“[…] let us insist that the home is sacred, the hearth, and the very things of the home.” (FUPU 119)
1The concept of home in an increasingly and alarmingly globalized world is acquiring metaphysical, political and existential importance, as migration flows of all types expand and gather pace. Lawrence’s words from Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) now take on a more immediate topicality and relevance today, notably in view of the number of refugees, displaced and exiled people we have in our world. Home in Lawrence’s fiction stands as a fortress, or a traditional “castle” for an Englishman. Such a conception does however involve a paradox. In Lawrence’s case, his fictional embodiment of homes opposes his own condition of an exile: “They talk about home, but what is home? […] I find I can be at home anywhere, except at home” (“Getting On” 27).
2Nicola Wilson expresses the universal truth characterizing homes in Lawrence’s fiction: “For Lawrence, the homes of his characters constitute living, inhabited spaces, which are not often to be read as markers of character, class or distinction” (Wilson 78). I would slightly disagree, however, arguing in this paper that the home in The Rainbow (1915) has a strong impact on identity formation. By identity, as opposed to character (the “old stable ego” with fixed and predetermined qualities), I mean the characteristics that distinguish the personality of a literary character from other people, with the crucial emphasis resting on the process of self-determination. Identity makes one aware of the character’s belonging or non-belonging to a group, community or milieu.
3Critics and scholars have conceptualized The Rainbow from a multitude of different perspectives. Among the significant recent readings, we may mention Howard Booth’s excellent paper on the centenary of the novel’s publication, in which he focuses on The Rainbow’s foreshadowing or anticipation of a better world to come. Booth mentions that the novel possesses a utopian quality of “no place” as a visionary alternative to the space the characters inhabit (Booth 36). Besides, Booth also takes into account the transformative power of temporality expressed through the symbolic ending, where the rainbow appears to produce this envisaged time leap into the future.
4Spatiality and temporality as the metaphysical properties of The Rainbow have also attracted the attention of such scholars as Stefania Michelucci, Brigitte Macadré-Nguyên, Peter Fjågesund, to name a few. The importance of spaces in Lawrence’s works is a defining feature of his style. Regarding the peculiarity of space in Lawrence’s mid-period works (The Rainbow among them), Michelucci comments in her book Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence (2002):
In these novels we notice a close relationship between place and experience, each place being appointed for a particular experience and each experience allocated to a particular place. Characters are constructed along the chain of their movements from one place to the next, a chain from which arises the eminently spatial structure of the novels themselves. (5)
5Michelucci regards the Brangwens’ home, the farm, as containing “the seeds of the crisis, because while it is on the one hand a happy island where people lead serene, almost idyllic lives, in harmony with the surrounding natural environment, on the other hand, it is condemned to death by its very isolation” (69).
6My intention is to use the interpretive theory of the chronotope in order to elucidate the meaning and role of home in identity creation, as Lawrence depicted it. Looking at the dynamics of the time-space interaction in The Rainbow, I intend to establish the static (place) and the dynamic (time) qualities of the home chronotope, pointing up how their opposing magnetisms form, in particular, Ursula’s identity and how a character’s absence from home creates an identity crisis.
7The basis and essential vector for the study of the artistic chronotope was established by Mikhail Bakhtin, who produced Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel between 1937 and 1938. Bakhtin tried to isolate the historically specific ways in which the temporal dimension of the narrative interacts with space and matter, and the concrete embodiment of this interaction, the chronotope, here defined as the place where the image is tightly united with the narrative (234). Bakhtin generated a systemic approach and typology of chronotopes, starting from the early novels and ending with the novels of the 19th century. Chronotopes can range from an unlocalized “adventure-time” to the castle in Gothic writing, seen as a spatial locus intensively inhabited by different historical periods, and the salon and the provincial town in the French novel. The notion of the chronotope is also a convenient critical tool to illuminate such a place as home, which survives in time and also surrenders to its relentless flow. Scholars such as Maria Troy, Nancy Armstrong, Philip Fischer corroborate the idea that “the family house with its biographical temporality or temporalities appears to be one of the – if not the – most important chronotopes” (Troy 20).
8The notion of home suggests an enclosed space, even though it also includes open spaces. This enclosure presupposes borders of human comfort, safety and belonging. “When we think of home we imagine being rooted, safe and secure in our surrounding environment. We conceive of being in place. Since antiquity, the quest for such a place, in which one feels at home, has pervaded literature and literary theory throughout the world” (Woods 1). As Simone Weil suggests, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul” (43).
