Literatura Victoriana, Apuntes de Literatura inglesa

¡Descarga Literatura Victoriana y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura inglesa solo en Docsity! Notes on Victorian Literature THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THE WAR OF IDEAS The received view of the English novel in the latter part of the eighteenth century is hardly encouraging. ‘Between the work of the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century and that of Jane Austen and Walter Scott there are no names which posterity has consented to call great’. The middle of the eighteenth century was a period of growing insight into the subjective mind, so that when, for example, its novelists became engrossed in the triangular relationship between hero, author, and reader, they were reflecting an intellectual innovation of great importance. With few really good novels to its credit, the movement known as sentimentalism is nevertheless fascinating for the contribution it makes towards the representation of the inner life, and its active engagement of the reader's imaginative sympathy. The most marked trend in the English popular novel of the 1790s is its resolute rationality, its suspicion of the uncontrollable workings of the unconscious mind. No feature is more common in novels of any ideological complexion during the revolutionary era than an unremitting hostility to that central plank of Henry Mackenzie and other leading sentimentalists, the intuitional psychology of David Hartley and David Hume. Conservative critics of the novel see that the true threat to orthodoxy lies in the moral relativism implicit in the sentimental movement. It is therefore cunning of them, though inaccurate, to ascribe to the ‘jacobins’ of the 1790s subjectivity, emotionalism, indulgence towards human weakness, and belief in sexual freedom, all of which the jacobins explicitly renounce. For the time being, the English progressive novelist speaks resolutely to the Reason. Sentimentalism has many critics in the period, but no one who is juster, more penetrating, more whole-hearted, than William Godwin. As revolutionary novelists, William Godwin and Robert Bage are virtually as unlike as they can be. A highly theoretical student of liberty, Godwin creates a fictional world in which social reality is reflected symbolically through personal relationships, rather than re-created in detail. The businessman Bage prefers to deal in actuality: Hermsprong is a lively caricature of the world as it is. Godwin's mood is sombre, even tragic, Bage's sparkling and ultimately optimistic. Godwin's opinions influenced all the remaining jacobin novelists, and his pessimism, an understandable mood for an English radical of the period, extended itself in due course to his friends. Bage, the product of an older generation, was eventually to meet Godwin, but in his work he never acknowledges his influence. Both Godwin and Bage make the central assertion of the progressive when they assert the truth of the inner life over the mindless tyranny of the group. Jacobin novels were written between 1780 and 1805 by British radicals who supported the ideals of the French revolution. The term was coined by literary scholar Gary Kelly in The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 (1976) but drawn from the title of the Anti- Jacobin: or, Weekly Examiner, a conservative periodical founded by the Tory politician George Canning. Canning chose to tar British reformers with the French term for the most radical revolutionaries: Jacobin. Among the Jacobin novelists were William Godwin, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Turner Smith. The leading spirits behind The Anti-Jacobin of 1797–1798 were George Canning, William Gifford, and Hookham Frere, intelligent men who liked at least to claim that their targets were ideas rather than personalities. When they did single out individuals for attack, these were as a rule offenders by conservative lights: among creative writers, Robert Southey and, less prominently, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd; the didactic poets Richard Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin; and the German dramatists Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and August von romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are William Beckford’s Oriental romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin’s story of an Irish Faust, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its definitive mystery and terror. Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals. In the underlines of these works one can find the buried echoes of a society yearning for sexual and social liberation, cries of fear for an unknown future menaced by strange and alien entities (catholic, old regime, socialists…) MARY, A FICTION. Wollstonecraft's first novel, Mary - A Fiction was written during the summer of 1787 while serving as a governess in Ireland. An innate belligerence is immediately clear from the title proudly, proclaiming itself as a "fiction". Mary - A Fiction was written in an era in which many novels, such as Moll Flanders or Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, were presented as real-life case studies, hiding the novel under the noble aim of confessional. Fiction was suspect. Yet, despite her proclamation, Wollstonecraft's first novel was indeed autobiographical, telling the tale of Mary, a self-taught rational heroine who believed in defining femininity and marriage for herself. Marriage for this heroine would mean being enchained as opposed to being enriched. Accordingly, Mary's fiction did not pander to the disease of happy endings nor provide romantic illusions into which women could escape - a main attraction of the "sensation" novels gobbled up by bored ladies of leisure. Mary disliked sensation novels because they encouraged illusions such as "love at first sight" and "happy ever after" and would only set up false notions that would inevitably end in disappointment in reality. In order to combat this she intertwined her fiction with the emerging philosophy of the day. Locke's idea of the tabula rasa was gaining ground amongst the thinking elite, especially the Romantics, and Wollstonecraft took the philosopher's conception of the way experience inscribes itself upon