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412 The twentieth century: 1900–45<br />

would be feeling vaguely uncomfortable. His soul would reach<br />

out in its blind way to her and find her gone. He felt a sort of<br />

emptiness, almost like a vacuum in his soul. He was unsettled and<br />

restless. Soon he could not live in that atmosphere, and he affected<br />

his wife. Both felt an oppression on their breathing when they<br />

were left together for some time. Then he went to bed and she<br />

settled down to enjoy herself alone, working, thinking, living.<br />

Lawrence’s next major novel was The Rainbow, which was published<br />

in 1915 but suppressed a month later as indecent. The novel deals<br />

with three generations of the Brangwen family, from the middle of the<br />

nineteenth century to the early years of the twentieth century. Like<br />

many of Lawrence’s novels, The Rainbow explores human individuality<br />

and all that might hinder or fulfil that essential individuality. At the<br />

heart of individual fulfilment is a proper basis for marital relationships,<br />

and the elemental symbols which Lawrence employs represent the<br />

deepest rhythms and impulses in the relationships between men and<br />

women. At the end of The Rainbow, Ursula Brangwen, the main<br />

character, rejects a future life with her fiancé because he is insufficiently<br />

aware of her as a unique individual. For Lawrence, awareness of the<br />

essential ‘otherness’ of one’s partner is fundamental to a truly<br />

harmonious relationship. If either partner is too weak or seeks to<br />

dominate the other, then mutual destruction will follow.<br />

In The Rainbow and its sequel Women in Love (1921), Lawrence<br />

explores human relationships with psychological precision and with<br />

intense poetic feeling. He combines a detailed realism with poetic<br />

symbolism in ways which make us believe in his characters at the same<br />

time as we understand the most deeply buried aspects of their selves.<br />

Although technically more innovative and experimental, Lawrence’s<br />

novels owe much to the nineteenth-century tradition of realism developed<br />

by George Eliot, in which a central task of the novelist was to depict the<br />

formation and development of an individual character. Much of Women<br />

in Love – including an opening chapter which was suppressed for many<br />

years – discusses the close male–male relationship between Gerald Crich<br />

and Rupert Birkin. Here, they have just had a wrestling match:<br />

‘It was real set-to, wasn’t it?’ said Birkin, looking at Gerald with<br />

darkened eyes.

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