Literatura Inglesa del Siglo XIX, Apuntes de Literatura inglesa

¡Descarga Literatura Inglesa del Siglo XIX y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura inglesa solo en Docsity! Nineteenth Century English Literature From the Romantic View to the Victorian Frame of Mind Romanticism (until 1840s) Emotion, individualism, past/nature, medievalism, isolation Early gothic genre l. Revolution (until 1840s) emergence of middle class, urban sprawl class difference/gender difference Victorianism (1837-1901): realism, gothic gender revised (feminized) Over the 19th century there were many developments in the widespread questioning of the place and value of women in English society. The woman question in Victorian England witnessed various debates over women’s place in society with opposing voices emphasizing either the need for women to have educational, political and economic opportunities or else the contention that women properly belonged in the home as caretaker to the family. Coventry Patmore’s ’the Angel in the House’ and the Separate Spheres as an ideology. Ideology from Industrial Revolution Men -will of God and biologic determinism- public sphere Women – religion doctrines – private sphere (not domestic!) The separate sphere ideology: women and men are unapologetically different and therefore distinctive gender roles are natural. WHY DID WOMEN TAKE CENTER STAGE? The main reason why women came to become so central to political, social and literary debates is to be found in the charges that industrialization and capitalism brought about. Industrialization brought new types of work but also urban poverty. Many forms of these new types of labour could be done either by men or by women but women did not stand the chance to be equally paid. The development of women’s labour in industries, that eventually led them to the realm of the public sphere openly challenged traditional notions of the woman as economically inferior and bound to the private realm. Accordingly, women were obliged to live under a stark scrutiny regarding established traditions alongside scientific theories that revolved around their supposed physical and mental limitations. As a result, even the most educated women had great difficulty practicing a profession. 18/09/2019 Education entails it for women and men. That’s why they refer that as a ‘manual of conduct’. Enlightenment, thinking…are linked to a specific society that truly needs to build up. There’s no separation between private and public. THE NOTION OF COVERTURE . At the beginning of the nineteenth century, married women had no standing due to the notion of coverture. It refers to the legal conception that a woman’s rights were engulfed under her husband’s which implied that women had no right to own any property. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England ( 1769) Alcohol literature: important. CHILDREN’S FICTION Definition of childhood and child have varied through the tie and are dependent on cultures, ethnicities, religions, gender, and have been subject of much discussion Such notions are not essentialist or objective but fluid constructions that serve and obey social and political needs. As Isaac Krammick contends: ‘children’s literature has always been ideological’. The turning point of the emergence of the child in Western culture can be traced back to Reformation. Protestantism became firmly the ideology to be followed and was much more than a spiritual thing. The cultural changes that accompanied the religious shift from Catholicism to Protestantism had a relevant impact on the concept of a child. In the new Protestant faith, the child was an ‘important ideological vessel’ and the principal subject to be indoctrinated in order to reinforce and expand the religious and social networks. The origins of children’s literature during the eighteenth century must be unavoidably related to the evolution of industrial capitalism. Introduction of bourgeois ideology embraced by the English Protestant creed. These Protestant dissenters played a leading role in destroying the aristocratic values not only in politics but also in writing. 18 th century children’s fiction became significant to display the Protestant ethic that permeated capitalism. The authors of children’s books used their writing as one of the main channels to help spread the emerging bourgeois values which celebrated MERIT, TALENT and HARD WORK as the only facts that dictated social, economic and political rewards in contrast to traditional aristocratic restrictions base on privilege, rank and birth. Central to this emerging liberal middle-class ideology were the conceptions of childhood espoused by JOHN LOCKE and JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. Locke conceived children as no longer fouled by the original sin but beings born as tabula rasa, empty vessels or water, images that illustrate their malleability. Children as rational creatures in need of education. Parents, family and society oversaw inculcating the right ideas in their little ones. *concept of ‘palisade’ A great care is to be had in the forming of children’s minds, and in giving that seasoning early since it shall influence their lives always after. As rational creatures, children imbibed learning through the example set before them and the experiences they lived. Among these experiences, reading was a priority. Locke’s approach towards education, mainly his innovations highlighting the classical educational doctrines of deluctando monemus, had significant consequences on pedagogical theories both in England and the transatlantic colonies, and triggered the emergence of children’s books, volumes which were instrumental in transmitting his principles to young readers and in conforming new generations of enlightened children. Locke conceived a society in which education, mindless of the origins of its recipients, has the power to turn individuals into virtuous members through the exposure to positive impressions and learning. Children, for Locke, ‘must be tenderly used’ and ‘must play and have play-things’. Thus, he transformed children’s books into ‘play- things’ which had their moral messages enhanced by the display of visual material. Together with Locke, Rousseau was the prevailing philosophical author of the latter part of the 18 th century on education theories. The Enlightenment theorists had provided ample pedagogical background to spurn the desires of parents, publishers and writers to put them into practice both in private and public spheres. Both thinkers rejected the concept of original sin attached to children. Children’s fiction: knowledge and truth can only be derived from the action of one’s reason on individual experience and observation. Locke and Rousseau recognized education as the key process in the formation of virtuous citizens for a new liberal world. 19/09/2019 Children’s fiction in Victorian era follows these train of thought. Children as the stronghold beings through whom to protect a sense of national character out of the corruption of adulthood. EVANGELICAL REVIVAL: childhood was centrally important as a site for redeeming individual souls and reforming society. 1802: Sarah Trimmer founded the periodical The Guardian of Education- aimed at reforming parents and educators. The necessity to protect children from corruption can be seen in the developing subgenres of children’s fiction. Parents and children should unite for the same purpose. There was this necessity of protecting children as future generations. THE BILDUNGSROMAN Refers to a novel (roman) about human development and formation (bildung) that has experienced mainly positive growth. First applied to Goethe’s early work Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) Narrative of growing up, novel of growth. A Bildungsroman is a story of education. It is similar to coming-of-age stories; however, the characters of the Bildungsroman are more specific. In order for a novel to be considered a true Bildungsroman, the main character has to experience some form of moral development. In essence, they have to grow up. The focus of the character’s growth is the main thrust of the narrative. Since the late 18th century, the forces of change, commercialism and capitalism, the growth of a world politics and a world economy have kept changing the world incredibly – with the growing person forced to live out in her or his life the gaps that endlessly emerge between old and new. In its great variety the Bildungsroman gives us access to most of the important ways people have represented, conceptualized and created discourses about growing up in such a dynamic, disturbing period. The popularity of the genre