XV - "The Bitterness of Ecstasy"
Ursula is set to begin college while the family gets settled in Beldover. Gudrun attends art school in Nottingham where she becomes a talented sculptor. Ursula starts school and befriends a classmate, Dorothy Russell.
At the end of Ursula’s first year at college, the Brangwens spend a month in the coastal town of Scarborough and Ursula enjoys the natural beauty. After returning to school, Ursula finds her interest in learning waning and comes to regard the subjects she studies as merely “dry good of knowledge” (403).
During her third year of studies, Anton and Ursula get back in contact with one another. They begin corresponding and she is filled with a sense of joy. They reunite and Anton reveals that he will be leaving again in six months to take a job in India. They go for a walk and she tells Anton that she has always loved him.
While Ursula dislikes college and the town her family now lives in, she feels happy to have Anton back in her life. One night, she and Anton make love beneath a tree. He proposes to her but she refuses to give him a firm answer.
Anton and Ursula travel to London. Wanting to see more of the world, Ursula suggests they visit France. They stop in Paris and then at the cathedral in Rouen. Slowly, Ursula drifts aparts from Anton as “her soul began to run by itself” (422). Anton realizes that she no longer loves him as she once did and he becomes depressed. Ursula returns home to Nottingham and Anton begins to drink heavily.
After corresponding with letters, Ursula and Anton agree to marry. They meet at a friend’s house in Oxford where he gives her an emerald ring. They start to fight again, this time about politics. They break up and Anton begins flirting with other women, including Gudrun.
They meet up again at Ursula’s friend Dorothy’s estate in Sussex. One warm night they sleep outside and swim naked in the sea. They return to London where Ursula tells Anton that she never wants to marry him. He begins crying uncontrollably and feels that “his manhood was cruelly, coldly defaced” (433). Ursula is touched to see him care so deeply about her, and she decides to stay with him.
In August, the month they are due to be married, Anton and Ursula meet up again at a friend’s party in Lincolnshire. Ursula and Anton go walking along the shore and make passionate love beneath the moonlight. The experience is not pleasant and is described as a “fight” and a “struggle” and it marks the end of their relationship (445). In a heated exchange Ursula concludes, “‘we have both done with each other’” (446).
Anton decides to marry his Colonel’s daughter and the two sail off to India together.
XVI - “The Rainbow”
Ursula returns to Beldover and begins to fear that she is pregnant. She decides that she will marry Anton so that they can raise the child. Her prior resolve seems to break down and she thinks, “what was her flesh but for childbearing, her strength for her children and her husband, the giver of life?” (450).
One day in October, Ursula goes for a walk in the rain. In the woods, she becomes surrounded by a pack of wild horses. They gallop around her and she feels excited and frightened. She tries to climb a tree to escape them but falls into a hedge. She gets up, runs across a field and hops a fence.
She returns home and grows sick. While bedridden for two weeks, she considers her past and her relationship with Anton. She recovers and determines that she is not pregnant shortly before receiving a telegram from Anton saying “I am married” (457).
She heads out for another walk and sees a rainbow forming in the sky. The beautiful sight fills her with hope for “new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain in heaven” (459).
Analysis:
Lawrence emphasizes Ursula's tenacity. Despite her disappointment with the professional world, she continues her self-cultivation by attending college. Although just as she is tenacious, she is always restless and hard to satisfy, as college soon fails to impress her.
Anton's return is timely, and Lawrence seems to bait the reader into thinking that Ursula will abandon her quest for liberation and, like Lydia and Anna, settle into married life. Yet, Ursula and Anton's courtship is fraught and marked by considerable differences in their dispositions and opinions. It also takes place in a considerably bleaker world than the one in which the earlier Brangwens found love. At times, both Ursula and Anton feel dislocated and alienated in the increasingly urbanized and anonymized setting of the novel. Ursula bemoans "the stupid, artificial, exaggerated town" just as Anton despises the "cold, stark, ashen sterility" around him (414, 423). It seems as though romance is impossible in such an unromantic landscape. Still, they persist in vain.
If love with Anton is not fated to satisfy Ursula, then what will? Here, Lawrence gestures back to Ursula's spirituality. During their travels to France, Anton and Ursula stop at the Rouen cathedral (again, a cathedral makes an appearance in the novel). As for her father, the experience is revelatory for Ursula—in language directly referring back to Will's experience at the Lincoln Cathedral, Ursula admires the cathedral for its "absoluteness" (422). From this point, Ursula's "soul began to run by itself" (422). From here it is clear that Ursula and Anton will never marry.
The conclusion of the novel has been criticized for its unbelievability and its melodrama. Indeed, after such a long novel with so many characters and so much development, it is somewhat strange that it should end with Ursula marvelling at a rainbow. Of course, the rainbow is an important symbol in the Book of Genesis, when God tells Noah that he will send rainbows as a reminder that he will not flood the Earth again.
For Ursula, this is a hopeful sign that her misfortunes are behind her, as well as a reassurance of her faith, as though God is communicating to her. If love and a career did not satisfy Ursula, Lawrence suggests that our only hope for peace and happiness lies in the beauty of nature and a spiritual sensibility. For scholar Evelyn J. Hinz this is an unsatisfactory ending, which involves "Ursula's final contended surrender of herself to a 'vaster power'" (1).
After all, Ursula ends the novel living at home with her family, with her plans for an independent life seemingly on hold. Yet although it is the end of the novel, it is not the end of Ursula's story, as she is the protagonist of Lawrence's subsequent novel, Women in Love. In this way, the titular rainbow represents a new beginning as much as a conclusion.
