虹

內容概要

《虹》是英國當代小說家、散文家、詩人勞倫斯的代表作。
小說通過一家三代人的生活經(jīng)歷，描寫了英國從傳統(tǒng)的農(nóng)業(yè)社會向工業(yè)社會轉變的過程。第一代人的生活帶有田園詩的色彩，同時也預示著古老文明即將結束。湯姆·布蘭文被送到語法學校受教育，他愛上了波蘭愛國者的遺孀莉迪亞并終于與她結合。莉迪亞在湯姆的生活方式中找到了信心；而湯姆也發(fā)現(xiàn)了妻子身上神秘的成分。第二代人精神苦悶、目光呆滯，這是對令人窒息的工業(yè)化社會的注解。安娜·布蘭文與維爾不僅信仰上有分歧，性格上也不合。肉體的滿足無法彌補精神的空虛，安娜從生兒育女中尋找寄托；維爾則從一個有創(chuàng)新精神的藝術家變成了平庸的木匠。第三代人要沖破狹窄的生活圈子，渴望自然和諧的生活，是作品中著重描寫的對象。厄秀拉·布蘭文在性關系上的體驗代表現(xiàn)代女性的特點，她為了擺脫家庭的牢籠，在一所英語住宿學校當教師，卻又發(fā)現(xiàn)學校的生活冷漠、殘忍，她和一名女教師有一段同性戀經(jīng)歷，后來愛上了工程兵少尉安東·斯克列本斯基。他們的戀情開始如火一樣的熱烈，但很快就有了分歧。厄秀拉雖然對安東所體現(xiàn)的男性自然力量充滿渴望，但同時對他為殖民主義賣命非常反感；安東只有性欲，沒有激情，他們的關系最后破裂。小說以厄秀拉仰望著天上的一道彩虹為結尾，象征她遐想、憧憬著美好的未來。
不少評論家這樣評價《虹》：“沒有一本英國小說能在如此復雜的環(huán)境里將社會主題和個人主題這樣完美地結合起來?！薄逗纭?br />“表面上是一部跨越三代人的家史，實際上是對處在變化和崩潰階段的社會內部生活的創(chuàng)造性分析?！彼载S富而深刻的思想內容，史詩般的畫面，以及對兩性關系嚴肅而充滿熱情的探索，成為英國現(xiàn)代主義小說的一部經(jīng)典作品。

作者簡介

勞倫斯(1885—1930)是英國當代小說家、散文家、詩人，是20世紀英國最獨特和最有爭議的作家，被稱為“英國文學史上最偉大的人物之一”。
勞倫斯生于諾丁漢郡的一個煤鄉(xiāng)，父親是煤礦工人，母親當過小學教師。勞倫斯受母親影響很大，這在他一生的作品中都隱約可見。16歲中學畢業(yè)以后，勞倫斯棄學兩年，當過職員和小學教師。在大學讀書時，勞倫斯開始了第一部小說的創(chuàng)作，到1911年定名《白孔雀》出版。從此，他放棄教師職業(yè)，專門從事創(chuàng)作。
勞倫斯對當時英國生活中的工業(yè)化物質文明和商業(yè)精神感到厭惡，為了逃避現(xiàn)實，他一生的大部分時間是在國外度過的，先后到過意大利、澳大利亞、新西蘭、美國、墨西哥，后來在歐洲大陸過著漂泊不定的生活，于1930年因肺病在法國南部去世，享年44歲。
在近20年的創(chuàng)作生涯中，勞倫斯為世人留下了十多部小說、三本游記、三本短篇小說集、數(shù)本詩集、散文集、書信集。小說代表作有《戀愛中的女人》、《查泰萊夫人的情人》、《虹》、《兒子與情人》等。
勞倫斯的創(chuàng)作受弗洛伊德精神分析法的影響，他的作品對家庭、婚姻和}生進行了細致入微的探索。其中對于性愛的深入描寫，一度引發(fā)極大的轟動與爭議，對20世紀的小說寫作產(chǎn)生了廣泛影響?！逗纭放c《戀愛中的女人》以非凡的熱情與深度，探索了有關戀愛的問題，代表了勞倫斯小說創(chuàng)作的最高成就。
勞倫斯生前曾抱怨，三百年內無人能理解他的作品。但從20世紀60年代其作品開禁之后，他立即成為人們最熟悉與喜愛的著名作家之一。

