The Rainbow

Will and Anna’s battle for dominance in their marriage centers largely around their opposing views of religion. Anna’s disbelief clashes often with Will’s devout beliefs, and their strife is representative of a larger shift in England at the time. Atheism was becoming a more prominent opinion, and the rift in Anna and Will’s marriage because of religion comes to represent the division between non-believers and believers. Anna often intentionally undermines Will’s belief, as seen when they visit Lincoln Cathedral. She knows he adores the cathedral, but she deliberately mocks its architecture and its art—especially a carving, which at the time is Will’s main form of artistic expression. The narration deftly moves from the transcendent nature of Will’s experience to the tremendous embarrassment and shame Anna makes him feel for being so excited by church and religion. Her mockery alters his understanding of the role of a church or a cathedral. As Will enters the cathedral, the narration explores his emotional reaction as one in which churches figure as divine sites where God communicates directly with humanity. Anna’s stunningly cruel mockery leads Will to conclude that the cathedral is just a building, albeit a highly symbolic one, and “there was much that the church did not include” (190). This change in his spiritual views ties to the theme Society, Family, and the Self as Will’s beliefs, a vital part of his identity, adjust in response to questioning and critique from his wife.

Much in the same way that industrialization demystifies the natural world, Anna’s mockery demystifies Will’s spirituality. The cathedral scene represents the broader world’s shift into modernity: Much of the world seems less wondrous, less sacred, and there is an increasing emphasis on the physical purpose of things. This cultural shift relates to the theme of Education and Industrialization. Britain transitioned in the 18th and 19th centuries from agriculturally centered to production-focused, and people became more oriented to the mechanical and the concrete rather than the spiritual. As the arguments over religion drive a wedge between Will and Anna, their marriage starts to mirror Tom and Lydia’s. Their differences push them apart, because instead of working toward mutual acceptance, they constantly pick at each other until they despise one another. As a result of this new distance, Will bonds with Ursula just like Tom bonded with Anna. The husband does not feel belonging and acceptance with the wife, so he pursues that sense of purpose with the eldest daughter.

The novel’s midpoint closes one generation as another begins. The elder Tom’s role in the story ends when he dies in a sudden flood caused by the canal walls breaking down during a storm. Still drunk, he tries to inspect the damage, and he is pulled under by unseen debris, knocked unconscious, and drowns in the quick currents, a victim of the tools of “progress” that were brought to his farm. The Brangwens are bound together by the passing of Marsh Farm from one generation to the next, particularly from one male to another. The dynamics of Tom and Lydia’s marriage, and Will and Anna’s, are so similar because they are caught up in the same cycles of marriage, agriculture, and unfulfilled ambition. The flash flood ultimately signals an impending shift in where and how the Brangwens will live. The water fills the ground floor of Tom and Lydia’s house, carrying away furniture and dishes, and it claims Tom’s life in a swift and unexpected—but brutal—death scene that echoes the suddenness of his father Alfred’s death by falling from a ladder. Akin to the phoenix depicted on the butter stamp that rises from ashes, the Brangwens will rise from floodwaters.