An Ecocritical Reading of D. H. Lawrence’s TheRainbow

الملخص

This paper intends to analyze the Ecological elements in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. It investigates the treatment of nature and how man and nature exchange mutual effects, through three generations, as man moves from rural to industrial era. It traces how the three generations of the Brangwens live in contradictions as they live in a transitional era from country life to city life. The environmental awareness of the Brangwens characters make them sensitive to their natural surroundings. Although the first generation women were attracted to the industrial lights, Ursula returns to nature to be in direct connection with nature. Ursula's unity with nature represents human survival from the industrial capitalist civilization. This attitude towards nature mirrors Lawrence's sound ecological inclinations. Lawrence denounces modern intellectual way of life based on dead mechanical principles. He uses his fiction, particularly The Rainbow, as a means to formulate and theorize his nostalgic doctrine of the organic, blood intimacy of nature as a contrast to the anarchy and apocalypse of modern life. He shows very early awareness of the dangers of modern industry and prophetically anticipated the late 20th century ecocriticism. He has a green thumb to point at the man-nature relationship. It discloses how Lawrence artistically reveals the dreadful effects caused by environmental crisis on nature world. It takes these two masterpieces of Lawrence as a model to show the of industrialism on imaginational literary mind, the description of nature in literature, the abuses of nature under the damaging hand of the human being, the ecofeminism that analyses the parallel between the oppressed women and oppressed nature.

KEY WORDS:Ecocriticism, nature, industry, The Rainbow, ecofeminism.