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The Evolution of Lawrence’s Burgeoning Socio-philosophical Thoughts in The Rainbow, Women in Love and Touch and Go

Marie Geraldine Rademacher

Résumé

With the intention of reforming society, D.H. Lawrence began to be preoccupied with the terms of the social contract, as his letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, from April 1915 indicates: “as for my Contrat Social, wait, wait, wait, for I can’t do it yet. Soon I shall try” (Letters ii. 312). Written in the same year as this letter, The Rainbow mirrors Lawrence’s early “awareness and understanding of the nature of society” (Maes-Jelinek 11). This novel and its sequel Women in Love (1920) underline the important changes that were taking place at the time, especially the growth of class consciousness, which led to major upheavals that were already brewing in the late nineteenth century. The Rainbow reflects Lawrence’s nascent observation and assessment of the social pact, while Women in Love, essentially through the description of the relation between the Crich in their social position as factory owners and the working class, offers a deeper reflection on capitalism, the people, their social condition, and their right to revolt. In this exploration of the social question, it is essential to emphasize Birkin and Gerald’s discussion on the necessity to “return to nature” (WL 55) and the implication of such a decision. Finally, it seems that Lawrence’s conception of the social contract comes to maturity in his political play Touch and Go (1920), which can be read as a follow-up to the ideas expressed in Women in Love. My analysis of these works considers the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s thoughts on Lawrence’s understanding and criticism of the social pact.

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Rousseau’s Social Contract

1It is with the famous line: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (45), that Rousseau begins his book The Social Contract (1762), in which he claims that men are essentially free, and were free in the State of Nature, but that the “progress” of civilization has led them to give up that natural liberty for civil liberty. In his view, the State of Nature was a peaceful time, when people lived simple lives, full of insouciance. However, a series of important changes which occurred over time, such as the increase of the population, the formation of small communities, the introduction of the division of labor and, most significantly, the emergence of legal forms of private property, resulted in the engendering of competition, greed, envy, while fostering inequalities. Given these transformations and their repercussions, men were left with no other choice but to abandon this primitive model and enter the social pact. According to Rousseau, the idea of the social contract is that men agree to form a collectivity so that “each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and we as a body receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole” (55). Under these conditions, Rousseau admits that “what man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and an unlimited right to anything by which he is tempted and can obtain” (59). He explains that on the other hand “what man gains is civil freedom and the right of property over everything that he possesses” (ibid.). Yet, if the original idea behind the social contract was to ensure equal protection of the rights of everyone in the community, in the end this pact proved to have benefitted only a few and instead to have rather exacerbated social inequalities, which Rousseau holds responsible for the ills of modern society. This idea of the role of community and collectivity will resonate in Lawrence’s works. It is central to his examination of social values and his realization that the system has crippled human individualism.

The Family in The Rainbow and Lawrence’s Early Assessment of the Social Pact

2Although almost two centuries separate Rousseau and Lawrence, similar concerns for the effects of modernity on England’s economic and social structure are raised in Lawrence’s works. Allan Thompson observes that the Industrial Revolution not only brought about technological advancement but also a shift in people’s mentality, and that it profoundly transformed British society and led to “fundamental change in its character and outlook” (30). He explains that:

The external appearance of society altered – the majority of people were urban dwellers, their occupations as well as their dwellings divorced from the land; the ambitions of the society altered – at the upper levels land ownership lost its social position and the measure of social achievement was more material and wide-ranging. (28)

3Experiencing the drawbacks of the industrial revolution firsthand, Lawrence admits in his essay “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside”:

In my father’s generation, with the old wild England behind them, and the lack of education, the man was not beaten down. But in my generation, the boys I went to school with, colliers now, have all been beaten down, what with the din-din-dinning of Board Schools, books and cinemas, clergymen, the whole national and human consciousness hammering on the fact of material prosperity above all things. (Phoenix: the posthumous papers of D.H. Lawrence 137)

4Hence, he concludes that “the industrial problem arises from the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition” (138). Competition, materialism, and greed are the flaws that Rousseau had also previously denounced. While Rousseau suggested that the social pact was created to address these challenges but that it failed to do so, Lawrence shows, through his observation of the people, the magnitude of the problem as it had intensified over the years.

  • 1 McCrum, “The 100 best novels: No 43-The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915).”