9Home plays an exclusive role in The Rainbow. S. Michelucci writes that “The fundamental element of The Rainbow is the presence of a distinct and definite center, represented by the home, around which revolve – like a planet around its orbit – the intimate relationships of the protagonists, a couple for each of the three generations” (66). In this sense, home in Lawrence’s novel takes on an archetypal function. In the materiality of the text, a house in the countryside is perhaps the most typical of images, creating the setting for many of the writer’s fictional works. Wilson observes: “For whether it is the ‘Bottoms’ of Sons and Lovers, Marsh Farm and Yew Cottage in The Rainbow or Mellor’s cottage in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, home is the living centre of Lawrence’s fiction, the place from which characters, desires and relationships are broken and formed, tried and tested” (78). This kind of house is a symbolic space, one which “is organized concentrically around a center which orders the chaos. Up and down, right and left are oriented in respect to the center. Every geographical center repeats, and in fact is the only one symbolic middle of the cosmos. In antiquity any holy or sacred place was regarded as the center of the universe” (8), Zofia Kolbuszewska writes.
10In Lawrence’s novel, home is that very sacred centre around which life whirls and bubbles, while remaining in a static enclosure on the Marsh Farm, standing as an old archetypal structure: “The homestead was just on the safe side of civilization, outside the gate. The house stood bare from the road, approached by a straight garden path…” (R 22), Lawrence writes at the beginning of the novel. At the same time, home is also dynamic – “moving” through time from the 19th century agricultural domestic arrangements to the change and flux of the early 20th century. Thus, the history of the successive generations of the Brangwens espouses and moves through this dynamic sequence. It seems the family strives to preserve the stasis of the household, which creates in the mind the image of an uninterrupted family life, of reassuring stability, serving as a guarantee of generational continuity. This idea is rounded up at the very end of Ursula’s journey in search of self: “She must beat her way back through all this fluctuation, back to stability and security” (R 472).
11In this sense, the novel substantiates Bakhtin’s idea of the idyllic novel chronotope. To quote Kolbuszewska again:
Idyllic life and its events seem inseparable from a place where the ancestors had once lived and where the children and the grandchildren will live ever after. The unity of place erases the temporal limits and therefore idyllic time is cyclical. The emphasis is on everyday life. Quotidian experience is elevated here. And human life is closely connected with the rhythm of nature. Sexuality appears in a sublimated form and is manifest with its association with growth, renewal and death. These in turn are manifested in the characters of children, old men, or children playing on the ancestral grave.” (25)
12In a cyclical pattern, time inevitably tends to return to the starting point, only to resume another cycle: “The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from Heanor”(R 22), the second Alfred “married the daughter of a chemist”(R 24), his younger son Tom married the Polish widow Lydia; Tom’s step-daughter Anna married another Brangwen. However, the Modernist tendency of abrogating, twisting and channeling time into unforeseen tracks, unquestionably left its imprint in The Rainbow, too. Against the seemingly idyllic archetypal home space, with its ongoing and rhythl of change, through the seasons and through generations, time, I would argue, is an ongoing dynamic, breaking through the thick wall of family patterns, a force of change and opening which Lawrence hints at in the opening of his saga of the Brangwens: “But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen” (R 18).
13This dialectic of stasis versus kinesis comes into play with the introduction of Tom Brangwen into the story: “Then a fever of restless anger came upon him. He wanted to go away – right away. He dreamed of foreign parts. But somehow he had no contact with them. And it was a very strong root which held him to the Marsh, to his own house and land” (R 35). Tom’s drunkenness is a way for him to abate or repress his painful realization of the magnetizing stasis of his home which preventis him from espousing the dynamic movement outwards. For little Anna, the new place resists becoming her home at first: “We don’t live with you,” (R 77) she keeps repeating. It seems the magnetism or “pull” of this stasis works powerfully and insistently. Tom is said to be “rooted in his mother and his sister” (R 28), while Lydia and later, Anna, feel the “rooted safety of him, and the life in him” (R 63). In spite of Anna’s periodic impulses to get away, she “was only easy at home, where the common sense and the supreme relation between her parents produced a freer standard of being than she could find outside” (R 106).
14This magnetism of the static, immovable house is produced by the strong sense of enclosed, spiritual isolation which rubs into every subsequent descendent, leaving a mark on their identity: “They were a curious family, a law to themselves, separate from the world, isolated, a small republic set in invisible bounds” (R 108).
15The home chronotope in the novel is moreover a complex and expansive artistic configuration. It encompasses the fields and the familiar landscapes, processes of renovation and dilapidation, a sense of the self as both integrated and disintegrated, a movement away from it and back to it. In this context, it is the threshold that is constantly foregrounded in the narration, marking the most crucial moments in the characters’ lives. Thus, Tom muses that whenever one comes into the house, they linger on the threshold, but Lydia dashes inside without stopping, thus bringing in a new quality into this place, an initial easiness, an uninhibited motion of trespassing the restraint of the threshold. “He stepped aside and she at once entered the house, as if the door had been opened to admit her. That startled him. It was the custom for everybody to wait on the doorstep till asked inside” (R 43).
