The notion that there is no kindness or tenderness in D.H. Lawrence's characters cannot be supported by a careful reading of The Rainbow, though it may be accurate to say that the shape of tender feeling expressed by the characters lacks the ease and comfort of familiar sentiment. The distinction between tenderness and sentimentality is an important index of the complex characterization that marks the novel. Set as it is in northern agricultural England, among people who are hardly cosmopolitan, The Rainbow may seem an unpromising vehicle for characters who convey something of the vagaries of the human heart. Equally, the narrative is an examination of encounters in tension and suspense, chiefly though not exclusively in respect of physical relationships. And the whole narrative unfolds in a context of the permanent arrival of modernity, which are literally and figuratively redefining the green and pleasant land. Such relationship dynamics, manifest in a context of a more far-reaching transformation, constitute the action of the novel. Within that scheme of action there emerge moments of tender physical and emotional expression that are loaded with implication and ambiguity but that nonetheless--or for that very reason--illustrate the range of feeling that marks, enriches, and sometimes savages the human heart.
A minisaga of the Brangwen family, The Rainbow quickly sets the stage for action in a context of strangeness. The family itself is something of an alien in the Derbyshire area, Marsh Farm being described as "remote and original" (Lawrence 12) and Tom's mother Heanor as "whimsical . . . oddly a thing to herself" (13). Heanor and Alfred's marriage is a little testy and peculiar, and each of their children has an odd streak of behavior. Tom is alien, too, apparently having the soul of a poet but unable to articulate its power over him (Lawrence 16). Sexuality also puzzles him; he wants it to satisfy "his inarticulate, powerful r...