first spread across the European continent and then the entire world. The existence of the female Bildungsroman genre has been debated amongst scholars and feminists alike with a blurred resolution. Does the genre stray with the patterns of the male Bildungsroman? What are its definitive characteristics? ATTRIBUTES: There is a search for meaning by the protagonist, who is usually inexperienced at the beginning of the narrative. The story typically centres on the maturation process of a single person. There is some kind of inciting incident that pushes the protagonist into their journey. It’s usually something akin to a great emotional loss. The journey will not be easy. In fact, there will be many failures along the way. The hero will be tested, and he will fight tooth and nail to survive the unwavering rules and limits of society. There is actually an epiphany, or a flashing moment where the hero finally ‘gets It’. this lucidity changes them as a person. They learn what it takes to be grown. The hero will eventually find his place in society by accepting its values and rules. The ending isn't necessarily about closure. We often do not know exactly what's going to happen to the hero. We do know that he has grown as a person from page one, and at the very least he is equipped with the maturity and knowledge to have a chance in life. The hero gives himself a new birth; he realizes his fate and role in society. If gender is defined by its cultural representation, it is obvious that social signifying practices participate Charles Dickens ‘David Copperfield’ Mark Twain ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ J.K. Rowling ‘Harry Potter’ FEMALE BILDUNGSROMAN The female Bildungsroman of these times depicted the suppression and defeat of female autonomy creativity and maturity by patriarchal gender norms. Writing the development of a female protagonist as parallel to a male lead character during this time period would have meant describing a girl undergoing personal development of education (*) For the formation, panful experience and suffering are needed. Change and realization are based on a painful experience. Changes are the sources of formation. If the profession, family and social factors is successful, then we can say that the formation is achieved. There are two typed of relationships: individual with herself and individual with society. The protagonist passes through some stages in her life: experience of childhood, formal and self- education, entering larger society, experience of urban life…In general, social victimization of the protagonists. Gender makes a difference when it comes to this literary genre. The aesthetic of repression is the most important thing. If they break the ‘rules’ such as having sex, they will be called ‘the fallen _______’. Marriage as social endeavour. To marry threatens to end any other development in favour of a peculiar famed destiny; not to marry seems a failure in itself. The female Bildungsroman does exist, perhaps it is not the antithesis but rather and extension of the traditional Bildungsroman first located in Goethe’s text. In particular, Jane Eyre and the Mill on the Floss provide the possibility to explore the conflict and tensions inherent in the 19th century incarnation of the genre once the question of gender is introduced. Furthermore, the social realism which manifests in these texts allows for an investigation of the young woman’s need to negotiate her place in society and how such realistic contexts impact upon her self-creative impulses give she has only a limited degree of autonomy. As a result, it becomes clear that female self-definition via a single identity is impossible when considered with the complex historical situation which, once experienced and witnessed by the female authors; then produces their complex heroines of fiction woman’s place is multiple (daughter, wife, sister, teacher , loves…) in both fact and fiction. The complexity of the female Bildungsroman is so because the plots of women’s literature are not solely about life and solutions in a therapeutic sense. They are about the plots of literature itself, about the constraints the maxims paces on rendering a female life in fiction. 26/09/2019 The Newgate novel and the sensation novel were sub-genres of the literature of crime, which enjoyed a relatively brief but quite extraordinary popular success in the 1830s and 1840s and 1860s. The Newgate novel was associated exclusively with male authors. The sensation novelists included a number of best-selling female authors and this fact made for important differences of emphasis in the two sub-genres, and also for significant differences in the critical response to them. These novels and the controversies they engendered tells us a great deal about cultural anxieties and social and literally change at two key points in the Victorian period. Newgate novels looked back to the 18 th century literature of crime and also to the radical indictments of oppressive legal and penal systems at the turn of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. NN took their name from various versions of the Newgate Calendar (1773) which satisfied the popular fascination with the crime and criminals by gathering accounts of the lives, trials, confessions, punishments and/or escapes from the law of celebrated criminals. Offered to the public as works of moral improvement whose purpose was to provide a necessary example of punishment to offenders and to record examples of morally corrupted people. They made a spectacle of ‘deviant’ or socially transgressive behaviour. NN Phenomenon: taking up in the rapidly growing penny press (debate over the nature and future of the novel as literary form) Edward Bulwer’s Eugene Aram (1832) William Harrison Ainworth’s Rockwood (1834) Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1840) The Newgate controversy as it developed in the 1840s was in part a debate about what could and could not be represented in the novel, and about what forms or models of representation were appropriate to the novel. It was a debate about the changing nature and status of the novel, and its relationship with what Thackeray called the ‘middling classes’ and to other cultural forms and it was also a contest about fictional realism. In the 1860s, the sensation novel debate was also closely intertwined with the developments in the following the abolition of the Stamp Tax on newspaper in 1855, and the tendency of both the expanding penny press and the middle class newspaper to include more crime reporting was one factor in the creation of the market for sensation novels. In the late 1850s, the newspapers were also full of sensational stories of the great social evil of prostitution and scandals of wrongful imprisonments in lunatic asylum. All of these things found their way into the plots of sensation novels. The Newgate debate was also a debate about hierarchies both social and literary. It was about keeping the different classes of society separate both in fiction and as a reader of fiction One of the objections to the Newgate novel was that it imported the literature of the streets to the drawing room. THE SENSATION NOVEL Like the NN, the SN was a journalistic construct, a label attached by reviewers to novel whose plots centred on criminal dees, or social transgressions and illicit passions and which preached. SN were phase of modern life that dealt in nervous, psychological, sexual and social shocks, and has complicated plots involving bigamy, adultery, seduction, fraud, forgery, blackmail, kidnapping, and sometimes. HISTORICAL NOVEL As the literary glory of the Victorian age, no form of novel writing in the period had more prestige, and of none were hopes higher hopes of dignity, seriousness and moral insight. Literature of the 19th century had a complex and fruitful relationship to the writing of history which grew in the course of the century into a professionalized discipline. Historical novels were by no means a matter for the elite. Together with the Gothic and the sensation fiction, the historical novels of Walter Scott and Ainsworth were major influences on working class and popular literature in the early decades of the century. The greatest difficulty of writing historical fiction was that of creating a flexible yet authentic historical idiom for periods and countries that have to be imagined, not seen or heard. Important names: Walter Scott and George Lukács. At the beginning of the Victorian period, the novel was dominated, overawed almost, by the achievements of Scott, the most successful of all novelists writing in English and had raised the novel to a new seriousness and dignity. Although