D. H. 로렌스의 기계문명에 대한 불만

D. H. Lawrence’s Discontentment to the Mechanical Civilization: Through Women in Love

In this paper, I tried to clarify Lawrence’s tragic view of mankind, England and life, especially his bitter observation of the result of the modern mechanical civilization. He asserts that all the characters we meet in Women in Love are either empty and barren. Lawrence’s alter ego, Birkin, says that the whole of humanity is rotten. It is true that Lawrence was a sensitive artist and the war, the climax of mechanical civilization, had a great effect on his thought, emotions and actions. Since the war had convinced Lawrence of the hopelessness of everything, and especially of the uselessness of mankind. In the novel, Birkin is portrayed as holding similar views to Lawrence’s; “His dislike of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness.” Lawrence tells us in his “Foreword to Women in Love” that the war contributed a lot to the final shaping of this novel. I observed that Lawrence traced the tragic result of the mechanical stress upon human life - upon the response of man to nature, upon the institutions of the home and family and upon personal relationships, especially upon the way of thoughts of Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun. Concludely speaking, in industrial and mechanical civilization, man as an individual is reduced to an inorganic unit of a vast machine. So they are unable to love each other in normal manner.