Part 1:
Prompt: 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.
In D.H. Lawrence's novel, The Rainbow, he uses polysyndeton, repetition, analogies, and rhetorical questions to characterize the woman as an adventurous woman who wants to leave her drab situation for the quest of knowledge.
Lawrence uses polysyndeton to emphasize the woman's current painfully boring and unsatisfying situation. The situation is described as being filled with "warmth and generating and pain and death" (Lawrence 7-8). The repetition of the conjunction lengthens and dramatizes the situation as being extremely boring and unsatisfying for the woman, yet the perfect life for all of the males. The woman's current situation forces her to want something more in life.
To characterize and show that the woman is adventurous, Lawrence uses repetition of words that imply leaving. Lawrence repeatedly describes the house or the woman as "faced out" or "looking out" into the distance and into another world (17,30). The woman is not only looking far off into another world, but into her hopeful future. She is ready and willing to move out of her current situation and into a satisfying life.
Lawrence uses analogy and rhetorical questions to show that the woman wants to reach a place of knowledge. The vicar, full of knowledge, is compared to her family and husband, content with a methodical lifestyle, in the analogy: "what was it in the vicar, that raised him above the common men as man is raised above the beast?" (Lawrence 54-56). Lawrence shows that the vicar, or outside world, is greater and more powerful than her husband, her current situation. The woman wants to be a part of this greater power and so she is questioning how to achieve that level above her current situation.
Lawrence later answers this question by stating: "It was not money nor power nor position" but the "question of knowledge" (61,66). The polysyndeton once again emphasizes how none of those traits raise the woman to the next level, but knowledge can and will. The use of polysyndeton at the beginning and the end characterize the two different situations of monotony and power.
Lawrence uses polysyndeton, analogy, rhetorical questions, and repetition to show that the woman desires knowledge and is willing to achieve this knowledge in order to leave her unsatisfying situation.
Part 2:
Rickey Terrell graded my response to this prompt and gave the essay a 6. My essay is a 6 because I have a "reasonable analysis" of the passage, but it was "less perceptive" and not as developed as a 7 essay. My essay provided a "sustained, competent reading" of the prompt and of the passage, which showed through my analysis. I completely agree that my essay is a 6 essay because although I did have a fairly competent analysis of the passage, I did not write about or figure out the complexity of the passage, which prevented my essay from scoring higher. Because of my lack of control of my writing style, both Rickey and I agreed that that is why the essay a 6 and not a 7.
I would definitely improve my essay by comparing and contrasting the men and the woman. In the third and fourth body paragraphs, I touched briefly on the idea that the men were comfortable with their methodical lifestyle, while the woman wanted to have something more in life. We discussed in class how the woman is facing outward while her husband faces toward the sun. It is ironic that the husband faces the sun and is complacent with his current situation, while the woman is facing away from the sun and is the one that is yearning to grow. The irony of the relationship between the man in the woman is definitely part of the complexity of the passage and is important part to add to my essay in order to improve it. I would improve my essay even further by writing about the tension that the woman feels at the beginning of the passage, which also applies to the comparison between the man and the woman. Unlike the men, the woman actually questions the situation and recognizes how to get out of her current situation, which Lawrence shows through the use of the rhetorical questions at the end of the passage. I briefly touched on the idea of the rhetorical questions and how they relate to the woman's questioning of the situation, but to better my analysis, I would discuss how the rhetorical questions contrast the woman and the men even more.
The men are overall very complacent with their situation. They are completely content with farming all day, manipulating the earth to produce food, and raising and killing the animals. They follow the cycle of life and death everyday and are very content. They are in a monotonous situation, but the men stick with their profession because it is what they know. The idea of their complacency is shown through the anaphora and parallelism in the first paragraph. This parallelism and anaphora characterize the men because Lawrence lists all of their daily activities to show how monotonous their lives are, but yet how content the men are. I did slightly discuss the complacency of the men, but not in much detail. To improve my essay, I would add this analysis and characterization of the men, which also helps to characterize the woman.
After my research on D.H. Lawrence and our class discussion, I would discuss the irony between what the woman wants and D.H. Lawrence's ideologies. Lawrence believed that people were beginning to focus too much on the mind instead of the body and that people should move their focus back to the body. The lady is trying to move away from the body (blood, life, death) and toward the mind and knowledge. If Lawrence believed that the body is more important than the mind, then the men are actually more important than the woman in the passage. They are the ones who work and are complacent with life, death, and the body, while the woman wants to achieve knowledge. Part of the complexity of the passage is that the men's farming job is just as important as the vicar's knowledge. I did not touch on the idea that the two groups are both important, but instead, in my third body paragraph, I discussed how the two groups contrasted and how the vicar had power over the farmers.
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