Maria Edgewirth’s Castle Rackrent (1880) has claims to be the first historical novel in English, it was Scott’s Waverley: Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1815) and its many successors that formed the model for his Victorian rivals. As the turn of the century drew nearer, the strains within evolutionary thought intensified. Commentators increasingly focused on the darker implications of the Darwinian narrative: Darwinism’s ‘disturbing elements’, its emphasis on ‘extinction and annihilation’, ‘gradually accrued a heavier and heavier weight in consciousness’. Even the fundamentally progressivist traditions of evolutionary psychology and anthropology harboured unspoken tensions – while celebrating the advance of the human mind, they were nonetheless preoccupied by the survival of the past within the present, the endurance of savage psychologies. The new theory of degeneration, moreover, which haunted fin-de-siècle Europe, increasingly challenged the mellorist narratives of evolutionist psychology and anthropology. Advanced by British scientists, including Henry Maudsley and Ewin Ray Lankester, along with their Continental counterparts, the theory of degeneration recognized that life did not always move from the simple to the complex and envisaged instead a future characterized by arrested development, atavistic throwbacks and the disintegration of overly evolved civilizations. Degenerationist theories drew on and fed into fin-de-siècle concerns about racial decline but were ultimately hesitant about the relative influence of heredity or environmental pathologies. What’s a historical novel? It is a hybrid and dynamic form of writing that changes substantially over the course of the century. It borders on, is touched by, and infiltrates many other forms: romance, gothic but also melodrama, satire and farce and tragedy. William Thackeray: The Virginians (1857) Henry Esmund (1852) Vanity Fair (1848) Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia Lovers (1863) THE DOUBLE AND LATE 19 TH GOTHIC Late 19 th century : new variety of gothic fiction liked to fantasy and the supernatural. This new variety of gothic became one of the literary forms of modernity, the vehicle of fragmented modern subjectivity, and detached, often politically and/or psychologically alienated individuals. phenomenon of political rebellion, though her shifting responses reveal a significant ambivalence. In April 1848 she speaks of Chartism as an ‘’ill-advised movement…judiciously repressed’’: collective political action should be replace by mutual kindliness and the just estimate of individual character. TELLING THE (HI)STORY The eighteenth-century novel set itself up as a discourse spun by a narrator, and as relation the ‘truth’ of a ‘real’ person’s life. The status of the narrative as fictional of factual was dependent on the status ascribed to that narrating subject. In the nineteenth century— ‘the great age of a novel’ — the notion of reality was transformed into the more formalist concept of realism, and this realism, in turn, was made to rest on an author’s personality and experiences. The authentic voice of the writer was now sought within a discourse which openly displayed itself as fictional. Life’s ‘truths’ were somehow to be gleaned through the fictional prism. The 18th century concept of Vraisemblance had operated to separate the novel from the romance. This concept highlighted the truth or ‘reality’ of the novel, which was then differentiated from romance on this basis. The appeal to reality was substantiated by the convention of the actor’s preface which could then be presented a ‘true’ story told in the actual words of the protagonist. The blend of fatal and fictional modes that the novel embodied merged from this masquerade as ‘reality’. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the notion of the ‘reality’ within a novel had been replaced by a notion of ‘realism’: the reader and the writer are both aware that the novel is fictional —not real— but its value and excellence are nevertheless remains crucial. The excellence (or otherwise) of a novel is now judged on its closeness to the actual experiences of the author, so that a notion of reality — Vraisemblance — remains central in determining the value of novels Jane Eyre the novel, read as the narrative of individual subject, makes that subject represent a real character, and aspects of social reality are seen to be portrayed within the pages of a novel. The notion of the text as dangerous brings into focus the multifaceted connections between the text and social, political reality. The text is dangerous because, while it reflects real events, it also contains the power to influence them. In light of Evangelical tracts and sermons counselling women to thick more of religion than love as a foundation for marriage, St. John would have been viewed in many circles as a most eligible bachelor. Instead, the natural world (divinity of humanity and its relationships) reinforces for Jane her conviction of a God far greater than — and hence separate from mankind 03/10/2019 FEMININE MODELS OF SPIRITUALITY Unlike men who attempt to impose their wills upon Jane, women in the novel communicate their theological convictions by examples rather than exhortation ALWAYS in inner spaces. Helen Burns: models for Jane an independence of thought on matters of theology and doctrine. Universal salvation (43-44) Diana and Mary: models of divinely inspired womanhood for Jane. No trace of Calvinist of the morbidity or grim earnestness that consume their brother Jane as highly spiritual: throwing waters of baptism (spiritual rebirth) upon Rochester, ostensibly quenching the fires which threaten to devour him. Jane Eyre is a model for middle class and criticized in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times COLONIALISM The figurative use of race relations in Jane Eyre reveals a conflict between sympathy for the oppressed and a hostile sense of racial supremacy, one that becomes most apparent in Jane Eyre. Bronte makes class and gender oppression the overt significance of these other races, displacing the historical reasons why non-white people might suggest the idea of oppression, at some level of consciousness, to nineteenth-century British readers. What begins then as an implicit critique of British domination and an identification with the oppressed collapses into merely an appropriation of the imaginary of slavery, as the West Indian slave – the black character – becomes the novel’s archetypal image of the oppressed ‘dark races’. Nonetheless, the novel’s closure fails to screen out entirely the history of British imperialist oppression. RACE In the opening chapters of Jane Eyre, race is a controlling metaphor – the young Jane is compared to a slave both at Gateshead, as she resists John Reed’s tyranny, and at Lowood where she argues the need to resist unjust domination and angrily states that she would refuse to be publicly ‘flogged’ only later to find herself subjected to another form of public humiliation like ‘’a slave or victim’’. Although in a few of these references Brontë represses the recent and immediate historical of British shareholding by alluding in the same passages to a safely remote history of Roman acts of enslavement (‘’You are like a murder— you are like a slave-driver— you are like the Roman emperors!’’ Jane cries out to John Reed in the opening chapter (9-10) the history of Britain’s shave-holding, only nine years past at the time the novel was published, is inescapably evoked by such references. Indeed, the novel will later hint unflattering links between the British and the Roman empire. HOW TO CREATE A COLONIAL SUBJECT In 1840, the first World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London, an event at which British abolitionists dedicated themselves to the eradication of American Slavery. Also traversing the country on a lecture tour was the figurative slave, Moses Roper, who fled to England in 1835. Aided by several British abolitionists, Roper attended boarding schools and University College in London. In the 1839 edition of his narrative, Moses Roper appends a list of the churches and halls he visited in his lecture tour. Included on the list are the ‘’Independent’’, or Congregationalist, churches in Gomersal and Skipton, two small towns near Haworth, where Brontë grew up. Mary 27 Taylor was from Gomersal, and we know Brontë visited her several times between 1836 and 1840. We also know the two women attended services at Gomersal Church almost every day. PROOF In his autobiographical slave narrative, Roper describes and unsuccessful flight attempt in which surrounded by slave