The Rainbow and the Flood of Consciousness

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence almost certainly read Howards End between its publication in 1910 and the beginning of his own work on what was to become The Rainbow and Women in Love. Forster’s novel was favourably reviewed, widely discussed, and sufficiently rooted in Edwardian conventions to enjoy considerable popular success. Lawrence mentions it several times in his letters;¹ The Rainbow’s structure and symbolism suggest that he both understood Forster’s aims and worked to avoid Forster’s failures. ‘You did make a nearly deadly mistake glorifying those business people in Howards End’, Lawrence wrote to Forster several years later. ‘Business is no good.’² Like his heroine, Forster seems to undermine his own aesthetic and humanistic values out of fairness to those who guarantee his income; Lawrence, in contrast, was freed by birth and poverty from any such constraint. In The Rainbow, he reworks Forster’s antinomies of prose and passion, business and art, into broader contrasts between mind-consciousness and blood-intimacy, between male and female principles, between the life of the spirit and the life of the body. Ursula’s culminating rainbow vision retrospectively unites these contrasts, promising that man’s relationship with nature will never again be nearly drowned beneath a flood of consciousness like that which has innundated the modern world.