로렌스의 작품에 드러난 인간과 동식물의 관계-인간중심주의를 넘어서-

Plants and Animals in the Novels and Essays of D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Anthropocentrism

This paper proposes to examine D. H. Lawrence's thinking on the relationship between man and nature, focusing on Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and his later essays. In his life and art, Lawrence paid special attention to nature. Noticing that man's relation to nature had been seriously distorted or disrupted in the modern world, he tried to trace the psychological, cultural, and historical causes of this phenomenon, and to find out an alternative way of life. In a series of closely related essays in Reflections on the Death of Porcupine and Other Essays, Lawrence criticizes idealism and anthropocentrism embedded in the European civilization and expounds the principle of 'power' on which to build a new life, His novels present a far more detailed description of various human attitudes to plants and animals, In Sons and Lovers, the ideological, or spiritual approach to nature is set against the natural one. Women in Love discloses the prevailing modern tendency to impose one's egocentric will on animals, whether by harsh violence, or in a more disguised way. It also indicates another dangerous tendency to project human feelings onto animals, as exemplified even in Ursula who is sympathetic to animals. Extremely cautious of the danger of encroaching upon the inhuman otherness of natural beings, Lawrence suggests the possibility of a subtle balance between man and animal in the "Mino" chapter of Women in Love, or envisions an integrated world of man and nature, as powerfully evoked in the consummation scene of Paul and Clara. Throughout his works and essays, Lawrence urges the reader to think over the problematic nature of man's relation to nature in the modern world, and to reorient the anthropocentric, technological civilization towards a harmonious one.