catchers, he is taken to ‘the red house, where they confined me in a room the rest of the night, and in the morning lodged me in the gaol of Caswell Court House (30)’. The episode strongly recalls the movement early in Jane Eyre when, ‘’like any other rebel slave’, Jane struggles to escape Mrs. Reed, Bessie, and Miss Abbot as they confined her in the ‘’red moon’’ Bertha, a ‘Jamaican Creole’ is a ‘’native subject,’’ indeterminately placed between human and animal and consequently excluded from the individualistic humanity that the novel’s feminism claims for Jane Brontë gives the white Jane individuality at the expense of the native Bertha. Jane Eyre was written in an ideological context in which women were frequently compared to people of non-white racism especially blacks, un order to emphasize the inferiority of both to white men. But as Brontë constructs the trope in Jane Eyre, the yoking between the two terms of the metaphor turns not on shared inferiority but on difference and oppression An interpretation of significance of British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeper locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion. Bertha functions in the novel as the central locus of 28 Brontë’s anxieties about the presence of feminine oppression in England, anxieties that motivate the plot and drive it to its conclusion. The novel’s imperialist politics, such examples suggest, are more self-interested than benevolent. The opposition imperialism arises not primarily out of concern for the well-being of the people directly damaged by British imperialism —The African slaves in the West Indian colonies, the Indians whose economy was being destroyed under British rule — but out of concern for the British who were being contained by their contact with the unjust social systems indigenous to the people with dark skin In opposition to the danger of the contagious inequality characteristic of other races— Brontë proses an alternative directly out of middle-class ideology: keeping a clean house at home in England. Part. Of what the novel solves in its conclusion is the problem of contamination from abroad. Clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy environments from a central symbolic structure in the novel, and what is clean is represented intrinsically English. Bertha institutes the great act of cleaning in the novel, which burns away Rochester’s oppressive colonial wealth and diminishes the power of his gender, but the she herself is cleaned away, burned and as it were unified from the novel. Brontë created a character of the non-white raced to use as the vividly embodied signifier of oppression in the novel, and then has this sign, by the explosive instability of the situation it embodies, destroyed itself THE DOUBLE Bertha seems to act out for Jane where she cannot act for herself. There are several examples of this throughout the novel: in chapter 20 Mr. Mason us stabbed by his lunatic sister. Jane had in the 29 previous chapter voiced to the audience her dictate for the man. She disliked him, though she did not wish him harm. Bertha attacked him the night of this arrival, nearly killing him in the process. While she literally does not to do this because Jane does not like him, it is easy to look at it in a metaphorical manner. Similarly, she destroys the wedding veil Jane veil was to wear after Jane beings to have second thoughts about marrying Rochester. Again, while its not literal, it is easy to see how it is interpreted that it is Bertha acting on behalf of Jane by destroying the veil, symbolizing her sudden ill feelings towards the marriage. It also serves as foreshadowing for the pending nuptials that cannot occur because of Bertha. Bertha puts into motion, in a way, the repressive thoughts that Jane could never voice, as she is bound by the rules of proper society. This relationship is crucial to the novel as it dictates a great part of Jane’s future. IN (HUMAN BEINGS): MACHINES In Hard Times machinery usage disables the development of real human relationships, which is precisely the reason why people behave as though they are robots and not human beings. Hence, Coketown, the city of Fact, foreshadows the emergence of a monstrous mass urban society based on rationalism, anonymity, dehumanization. CH. 1, p.7. EDUCATION p.9, horse /p.12 Everything revolves around manufacture and material things, ultimately causing its participants to become the victims of their own greed and engulfed in the inhumane ethos of capitalist greed. In the novel, human relationships are contained by the overrated power of economics. Dickens indicated the inevitable connection between money and moral and social corruption Manufacturers are equated with machinery. Bounder by refuses to acknowledge that the factory workers are people of value, but instead separates them from himself. He calls them ‘’pests of the earth’’ and ‘’you people’’. Moreover, as individuals, they have no importance whatsoever, only as a collective do they serve a purpose. Dicken’s Coketown embodies the 19th century England situation, when, by means of massive industrialization, the country becomes a place of alienation, and the folk simply a tool in the endeavor of gaining more material wealth Industrialization causes the emergence of a special kind of a race, whose main feature are ironically the shackles, that simultaneously kill and feed them. 64, CH. X (proverbs 12:24; ‘’The hand of the diligent will rule, but laziness ends in forced labor’’) The raise of industrialization ruined the traditional way of life of the laboring poor and turned them into a working class. ROMANTIC SPIRIT (*) What allies Blake and Worth The movement of quest-romance, before its internalization by the rOMANTICS, WAS FROM NATURE TO REDEEMED nature, the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority, sometimes magical. The Romantic movements is from nature to the imagination’s freedom (sometimes a reluctant freedom), and the imagination’s freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it. SONGS OF INNOCENCE, 1789 The poems in Songs of Innocence are a description of the contrary states of the human should. These poems do not describe a soul…(*) as it journeys through life seeking in the temporal world reflections of the divine spark that is the soul’s essence. Blake makes us aware of the soul’s divinity in the Songs of innocence through his depiction of children The introductory poems to each series display Blake’s dual image of the poet as both a ‘piper’ and a ‘Bard’. As man goes through various stages of innocence and experience in the poems, the poet also is in different stages of innocence and experience. The pleasant lyrical aspect of poetry is shown in the role of the ‘’piper’’ while the more somber spheric nature of poetry is displayed by the stern Bard. The dual role played by the poet is Blake’s interpretation of the ancient dictum that poetry should both delight and instruct. More important, for Blake the poet speaks both from the personal experience of his own vision and from the ‘’inherited’’ tradition of ancient Bards and prophets who carried the Holy Word to the nations. (Donne, Milton) Examples of pages 143 and 144 William Blake - Introduction - The Chimney Sweeper Very beginning of the Romanticism. How to instruct people to read. Importance of religion. Blake suggest, through the character of the wise innocent, that we can approach God and restore the world’s divinity through the power of our creative energy. The wise innocent speaker/poets of THE SONGS OF INNOCENCE have created in their songs a divine and perfect world; that have the power to transform the world of experience. It is the creative act that mirror God’s own creation of the world. If man can display a corresponding creativity, as do the wise of innocents of Blake’s Songs of Innocence , he has the power to transform the world of experience into the world of innocence where one can reside in unity with all the things. TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIETY - latest 18th - beginning of 19th century THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER 6 quatrains. Rhyme scheme: AABB/ Two rhyming couplets per quatrain. The salvation of Tom Dacre seems naive and simple-minded. But to question Tom’s salvation is to miss the overpowering irony that pervades the poem. Black saves the innocent in order to indict the experienced. Stanza one, line four, lays the responsibility on the reader. The last two lines of stanza who distill the ironic essence of the poem. The consolation for Tom’s loss of curly white hair, the symbol of his innocence, is that it cannot now be spoiled by the soot of the chimneys