Gothic Literature and the Romantic Period: An Overview, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Gothic Literature and the Romantic Period: An Overview e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Restoration to Romanticism (1660-1789) Pope Alexander Pope was, like Dryden, considered one of the main authors of the Augustan age. He achieved great success thanks to his translations of Greek and Latin classics -especially Homer- into English and to his satirical works on society and the intellectual environment (whereas Dryden’s were political, philosophical and religion-oriented) he lived in. Among his main works one can’t but list “The Rape of the Lock” (a playful poem full of paradoxes and witty observations on the self-regarding world it depicts, as a family quarrel over a lock of hair is projected on the triviality of the world with a mock heroic style), The Dunciad (in which Pope attacks his literary rivals, critics, and enemies, all grouped together as the general enemy “Dulness”, which gradually takes over the world) and the Imitations of Horace (which raises issues of political neutrality, partisanship and moral satire). Journalism As the market for the printed word expanded around the beginning of the eighteenth century, so production rose to meet the demand. Journals could count on a readership made of the rising middle classes and especially women. The most prominent journals were The Tatler (founded by Richard Steele, ran 1709-1711), The Spectator (run by Steele with Joseph Addison 1711-1712. It became the journal of a gentleman’s club, led by the fictional Sir Roger de Coverley, whose attitudes in relation to the city and the country, and between social classes, are significant indications of the time. Its objective was “to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality”, giving a point of view rather than a committed engagement with issues and debates) and Daniel Defoe’s The Review (which engaged in highly critical and controversial debates. In The Mercator, the polemic about money and the new mercantile ethos in society are known), which was written before he became a novelist. Journalism was an integral part of major writers’ literary careers and writing, with the growing popularity of the novel, was now a profession. Scottish Enlightenment, diarists and Gibbon In the eighteenth century, the Scottish Enlightenment focused attention on Glasgow and Edinburgh, cities that became centres of intellectual activity (philosophical enquiry and its practical applications. David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature presents the philosopher’s argument on God and its relationship with men). Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was probably the most important work on economics of the century, revolutionizing concepts of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America. The growth of the writing profession coincided with a rise in writing which was private, not intended for publication: letters (which gave fiction the basis of the epistolary novel and became a kind of handbook of good behaviour, a manual of how society saw itself) and diaries (Diary of Samuel Pepys, written in a form of code which was not deciphered until 1825 and that gives a day-by-day insight into the decade of the Restoration and a spontaneous account of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London). History becomes the new secular authority of the Enlightenment and comes to be a very wide- ranging category of writing: the greatest product of this was Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which examines not only the greatness of Rome, but also the forces which brought about its decay with a prose style, though his interpretation was controversial (history is seen as a branch of belles-lettres, it subsumes within it sculptural authority on the one hand, and fictional narrative on the other). The novel The concern of the Augustan age was not so much with exploration (of the bounds of human potential and of geography and the sciences) as with experience. The novel was not a sudden innovation at the end of the seventeenth century, as many accounts of travels (Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, one of the earliest picaresque tales in English) grew popular in that period, notwithstanding the prominence of Englishness over exoticism. The expanding readership was largely female and upper or upper-middle class. The new ethos indicated that all kinds of social behaviour be monitored, regulated, controlled (new morality propounded, covering figures of authority, male/female relationships, the social awareness of needs…). Aphra Behn was certainly a controversial figure (accused of lewdness, she spoke out for women’s rights and sexual freedom) in the English literature of the time. Her exotic Oroonoko recounts the tale of a noble African carried off to slavery in the English colony of Surinam, to illustrate the violence of the slave trade and the corruption of hypocritical Christian colonisers (noble savage). Delarivier Manley was also silenced amidst scandalous accusations due to her The New Atalantis (a sensational political allegory in which an ageing Duchess, mistress of the King, is attracted to a young count) and The Secret History of Queen Zarah (political satire, novel that exposed the corruption of the worlds of high society and politics, was considered driven out of what was considered “proper” in literature). Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (first-person narration of a dissolute life as thief, prostitute and incestuous wife who has been accepted back into society and improved her behaviour. Search for love, social stability and identity+ social comment on the conditions of the poor, the sufferings of emigrants…), Robinson Crusoe (a novel that depicts one of the first capitalist heroes and the difficulties he overcomes in his colonial venture. Crusoe is a coloniser, who establishes a model of his own society on the island upon which he’s shipwrecked. He later encounters Friday, who is to be his loyal slave, educated in Christian values. Robinson Crusoe’s marriage occupies less than a page), and Roxana (subtitled The Fortunate Mistress, is a novel which deals with the transgression of the Puritan ethic by Roxana, a kind of superior Moll Flanders who becomes very rich herself going through a series of rich protects, not appreciating the effort in amassing money and in the end dying as a penitent) are of vital importance for the understanding of the ongoing changes in English literature of the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has long been considered a comic fable for children, yet it is in fact a severe attack on the political parties of the time, and on the pointlessness of religious controversies between different denominations within Christianity (differences between Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Big- endians and Little-endians, satire on The Royal Society through the Houyhnhnms contrasted with the uncivilised ape-like Yahoos). Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a full-fledged critic against English society and the marketing of Irish children for English consumption. With the next generation of novelists love stories come into their own. Samuel Richardson’s works are mostly letters (epistolary novel, which was to set forth subjective points of view): Pamela (virtuous yet poor heroine suffers a series of trials at the hands of Mr B, refuses to become his mistress but in the end she agrees to marry him. Her virtue is rewarded. The novel underscored female-male role distinctions and psychological aspects of the characters’ behaviour) and Clarissa (four major letter writers, ends in tragedy as Clarissa’s suitor Lovelace plays with her emotions in devious ways so that she loses her reason and her very identity) above all. Henry Fielding began his novel-writing career with Shamela (a pastiche of Pamela) and later focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson, creating a new kind of hero in his “comic epics in prose”: Tom Jones tells the picaresque journey of a young man enjoying his freedom and sexual freedom, eventually assuming his social responsibilities and marrying the woman he has always loved (from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility. The crusade is not to the Holy Land, but a personal one, and the reader is invited to sympathise with the hero, trusting the omniscient narrator), Jonathan Wild the Great is the story of a criminal, one of the first real anti-heroes in English literature (his title is highly ironic) and a champion of hypocrisy (he faces his sentence of death unheroically). Richardson provides models for the psychological novelists who follow him, Fielding for the social and comic writers. Female writers of the time have been largely ignored in the history of the novel (Eliza The Romantic period (1789-1832) Contexts and conditions The dates of the Romantic period of literature are not precise: conventionally, the period begins in 1798, which saw the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of their Lyrical Ballads, and ends in 1832 (which saw the death of Sir Walter Scott and the enactment by Parliament of the First Reform Bill (literary revolution took place alongside social and economic revolutions, so the period is called the “Age of Revolutions”). During the Romantic Period, the nation was transformed from an agricultural country to an industrial one: power and wealth were gradually transferred from the landholding aristocracy to the large-scale employers of modern industrial communities (new class of urban industrial labourers, the working class). The changing of the whole landscape of the country was influenced by social change, leading to an exodus to the cities of large numbers of people seeking employment. As society was divided into those who owned property and those who did not, so debate in Britain was polarised between support for radical documents (the American Declaration of Independence played a major role in this) and more conservative voices (like Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France). Though the French Revolution brought Napoleon Bonaparte to become dictator of France, support for the spirit of it remained. The end of the Battle of Waterloo led to a decline in manufacturing output and to unemployment, culminating in the “Peterloo Massacre” of 1819, in which government