The “Embodied Consciousness”: Individual, Relationship, and Community in Novels by D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf

This dissertation aims to show that D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf in the works such as The Rainbow, Women in Love, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse, explore a unknown world of the “embodied consciousness”, a term of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by presenting the consciousness as connected to both the body and the outer world. This can be seen as the two authors’ common ground in their attempts to escape from the Victorian binarism of body and mind. The modern consciousness found in modernist novels can be much more fully explored when Lawrence’s and Woolf’s are analyzed in relation to each other. But many critics of Lawrence and Woolf have tended to focus on the differences in their novels rather than similarities. For example, Lawrence puts the first significance on the body and sexuality in his novels whereas Woolf pays attention to the inner world by using the narrative of the ‘stream of consciousness’; Lawrence is regarded as a realist writer while Woolf as a modernist writer.
Reading against the grain, however, this study suggests that Lawrence and Woolf have a major common feature insofar as they both inquire into the consciousness connected to the body to regain individuality and represent a new reality. When the modern conscious Lawrence and Woolf focus on in their novels is closely examined, it is obvious that individuality is grounded not on either the body or consciousness, but on the dynamic interaction between body and consciousness. More interestingly, their novels reveal that the two writers use similar narrative techniques in order to show particularly conscious states of characters. In doing so, they focus primarily on sensory consciousness through which to imply that subjectivity should be based on the body.
Their novels present that the embodied consciousness, the very foundation of changeable and creative life, is not a mental idea, but a ‘driving force in life’. There are a few features, conspicuous in their works, of the embodied consciousness. One is the singularity of the embodied consciousness, which means every consciousness is different from another. In other words, the world as perceived by one is different from the world another does, just as one’s body is different from another’s. This indicates that each should live their own life. Another feature is the dynamic of the embodied consciousness, which signifies that the body and consciousness should act along and react to each other. Thus, an individual with the embodied consciousness approaches others and together creates new lives, which is a real consciousness and experience.
Lawrence and Woolf lead us to see the significance of the embodied consciousness by elaborating the interrelations among individuals, relationships, and community in their works. In The Rainbow and Mrs. Dalloway, the embodied consciousness in which body and consciousness are fluidly interacted takes shapes with their protagonists’ instinct, desire, unconsciousness, and sensual reality. Individuals with the embodied consciousness such as Birkin, Ursula, and Mrs. Ramsay in Women in Love and To the Lighthouse, are ready to change themselves and enter into a real relationship along with others. In this way, they experience mysteries of life, such as the moments of “oneness” with others or the “moments of being.” Ultimately all of these four novels deal with the deaths of the main characters, through which Lawrence and Woolf depict that deaths of others awaken a sense of ontological community of the embodied consciousness.
Lawrence’s and Woolf’s novels reveal that an individual can make a spontaneous response to others through being connected to other consciousnesses through bodies rather than isolated in one’s inner world. They also show that an individual’s relationships with other beings and communities are in building one''s own sense of individuality. In this sense, Lawrence and Woolf broaden the horizon of modernist novels by envisioning the unknown world of the embodied consciousness in their novels.