I am a freelance and development editor. I also work as a critic - book reviewer, evaluating and reading manuscripts for publishing houses and clients. The genres that I am interested in are - fiction (all kinds); children's and YA literature; non-fiction, including biographies and academic, especially related to gender studies.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Rereading D H Lawrence's The Rainbow, The Guardian, 19 March 2011
As The Rainbow and Women in Love are adapted for TV, Rachel Cusk reflects on how these daring novels subverted Victorian gender stereotypes and how Lawrence has been badly served by his libidinous image
Rachael Stirling and Rosamund Pike as the Brangwen sisters in BBC4’s adaptation of Lawrence’s novel. Photograph: BBC/Company Pictures/Kelly Walsh/Company Pictures
The Rainbow came into the world more or less without literary antecedents. Nothing like it had been written before: Lawrence's novel defined new territories that enabled the representation of human experience to move forward into the modern age. The same, of course, can be said of James Joyce's Ulysses, with which The Rainbow was contemporaneous and with which it shared the fate of being disowned and vilified by the literary establishment and the general public alike. Both were banned immediately on publication; in both cases the charge was obscenity, though Joyce's erudition and Lawrence's passion could hardly be more distinct from one another. Though both are books of truth, what yokes them together is in fact mere frankness: frankness about the life of the body in its most pedestrian, its most recognisable, its most universal form.
Lawrence is still seen by many as controversial – and controversial he was, but the highly sexed pornographer of public imagination bears no relation at all to the man whose modes of thought and self-expression still retain the power to provoke violent disagreement. The damage done to his reputation almost a century ago has proved curiously permanent; justice has an uncanny way of eluding him – the famous overturning of the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover at the Old Bailey in 1960 fixed his libidinous image still more firmly by associating it with the mores of that decade. Thus each successive generation of readers comes to Lawrence with preconceptions about his life and character that are the opposite of true. His was a cold, harsh, short life filled with rejection, poverty and sickness, in which every comfort of social, family and intellectual life was denied. That these conditions could produce such a work of generosity and empathy as The Rainbow is mysterious and miraculous; and indeed the mystery and the miracle of creation is what this novel sets out both to evoke and to immortalise at the core of ordinary life.
"One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life," Lawrence wrote in a letter at the time of the novel's composition. "One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one's fate is the fate of the whole of mankind." The brevity and the vastness of this statement may be taken as an articulation of Lawrence's ambitions for his tale of a Nottinghamshire family's generational movement out of a timeless agrarian communality towards the individualism and alienation of life in an industrialised society. This was the movement of history itself; the journey of man out of the fields and into the cities, his emancipation from physical labour by machines, the new forms of mental life this emancipation made possible and the new – often problematic – possibilities for relating that it offered.The Rainbow is an account of how the Victorian era gave way to the modern age.
But Lawrence's statement implies far more than this, both morally and artistically. The Victorian novel routinely used individual characters as emblems of wider social and geographical realities, to the extent that its concept of character often strikes the modern reader as stylised and lacking in reality. Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell: despite their interest in social change, regionalism, community, the position of women, these great English novelists have nothing in common with Lawrence at all. In The Rainbow Lawrence does more than part company with Victorian modes of narration – he destroys them by completely inverting the literary and actual function of "man" as a representative of "mankind". "One is in oneself the whole of mankind": in this assertion of the total significance of the self, Lawrence is seeing the future not just of the novel but of modern Freudian consciousness, and in the story of the Brangwen family he begins to imagine what the texture of this consciousness might be.
The Rainbow was originally conceived as a much longer novel, to be called "The Sisters", and ultimately became two, the second of which isWomen in Love. It is important to note that Lawrence's definitions of "man" and "mankind" at the outset of this project not only incorporated woman but were chiefly preoccupied by her. He regarded his novel as "do[ing] my work for women, better than the suffrage". In a letter written in 1913, he remarked: "It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman – who is much of a woman – is that in the long run she is not to be had. She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honour, duty, worth, work, salvation – none of them – not in the long run."