5It is in The Rainbow that Lawrence’s emerging engagement with the question of the social contract is visible. The novel tells the story of the Brangwen family over three generations and follows them from the pre-industrial to the industrial age, roughly from 1840 to 1905. Robert McCrum confirms that it “shows how the Brangwen farming family is changed by Britain’s industrial revolution, evolving from pastoral idyll to chaos of modernity.”1 This is evident in the novel’s opening scene, which starts with the description of the construction of the canal which broke into the family’s property:

About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a heavy bridge. […] The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land. Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen. (my emphasis; Lawrence 7)

6The use of “trespass” and “invasion” in the description of Marsh Farm is indicative of the writer’s concerns at the transformation brought about by industrialization and capitalism. Thus, Lawrence deliberately uses both the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and the saga of the Brangwen family, to illustrate the change in personal relationships, in individual mindsets and attitudes, occurring in British society over a 60-70-year timespan. For Rousseau, the family “may be regarded as the first model of political society: the leader corresponds to the father, the people to the children” (46). Nicholas Marsh notes that:

the main settings in The Rainbow follow a clearly structured progress moving in one direction: from an isolated house, through village, town, industrial conurbation, to city, and finally to the capital. The original community is a single separate family, and with each successive stage of development the community that surrounds the characters becomes larger, more populous and wider. (158)

7In the light of Rousseau’s model of the family as example of “the first model of political society” (46), Lawrence uses the Brangwen family as an illustration of a political community, in which the Brangwen men are the symbol of the patriarchal power but who suffer from the various manifestations of the impact of modernity on their rural life. They feel repulsed by the growing urban landscape and the masses, as Will’s exclamation upon his return from London shows:

How had helpless savages, running with their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a world of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more terrible than man himself, almost monstrous. (The Rainbow 161)

8As conservative patriarchal figures, the Brangwen men are also affected by the transformation of the traditional model of nuclear family and the role assigned to men and women within the domestic sphere. With the employment opportunities offered to women, who provided employers with a cheaper supply of labour, the family structure was modified, bringing “first physical and then mental separation of the couples” (Baysal 195). Alev Baysal explains that “physically men and wives were separated because women spent less time in the house. Thus, the more the females worked outside, the more they learned about different circumstances of life besides their domestic existence” (ibid.). This progression is visible through the personal experience of the Brangwen heroines. Contrary to their husband, the Brangwen women are depicted as “look[ing] out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm life, to the spoken life beyond” (The Rainbow 4), which indicates that they are ready to embrace the developments that the Industrial Revolution has brought into their life. They also stand “to see the far-off world of cities and governments […] where desires [are] fulfilled” (The Rainbow 5) and want to “enlarge their scope and range of freedom” (ibid.). They try to rebel against the established domestic norms and to become more independent. This is best illustrated through Ursula, who challenges the domestic life and sexual expectations for women of the time. Although she wants to grow out of this earlier model of political society that the family represents, as soon as she finds herself outside in the labour force she realizes that man is just the product of an education system based on mechanical teaching, geared to the preparation of the next generation for a life of “mechanical action” (The Rainbow 62). By using the family as microcosm of Britain, The Rainbow explores how industrialism and capitalism have negatively impacted people’s lives, dehumanizing them and cutting them from their natural and intuitive blood-consciousness. While the novel is an early assessment of the pressures of industrialism, Women in Love, which follows the life of Ursula Brangwen and her sister Gudrun, offers a careful (re-)consideration of the sense of community, as it evolved under the pressure stemming from industrial growth, thus offering a more profound reflection on the social question.

A Possible Return to the State of Nature

9In Women in Love, the first allusion to the terms of the Social Contract as presented in Rousseau’s work is to be found in the discussion on “the question of possessions” (WL 29) between Gerald Crich, Hermione Roddice and Rupert Birkin at the wedding party. Gerald believes in the protection of man’s property as a prerequisite to his liberty. This is made visible through the hypothetical example he gives to Hermione: “If I go and take a man’s hat from off his head, that hat becomes a symbol of that man’s liberty. When he fights me for his hat, he is fighting for his liberty” (29). He is convinced that in reality, if “a man does not come and take my hat from off my head” (ibid.), it is “only because the law prevents him” (ibid.) from doing so. His argument echoes Rousseau’s understanding of man’s renunciation of his natural liberty for civil liberty, coupled with the need to establish a political community which will guarantee and protect the people’s rights. Gerald, as heir to his family’s mining company, is a keen supporter of industrialism subscribing to the modern overvaluation of work and man’s ability to master the earth through technological advancement. Unlike his father Thomas Crich, who “having sufficient fortune, had thought only of the men” (WL 224), and had the initial idea “to obtain as much money from the earth as would make the owners comfortably rich, would allow the workmen sufficient wages and good conditions, and would increase the wealth of the country altogether” (ibid.), Gerald only sees the working-class as “a solid mass of human beings” (WL 222), “subordinate to him” (WL 223) and as “his instruments” (ibid.), for after all “he was the God of the machine” (ibid.). Gerald is the consummate example of dehumanization:

[…] he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. […] The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered. (ibid.)

