Tom Brangwen and Women

Once, when he was drunk at a public house, he went upstairs with a prostitute who seduced him. He was then nineteen.

The thing was something of a shock to him. In the close intimacy of the farm kitchen, the woman occupied the supreme position. The men deferred to her in the house, on all household points, on all points of morality and behavior. The woman was the symbol for that further life which compromised religion and love and morality. The men placed in her hands their own conscience, they said to her "Be my conscience-keeper, be the angel at the doorway guarding my outgoing and in my incoming." And the woman fulfilled her trust, the men rested implicitly on her, receiving her praise or her blame with pleasure or with anger, rebelling and storming, but never for a moment really escaping in their own souls from her prerogative. They depended on her for stability.

Now when Tom Brangwen, at nineteen, a youth fresh like a plant, rooted in his mother and his sister, found that he had lain with a prostitute woman in a common public house, he was very much startled. For him there was until that time only one kind of woman- his mother and sister.

But now? He did not know what to feel. There was a slight wonder, a pang of anger, of disappointment, a first taste of ash and of cold fear lest this was all that would happen, lest his relations with woman were going to be no more than this nothingness; there was a slight sense of shame before the prostitute, fear that she would despise him for his inefficency; there was a cold distaste for her, and a fear of her; there was a moment of paralyzed horror when he felt he might have taken a disease from her; and upon all this startled tumult of emotion, was laid the steadying hand of common sense, which said it did not matter very much.

But it had shocked him, and put a mistrust into his heart, and emphasized his fear of what was within himself.

Excerpt from D.H. Lawrence's 'The Rainbow' Ch 1, pg 15



I am stunned with how easily Lawrence sums up the back and forth motions of love within a man. That bitter and acrid taste of fear inverts the forwardness of carnal desire. Often times I find myself doing something that I know is wrong for me, completely and totally wrong, yet I cannot stop. I cannot stop because I am too scared to be caught in my tracks. I have to go through with it, because that fear of incompletion is too real.

Yet, don't I often find myself more disgusted afterwards? That fear is only replaced with loss and shame, like a little boy who just got away with a white lie to his parents. I stand there in the dark and hate the guilt that was there all along.

Thus, I'm amazed with D.H. Lawrence. His ability to pinpoint that back and forth in the heart of man. He and Thomas Hardy understand the finest points of love and its paradoxical nature. We want the angel of the hearth to watch over us, we want the maternal figure to guide us, to put us to bed. Yet, how pathetically we struggle against the whore. How frail our minds are when provoked with temptation.