he must sweep Quite revelling in terms of the meaning of the poem ANALYSIS OF THE POEM (*) PAGE 143 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - PAGE 145 In the traditional account of literary Romanticism in Britain, Lyrical Ballads is considered the seminal, inspirational work Lyrical Ballads, collection of poems, first published in 1798 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, the appearance of which is often designated by scholars as a signal of the beginning of English Romanticism The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge documents Romanticism’s impulse to merge artistic and social change. Featuring subjects from ‘ordinary life’ such as could be found ‘in every village and its vicinity’, the collection expresses Wordsworth’s conviction, phrased years later in a letter, that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’ ANALYSIS OF THE POEM (*) PAGES: 145 - 146 - 147 LUCY GRAY The Ballad Lucy Gray was written in 1799 during Wordsworth’s brief and unhappy residence in the Harz mountain of Germany. His isolation and solitude found sympathetic expression through a story suggested by Dorothy in which a girl becomes ‘bewildered’ by a snow storm, and falls and drowns in a canal lock near Halifax. The poem is in three main sections. The first (Stanzas 1-3) is in the narrative ‘present’, looking back to her time and place; the middle section (stanzas 4-14) relates to Lucy’s fruitless search for her mother in the storm; the final section returns to the ‘present’ and the memory of her disappearance. Wordsworth’s poem manifests many of the traditional ballad features: simple, musical rhythm, using deceptively plain diction, focused on an intensely dramatic narrative. The poem is also set in conventional ballad meter: four lines alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter, rhymed ABAB. ‘’Nature is a character in itself for the Romantics’’ - Wilderness, escapism PERCY B. SHELLEY - OZYMANDIAS Percy B. Shelley: NOT AN INTENT OF RECREATION Shelley and Smith remembered the Roman - Era historian Diodorus Siculus, who described a statue (*) In England in 1818 all things Egyptian were in fashion. For ‘Ozymandias’ Shelley has a number of sources to draw on in addition to Diodorus, including Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East, and some other Countries (London, 1743), with its engraved plates and quotations from Didorus, and other travel writings describing unsuccessful searches for the original statue. Ancient Egyptian monuments were arriving in England to the public’s great excitement, although the most famous of them, the colossal bust of Ramses II, did not go on display until after Shelley left England for good in March 1818, and so it cannot have directly informed the poem. In any case, ‘Ozymandias’ is primarily a product of Shelley’s imagination, not an attempt at historical reconstruction Ozymandias is as much about the survival of creativity as the transience of tyranny. Thanks to art, only the Pharaoh’s arrogant passions, as expressed in the ruined statue, have survived, outliving both the sculptor (‘The hand that mocked them’) and Ramses himself (‘the heart that fed’), whose many monuments have reverted to ‘The lone and level sands.’ With a fine irony, Ozymandias’ proud boast to other rulers that he has no rivals (‘Look in my words, ye mighty, and despair!’) Is fulfilled, but not in the way he would chosen: his statue causes other rules to despair not because of his unrivaled achievements, but because it reminds them that they will share his inevitable fate. LORD BYRON - Don Juan Renowned as the ‘’gloomy egoist’’ of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18) he is more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819-24). Don Juan, a mock-heroic satire in the dorm of a picaresque verse tale. Don Juan was begun in 1818 and published in July 1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view the absurdities and irrationalities of the world. Transformation of Don Juan: from the very beginning of the poem (Spanish) to the end: British product SOURCES Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest (Spanish: El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra): 1630 Molière, Don Juan 1665 Luigi Pulci Alexander Pope Rhyme scheme: ABABABCC: the AB rhymes are repeated one too often for comfort, and the CC at the end provide a ‘pouncing’ effect to conclude the stanza. IAMBIC PENTAMETER: the rhythm established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in groups of syllables called ‘’feet’’. ‘Iambic’ refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. French Revolution = outcome = change in literature— urban life and machines isolated the individual and fostered the focus on individualism. The man alone in front of Nature = ROMANTIC ISOLATO Don Juan: Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest Spanish: El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra): 1630 Molière, Don Juan 1665 Byron despises the satanic nature of the Spanish character (proud, cynical, vengeful…) and defends man’s good nature. Society is to blame, society corrupts humankind = humans need to represent themselves. Influenced by Rousseau: ironic qualities POETRY Consider the theme and the development of the theme in the poem Twi general distinctions: lyric and narrative poetry LYRIC POETRY: state of mind or an emotional state. Subcategories: elegy, ode, sonnet and dramatic monologue and most occasional poetry. LYRIC POETRY Elegy: lament for the death of a particular person. Also used for solemn mediations often on questions of death ODE: a long lyric poem with a serious subject written in an elevated style SONNET: originally a love poem which felt with the lover’s sufferings and hopes. It originated in Italy. It contains 14 lines. NARRATIVE POETRY Narrative poetry, epics. In the first stanza, the lyrics describes the damozel or damsel, a young unmarried woman. He sees her as unattainable, but also infinitely deep and beautiful. The woman is holding ‘three lilies in her hand’ and scattered throughout her hair are seven stars, representing the seven classical planets. She Is being related o the sky, the traditional realm of God. This lady has passed away and is in heaven with God, pining for one she left behind. In the second stanza, her dress is loose around her waist; it has become ‘ungirt’: not covered in decorations or adorned in anyway. Aside from a ‘white rose of Marys gift’. This rose is a direct reference to Christianity, the Virgin Mary is often represented as a white rose and referred to as the ‘Rose of Heaven’. This strengthens her divine connection. The last lines contrast the religious imagery. Instead of having her hair pulled back and covered as would be proper, it is down, laying ‘along her back’ and shining bright ‘yellow’. A woman’s hair is seen as the embodiment of her sexuality and to have it loose would not follow Christian principles. It seems from her countenance that the woman has only just gotten to heaven. She is ‘One of God’s choristers’ but she still has a look of ‘wonder’ on her face as if she only just arrived. It might seem as if the woman has only been there for one day, but she’s been there for ten years. This speaks to her purity and divine soul that she is still amazed by what she is seeing. The four stanzas of the poem is told of a different perspective. The lover that she left behind in the mortal world is mourning for her absence. To him, it seems like she has been gone much longer than ten years, but he can still remember her well. It seems as if she is leaning over him, her hair draping around his face. But his fantasy is soon crushed, it is not the hair of the damsel, only leaves that are falling from a tree. The lover was outside daydreaming and got caught up in the fantasy. In the fifth stanza, the narration return to the moment when the speaker is gazing up at his beloved who is standing on the rampart of God’s house. She is leaning over the walls that surround heaven. It is so far above the earth that when the damsel looks down, hoping to see her lover, she can’t even see the sun. The rampart of God ‘lies in heaven’ where the damsel is trapped. There are many things that separate the two lovers: distance itself as well as the flood of ether that heaven is built on. This stanza is meant to emphasize the different worlds that these people live in. earth is deeply distant from heaven and is regarded from God’s house as a speck not even close enough to see. In the sixth stanza, the damsel is not alone and there are people around. They are being reunited with those they have lost. Their souls join together, and arm in arm, travel