10This is precisely the lack of empathy for others and the extreme greed for material wealth that Lawrence denounces, holds responsible for a process of social ossification. He disapproves of the mine owner’s conduct. But, more importantly, he condemns the whole system, which has fossilized social inequalities, created material cupidity and incited the miners to revolt in the hope of improving their conditions. Under Thomas Crich’s charge, the miners “sufficiency decreased with knowledge, [they] wanted more” (WL 224) and they started wondering “why should masters be so out-of-all-proportion rich?” (ibid.). This resulted in “war” (WL 225), in “seething masses of miners meet[ing] daily, carried away by a new religious impulse”, with the idea that “all men are equal on earth” (ibid.). If Lawrence seems to support the miners’ request for better work conditions, he nonetheless also questions their ulterior motives:

Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equal possessions? Each man claimed equality in the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man was part of this Godhead […]. When the machine is the Godhead and production or work is worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the representative of God on earth – and the rest are subordinate, each according to his degree. (WL 225)

11Here, the insistent, recurrent reference to “smoke of cupidity” and “passion of cupidity” suggests the material corruption of the masses and challenges our understanding of “equality.” This is a question that was also raised by Rousseau, whose definition of “equality” was as follows:

as for equality, this word must not be understood to mean that all individuals must have exactly the same amount of power and wealth, but rather (a) that power must be exercised only in accordance with rank and the laws, so that no one shall have so much of it as to be able to use violence upon another, and (b) that no citizen shall have so much wealth that he can buy another and none so little that he is forced to sell himself. (55)

12Lawrence was convinced that the problem lies within what he defines as man’s “economic bondage. Slavery!” (Late Essays and Articles 142). While he did not believe in the complete disappearance of social classes, his critical view of modern society is chiefly expressed through his condemnation of modern values and institutions, as is made explicit in the discussion between Birkin and Gerald. Contrary to Gerald, Birkin is repulsed by the excessive human tendency to pursue materialistic goals, with man’s inescapable reliance on work breeding a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction. Gerald’s understanding of life can be summed up as “liv[ing] to work, to produce something, in so far as I am a purposive being” (WL 56). He is convinced that “you’ve got to start with material things,” that “we’ve got to live for something, we’re not just cattle that can graze” (ibid.). In contrast, for Birkin:

we [men] are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to ourselves. We have an ideal of a perfect world, clean and straight and sufficient. So we cover the earth with foulness, life is a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth, so that your collier can have a pianoforte in his parlour, and you can have a butler and a motor-car in your up-to-date house, and as a nation we can sport the Ritz, or the Empire, Gaby Deslys and the Sunday newspapers. It is very dreary. (WL 55)

13Birkin’s rejection of all material things prompts Gerald to wonder: “would you have us live without houses – return to nature?” to which Birkin answers: “I would have nothing at all. People only do what they want to do – and what they are capable of doing. If they were capable of anything else, there would be something else” (WL 55). Noteworthy here is the hypothetical structure used in the last sentence, which suggests that he is aware that a complete return to the state of nature is unrealistic and incompatible with the latest development of civilization. He cannot help feeling nostalgic for the idyllic past, which is indicated through his reference to Robert Browning’s poem “Love Among the Ruins”:

where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles
Miles and miles,
Over the pastures where the something something sheep
Half asleep - (WL 61)

14As their train is approaching London, we are told that Birkin “was filled with a sort of hopelessness. He always felt this, on approaching London. His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to illness” (WL 61).

15While Birkin recognizes that “it is possessions, possessions, bullying you and turning you into a generalization” (WL 356) that should be held accountable for the annihilation of human spirituality and their estrangement from themselves, he proposes that man “must leave [his] surroundings sketchy, unfinished, so that [he is] never contained, never confined, never dominated from the outside” (WL 356-57). Although Birkin/Lawrence shows some misanthropic tendency, for instance when he declares that he “abhor[s] humanity, I wish it was swept away. It could go, and there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. The reality would be untouched” (WL 127), he still believes, as Ursula points out, “in individual love” (WL 129) and does not really reject society per se. In fact, Lawrence wanted to revolutionize humanity and had in mind the creation of a small community called “Rananim.” He wanted Ottoline Morrell who, it is widely held, served as a model for the character of Hermione Roddice:

to form the nucleus of a new community which shall start a new life amongst us, a life in which the only riches is integrity of character. So that each one may fulfil his own nature and deep desires to the utmost, but wherein the ultimate satisfaction and joy is in the completeness of us all as one. […] We can all come croppers, but what does it matter? We can laugh at each other, and dislike each other, but the good remains, and we know it. And the new community shall be established upon the known, eternal good part in us. […] I hold this the most sacred duty – the gathering together of a number of people who shall so agree to live by the best they know, that they shall be free to live by the best they know. (Letters ii. 271-2)

16The class warfare between the Crich family and the miners stands for what Lawrence describes in the preface of his play Touch and Go as:

