Victorian Era: Reforms, Novels, and Social Issues, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Victorian Era: Reforms, Novels, and Social Issues e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The dawn of the Victorian age Queen Victoria came to the throne at the age of 18 from the 1837 to the 1901 and she gave her name to an age of social, political and economic prosperity. She married prince Albert who received the title of “Prince Consort" only after when she was sure about his help and devotion to England. An age of reform: This was an age of reform:  the First Reform Act, also called the Great Reform Act, had transferred voting privileges from a few, such as the nobility and the gentry, to many people like the large industrial towns;  the second one, called Factory Act, said that children between 9 and 13 couldn't work more than 48 hours a week and between 13 and 18 couldn't work more than 72 hours a week  the last one, called Poor Law Amendment Act, introduced the Workhouses. (A workhouse was an institution where the poor received board and accommodation in return of work, but life in workhouse was hard: the poor had to wear uniforms and their families were divided, also workhouses where mainly run to the Church.) Chartism: During Victoria's reign, a group of a working-class radicals drew up a People's Charter demanding equal electoral districts, the universal male suffrage, a secret ballot, paid MPs, annually elected Parliaments and abolition of the property qualification for membership, but failed. However, after that was introduced a secret Ballot and was admitted to the right of voting part of the male working class. The Irish Potato Famine: A terrible famine was caused by the bad weather and an unknown plant disease from America. Therefore, there was a terrible famine in Ireland because their agriculture depended on potatoes. So many people died and others emigrated mainly to America. Technological progress: The 19th century was also an age of technological progress and Prince Albert made built the Crystal Palace to expose all new inventions. Money that came to the exposition was invested in the construction of museums, like the Natural History Museum. Foreign policy: In the mid-19th century, England was involved in the two Opium Wars against China; 1. the First Opium War (1839-42) was fought between China and Britain, 2. while the Second Opium War (1856-60), also known as the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Britain and France against China, but also supported many causes for independence, such us Italian independence from the Austrians. When Russia became too powerful against the weak Turkish Empire, France and Britain got involved into the Crimean War to limit Russia’s power; it was the first conflict reported in newspapers by journalists ‘on the ground’. Descrizione immagine pag. 5: The image above shows a typical mealtime for women residing in St Pancras Workhouse in London. The women are seated in a large dining room under the watchful 1 eyes of the Workhouse staff. Women, many of whom have a tired and resigned expression, portray the depressing realities of workhouse living. One woman is even shown to be hiding her face from the camera, indicating a sense of shame for those calling the Workhouse home. The clothing that they wearing are all part of the standard issue uniform provided by the workhouse. Although, there are a few minor variations with the inclusion of shawls, the clothing is identical and thus conveys a lack of individuality amongst the workhouse residents. The lack of men in this image is due to the strictly enforced rules for segregation of the sex within the work house. The later years of Queen Victoria’s reign Prince Albert passed through in 1861 because of typhoid. At that time, Queen Victoria was the mother-in-law of many European rulers (the Danish, the Russian, the Prussian and the German one). Her Golden and Diamond Jubilees turned out to be national celebration and pride events. The two most important political parties were the Liberals (the old Whigs) and the Conservative (the old Tories), that both won the elections thanks to their leaders, which were Gladstone and Disraeli. They faced many issues concerning urban health, trade unions rights and public education. Overseas British possessions became greater, like the ones in South Africa consequentially to the defeat of the Boers. So, Queen Victoria was named “Empress of India”. The Third Reform Act gave vote to male householders. Workers found union in the trade unions that became legal with the Trade Union Act. The campaign of the Suffragette movement got a lot of publicity, but women’s rights cause was sometimes shaded by its violence. Consequentially to the epidemic of cholera and typhoid, the Public Health Act encouraged the provisioning of clean water and sanitation. Victorian cities were provided with gas lightning, rubbish collection and many public buildings like halls, railway stations, libraries, museums, schools, hospitals, police stations and prisons. The Elementary Education Act granted state education. Intellectuals suffered from the opposition of religious faith to scientific discoveries. While the Victorian Age was a positive era, its following century was dominated by a sense of disillusionment. The Victorian Novel During the Victorian Age there was for the first time a communion between writes and their readers. In this period the novel became the most popular form of literature. The novelists felt they had a moral and social responsibility to fulfil, they aimed at reflecting the social changes that had been in progress for a long time. The novelists of the first part of the Victorian period described society as they saw it, and, with the exception of those sentiments which offended current morals. They were aware of the evils of the society, such as the terrible conditions of manual workers and the exploitation of children. Their criticism was not radical, it just aimed at making readers aware of social injustices. Setting and characters: The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the city, which was the main symbol of the industrial civilization as well the expression of anonymous lives and lost identities. Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic characters the public could easily identify with, in terms of comedy (in Dickens characters), or dramatic passion (in the Bronte sister’ heroines). Types of novels:  The novel of manners: It kept close to the original 19th century models. It dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation. 2 environment and not simply illustrative, but also provide a social and psychological map of the situation they depict. Characters: as in all his novels, Dickens demonstrates his talent for portraying unforgettable characters often drawn from real life models but transformed through comic exaggeration. Character of Thomas Gradgrind: probably based on the Utilitarian leader, James Mill (Utilitarism = 19th-centurypolitical, economic and social doctrine which based all values on utility, measured by the extent to which it promoted the material happiness of the greatest number of people). For Dickens, Utilitarism was based on a fallacious conception of the human nature, its reliance on statistical evidence left no space for human qualities (generosity, altruism and imagination), and its concern with quantitative analysis made it insensitive to the individual. Gradgrind himself believes that education should be merely practical and factual, allowing no place for imagination and emotion. Settings:  Coketown (fictious city, modelled on Late-Victorian Industrial Town)  red bricks made black by the chimneys and the endless smoke from factories (= endless work: pistons moved up and down like the head of a “mad elephant”), gloomy atmosphere  Dickens analyses the effects of industrialization: alienation (loss of humanity and depression) but also proudness (industrialization led to the town efficiency and the production of welfare). Robert Louise Stevenson R. L. Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. His bourgeois family was religious and respectable but their son Robert adopted a different lifestyle which compromised his relationship with his father. He suffered for a respiratory disease and for that he moved to the south of France. He got married with an American lady there. His first work is An Inland Voyage published in 1878 but his most famous novel is: The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). In his literary production he managed to create a reality rich of adventure and unlikely events. Dr Jekyll and Mister Hide Mr Utterson is respectable London lawyer and friend to the brilliant scientist Dr Henry Jekyll. After relating a disturbing tale of a sinister mas assaulting a small girl, Utterson begins to question the odd behaviour of his friend. He then discovers that Jekyll has created a potion able to release his evil side: Mr Hyde. These two beings are in a perpetual struggle; once Hyde is released from hiding, he achieves domination over the Jekyll aspect, so that the individual has only two choices. On one hand, the man may choose a life of depravity and crime or, on the other hand, Jekyll must eliminate Hyde by killing him. Jekyll’s suicide is the final and only choice. The story takes place in London in the 1870s. At that time London had a double nature and reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian Society: the respectable west end was in contrast with the poor east end slums. This ambivalence is reinforced by the symbolism of Jekyll’s house whose two facades represent the faces of the two opposed sides of the same man:  Front of the house (Dr Jekyll) fair, part of a square of ancient, handsome houses;  The rear side used by Hyde is part of a sinister block of buildings, which showed no windows. 5 Most of the scenes take place at night and are wrapped up in darkness and fog. The novel has its origins in a dream; Stevenson seems to have been concerned since his youth with the duality of man’s nature, the good and the evil sides. The Calvinism of his family gave him a sense of man’s divided self and its pessimism moved him to rebel against religion. The novel has a multi-narrative structure; there are four narrators: 1. Utterson, whom has the role of a detective; 2. The walks of these two very different men may be a metaphor for the dual nature of every human being, which man must accept to live with; 3. Dr Layon, is the first person to see his friend enact his transformation. Since he witnesses a physical impossible phenomenon, he prefers to die rather than go on living in a world that he thinks has turned up-side down; 4. Dr Jekyll, who speaks in first person. Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies about man’s kinship to the animal world. Hyde’s small stature indicates that his body is not exercised; he is lame, deformed. Jekyll is as guilty as Mr Hyde, because he had projected his hidden pleasures on his alter ego. Jekyll is a kind of Victorian Faust and his awareness is a sort of pact with an interior evil that controls him in the end. The novel may also be conceived as a reflection on art itself, and Jekyll’s discovery may symbolise the artist’s journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche. Jekyll’s experiment (page 115) The introduction of the final chapter and Jekyll’s confession letter is the first time we are allowed access to the details of Jekyll’s secret double life. Stevenson has kept up the suspense when, all along, the truth has been hidden and suppressed in Jekyll’s secret diary of documents. You can imagine a very different story told by Jekyll instead of Utterson with this as its beginning. Jekyll’s character is a mass of contradictions – his scientific career and his split personality cause a gulf between his professional and private lives. Stevenson chooses not to go into the details of the potion or its anatomical effect. This may well be because he wants us to believe the transformation is real. It’s also accentuated the idea of repression that runs through the whole narrative. Even in what is supposed to be a confession, Jekyll is vague and secretive, leaving the full sensory experience to the imagination. Jekyll longs to come clean and public about his split identity. For him, the transformation into Hyde signifies more than just a miracle of science, it is his chance to be himself, to speak the things that he has always silenced. The act of looking at the mirror at the manifestation of all his suppressed evil desires is a momentous, symbolic act. Jekyll’s two identities are not in fact two sides of one coin. Hyde, who has been in the shadow of Jekyll until now, has been released with greater force than he exerted as a repressed, secret alter ego and is now taking over, putting Jekyll in the shadows. He is not just a supernatural, outsider anymore, he is being given a real life, with property and money. Even in his final confession, Jekyll seems to be suppressing the truth about his relationship to Hyde. He describes the freedom of being able to exercise his evil desires but the way he hints at his conscience suggest that they are not separate at all. Up until now the shift in balance between evil and good has been an internal struggle for Jekyll, but now he physically can’t control the transformation. Science has gone from holding a lot of power to now seeming small compared to the unexplainable laws that govern Hyde. Initially, Jekyll’s split personality was a gift, then it became a curse. Now Jekyll is forced to choose between the two, he is given back a kind of moral authority. The mention of “judgment” conjures a world beyond both superstition and science to an idea of 6 God. In his confession letter, Jekyll recalls all the events of Hyde’s life and the events of Jekyll’s. Authority becomes separated from morality when Jekyll feels all the guilt for Hyde’s deeds. The good and evil sides of Jekyll, which he described as two discrete, equal sides in his theory, are unbalanced. The description of Hyde’s journey and his time at the inn trying to keep himself busy and out of sight accentuate how badly contained his rage and animal qualities are. It is as if he is about to burst with all the negative energy he is carrying. The movement of this chapter creates a false sense of security when Jekyll finally arrives back home and can sleep in his own bed – it is as if he has been running from his alter ego, but we know that he will have to find a different kind of escape. Once, Jekyll looked with pleasure on his twin, identifying with both Hyde and Jekyll equally. Now the duality has turned to rivalry and the difference between good and evil has been blurred. Hyde is not the only creature with hatred in his heart. Jekyll has a fair share of hatred too and even his mind is alternating with Hyde’s thoughts and his own until they are hardly distinguishable. Both science and mysticism have failed now. As the last of this faulty batch of chemicals runs out, the real, human consequence of Jekyll’s experiment sinks in. Though he has succeeded in bending the natural laws that people like Lanyon took for granted, he has also engineered his own death. He has changed the nature of death as he changed the nature of life – in a way his death is not even his own – he is leaving a living corpse behind. Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde, the son of a surgeon and of an ambitious literary woman, was born in Dublin in 1854.After attending Trinity College, he was sent to Oxford were graduated in Classics and then settled in London, where he soon became a celebrity for his wit and his manners. He became a disciple of Walter Pater, the theorist of Aestheticism, accepting the theory of ‘Art for Art's sake': he regarded Aestheticism as the science through which men looked for the relationship between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were different forms of the same truth. After a tour in the United States, he married Constance Lloyd with whom he had two children. He was known as a great talker. In the late 1880s he wrote some short stories, such as The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (written for his children) and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). After that he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners, producing a series of plays: the most remarkable one is The Importance of Being Earnest, which dates back to 1895. However, both the novel and Salomé (1893), a tragedy written in French, damaged the writer’s reputation, since the