Author: David Easterling, Rio Cazadero High School
📍Sacramento, CA

Lawrence employs varied syntax, repetition, and contrasting imagery to capture the woman’s dissatisfaction with her current situation and her desire to pursue knowledge deeper than she believes exists in her simple, rural community. 

This passage from D.H. Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, introduces a woman who is discontented with and bored by the mundane and worldly nature of her life and the company she has in front of her. She is constantly occupied by her desire to leave her unenlightened rural community to seek knowledge that transcends anything the men around her could even imagine. Lawrence employs varied syntax, repetition, and contrasting imagery to capture the woman’s dissatisfaction with her current situation and her desire to pursue knowledge deeper than she believes exists in her simple, rural community. 

Lawrence varies the syntax when describing the Brangwen men, the woman, and her desires, and the vicar to capture the woman’s discontentment with the life she is living on her family’s farm and her desire to experience the outside world. When describing the Brangwen men, Lawrence uses boring and uninteresting sentence structure. Lawrence describes the men’s daily tasks while working in the field in a long, droning list, writing, “…it was enough that they (the men) helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats from under the barn, or broke the back of a rabbit with a sharp knock of the hand” (Lines 4-7).  Additionally, throughout the opening section of this passage, which is the section that contains this excerpt, wherein the Brangwen men are introduced to the readers, Lawrence repeats this syntax, beginning almost every sentence with the phrase “It was” and flatly listing things out in basic sentences. Lawrence’s repetition of this uninteresting sentence structure when describing the men is boring to the readers. This effect captures the woman’s feelings towards the men: because they do not think to look past their earthly daily tasks, they are uninteresting, and the life that they engage in, which consists of tending to animals and being immersed in the physical world is unfulfilling. In contrast, in the section where the vicar is introduced, Lawrence uses syntax that is far more dynamic and varied, conveying the woman’s interest in and fascination with the vicar. For example, Lawrence writes “What power had the vicar over Tom Brangwen— none. Yet strip them and set them on a desert island, and the vicar was the master. His soul was master of the other man’s” (Lines 62-65). The opening sentences which describe the men to the readers repeat a specific structure, beginning with the phrase, “It was” and then go on to list different actions in the same linear, droning format, without adding any abstraction nor meaning to the men’s actions. In contrast, the syntax in this section is far more interesting to read. The author uses a variety of sentence lengths, and structures, and even asks a rhetorical question, as mentioned above, highlighting the woman’s fascination with and interest in the vicar, as opposed to her boredom and dissatisfaction with the men in her life and what her life on the farm has to offer. This is especially apparent because in this moment when the woman is observing the men working and going about their “menial” tasks, the vicar is not even at the scene. While the men are milking cows, protecting the farm from rats, and tending to the crops, in front of the woman, the vicar exists only in her head at the moment. In addition, the uninteresting syntax used to describe the men can also be contrasted with the syntax used when describing the woman’s dreams and aspirations of pursuing other-worldly knowledge. For example, Lawrence writes, “She craved to know. She craved to achieve this higher being, if not in herself, then in her children.” While in this excerpt Lawrence does repeat the same two words at the beginning of both sentences, the effect this creates is not one of boredom with the content of the sentences, but rather, because it expands upon what “she craved” by using repetition along varying the sentence lengths and structure, it makes her desires seem more compelling and exciting. Lawrence’s intentional use of uninteresting syntax when describing the men in the woman’s eyes compared to the use of more dynamic and interesting syntax when describing the vicar and the woman’s dreams of the outside world contribute to his characterization of the woman as someone who is dissatisfied with her situation and longs acquire the kind of knowledge and power, she believes that the vicar, and men of the outside have.