SOURCE: "The Making of an Ugly Technocrat: Character and Structure in Lawrence's The Rainbow," in Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas, Vol. XII, No. 1, Autumn, 1978, pp. 61-78.

In his essay "Pan in America," D. H. Lawrence concluded with a call to his contemporaries to recover the vital sources of genuine human life:

Yet live we must. And once life has been conquered, it is pretty difficult to live. What are we going to do, with a conquered universe? The Pan relationship, which the world of man once had with all the world, was better than anything man has now. The savage, today, if you give him the chance, will become more mechanical and unliving than any civilized man. But civilized man, having conquered the universe, may as well leave off bossing it. Because, when all is said and done, life itself consists in a live relatedness between man and his universe: sun, moon, stars, earth, trees, flowers, birds, animals, men, everything—and not in a 'conquest' of anything by anything. Even the conquest of the air makes the world smaller, tighter, and more airless.

And whether we are a store-clerk or a bus-conductor, we can still choose between the living universe of Pan, and the mechanical conquered universe of modern humanity. The machine has windows. But even the most mechanized human being has only got his windows nailed up, or bricked in.

This statement contains, in capsule, a central theme of much of his fiction, including The Rainbow. His optimistic affirmation of the human capacity to counter-balance the forces of dissolution underlies the stories of the main Brangwen characters; the role of the second Tom Brangwen subsumes the negative thrust of this theme. It is the younger Tom who represents the evil effects of the deadly growth of nineteenth-century modernism, with those influences and aspirations which have "bricked in" the lives of the other characters. He embodies, in the second half of the novel, the kind of dehumanization which each major character must struggle to overcome.

Young Tom Brangwen has hardly been mentioned in critical commentaries on The Rainbow; yet he is the only Brangwen character who appears early, as part of the world of Tom and Lydia, his parents, and continues throughout to perform an important function, revealing the lives of the successive Brangwen generations as they struggle against an infectious contamination: the impulse to accommodate themselves to modern beliefs which, for Lawrence, cause human impotence.

It is possible to summarize young Tom's character as he appears in the adult Ursula's life by simply quoting parts of the final episode in the "Shame" chapter, where he meets Winifred Inger. This is, in fact, what most of the few references to him do. But it is essential for an understanding of his importance to realize how he came to be what Ursula so detests when she brings Winifred to him: to see him as the product of his time, the nineteenth century in England as Lawrence viewed it, and of his parents, whose lives could not but be affected by the changes portrayed in the opening of the novel, epitomized by the descriptions of the growth of the canals and the coming of the railroads:

About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a heavy bridge.

So the Marsh was shut off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of Cossethay.

The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land. Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen.

The novel begins with a vision of the past, expansive world of the Brangwen's gradually being enclosed, shut in by growing mechanisms; it ends with the rhetorically embellished vision of Ursula of the future. The novel is framed by Lawrence's interpretation of history and his hope for amelioration of the ills he embodies in the portrait of young Tom.

The nineteenth century was, for Lawrence, a century of betrayal:

Now though perhaps nobody knew it, it was ugliness which really betrayed the spirit of man, in the nineteenth century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

In their own time, the great exponents of progress were usually driven by some form of perfectibilian idealism generated by a confidence in man's power to control all circumstances affecting human existence. For some, dazzled by science and technology, there was confidence in human intellectual potential; for others, there was confidence in the inevitability of the survival and ultimate triumph of the best in man despite the evidences of the persistence of the worst. There were those who cried out against the naivete of such idealists even to the point of arguing their destructive potential; but few, up to and including the writers of Lawrence's time, argued that their motivation itself was perverse. Lawrence, in his portrayal of the younger Tom Brangwen, exhibits not only the twisted motivation of the apostles of the machine but also their destructive power. As a man, young Tom is a kind of Dorian Grey, without the power to hide completely his ugliness, as it grows, from himself or from Ursula. Behind the mask of health and affluence, his eyes speak his degeneracy. His portrayal represents the degeneration of humanity, escaping through technocracy the need to realize human potential as Lawrence so earnestly interpreted it. His final condition in the novel, coupled with that of Winifred, prefigures the ultimate quality of human life Lawrence saw such people engendering.

It is his early life that suggests most vividly the causes of young Tom's perversion as a man; his relationship to his family, or lack of vital relationship to be more precise, is focussed by the reactions to him of his parents and half-sister, Anna, and by the differences between him and his brother Fred. His early development accomplishes two functions: it illuminates the stories of his parents and of his own generation, and it prepares his role in Ursula's life in the later episodes. The role of young Tom is a unifying thread in the novel, and considerations of the novel's unity will be weaker to the extent that they fail to take into account his function.

