The Rainbow

The Brangwens often find themselves having their most significant interpersonal moments in or near bodies of water. Ursula especially has some of her most transitional and transcendent experiences in water. When Winifred takes Ursula’s class to the pool for swimming lessons, she challenges Ursula to a race and initiates their first significant physical contact when she wins. Ursula does not care about winning the race, nor does she mind the other students’ seeing this intimate moment. What compels her in this scene is the sight of Winifred’s body moving through the water: She admires her teacher’s body but “despised” her own. Later, when they swim naked together, Winifred first leads her through the dark while it rains and carries her into the pond. The scene marks a transitional period in Ursula’s life, functioning like a baptism that marks her rebirth as she moves on—for a period of time—from Anton and explores a sexual relationship with Winifred. Water also plays a vital role in Ursula’s final liberation from Anton. When their off-and-on relationship finally reaches a definite end through his new marriage and her realization that she is not pregnant with his child, a rainstorm ends. She realizes that her torment is ending along with the storm’s end. She is free from the domestic constraints that she long struggled against, and a rainbow forms, offering her renewal and hope.

P. T. Whelan notes that “the end of Tom’s era is marked by a flood which he does not survive” (26). The scene itself is rendered in vivid, upsetting detail as the first Brangwen protagonist dies. The water becomes a passive, swirling darkness that washes Tom away as if he were no different from the debris caught in its currents. It surrounds him, suffocates him, and holds within it unseen objects that knock his feet out from under him and strike his head, rendering him unconscious. In sharp contrast to other scenes of water as locations of love, flirtation, friendship, and life-giving, the flood transforms water into a strange, unidentifiable monster that consumes everything in its path.