From Blood Intimacy to the Birth of Self-consciousness in The Rainbow

The opening chapters of Lawrence’s The Rainbow is modeled on the Bible in terms of its narrative discourse and profound implication. The novel begins with a pastoral portrayal of the Marsh Farm where mankind forms a blood-intimate and reciprocal relationship with the natural world. But driven by man’s own eagerness to pursue knowledge and pushed by the development of industrialization, man’s unconscious closeness with nature gradually gives way to the birth of self-consciousness which alienates him from the natural world, thus thrusting him into an ontological existence