, indifferent worthlessness. He felt he would kill her.

When she had aroused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

And at such moments, when he was mad with her destroying him, when all his complacency was destroyed, all his everyday self was broken, and only the stripped, rudimentary, primal man remained, demented with torture, her passion to love him became love, she took him again, they came together in an overwhelming passion, in which he knew he satisfied her.

But it all contained a developing germ of death. After each contact, her anguished desire for him or for that which she had never had from him was stronger, her love was more hopeless. After each contact his mad dependence on her was deepened, his hope of standing strong and taking her in his own strength was weakened. He felt himself a mere attribute of her.

Gradually, Anton breaks down. Ursula says she does not want to marry him, and he collapses upon himself. Yet although she is afraid of the fearful compulsion of his utter dependence upon her, tacitly she seems to have given in to marrying him. They go away together to a house by the sea as an engaged couple. The physical contact goes on, but she is indifferent. One night, once more in the presence of a great burning moon, beneath which once more Anton "felt himself fusing down into nothingness, like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent flame," they reach their terrible consummation.

Then there in the great flare of light, she clinched hold of him, hard, as if suddenly she had the strength of destruction, she fastened her arms round him and tightened him in her grip, whilst her mouth sought his in a hard, rending, ever-increasing kiss, till his body was powerless in her grip, his heart melted in fear from the fierce, beaked, harpy's kiss. The water washed again over their feet, but she took no notice. She seemed unaware, she seemed to be pressing in her beaked mouth till she had the heart of him. Then, at last, she drew away and looked at him—looked at him. He knew what she wanted. He took her by the hand and led her across the foreshore back to the sand-hills. She went silently. He felt as if the ordeal of proof was upon him, for life or death. He led her to a dark hollow.

"No, here," she said, going out to the slope full under the moonshine. She lay motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon. He came direct to her, without preliminaries. She held him pinned down at the chest, awful. The fight, the struggle for consummation was terrible. It lasted till it was agony to his soul, till he succumbed, till he gave way as if dead, and lay with his face buried, partly in her hair, partly in the sand, motionless, as if he would be motionless now for ever, hidden away in the dark, buried, only buried, he only wanted to be buried in the goodly darkness, only that, and no more.

This is the end. Anton has failed at the proof. Ursula lies in a cold agony of un-satisfaction, and he creeps away a broken man.

To discover all that underlies this fearful encounter, we should have to go to Lady Chatterley's Lover, to Mellors' account of his sexual experience with Bertha Coutts. That is, in the present state of affairs, unquotable. But in that page and a half the curious will find not only the naked physical foundation—"the blind beakishness"—of this experience of Ursula and Anton, but also Lawrence's final account of the sexual experience from which both the sexual experience of Will and Anna, and of Anton and Ursula is derived. The Rainbow is, radically, the history of Lawrence's final sexual failure.

It is much beside that; but that it is. And unless we grasp the fact, the inward meaning of The Rainbow and its sequel, Women in Love, must be concealed from us. One shrinks from the necessity of thus laying bare the physical secrets of a dead man; but in the case of Lawrence we have no choice. To the last he conceived it as his mission to teach us the way to sexual regeneration, and he claimed to give the world the ultimate truth about sex. If we take him seriously, we must take his message seriously. Continually, in his work we are confronted with sexual experience of a peculiar kind; it is quite impossible to ignore it. The work of a great man, as Lawrence was, is always an organic whole. If we shrink from following the vital thread of experience from which it all derives, then we shrink from him altogether. It is all or nothing, with such a man as Lawrence; and, since it must not be nothing, it must be all.

The Rainbow is the story of Lawrence's sexual failure. The two men, who have succumbed to the woman, are one man—himself. The rainbow, in the symbolic sense of a harmony between spirit and flesh, is as far away as ever at the end of the book. It shines over the first generation, where man is really man, and does not need to arrogate authority over woman; it begins to be remote in the second, where the woman begins to establish the mastery; in the third, where woman is not only "victrix" but "triumphans," it fades into the dim future. Ursula, the woman, becomes the protagonist; the man is secondary, an attribute of the woman. Nevertheless, Ursula is an unconvincing character in The Rainbow. She is a composite figure, made of the hated sexual woman, and of some of Lawrence's own manly experiences. Thus she is made to carry much of his experience as a schoolmaster, and of his own disappointment with the university; and more important, she is made to undergo a sort of physical-mystical experience, an annihilation of the personality. When in the last chapter the horses stampede upon her, she dies, and rises again in a new world: she becomes the mouthpiece of Lawrence's own visions.

