사물과 인간의 관계 맺기: 로렌스의 「물건」과 울프의 「단단한 물체」

Abstract

The works of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf seem quite different, even though they are under the same umbrella of modernism literature, in that the former pays attention to the senses of the human body while the latter focuses on the human consciousness. But they turn out not to be very different when we read their short stories in terms of the issue of the relation between things and humans. It is interesting that Lawrence’s “Things”(1928) and Woolf’s “Solid Objects”(1920) were published in the 1920s when writers and philosophers had desperately searched for a new paradigm to understand human beings after the World War I. In particular, intellectuals like Georg Lukacs, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin had reached some consensus that new approaches to things, always and already considered as some objects and tools, were essential prerequisites for new understandings of human being. Lawrence’s “Things” and Woolf’s “Solid Objects” need to be read in this context of the era. Lawrence’s and Woolf’s short stories commonly evoke how anthropocentric the relation between things and humans has been. This paper examines how human will to dominate things paradoxically distort and repress human beings. Through the essays of Heidegger and Lawrence, this paper also explores some possibility of building a new relationship between things and humans.