The Rainbow

Rating:
Summary: a certainly beautiful, underwhelming novel
Review: Or call it missed opportunity. Now The Rainbow is, of course, a glorious masterpiece and blah blah blah, mostly as a result of its 'passion and intensity of vision'.(or quote any Lawrence critic particularly in love with what someone else said about him) If you are at all familiar with the author its likely you'll know what to expect: gorgeous, twisting passages of intense interior monologue where every question is asked and an uncomfortable number are answered. There is no space for lies or delusion as a nobel and frequently brutal honesty must underlie any such personal thoughts.

The story is actually often rather interesting, particularly the earliest section, the beginnings of this family and the comparitive subdued nature of their once scandalous passion. I found myself most interested by the patriarch and matriarch and felt the children's defiance and mistakes were inevitable. The problem is that this theme is hammered home in such an ongoing blaze of fury that the very similarities of each subsequent generation becomes a superfluous point thereby rendering the whole construction numb.

By all accounts a worthwhile reading experience, those of a mind for(or with tastes running to) passionate inquiry into the nature of life might quite possibly love this book.

Rating:
Summary: Colorful
Review: Spanning the years 1840 to 1905, D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow" is the story of three generations of a rural English family, focusing on five main characters. More than just a simple family history, it is about gender conflict and the quest for identity and individualism.

The novel begins with the early life of Tom Brangwen, a simple, poorly educated farmer. He marries a well-bred Polish widow named Lydia Lensky, who has a young daughter named Anna. Like any kid with a new parent, Anna is reluctant to adapt to her new environment, but eventually she learns to love Tom like her own father. When she grows up, she falls in love with Tom's nephew Will, and they get married and have very many children, an extraordinary number by today's standards but understandable back then when there was a higher infant mortality rate. Their oldest daughter, Ursula, emerges as the most prominent character, the one with whom the last half of the novel is most concerned.

Ursula is nothing like her mother or her grandmother. She resents her parents' provinciality and her mother's complacency of being kept at home to be a baby-making machine and a domestic servant. Falling in love with a young man named Anton Skrebensky, she is unwilling to accept the dullness of being a wife. She rejects the sanctimoniousness and hollowness of religion. She becomes interested in the Women's Movement, such as it existed in the earliest years of the 1900's. She finds a new, exciting experience in a lesbian relationship with her teacher, Miss Inger. She decides to take up a profession, and teaching is one of the very few open to young women of the day. When given charge of a class, she soon learns that she must abandon her meekness and solicitude and become a stern disciplinarian if she wants to succeed as a teacher, and by doing so she manages to earn the respect of the unruly students and the other teachers. So ultimately, "The Rainbow" becomes the story of Ursula's (and woman's) self-liberation.

The novel is structurally and thematically enigmatic. It presents conflicts but does not seek to resolve them. Its characters exist as dynamic life forms, interacting with and drawing vivacity from each other, and do not merely serve the purpose of advancing the plot, which has no beginning or end. It challenges conventional Victorian notions of feminine roles and sexual propriety, offering moments of daring sexual innuendo for its time, though necessarily muted by the censors of the day. While this book is not really a feminist tract, it offers unique insight into the issues of social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

Rating:
Summary: Probing for truth beyond the mist of lust
Review: Sunshine is a substance of transparency, yet when it touches the soft mist and shines through the concrete droplets, the arc of color manifests and dazzles the human yes. In many ways, this is the journey of man as the essence of living is filtered through the mist of love. D.H. Lawrence's controversial Rainbow makes few reference to the natural phenomenon as rainbow, yet through out the lines, readers feel the "unbearable lightness of being" sipping through to cinch the yearning hearts. Countless twenty-century writers dedicated their finest works to capture this evanescence, and surviving through scandals and suppression is this ambitious piece.