16Besides the threshold, the home imagery and certain connected, supplementary chronotopes, such as the road and the salon (all of which are Bakhtinian notions), mark important progress stages and stopovers in all the Brangwens’ identity formation. For Tom and Lydia, Lawrence uses a chronotopic metaphor of a doorway:
Their coming together now, after two years of married life, was much more wonderful to them than it had been before. It was the entry into another circle of existence, it was the baptism to another life, it was the complete confirmation. Their feet trod strange ground of knowledge, their footsteps were lit-up with discovery. Wherever they walked, it was well, the world re-echoed round them in discovery. They went gladly and forgetful. Everything was lost, and everything was found. The new world was discovered, it remained only to be explored.
They had passed through the doorway into the further space, where movement was so big, that it contained bonds and constraints and labours, and still was complete liberty. She was the doorway to him, he to her. At last they had thrown open the doors, each to the other, and had stood in the doorways facing each other, whilst the light flooded out from behind on to each of their faces, it was the transfiguration, glorification, the admission. (R 101)
17For Ursula, too, identify formation finds expression through a similar metaphoric construction: “[…] her doors opened under the arch of the rainbow, her threshold reflected the passing of the sun and moon, the great travellers, her house was full of the echo of journeying” (R 196).
18The novel’s time spins forward in cycles, repeating certain patterns of family life: “[…] the ash trees of the hill, where her grandfather had walked with his daffodils to make his proposal, and where her mother had gone with her young husband, walking close upon him as Ursula was now walking upon Skrebensky” (R 269). Simultaneously, the home’s innermost content is constantly filled with new senses. It houses both love and estrangement (evidenced through the relationships between Tom and Lydia’s, Will and Anna), passion and tragedy (several infant deaths, Tom’s tragic demise), mental knowledge in the case of Tom’s brother, his mistress and their circle of friends, “sensual knowledge” in the case of Ursula, among others, desire and mortification (all the characters seem to have experienced this binary opposition). It is these tensions which disrupt the cycles, intruding upon the choices which are to be made, choices that are unlike those of their ancestors’, when “the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day” (R 18). However though the Brangwen women of the past generations were different, they, too, inevitably made their predetermined choices as wives of the men, mothers of numerous children, and as dutiful housekeepers. “Here were always children, and the patrimony was divided every time. But always, at the Marsh, there was ample”(R 17). The disruptions also come from the outside world, for example, when Skrebensky appears on the doorstep, “The house [i]s changed” (R 262).
19Ursula’s identity as a “new” woman, who does not fit into the age-old established patterns of life, is also initially inscribed into these aspects of the home chronotope. However in her case, there is evidence of a series of dynamic breaks, intrusions and distortions of time that challenge the stasis of home as space, transforming it into a home as a journey in time. These occasions change the temporal flow from the even and cyclic to intermittent and spasmodic. They may look like insignificant episodes, incidents of minor importance in family life. However, Lawrence proceeds to reveal their impact on the character’s identity through such scenes. As an example of this, we may mention the mischief of little Ursula, the response to which was her being scolded and reprimanded, thus sowing the seeds of her new identity, the divergence in her case from the roles which traditionally were those of women:
When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather stiffly to play. She willed to forget. She cut off her childish soul from memory, so that the pain, and the insult should not be real. She asserted herself only. There was now nothing in the world but her own self. So very soon, she came to believe in the outward malevolence that was against her. And very early, she learned that even her adored father was part of this malevolence. And very early she learned to harden her soul in resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden herself upon her own being. (R 222)
20According to Bakhtin, such moments in time are usually accompanied by the imagery of thresholds, doors, staircases, antechambers, corridors, and also streets and squares. In the scene above, little Ursula who had unwittingly trampled upon her father’s seed-bed, “would go and creep under the parlour sofa, and lie clinched in the silent, hidden misery of childhood” (R 222).
21The relatedness to the home chronotope here is of the utmost relevance. While outside crises – hostility or bullying at school, social unease or alienation in public places – are reversed by homecoming, returning to the safety and protection of the house: “There was over the house a kind of dark silence and intensity, in which passion worked its inevitable conclusions. There was in the house a sort of richness, a deep, inarticulate interchange which made other places seem thin and unsatisfying” (R 110). Notice the rhetorical device of anaphora, adding to the rhythmic cyclicity. No matter what attractions are harboured in the world outside, each Brangwen is magnetically drawn to this home. Even Anna, the initial outsider, “[…] was uneasy. She wanted to get away. Yet wherever she went, there came upon her that feeling of thinness, as if she were made smaller, belittled. She hastened home” (R 110). William Ronald D. Fairbairn, in a paper first published in 1943 in The British Medical Journal, explains that this compulsion “lies in the process of identification as it is found to operate in an individual who has failed to emerge adequately from the state of infantile dependence” (Fairbairn 277).
