SOURCE: "Lawrence's Quest in The Rainbow," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 11, No. 3, July, 1980, pp. 43-66.

In the following essay, Schwarz maintains that The Rainbow reveals Lawrence in the act of self-definition.

A major subject of much modern literature is the author's quest for self-definition. In particular, the search for moral and aesthetic values is central to the novels of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Conrad, and Lawrence. Yet we have neglected how novels reveal their authors because much modern criticism has been uncomfortable with the expressive qualities of texts. Certainly, the New Criticism insisted that texts be examined as self-referential ontologies which are distinct from their authors' lives. Unwilling to commit the intentional fallacy, Anglo-American formalism ceded discussion of the author to biographers, psycho-analytic critics, and, more recently, to phenomonologists, structuralists, and their successors. Yet because the quest for values, form, and language is a central...