Drawing by Alice Stanley of a pregnant Anna Brangwen
dancing in the firelight, whilst her husband Will
watches from the shadows
As I said at the end of part one of this post, Connie's pagan rain dance in which she affirms her shameless love of self as a vital sexual being, is something we've encountered before in Lawrence's fiction, when a heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen dances naked in her bedroom, lifting her hands and body to an unseen deity:
"She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss ... she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness."
Arguably, this incident in chapter 6 of The Rainbow is more provocatively ambiguous than the one in chapter 15 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, but then the earlier novel is far more complex and challenging than the later work in almost every regard. There's certainly nothing joyous about Anna's dance and she's not doing it to entice and arouse a lover - quite the opposite in fact.
One late Saturday afternoon, following the first incident, Anna again "took off her things and danced". But this time she danced before her husband, Will. Only she danced in a manner that was not only beyond his comprehension, but as if choreographed to nullify him in his manhood. With firelight on her feet and ankles, but otherwise naked in the twilight, like a witch, she lifted her hands and began to make slow, strange movements:
"He stood away near the door in blackness of shadow, watching, transfixed. And with slow, heavy movements she swayed backwards and forwards, like a full ear of corn, pale in the dusky afternoon, threading before the firelight, dancing his non-existence, dancing herself ... to exultation.
He watched, and his soul burned in him. He turned aside, he could not look, it hurt his eyes. Her fine limbs lifted and lifted, her hair was sticking out all fierce, and her belly, big, strange, terrifying ... Her face was rapt and beautiful, she danced exulting ... and knew no man.
It hurt him as he watched as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burned alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not understand. He waited obliterated."
Eventually, finding his voice with which to speak, Will demands to know what on earth she thinks she's doing. Anna tells him to go away and let her dance by herself. He sneers that what she's doing isn't dancing. But, nevertheless, this vision of her as a woman caught up in narcissistic ecstasy "tormented him all the days of his life".
What, then, is this queer and disturbing scene all about?
Lawrence seems to be exploring something of a pregnancy fetish whilst, at the same time, betraying elements of maiesiophobia; Anna's belly is significantly described not only as big and strange, but terrifying. And, to be honest, I can understand his - and Will's - male discomfort and sense of disconcertedness when confronted by the obscene sight of a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy.
For no matter how hard Demi Moore and other female celebrities have tried to make pregnancy seem a glamorous, sexy lifestyle choice, there's something monstrous about a woman becoming part-goddess, part prisoner - trapped, as Camille Paglia writes, in the "bulging mass of her own fecund body ... turgid with primal force, swollen with great expectations ... weighed down by her inflated mounds of breast, belly, and buttock".
Having said that, I'm also fatally fascinated - like Lawrence, like Will - by Anna's dancing and admire her shameless self-affirmation. She knows that she - as Woman - is the great be-all and end-all; "the womb-tomb of mother nature", to quote Paglia once more.
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 15.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6.
Camille Paglia, 'The Venus of Willendorf', in Free Women, Free Men, (Pantheon Books, 2017), pp. 38-41.
To read part one of this post - The Case of Lady Chatterley - click here.
For an interesting essay that explores some of the themes in this post in much greater depth and detail, see Marina Ragachewskaya, 'No Dancing Matter: The Language of Dance and Sublimation in D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 44, (2013), pp. 187-204. This work can be read online by clicking here.
