『채털리 부인의 연인』과 『월든』 : 인간의 본질적 실상에 대한 통찰

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence and H. D. Thoreau wanted to express their criticism of industrial civilization and the vision of desirable human life. According to them, human lives are bound by material restrictions and the power of Mammon, which bring about a terrible dehumanization. Throughout Lady Chatterley's Lover Lawrence advocated his faith of life-force in order to relieve people from the crisis of this mechanical civilization. And he contrasted the world of nature with the world of mechanical civilization as Thoreau did in Walden. It is certain that Lawrence and Thoreau shared the same visions and had the same points of view on human life in their works.In Walden Thoreau rejected the things worldly-minded people desired in life, such as money and possessions. Instead, he emphasized the search for true wisdom or true enjoyment which comes only when one throws off all unnecessary things. He provided his contemporaries and us with a concrete way to attain successfully such a quest for a higher mode of life.In Lady Chatterley's Lover and Walden, the woods as a symbol of the living universe represents the powerful sacred world in which human beings are able to encounter another world and to revitalize themselves. And in order to escape from the death-in-life or nothingness in the mechanical life one must seek the vitality of life lied inside nature as the real substance. For Thoreau and Lawrence self-awareness by the penetration into the essential facts of human life is a final means to revive the natural personality of human beings gradually lost by the corruption of industrial civilization.