모더니즘 서사와 외부세계: 울프와 로렌스

Abstract

In the paper exploring the interrelations between D. H. Lawrence and modernism, Michael Bell seems to agree with Percy Wyndham Lewis’s view that the emphasis on time went with a preoccupation with the inner processes of consciousness at the expense of a grasp on the external world. This binarism between individual’s inner consciousness and the outer world can be also found in Georg Lukács’s severe criticism against the modernist narrative which, he thinks, negates the external world. Not only these critics but also does Lawrence criticize the modernist narrative of Marcel Proust and James Joyce as excess of self-consciousness in his essay “Surgery for the Novel or a Bomb.”This paper aims to examine the way in which Virginia Woolf and Lawrence narrativize individual’s inner world and the reality in Mrs. Dalloway and The Rainbow. Although Woolf and Lawrence use different narrative styles, quite surprisingly they both criticize the egotistical self. Unlike James Joyce’s narrative, the narrator of Woolf’s novel keeps appearing between character’s interior monologues, which makes possible balancing the personal voice of character and the public voice of the narrator. The paper closely examines the narratives related to Doris Kilman and Winifred Inger to argue that the modernist narrative is not necessarily led to the excess of self-consciousness and to the attenuation of reality. This examination includes how they deconstruct the binarism between the inner and outer world, and in doing so, how much they successfully get the reader’s empathy to the novel.