troops charged a large group of workers who were meeting in Manchester to demand social and political reforms. The period from 1820 to 1832 was a time of continuing unrest (economic depression, the government did not intervene directly in economic affairs, so the free market and private individual decisions became central). A general alliance arose between liberal working-class reformers (Whig) politicians and the new middle class, resulting in pressure on the Tory government for political reforms (the first Reform Act extended voting rights to include a more representative proportion of the country and would lead, decades later, to universal suffrage and greater democracy in the country). In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads is seen as a landmark: its Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age (poetry was to establish a new, more “democratic” poetic order using “the real language of men” and advocating involvement in political activities). The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it, in that the latter stressed the importance of reason and order, so the child’s savage instincts had to be trained, civilised and sophisticated, whilst the Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition and the heart, and extols child as a holy and pure being, source of natural and spontaneous creature near to God that the adult has to learn from (literary theme of innocence/experience). Moreover, the Augustans developed a formal and ordered way of writing characterised by adherence to the conventions, while the Romantics tried to capture individual experience in forms and language which were intended to be closer to everyday speech. Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge William Blake achieved little fame in his own lifetime: he was an engraver (extensive use of symbolism in his poetry) and spent his life in rebellion against the rationalism of the eighteenth century (his characteristic feature was a tendency to see the world in terms of opposites). Blake’s symbolism is cast in the mythological world he creates: in The Tyger, the animal is seen as the natural and creative energy of human life, fearful yet majestic, in Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake reveals a profound understanding of psychology and an ability to explore the spiritual side of human existence. The theme of experience is also vital in William Wordsworth’s works. His works describe the world of nature and of the characters who inhabit the natural landscape, looking inward rather than outward. In Ode: Intimations of Immortality the child is a symbol of all that is holy and good, is seen as father of the man. Wordsworth’s language breaks with the artificial diction of the previous century, creating a more open and democratic world of poetry, yet sometimes he uses more complex grammar and vocabulary. His most representative work, The Prelude, explores the scope of human imagination and the power of human memory and shows that memories fade (the failure of the French Revolution affected the course of Wordsworth’s own poetry). Wordsworth collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to bring Lyrical Ballads forth, the former concerning with the ordinary, everyday world, and the latter pinpointing at the sense of the mysterious, supernatural and extraordinary world (Wordsworth wanted to explore everyday subjects and give them a Romantic or supernatural colouring; Coleridge’s purpose was to give the supernatural a feeling of everyday reality). Coleridge’s best-known poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, is a poem (whose form recalls that of a mediaeval ballad) in which an old sailor narrates the terrible sequence of events which followed when he shot an albatross and was cursed: he is subjected to nightmare visions, but is finally able to return home as his offence against the power of nature is forgiven through the blessing of some sea-creatures (The lack of water represents the dryness of spirit, the becalmed ship symbolises the aimless soul and the explicit moral is Christian). Poems such as Christabel and Kubla Khan represent exotic and mystical flights of the imagination, whilst Dejection: An Ode explores an occasion on which the poetic imagination fails (extension of the power of senses and intuition) and reflects on universal issues such as the relationship between parents and children (intimate and conversational in tone). Coleridge complained that poetic inspiration had deserted him and he wrote no poetry during the last thirty years of his life, during which he dedicated himself to philosophy and to literary criticism (aspect of the modern writer, who almost simultaneously produces both literary work and self-conscious critical reflection on that work and on literature in general). Keats John Keats reflected on the nature of poetry, expressing his thoughts through letters. Poetry should be more indirect, communicating through the power of its images without the poet making his own presence too obvious. Like other Romantic poets, Keats wrote incomplete poems and died at a very young age. A main theme of Keats’s poetry is the conflict between the everyday world (decay, suffering, death) and eternity (timeless beauty and lasting truth of poetry and the human imagination), which is present in Endymion, a long poem in four books about the search for an ideal love and happiness beyond earthly possibility in a style derived from Greek legends and myths. Sensuous imagery and precise descriptive detail are characteristic features of Keats’s style, whose Romantic experience is expressed at its peak in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which explores the relationship between emotion and reality and the search for an elusive beauty with particular attraction to the mediaeval era. Keats’s ballads were written in the period which spans the two years from 1818 to 1820, during the same period in which he wrote the odes (that explore fundamental tensions and contradictions. Ex: Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, the latter representing the permanence of art and celebrating the power of the artist to immortalise human activity. Art is the real truth of existence). Keats celebrates beauty, but at the same time he knows that all things of beauty must fade and die (as Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote, suffering is necessary for an understanding of the world and great poetry grows from deep suffering and tragedy). Shelley The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley is similar to that of Keats, but, unlike Keats, Shelley explores political and social questions more explicitly, representing the more revolutionary and non-conformist element in English Romanticism (anarchic, individualist and idealist who rebelled against the institutions of family, church, marriage and the Christian faith). One of Shelley’s major poems, Queen Mab, is an attack to institutional religion and codified morality, portraying a utopian vision of man’s need for simple virtue and straightforward happiness. In a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, Shelley argued that the existence of God could not be proved, so he got expelled from Oxford by the university authorities. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley employs the Greek myth of Prometheus, who was punished for stealing the gift of fire from the gods and giving it to mankind (in Shelley’s work he is redeemed by the power of love and acts as a symbol of human fulfilment resulting from a change in his imaginative vision. Prometheus represents an archetypal humanity). Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo is a central text of English Romanticism: in it is a conversation in couplets (to reflect its intimate tone) between Julian, who represents Shelley himself, and the Count Maddalo, which is Byron, that takes place in Venice and ranges around free will, religion, progress, and love. In The Triumph of Anarchy the clash between the ideal and the real, past, present and future reflects the principal anxiety of the time: that the necessity of revolutionary change causes individual anguish in the process. Finally, his A Defence of Poetry can be read as a poetic manifesto for his strong beliefs, according which the poet was a missionary, a prophet, a potential leader for a new society. Byron Like Shelley, Byron was heavily involved with contemporary social issues and became particularly well known for his verse satires (the Byronic hero, who is usually a melancholy and solitary figure which defies social conventions, almost became a literary fashion). In the long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the hero is often identified with Byron himself and is a restless wanderer, committed to new, usually forbidden experiences. A vivid example of the Byronic hero is to be found in Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred, in which a passionate outcast, beyond good and evil, contrasts the restraint and humility of the typical Augustan, classical hero with his sense of doom. Byron’s semi-autobiographical Don Juan is an example of the more satiric side to his poetry (light-hearted and comic tone, even when the subject matter is at its most serious. This is due to the ottava rima rhyme scheme and due to the mixture of different style). Don Juan is an adventure poem as well as an ongoing series of love stories. It begins with a shipwreck and continues by exploring the results that follow. The (amusing and sometimes trivial) digressions here and there let Byron, as narrator, advance his own ideas on a range of subjects and can satirise many aspects of contemporary life and of his contemporaries. However, Byron’s poetry cannot be properly compared with the Augustan satires of Pope, who he saw as his main technical model (mock-heroic style, but his satires are not based on a vision of positive moral values and he uses colloquial language). Don Juan was judged an immoral poem by many of Byron’s contemporaries but it is never clear how far this is a judgement on Byron himself, that, in spite of being a Lord, held an unconventional liberal (Whig) view of society and scandalised society with a series of well-publicised affairs. Rights and voices and poetry Even though the Romantic period is traditionally seen as an all-male preserve, this is but an oversimplification. Susanna Blamire was a great documenter of country life who used