A N A P P R O A C H T O T H E I M A G E R Y : A S T U D Y O F S E L E C T E D B I B L I C A L A N A L O G U E S I N D. H. L A W R E N C E ’ S T H E R A I N B O W DAVID MANICOM McGill University M u c h of the imagery used by Lawrence in The Rainbow is frustratingly archetypal; frustrating because the massively complex structures of meaning that have been built up around symbols as basic as those in the novel, make assessment of the specific value communicated extremely difficult. For in stance, we are consistently given the symbols of water and fire in connection with sexual intercourse. As two of the four classical “elements,” these sym bols have found a range of associated values in literature, art, philosophy, and other disciplines so vast that they become severely limited as means of analyzing The Rainbow's message with any precision. This is not to deny that such symbols have a role to play as elemental archetypes. They do have such roles, but their function in this regard must almost necessarily be limited to the formation of atmosphere, mood, and tone, which are, of course, important aspects of the art of a novelist as emotional and “pro phetic” (in the definition of E. M. Forster), as D. H. Lawrence. But they can be of much more use to us than this. Many of the primary image patterns of the book are also allusive, that is, they are represented in conjunction with, and are illuminated by, a series of analogues from outside the novel. Even the analogues tend to be archetypal (the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the fiery furnace of “Daniel” ), and therefore have associated with them, to a lesser degree, the same difficulties of precise interpretation. Despite this, an examination of some of the book’s principal analogues with their associated imagery, can serve as a useful point of entry into a more exact definition of Lawrence’s abstractions. I The Rainbow is an apocalyptic novel. Lawrence is not interested in fine distinctions of morality or happiness: he is concerned with ecstasy and agony, with paradisical perfection and the landscape of hell, with fullness and emptiness. It is not surprising that Edenic imagery and its demonic counterparts play a large role in his fiction. The opening pages plunge us E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x i, 4, December 1985 into the much celebrated description of pre-industrial England, where “heaven and earth was teeming,” and the Brangwen men feel “the sap . .. the intercourse between heaven and earth” (7-8) d Such intercourse is of course a central feature of many creation mythologies. The theme of the section is interconnectedness between man and nature. The males are at sensual peace, for “the earth heaved and opened its furrows to them” (8). This is not paradise; it is, after all, “the close Brangwen life” that Anna finds so stifling (199), almost a parody of the Spenserian “Bower of Bliss,” yet it is, in the words of Ronald Draper, “with certain qualifications. . . his [Lawrence’s] pastoral ideal — a Golden Age — by comparison with which modem life is a fallen condition.” 2 It is a beautiful dream, a place out of time, but one from which man must escape, as he “escaped” from Eden, if he is to fully develop his potential. Already, in the opening pages, the women are looking outward, “to the spoken world beyond,” and although the females in the novel are at times earth-mother figures, especially Anna, “the earth, the mother of everything,” who establishes “the matriarchy” at the cottage near the church (208) and temporarily gives up her outward striving to serve as a doorway for new souls (196), in general the female is the opposite of this. It is the men who cling to the ground, to the security of the garden; their sexuality...