Summary:
Chapter IV - "Girlhood of Anna Brangwen"
The maturation of Anna Brangwen is detailed. At nine, she is sent to school in nearby Cossethay. She is mischievous and struggles to make friends with her peers. Tom and Lydia have another son, Fred, whom Anna loves dearly. A Polish man, named Baron Skrebensky, settles in Yorkshire and Anna visits him with her mother. Anna is captivated by him such that he is described as “the first person she met, whom affected her as a real living person” (92).
Anna is then sent to a girls’ school in Nottingham. Again, she does not make any friends and rejects her peers. She has a tumultuous relationship with her parents, but remains closer to her father although she chides him for his drinking.
When Anna is eighteen, Tom’s nephew William, the son of Alfred, moves near Marsh Farm to work as a draughtsman at the local lace factory. Anna is immediately struck by his character and becomes flushed while in his company. William, Anna, and Frank attend church one Sunday. She becomes giddy when she hears William singing hymns and she starts to laugh uncontrollably.
Anna and William continue to grow closer, and Anna develops a sense of independence. Will also feels an attraction to Anna and kisses her one night after they go out for a walk. A gifted wood-worker, he gifts her a butter stamper. Tom grows suspicious of his daughter and her relationship to Will. One night he spies them embracing in the barn and he grows irate. Anna admits her love for Will.
One evening, Anna and Will harvest corn together. In an erotically-charged scene, they begin to haul sheaves of corn together. Although the work splits them apart on the field, they gradually come close together. After gazing at each other in the moonlight, they begin to kiss passionately and Will proposes to her.
Will tells Lydia and Tom of his plans to marry Anna and they reject him for having not enough money or life experience. He persists and leaves to tell his own parents of the engagement. Tom confronts Anna and they begin to argue. During the argument, Anna cries, “you are not my father—my father is dead—you are not my father” (118).
This outburst prompts Tom to have something resembling an existential crisis, and causes him to question, “what was missing in his life, that, in his ravening soul, he was not satisfied?” (120). He feels pained that Anna had chosen her love for Will over him. Nonetheless, he agrees to allow Anna and Will to marry and begins to shower them with gifts, including a lease on a cottage called the Yew Cottage and shares in the Marsh Farm. Anna and Will begin to set up the cottage and prepare for their wedding.
V - "Wedding at the Marsh"
Anna and Will are married around Christmastime. Tom gets drunk before the ceremony, and during the Church service he feels uncomfortable and thinks about how he has aged and will someday die.
After a quick drink at Anna and Will’s cottage, the wedding party returns to the house at the Marsh. The men proceed to get drunk on brandy, and Tom delivers a rambling, sentimental speech about marriage with many interruptions from his brothers, Alfred and Frank. The wedding party sings songs and gives Will advice and innuendo on how to act during his first night with Anna. The newly-weds depart in a carriage back to their cottage.
A group of men, including Tom and Alfred, later walk over to the cottage to regale Tom and Anna with a carol. The couple cuddles in bed while hearing the music outside their window.
VI - "Anna Vitrix"
Anna and Will enjoy their honeymoon at the cottage. For several weeks, they do nothing but spend time in bed with each other. At first, Will is anxious about spending so much time at leisure but he grows to love the relaxed time with Anna. He comes to realize that “a man wasn’t a man before he was married” and revels in his time apart from the world with Anna (140).
Anna plans to host a tea-party, thus signaling the end of their relaxed time alone together. Will becomes upset and wishes to return to the way things were before. They begin to fight viciously, and Lawrence describes the rift between them in vivid, upsetting detail. Anna begins to cry uncontrollably and Will feels a surge of compassion for her. They reconcile briefly.
One Sunday at Church, Anna notices that Will is transfixed by a stained glass window depicting a lamb. Although Will is devoted to the Church, Anna “hated it for not fulfilling anything in her” (146). She begins to cruelly mock Will for his devotion and his belief in practices like taking Sacrament. Their marriage worsens again.
After a fight one day, Will takes the train to Nottingham and buys a book about a cathedral at a bookshop. When he returns to the cottage, he and Anna reconcile, yet they continue “the recurrence of love and conflict between them” (155).