The younger Tom Brangwen becomes significant very early in the novel. During Lydia's first pregnancy after her marriage to the older Tom, the strain in her relationship with her husband intensifies. The causes of this strain in the character of her husband are given in the beginning of the novel, in the portrayal of the breakdown of the old Brangwen world with the growth of the technology separating the men from their awareness of the open expanse of land and sky, and in the story of the early life of Tom under the influence of his mother's vision of the town, leading to "the magic land, where secrets were made known and desires fulfilled." The responses of the parents to the infant in the context of the breakdown of the old Brangwen way of life and the strange world, for them, which Lydia represents, become the foundation of the boy's development into tormented manhood.

The marriage of Tom and Lydia is often cited as the model of man-woman fulfillment according to Lawrence. Lucia Henning Heldt stated this view [in D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (Fall 1975)]: "The courtship and marriage of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky set the standards by which all of the other sexual involvements in the two novels [i.e., The Rainbow and Women in Love] can be judged and provide the reader with a rare, fully developed example of exactly what Lawrence has in mind when he speaks of love." This view is valid when related to Lawrence's notions of intimate man-woman fulfillment. But Lawrence conceived of man-woman love as a stage in a man's life which should lead beyond, to "some passionate, purposive activity." That Tom's life does not adequately go beyond the limitations of a circumscribed world on the Marsh farm shows his failure to achieve something his children could grow through as they have to move into the society about them. The measuring of the success of Tom and Lydia cannot ignore the consequences of their limitations in the lives of their children; young Tom embodies these effects in their most extreme and persistent form throughout the novel.

The older Tom married Lydia after a prolonged period of alienation from his community. He failed to adapt to the modern world from the moment in his childhood when his mother, in her aspiration for contact with "the activity of man in the world at large," sent him to school, thereby imposing on him an aspiration always alien to his character. That Lawrence himself was preoccupied with this kind of impact mothers can have on sons is well-known. But his extension of this perception to the society and its development, in that sons of mothers become fathers of sons and thereby perpetuate the evil consequences, is very appropriate to an understanding of the older Tom's influence on his son's life. Lawrence stated the point precisely:

We are such stuff as our grandmothers' dreams are made on. This terrible truth should never be forgotten. Our grandmothers dreamed of wonderful 'free' womanhood in a 'pure' world, surrounded by 'adoring, humble, high-minded' men. Our mothers started to put the dream into practice. And we are the fulfilment. We are such stuff as our grandmothers' dreams were made on.…

The older Tom's mother had dreams for him:

So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first. He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him, but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would cut a sorry figure at school. But he took the infliction as inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his being were wrong, and his mother's conception right. If he could have been what he liked, he would have been that which his mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration for any boy. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as he told his mother very early, with regard to himself; much to her mortification and chagrin.

The older Tom grew up convinced of his own inadequacy when faced with the society developing around the Marsh farm. His failure to adapt to that world made it the focus for his unfulfilled sense of self; anything which represented the sophisticated world with which his mother's hopes forced him to cope becomes a source of fascination and mystery for him. As a boy his friendship with a frail but intelligent fellow student was rooted in this attitude. Later, the people at Matlock, especially the lady who seduced him, and her friend, the monkey-faced foreign gentleman, attracted him because he could not understand them, yet he felt they were superior because of their sophistication:

His mind was one big excitement. The girl and the foreigner: he knew neither of their names. Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his nature, and he would be burned out of cover. Of the two experiences, perhaps the meeting with the foreigner was the more significant. But the girl—he had not settled about the girl.

He did not know. He had to leave it there, as it was. He could not sum up his experiences.

The result of these encounters was, that he dreamed day and night, absorbedly, of a voluptuous woman and of the meeting with a small, withered foreigner of ancient breeding. No sooner was his mind free, no sooner had he left his own companions, than he began to imagine an intimacy with fine-textured, subtle-mannered people such as the foreigner at Matlock, and amidst this subtle intimacy was always the satisfaction of a voluptuous woman.

It is the strange separateness of Lydia, her power to create in him a sense "as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality" that first attracts him to her. He becomes fascinated by her mysterious connection with a larger, unknown world. After learning about her background, his feeling for her, which at first was "like a mist" that kept out "the common, barren world," yet tormented with doubt "like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness, annihilating," becomes established by knowledge of her foreign origins:

Brangwen felt that here was the unreality established at last. He felt also a curious certainty about her, as if she were destined to him. It was to him a profound satisfaction that she was a foreigner.

