692 Lawrence, D. H.
Inger and Anton Skrebensky. The novel is devoted
mostly to Ursula, whose story continues in Law-
rence’s Women in Love (1920).
The Rainbow was banned as obscene soon after
publication, but it is now generally recognized as a
significant novel because of its innovative form and
its bold thematic treatment not only of marriage,
sexuality, and the unconscious, but also of education,
gender and industrialism.
Mitchell R. Lewis
commodiFication/commercialization
in The Rainbow
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, commerce
in England was dominated by industrialism. Law-
rence introduces the theme of industrialism after the
prologue, beginning with the description of a canal
constructed across the Brangwen farm that connects
“the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Val-
ley.” The Brangwens receive financial compensation
for this trespass on their property, but Lawrence
indicates that this canal serving the collieries is the
beginning of an “invasion” into what is described as
a pastoral paradise for the Brangwen men. Soon,
a colliery is built on the other side of the canal,
followed by a railway line. With this development
come “red, crude houses plastered on the valley in
masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill of the
town.” The Brangwens are “astonished” by the com-
motion, becoming “strangers in their own place,”
always aware of the sound of “the rhythmic run of
the winding engines.” Driving home, they see “the
blackened colliers trooping from the pit-mouth,”
and during the harvest they endure the “faint, sul-
phurous smell of pit-refuse burning.” The industrial
invasion contaminates the countryside, disrupting
the vital interchange between the Brangwens and
their farm. Lawrence suggests a fall from paradise,
contrasting industrialism with nature as he reveals
its deadening influence.
The subject of industrialism comes up again
when Ursula introduces Winifred Inger to her
Uncle Tom. A manager of a new colliery, Tom
lives in Wiggiston, a former hamlet in agricultural
country that has been transformed into an industrial
town, much like the towns in the vicinity of the
Brangwen farm. Colliers hang out in gangs, looking
like “spectres,” while the town itself is character-
ized by a “homogeneous amorphous sterility.” The
buildings and roads are uniform and regimented,
yet for all this order there is “no organic formation.”
The order is mechanical, not vital. It is imposed,
not growing out of the life of its inhabitants. The
same is true of the “great, mathematical colliery on
the other side of town.” It also imposes itself on the
workers, who have come to believe that “they must
alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather
than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves.”
Tom and Winifred derive a perverse pleasure from
“serving the machine,” worshiping it, feeling “free
from the clog and degradation of human feeling.”
Ursula, on the other hand, rejects “the great machine
which has taken us all captives.” She would see the
colliery destroyed and the men out of work, “rather
than serve such a Moloch as this.” She is equally
appalled with Tom and Winifred and “their strange,
soft, half-corrupt element.”
As Ursula’s reactions suggest, Lawrence’s por-
trayal of industrialism emphasizes the sacrifice of
the individual to the machine. In this regard, it is
linked to the novel’s general concern with the mod-
ern world’s attempt to subordinate the individual
to society. The novel repeatedly uses terms associ-
ated with the colliery to describe society’s negative
influence. Anton Skrebensky, for instance, views
London as an “ashen-dry, cold world of rigidity,
dead walls and mechanical traffic, and creeping,
spectre-like people,” and he himself becomes a
person in whom “only the mechanism of his life
continued.” Ursula’s school is also described in
similar terms, the teachers “compelling many chil-
dren into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing
the whole set to an automatic state of obedience
and attention.”
The industrialism theme takes on its full value
in Ursula’s concluding vision of the rainbow. First,
she sees “the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which
seemed already enclosed in a coffin,” and the houses
of a colliery town, “which seemed to spread over
the hillside in their insentient triumph, a triumph
of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines.”
Then she imagines that the colliers have a “rainbow
arched in their blood,” and it is this rainbow that is
prompting a new germination that will cast aside the