together ‘up to God’. She is not so lucky. Her lover is still on Earth and she is mourning their separation. There people pass by her like ‘thin flames’ and remind her of what she does not have. CHRISTINA ROSSETTI She was born in 1830, she wrote a variety of romantic, devotional and children’s poem. Famous for Goblin Market and Remember. Her popularity faded because of the modernism, but later scholars began to explore Freudian themes in her works. For feminists, she represents the symbol of constrained female genius and place her as a leader of 19 th century poets. Her writing strongly influenced the work of such writers as Virginia Woolf, or Philip Larkin. Goblin Market was written in 1859 and it is a narrative poem. The poem tells the story of two sister, Laura and Lizzie, who are tempted with fruit by gobbling merchants. Rossetti herself claimed that the poem, which is interpreted frequently as having features of remarkably sexual imagery was not meant for children. It was illustrated by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Since the 70s, critics have tended to view the poem as an expression of Rossetti’s feminist and homosexual politics. Some critics suggest the poem is about feminine sexuality and its relation to Victorian social mores. Other critics focus on the Victorian consciousness of a capitalist critique of the growing Victorian economic market. The poem has an irregular rhyme scheme, often using couplets or ABAB rhymes but also repeating some rhymes many ties in succession or allowing long gaps between a word and its pair. The metre is irregular, typically keeping 3 or 4 stresses in varying feet per line 20/11/2019 From ‘Goblin Market’: Close Reading (IV) 1st stanza Only the maids hear the goblins cry. Could the goblins themselves represent masculinity? Critics have commented on the comparisons between the poem and the story of the original sin in the Bible (Adam and Eve eating the apple in the Garden of Eden). The list of fruits is very long and contains some fascinating adjectives. Peaches are compared amusingly to cheeks. Mulberries could be considered a personification, since they have a head. ‘come buy, come boy’ is repeated throughout this section as a form of temptation. Most of the fruits named in this section are unusual or exotic. This adds to their tempting nature. These are not fruits that would have been readily available in England during that period. The last two lines are interesting as they point towards the questionable legitimacy of the fruit. The fact that they are referred to as being sound to eye may raise and alarm. They may taste sweet, but could they come with a catch? 2nd stanza The first two lines introduce the two main characters (the sisters) and portray their very opposite personalities. Laure appears charmed by the Goblins and she wants to hear what they have to say, whilst Lizzie appears more prudent and is ashamed of Laura’s actions. The tone of the poem changes at this point. The girls seem to be hiding. The phrase ‘cautioning lips’ combined with ‘fingertips’ suggests that one of the girls is trying to silence the other one. ‘Lie close’ Laura said: Laura wants Lizzie to pull close to her, perhaps to better hide the pair of them. At first it seemed like Lizzie was more cautious but once Laura realized what it was, she was hearing her behaviour changed. Laura’s cautious tone: The Goblins’ fruit is forbidden, and they must not taste it (like the apple in the Bible). The stanza ends with the Goblins once again repeating their catch phrase which at this point has taken on a sinister tone. 3rd stanza In these first two lines the true dynamic between the girls is revealed. They are both wary of the Goblins, but it is Laura who has the sense of curiosity whereas Lizzie is the more sensible of the two. Worth noting that the girls do not even look at the Goblins. If the Goblins are in fact a metaphor for men, then perhaps looking itself is considered to be a sin. Laura does not seem to grasp the gravity of the situation and lets her curiosity get the better of her. She cannot resist temptation and looks at the Goblins going about their business. The narrator describes what Laura is seeing as she ignores Lizzie’s advice. Here it is revealed that the goblins are small. Goblins are a mythical gnome-like creature with grotesque facial features. They are notorious mischief makers. Different ways of transporting their wares. Use of parallelism to enumerate the goblins’ different actions: ‘One hauls a basket’ / ‘One bears a plate’ / ‘One lugs a golden dish’. ‘How fair the vine must grow / whose grapes are so luscious’: this symbolizes temptation. Laura begins to think about the fruit and imagines how good it must be. ‘No’ said Lizzie, ‘No, no, no’ / Their offers should not charm us / their evil gifts would harm us’. Laura repeats the word ‘no’ four times before justifying what she is saying. For some reason Lizzie is able to see beyond the tricks that the goblins are using to seduce Laura. Realizing that hiding isn’t working. Lizzie runs away. She does so with her eyes shut. Laura is less scared of the goblins. She is aware that the goblins are a force to be feared, but still she lingers it is as if she cannot resist them. Like she is under some sort of spell. The narrator describes what Laura is seeing. The descriptions are not flattering. The animals the goblins are compared to have vermin-like qualities. They are also compared to a snail. The last few lines again point to the goblins’ seductive nature. Despite not looking particularly pleasant, it is their sound that really lures people in. their voices resemble a dove. This is another example of Christian imagery: Doves are associated with purity and goodness. From Lizzie’s description are the goblins good or evil? Ambiguity. JOHN KEATS Biography Born in London in 1795. One of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. His works were in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis. His poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, but his reputation grew after his death. The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. He was a Medical Student at Guy’s Hospital when Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) led him to write poetry. Over his short life (25 years) Keats published fifty-four poems and three novels using a wide range of poetic forms including odes and sonnets. 27/11/2019 La Belle Dame Sans Merci (V) Speaker: the knight Wildness of eyes is not usually used to describe a lady in Romantic poetry. It seems that she has some mysterious power to charm men, especially by her wild eyes. To emphasize the knight’s surprising meeting, Keats uses the magical words to describe what happened (‘fragrant zone’, ‘a faery’s song’). The knight describes his romantic gestures towards the lady. La Belle Dame Sans Merci (VI) Seventh stanza: the lady’s romantic gestures in return. Anaphora: ‘and there’ is repeated in the eighth stanza to emphasize the point ‘Roots of relish sweet’ and ‘honey wild’ tasty and sugary plants to seduce the knight. ‘And sure, in language strange she said’: a foreign language to increase the lady’s exoticism. ‘Wild, wild eyes’: this kind of expression in her eyes is not human-like, so the lady is thought to be a non-mortal. La Belle Dame Sans Merci (VII) The knight was powerless: ‘she took me to her Elfin grot’; ‘she lulled me asleep’. ‘She took me to her Elfin grot’; ‘on the cold hill side’: implies the sinister reality which the knight faces. This is supported by the idea that hills are often where the fairies and elves live. La Belle Dame Sans Merci (VIII) Alliteration: the sound of /w/ in ‘with horrid warning gaped wide’. Burlesque became the speciality of London’s non-patent theatres from the 1860s to the early 1890s. In the 1860s and 1870s, burlesques were often one-act pieces running less than an hour and using parodies of popular songs, opera and other music that the audience would recognize. By the 1830s, burlesque shows had slowly changed to simple performances which focused on dancing. This resulted in their downfall. CLASSICAL BURLESQUE The Victorian classical burlesque was a popular theatrical genre of the mid-19th century. It parodied ancient tragedies with music, melodrama, pastiche, merciless satire and gender reversal. Immensely popular in its day, the genre shows the role and perception of women in Victorian society. Classics was an integral part of the furniture of the Victorian mind bolstered through the elite education spread parodically and inspirationally through popular system (*) ORIGINS: Legitimate theatre: operas and ballets were the elite spectacles where the privileged could be shocked by Galatea-like celebrities who proved fertile source for classical burlesque. The growing interest in classical mythology which developed during the 18th century (reworking of the fables) intensified in the 19th century. The decline in the production of satire after the 1737 Licensing Act (which also excluded political satire from the stage) might have turned the attention of playwrights towards mock classical burlesques. 