RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

The end is not convincing enough.
Another idea is that the
rainbow itself is like a faint gleam of light at the end of a
tunnel.
When Ursula gets to the end of the tunnel, the light
may be a false light or it may vanish.
The rainbow may
extinguish itself When she crosses the hill looking for the
treasure at the bottom of it.
It is therefore a false and
individualistic hope, a rhetorical gesture by the author which
the details of plot and character cannot justify.
To sura up the main points of this chapter: The Rainbow
closes Lawrence's first phase in which the author has a strong
preference for women who are much connected with the mind. These
women have, because of their strong minds, defeated their male
partners.
The most significant representatives of this phase
are Helena, Who can be seen as the ancestress to Mrs Morel, Anna
and Ursula.
The last two women, although very strong, are not
as idealistic as Helena and are not as soulful as Mrs Morel.
Anna, in her victory over Will, may be seen as a strong woman in
the sense that her self-sufficiency and independence have made
her fight for what she believed.
Her husband, on the other hand,
is a weak male in the sense that he simply could not defend his
own beliefs: he has let Anna superimpose her will over him.
We
can say that Anna and Mrs Morel have replaced their husbands in
their homes exactly because their men could not fight for their
rights.
Ursula is different from these three heroines because
her desire is not to defeat the male, at least as the other
female characters did, but to find her own place in a society
which is completely masculine.
The fact that she has defeated
her first lover may be seen in terms of Skrebensky's weak
character.
He "loses"not because he could not fight Ursula, but
because she has a self while he does not. Thus he could not