Commentary on Ch.1 Rainbow-by D. H. Lawrence

The extract form the book ‘The Rainbow’ by D. H. Lawrence is taken from chapter 1. In the extract the writer explores the theme of human relationships and particularly the one between a man and a woman. He describes the wavery nature of love and fear of uncertainty through a third person narrative of Brangwen’s experience with a woman. The writer lays great stress on the ambivalent characteristics of such relationships and reflects this in the body of the prose. Lawrence is deeply concerned with his characters emotions and physical experience.
The events in the story take place in a vicarage kitchen where Brangwen is anxiously sitting and observing a woman he loves. Brangwen under goes a mixture of emotions and seems to be totally ‘puzzled for her’ and the writer effectively demonstrates this when he describes the woman’s mouth as ‘ugly-beautiful’ and contradicts himself in saying that while her grey eyes smiled her mouth was displayed sadness. Brangwen seems to be under the sway of his passions and he rises to kiss against his own will. The character seems to be nervous and fears rejection and his feelings are reflected in the varying lengths of the sentences. The sentences like –‘Again he had not got her. /She turned away.’ are relatively shorter and abrupt to convey the anxiousness.
Brangwen’s thoughts seem to be affected by his passions as he sees beauty in untidiness. The writer makes use of colours to describe the emotions of the charters. For instance Brangwen’s eyes are blue with passion and bewilderment while the kitchen maids eyes are black unfathomable and her thoughts appear to fluctuate in an electric manner in which she accepts and abandons the man. This reinforces the point of ambivalent love. The author also gives a detailed description of Brangwen’s physical sensations in writing:
‘He breathed with difficulty, and sweat came out at the roots of his hair, on his forehead.’ The writer also makes a lot of use of emotive language such as-‘agony’, ’anguish’, ’fear’, ‘unmoved and sad’ to address his emotional theme.
Lawrence beautifully portrays the kiss and the passions associated with it. He repeats the adjective ‘ugly-beautiful’ to lay stress on it, and uses the image of the woman seeming to be ‘thundering’ at him, which hints at the power of her emotions and suggests something more threating in love. In the sentence –‘He drew away, white, unbreathing.’ The author makes use of punctuation mark (,) to disrupt the flow of the sentence and convey the moment of tension and give a sense of urgency and indecision that is also felt by the character. The writer focuses on the eyes of the lovers to convey their emotions and the verbal conversation between them is kept minimum. At points when there is a communion between them the sentence flows freely. The writer yet again brings up the ambivalent attribute of love in in saying that how the lovers seemed distant and intimately close at the same time and how Brangwen wanted to possess her and renounce her.
In the final paragraph Lawrence gives a description of a stormy night sky and uses these powerful images and metaphors of nature to portray the emotional experience of Brangwen with the woman. The author also cleverly links them to the descriptions of the woman. The image presented is of dark clouds blowing over the bright disk of moonlight and instants totally blocking it. Just like in the woman’s mind there is thunder in the sky and clouds seem to be dark black like her unfathomable eyes. And under light of the moon the clouds seem to be ‘teeming and tearing’ like the women ‘thundering’ with the ‘force and passion.’ this indeed replicates the violent image. The writer creates a contrast between the instant of seeing a halo (a symbol of holiness and purity) followed by the ‘terror of the moon’. This represents the switch in the moods of Brangwen and the theme of ambivalent relationship.
Thus through this analysis we can appreciate the writers choice of words and the literary techniques he uses in order to present his emotional theme about the strangeness of love and the ambivalent experience it provides which is in this story provided through the emotions of Brangwen.