The Matlock experience left him in torment; Lydia, he fears, will reopen that wound:

The feeling that they had exchanged recognition possessed him like a madness, like a torment. How could he be sure, what confirmation had he? The doubt was like a sense of infinite space, a nothingness, annihilating. He kept within his breast the will to surety. They had exchanged recognition.

He walked about in this state for the next few days. And then again like a mist it began to break to let through the common, barren world. He was very gentle with man and beast, but he dreaded the starkness of disillusion cropping through again.

Brangwen's state of mind, the effect of his upbringing, is complex: he is unable to feel at ease outside of the farm world of the Brangwen past, yet he needs to join, somehow, the mysterious modern, cosmopolitan world into which he has been made to move in order to fulfil his mother's desire. Lydia Lensky is a connection to the world the monkey-faced foreigner represents, and she meets the need represented by the girl.

The attraction of Brangwen to Lydia is not simply to what she is in herself but, more importantly at this stage, to what she represents. The irony of the situation is central to an understanding of both Brangwen and his first son. That which attracted him to Lydia becomes the focus of his anger and frustration in the early stages of his marriage: her "separateness," her unknowable "otherness." Tom is both attracted by Lydia's strangeness and confused by his inability to comprehend that in her. The resulting torment as he moves toward the woman tends to confirm his negative assessment of himself. At this point in his life he looks to Lydia as the fulfillment for him of what he thinks he needs but lacks: "He was nothing. But with her, he would be real."

In an essay Lawrence describes the difference between two attitudes towards love, the one ending in a death of love and the other leading the lover to a new transcendence:

… love is strictly a traveling. 'It is better to travel than to arrive,' somebody has said. This is the essence of unbelief. It is a belief in absolute love, when love is by nature relative. It is a belief in the means, but not in the end.… We travel in order to arrive … Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, and body towards body, in the joy of creation. But if all be united in one bond of love, then there is no more love. And therefore, for those who are in love with love, to travel is better than to arrive. For in arriving one passes beyond love, or, rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence.

The love of Tom and Lydia in its early stages is not a "passing beyond" but a "passing away" or a "trespass" in that their love is the end for him. Tom wants to live in her rather than to go out into the world of work as a man; he wants to find his satisfaction in knowing her and cannot rest easy with the distance between them which their different backgrounds cause:

They were such strangers, they must for ever be such strangers, that his passion was a clanging torment to him. Such intimacy of embrace, and such utter foreignness of contact! It was unbearable. He could not bear to be near her, and know the utter foreignness between them, know how entirely they were strangers to each other. He went out into the wind. Big holes were blown into the sky, the moonlight blew about. Sometimes a high moon, liquid-brilliant, scudded across a hollow space and took over under electric, brown-iridescent cloud-edges. Then there was a blot of cloud, and shadow. Then somewhere in the night a radiance again, like a vapour. And all the sky was teeming and tearing along, a vast disorder of flying shapes and darkness and ragged fumes of light and a great brown circling halo, then the terro of a moon running liquid-brilliant into the open for a moment, hurting the eyes before she plunged under cover of cloud again.

The moon is the symbol of the female principle. The exposure of Tom to the light of the moon hurts his physical eyes as the exposure to the fleeting female in Lydia, the thing in her he wants to know and understand with his mind, comes and goes, and its light hurts him. Until he is able to accept the female for what she is without trying to grasp her in his mind, and until he becomes the male completely in his relationship to her, the hurt will not only remain but grow more severe.

Before meeting Tom, Lydia had retired from active involvement in the outer world. Tom made her tingle in her body from the first moment when they saw each other on the road. Between the times of their early meetings, however, "she lapsed into the old unconsciousness, indifference and there was a will in her to save herself from living anymore." But the impact of Tom was strong, and although her "impulse was strong against him, because he was not of her sort," her "blind instinct" led her to accept him. During their courtship and early marriage Lydia shifts constantly between two attitudes: indifference and being "attentive and instinctively expectant before him, unfolded, ready to receive him." The vascillation drives Tom to despair:

And after a few days, gradually she closed again, away from him, was sheathed over, impervious to him, oblivious. Then a black, bottomless despair became real to him, he knew what he had lost. He felt he had lost it for good… In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

Another attitude in Tom which further intensifies the difficulty of the relationship is his suffering "very much from the thought of actual marriage, the intimacy and nakedness of marriage." The same attitude was evident earlier in his reticence regarding the "nice" girls of his home town. The image of his mother and sisters on the farm came between him and any physical contact with them. In connection with Lydia, this attitude is linked to his awareness of her foreignness:

They were so foreign to each other, they were such strangers. And they could not talk to each other. When she talked, of Poland or of what had been, it was all so foreign, she scarcely communicated anything to him. And when he looked at her, an over-much reverence and fear of the unknown changed the nature of his desire into a sort of worship, holding her aloof from his physical desire, self-thwarting.

