The Rainbow

“He could not learn deliberately. His mind simply did not work.”

Tom struggles with the intellectual labor of his lessons at school. His mother’s wish for her children to be educated is nearly lost on Tom, as he finds himself unsuited to the structure of public school. This is not to say that Tom is unintelligent; he excels in literary studies, but he ultimately gravitates toward the practical education gained by working the farm.

“He was back in his youth, a boy, haunted by the sound of the owls, waking up his brother to speak to him. And his mind drifted away to the birds […] his brother had shot, fluffy, dust-coloured, dead heaps of softness with faces absurdly asleep. It was a queer thing, a dead owl.”

Lydia’s pained cries while giving birth remind Tom of owls he heard outside as a boy. His brother killed the owls to stop the noise, leaving Tom with a disturbing image of the dead birds. This auditory image links childbirth with death.

“In the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her former self.”

Lydia changes after giving birth to her first son, and she feels disconnected from the woman she used to be before motherhood. Although she did not physically die during childbirth, the act of becoming a mother metaphorically killed her former self.

“You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do you do to make me love you?”

Lydia confronts Tom about her suspicion that he is having an affair. During their argument, they realize they make each other feel unappreciated and unloved. Lydia’s question—“What do you do to make me love you?”—is especially poignant as it directly addresses Tom’s distant attitude toward her. This discussion leads to an important breakthrough in their marriage.

“[…] she could not for her life see why a woman should bully and insult her because she did not know thirty lines of ‘As You Like It.’ After all, what did it matter if she knew them or not?”

Anna wonders if her education is really as important as people make it seem. Her attitude here reflects her stepfather’s own thoughts during his education. Although Anna takes to school more easily than Tom did, she shares his feeling that not everything she learns is actually necessary to her growth or position in society.

“You are not my father—my father is dead—you are not my father.”

Anna and Tom fight after he denies Will permission to marry her. She lashes out at Tom, striking the nerve she knows will hurt him the most: their relationship as stepfather and stepdaughter. This foreshadows a pattern in Anna’s adulthood: When things do not go her way, she takes her frustration out on those closest to her, with the intention of hurting them.

“And to him, as the days went by, it was as if the heavens had fallen, and he were sitting with her among the ruins, in a new world, everybody else buried, themselves two blissful survivors, with everything to squander as they would.”

Will revels in the freedom of his honeymoon in this apocalyptic image of the world destroyed. In solitude, he and Anna are like Adam and Eve, the only two people on earth. However, transferring the Garden of Eden to a post-apocalyptic world shows how drastically industrialization has changed their world: Rather than imaging themselves in a natural paradise, Will’s vision of a “new world” sees the rest of humanity buried under the ruins of an industrialized society.

“She shrank and became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down. A sort of swoon of helplessness came over her. She was of another order than he, she had no defence against him. Against such an influence, she was only vulnerable, she was given up.”

When Will lashes out at Anna during a particularly heated argument in the same way she has done to him in the past, she becomes afraid of him. Being treated similarly to the way she treats others makes her feel broken and small.

“You mustn’t expect it. Between two people, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you nor him. It is a third thing you must create. You mustn’t expect it to be just your way.”

Lydia advises Anna on her fraught marriage, but the lesson is lost on Anna. She does not share Lydia’s patience, nor does she see the need to develop a foundation of mutual trust in her relationship with Will.

“He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand, without one belief in which to rest.”

Will resents Anna’s interrogation of his faith. Rather than merely asking questions, Anna mocks Will’s beliefs and the religious art he admires. She knows precisely how to hurt him the most, and Will feels that she will shame him out of all his passions.

“She saw him, she saw him go white when he heard the news, then frown, as if he thought, ‘Why have they died now, when I have no time to grieve?’”

Lydia recalls her first husband, Paul, reacting to the news of their children’s deaths. She resents him for not grieving and for responding to the news as if losing their children were inconvenient for his political work.

“For the first time, she was in love with a vision of herself: she saw as it were a fine little reflection of herself in his eyes. And she must act up to this: she must be beautiful.”

Ursula attends to her appearance with more care as she and Anton grow closer. She identifies strongly with the image of herself that she thinks Anton sees, even if that image is not an accurate view of who she really is. Rather than considering what the image he has of her might mean, she works hard to adhere to it.

“‘Don’t you like me tonight?’ said his low voice, the voice of the shadow over her shoulder.”

