Water and Insularity as Structural Elements in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love

Abstract

The article argues that the element of water (supplemented by the presence of islands and an island existence) serves as a wide-ranging and thus typically modernist leitmotif in the duology The Rainbow and Women in Love, taking its ultimate inspiration from the story of the Flood in Genesis. This, in turn, establishes a closer structural connection between the two works than is usually recognised. However, whereas in The Rainbow this motif remains throughout within an organic, meaningful, and ultimately constructive context, it is transformed in Women in Love into an almost exclusively destructive force, closely connected with the writer’s apocalyptic sentiments about the War. To some extent, the Flood or Deluge motif could be seen as a symbolic substitute, on a universal level, for the conspicuous absence of the War in the latter novel, that is as a threat of universal extinction. At the same time, the motif is also applicable to the individual lives of the characters and their needs for the death of an old self and the resurrection of a new one. In Women in Love Gerald Crich, in particular, personifies these destructive forces, both as an individual and as a representative of a larger system. Despite being confined almost exclusively to inland settings, this novel also explores ideas of escape, crossings, islands and insularity.