Will’s woodcarving of Adam and Eve symbolizes his desire for spiritual harmony both in his faith and in his marriage to Anna. By carving these figures, he expresses a longing for an Edenic world where life and relationships remain free from conflict and sin. However, when Will destroys the carving during a difficult period in his marriage, it reveals his growing disillusionment. The destruction reflects his realization that marriage, and life itself, involve complexities that defy his idealistic view. This moment in Will’s personal life parallels the novel’s broader theme of the modern world intruding on the Eden-like Marsh Farm. Will’s vision of marital and spiritual perfection shatters as the traditional life at Marsh Farm faces the pressures of modernity. The destruction of the carving symbolizes Will’s rejection of an unattainable ideal and underscores the inevitable decline of the rural, pastoral life as the Brangwens confront the changing world.
The Adam and Eve Wood Carving Quotes in The Rainbow
She bundled the dishes away, flew round and tidied the room, assumed another character, and again seated herself. He sat thinking of his carving of Eve. He loved to go over his carving in his mind, dwelling on every stroke, every line. How he loved it now! When he went back to his Creation-panel again, he would finish his Eve, tender and sparkling. It did not satisfy him yet. The Lord should labour over her in a silent passion of Creation, and Adam should be tense as if in a dream of immortality, and Eve should take form glimmeringly, shadowily, as if the Lord must wrestle with His own soul for her, yet she was a radiance.
Their children became mere offspring to them, they lived in the darkness and death of their own sensual activities. Sometimes he felt he was going mad with a sense of Absolute Beauty, perceived by him in her through his senses. It was something too much for him. And in everything, was this same, almost sinister, terrifying beauty. But in the revelations of her body through contact with his body, was the ultimate beauty, to know which was almost death in itself, and yet for the knowledge of which he would have undergone endless torture. He would have forfeited anything, anything, rather than forego his right even to the instep of her foot, and the place from which the toes radiated out, the little, miraculous white plain from which ran the little hillocks of the toes, and the folded, dimpling hollows between the toes. He felt he would have died rather than forfeit this.