근대성과 런던의 지형학: 버지니아 울프의 『댈러웨이 부인』

초록

The imagination of the city in modernism has been received a great amount of critical attention in recent discussions of modernist literature. Malcolm Bradbury finds the art of cities in modern European literature that show a strong impulse to encapsulate experience within the city—the contingency, plurality and principles of conflict and growth in urban experience. The urban imagination of modernist writing localizes modernity as a social and historical practice in the city while it presents the city as a theatre of an unresolved and plural impressions. In both of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, London typifies the great city of modernity, conveying the disorganized, flickering impressions of the present and containing cultural strains of modern commerce and politics. While Eliot’s The Waste Land, however, makes the imperial city of London the mythical figure for all the historical cities of the past, an archetypal site for apocalyptic cities of ruins, London in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway seizes collective existence and experience of urban reality firmly localized in here and now. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway encapsulates the spectacular, dynamic modernity in the city of light and darkness. Mrs. Dalloway is a novelistic rendering of Woolf’s own fascination with London, a real historical city the urban reality of which is caught in myriads of sensorial perceptions and intuitive impressions. However, Woolf’s geographical imagination of the city does not codify London as a psychological terrain, a mere backdrop for individual subjectivity. In her geopolitical imagination, London is a socially produced space where the historical experience of modernity is vividly, dynamically, dialectically, configurated. That is, London in Mrs. Dalloway is quintessentially a space fundamental in communal life of a nation and fundamental in the exercise of power in relation to social practices of patriarchal capitalist imperialism. While London is portrayed as a heterogeneous space where each individual experience is simultaneously allocated, dispersed and intersected, where a set of social relations are irreducible to one another, thus jarring at one another, the city also generates a new social space open to compassion and communication, a more liberating space where historically bounded conditions of modern urban reality are negated and the claustrophobic regression of individual subjectivity is resisted.

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