Hardy has it that Lawrence’s characters are both symbolic and psychologically realistic… thereby “smashing” the old stable ego, “rewriting” the Victorian novel, making it introspective and extrovert (in the sense that it seeks to have an impact on the society it describes) at the same time. The Rainbow is, according to Barbra Hardy (1993), “one of the great works of modern art, reflecting its age, but also forming it …it is not passive, simply reactive image but a maker of modern consciousness, a shaper of history… the novels is a maker, as well as a mirror, of its time.” Also, she claims “one of the great feminist novels.” But how has the reader been changed, if at all? If the reader has been changed, it will be something to do with the woman who slowly emerges as Lawrence’s protagonist, the fraught, dissatisfied, and disoriented Ursula Brangwen. Lawrence’s ‘The Rainbow’ is experimental, is of its era and has long since become a classic, is exciting, is moving, and works as a novel should: the reader is drawn into an array of characters’ feelings and thought processes, profoundly befuddled and caught up as they are, drawn along a series of plausible events, drawn through another not too unfamiliar world, and delivered up onto another shore.
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