One of the unique faces of The Rainbow is its treatment of characters; instead of expanding from individuals, D.H. Lawrence reverses focus and lets the plot drift along. It's impossible to determine which character is the true protagonist because individuality is simply abashed in this banned work. In place of emphasis on characters, Lawrence traces a circuitous journey through three generations-alternating voices of three generations of Brangwen women. Despite the complexity of this novel however, each of these three women are given their space to dictate the path of their own rainbow. The word "journey" itself is repeated frequently enough, and the torch of change is constantly being passed along. The journey traces from the Polish widow to her Brangwen husband, her daughter to another Brangwen, and eventually the "heiress" of Brangwen memories-Ursula. The mother-daughter loop itself is a symbolic journey as the understanding of love is inherited.

As a novel focusing on the very nature of relationships and their connection to love, to sex, and to God, The Rainbow captures the pain and anguish of each woman as they come to possess the fruit of union with a man. And as the daughter gains voice over the ailing mother, the readers come to see how much time leads the mind towards something new. All characters seek illumination of love, and different from conventional romance novels, The Rainbow traces not the journey of one person, but the journey of an understanding. Anna Brangwen, the daughter of Lydia Lensky, finds a lover with whom she develops "a sensuality violent and extreme as death" (280), a relationship that ends in great fecundity. As her fresh and wishful perspective fades, her eldest daughter, Ursula commands the pace as she comes to possession of passion. Through her youthful flirtation with Anton Skrebensky, Ursula grows to be an emotional teacher eager to share her passion, only finding herself shut down by reality into "a hard, insentient thing" (445). Her meager knowledge of love leads her to a physical and emotional affair with Skrebensky as both grope for the truth behind relationships. But this truth is too grand for both of them as they yield to the tempting nature of passion, and let love pass by. But does the journey stop there?

"The primeval darkness falsified to a social mechanism" (499) is indeed the chimera that propels all characters towards the light of human affections. During a time of great changes, men and women cannot help but clang to one thing that seems unscathed-this primordial sense of protection in the bodies of opposite sex. But this need fades so fast as they probe deeper into the soul in search of the amorphous answer that leaves them sleepless. Just as the sun penetrates through the seductive veil of mist, the characters reach a point where physical relationships is a concrete something that does not satisfy. But while they reach in the darkness of lust for the light of emotional union, all falter just as the beautiful array of colors fade away. The sunshine never fails to reach earth, but it never fails to trick wild hearts into the trap of a surreal realm of love-the paradise beyond the rainbow.

Rating:
Summary: simply awful
Review: The essential project of the Romantic Movement and the Left in the past 100 or more years, perhaps best expressed in the novels of Lawrence, is to replace Love with Passion. Love you see is a mutual thing. It requires interrelations and bonds which are anathema to the wholly nihilistic, individualistic and selfish intellectual elites of the Modern era. What in the end does Freudianism consist of, other than an attack on the foundations of the family?

Passion on the other hand, requires nothing from anyone other than the individual. It does not require that the object of one's desires reciprocate. The individual, whole in himself, can experience passion.

Lawrence, in these novels (Rainbow & Women in Love) and others, tried to explore new alternatives to the traditional Western structures of marriage, family and Christianity. He hoped to recreate humans and human relations in new forms, unbound by tradition and reason.

It is for this fundamental attack on the great accomplishments of Western Civilization that his books should have been banned, not because of some wildly melodramatic sex scenes in the haystacks.

GRADE: F

Rating:
Summary: Not sure if this is the best edition to read....
Review: The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition is an attractive edition with plenty of space in the margins for making notes. Also included with the main text is a fragment of "Sisters II" (which would become "Women in Love"), a chronology of the happenings in "The Rainbow," some explanatory notes, and a list of further reading. For the scholar, this is a handy text.

I am not sure if this is the best edition to read however. In reading the introduction, the history of revisions to the text by Lawrence, his wife, editors, and copyeditors lets the reader know that this was "corrected" many times. Unfortunately, the editors never really keep to one interpretation. From reading this introduction, it sounds like they tried to incorporate all the editings of everyone who worked with it. After reading this, I could not help wondering if what I was reading was from Lawrence or from some "well-meaning" editor. Possibly caused by reading this, I found the flow of the book to be sometimes off.

