DAU Library

학위논문 동서

D.H.Lawrence의 ‘Leadership Novels’에 나타난 사회적 자아탐구

이우상

부산: 동아대학교 1997. -

i,145p: 삽도; 26cm. -

학위논문(석사)- 동아대학교 대학원 영어영문학과 전공 1997년2월

영문초록 : The aim of this thesis is to analyze D. H. Lawrence's attitude towards human identity, his unique, lifelong struggle to understand all the aspects of the complex world of human relations. His main concern is the identity of self, that is, the real self of our inner soul, and the fragmented self at the center of our inner soul. This is not, then, 'blood' religion, nor modern sexuality, nor the vicissitudes of the industrial age which primarily interests Lawrence. Each one of his novels, especially the 'leadership novels', no matter what its avowed subject, is fundamentally an attempt ta create through the medium of fiction an image of the self adequate to the demands with which human beings must grapple. Lawrence's analysis of the self is extensive and systematic enough to be properly considered, a study in ego psychology. During the early period of his literary career, his approach to the human takes the form of a psychological realism which deals with the various relations between men and women. In Lawrence's writing of this period, he uses various private and literary symbols to explore a let of ultimately thematic meanings. Because of his experience during the World War I, Lawrence turned to a consideration of the real world is which human beings find themselves confronted by distorted notions of civilization. During this period, he began to grope into the heart of darkness of a modern human beings have created for themselves. In other words, he began to search for real, desirable identies within contemporary society. The fictional situations of the so-called, the 'leadership novels', are very much the same as those of modern civilization itself. In fact, the novels, Aaron's rod, The Plumed Serpent and Kangaroo may be considered, as some critics did, to be among his weakest novels, if one views them, simply from the perspective of formal aesthetic beauty. But these novels offer also the clearest presentation of his ego psychology. In these novels he uses allusions from the Bible, ancient myths, ancient religions and various esoteric religious and theosophic ideas in order to express human psychic life. A large part of this psychic life is unconscious, and the language of the unconscious is the symbol. And a good deal of his writing might be called 'interlinear' in that is it Lawrence makes a constant effort to render conscious and articulate the silent subconscious communication between human beings. Aaron's Rod is a great statement about the political tragedy of the times. The work documents the cynicism that the war produced, especially among the soldiers, workers, and artists who were its primary victims. In a number of ways the book is experimental and self-reflective. It offers a search for acceptable answers to questions put by articulate human beings, This novel experiments with different, and even contradictory notions. The idea of the singleness of life is negated by the argument in favor of voluntary submission, and finally that idea is tempered by Aaron's reluctance to accept it. In the end, Lawrence is unwilling to commit his characters to the social and political fight that surrounds them. The two main characters, Aaron and Lilly, become social orphans with nothing for them to go back or forward to. They cannot establish a real relationship between themselves and the wider society. Lawrence's Kangaroo is both social and political, and contains many of his ideas about democracy, fascism, the social role of art, and the role of the individual caught between the decline of postwar Europe and the rise of militant left-wing and right-wing politics. With Harriet's love for her husband, the Christian love for people of Kangaroo, and in the socialist ideals of Struthers, we see that all the characters become the foils for Somers' self-image, through he ultimately fails to establish any meaningful self-identity. Kangaroo, as the apostle of abstract love, has as his predecessor Jim Bricknell in Aaron's Rod. In other words, Kangaroo's love is oppressive because it is love in the abstract, and denies individuality. And Harriet ridicules the untenable positions her husband takes as he straddles the two worlds of his egoistic self and his social idealism. So Lawrence shows Somers to be both limited and ambivalent in his own self and in his relations with the wider world. At the end of the novel, Somers sails in symbolic fashion from Australia to America on an ocean liner. The Plumed Serpent is both variation on his common theme and an attempt at developing into a finished form. In this novel, Lawrence creates his most complex model of personality, an attempt at a self-sustaining being. Yet at the conclusion of the work, we find that all the attempted strategies have failed. Ramon cannot be divinely self-sufficient ; he descends to the realm of human need in marrying Teresa. And even this relationship is not enough to prevent his disintegration. Cipriano is swallowed up in his own passionate center, as does Ramon but only in his trances. Kate's submission to Cipriano's male passion is the same as those of Ramon's and Cipriano's submission to the god Quetzalcoatl. There is no real self, no identity of the individual. There are only birth and death, and the eternal creative and destructive rhythms of the cosmos. Lawrence's message is that one's individuality is, in the end, a great illusion; he is saying that we are, inescapably part of a greater the search for whole from which we cannot escape. In brief, the leadership novels offer the reader a sustained analysis of one writer's searching question for meaningful relations among human beings in the first half of the twentieth century.

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