Blog Post 1: Every Rainbow Has Its Fact-Based Explication

The Essay:         

        In The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence uses repetition, figurative language, and selection of detail to show the contrast between farm life and city life in order to emphasize the woman's desire to leave the simplicity of her current home, and chase down the knowledge and innovation of man progressing right outside her doorstep.
        Lawrence weaves the woman's displeasure with the life she currently leads through the use of repetition. The anaphora in the first sentence, "It was enough for the men...it was enough that they helped the cow in labour, or ferreted the rats..." establishes immediately that farm tasks sufficient for the men's contentment are not so for the woman. Lawrence continues with the repetition of the motif of looking inwards or outwards; the men's faces are "always turned to the heat...unable to turn around" and face "inwards to the teeming life of creation". Never do the men search for something outside the scope of their nature-centered lives, nor do they want to.
         The woman, on the other hand, is consistently described as "faced out", "looking out", and "outwards", always craving something beyond the world she currently lives in. By repeating the theme of 'facing inwards' for the men and 'looking out' for the woman, Lawrence is able to directly contrast the desires of the woman with those of the men she lives with. Stuck with a family who is content with "staring into the sun", the woman seeks the satiation of her thirst for knowledge elsewhere.
        The woman finds the quintessential intellectual she's looking for in the town's vicar, and Lawrence uses figurative language to highlight the significant difference in how the woman views this man of knowledge and how she views her own husband. The woman notes that "as Brangwen had power over the cattle, so the vicar had power over her husband". The woman is so disillusioned with her life on the farm and so enamored with the potential to gain knowledge that she views her own husband as nothing more than an animal when compared to an educated man; in her mind "it was a question of knowledge" that "raised him [the vicar] above the common man as man is raised above the beast". So desperate is she to gain that same knowledge, to be elevated to that same level as the vicar, and yet she's trapped in the life of a farmer's wife.
       The woman in The Rainbow wanted something far beyond the simple life she was given.

The Breakdown:

Saie gave me a 7+/8- on this essay, which, as far as I can tell, is more than a little generous. While I would agree that my analysis was reasonable, used textual support, and presented ideas with clarity, it was not persuasive enough or sophisticated enough to be pushed out of the 6/7 range; in fact, if I were to score this essay myself, I would give it a 6.  The composition was often sloppily organized and lacked the elevated diction that a 7 essay of the same caliber analysis would possess. Though I think I was working towards the right ideas as far as the analysis itself, I failed to address the complexity of the woman's situation, and because I did not map out my time efficiently, I ran out of time and was not able to write about the third literary device I found. Therefore, the variety of literary devices within my essay was lacking.
The first thing I would do to improve this essay would be to solidify the complexity of my analysis, which would certainly be encapsulated within Lawrence's idea of "blood knowledge". I mentioned that the woman was craving knowledge, seeking it with the kind of desperation and tension that the men around her simply couldn't understand. With this pursuit of innovation and progression in place with the woman, I could begin to discuss Lawrence and how he proposed the idea of "blood knowledge", that primal instinct running through our veins, that gut feeling that, in Lawrence's eyes, held the most comprehensive body of knowledge at all. In terms of The Rainbow, I could've discussed how the woman was looking outwards for knowledge when the true knowledge she was seeking may have been inwards, where the men were searching, all along.
I would also improve my writing by spending my time more wisely. I took a good few minutes just to read through the prompt and the passage with no analysis; this is a step I need to combine with close reading so I can identify literary terms and the complex meaning of the passage at the same time.  I should also delegate enough time to each of the literary terms I'm analyzing because, as I mentioned above, I didn't have enough time to address selection of detail, and my paper as a whole was weaker because of that. 
On a similar note, I think I needed to include a few more literary devices that were integral to the meaning of the piece, such as parallelism and symbolism. These two devices were incredibly important when it came to deciphering the woman's attitude and how it contrasted from her situation; the symbolism of Mother Earth, blood, and the sun all as "sources of generation", that which gave life, were all rejected by the woman. The parallel structures of polysyndeton within the lines of description for the men's lives shows how the woman has grown tired of the simple, repetitive farm life, and longs to gain enlightenment and self-actualization, two things she believes she cannot find with the life she currently has.