二度生まれる物語『息子と恋人』

概要

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In this paper, I will focus on Paul Morel's growing up and his awakening to the sensitivity to his own creative powers by tracing his psychic life. Once he was born from his mother's womb, then he was threatened to be stifled by her emotional merger with and dependence on him, and finally he is born again from his mother's soul. The whole process is a struggling one to retain a strong hold on his own identity. Symbolically considered, Paul fights against something which induces George in The White Peacock to fall a victim to delirium tremens and also Siegmund in The Trespasser to fuse together into the death urge. After his mother's death, Paul in Sons and Lovers immerses himself in a deathlike situation, where he finds himself frail but alive as is shown in the paradox of "at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing." The shaky basis is the origin of the existence acquired without some psychic fusion of his mother. The hard-won origin is not the place where the life is bound by the fatality, but the place of the individual integrity where Paul experiences the birth of the self once again which is ready to be deeply committed to the world. He makes a re-entry into "the first bubbling life" in him, or "the spontaneous origin" from which it is worth living. Unlike the previous protagonists, George and Siegmund, Paul eventually does not sacrifice his individuality that can be embodied by the single, unique entity.
2006-02-28