Ursula was very proud in her family. The Brangwen girls had all a curious blind dignity, even a kind of nobility in their bearing. By some result of breed and upbringing, they seemed to rush along their own lives without caring that they existed to other people. Never from the start did it occur to Ursula that other people might hold a low opinion of her. She thought that whosoever knew her, knew she was enough and accepted her as such. She thought it was a world of people like herself. She suffered bitterly if she were forced to have a low opinion of any person, and she never forgave that person. (R 259)
22The home chronotope in The Rainbow, as an embodied image of the house surrounded by rural landscapes, remaining static in the cyclicity of time, is clearly opposed to the volatile and abstract notion of homelessness, uprootedness. Hence the evocative conversation between Ursula and Anton Skrebensky:
Where is really your home now?” she asked.
“My home?—I wonder. I am very fond of my colonel—Colonel Hepburn: then there are my aunts: but my real home, I suppose, is the army.”
“Do you like being on your own?”
His clear, greenish-grey eyes rested on her a moment, and, as he considered, he did not see her.
“I suppose so,” he said. “You see my father—well, he was never acclimatized here. He wanted—I don’t know what he wanted—but it was a strain. And my mother—I always knew she was too good to me. I could feel her being too good to me—my mother! Then I went away to school so early. And I must say, the outside world was always more naturally a home to me than the vicarage—I don’t know why.”
“Do you feel like a bird blown out of its own latitude?” she asked, using a phrase she had met.
“No, no. I find everything very much as I like it.”
He seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world, a sense of distances and large masses of humanity. It drew her as a scent draws a bee from afar. But also it hurt her. (R 287)
23Skrebensky is described as being aware of his own sense of being, as “himself,” “beyond any change or question” (R 261). It would appear that the identity which springs from the sense of belonging home is never stable, while, paradoxically, uprootedness fixes and freezes this sense of belonging to no home.
24Ursula thus constantly fluctuates between home (or the place that is felt to be slowly moving through time) and what is not home. In her temporal space, she has lived through all the romantic ages that pass through her in the very room of her home:
How she loved it! How she leaned in her bedroom window with her black, rough hair on her shoulders, and her warm face all rapt, and gazed across at the churchyard and the little church, which was a turreted castle, whence Launcelot would ride just now, would wave to her as he rode by, his scarlet cloak passing behind the dark yew trees and between the open space: whilst she, ah, she, would remain the lonely maid high up and isolated in the tower, polishing the terrible shield, weaving it a covering with a true device, and waiting, waiting, always remote and high. (R 261)
25And also she hated “[…] houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses” (R 279).
26As the novel demonstrates, however, Ursula is that very “bird” always flying away. Here is the traditional interpretation of her sense of “unbelonging,” to quote Wilson again:
The sisters Ursula and Gudrun equally reject the pull of home, children and the maternal body in The Rainbow and Women in Love. Through their rejection of ‘houses and furniture and clothes […] all terms of an old base world, a detestable society of man’, they seek a more fulfilling, alternative mode of being; a precursor to the kind of ‘savage enough pilgrimage’ that would see Lawrence himself travel across the globe after the First World War to experience different forms of society. (111)
27This collision between belonging and getting away is a dialectic which is never stabilized or finalized in the novel. The novel’s unresolved open ending reads as a resonant vindication of this point. Ursula’s compulsion to return (after the separation from Skrebensky) becomes almost nostomania, which makes the home chronotope a kind of temporal space that has formed Ursula’s identity: “Already it was a history. In every phase she was so different. Yet she was always Ursula Brangwen” (R 424).
- 1 I am grateful to Jim Phelps for this suggestion.
28In conclusion, I would like to bring into this context two emblematic and contrasting poems by William Blake: “The Echoing Green” (from his Songs of Innocence) and “London” (from Songs of Experience).1 While the village green described in the first poem may not exactly be the home, it still suggests the natural, communal extension of the home, the place for the community of homes, across the generations, into which is accommodated the cycle of time, where “The Sun does arise, / And make happy the skies” (Blake 8), an anticipation of the image of home to be found in The Rainbow. In “London,” the great city is the site of the break away into modernity where the voice of the poem is that of a homeless outcast wandering without a destination in the degraded, dehumanised “chartered streets” (Blake 86). Time is measured between day and night, but here seems endless. It is almost as if the chronotope has been obliterated. So absolutely alienated is the speaker, he sees in “every face” “marks of weakness, marks of woe” (ibid.). Blake’s “London” poem may be sounding a warning that no one escapes from homelessness, Anton Skrebensky serving as a case in point. This pairing of poems reflects the vast changes that modernity wrought upon English society, a set of profound changes in the very fabric of living and being which Lawrence explores in The Rainbow and in Women in Love, too.