Post date: Jan 25, 2014 1:5:45 PM
(Suggested time—40 minutes. This question counts as one-third of the total essay section score.)
The following passage is from D. H. Lawrence’s 1915 novel, The Rainbow, which focuses on the lives of the Brangwens, a farming family who lived in rural England during the late nineteenth century. Read the passage carefully. Then write an essay in which you analyze how Lawrence employs literary devices to characterize the woman and capture her situation.
It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved
and opened its furrow to them, that the wind blew to
dry the wet wheat, and set the young ears of corn
wheeling freshly round about; it was enough that they
5 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. So much warmth and
generating and pain and death did they know in their
blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so
10 much exchange and interchange they had with these,
that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full
fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood,
staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the
source of generation, unable to turn around.
15 But the woman wanted another form of life than
this, something that was not blood-intimacy. Her
house faced out from the farm-buildings and fields,
looked out to the road and the village with church and
Hall and the world beyond. She stood to see the far-
20 off world of cities and governments and the active
scope of man, the magic land to her, where secrets
were made known and desires fulfilled. She faced
outwards to where men moved dominant and creative,
having turned their back on the pulsing heat of
25 creation, and with this behind them, were set out to
discover what was beyond, to enlarge their own scope
and range and freedom; whereas the Brangwen men
faced inwards to the teeming life of creation, which
poured unresolved into their veins.
30 Looking out, as she must, from the front of her
house towards the activity of man in the world at
large, whilst her husband looked out to the back at sky
and harvest and beast and land, she strained her eyes
to see what man had done in fighting outwards to
35 knowledge, she strained to hear how he uttered
himself in his conquest, her deepest desire hung on
the battle that she heard, far off, being waged on the
edge of the unknown. She also wanted to know, and
to be of the fighting host.
40 At home, even so near as Cossethay, was the vicar,
who spoke the other, magic language, and had the
other, finer bearing, both of which she could perceive,
but could never attain to. The vicar moved in worlds
beyond where her own menfolk existed. Did she not
45 know her own menfolk; fresh, slow, full-built men,
masterful enough, but easy, native to the earth,
lacking outwardness and range of motion. Whereas
the vicar, dark and dry and small beside her husband,
had yet a quickness and a range of being that made
50 Brangwen, in his large geniality, seem dull and local.
She knew her husband. But in the vicar’s nature was
that which passed beyond her knowledge. As
Brangwen had power over the cattle so the vicar had
power over her husband. What was it in the vicar, that
55 raised him above the common men as man is raised
above the beast? She craved to know. She craved to
achieve this higher being, if not in herself, then in her
children. That which makes a man strong even if he
be little and frail in body, just as any man is little and
60 frail beside a bull, and yet stronger than the bull, what
was it? It was not money nor power nor position.
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
65 the other man’s. And why—why? She decided it was
a question of knowledge.