초록 열기/닫기 버튼
D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, in a self-reflective exposure of the paralysis in the middle class England, provides a playful quixotic narrative which engages in a polemic about goodness and morality. A number of commentators locate this novel in the tradition of “the problem novel” which includes Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Arnold Bennett’s Anna of Five Towns and G. E. Moore’s The Mummer’s Wife. Clearly Lawrence’s novel, as a ‘problem novel’, challenges the Victorian patriarchy based on self-discipline and utilitarianism. Yet it cuts another way when Lawrence reinstates ‘morality’ and aligns it with metaethical investigation into ‘goodness’. In context, G. E. Moore’s conception of ethics sheds new light on Lawrence’s expressive struggle. Moore, in his Pricinpia Ethica, rectifies the conventional practical ethics which revolves around ‘good’ conduct and practice. Moore suggests that ethics should touch on the issue of goodness and badness beyond casuitry. According to him, ethical goodness is indefinable, and the only possible form of ethics is ‘open question’. In this context, Alvina’s quixotic adventure can be seen as a novelistic representation of the Moorean ethics. Yet, the lost girl’s journey is far more radical.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
The Lost Girl, ethics, patriarch, personal relations, goodness, badness, the Apostles, Bloomsbury, utilitarianism, self, cognitive expressivism, oppression, freedom, indefinable, open question