the mind of the individual and used it to challenge the belief that certain behaviours were biologically specific, such as the idea that women were essentially feeble and incapable of worthwhile learning, needing men to rescue them. Wollstonecraft wrote literature as intelligent protest. Remarking on the completion of Mary - a Fiction, she said: "I have lately written, a fiction, it is a tale to illustrate an opinion of mine, that a genius will educate itself." For Wollstonecraft it was all about knowledge as power. Whilst educating young minds as governess, she never neglected her own. Like most revolutionaries she was fiercely auto-didactic. However, Mary was no conventional bluestocking. We could learn much from Wollstonecraft, especially her intention of using fiction as a way of connecting to the radical and non-conventional, and awakening readers as opposed to lulling them into false ideals. nspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that geniuses teach themselves, Wollstonecraft chose a rational, self-taught heroine, Mary, as the protagonist. Helping to redefine genius, a word which at the end of the 18th century was only beginning to take on its modern meaning of exceptional or brilliant, Wollstonecraft describes Mary as independent and capable of defining femininity and marriage for herself. According to Wollstonecraft, it is Mary's "strong, original opinions" and her resistance to "conventional wisdom" that mark her as a genius. Making her heroine a genius allowed Wollstonecraft to criticize marriage as well, as she felt geniuses were "enchained" rather than enriched by marriage. Mary begins with a description of the conventional and loveless marriage between the heroine's mother and father. Eliza, Mary's mother, is obsessed with novels, rarely considers anyone but herself, and favours Mary's brother. She neglects her daughter, who educates herself using only books and the natural world. Ignored by her family, Mary devotes much of her time to charity. When her brother suddenly dies, leaving Mary heir to the family's fortune, her mother finally takes an interest in her; she is taught "accomplishments", such as dancing, that will attract suitors. However, Mary's mother soon sickens and requests on her deathbed that Mary wed Charles, a wealthy man she has never met. Stunned and unable to refuse, Mary agrees. Immediately after the ceremony, Charles departs for the Continent. To escape a family who does not share her values, Mary befriends Ann, a local girl who educates her further. Mary becomes quite attached to Ann, who is in the grip of an unrequited love and does not reciprocate Mary's feelings. Ann's family falls into poverty and is on the brink of losing their home, but Mary is able to repay their debts after her marriage to Charles gives her limited control over her money. As literary scholar Diane Long Hoeveler has demonstrated, Mary is not only a sentimental novel, but, with its emphasis on death, hyperbolic emotion, and persecution, also a gothic novel. Hoeveler identifies in the text what she calls "Gothic feminism", an ideology that values the persecuted heroine above all: it "is not about being equal to men" but rather "about being morally superior to men. It is about being a victim". In other words, Hoeveler argues that the position of victim grants women moral authority. In a Freudian reading, she focuses on how Mary "displaces and projects her own anger and disappointment" onto other characters, such as Ann and Henry. In this interpretation, Ann and Henry become surrogate parents to Mary; she is "unable to move out of her childish identifications with parental figures, and so she just keeps constructing one parent-substitute after another, never being able to accept the demands and realities required for marriage Wollstonecraft's subtitle—A Fiction—explicitly rejects a number of popular 18th- century genres, such as the longer "history" or novel (Mary is substantially shorter than Richardson's Clarissa, for example).[25] In the advertisement, she defends writing a reality-based "fiction" about a female genius: Without arguing physically about possibilities—in a fiction, such a being may be allowed to exist; whose grandeur is drawn from the operations of its own faculties, not subjugated to opinion; but drawn by the individual from the original source. (emphasis Wollstonecraft's)[26] Through her choice of the subtitle "fiction", Wollstonecraft implies that other genres, such as the novel, restrict the plots available for women; she therefore attempts to invent a new genre, one that offers choice and self-confidence to female characters FROM ROMANTICISM TO VICTORIAN NOVEL WALTER SCOTT AND THE IDEAL PAST Sir Walter Scott, in full Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, (born August 15, 1771, Edinburgh , Scotland—died September 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh, Scotland), Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer who is often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel. His explorations of the neighbouring countryside developed in him both a love of natural beauty and a deep appreciation of the historic struggles of his Scottish forebears. In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic novels, and Scottish border ballads. His first published work, The Chase, and William and Helen (1796), was a translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer G.A. Bürger. A poor translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen followed in 1799. Scott’s interest in border ballads finally bore fruit in his collection of them entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vol. (1802–03). His attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated Romantic flavour. The work made Scott’s name known to a wide public, and he followed up his first success with a full-length narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), which ran into many editions. The poem’s clear and vigorous storytelling, Scottish regionalist elements, honest pathos, and vivid evocations of landscape were repeated in further poetic romances, including Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), which was the most successful of these pieces, Rokeby (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). Waverley. It was one of the rare and happy cases in literary history when something original and powerful was immediately recognized and enjoyed by a large public. