D.H.로렌스의 감성주의 교육관: 감성 위기 시대와 생명적 자아의 복원

Abstract

This paper is intended to investigate D.H.Lawrence’s view of sensibility-oriented education based on his anti-intellectualism in his major two novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love and some education related essays with a great notice to Lawrence’s teacher career for about 9 years. His society of 20th century’s England was biased to the perverted way of life in the atmosphere of industrialization, scientism, and intellectualism. So people in the industrial-technical society became mechanical, automatic, and materialistic state of mind which lost dynamic, living life and energy out of them. Such situation was similar to school children, teachers, university students and professors. Lawrence was very serious, repulsive, and critical to the situational atmosphere of educational field and the whole society. Ursula, an elementary school teacher in The Rainbow saw all the schoolteachers compelling children into one disciplined, mechanical set, reducing the whole set to an automatic state of obedience, and commanding their acceptance of various pieces of knowledge. She hates the will of the teacher and school authority is imposed upon the will of the children. Lawrence thinks that the ‘will’ is a negative element against spontaneous, living, vital self, which leads people fixed, mechanical, and empty entity. In this way, Ursula wants to be free from her school and seeks a real, dynamic, wonderful world which can give the fullness of her soul. She found that the university was not different from the elementary school in the unreal, misleading points when she entered the university to get a regular teacher certificate. To her, professors was a flunkey to the god of material success and a serviceman at the commercia shrine. Ursula hates the university’s simple and shabby commercialism, materialism, and intellectualism. Dr. Frankstone, physics professor who rejects special mystery of beings is a representative of modern academic materialism and intellectualism. He believes that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities. According to Lawrence, such kind of thinking way deprives man of ‘To Be.’ What he believes in is ‘a being infinite’, impossible within a limited set of concepts. Lawrence says that the being infinite belongs to dark world. “Dark real body of life”, what he calls, is related to dynamic, vital self, based on senses and sensibility which is impossible in the materialistic, mechanical, and intellectual consciousness/self. Birkin, a school inspector, in Women in Love suggests “dark knowledge” to Hermione, his temporary lover who is overcharged with intellectual, mental consciousness and is always proud of her intellectual, mental knowledge. Dark self/consciousness, what Lawrence calls, is blood-self/consciousness. It is the opposite of intellectual, mental self/consciousness. Lawrence places much greater importance on blood-consciousness than mental consciousness. Birkin argues about the issue ‘dark knowledge’ with Hermione and Ursular, his later lover and a grammar school teacher now in this novel. Lawrence sees only a fixed, static entity, an abstraction, and an extraction from the living body of life that is blood-being/soul from an intellectual man. For this reason he was quarreling with Bertrand Russell, a great intellectualist at his days. Lawrence thinks that intellectualism works upon control-principle and machine-principle, so looks upon it as a fall or a sin against spontaneous, instinctive, and sensitive adjustment for children. Therefore a natural man, or a savage man in a state of nature is ideal to Lawrence than a civilized man. Lawrence’s educational view and motto are very similar to those of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who asks one to “Return to the Nature.” Rousseau’s romantic, naturalist educational motto which is expressed in his educational novel, Émile, can be found equally in Lawrence’s novels and educational essays. Like Rousseau, Lawrence believes that one should maintain and develop his own natural sensibility in order to realize his creative life, that is, his ultimate goal. His final hope for modern schoolchildren and all the people as well in the industrial, technical dangerous society of his times is the restoration of one’s vital, dynamic, spontaneous self based on the natural sensibility or blood-consciousness by being free from the mental, intellectual consciousness.