書籍目錄

Chapter 1  How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady
Chapter 2  They Live at the Mah
Chapter 3  Childhood of Anna Leky
Chapter 4  Girlhood of Anna Brangwen
Chapter 5  Wedding atthe Mah
Chapter 6  Anna Victrix
Chapter 7  The Cathedral
Chapter 8  The Child
Chapter 9  The Mah and the Flood
Chapter 10  The Widening Circle
Chapter 11  Fit Love
Chapter 12  Shame
Chapter 13  The Man's World
Chapter 14  The Widening Circle
Chapter 15  The Bitterness of Ecstasy
Chapter 16  The Rainbow

章節(jié)摘錄

　　The curate was poor enough, and not very efficacious as a man, either,yet he took rank with those others, the superior. She watched his children being born, she saw them running as tiny things beside their mother. And already they were separate from her own children, distinct. Why were herown children marked below these others? Why should the curate's children inevitably take precedence over her children, why should dominancebe given them from the start? It was not money, nor even class: It waseducation and experience, she decided.　　It was this, this education, this higher form of being, that the mother wished to give to her children, so that they too could live the supreme life on earth. For her children, at least the children of her heart, had the complete nature that should take place in equality with the living, vitalpeople in the land, not be left behind obscure among the labourers. Why must they remain obscured and stifled all their lives, why should they suffer from lack of freedom to move? How should they learn the entry in to the finer, more vivid circle oflife?　　Her imagination was fired by the squire's lady at Shelly Hall who came to church at Cossethay with her litde children, girls in tidy capes of beaver fur, and smart little hats, herselflike a winter rose, so fair and delicate. So fair, so fine in mould,. so lununous, what was it that Mrs. Hardy felt which she, Mrs. Brangwen did not feel? How was Mrs. Hardy's nature different from that of the common women of Cossethay, in what was it beyond them? All the women of Cossethay talked eagerly about Mrs. Hardy, of her husband, her children, her guests, her dress, of her servants and her housekeeping. The lady of the Hall was the living dream of their lives, her life was the epic that inspired their lives. In her they lived imaginatively, and in gossiping of her husband who drank, of her scandalous brother, of Lord William Bentley her friend, member of Parliament for the division,they had their own Odyssey enacting itself, Penelope and Ulysses before them, and Circe and the swine and the endless web.　　So the women of the village were fortunate. They saw themselves in the lady of the manor, each of them lived her own fulfilment in the life of Mrs. Hardy. And the Brangwen wife of the Marsh aspired beyond herself,towards the further life of the finer woman, towards the extended being she revealed, as a traveller in his self-contained manner reveals far-off countries present in himself. But why should a knowledge of far-off countries make a man's life a different thing, finer, bigger? And why is a man more than the beast and the cattle that serve him? It is the same thing.　　The male part of the poem was filled in by such men as the vicar and Lord William, lean, eager men with strange movements, men who had command of the further fields, whose lives ranged over a great extent. Ah, it was something very desirable to know, this touch of the wonderfulmen who had the power of thought and comprehension. The women of the village might be much fonder of Tom Brangwen, and more at their ease with him, yet if their lives had been robbed of the vicar, and of Lord William, the leading shoot would have been cut away from them, they would have been heavy and uninspired and inclined to hate. So long as the wonder of the beyond was before them, they could get along, whatever their lot. And Mrs. Hardy, and the vicar, and Lord William, these moved in the wonder of the beyond, and were visible to the eyes of Cossethay in their motion.　　II About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm, connecting the newly-opened collieries of the Erewash Valley. A high embankment travelled along the fields to carry the canal, which passed close to the homestead, and, reaching the road, went over in a heavy bridge.　　So the Marsh was shut off from Ilkeston, and enclosed in the small　　valley bed, which ended in a bushy hill and the village spire of Cossethay. The Brangwens received a fair sum of money from this trespass across their land. Then, a short time afterwards, a colliery was sunk on the other side of the canal, and in a while the Midland Railway came down the valley at the foot of the Ilkeston hill, and the invasion was complete. The town grew rapidly, the Brangwens were kept busy producing supplies, they became richer, they were almost tradesmen. Still the Marsh remained remote and original, on the .old, quiet side of the canal embankment, in the sunny valley where slow water wound along in company of stiff alders, and the road went under ash-trees past the Brangwens' garden gate.　　