The Rainbow

Abstract

One of the major patterns to emerge from a reading of The Rainbow is that of the shifting relationship between what Lawrence calls ‘the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life’ and ‘the spoken world beyond’ (p. 8), and this fact alone is enough to make the novel one of the most interesting and challenging of his entire achievement in fiction. During the course of this chapter I shall be discussing some of the most significant manifestations and expressions of this pattern, both in terms of the way Lawrence manipulates and exploits the resources of language and in terms of the engagement with the subject of language itself as a primary preoccupation of the novel. The Rainbow is itself about language, about the relations that are possible between articulacy and inarticulacy, between expression and the inexpressible, between speech and silence, and is therefore peculiarly appropriate for special treatment in a discussion of Lawrence’s language.