former was considered immoral, and the latter was banned for obscenity. In 1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had an affair. On finding out about their relationship, the boy's father forced a public trial and Wilde was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two-years of hard labour. While in prison he wrote De Profundis, published in 1905.When he was released, his wife refused to see him, and he went into exile in France, where he lived in poverty, dying of meningitis in 1900. Wilde affirmed that “His life was like a work of art". He lived in the double role of a rebel and a dandy, which must be distinguished from the bohemian: while the latter is close to the urban proletariat, the former is a bourgeois artist, who, despite his unconventionality, remains a member of his class. The Wilde’s dandy is a member of aristocracy, whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock, and demands absolute freedom. Since life was meant for pleasure, and pleasure meant letting yourself being carried away by what’s beautiful, Wilde's interest in beauty had no moral intent. 7 A different use of time: The concept of time was different: it was all subjective and internal. The plot didn’t necessarily follow the chronological sequence of events. The stream of consciousness technique:  It was one of the most common techniques of modern novel. It was the continuous flow of thoughts and sensation that characterised the human mind.  The interior monologue is the verbal expression of this phenomenon. Three groups of novelists: It is possible to distinguish 3 groups of novelists in the first decade of the 20th century.  The first group is made up of psychological novelists who focused on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships. The most important are Conrad (the mystery of human experience), Lawrence and Forster.  The second group consists of novelists who experimented with subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of one or more characters and giving voice to their thoughts. Joyce and Virginia Woolf belong to this group. They reflected the lack of faith in traditional values, the trauma of World War I and the disillusionment with modern myths such as progress, science and technology. To compensate this, classical myths were often freely incorporated into modern narrative.  The third group instead focused on social and political problems of the 1930s society. Orwell and Huxley were the most important authors of anti-utopian and dystopian novels. The interior monologue: At the beginning of 20th century, writers gave more and more importance to subjective consciousness and understood it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind through traditional techniques; so they looked for other suitable means of expression. Novelists used the interior monologue to represent the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered into speech. The characteristics of the interior monologue:  It is the verbal expression of the stream of consciousness;  It is characterised by the lack of chronological order;  The narration is often in present tense;  All the action takes place in the character’s mind. It can be direct or indirect:  In the direct interior monologue, the narrator maintains logical and grammatical organization and seems not to exist.  In the indirect interior monologue, the author is present within the narration the character stays fixed in space. James Joyce Dublin 1882-1904: Joyce was born in Dublin and he is the eldest surviving child of the children. He was educated at a Jesuit school and graduated from University College, Dublin, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts degree with a focus on modern language. Dublin did not allow him to be free, it did not give him the kind of life he wanted, he had the desire to escape, Ireland was a kind of paralysis for him so he thought of himself more of a European than an Irishman. Joyce believed that the only way to increase Ireland's awareness was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European 10 cosmopolitan viewpoint. Joyce well intentioned to become a writer, left Dublin to go to Paris, but he came back to Dublin for his mother's death; then he left Ireland with Nora Bacuscle, the woman with whom he spent the rest of his life. Their first date on 16th June became the "Blooms day of Ulysses“, the name comes from Leopold Bloom, protagonist of Ulysses and all the fact happen on this day, it is also a nation holiday, but also global. Trieste 1905-15: The couple lived in Trieste, where Joyce met and appreciated the Italian writer Italo Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two children and worried. The years in Trieste were difficult because of financial problems. The first of his works in book form was a collection Chamber Music. Dubliners, a collection of short stories about Dublin and its life was completed in 1905 and published on the eve of WWEI. The book attracted Ezny Pound who called Joyce's style unconventional and helped him print a semi-autobiographical novel, "A portrait of the Artist as a young” Zurich 1915-20: He moved with his family to Zurich because of the Austrian occupation in Trieste. Paris 1920-40: After the war they settled in Paris, where they spent 20 years and Joyce wrote his famous works and Ulysses was published. This novel caught praise and share criticise. This final decade of Joyce's life was darkened by his daughter illness (mental) and his father's death. He wrote "Finnegans Wake", to which refers