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It should be noted that Lawrence identifies Law as a feminine principle and Love as a masculine principle. Sanderson: D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow… 199
Nebula4.1, March 2007 After Tom finally met Lydia, "a daze had come over his mind" (38). Lawrence describes the feeling: "It was as if a strong light were burning there, and he was blind within it, unable to know anything, except that this transfiguration burned between him and her, connecting them, like a secret power" (38). He compares the feeling to a strong light, which allows him to name the "connection" between Tom and Lydia a "transfiguration," one of the central tropes of The Rainbow. If a "strong light" were burning inside Tom's head, then transfiguration would be possible, and he acts as if it is true. Lawrence enters the realm of the impossible when he uses "as if," yet this impossibility transfigures humanity on a metaphysical level. Lawrence also acknowledges Tom's usual world as a fiction in the days before the wedding. Tom "lived in suspense, as if only half his faculties worked, until the wedding" (55). Without Lydia, Tom lives "as if"; he also lives "as if" when he is with her. Tom Brangwen, therefore, lives between two fictions, one in which he feels incomplete and one in which he feels complete. Lawrence's emphasis on feeling instead of action highlights the fact that the novel tracks the characters' "being," not what they do in the world but how they are in the world. Michael Bell claims that the language of The Rainbow has "an ontological subtlety" (51) that "always highlights the 'subjective' ontology of feeling that underlies 'external' description (55). Tom and Lydia's marriage initially problematizes the synthesis between themselves and between Law and Love. In an argument, Lydia declares to Tom, "You come to me as if it were for nothing, as if I was nothing there," to which he replies, "You make me feel as if I was nothing" (89). Instead of becoming whole, both Tom and Lydia are desolated by the physical proximity of each other. The masculine and feminine principles seem to emerge only when the male and female approach each other. Love comes to depend on the presence of Law, and vice versa, for existence. Instead of Love retaining the effects of Law when the male leaves, it recedes, making Tom feel as if he "was nothing"; neither does Law retain the effects of Love in the absence of the male. The principles cannibalize each other in the same way that Tom and Lydia cannibalize each other in the early days of their marriage. Of course, Tom and Lydia feel "as if" this is the case. "Nothingness" is a state of being, a phase in the process of becoming. The desolation is necessary for synthesis; the two fictions, Love and Law, attract each other too strongly initially. No balance exists between the two, so they collide and disintegrate. From these fragments, Lawrence starts building his new fiction. Anna embodies the next phase of Lawrence's construction of the modern fiction, and the Sanderson: D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow… 200

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