The Matlock image, which is in itself the embodiment of the ideal inculcated into Tom by his mother, and the image of woman based on her significance to him on the farm are the two influences which thwart Tom's spontaneous response to the flow of Lydia's female force into his being: "He wanted to drink, to get rid of his forethought and afterthought, to set the moment free. But he could not. The suspense only tightened at his heart." The thought patterns built in Tom's mind out of earlier experiences have the combined effect of hindering an open, natural response to Lydia in the beginning of their marriage and of stopping him from moving beyond the love relationship to a realization of his fullness of being as a man. Lawrence's comments on the proper development of a man in his middle years offer a contrast to the description of Tom:

When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the fulfilment of his individuals self, about the age of thirty-five, then is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence and central appeasedness of maturity; and then, after this, assumes a sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future, there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness, and the further deep assumption of responsibility—this is necessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certain point. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility never embraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste to the family.

During the wedding of Anna Tom sees that his small, farm world cannot go unchanged; at that moment his self-perception becomes complete:

Brangwen was staring away at the burning blue window at the back of the altar, and wondering vaguely, with pain, if he ever should get old, if he ever should feel arrived and established. He was here at Anna's wedding. Well, what right had he to feel responsible, like a father? He was still as unsure and unfixed as when he had married himself. His wife and he! With a pang of anguish he realised what uncertainties they both were. He was a man of forty-five. Forty-five! In five more years fifty. Then sixty—then seventy—then it was finished. My God—and one still was so unestablished!

How did one grow old—how could one become confident? He wished he felt older. Why, what difference was there, as far as he felt matured or completed, between him now and him at his own wedding? He might be getting married over again—he and his wife. He felt himself tiny, a little, upright figure on a plain circled round with the immense, roaring sky: he and his wife, two little, upright figures walking across this plain, whilst the heavens shimmered and roared about them. When did it come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get old, never die? That was the clue. He exulted strangely, with torture. He would go on with his wife, he and she like two children camping in the plains. What was sure but the endless sky? But that was so sure, so boundless.

Still the royal blue colour burned and blazed and sported itself in the web of darkness before him, unwearingly rich and splendid. How rich and splendid his own life was, red and burning and blazing and sporting itself in the dark meshes of his body: and his wife, how she glowed and burned dark within her meshes! Always it was so unfinished and unformed!

Unestablished, unfinished, and unformed—each term is indicative of a lack of larger purpose, leading into the unknown which he fears. The failure of the father to achieve fullness of being as a man in a larger human community leads to the poverty of Fred and the emptiness of Tom, both of whom must move beyond the small world of the farm, especially with the father's death ending its reality for all the Brangwens. The older Tom never truly "assumes a sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future." He is swept away by the modem "deluge." The father's limitations become, in his son and namesake, the source of spiritual death. A chain has been established from generation to generation—young Tom represents its destructive power; Anna and Will and Ursula represent the struggle against that power.

The elder Tom's attitude towards his newborn son is negative; he identifies the child with the mother's foreignness and therefore with the modern world alien to the Marsh farm. The larger process figured in the opening of the novel, of rural England moving into the age of technocracy, is the frame within which Brangwen moves and into which the child is born. The total process has had a cumulative effect on the formation of the father, on the father-son relationship, and therefore on what the son will become.

The father does not love his son except as a confirmation of his own masculinity:

Tom Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his stepchild Anna. When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill of pleasure. He liked the confirmation of fatherhood. It gave him satisfaction to know he had a son. But he felt not very much outgoing to the baby itself. He was its father, that was enough.

Anna has been a surrogate for Lydia during those moments of greatest estrangement which the stepfather has felt. The girl, simple and wanting his affection, becomes an outlet for his frustrated need for a being beyond himself to whom he can uncomplicatedly relate: as Lydia's daughter and as a responsive "other," she helps him cope with his unresolved need to give himself without destroying himself. He identifies his own child with that in his wife with which he cannot cope, her past.

The mother, through the birth of their child, is finally able to break from her past, at least enough to begin to become the wife and mother of the Marsh farm community:

She was serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her former self. She became now really English, really Mrs. Brangwen. Her vitality, however, seemed lowered.

The break with the past has cost her something; she has lost the memory of her "noble" past, her sacrificial life with the intense Lensky, which gave her a sense of self by which she maintained her will to persist. Until her new husband accepts her as a woman, not as a Matlock substitute, she will be unable to "bear the full light" of her new role. He demands that she be an object for his total fulfillment, but the child divides her from him:

He wanted to give her all his love, all his passion, all his essential energy. But it could not be. He must find other things than her, other centres of living. She sat close and impregnable with the child. And he was jealous of the child.