19th century classical burlesque contains allusions to the industrial and social changes which under printed the Victorian imagination. The relationship between topical references and Greek and Roman mythology is the key to an aesthetic reinterpretation of prescribed roles (e.g. transgressive gender moulds). Classical burlesque made use of prominent figures of Greek tragedy which delivered a deeply rebellious view of the roles of women in society. BROUGH’S MEDEA Medea; or the Best of Mothers, with a Brute of a Husband was first staged at the Olympic Theatre in London in 1856. Robert Barnabas Brough born in London, his literary career included translations, prose and journalism, where he displayed his talent for satire. He worked with his brother William on various burlesques. Other of his classical burlesques include The Twelve Labours of Hercules or The Siege of Troy. Based on the character Medea (from Greek mythology) and on Euripides’s play Medea. It is an enchantress who helped Jason, leader of the Argonauts, to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father, King Aeëtes. She was of divine descent and had the gift of prophecy. She married Jason and used her magic powers to help him. Euripides’ play is set in Corinth, where Jason deserted Medea for the daughter of King Creon of Corinth. In revenge, Medea murdered Creon, his daughter, and her own two sons by Jason and took refuge with King Aegeus of Athens. The play displays an open criticism against the lack of legislation protecting women in general and wives in general and wives in particular. The 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act’s legalization of divorce in England was much discussed on the comic stage of the 1850s and 1860s. The new law allowed women to allege domestic brutality in Court. Medea is at the forefront of the early campaign for women’s independence, as she actively struggles against bigamy and for the rights of married women. Medea’s words in the final speech: ‘What can a poor, lone helpless woman do…’ were addressed to a sympathetic audience which condemned the ‘perfidious conduct of her husband’ and pitied ‘the desolate unhappiness of the mother begging food for herself and her perishing children’. It allowed the audience to see on stage some of the questions on marriage which were at the centre of the social debates at the time: bigamy, infanticide and divorce. Infanticide was associate with double moral standards which could not be publicly accommodated in the Victorian mindset. It was also associated with sexual practices opposed to what was excepted from the ‘angel in the house’. Public awareness of the issue prompted more debate on the solutions for the social problems underlying child murder. A legislative change and a formal cataloguing of stillbirths were suggested. Medea as ‘the new woman’ or ‘strong-minded woman’. By the end of the 19th century, the new woman had become a citizen who fought in the social, political and economic frameworks. She was also considered to be a woman that rejected the conventional dress codes and who took up traditionally ‘masculine’ traits (smoking, riding bicycles…) They were also pejoratively called ‘strong-minded’ women: ‘women who have or affect the qualities of mind and character regarded as distinctively or who take up an attitude of revolt against the restrictions and disabilities imposed on their sex by law and custom’ The 19th century press portrayed ‘strong-minded’ women as giving lectures to their peers and being criticised for neglecting their duties as mothers, wives and daughters. Being a highly topical issue, strong-minded women could not escape the burlesque pen and soon became an easy target for satirical drama. From the 1850s on, the epithet turned into a stock character representing a woman who was the complete opposite of the ‘angel in the house’. On stage, they also represented independent, self-assured women, often opposed to weak ladies and effeminate male leading roles. Travestism: one of the key features of burlesque. The female characters less in tune with Victorian ideals of femininity were performed by mature, well-known actresses and men. In fact, Brough’s subversive and acclaimed Medea was impersonated by a male actor: Frederick Robson. MEDEA: SOME QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT 05/12/19 PRESUMPTION OR THE FATE OF FRANKENSTEIN Author: Richard Brinsley Peake First staged in 1823 are the English Opera House. 37 performances during its summer run. It was revived until 1850. It was based on Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. Drama during the Romantic period: Only the Theatres Royal of Drury Lane and Convent Garden allowed to present conventional plays (i.e. tragedy and comedy) Peake’s adaptation had to include music, pantomime, and spectacle to be staged in alternative theatrical values. By the 1830s the minor and alternative theatres had begun to challenge the patent theatres’ monopoly. THE PLAY Original 1823 playbill used only the main title, Frankenstein, and referred to it as a romance. The play created a considerable sensation Title changed of Frankenstein; or The Danger of Presumption Many audiences made their first acquaintance with Frankenstein through the staged version rather than Shelley’s novel Presumption exists in two primary performing texts: Frankenstein: A melodramatic opera in three acts Dick’s Standard Plays Stephen C. Behrendt’s version: editorial reconstruction from the two sources and based on Jeffrey N. Cox’s Seven Gothic Dramas FROM NOVEL TO STAGED DRAMA The play resulted in a mixed production that combined music, high and low comedy, and stage spectacle. It included elements later associated to the English music hall, burlesque and the modern musical comedy. Peake’s play offered. ‘something for everyone’ The play lacks the dominant aesthetic or dramatic unity we associate to modern versions of Frankenstein. Frankenstein had been published in 1818 but was not being commercially successful. Mrs. Shelley had begun to take credit for Frankenstein in 1822. Presumption became a popularly acclaimed William St. Clair: “every single night when one of the Frankenstein play was performed brought a version of the story of the manmade monster to more men and women than the book did in ten or twenty years” The Whittaker publishing house agreed to issue a second edition of Shelley’s novel in 1823, due to the play’s success. Presumption is more than a mere appropriation or adaptation of Frankenstein Both the novel and the play ‘shape and regulate public skepticism about potentially threatening new advances in the life sciences” The novel: technology as dangerously exceeding its maker’s ability to control it The play: unleashes an apparent unstoppable creature, but ultimately controls it Control over the Creature in the play By muting it By making it subject to the effects of music By not mentioning the potential of its propagation By staging its death at the hands of his maker before the audience, rather than having it take place offstage Presumption offered a more promising portrait of science than the novel, suggesting its maker’s ability to retain his authority in the face of its overwhelming power. MARY SHELLEY’S OPINION OF THE PLAY Writing to her friend Leigh Hunt, Mrs. Shelley confessed that the play had amused her, and she praised Cooke’s interpretative skills, that was extremely good. SCIENCE FURING THIS ROMANTIC PERIOD Frankenstein and Presumption should be understood in the context of Romanticism, when science was being incorporated into everyday life. Theatre played a crucial role in that social incorporation: it provided the tools to communicate ‘knowledge’ to the public. Vigorous scientific debates in England and Europe about the nature of life itself due to the changes triggered by the Industrial Revolution. The Body The Soul The limits of Scientific Knowledge GALVANISM Luigi Galvani claimed he had discovered a new form of ‘animal electricity’: the source of animation of all living creatures Subject of intensive debate Detractors, such as Alessandro Volta These public debates (termed ‘Vitalist debates’) escalated into personal attacks Science at the beginning of the 19thcentury was the subject of intense dispute