Lawrence’s Quest in The Rainbow

Abstract

A major subject of much modern literature is the author’s quest for self-definition. In particular, the search for moral and aesthetic values is central to the novels of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Conrad, and Lawrence. Yet we have neglected how novels reveal their authors because much modern criticism has been uncomfortable with the expressive qualities of texts. Certainly, the New Criticism insisted that texts be examined as self-referential ontologies which are distinct from their authors’ lives. Unwilling to commit the intentional fallacy, Anglo-American formalism ceded discussion of the author to biographers, psychoanalytic critics, and, more recently, to phenomonologists, structuralists, and their successors. Yet because the quest for values, form, and language is a central subject in much modern fiction, it must be discussed as a formal component within the text, separate and distinct from the narrator or implied author. To neglect the dialogue between the creative process and the subject matter of the story is to ignore a fundamental part of the novel’s imagined world. Lawrence’s struggle with his subject (his relationship with Frieda) is a major aspect of The Rainbow, just as Sons and Lovers dramatizes his struggle to come to terms with his relationship with Jessie Chambers and his mother. Moreover, the author’s quest for self-understanding is central to other late nineteenth and early twentieth century British novelists: Conrad in the Marlow tales, Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, and Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

Now you will find [Frieda] and me in the novel, I think, and the work is of both of us.

(22 Apr. 1914; Huxley, p. 191)¹