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Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Late in his life, in 1933, Yeats read Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love “with excitement,” and found the love story of Lady Chatterley's Lover “noble.” In Lawrence he found an ally “directed against modern abstraction”; and he considered that, with Joyce, Lawrence had “almost restored to us the Eastern simplicity.” A hatred of Abstraction; a fearless plunge into the mire of human existence; an anti-intellectual stance (which was almost at times a pose); and a mythopoeic conception of art and life: these Yeats and Lawrence shared, whatever their differences—which were considerable. And what they shared accounts in part for their similar response to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisler and that hero's search for experience: it was, they felt, guided too dominantly by intellectual choices. In 1928 Lawrence wrote to Aldous Huxley that he thought “Wilhelm M eisler … amazing as a book of peculiar immorality, the perversity of intellectualised sex, and the utter incapacity for any development of contact with any other human being, which is peculiarly bourgeois and Goethian.” Yeats remarked that Goethe, a man “in whom objectivity and subjectivity were intermixed,” could “but seek … [Unity of Being] as Wilhelm Meister seeks it intellectually, critically, and through a multitude of deliberately chosen experiences.” He insisted that “true Unity of Being … is found emotionally, instinctively, by the rejection of all experience not of the right quality, and by the limitation of its quantity.” But for Yeats, the poet, it was less problematic than for Lawrence, the novelist, to crusade against Abstraction and Intellection: the poem had its gnomic power to snap meaning at you in an instant of time; the novel had somehow to have people and a story —and a world in which both could occur.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
Note 1 in page 103 The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London 1954), pp. 803,807,810.
Note 2 in page 103 D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London, 1955), p. 148.
Note 3 in page 103 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1953), p. 212. It is relevant to record young Henry James's remarks on Wilhelm Meister (he was twenty-two) in his review of “Carlyle's Translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister,” first published in The North American Review, July 1865, and reprinted in Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. Albert Mordell (New York, 1957), pp. 267–271. James regarded the book as a “great novel” (p. 267), recognizing, however, its intellec-tualized stance: “It is, indeed, to the understanding exclusively, and never, except in the episode of Mignon, to the imagination, that the author appeals”; “Was there ever a book so dispassionate, or, as some persons prefer to call it, cold-blooded? … [But] Goethe's plan was non flere, non indignari, sed intelligere” (p. 271). It was finally the ‘reality’ of Goethe that most impressed James: “Goethe's persons are not lifelike … they are life itself … they live,—and assuredly a figure cannot do more than that” (p. 269).
Note 4 in page 103 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, tr. John Oxen-ford, ed. J. K. Moorhead, Everyman's Library, 1951, p. 103.
Note 5 in page 105 Selected Literary Criticism, p. 120.
Note 6 in page 105 Since I am now prepared to treat The Rainbow as a Bildungsroman, I should make clear that I am not forgetting that the novel is also a family chronicle. But Lawrence's interest is clearly in Ursula—in her education. And the novel is shaped toward that end from the beginning, since Ursula learns—and profits—from the failures of the generations that precede her. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks is also a family chronicle, but the fourth generation, represented by Hanno, never has a chance. Hanno is trapped by heredity and destroyed by his forebears. The Rainbow, unlike Buddenbrooks, leads toward a progressive strengthening, toward life, not toward decline and death. Here, too, Lawrence reversed a trend of his time. Marvin Mudrick has written a fine appreciative and interpretive essay on The Rainbow: “The Originality of The Rainbow,” reprinted in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, ed. Harry T. Moore (Carbondale, 111., 1959), pp. 56–82. His essay is shaped toward different ends than mine, which is ultimately an examination of Ursula's experience, the validity of the rainbow image (which Mudrick defends), and the tradition of the Bildungsroman. I cannot agree that the “last half of The Rainbow seems to have been written with a slackening of Lawrence's attention to proportion and detail” (p. 78). The words “originality” and “tradition,” as Mudrick uses them, carry rather special meanings: I argue that The Rainbow is more within a tradition than Lawrence thought and that its structure is defensible in these terms. The originality lies in Lawrence's special conception of the hero's education. Mudrick is, of course, right in insisting that part of the “originality” of the novel was its treatment of themes hitherto less boldly explored in English fiction.
Note 7 in page 105 F. R. Leavis thinks otherwise. See D. B. Lawrence: Novelist (New York, 1956), p. 111.