Anna relieves him: "Gradually a part of his stream of life was diverted to the child [Annal, relieving the main flood to his wife."

The passages which reveal the father's attitude to his new-born son are crucial for an understanding of the son's role. One of the most revealing is that which relates his and Anna's game involving the infant:

She shared a sort of recklessness with her father, a complete, chosen carelessness that had the laugh of ridicule in it. He loved to make her voice go high and shouting and defiant with laughter. The baby was dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother, and had hazel eyes. Brangwen called him the blackbird.

'Hallo,' Brangwen would cry, starting as he heard the wail of the child announcing it wanted to be taken out of the cradle, 'there's the black-bird tuning up.'

'The blackbird's singing,' Anna would shout with delight, 'the blackbird's singing.'

'When the pie was opened,' Brangwen shouted in his bawling bass voice, going over to the cradle, 'the bird began to sing.'

'Wasn't it a dainty dish to set before a king?' cried Anna, her eyes flashing with joy as she uttered the cryptic words, looking at Brangwen for confirmation. He sat down with the baby, saying loudly:

'Sing up, my lad, sing up.'

And the baby cried loudly, and Anna shouted lustily, dancing in wild bliss:

    'Sing a song of sixpence
Pocketful of posies,
Ascha! Ascha.…'

Then she stopped suddenly in silence and looked at Brangwen again, her eyes flashing as she shouted loudly and delightedly:

'I've got it wrong, I've got it wrong.'

That the son is called "blackbird" is appropriate since the baby is "dark-skinned and dark-haired, like the mother." Also, the child resembles his Brangwen grandmother:

The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the 'Black Horse.' She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent.

Later, the young Tom's resemblance to his grandmother will become much more apparent. The child symbolically embodies, at this point in his physical appearance, the two strains of heritage that have most hindered the father: his mother's influence and his wife's non-Brangwen strangeness.

The song of Anna also contributes to the portrayal of the infant's early situation. She is acting like a child; after having been almost unnaturally attached to her mother, jealous and defensive, she is released from a burden with the birth of the infant:

The child ceased to have so much anxiety for her mother after the baby came. Seeing the mother with the baby boy, delighted and serene and secure, Anna was at first puzzled then gradually she became indignant, and at last her little life settled on its own swivel, she was no more strained and distorted to support her mother. She became more childish, not so abnormal, not charged with cares she could not understand. The charge of the mother, the satisfying of the mother, had developed elsewhere than on her. Gradually the child was freed. She became an independent, forgetful little soul, loving from her own centre.

The baby is, to Anna, like an offering to her father which has released her from bondage; the English folk songs of her stepfather have replaced the "poignant folk-tales she has had from her mother, which always troubled and mystified her soul." Brangwen is Old King Cole. The "laugh of ridicule" in their singing is directed at "the blackbird tuning up." The baby does not sing; it cries—loudly. The scene, which I consider is the seed of young Tom's developing function in the novel, is representative of Lawrence's use of singular scenes which typify recurring patterns of behavior of his characters. The actions of Anna and Brangwen described in the passage are presented as representative rather than as singular. The child's place in the family, especially for his father and step-sister, is to focus for them their relationships with each other; the child is not included in their vital interaction.

The use of "cryptic" to describe Anna's completion of the nursery rhyme the father begins suggests her attitude. The word suggests a sense of the mysterious and baffling in Anna's statement. She "uttered the phrase; she did not sing it. She looked to her stepfather for confirmation." There is a mysterious, ritual quality in the use of the nursery rhyme; the game is more than mere childish play. For Anna, Brangwen is "king" and the baby is "a dainty dish" set before him. She confuses "Sing a song of six-pence" with "Ring-a-ring a Rosie." Each of these nursery rhymes is associated with death: the first song suggests a sacrificial offering and the second the image of death itself. She dances wildly round the child, laughing in the joy of her new-found freedom. The behavior of both father and daughter is suggestive of a kind of Death rite with Dionysian undertones. The irony of this scene, so innocent and playful in appearance, so suggestive of disaster for the child, will be completed by the effect of these attitudes on the future of young Tom.

