Throughout the novel, Lawrence explores the restrictive gender roles imposed on women through the experiences of Anna and Ursula Brangwen, illustrating how these roles shape, challenge, and sometimes confine their personal growth. Both characters confront the expectations placed on them as women, but their responses highlight different aspects of the struggle for autonomy within the constraints of traditional female roles. Anna Brangwen’s journey through marriage reveals the pressures placed on women to conform to domestic life. In her relationship with Will, Anna initially revels in the intensity of their love and the domestic routine that accompanies it. However, as their marriage progresses, the traditional gender roles that cast her as the passive wife and mother begin to stifle her sense of individuality. Anna’s identity gets reduced to that of “mother,” leading her to question the narrow space that society has left for her independence. While she finds joy in motherhood, there is an underlying frustration as she navigates the tension between her prescribed domestic role and her desire for personal fulfillment.
Ursula, Anna’s daughter, takes this struggle further by actively rejecting many of the traditional expectations for women. Unlike her mother, Ursula seeks intellectual freedom and independence. Her education and relationships reflect her refusal to be confined to the roles of wife and mother. In her relationship with Anton Skrebensky, Ursula considers the expectation of submission and self-sacrifice that comes with marriage. However, she resists these constraints and ultimately rejects Anton’s marriage proposal. Ursula’s rejection of marriage as the primary means of defining her womanhood demonstrates her desire for a life of personal autonomy, where she is free to shape her own identity without others imposing their own ideas of femininity on her. Through Anna and Ursula, Lawrence critiques the limitations that traditional gender roles place on women. He shows how these roles can confine women to lives of passive obedience or domesticity, while also offering glimpses of the personal liberation that can come when these expectations are challenged or rejected entirely.
Gender Roles ThemeTracker
Gender Roles Quotes in The Rainbow
He went down to her room, entering softly. She was lying still, with eyes shut, pale, tired. His heart leapt, fearing she was dead. Yet he knew perfectly well she was not. He saw the way her hair went loose over her temples, her mouth was shut with suffering in a sort of grin. She was beautiful to him–but it was not human. He had a dread of her as she lay there. What had she to do with him? She was other than himself.
Something made him go and touch her fingers that were still grasped on the sheet. Her brown-grey eyes opened and looked at him. She did not know him as himself. But she knew him as the man. She looked at him as a woman in childbirth looks at the man who begot the child in her: an impersonal look, in the extreme hour, female to male. Her eyes closed again. A great, scalding peace went over him, burning his heart and his entrails, passing off into the infinite.
Tom Brangwen never loved his own son as he loved his stepchild Anna. When they told him it was a boy, he had a thrill of pleasure. He liked the confirmation of fatherhood. It gave him satisfaction to know he had a son. But he felt not very much outgoing to the baby itself. He was its father, that was enough.
He was glad that his wife was mother of his child. She was serene, a little bit shadowy, as if she were transplanted. In the birth of the child she seemed to lose connection with her former self. She became now really English, really Mrs. Brangwen. Her vitality, however, seemed lowered.
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.
“Oh, this is good!” she cried again. “Here is the same woman—look!—only he’s made her cross! Isn’t it lovely! Hasn’t he made her hideous to a degree?” She laughed with pleasure. “Didn’t he hate her? He must have been a nice man! […] You hate to think he put his wife in your cathedral, don’t you?” she mocked, with a tinkle of profane laughter. And she laughed with malicious triumph.
She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter–but dead, dead.
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.
“Why?” he asked, “why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I don’t want to be with other people,” she said. “I want to be like this. I’ll tell you if ever I want to marry you.”
“All right,” he said.
He would rather the thing was left indefinite, and that she took the responsibility.
Strange, what a void separated him and her. She liked him now, as she liked a memory, some bygone self. He was something of the past, finite. He was that which is known. She felt a poignant affection for him, as for that which is past. But, when she looked with her face forward, he was not. Nay, when she looked ahead, into the undiscovered land before her, what was there she could recognise but a fresh glow of light and inscrutable trees going up from the earth like smoke. It was the unknown, the unexplored, the undiscovered upon whose shore she had landed, alone, after crossing the void, the darkness which washed the New World and the Old.
There would be no child: she was glad. If there had been a child, it would have made little difference, however. She would have kept the child and herself, she would not have gone to Skrebensky. Anton belonged to the past.