dialect as well as standard English, echoing Burns and George Crabbe. With regards on rights and social concern, one can’t but mention Clara Reeve’s An Argument in Favour of the Natural Equality of Both the Sexes and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem The Rights of Woman (that echoes Mary Wollstonecraft’s) and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (one of the first texts to foresee the decline of Britain’s wealth and power and the increasing prosperity of America). Clare John Clare’s poetry is difficult to categorise (between Romantic and Victorian). He is a nature poet but his poetry is different from other Romantic poets’, in that it stresses the spoken voice and expresses feelings like sadness, regret, self-awareness (Child Harold and I Am). In his later years, he took longer and more detailed journeys between external nature and internal landscapes of the mind. The metaphor of the journey or quest is central to Romantic poetry, as it meant leaving England in search of new experiences and radical social or political causes: this feeling is conveyed by poems of epic length (growth and development of the self), lyrics (search for identity); both of them establish a close relationship between the poem and the poet’s own personal circumstances, becoming a form of spiritual autobiography. The Scottish regional novel After the Scottish Enlightenment of the early mid-eighteenth century, Edinburg became a major publishing centre, and several of the most influential magazines of the nineteenth century were based there (Edinburgh Review and its main rival Blackwood’s Magazine, that published essays, articles, stories, and fiction, the latter also being another Tory rival to the Review, which was Whig-oriented. After Maria Edgeworth, the regional novel began to flourish: Susan Ferrier’s three novels of Scottish life (Marriage, The Inheritance and Destiny, that contain the social observation of Austen, but with a rather more didactic intent) and John Galt’s The Provost (which uses a self-revealing first-person narration to create a complete picture of the manipulations of Mr Pawkie, the small-town politicians) and The Entail (portrait of a selfish obsession with inheritance and property, and the tragic consequences for an entire family) contributed in that they gave national significance to the Scottish novel. Furthermore, James Hogg’s psychological study of what is called a “split personality” in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is one of the earliest novels of “a second self”, anticipating Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and using a fanatical narrator who sees his mission to commit a series of murder “justified” because of his own faith and religious superiority. The nineteenth century (1832-1900) Contexts and conditions Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, at a time when the monarchy as an institution was not particularly popular. Victoria, widowed in 1861, became Empress of India, and by her death in 1901 had come to represent the nation in a way in which only Queen Elizabeth 1 had done in the past. A history of the Victorian age records a period of economic expansion and rapid change: when Queen Victoria came to the throne, the population of London was about two million inhabitants; at her death, the population had increased to 6.5 million (change from a way of life based on the land to a modern urban economy based on manufacturing, international trade and financial institutions, as Britain became the centre of the new philosophy of Free Trade and the workshop of the world). The major invention of steam power was exploited for fast railways and ships, for printing presses, for industrial looms and for agricultural machinery. An efficient postal service was developed, the telephone invented and communications improved. The contrast between social unrest and the affirmation of values and standards which are still referred to as “Victorian values”, is an essential part of the paradox of the age (Victorian compromise=double standard between national success and the exploitation of lower-class workers at home and of colonies overseas; a compromise between philanthropy and tolerance (tolerance for Catholics, abolition of slavery) and repression (conditions of the poor). Critiques against the government by Romantic poets were suppressed through exile. The 1820s saw the deaths of Byron, Keats and Shelley, byt they also saw the greatest success of Sir Walter Scott (historical novel. It was the novelists rather than the poets who became the literary representatives of the age). Benjamin Disraeli’s political novels give us one of the main “labels” of the Victorian age: The Two Nations, subtitle of his novel Sybil, underlines the fact that social and reform were sympathetic subjects for a novel (danger represented by the working-class Chartist movement, that arose as a result of the First Reform Bill of 1832, movement throughout the Victorian period towards democracy). Dickens The life of Charles Dickens can be seen to mirror the intellectual patterns of the Victorian age: he started his career as a journalist (Sketches by Boz), later becoming a comic novelist (The Pickwick Papers) in the