SOURCE: "Comedy and History in The Rainbow," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XIII, No. 4, Winter, 1967-68, pp. 465-77.

In the following essay, Wasson interprets The Rainbow as a comedy wherein marriage and the union of the individual and society are the end goals.

Scholarship on D. H. Lawrence reminds one of a guerrilla war; Leavisites, Christians, Marxists, Freudians, Liberals, Utopians, and a few confessed demonics ambush each other and stage coups and counter-coups within their own groups. Yet for all their warfare they disagree less than one might suppose over the substance of any given novel. In discussions of The Rainbow critics compulsively return to the same scenes interpreting them with some variation, but generally functioning within a narrow area of agreement. For all the talk about Ursula's encounter with the horses, for example, criticism has not advanced much beyond saying that some repressed passion returns to Ursula's...