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, it reinterpreted and presented with living force the manners and loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. Scott was the master of a rich, ornate, seemingly effortless literary style that blended energy with decorum, lyric beauty with clarity of description. Scott followed up Waverley with a whole series of historical novels set in Scotland that are now known as the “Waverley” novels. Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816) completed a sort of trilogy covering the period from the 1740s to just after 1800. The first of four series of novels published under the title Tales of My Landlord was composed of The Black Dwarf and the masterpiece Old Mortality(1816). These were followed by the masterpieces Rob Roy (1817) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and then by The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (both 1819). It was only after writing these novels of Scottish history that Scott, driven by the state of his finances and the need to satisfy the public appetite for historical fiction that he himself had created, turned to themes from English history and elsewhere. He thus wrote Ivanhoe (1819), a novel set in 12th-century England and one that remains his most popular book. In dealing with the recent past of his native country, Scott was able to find a fictional form in which to express the deep ambiguities of his own feeling for Scotland. On the one hand he welcomed Scotland’s union with England and the commercial progress and modernization that it promised to bring, but on the other he bitterly regretted the loss of Scotland’s independence and the steady decline of its national consciousness and traditions. Novel after novel in the “Waverley” series makes clear that the older, heroic tradition of the Scottish Jacobite clans (supporters of the exiled Stuart king James II and his descendants) had no place in the modern world; the true heroes of Scott’s novels are thus not fighting knights-at-arms but the lawyers, farmers, merchants, and simple people who go about their business oblivious to the claims and emotional ties of a heroic past. Scott became a novelist by bringing his antiquarian and romantic feeling for Scotland’s past into relation with his sense that Scotland’s interests lay with a prudently commercial British future. He welcomed civilization, but he also longed for individual heroic action. It is this ambivalence that gives vigour, tension, and complexity of viewpoint to his best novels. Scott gathered the disparate strands of contemporary realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life. In her six major novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of “domestic” literature. Her repeated fable of a young woman’s voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style, her shrewd, amused sympathy, and the satisfaction to be found in stories so skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed, that helps to explain her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so ordinary and so circumscribed. EMILY BRONTE AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS In 1835, when Charlotte secured a teaching position at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, Emily accompanied her as a pupil but suffered from homesickness and remained only three months. In 1838 Emily spent six exhausting months as a teacher in Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill, near Halifax, and then resigned. In February 1842 she and Emily went to Brussels to learn foreign languages and school management at the Pension Héger. Although Emily pined for home and for the wild moorlands, it seems that in Brussels she was better appreciated than Charlotte. Her passionate nature was more easily understood than Charlotte’s decorous temperament. In October, however, when her aunt died, Emily returned permanently to Haworth. In 1845 Charlotte came across some poems by Emily, and this led to the discovery that all three sisters— Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—had written verse. A year later they published jointly a volume of verse, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the initials of these pseudonyms being those of the sisters; it contained 21 of Emily’s poems, and a consensus of later criticism has accepted the fact that Emily’s verse alone reveals true poetic genius. The venture cost the sisters about £50 in all, and only two copies were sold. y midsummer of 1847 Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey had been accepted for joint publication by J. Cautley Newby of London, but publication of the three volumes was delayed until the appearance of their sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, which was immediately and hugely successful. Wuthering Heights, when published in December 1847, did not fare well; critics were hostile, calling it too savage, too animal-like, and clumsy in construction. Only later did it come to be considered one of the finest novels in the English language. Soon after the publication of her novel, Emily’s health began to fail rapidly. She had been ill for some time, but now her breathing became difficult, and she suffered great pain. She died of tuberculosis in December 1848. Emily Brontë’s work on Wuthering Heights cannot be dated, and she may well have spent a long time on this intense, solidly imagined novel. It is distinguished from other novels of the period by its dramatic and poetic presentation, its abstention from all comment by the author, and its unusual structure. It recounts in the retrospective narrative of an onlooker, which in turn includes shorter narratives, the impact of the waif Heathcliff on the two families of Earnshaw and Linton in a remote Yorkshire district at the end of the 18th century. Embittered by abuse and by the marriage of Cathy Earnshaw—who shares his stormy nature and whom he loves—to the gentle and prosperous Edgar Linton, Heathcliff plans a revenge on both families, extending into the second generation. Cathy’s death in childbirth fails to set him free from his love- hate relationship with her, and the