But, looking from the garden gate down the road to the right, there, through the dark archway of the canal's square aqueduct, was a colliery spinning away in the near distance, and further, red, crude houses plastered on the valley in masses, and beyond all, the dim smoking hill of the town.　　The homestead was just on the safe side of civilisation, outside the gate. The house stood bare from the road, approached by a straight garden path, along which at spring the daffodils were thick in green and yellow.　　At the sides of the house were bushes oflilac and guelder-rose and privet, entirely hiding the farm buildings behind.　　At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man's figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.　　At first the Brangwens were astonished by all this commotion around them. The building of a canal across their land made them strangers in their own place, this raw bank of earth shutting them off disconcerted them. As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain. Then the shrill whistle of the trains re-echoed through the heart, with fearsome pleasure, announcing the far-off come near and imminent.　　As they drove home from town, the farmers of the land met the blackened colliers trooping from the pit-mouth. As they gathered the harvest, the west wind brought a faint, sulphurous smell of pit-refuse burning. As they pulled the turnips in November, the sharp clink-clink- clink-clink-clink of empty trucks shunting on the line, vibrated in their hearts with the fact of other activity going on beyond them.　　The Alfred Brangwen of this period had married a woman from Heanor, daughter of the "Black Horse." She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamentable complaints, when she raised her voice against her husband in particular and against everybody else after him, only made those who heard her wonder and feel affectionately towards her, even while they were irritated and impatient with her. She railed long and loud about her husband, but always with a balanced, easy-flying voice and a quaint manner of speech that warmed lus belly with pride and male triumph while he scowled with mortification at the things she said.　　Consequently Brangwen himself had a humorous puckering at the eyes, a sort of fat laugh, very quiet and full, and he was spoilt like a lord of creation. He calmly did as he liked, laughed at their railing, excused himselfin a teasing tone that she loved, followed his natural inclinations, and sometimes, pricked too near the quick, frightened and broke her by a deep, tense fury which seemed to fix on him and hold him for days, and which she would give anything to placate in him. They were two very separate beings, vitally connected, knowing nothing of each other, yet living in their separate ways from one root.　　There were four sons and two daughters, The eldest boy ran away early to sea, and did not come back. After this the mother was more the node and centre of attraction in the home. The second boy, Alfred, whom the mother admired most, was the most reserved. He was sent to school in Ilkeston and made some progress. But in spite of his dogged, yearning effort, he could not get beyond the rudiments of anything, save of drawing. At this, in which he had some power, he worked, as if it were his hope. After much grumbling and savage rebellion against everything, after much trying and shifting about, when his father was incensed against him and his mother almost despairing, he became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham.　　He remained heavy and somewhat uncouth, speaking with broad Derbyshire accent, adhering with all his tenacity to his work'and to his town position, making good designs, and becoming fairly well-off. But at drawing, his hand swung naturally in big, bold lines, rather lax, so that it was cruel for him to pedgill away at the lace designing, working from the tiny squares of his paper, counting and plotting and niggling. He did it stubbornly, with anguish, crushing the bowels within him, adhering to his chosen lot whatever it should cost. And he came back into life set and rigid, a rare-spoken, almost surly man,　　He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the household, mad when anything clumsy or gross occurred. Later, when his three children were growing up, and he seemed a staid, almost middle-aged man, he turned after strange women, and became a silent, inscrutable follower of forbidden pleasure,　　neglecting his indignant bourgeois wife without a qualm.Frank, the third son, refused from the first to have anything to do with learning. From the first he hung round the slaughter-house which stood away in the third yard at the back of the farm. The Brangwens had always killed their own meat, and supplied the neighbourhood. Out of this grew a regular butcher's business in connection with the farm.　　