eighteenth-century tradition represented by Smollett, whom he acknowledged as one of his masters. The vein of good-nature comedy, well observed characters, humorous use of class and dialect difference, and “traditional” values will be found repeatedly in later Dickens’s works, such as A Christmas Carol, the high point of one of these trends, bringing together a touch of the Gothic (clash between wealth and poverty) and the sentimental assertion of fireside and family values. Dickens also plays on his readers’ awareness of social problems and the growing conscience of the age (Oliver Twist highlighted the problems of poor city children who after the Poor Law Act of 1833 ended up in the workhouse, while the suffering of children in the Yorkshire schools is described in Nicholas Nickleby), that in the 1840s reached its climax in the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield (which built up a huge worldwide readership for each monthly issue). Dickens’s next novel begins to mark a change in sensibility and attitude: Bleak House reveals even by its title a negative feeling, London (the city which had given hope and future to Dicken’s heroes) is shrouded in fog in the opening chapter, which can be read as a symbol of what was happening to Victorian optimism and self-confidence. Dickens’s scope expands greatly during the 1850s, with the “state of the nation” novels (Hard Times contains a picture of the industrialised English Midlands which emphasises the dehumanising aspects of the Industrial Revolution) and the re- examination of the semi-autobiographical concerns in Great Expectations, in which the hero does not achieve the success and happiness which crowned David Copperfield. The high point of Victorian success and self-esteem was probably the Great Exhibition (1851), which was held in the Crystal Palace in London to display Britain’s achievements at home and abroad, and to show Britain at the height of its wealth, power and influence under the spirit of didacticism, that underlines the feeling of superiority in mid-century, the role the Victorians gave themselves as moral leaders and exemplars. The beginnings of the growth in public sympathy for the Queen as a symbol of the nation was to be brilliantly manipulated by the prime minister, Disraeli, in his imperialist policies of the 1870s, reinforcing the image of the monarch by her nomination as Empress of India. However, public faith had been shaken in the 1850s by the Crimean War (a war in a distant place, and for no clear purposes) and by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), that foresaw the kind of effect his doctrine of natural selection would have on the religious beliefs and moral attitudes of the Victorian. The disillusion and doubt which exist in the later novels of Dickens became ever more dominant in late Victorian and early twentieth-century literature, especially in the novel (that, published in weekly or monthly parts, became both increasingly popular and the forum for the expression and shaping of ideals and ideas). Victorian thought and Victorian novels Harrison Ainsworth’s historical novels brought together elements of the Gothic, the adventure story, and the detailed “archaeological” sense which the mid-nineteenth century took as authenticity (his story is fanciful rather than factual, his subjects partly historical and partly mythical. Ex: Guy Fawkes). He cashes in on the early/mid-Victorian taste for historical fantasy, making little use of the kind of serious social observation of the past, in relation to the present (-Walter Scott). Edward Bulwer Lytton tapped with Ainsworth into the Victorian interest in crime, and criminal fictional subjects (Eugene Aram -which uses the name of a real criminal- and Lucretia – which used the real-life case of the murderer Thomas Wainewright, a well-known artist and associate of literary figures). Charles Reade became known as a “reforming” novelist for his novels about prison life and the treatment of criminals. His best-known novel was The Cloister and the Hearth, and Griffith Gaunt -published in 1866- caused considerable controversy for its outspoken treatment of sexual themes. The changing role of the writer in society is to be traced in the influence of philosophers of a wide spectrum of different opinions (Dickens= Thomas Carlyle, occupied with “the Condition-of-England question” bearing his views on strong leadership and on the importance of “Great Men” at a moment of historical and ideological crisis), among which can’t but be mentioned Karl Marx and his Das Kapital (abolition of private property, advocacy of class war), and John Stuart Mill and his writings about utilitarianism, liberty, logic, and political economy. Accounts of the religious life of Oxford at the time are provided by John Henry Newman (cardinal in 1879)’s autobiography Apologia pro Vita Sua. Though overshadowed by his political career, the novels of Benjamin Disraeli are fundamental as they give ironic portrayals of high society and politicians (Sybil might be considered one of the first truly political novels in English) and, by doing so, they influenced public opinion. [ppg. 257-261] The Brontës and Eliot Several of the major figures of the Victorian novel are women; and