감각과 양명한 정신의 관계: 『무지개』의 윌 브랑귄을 보는 하나의 시각

Abstract

This paper purports to elucidate the significance of Will Brangwen’s transformation into a modern man, in terms of “the broken relation between the senses and the outspoken mind”. Unlike the first generation who finally achieves a complete arch providing full security to their daughter, the marriage of Will and Anna undergoes the alternation of love and conflict, that is the unconscious “unknown battle”. While sharing the widely agreed views that this conflict of the second-generation Brangwens represents the crucial watershed between the traditional past and the modernity in The Rainbow, this paper tries to interpret it not as a conflict between opposing, or dualistic ideas imposed to them a priori, but as a process made through their reciprocal relationship at the moment. More specifically, the crux of their conflict lies in their different attitudes towards the mind or the mental consciousness and in how this influences the way toward each other and their own life as well. In that context, the biblical allusions as well as church buildings and Christian art, for example, show their respective attitudes to the senses and the mind. As it turns out, it is the repression of “the outspoken mind” that causes Will to be infatuated with the Gothic form and then with Absolute Beauty found in the body of woman. And neither of them is considered to have fulfilled the task of creating “the rolling, absolute beauty of the round arch” in his own era. Rather, Will’s intense feeling here recorded can be estimated as characteristically modern in pursuit of a single aspect of experience.