Without knowing the title, you would know it is Lawrence right away. It is not as concise as "Sons and Lovers," but is a good read nonetheless.

Rating:
Summary: Truimph of Ursula
Review: The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence is a fascinating saga of three generations of Brangwen family. I should have read this book before "Women in Love". Although there is no connection between the two. Numerous characters come and fade away making room for our protagonist, Ursula Brangwen. She is the quintessential Lawrence character, also appeared as Paul Morel in "Sons and Lovers" and Gudrin in "Women in Love". They attain everything they desire and yet reject and abandon what they seek to soar even higher. They surely triumph and that is the beauty of all his creations. I guess if all stories end up "lived happily ever after", then nobody would have heard of Shakespeare.

It must have been a shock to the early 20th century readers of the beautiful lesbian liaison of Ursula and her teacher, not to mention numerous premarital sexual romps with Anton Skrebensky. Lawrence exquisite and poetic prose make it exhilrating and yet sensual. I guess he kept all the graphic detail for "Lady Chatterely's Lover".

It is a great book with chock full of unforgetable charectors in the rich tradition of Dickens and Hardy. I

Rating:
Summary: A vivid tale of visceral reality
Review: The two part saga of the Brangwens comprised by "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love" is surely the most stirringly realistic piece of writing concerning matters of the soul that I have ever read. Mr. Lawrence stands with Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as the masters of the art of realistic fiction. This novel doesn't succeed because it is considered Literature by some astute scholar. It succeeds because it tears at one's emotions until he is certain that these events befell some poor middle class family in earlier England. Engaging and highly readable!

Rating:
Summary: Rainbow rainbow rainbow
Review: This book is an odd case. I found it to be very campy (the title is an unintentional tipoff), and yet at the same time the psychological makeup of just about every one of these characters was very real. D.H. Lawrence really probes the every nuance of the mind, even if he is a bit repetitive. His symbols, metaphors & similes (esp. light and dark and flowers and birthing and fire and weather and animals and....just about all of them, should I keep going?) seemed a bit clunky, but always literary.

In the spectrum of the rainbow, Lawrence's prose style tends to favour the purple. This can make for some quite unfortunate, laughable passages. It's like the Romantic poets, and the way they get all worked up into a frenzy-- but without the lyric beauty. Lawrence is just TOO over-the-top to be taken seriously (at least by me). Very heightened emotion; these folk in 'The Rainbow' feel intensely, and Lawrence wastes no opportunity to tell the reader just what everyone is feeling. So... I like it? I guess. It's hard for me to tell.

Rating:
Summary: The Rainbow? Rocks.
Review: This is a book that needs to be read relatively quickly to get the full effect. A masterful, overwhelming, huge, almost perfect book. He trances the history of the main character through multiple generations of parents to explain in incredible detail the creation of the protagonist. The use of a long running darkness and light metaphor, echoes Conrad, and gives an erieness to the book, the best example of this is early in chapter 15, and incorporates some of his pro-nature anti-business themes.

His critique of industrialism and mindless consumerism at the expense of nature I found to be enormously topical. The concluding 10 pages, particularly the last 100 or so lines are truly epic and wonderful.

Entrenched in the middle of this long book, I found I stopped noticing lawrence's style. Though I repeat the recomendation of reading the book in large chunks.

Rating:
Summary: Emotional and character-driven, vivid and poignant...
Review: This novel is amazing. It is lusty and moving -- the characters are so well fleshed out and you can't help but be drawn into their world. Every member of this family is unique in every way and equal attention is paid to their faults and their strengths. They are real people, living out their lives, and Lawrence invites us to share it with them. He makes you feel as if you too are a member of the Brangwen family.