"The Rainbow" Essay and Analysis

In a world of much simplicity, where the men pride themselves on coming from the land and working the land, one woman is trapped on the inside looking out at the future that she could have herself if she were allowed to educate herself.  In The Rainbow, author D. H. Lawrence employs a metaphor characterizing the farm in which the men work as hell, a contrast between the life of education and the life without it, and a personification of the vicar in order to portray the woman as a woman who passionately yearns for an education.

                The passage opens on a peculiar phrase: “It was enough for the men.”  It was enough for them to live on a farm where they modestly grow their own food, and take pride in living off the land.  The woman, though, sees this from a different perspective.  She sees the men in a bloody struggle against nature.  She sees the men as creatures who naturally have “pain and death … in their blood.”  They beg for mercy from this perpetual cycle that they are “unable to turn around from.”  So instead of glorifying the work like the men might, through the depiction of farming as a battle against nature it is only natural for her to want an education so that she can “face outward” from this hell and move on towards the promising village.

                Once this farming is established as a hellish, unglorified struggle, she contrasts it to the life that she could have had if she was like “the vicar” that spoke “the other, magic language” of “knowledge.”  The knowledge that she could obtain if she was to be educated, personified as the vicar, is idolized by this woman.  “She craved to know” of the vicar’s movement through “worlds beyond where her own menfolk existed.”  This personification of her life after education, even though she was much smaller and weaker than her husband, promised a power over him in the form of knowledge.  This idolization of the personified knowledge shows the life that she believes that she could attain if she “faced outward” and defied the men’s wishes and got an education.

                When life on the working-class farm, characterized by Lawrence as a hellish, miserable place, is directly contrasted with the idealized vicar, who represents the woman’s life after an education it is clear that the woman passionately desires an education, even if it is against the men’s wishes.

Part II:

Initially my peer, Reilly Carr, scored my essay at an 8.  He said that my essay did offer a persuasive analysis of the prompt, just as the essay states.  In addition he wrote that it was well organized, and used apt and specific text references.  Though it does have characteristics of high ranging essays, one worry that Reilly had was with the voice.  He told me that in order to score a nine, one must use quite sophisticated language.  I agree wholeheartedly with his statements.  Though highly sophisticated language may only be explicitly stated as a deciding factor between 8 and 9 essays, it is always important to use the jargon of literary analysis in order to effectively communicate the points that you are trying to make to your reader.

Certainly as mentioned above, using highly sophisticated language can be very important as it comes to clearly communicating ideas, but it does no good if you do not have any noteworthy ideas to start with.  While I feel that I did well in outlining the principle literary devices use to characterize the woman in The Rainbow, after researching the author, D.H. Lawrence, reading the “Prose Passage” section in the 5 Steps to a 5 book, reading the 1-9 norming essays set as examples by College Board, and participating in class discussion, I have come up with quite a few ideas to include and areas to improve upon.  Though all of this took much more than the estimated 40 minutes given by College Board on the AP exam, some of the elements that I discovered can be applied even without the research beforehand.

Part I

The 5 Steps to a 5 is great help when looking to improve on the prose passage essay.  It gives great models that provide as close to a perfect formula for writing as possible.  Unfortunately though, this is English, not Calculus.  A perfect formula for writing about the devices on one passage may not hold true for a multitude of other passages that may be thrown at you on an exam.  Instead you must adapt to the passage and prompt, and write an essay that is specifically tailored to that.  While I believe that I did a good job structuring my essay into two parts, mirroring the structure that Lawrence uses when characterizing two groups (men and women), I still feel that my structure is very rigid, and limits what I may have to say.  In future essays I would like to transcend beyond the 4 or 5 paragraph structure limited to one thesis, a few points and then a conclusion.  Instead, I would like to be able to elaborate deeply on a subject, or literary device in a paragraph, and then be able to bring it back into a bigger meaning without waiting for the conclusion to wrap it all up.

As said before, effective communication is useless if you do not have ideas worthy of communication.  In my essay I feel that I quite effectively answered the prompt by showing how a multitude of literary devices contributed to the characterization of the men and woman in the passage.  Even still there is a strong element that is quite central to characterization but is somewhat absent from my essay: a discussion of tone.  Just as beefing up on the tone words is critical before taking the multiple choice portion of the AP English Literature Exam, it is also quite integral to the process of writing a prose passage essay.  The tone in which a character is introduced speaks volumes on the emotions and desires of the characters themselves.  The fact that the one isolated woman is introduced with a tone of longing, and the men introduces with a sense of complacency, is quite important, and though I danced around these ideas, it is always good to explicitly state that it is a specific tone that contributes to characterization in order to earn a higher score on the prose passage essay.