The Rainbow

Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her

schooldays were over. She had passed the matriculation

examination. Now she came home to face that empty period between

school and possible marriage.

At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the

time, she would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded

suffering, maimed. She had no will left to think about herself.

For a time she must just lapse.

But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her

mother had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the

girl continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs.

Brangwen was again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had

died of diphtheria in infancy.

Even this fact of her mother's pregnancy enraged the eldest

girl. Mrs. Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in

her breeding. She would not have the existence at all of

anything but the immediate, physical, common things. Ursula

inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth's

reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can't grasp, can't

even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the

darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her

mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of

physical considerations, and complacently to reject the reality

of anything else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen

care about, but the children, the house, and a little local

gossip. And she would not be touched, she would let

nothing else live near her. She went about, big with child,

slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own

time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the

children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of

womanhood.

This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her

young and undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when

Gudrun was born. All these years nothing had happened save the

coming of the children, nothing had mattered but the bodies of

her babies. As her children came into consciousness, as they

began to suffer their own fulfilment, she cast them off. But she

remained dominant in the house. Brangwen continued in a kind of

rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with his wife. They

were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as

individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of

breeding and rearing their young.

How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close,

physical, limited life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid,

unshakeable as ever, Mrs. Brangwen went about in her dominance

of physical maternity.

There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that

mattered to her. She would have the children less rude and

tyrannical, she would have a place in the house. But her

mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the cunning

instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen ridiculed and held

cheap Ursula's passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula

would try to insist, in her own home, on the right of women to

take equal place with men in the field of action and work.