The chief vision of which she is the vehicle is the vision of the darkness with which the conscious, personal, deliberate, social life of mankind is surrounded.

This inner circle of light in which she lived and moved … suddenly seemed like the area under an arc-lamp, wherein the moths and the children played in the security of blinding light, not even knowing there was any darkness, because they stayed in the light.…

Nevertheless the darkness wheeled round about, with grey shadow-shapes of wild beasts, and also with dark shadow-shapes of the angels, whom the light fenced out, as it fenced out the more familiar beasts of darkness. And some, having for a moment seen the darkness, saw it bristling with the tufts of the hyaena and the wolf; and some, having given up their vanity of the light, having died in their own conceit, saw the gleam in the eyes of the wolf and hyaena, that it was the flash of the sword of angels, flashing at the door to come in, that the angels in the darkness were lordly and terrible and not to be denied, like the flash of fangs.

It is not easy to be sure what Lawrence means by this. Is the surrounding darkness the darkness of "the sensual sub-consciousness" which Ursula and Anton inhabited like wild animals? Or is it that darkness whose "unclean dogs" Will Brangwen feared would devour him if Anna left him? Or are both these darknesses the same darkness? Is this darkness beneficent, or is it horrible?—creative, or destroying?

It would be hard to say. For this conception of the surrounding "darkness," which will return in many forms in Lawrence's work, is an intensely personal conception. It derives, once more, from his peculiar experience. It is the darkness of pure animality as conceived and experienced by an intensely spiritual man. It is, therefore, essentially a horrible darkness of sin and evil, the enemy and destroyer of the light. To explore it, to surrender to it, is for Lawrence a self-violation, a perversity. Of this deliberate and willed surrender to the horror of darkness, the woman really knows nothing; because the woman is not spiritual. To her, what darkness she knows is warm and natural. Her darkness is not the same as his, because she is not divided. In the religious phrase, she has no sense of sin.

Therefore, to represent her in Ursula as realising the horror and majesty of the darkness is false. Neither the conception nor the experience belongs to her at all. All that she knows of this darkness comes to her from and through the man. She represents that darkness to him; indeed she is that darkness to him: but she is completely unconscious of it. That the man should regard her as the creature and embodiment of his darkness horrifies her. She repudiates it utterly. She does not belong to his darkness at all. She recoils instinctively away. The truth of the whole strange situation is in the momentous poem "In the Dark," where she cries:

"I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid!There is something in you destroys me—!"

And it is so. His darkness is necessarily death to her. For she is the real animal, unconscious of evil; but he is a spiritual man, willing himself into animality, into a deadly darkness, which if once she really entered, her innocent integrity would be shattered, and she would be destroyed.

This profound conflict is terrible indeed. The man is trying to compel the woman out of her own innocent darkness into the utterly different darkness of depravity. Neither he nor she knows quite what is happening; but he knows far better than she. She is simply conscious of a horror from which she shrinks. And in creating the character of Ursula in The Rainbow, Lawrence has begun an effort of imaginative duplicity which will be decisive. For, in creating Ursula, he makes the woman a denizen of his darkness, not of her own; and he makes her in the final pages consciously submit herself and do homage to the darkness in which she would die. Ursula Brangwen of The Rainbow, is, in fact, a completely incredible character. She is the woman who accepts the man's vision of herself; accepts it, believes in it, and obeys it. She therefore, becomes a monster, a chimaera.

Only in Women in Love does Ursula Brangwen really come alive; and then she is manifestly her mother, Anna Brangwen, continued from the point at which her imaginary child-bearing began. She becomes the Woman who is constant in Lawrence's books—the Woman whom Lawrence can never really understand, the innocent sensual woman, whom he can only watch and wonder at, love and hate, and cleave to until the end.