What she wanted was, he said, satisfaction: "physical at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul." In planning "The Sisters" he set out to unravel "the woman question" – "it is the problem of the day," he wrote, "the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women" – by interrogating the deepest sources of this satisfaction and its denial through the destinies of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. It was an unravelling so lengthy, requiring such a profound investigation of the origins of female character, that one novel could not encompass it. The Rainbow, then, is the story of those origins; of woman as the eternal life-giver who, through time and change, is finally driven to give birth to herself.
Anyone encountering Lawrence's prose for the first time will feel the immediate force of its revelations, the density of its character and its originality. The opening pages of The Rainbow, with their evocation of the cyclical harmony of man and beast and land, are among the most memorable in English literature: "They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and inter-relations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it."
This is provocative writing, but provocation is far from being Lawrence's aim. Rather, he is serving his own vision of an original world free of shame, out of which arises the discord of gender: "The women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen."
In this Eden, too, the woman's curiosity is the driving force that rouses creation from the stasis of repetition. Is woman wrong to want "another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy"? It is culture, civilisation, she is drawn to: "she strained her eyes to see what man had done in fighting outwards to knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered himself in this conquest, her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the edge of the unknown."
Lawrence considers these questions through the medium of English rural life, beginning his story in the small Midlands village of Cossethay just as a canal has been built through it to connect the new collieries, bringing the first signs of the "commotion" – the violation, in Lawrence's sexual-topographical vision – of industrialisation to the slumbrous valley. The Brangwens have farmed there for so long their origins are lost in the mists of time; the men and women of this family experience its transformations through their very bodies and minds, live out its recalibrations of domestic power, material wealth, urban migration, social ambition, sexual possibility. They become aware of the world beyond the village and beyond England, discover the concepts of freedom and choice; like waves that advance and draw back but are always encroaching they move generationally towards education, culture, self-fulfillment.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the fruit of this long clamber out of stasis and "blood-intimacy", are deposited by the novel's end on the shores of the 20th century: frustrated and desirous in equal measure, vibrating to life at its highest pitch, giving voice to themselves out of the long silence of femininity, they are Lawrence's incarnation of modern womanhood. How will they live? How will they find satisfaction? Not in the manner of their mother or their mother's mother, not by means of domestic power: they will no longer serve as the medium through which life begets itself. The "wave which cannot halt" is to be halted: Ursula and Gudrun realise that to liberate themselves from the cycle of repetition they will require financial independence from men; they will have to educate themselves; they will have to work. And, without the context of hearth and home, childbearing, male protection inextricable from female servitude, what will love between a man and woman be?
These are the questions with which the novel concludes and which Lawrence goes on to address in Woman in Love. But the achievement ofThe Rainbow in creating the conditions for such questions to be asked is momentous. The Old Testament world of Cossethay, with its ceaseless begetting and harvesting, with the rainbow that stands over it as the sign of God's pleasure in the order of his creation, has finally elapsed. The new world is one of fundamental disorder, a world predicated on the potency of the individual, a world that has moved out of the shelter of God's creation and is creating itself. Lawrence's grasp of what kind of future this implies for men and women, for society, for the earth itself, is extraordinarily complex and prescient. And the "readjustment of the old relation" between the sexes is an evolution in which we remain embroiled, with all the pleasures and pitfalls Lawrence perceived.
The Rainbow retains its power of explanation, its capacity to demystify us to ourselves. Not least physically: to read Lawrence is to read with the body as well as the mind. For this he will always be treated with suspicion, with caution, as long as the formation of the human personality is based around the denial or misrepresentation of the body's wants. But Lawrence possessed the bitter knowledge born of his own experience: that originality and truth will always meet with rejection by the common mind. It was to the individual that he addressed himself, for it is as individuals that we recognise truth, and as individuals that we read. This is why Lawrence was a writer; and why reading him remains a subversive, transformative, life-altering act.
A two-part adaptation of The Rainbow and Women in Love, broadcast asWomen in Love, is on BBC4 on Thursday 24 and 31 March at 9pm.
I am a freelance and development editor. I also work as a critic - book reviewer, evaluating and reading manuscripts for publishing houses and clients. The genres that I am interested in are - fiction (all kinds); children's and YA literature; non-fiction, including biographies and academic, especially related to gender studies.
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