Given the total development of the characters and the heritage each is influenced by, the situation for young Tom Brangwen is at this point foreboding. He is the avenue of escape from the past for his mother, his father, and his stepsister. He is not accepted by the father because of Brangwen's unresolved relationship with Lydia, because the boy's physical appearance associates him with the world beyond the Marsh farm in which Brangwen feels incapable of living and fulfilling himself. Anna, as will soon be seen, becomes isolated from her stepbrother as he grows older. The mother uses him as a kind of tool to escape her past and, more importantly, to defend herself during the strained period of her developing life with her husband and his English farm world. In a way similar to many of Lawrence's mothers, at least to the end of the chapter called "Childhood of Anna Lensky," Lydia centers herself on her child; yet she loves her baby "with a sort of dimness, a faint absence about her, a shadowiness even in her mother-love." Again the child, as himself, is not vitally connected, not even with his mother. To avoid the fury and intensity of demand made on her by Brangwen which she cannot satisfy, she puts the child between them, further intensifying the isolation of the baby from his father and building his role as the tool of others to whom he cannot relate through genuine human interaction.

Between the episodes centered around the child's birth and the father's death, young Tom appears twice. At the beginning of the chapter "Girlhood of Anna Brangwen" is a brief description of Anna's relationship with her two half-brothers:

She had two brothers, Tom, dark-haired, small, volatile, whom she was intimately related to but whom she never mingled with, and Fred, fair and responsive, whom she adored but did not consider as a real, separate thing.

Each of the narrator's comments on Anna, Tom and Fred in this passage carries forward the motifs established earlier around these characters and forms a link between the first generation portion of the novel and the third generation story, where Tom's role becomes fulfilled.

Anna's isolation from Tom is absolute: she "never mingled" with him. In contrast, Anna does feel a strong emotional attachment to Fred, as suggested by the word "adored." Her attitude towards each brother shows how each is accepted as part of the family life on the Marsh farm: Tom is isolated; Fred is identified with the world of his father. Tom provided Anna's way of escape from the bondage of her mother's past as a child. Her life is intimately entwined with his, but she does not feel any bond of affection with him as she does with the younger brother. As Tom's role evolves, his isolation from the reality of life centered on the farm will become total. Contrary to custom, the second son, Fred, will inherit the Marsh. He is very much his father's son, in appearance, in attitudes, and in his father's mind. The older son, who should have inherited the farm, will depart entirely from the Brangwen society when, at a relatively early age, he will be sent to London.

The brief description of Tom, contrasting him with Fred, continues what he was seen to be as an infant and prepares for his role as an adult in Ursula's portion of the novel. Being "dark-haired and small," he is the child of his mother's non-Brangwen world and grandson of his father's town born and bred mother. His inner being lacks the Brangwen strength which enabled his father to sustain himself despite the attacks against his sense of self-worth as a child and young man before his meeting with Lydia. These aspects of the youngster's character, which the description of him at this point suggests, will come to fruition as his role expands after his father's death. Their importance now is that they continue and strengthen the portrayal of the roots of his character in his childhood role on the Marsh farm, which, in turn, must modify our conception of the nature of the separate universe created by his parents: their world succeeds only to the extent they can exclude from it signs of things alien to their way of life.

The second direct mention of young Tom during the portion of the novel devoted to Anna is related to her ridiculing, through laughter, Will Brangwen's singing in church. The boy Tom, in the scenes on the way to and in the church, is not present—he sings in the choir. Anna is with Will and Fred when the intensity of Will's singing makes her laugh. When Tom learns about Anna's behavior later at home, his eyes are "bright with joy" over the spectacle his sister created. He takes pleasure in her denigrating the religious feelings so important to Will. Later Tom, along with Winifred, will take pleasure in attacking the value of anything but the machine. His attitude in this episode is indicative of what he will come to represent; his enjoyment of the comedy Anna has made of religious seriousness is a prelude to his desire as an adult to belittle genuine human feeling or human commitment of any kind. The machine will become his god, the factory his church, and technology his religion.

The chapter "The Marsh and the Flood" is pivotal: it marks the passing of the father, the transition from Will and Anna to Ursula as the center of attention, and the movement away from the Marsh farm into the world of the town. The figure of young Tom occupies a dominant position. The chapter begins with the completion of the story of his boyhood and adolescence, and the story of his development into manhood is identified with the change of the way of life of the second and third generations of Brangwens. The resume of his development into his early twenties is followed by the story of old Tom's death and funeral. The chapter ends with Lydia's telling the story of her first husband, Lensky, to Ursula. The linking of characters through the structuring and emphases of the chapter does much to develop and clarify the purpose of the son's role.