Note 8 in page 105 Two strong objections to the conclusion of The Rainbow are raised by Leavis and Graham Hough. Although he admires The Rainbow and thinks it a unique book, Leavis feels that there are “signs of too great a tentativeness in the development and organization of the later part; signs of a growing sense in the writer of an absence of any conclusion in view” (p. 172). He also feels that the rainbow vision is “a note wholly unprepared and unsupported, defying the preceding pages” (p. 170). This position is supported by Graham Hough, The Dark Sun, A Study of D. H. Lawrence (London, 1956), p. 71: “the book can have no proper ending … we can only feel that … [the rainbow vision] is quite insufficiently based, nothing in the book up to now has led up to it.” Arnold Kettle, in an otherwise useful essay, concludes with a strong social indictment of Lawrence and of the rainbow image: “the final image of the rainbow, upon which almost everything, artistically, must depend, is not a triumphant image resolving in itself the half-clarified contradictions brought into play throughout the book, but a misty, vague and unrealized vision which gives us no more than the general sense that Lawrence is, after all, on the side of life” (An Introduction to the English Novel, London, 1953, II, 131). The most recent attack on The Rainbow (though it is not a total condemnation) was published after the present essay was completed. S. L. Goldberg, in “The Rainbow: Fiddle-Bow and Sand,” Essays in Criticism, xt (October 1961), finds, in general, that the ideology and the artistry of the novel are unresolved. He underscores the “emotional falsity of the last few pages” (p. 427); finds the second half of the novel weaker than the first; accuses Lawrence of “romantic assumptions … impatience and vagueness … in the last pages” (pp. 431432); and sees the rainbow image as a culminating “weakness that is obviously more than stylistic and is also more than local” (pp. 426–427).
Note 9 in page 106 Louis Fraiberg, “The Unattainable Self: D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers,” in Twelve Original Essays on Great English Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 1960), pp. 200–201. Mark Spilka is willing to grant Paul “a kind of half-realized, or jigsaw success …” (The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence, Bloomington, Ind., 1955, p. 85). Graham Hough can say no more than that Paul shows himself “capable of a regenerating spark” (p. 52). Lea vis devotes no space to this novel at all. Eliseo Vivas feels that the ending is there “simply to wind up the book and enable[s] the novelist to write ‘The End’ ” (D. H. Lawrence, The Failure and the Triumph of Art, Evans-ton, 111., 1960, p. 175).
Note 10 in page 106 Selected Literary Criticism, p. 13.
Note 11 in page 106 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
Note 12 in page 109 Leavis admires this passage and feels it to be symbolic, but only of the world which lies before them, not also of the world which in the end will lie behind them—at least behind Ursula (p. 165).
Note 13 in page 110 Pp. 69–71.
Note 14 in page 110 Spilka discusses this perceptively and in greater detail, pp. 111–112. See also Leavis, p. 118 ff.
Note 15 in page 112 Like Lear, Ursula is freed from the “wheel of fire,” “the rack of this tough world”; Lawrence felt that “Lear was essentially happy, even in his greatest misery” (Selected Literary Criticism, p. 123), just as Yeats considered Lear “gay” in “Lapis Lazuli.” Lawrence might have entitled his penultimate chapter “The Ecstasy of Bitterness,” instead of “The Bitterness of Ecstasy”: at any rate, release makes way for vision: “the moment of [Ursula's] vision,” writes Harry T. Moore, “is the moment of her release” (“The Rainbow,” The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore, Norman, Okla., 1953, p. 156).
Note 16 in page 112 “The Morality of the Novel,” Selected Literary Criticism, p. 110.
Note 17 in page 112 Ibid., pp. 108–109.
Note 18 in page 112 Ibid., p. 118. Lawrence considered Flaubert, Ibsen, and Hardy “nihilist” and wrote, after reading Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns: “I hate Bennett's resignation… . [the book] seems like an acceptance—so does all the modern stuff since Flaubert” (pp. 72, 131). Emotional education would resist both annihilation and resignation. The schoolroom section of The Rainbow, with Ursula in the frustrating position as teacher, ironically counterpoints her education in the world: just as she must fail—in the ordinary sense—to learn from experience, so she must fail to impart such wisdom in the schoolroom, society's microcosmic experience-chamber. The effect of the schoolroom's inadequacy is thematically suggestive in projecting—often through ironic parallel to the school of life—the educative theme of nineteenth-century fiction. The schoolroom appears often, of course, in Dickens; but it plays its role in a good many books—Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Le Rouge et le Noir, and, to reach into our own century, in Buddenbrooks and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to cite only a few instances.
Note 19 in page 112 See his review of In Our Time (ibid., pp. 427–428): “Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away… . Beat it! ‘Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it.‘ Ah, the pleasure in saying that!” (p. 427). The review is dated 1927.
Note 20 in page 113 Ibid., p. 120.
Note 21 in page 113 Conversations with Eckermann, p. 84.
Note 22 in page 113 “Love,” Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. with an Introduction by Edward D. McDonald (London, 1961), pp. 152–153.
Note 23 in page 113 The rainbow does not suggest denial of life, nor is it a permanent lure from the real world. As Spilka (who approves of the ending) says, Ursula must learn to have a “conjunction” with life (p. 112); the full possibilities of such a conjunction are explored in Women in Love. One has finally to meet the objection—implicit in most critiques of the rainbow symbol—that, on the literal level, the rainbow is a temporary, transitory image: rainbows give way to different weather. But Lawrence was fully aware of this: The Rainbow gave way to a different novel. The very transitoriness of the rainbow makes it a proper and significant symbol for, at the end of the novel, Ursula is meant to be projected into that fourth dimension, suspended between an end and a beginning. It is a position of respite from which she will later re-enter the world; though neither she nor the world will be the same.