The Rainbow

Each generation of the Brangwens grapples with forming their identities, especially in relationship to their friends, families, and positions in society. The men especially define themselves in relationship to their wives and their female children. When Tom refuses to give Will and Anna permission to marry, Anna angrily declares that Tom is not her father, and her outburst provokes a kind of existential crisis for Tom: “His heart was bleak. He was not her father. That beloved image she had broken. Who was he then?” (119). If Tom’s bond with Anna ruptures, he loses his sense of self and how he envisions his place in the family. After losing this paternal bond, he no longer feels comfortable in his spousal bond with Lydia or his fraternal bond with Alfred. Tom’s self is rooted in his role as (step)father, and without it, he is lost.

Anton also experiences a similar existential crisis when he wonders:

What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all. The Whole mattered—but the unit, the person, had no importance, except as he represented the Whole (304).

Anton does not conceive of himself as an individual with bonds to other individuals. Rather, he envisions himself as being a small fragment of a larger civilization, indistinguishable from other people. He surrenders himself to his social position as a soldier, believing his deployments will help take English civilization to purportedly “uncivilized” people. His understanding of himself as a soldier first and a man second causes irreconcilable friction with Ursula—he may love her, but marrying her becomes a mission he must fulfill as a man, just like conquering another nation is a requisite part of being a soldier. He does not truly see her as an individual with her own wants and needs, because in his vision of people as parts of a greater whole, the individual does not matter.

Unlike those of Ursula’s parents and her grandparents, her struggle is more closely related to her difficulties in securing any sense of self at all. She believes she has no self, and she is ashamed to feel she exists in such fundamental difference from her peers: “She shrank violently from people, ashamed she was not as they were, fixed, emphatic, but a wavering, undefined sensibility only, without form or being” (311). Ursula labors under the misconception that a self is a fixed state an individual produces, rather than something more nebulous that exists in different phases at every stage of life. Her struggle to claim selfhood in the regimental machinery of her education is part of the reason why her relationship with Winifred affects her so profoundly. In The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (2020), Benjamin D. Hagen notes that Ursula’s relationship with Winifred “coincides with various other transitional and shifting experiences inflecting how Ursula is coming to build a sense of self” (201). In school, Ursula unlearns the freedoms she grew up with at home and learns lessons of conformity. Winifred appears to her as unique and vibrant, as someone claiming even the slightest bit of individuality in a system that enforces obedience; their intimate moments are kept secret to avoid publicly violating societal norms against romantic relationships between women. Winifred’s defiance of the system gives Ursula hope, even if she does not recognize it as such at the time. Only later, when she successfully sets Winifred up with her uncle, Tom, does Ursula realize what a role model Winifred was to her as an independent, single woman. In marriage and motherhood—the two most prominent signs of female conformity—Winifred becomes unrecognizable.