and uncertainty. These debates and experiments were met with public expressions of unrest and fear about the possibilities of the new technologies being developed. The idea of human reanimation triggered questions about the existence of the soul and blurred lines between the celestial and the divine. Dismissing the existence of the soul (and God) meant allowing people to do anything they desired, freed from fears of divine retribution. These theories would result in the destruction of civilization itself Contemporary advertisements for the play similarly attest to Cooke’s outsized presence compared to the rest of the cast. PRESUMPTION (1823): THE PLAY A play in three acts ACT I The play opens with Frankenstein declaring that his experiments have finally paid off, and tonight he will create life. Fritz, his nervous assistant, is bribed by Clerval to spy on his master. He watches Frankenstein animating the Creature. The Creature at first seeks comfort from its maker, but after Frankenstein tries to kill it with a sword, it escapes into the countryside. ACT II The Creature spends the day hiding around a gypsy camp, frequently moved by nearby music. Frankenstein’s sister betrothed to Clerval, encounters the Arabian woman Safie near their home. Safie is looking for Felix de Lacey, now living in poverty after Safie’s father betrayed him. Safie intends to marry Felix and tells Elizabeth that the De Lacey family has been living close to the Frankenstein estate. The next day, Safie goes to find the De Lacey family, but the creature has followed her there. After being rejected, the creature sets fire to their hut and disappears into the night. ACT III The Creature enacts its vengeance against its maker by disappearing Victor’s younger brother, William, on the wedding day of the four young lovers. He then strangles Agatha De Lacey almost to the point of death. Frankenstein finally chases the Creature up a snow-covered mountain, firing at it with a pistol that triggers an avalanche that kills them both together. ACT I SCENE III FRITZ prone to nervous fits. Greedy and a simpleton, he has been bribed by Clerval to spy on his master in exchange for money to buy cows and a farm. The Creature depicted as a deformed demon. Frankenstein is disgusted by his creation. He tries to murder the Creature with his sword but fails to do so. The Creature tries to appease Frankenstein, but he rejects its approaches. ACT II SCENE II Setting in a gypsy camp where there is music, laughter and merriment. The Creature is depicted as ‘a giant creature with something of a human shape; but ugly and terrible to behold as you would Paint the Devil’, but not violent. The DE LACEY FAMILY are cast out and living in poverty. Felix is responsible; he helped Safie’s father to escape from prison. The CREATURE is delighted with music. Disappointed that he cannot possess the sound. The Creature loves music but is not allowed to produce music of his own. ACT II SCENE V Setting in cottage of DE LACEY. Rural, humble setting: a rustic porch, a small wooden bridge and a wooden couch. The Creature tries to be friendly with the De Lacey family but is feared and rejected by them. Felix wounds the Creature, who sets the house on fire out of revenge. Broader destruction: the future productivity of the land and cutting of the De Lacey’s livelihood. 12/12/2019 ACT III SCENE I Setting is in Elizabeth’s garden and it is set at Clerval’s and Elizabeth’s wedding day. Frankenstein feels guilty for creating such a ‘monster’ and for putting Agatha in danger. He is determined to destroy the Creature. Fritz and Madame Ninon work together for comic purposes: - They are burlesque of the more romantic and younger couples. - They are an embedded ‘comedy team’ within the play. Replicating a stock unhappily married couple of the 18th century comedy of manners. Their scene is superfluous to either the dramatic or thematic design of the play. After the other couple’s blissful scene, they exchange a pun filled dialogue about a ‘beehive cap’, followed by a lively vocal duet. ACT III SCENE V Setting is the wild border of the Lake. Frankenstein, Clerval and Felix chase the Creature and fire at him. He believes that the Creature has murdered Agatha and wants to destroy him. He fires at the Creature, which makes the avalanche fall; both Frankenstein and the Creature are killed. ROBERTSON’S CASTE (1867) A comedy drama by Thomas William Robertson. First staged in 1867. The play was one of several successes by Robertson produced in London’s West End by Squire Bancroft and his wife Marie Wilton – also Society (1865) and Ours (1866). Caste focuses on distinctions of class and rank. THOMAS WILLIAM ROBERTSON He was born in 1829 and came from a theatrical family. He was sent to the Spalding Academy and a school at Whittlesea. Prolific author. His play Society (1865) was critically and popularly acclaimed. ROBERTSON’S PLAYS Audiences were accustomed to plays based on caricatures, and Robertson’s plays were written and directed in such a natural way that was refreshing for the time. The characters behave like real people, with setting that added realism to the drama. The actors were in sympathy with this new style and the plays were very successful. Caste was revived three times at the same theatre with a total of 650 performances. The triumph of Robertson’s plays owed much to the liberality of Miss Marie Wilton (aka Lady Bancroft). She was determined that Robertson would succeed and that his plays would be acted. She allowed him to have his own way with the stage management and with mounting of his work. He dedicated his plays to his manageress. ROBERTSON’S INNOVATION He studied his art in his parents’ circuit: the Lincoln Circuit. They travelled from town to town under the difficulties of their time: at some places being treated with gracious favour, at others being mistreated. The Robertsons were an artistic but not wealthy family. He worked for his father behind the scenes, mastering every branch of the trade (writing, painting, acting, managing…) He grew dissatisfied with the pre-existing state of things and wanted to take part in the reforms. He found the theatrical world of London conservative and stagnant. His plays became known as ‘problem plays’ because they seriously dealt with issues of the time. In the 1850s and 1860s, Robertson’s plays were considered revolutionary. These plays were notable for their realism (characters and settings that were realistic, unlike the oversize acting in Victorian melodramas). The importance of everyday events, the revealing of character through apparent ‘small talk’ and the idea that what is not said in the dialogue is as important as what is said. REVIEWS The ‘New School’ had the constant support of the Daily Telegraph. All that was liberal was in favour of the new Robertsonian departure. Robertson was praised for not being an old-fashioned and dull writer; the actors were considered to be fresh and talented. The opinions of the leading critics was ‘a new departure’. The play became very successful and the public gladly validated the verdict of the critics. SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE PLAY The Indian Rebellion of 1857 - Unsuccessful mutiny in India (1857-1858) against the British East India Company, which ruled on behalf of the British Crown. - A mutiny of sepoys (Indian soldiers serving under British orders) of the Company’s army in the garrison town of Meerut. - The rebellion was fed by invasive British-style social reforms, harsh land taxes, and scepticism about the changes introduced by British rule. - The rebellion posed a threat to British control in the region, but it was contained, and the rebels defeated in Gwalior on 20th June 1858 THE TEMPERANCE MOVEMENT - The temperance movement, which advocates moderating or entirely abstaining from alcohol, became popular in Britain in the 19th century. - The British Association for the Promotion of Temperance was founded in 1835 - Temperance was soon adopted by working-class movements fighting for the right to vote, as they hoped abstinence would give them respectability - Britain never implemented an American-style prohibition law. - The character Eccles as a critique of alcoholism in working-class men. THE CHARACTER ECCLES Robertson was familiar with the English working-classes. He would know that, in certain parts of London, there would be a lazy Eccles at the entrance of every public house who would pawn his very soul for a drink. A popular pot- house orator on the rights of the labouring man, and who declares (while he idles) that there is ‘nothing like work for the young’. His antithesis would be Sam Gerridge, an honest, hard-working man.