RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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looking at the final paragraph of the novel we see that only
Ursula expects too much.
The other people, the colliers, are
seen as if by magic touch they had become good and are no longer
corrupt:
And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew
that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and
separate on the face of the world's corruption
were living still, that the rainbow was arched in
their blood and would quiver to life in their
spirit, that they would cast off their horny
covering of disintegration, that new, clean,
naked bodies would issue to a new germination,
to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind
and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the
rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old,
brittle corruption of houses and factories swept
away, the world built in a living fabric of Truth,
fitting to the overarching heaven (pp.495-6).
It seems to me a terrible presumption of the author to think that
the symbol of hope would make us forget everything the character
has gone through.
It also seems unreal the way Ursula visualizes
the colliers after the rainbow appears.
It is as if she had
veiled her own eyes to reality. Corruption, progress —
everything — will be swept away because of a rainbow which may
only be another projection of Ursula's imaginative mind.
The
ending indeed seems a closed ending but the fact that it is
conveyed through the author's voice only serves to signal
Lawrence's fixed wish not to end his book in more negative terms.
His optimism can be viewed in terms of his 'intentions' but not
in terms of his 'feelings'. One denies the other. The 'message'
is not optimistic at all.
It only makes -us think of the coherence
of the ending.
Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow thus have closed endings
with ambiguous optimism.
Neither of the characters h a s . strong
motives to be happy or fulfilled.
Neither of them attains
balance.
The search must go on through the characters of the