The names of Tom and Fred are linked, but the vast differences between the brothers are stressed. Fred "was a Brangwen, large-boned, blue-eyed, English. He was his father's very son, the two men father and son, were supremely at ease with one another. Fred was succeeding to the farm." Fred is at home on the Marsh farm; he fits totally into his father's world, and the weakness of that world as a basis for living in a modern society will be revealed through Fred's eventual accommodation to the world outside of the Marsh. Tom is described as the opposite of Fred:

Tom was a rather short, good-looking youth, with crisp black hair and long black eyelashes and soft, dark, possessed eyes. He had a quick intelligence. From the High School he went to London to study. He had an instinct for attracting people of character and energy. He gave place entirely to the other person, and at the same time kept himself independent. He scarcely existed except through other people. When he was alone he was unresolved. When he was with another man, he seemed to add himself to the other, make the other bigger than life size. So that a few people loved him and attained a sort of fulfilment in him. He carefully chose these few.

He had a subtle, quick, critical intelligence, a mind that was like a scale or balance. There was something of a woman in all this.

This passage adds to the portrait of Tom as it has been developed thus far: it suggests his sophistication through education, making him more like the Matlock people and the Skrebenskys than his own family; it suggests his femininity, making him symbolic of the importance of the modern man; and it suggests his "unresolved" sense of self, making him the inheritor of his father's debility—his grandmother's dream fulfilled.

Young Tom at this point in the novel has developed into an inwardly tormented and isolated human being. Just after high school he left the Marsh farm for further education in London, the one Brangwen to become absorbed into sophisticated society early in life. The description of his life in London clearly emphasizes his inner isolation and suggests his subtle, uncommitted approach to sophisticated people. It begins with the mention of his "master," suggestive of a Lord Henry Wotton type, and ends with the portrait of his attractive external appearance, suggestive of a Dorian Gray type:

In London he had been the favourite pupil of an engineer, a clever man, who became well-known at the time when Tom Brangwen had just finished his studies. Through this master the youth kept acquaintance with various individual, outstanding characters. He never asserted himself. He seemed to be there to estimate and establish the rest. He was like a presence that makes us aware of our own being. So that he was while still young connected with some of the most energetic scientific and mathematical people in London. They took him as an equal. Quiet and perceptive and impersonal as he was, he kept his place and learned how to value others in just degree. He was there like a judgment. Besides, he was very good-looking, of medium stature, but beautifully proportioned, dark, with fine colouring, always perfectly healthy.

His parents' reality has nothing to do with the modern ways he must accommodate. Having nothing of which he is a part, neither family roots nor community, he "scarcely existed except through other people," yet he "kept himself independent." He is not a man as a person, given Lawrence's sense of manhood; he does not and will not live through a woman as did his father when he was young and unresolved. He lives through others without becoming anything in himself; "There was something of a woman in all this."

What Lawrence says elsewhere of the effects of modern education on young minds offers a commentary on young Tom:

We talk about education—leading forth the natural intelligence of a child. But ours is just the opposite of leading forth. It is a ramming in of brain facts through the head, and a consequent distortion, suffocation, and starvation of the primary centres of consciousness. A nice day of reckoning we've got in front of us.…

The whole of a child's development goes on from the great dynamic centres, and is basically nonmental. To introduce mental activity is to arrest the dynamic activity, and stultify true dynamic development. By the age of twenty-one our young people are helpless, hopeless, floundering mental entities, with nothing in front of them, because they have been starved from the roots, systematically, for twenty-one years, and fed through the head. They have had all their mental excitements, sex and everything, all through the head, and when it comes to the actual thing, why, there's nothing in it. Blase. The affective centers have been exhausted from the head.

These comments can be applied to our understanding of the elder Tom and both of his sons, but the "starvation" increases in its extremity as time progresses; Fred is less capable of fulfillment than his father, and Tom, lacking even that measure of vital resource his brother has in the farm, will become incapable of anything but the "sterile substitute of brain knowledge."

The adulthood of young Tom begins with his removal to London where he becomes "the favourite pupil of an engineer, a clever man." It is "this master" who introduces the youngster to "some of the most energetic scientific and mathematical people in London." The insinuation of homosexuality in young Tom's makeup is evident in his "woman" mind and in the "woman's poignant attention and self-less care" with which he "watched over" his younger brother. Whether or not the psychological aberration is homosexuality as such is not the important point. What is important is the fact that the personal relationships of the young man, from the youthful "uneasy friendship between him and one of the Hardys at the Hall" to his association with his "chief," which mysteriously suffers "some breach … never explained" when he is twenty-three, are with men, never with a woman.

