SEMIOTICS AND SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE MODERN NOVEL: A MODERNIST CRITIQUE OF D.H. LAWRENCE’S THE RAINBOW

Abstract

The advent of the modern novel has witnessed an array of significant changes in the matters of the content and the form; narration and structure as well as themes and narratology, and it has struck a note of marked difference from the traditional novel in terms of its emphasis upon the psychological depiction of the characters unlike the external representation of characters’ life by the majority of the traditional novelists. One of the important characteristics of the modern novel has been the interface between the text and the context. As semiotics is the study of the signs, words, objects, and images that are assumed to stand for a variety of ideas. The text, in the semiotic theory, therefore, may be taken as a signifier and the context as signified. The text which is a collection of blocks of sentences is a sign system, a signification, and an assortment of symbols containing within itself in exhaustive verbal energy that can be obtained and interpreted in several ways. The occurrence and actualization of these semiotic symbols, therefore, rely upon the total environment in which they are unfolded and occasioned. Within this theoretical framework i.e., semiotic mode of analysis, the present work seeks to read and interpret the imaginative portrayal of the existential dilemma and traumatic malaise faced by the modern male and female subjects of the 20th-century English society as portrayed by one of the top-notch modern novelist and poet, D.H. Lawrence in his masterpiece, The Rainbow. The detailed argument of the study is premised upon the assumption that the text as a verbal or semiotic sign bears upon the socio-political as well cultural chaos that defines the modern existential experience. The analysis, therefore, inevitably moves within an eclectic theoretical framework combining the linguistically informed semiotic and socio-historical critical approaches.