As a child Frank had been drawn by the trickle of dark blood that ran across the pavement from the slaughter-house to the crew-yard, by the sight of the man carrying across to the meat-shed a huge side of beef, with the kidneys showing, embedded in their heavy laps of fat. He was a handsome lad with soft brown hair and regular features something like a later Roman youth. He was more easily excitable, more readily carried away than the rest, weaker in character. At eighteen he married a little factory girl, a pale, plump, quiet thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who insinuated herselfinto him and bore him a child every year and made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery business, already a growmg callousness to it, and a sort of contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew everything, when in reality he was a noisy fool.　　Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston,before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.　　The last child, Tom, was considerably younger than his brothers, so　　had belonged rather to the company of his sisters. He was his mother's favourite. She roused herself to determination, and sent him forcibly away to a grammar-school in Derby when he was twelve years old. He did not want to go, and his father would have given way, but Mrs. Brangwen had set her heart on it. Her slender, pretty, tightly-covered body, with full skirts, was now the centre of resolution in the house, and when she had once set upon anything, which was not often, the family failed before her.　　So Tom went to school, an unwilling failure from the first. He believed his mother was right in decreeing school for him, but he knew she was only right because she would not acknowledge his constitution. He knew, with a child's deep, instinctive foreknowledge of what is going to happen to him, that he would cut a sorry figure at school. But he took the infliction as inevitable, as if he were guilty of his own nature, as if his being were wrong, and his mother's conception right. If he could have been what he liked, he would have been that which his mother fondly but deludedly hoped he was. He would have been clever, and capable of becoming a gentleman. It was her aspiration for him, therefore he knew it as the true aspiration for any boy. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's　　ear, as he told lus mother very early, with regard to himself; much to her mortification and chagrin.　　When he got to school, he made a violent struggle against his physical inability to study. He sat gripped, making himself pale and ghastly in his effort to concentrate on the book, to take in what he had to leam. But it was no good. If he beat down his first repulsion, and got like a suicide to the stuff, he went very little further. He could not learn deliberately. His mind simply did not work.　　In feeling he was developed, sensitive to the atmosphere around him, brutal perhaps, but at the same time delicate, very delicate. So he had a low opinion of himself. He knew his own limitation. He knew that his brain was a slow hopeless good-for-nothing. So he was humble.　　But at the same time his feelings were more discriminating than those of most of the boys, and he was confused. He was more sensuously developed, more refined in instinct than they. For their mechanical stupidity he hated them, and suffered cruel contempt for them. But when it came to mental things, then he was at a disadvantage. He was at their mercy. He was a fool. He had not the power to controvert even the most stupid argument, so that he was forced to admit things he did not in the least believe. And having admitted them, he did not know whether he believed them or not; he rather thought he did.　　But he loved anyone who could convey enlightenment to him through feeling. He sat betrayed with emotion when the teacher of literature read, in a moving fashion, Tennyson's "Ulysses," or Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." His lips parted, his eyes filled with a strained, almost suffering light. And the teacher read on, fired by his power over the boy. Tom Brangwen was moved by this experience beyond all calculation, he almost dreaded it, it was so deep. But when, almost secretly and shamefully, he came to take the book himself, and began the words "Oh wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being," the very fact of the print caused a prickly sensation of repulsion to go over his skin, the blood came to his face, his heart filled with a bursting passion of rage and incompetence. He threw the book down and walked over it and went out to the cricket field. And he hated books as if they were his enemies. He hated them worse than ever he hated any person.　　