Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow

Evolution towards independence

First of all, what we should be aware of is the heroines name, which, in my opinion,
reveals a great amount of information about her evolution in the novel. Saint Ursula (Latin for
'little female bear') is a British Christian saint. The legend says that she was sent by her father
to marry a king, and for this she set sail along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens. On their
way, they were captured by the Huns, and because she refused to marry the pagan leader of
the Huns, she and the rest of her maidens were martyred1.
Her name reveals that the character owns a strong personality (Ursula Latin for 'little
female bear'), who isnt afraid to take her own decisions, no matter the consequences. Her
resistance against being married is the climax of her evolution towards achieving
independence.
As I have said, the highest point in her struggle for independence is her denial of
marriage. But in order to get to this high point, we need to observe her evolution in the novel,
to capture the most decisive quotations and describe the matter in which she came to become
one of the most feminist characters in the early twentieth century.
Even during her childhood, she shows herself to be intelligent as well as independent.
She fights society's connections and restrictions almost from the beginning; even from the
beginning she feels the need to break the social/ domestic boundaries and to overcome her
condition (And very early she learned to harden her soul in resistance, and denial of all that
was outside her [] even as a girl of twelve she was glad to burst the narrow boundary of
Cossethey, where only limited people lived. Outside, was all vastness, and a throng of real,
proud people whom she would love.2).
Her journey towards emancipation begins at home in Cossethey and with her general
discomfort with the old generation, but most of all with her mother Anna. What strikes at
Ursula, as an early teenager, is her fierce denial and revolt against the domestic role of the
woman, a role attributed to her mother Anna (She was always in revolt against babies and
muddled domesticity. [..] when she saw, later, a Rubens picture with storms of naked babies
called Fecundity, she shuddered, and the word became abhorrent for her. She knew, as a
child, what was to live amidst storms of babies, in the heat and swelter of fecundity 3.)In her
evolution, we see Ursula as an instinctive human being, relying more on her instincts and
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Ursula
2
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Williams Heinemann Ltd., London, 1915, pp.334-335.
3
Ibidem, pp. 345-346.

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feelings rather than on rational thinking. Again linking to her name, Ursula 'little female
bear', she comes to be compared to an instinctive creature as strong as a bear (She was free,
unbeatable animal, she declared in her revolts: there was no law for her, nor any rule4)
As a child Ursula has a violent will of her own and she often asserts it against her
parents. She rejects the domesticity of her mother's life and "fights against the close, physical,
limited life of herded domesticity."5. She gets furious when asked by her father not to walk on
the seed-bed. She thinks that the earth is meant to walk on. So she doesnt see why she should
avoid a certain patch just because it is called a seed-bed.
As an adolescent, Ursula yearns for the world beyond and she believes that she has
found the key to her freedom when she encounters Anton Skrenbensky, a young officer. Both
of them are roused and excited to a new flame of life. She feels that she would be able to
realize herself through this passion. She could limit and define herself against him, the
male,she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in
exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme central distinction to the male.4She feels
supreme and triumphant but also feels sorry for having destroyed herself in annihilating him.
She is the first of the Brangwen women to lose her virginity before marriage. However, she
rejects Anton and becomes the 'victim, consumed annihilated'. Their affair temporarily ends
when Ursula returns to teaching and Anton leaves to fight in the South African Boer War. In
his absence, Ursula's search for identity takes her through some erotic experiences and she
develops lesbian relationship with her school mistress, Winifred Inger.
A highly individualistic character, Ursula feels very restless and suffocating at this
stage. She wants to break the restrictions that she suffers in a man's world and sets out to
enhance her education and build a career through which she hopes to find economic
independence and personal freedom. At the end of the novel, she finds her 'Rainbow' arching
over the earth and envisages it as the promise of a new life, a symbol of hope and rejuvenation
for her future. Thus by the end of the novel, she overcomes the traditional role of the woman
to achieve her own self-realization and becomes a newly restored being. Ursula symbolizes
the modern emancipated woman who follows her own course of life and experiences life
independently.

4
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, Williams Heinemann Ltd., London, 1915, p. 268.
5
Ibidem, p.354.