We call it Labour versus Capitalism. We say it is a mere material struggle, a money-grabbing affair. But this is only one aspect of it. In so far as men are merely mechanical, the struggle is one which, though it may bring disaster and death to millions, is no more than accident, an accidental collision of forces. But in so far as men are men, the situation is tragic. It is not really the bone we are fighting for. We are fighting to have somebody's head off. The conflict is in pure, passional antagonism, turning upon the poles of belief. Majesty was only hors d'oeuvres to this tragic repast. (vii)

17Besides the fact that Touch and Go and Women in Love both appeared in the same year, the resemblance by no means fortuitous between the Barlow family (Gerald, Mr. and Mrs. Barlow and Winnifred) and the Crich family is an invitation to read the two works together. In Touch and Go, Gerald Barlow’s view of the miners as “just mechanical little things that can make one or two motions, and they are done” (Act II, 36) reminds us of Gerald Crich’s earlier description of the workmen. The play, which begins with Willie Houghton’s call to the colliers to take measures to improve their work and social conditions epitomizes Rousseau’s claim that “the author of the laws ought therefore to be the people that is bound by them” (40). Lawrence seems to agree that the people must have a say in socio-political matters, especially when their rights and freedom are at stake, hence in Touch and Go he gives them a voice through the use of direct speech and provides vivid reports of their opinion on the issue. It is thus primarily through the character of Oliver Turton, who believes that “all our lives would be better, if we hadn’t to hang on in the perpetual tug-of-war, like two monkeys pulling at one carrot. The ghastly tension of possessions, and struggling for possession, spoils life for everybody” (Act II, 46), that Lawrence expresses his views on the social question. For him, “the poor as much as the rich” (ibid.) are to be blamed because they both equally support the system. He states that:

if every rich man withdrew from the system, the working class and socialists would keep it going, every man in the hope of getting rich himself at last. It’s the people that are wrong. They want the system much more than the rich do – because they are much more anxious to be rich – never having been rich, poor devils. (Ibid.)

18While he acknowledges the need for social reforms, he nevertheless opposes the use of violence as a means of leverage to improve one’s condition. His disapproval of force and brutality is visible in his condemnation of Job Arthur’s treatment of Gerald Barlow.

19Finally, when at the end of Touch and Go Lawrence writes: “We're all human beings, after all. And why can't we try really to leave off struggling against one another, and set up a new state of things?” (Act III, 127), he is not asking for a return to the State of Nature but rather that men should consider the creation of a new form of government which would be more appropriate to their needs. Perhaps at that point he still had in mind his utopian idea of creating the “Rananim” colony, “where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go” (Letters ii. 259).

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Bibliographie

Baysal, Alev. “Tocqueville’s Idea of Revolution and D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow: A Study of Social Changes and The Liberation of Women,” in Edebiyat Fakültesi dergisi, Vol. 23, Issues 1-2. Ankara: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 2006.

Lawrence, D.H. Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T.Boulton and M.H. Black. Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Lawrence, D.H. Phoenix: the posthumous papers of D.H. Lawrence. New York: Viking Press, 1968.

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Ed. James T. Boulton and George J. Zytaruk. Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Lawrence, D.H. The Rainbow. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1995.

Lawrence, D.H. Touch and Go: A Play in Three Acts. ReadHowYouWant.com, 2008.

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena. “D.H. Lawrence,” in Criticism of Society in the English Novel Between the Wars. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2013, 11-100.

Marsh, Nicolas. D.H. Lawrence: The Novels. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000.

McCrum, Robert. “The 100 Best Novels: No 43-The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915),” in The Guardian. 14 July 2014.
www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/14/100-best-novels-the-rainbow-dh-lawrence-robert-mccrum. Accessed 26 February 2021.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by Christopher Betts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Thompson, Allan. The Dynamics of the Industrial Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973.

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Notes

1 McCrum, “The 100 best novels: No 43-The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915).”

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Référence électronique

Marie Geraldine Rademacher, « The Evolution of Lawrence’s Burgeoning Socio-philosophical Thoughts in The Rainbow, Women in Love and Touch and Go  »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 54 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3260 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3260

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Auteur

Marie Geraldine Rademacher

Marie Geraldine Rademacher is currently a part-time lecturer of English Literature at Sophia University and Seikei University. She is also a researcher at the University of Tokyo. Her research focuses on travel narratives written by European women who came to Japan in the early 20th century. She has recently published a chapter on British and German scientific exploration in the Asian-Pacific Region, which was part of the edited collection The Discourse of British and German Colonialism published in July 2020 by Routledge and CRC Press. In September 2017, she received her PhD in English Studies from Frei Universität Berlin, Germany. As part of her dissertation project, she examined the representation of narcissistic mothers in the works of several modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. This resulted in the publication of her monograph Narcissistic Mothers in Modernist Literature in September 2019 by the German publisher Transcript Press.

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