Anton’s self-consciousness at the wedding celebration frustrates Ursula. His question strikes her as being whiny—childish, even—and she is acutely aware of his hovering around her. Anton is an annoyance here; if he were a fly, she would swat him away.

“Love is a dead idea to [men]. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say ‘You are my idea,’ so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me!”

Winifred talks to Ursula about men, and her views on gender dynamics put into words the lesson Ursula grew up learning from Anna and Lydia: No matter what men do, they will fail. Men fail women because they do not change with the world, and they continually try to fit women into old ideas of love, marriage, and domesticity.

“The prison was round her now! She looked at the walls, colour washed, pale green and chocolate, at the large windows with frowsy geraniums against the pale glass, at the long rows of desks, arranged in a squadron, and dread filled her.”

Ursula surveys her new classroom, and the imagery in this passage is reminiscent of how one might describe a jail or an army facility. Ursula literally refers to the classroom as a prison, and the desks arranged in “squadrons” represents the discipline and order imparted by schooling. No matter who the student is, school will make them conform, if not by regimentation, then by beating.

“Constantly haunting her, like a darkness hovering over her heart and threatening to swoop down on it at every moment, was the sense that somehow, somehow she was brought down. Bitterly she denied unto herself that she was really a school-teacher.”

Ursula struggles to establish herself as the authority figure in her classroom, and she directly equates her professional issues with personal failure. She feels defeated by her inability to control her students, even though she has no formal training in education at this point in the novel. Ursula blames herself, rather than blaming her public education for not preparing her for this job.

“She must admit that the man’s world was too strong for her, she could not take her place in it…And all her life henceforth, she must go on, never having freed herself of the man’s world, never having achieved the freedom of the great world of responsible work.”

Ursula nearly surrenders to her self-doubt. What is noteworthy in this passage is her equation of her professional role with the “man’s world,” as if by earning a wage she entered a different way of living. On the contrary, the society in which she grew up was always a man’s world, whether she knew it or not.

“Passion is only part of love. And it seems so much because it knows it can’t last. That is why passion is never happy.”

Ursula’s perspective on love and marriage differs from Maggie’s in one key way: Maggie views love as a flower one has to pluck when it appears, whereas Ursula sees love as overly reliant on passion, which is fleeting. Love that relies on passion alone will fail, and lovers who place the most value on passion will always find themselves unhappy when the passion runs out.

“[…] she was nearly forty years old, she began to come awake from her sleep of motherhood, her energy moved more outwards.”

Anna begins to dream her life can be more than it is after Will is hired by the Education Committee to teach crafting in the public schools. Motherhood being a “sleep” from which one must awake signals to the reader that Anna feels her role as a mother is not the only thing she is meant to do. Her turning her focus outward is reminiscent of the novel’s opening passages about the Brangwen women always looking out to the world in anticipation of the unknown.

“[…] out into the world meant out into the world. Will Brangwen must become modern.”

The Brangwens move from Cossethay to Beldover, and their move from Yew Cottage to the new house in the colliery town signals a distinct shift from rural to industrial life. The transition is not one that the family can make halfway—if they mean to enter the world, they have to do so on the world’s terms.

“Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different. Yet she was always Ursula Brangwen. But what did it mean, Ursula Brangwen? She did not know what she was.”

Ursula grapples with her identity again after agreeing to marry Anton. In her youth, she viewed the self as something stable that one achieves and holds onto permanently. As a young adult, Ursula discovers that the self is ever-changing, a process rather than a product. Her questions echo Tom Brangwen’s anxieties when Anna weds Will—he, too, wondered who he will be in that new phase of his life.

“She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality.”

Ursula and Anton are sexually intimate for the first time. Ursula’s experience is transcendent, but the imagery is unexpected. Rather than setting the moment in heavenly or Edenic scenes, the imagery evokes darkness and eternity as her vision of paradise.

“I’d far rather have an aristocracy of birth than of money. Who are the aristocrats now—who are chosen as the best to rule? Those who have money and the brains for money. It doesn’t matter what else they have: but they must have money-brains;—because they are ruling in the name of money.”

Ursula’s political views point the reader’s attention to a significant criticism of the rapidly industrialized and capitalist society in England. Ursula believes the members of the ruling class do not rule for everyone’s best interests; rather, they rule to build their own wealth and status. Ursula’s vision of an ideal political system is one in which money is not the primary goal.