to an Irish balled, and the original title is Finnegan’s Wake, therefore Joyce has removed the Saxon genitive and made it a name and "wake" can mean "awake" or "awaking". The original Irish ballad tells the aware of a drunkard during which, friends to pay - homage drink litres of alcohol, suddenly a shot of whiskey falls on the deceased and makes him almost awaken. The title can have different meanings: Finn -> can refer to a giant of Irish History. (myth) Finn(egains)-> egans-> again a kind of exhortation for Ireland to wake up because it wanted independence from England. Zurich 1940-62: He died in Zurich in 1941 at the age of 59 after on intestinal operation. Ordinary Dublin: Joyce exiled himself and all his works take place in Ireland, especially in Dublin, as he wanted to show a realistic portrait of the ordinary life of Dubliners. Time is perceived as subjective, leading to phycological change:  The description of Dublin derived from the characters' Floating mind The rebellion against the church: He had hostility towards the Church, the revolt of the autist- heretic against the official doctrine, the church which Bud taken possession of Irish minds. Style: Joyce was influenced by French Symbolists so the put into practice the impersonality of the artist whose purpose was to represent life in an objective way, to gives, in the readers something true. This led to an isolation of the artist from society. Joyce does not express his opinion; he uses different points of view and narrative techniques adapted to the characters. His style, language and technique developed from the realisms of Dubliners, through the use of free direct speech, to the interior monologue with two levels of narration to the extreme interior monologue. Joyce, using puns and inventing a language, breaks the barriers of English syntax and grammar making the work difficult to read. 11 Dubliners: Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories set in Dublin. These stories lack action, they disclose human situations and lead to a moral, social or spiritual revolution. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin, the others concern the middle years of characters. Victorian writers had celebrated the developments in civilisation, while Joyce, as Modern novelist, was hostile to city life. Dublin is a place where true feelings and compassion do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie. The stories are divided into 4 groups, which represent phases of human life: childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life. The last story "The Dead" can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece and it summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories, and it functions as an epilogue. Characters: The image of Dubliners as afflicted people is given by the social oppression suffered by those of the lower-middle-class, they are like in an endless web of despair and even if they want to escape, Joyce's Dubliners are unable to, because they are spiritually weak (Evelive). They are in some way enslaved by their culture, family and political life, but above all by religious life. In fact, Joyce wants to show the way it reveals itself to the "victims" of this moral and physical "paralysis" Realism and symbolism: The description of each story is realistic concise with an abundance of details. The realism is mixed with symbolism, since all details Rive deeper meanings. We can also find religious symbolism and colour symbolism, which suggests the atmosphere. The use of epiphany: The function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspect of life, and Joyce employed a peculiar technique, the "epiphany", that is the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by banal object or situation, which reveals the characters' inner truths. Style: Joyce's style in Dubliners is characterised by two elements: the interior monologue, where the narrator disappears and which is in the form of free direct speech, so the protagonist's pure thoughts without any reporting verbs; and the chiasmus, patterned repetition of images that can create also melodic effects. In the first three stories (childhood section), Joyce employs a first-person narrator, nameless and this narrator describes events from the point of view of the young boy (so you can understand him better). For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is used, who shares a particular character's perspective and reflect the language and the sensitivity of the character who is being described. The language is simple, objective and neutral, but is adapted to the characters, their age, social class and role. The opposite of paralysis is escape and its consequent failure, it originates from an impulse caused by a sense of enclosure and many characters don't succeed in freeing themselves.  Physical paralysis is linked to external forces  Moral paralysis is linked to religion, politics and culture.  The failure of the characters is linked to the fact that they can't find a way out of "paralysis", because they're not able to relate with other  Epiphany (liberazione) is often the key to the story itself  Narrative technique - style -> the omniscient narrator and the single point of view are rejected Eveline Eveline Hill, a nineteen-year-old girl, looks out of her window. Observing what is happening outside, she sees a musician playing an organ and this sound reminds her of a song she heard before her mother died. The girl then begins to remember her childhood: she thinks of her father, who often 12