He could not voluntarily control his attention. His mind had no fixed habits to go by, he had nothing to get hold of, nowhere to start from. For him there was nothing palpable, nothing known in himself, that he could　　apply to learning. He did not know how to begin. Therefore he was helpless when it came to deliberate understanding or deliberate leaming. He had an instinct for mathematics, but if this failed him, he was helpless as an idiot. So that he felt that the ground was never sure under his feet, he was nowhere. His final downfall was his complete inability to attend to a question put without suggestion. If he had to write a formal composition on the Army, he did at last learn to repeat the few facts he knew: "You can join the army at eighteen. You have to be over five foot eight." But he had all the time a living conviction that this was a dodge and that his common-places were beneath contempt. Then he reddened furiously, felt his bowels sink with shame, scratched out what he had written, made an agonised effort to think of something in the real composition style, failed, became sullen with rage and humiliation, put the pen down and would have been torn to pieces rather than attempt to write　　another word.　　He soon got used to the Grammar School, and the Grammar School got used to him, setting him down as a hopeless duffer at leaming, but respecting him for a generous, honest nature. Only one narrow, domineering fellow, the Latin master, bullied him and made the blue eyes mad with shame and rage. There was a horrid scene, when the boy laid open the master's head with a slate, and then things went on as before. The teacher got little sympathy. But Brangwen winced and could not bear to think of the deed, not even long after, when he was a grown man.　　He was glad to leave school. It had not been unpleasant, he had enjoyed the companionship of the other youths, or had thought he enjoyed it, the time had passed very quickly, in endless activity. But he knew all the time that he was in an ignominious position, in this place of learning. He was aware of failure all the while, ofincapacity. But he was too healthy and sanguine to be wretched, he was too much alive. Yet his soul was wretched almost to hopelessness.　　He had loved one warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a consumptive type. The two had had an almost classic friendship, David and Jonathan, wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the server. But he had never felt equal with his friend, because the other's mind outpaced his, and left him ashamed, far in the rear. So the two boys went at once apart on leaving school. But Brangwen always remembered his friend that had been, kept lum as a sort oflight, a fine experience to remember.　　Tom Brangwen was glad to get back to the farm, where he was in his own again. "I have got a turnip on my shoulders, let me stick to th' fallow," he said to his exasperated mother. He had too low an opinion of himself. But he went about at his work on the farm gladly enough, glad of the active labour and the smell of the land again, having youth and vigour and humour, and a comic wit, having the will and the power to forget his own shortcomings, finding himself violent with occasional rages, but usually on good terms with everybody and everything.　　When he was seventeen, his father fell from a stack and broke his neck. Then the mother and son and daughter lived on at the farm, interrupted by occasional loud-mouthed lamenting, jealous-spirited visitations from the butcher Frank, who had a grievance against the world, which he felt was always giving him less than his dues. Frank was particularly against the young Tom, whom he called a mardy baby, and Tom returned the hatred violently, his face growing red and his blue eyes staring. Effie sided with Tom against Frank. But when Alfred came, from Nottingham, heavy jowled and lowering, speaking very little, but treating those at home with some contempt, Effie and the mother sided with him and put Tom into the shade. It irritated the youth that his elder brother should be made something of a hero by the women, just because he didn't live at home and was a lace-designer and almost a gentleman. But Alfred was something of a Prometheus Bound, so the women loved him. Tom came later to understand his brother better.　　As youngest son, Tom felt some importance when the care of the farm devolved on to him. He was only eighteen, but he was quite capable of doing everything his father had done. And of course, his mother remained as centre to the house.　　……

編輯推薦

　　《虹》是勞倫斯小說中最長的一部，它以勞倫斯家鄉(xiāng)的礦區(qū)生活和農(nóng)村生活為背景，通過居住在德比郡和諾丁漢郡交界處科西澤村農(nóng)莊主布蘭文一家三代人的經(jīng)歷和變化，透視了英國社會從前期資本主義向資本主義大工業(yè)社會過渡的情景。是勞倫斯的創(chuàng)作從浪漫主義到現(xiàn)實主義，由現(xiàn)實主義再到現(xiàn)代主義過渡的一個決定性轉折點。也是他篇幅最長的一部小說。

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