He meets and then breaks with an older man and begins to travel the world, "always the same good-looking, carefully dressed, attractive young man, in perfect health, yet somehow outside of everything." He is alone: "He belonged to nowhere, to no society." So it is that young Tom comes to represent a reality alien to the Marsh world of Tom and Lydia, and to bring a "change in tone over the Marsh":

It was young Tom Brangwen, with his dark lashes and beautiful colouring, his soft, inscrutable nature, his strange repose and his informed air, added to his position in London, who seemed to emphasize the superior foreign element in the Marsh. When he appeared, perfectly dressed, as if soft and affable, and yet quite removed from everybody, he created an uneasiness in people, he was reserved in the minds of the Cossethay and Ilkeston acquaintances to a different, remote world.

The linking of young Tom to the alien world outside the farm is associated directly with the foreign heritage of Lydia. The mother's relationship with the son is strange:

He and his mother had a kind of affinity. The affection between them was of a mute, distant character, but radical. His father was always uneasy and slightly deferential to his eldest son. Tom also formed the link that kept the Marsh in real connection with the Skrebenskys, now quite important people in their own district.

Also, the mother herself remains separated, except as her husband's wife, from the Brangwen way of life:

His wife, as ever, had no acquaintances. Her hair was threaded now with grey, her face grew older in form without changing in expression. She seemed the same as when she had come to the Marsh twenty-five years ago, save that her health was more fragile. She seemed always to haunt the Marsh rather than to live there. She was never part of the life. Something she represented was alien there, she remained a stranger within the gates, in some ways fixed and impervious, in some ways curiously refining. She caused the separateness and individuality of all the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household.

She was also little concerned about her sons' behavior, except when they were ignoble or awkward:

She was furious if the boys hung around the slaughterhouse, she was displeased when the school reports were bad. It did not matter how many sins her boys were accused of, so long as they were not stupid, or inferior. If they seemed to brook insult, she hated them. And it was only a certain gaucherie, a gawkiness on Anna's part that irritated her against the girl. Certain forms of clumsiness, grossness, made the mother's eyes glow with curious rage. Otherwise she was pleased, indifferent.

Her affection for Tom, "of a mute, distant character, but radical," suggests the nature of the mother-son relationship. The etymological sense of "radical" applies as well as the current sense of "extreme": the boy's roots are in the mother's heritage, which has been buried for her except as a memory; the Polishness of Lydia is in him and this gives them their affinity. Yet their relatedness is not immediate and dynamic because she broke with that part of her past at the time of the child's birth. As the father saw the infant as a reminder of Lydia's foreign roots, so the mother situates her son in her affections as a kind of extension of her past self, held vitally, at a distance.

Tom represents this dead Polish past; he "formed the link that kept the Marsh in real connection with the Skrebenskys." It is the nature of the mother-son relationship which explains why the narrator says of Lydia, "She caused the separateness and individuality of all the Marsh inmates, the friability of the household." The Brangwen heritage will crumble under the pressure of a new way of life intruding into the Marsh, and Ursula's Uncle Tom is the leading wave of a deluge which will finally end the old way with the death of the father. In a sense, the isolated farm is a self-made prison, functioning as a shelter, in which Tom and Lydia and the children other than young Tom are "inmates," until the dam bursts and the "Skrebensky world" Ursula will come to despise overwhelms the past.

When Tom, then twenty-three, met Lydia, and Will and Anna met the Skrebensky's and visited Lincoln Cathedral, these older Brangwen men began a journey toward the resolution of a vital male-female relationship. At the age of twenty-eight each faces a crisis, a challenge which culminates in a kind of resolution of the destructive tensions in their marriages. However one may estimate the relative degrees of success each couple achieves in their marriages, the fact is clear that at about the same age each does reach a higher plateau in their mutual satisfaction. Young Tom, at twenty-three, broke with his "chief" and began to travel alone. The death of his father, given Ursula's age (eight), would have occurred when Tom was in his mid to late twenties. The scenes after that death signal the irrevocable disintegration of the son. The age parallels direct attention to the significance of the son's role, which is not simply to "represent [his] society fully… the irrevocably lost," and not simply to provide a gauge against which to measure the success and failure of the other characters, but also to portray the effects on an individual, and on particular human communities like that of the Brangwens, of the process of disintegration figured in the opening chapter. The depth of Tom's failure must heighten appreciation of whatever success the main characters achieve.

For Tom, the funeral of his father is climactic and his function henceforth will be to introduce Ursula, both directly by his acts, and indirectly by his recurring presence, to the world old Tom was frightened and transfixed by, the world represented by the Matlock episode. He brings that world to her, by bringing Anton Skrebensky to her, and he reveals it gradually, first at the funeral and finally with Winifred at Wiggiston, for what it is—destructive of vital human life. His final appearance in the novel, in "The Bitterness of Ecstasy" chapter, is an ominous foreshadowing of the continuation into the future of what he represents. He and Winifred have had a child.