Their relationship proceeds to worsen considerably and Anna realizes “that they were opposites, not compliments” (157). She continues to question his faith and compare him unfavorably to her father. He responds by beating her and remaining “always ready to burst out murderously against her” (158).
After a fight one day, Will burns a wood-carving of Adam and Eve that he has worked on since before he and Anna married. Anna then realizes that she’s pregnant but does not feel comfortable telling Will. At the Marsh she tells her parents both about “the tragedy of her young married life” and about her pregnancy (163). Will then arrives at the Marsh and she finally tells him that she is expecting a child.
While Anna is happy to be pregnant, her marriage remains strained. She takes up the habit of dancing naked when Will is out of the home. One day, he returns home and discovers her dancing by the fireplace in her bedroom. He confronts her angrily and she realizes that “her life, her freedom, was sinking beneath his physical will” (172). Will debates whether he should leave Anna but cannot bring himself to do it. They begin to sleep separately, but later return to the same bed.
Anna gives birth to a daughter and is disappointed as she had hoped for a son. Will and Anna name the child Ursula. They continue their married life and reach a level of acceptance with their relationship to one another. Shortly thereafter, Anna becomes pregnant again.
Analysis:
A noticeable change occurs between the third and fourth chapters of the novel. Anna is no longer referred to as Anna Lensky (the surname of her dead father) but rather as Anna Brangwen, thus marking her initiation into her new family unit. Ironically, it is as Anna Brangwen that Anna deeply hurts her adopted father, Tom, by stating that she is not his actually his daughter. In an attempt to secure freedom for herself—the ultimate goal of women in the Brangwen family—Anna must assert her independence from her father and from her new family.
The move is initially successful and Anna is allowed to marry Will. However, she fails to see that she married a member of the same family she has tried to free herself from. As scholar Mary Ann Melfi argues, Anna "marries a Brangwen, which is in itself a kind of regressive, incestuous, complacent move" (369). As a result, another generation of Brangwen women will have to live what Lawrence refers to as an "enforced domestic life" (329).
In these chapters, the religious dimensions of the novel becomes apparent. As critic James Wood notes, "Lawrence was quite explicit about his attempt to write a new version of Genesis" (xx). We can see immediately see these allusions to Genesis in the portrayal of Marsh Farm as a sort of Eden. Moreover, Will works on a wood-carving depicting the creation of Adam and Eve. In his honeymoon with Anna, Will becomes like Adam and Anna becomes like Eve. They live in blissful isolation and spend much of their time naked.
Yet Lawrence quickly forecloses upon the possibility that Eden can exist on Earth. Like Adam and Eve, Will and Anna are forced to leave the Eden of their honeymoon and they begin to fight ceaselessly. In just a few chapters, a biblical-like flood will destroy much of Marsh Farm.
Beyond these allusions, Lawrence also explicitly discusses Christianity in the novel. In fact, it is another source of strife between characters, as Will is highly spiritual which "Anna wanted to destroy in him" (148). Atheism, once heresy, was slowly beginning to gain more prominence in the United Kingdom (as seen in Shelley's 1811 essay "The Necessity of Atheism") and Will and Anna represent the rising divide between believers and non-believers. At times, Anna tries consciously to undermine Will's faith, as will be seen in the scene at the Lincoln Cathedral. In this way, Lawrence seems to be suggesting that faith is an essential element of one's personhood and that tolerance and respect is necessary if there is to be harmony between people with different religious beliefs.
In some ways, The Rainbow can also be considered a work of existentialist literature. In these chapters, Tom undergoes something of an existential crisis—first when Anna makes it clear that he is not her father and later at the church when she is getting married. In these tragically moving scenes, Lawrence makes it clear that a sense of belonging evades some of us for the entirety of our lives. Although Tom has lived in many ways a successful life, he still questions, "was his life nothing?" (120). In these moments, Lawrence allows us into the depths of his characters psyches in a way that is seldom afforded. His characters seem to be so alive that they even fear death.