obsessive haunting persists until his death; the marriage of the surviving heirs of Earnshaw and Linton restores peace. Sharing her sisters’ dry humour and Charlotte’s violent imagination, Emily diverges from them in making no use of the events of her own life and showing no preoccupation with a spinster’s state or a governess’s position. Working, like them, within a confined scene and with a small group of characters, she constructs an action, based on profound and primitive energies of love and hate, which proceeds logically and economically, making no use of such coincidences as Charlotte relies on, requiring no rich romantic similes or rhetorical patterns, and confining the superb dialogue to what is immediately relevant to the subject. The sombre power of the book and the elements of brutality in the characters affronted some 19th-century opinion. THE AGE OF THE NOVEL: VICTORIAN WRITERS AND THEIR WORK THE VICTORIAN AGE During the Victorian era (1837 – 1901), Britain could claim to be the world’s superpower, despite social inequality at home and burgeoning industrial rivals overseas. During the Victorian age, Britain was the world's most powerful nation. Though not always effortlessly, it was able to maintain a world order which rarely threatened Britain's wider strategic interests. The single European conflict fought during Victoria's reign - the Crimean War of 1854 - 1856 - contrasted markedly with the 18th century, during which the British were involved in at least five major wars, none of which lasted less than seven years. The Victorians believed that peace was a necessary pre-condition of long-term prosperity. In 1882 Britain was in the later stages of acquiring the largest empire the world had ever seen. By the end of Victoria's reign, the British empire The quality of political debate in Victorian Britain, in newspapers and in both houses of parliament, was also very high. The struggle for political supremacy between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli in the late 1860s and 1870s represents perhaps the most sophisticated political duel in the nation's history. During the Victorian era, then, the United Kingdom could plausibly be considered as the world's superpower. However, Germany and the United States had already begun to surpass its industrial capacity and Germany's naval build-up would shortly present a powerful challenge to long-held British supremacy. On the home front, the nation was only beginning to get to grips with widespread poverty while considerably more than half the adult population remained without a vote. Victorian supremacy by 1901 was only skin deep. THE VICTORIAN FICTION Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors. This new status as the world’s first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy. The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic thought were challenged by the growing prestige of empirical science and utilitarian moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more- objective modes in literature. Realismwould be one of the great artistic movements of the era. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immoralism. Several major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died in 1834, De Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843 and held the post until his own death seven years later. Posthumous publication caused some striking chronological anomalies. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” was not published until 1840. Keats’s letters appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth’s Prelude in 1850. Despite this persistence, critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of Austen in 1817 and Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of prose fiction were published in Victorian Britain by as many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or “three-decker”) was the standard mode of first publication; it was a form created for sale to and circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in the 1830s by the advent of serialization in magazines and by the publication of novels in 32-page monthly parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker finally yield to the modern single-volume format. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. They were usually inclined towards being of improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed. he reclaiming of the past was a major part of Victorian literature and was to be found in both classical literature and also the medieval literature of England. The Victorians loved the heroic, chivalrous stories of knights of old and they hoped to regain some of that noble, courtly behaviour and impress it upon the people both at home and in the wider empire. The discoveries of science seem to reflect considerable and particular effects upon the literature of the age. The Victorians had a mission to describe and classify the entire natural world. Much of this writing was not regarded as literature but one book, in particular, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, remains famous. The theory of evolution contained within the work shook many of the ideas the Victorians had about themselves. Although it took a long time to be widely accepted, completely changed following thoughts and literature. The old Gothic tales that came out of the late 19th century are the first examples of the genre of fantastic fiction. These tales often centred on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective of the times, Barry Lee, big time gang leader, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg, and other fictional characters of the era, such as Dracula, Edward Hyde. If one studies possibly, all the great writers of this period, you will mark three general characteristics, Firstly, literature in the Victorian age tended to come face to face with realism. This reflected more on practical problems and interests. It becomes a powerful instrument for human progress. Secondly, the Victorian literature seems to deviate from the strict principle of “art for art’s sake” and asserts its moral purpose. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Ruskin Bond – all were the teachers of England with the faith in their moral message to instruct the world. Thirdly, this was