How to read The Rainbow

The Rainbow is the first work in which Lawrence's ‘metaphysic’ of impersonal feeling was given comprehensive and central expression. Even at a comparatively early stage of composition he recognised that the quality he was seeking involved something more positive than ‘restraint’:

The Laocoon writhing and shrieking have gone from my new work, and I still think there is a bit of stillness, like the wide, still, unseeing eyes of a Venus of Melos. I am still fascinated by the Greek – more, perhaps, by the Greek sculpture than the plays, even, though I love the plays. There is something in the Greek sculpture that my soul is hungry for – something of the eternal stillness that lies under all movement, under all life, like a source, incorruptible and inexhaustible. It is deeper than change, and struggling. So long I have acknowledged only the struggle, the stream, the change. And now I begin to feel something of the source, the great impersonal which never changes and out of which all change comes.

Clearly, he is after something behind the ‘shimmer’ of life that Paul sought to capture in Sons and Lovers, and with successive rewritings he developed a more precise understanding of his conception. In particular, his Brangwen story concerns a necessary struggle towards a greater individuality in which Lawrence is now able to weigh the ambivalent value of individuality itself as well as the ambivalence of the ‘great impersonal’ from which it arises.