RELATIONS OF DOMINANCE AND EQUALITY IN D. H. LAWRENCE

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Ford's account of the end of the book is, like Sagar's,
one of hope.
When Ursula sees the rainbow, he thinks the
symbolism is
celebrated too stridently, it is some compensation
to recall the painful discords that preceded her
rebirth. And in Women in Love, the novel that
followed The Rainbow, despite Ursula's final
resolution of her own individual difficulties,
the somber notes are much more persistently in
evidence (p.162).
Hough's view of Ursula and Skrebensky's affair is seen in
terms of the critic's uncertainty about the sexual scenes.
He
says doubtfully that "it appears that they enjoy the fullest and
completest sexual satisfaction" (p.70).
Hough's uncertainty is
what marks the weakness of his interpretation of the affair.
I
could not find in any of the love scenes between the couple
where, when and how they are plainly satisfied, as Hough seems
to think.
I wonder if the critic means 'satisfaction' in the
first moonlight night in Which Ursula annihilates Skrebensky or
if he means the second meeting under the moon in which both
lovers are partially destroyed because they cannot fulfil each
other.
The following day they break the engagement..
Despite Hough's weak interpretation of Ursula's affair with
Skrebensky, he does succeed in making plausible his view of the
end of the book.
He says that the vision of the rainbow
is quite insufficiently based, nothing in the book
up to now has led to it. Regenerations are not
achieved by mere rejection; the only positive value
consistently represented in the text has been
fulfilment in the bond between man and woman; and
this Ursula has just signally failed to achieve.
The new religion has not proved itself on the
pulses; and all the end of The Rainbow ultimately
expresses is a vague hope and the need to end
somehow (p.72).
Saaar finds in Women in Love "The new image is the ebb and
flow of the sea — cycles of creation and decay which are