the heroines they created began to throw off the victim’s role that male authors had created (Moll Flanders, Pamela, Clarissa). The Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne) not only contributed much to the growth of the novel, but also to the position of women at this time, demonstrating new social, psychological and emotional possibilities for women. Like George Eliot, however, they adopted pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) in order not to draw attention to the fact that they were women. Charlotte and Emily Brontë are in many ways opposites to Jane Austen (romantic in temperament, exploring in their novels extremes of passion and violence, while Jane Austen’s novels are Augustan in spirit). Charlotte Brontë’s first novel Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman (a novel of growing up) in which Jane Eyre begins life as an orphan, undergoes many difficulties working as a governess, and finally marries the man she loves, Rochester, who is her social superior and a man of wealth (melodramatic incidents, but in each phase Jane grows in maturity and (Ode on a Grecian Urn). The giving of absolute values to such abstracts as art, beauty, and culture, is part of the late Victorian search for constants in a fast-changing universe. The re-evaluation of art, and the philosophical consequences of this, are found more significantly in the works of two of the most influential critics of the age John Ruskin (re-evaluations of painters such as Giotto to all-encompassing critiques of social concerns) and Walter Pater. The image of Pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism and delicate sensibility did little to attract public sympathy. Many tendencies in late Victorian writing come together in the works of Oscar Wilde, whose dichotomy between the elegant social witticism (dandy) and the seeming frivolity of his comic plots, and the shame and scandal of his private life, are almost emblematic of the whole crisis of Victorian morals. One of Oscar Wilde’s stories, which effectively explores Victorian assumptions and values about a variety of issues including art, is The Picture of Dorian Gray: it is the story of a beautiful young man and his portrait. As he ages, he keeps his good looks and indulges himself in all kinds of sensual pleasure without regard to moral consequences. But, as the action proceeds, his portrait changes, reflecting the corruption of his soul (Wilde refuses to pass judgement, having no ethical sympathies). It has been seen as a criticism of superficial self-love, and as a criticism of a society, Victorian society, which does not recognise its moral responsibilities (examined in his essays, such as The Truth of Masks, which probes the Victorian façade into the details and implications of some of the standard hypocrisies of the age). Hardy and James The novel form also documented the social changes of the time, encompassing the moral issues and responsibilities. Thomas Hard particularly dives into those, and can be seen as an outsider: he came from the rural county of Dorset, which in his novels becomes Wessex, the fictional countryside with a long historical past which is markedly distant from the capital city, London, or the industrial North. His two major novels were Tess of the D’Urbervilles (a deeply pessimistic novel, revealing how an intelligent and sensitive girl, victim of a hypocritical sexual morality, can be driven to her death by a society which is narrow in morality and spirit) and Jude the Obscure (Jude Fawley’s sensual nature cannot be accommodated by a rigid and inflexible social system, his crime is to want an education. The novel has been seen as an attack on Victorian chains of class-consciousness and social convention). Hardy’s vision has been called tragic, and the fate of many of his characters is indeed bleak (going back to Greek tragedy). Jude the Obscure, as Tess, caused a terrible scandal: it was burned, banned and denounced, leaving its author so discouraged that he stopped writing novels and dedicated himself entirely to poetry, marking the end of the dominance of the “triple-decker” long Victorian novel, usually published in instalments (1890s). From this time, novels in general become shorter (thus cheaper), and are usually published in volume form, as the power of circulating libraries began to decline too. Many of the novelists of the end of the Victorian age can be considered outsiders for one reason or another: Hardy was from the West Country, Wilde was an outsider twice over, as an Irishman and a homosexual. This preponderance of outsiders becomes more noticeable between the 1890s and 1914: Henry James was born in America, Joseph Conrad in the Ukraine, Rudyard Kipling in India. An American by birth, Henry James also stans “outside” Britain, although his education was divided between American and Europe, to whose culture he was deeply attracted, yet it explored it from the perspective of a sophisticated New York background. His early novels, such as The Americans, explore differences between European and American high society from the point of view of an “innocent” character who undergoes conflicts between innocence and experience (Bildungsroman). In What Maisie Knew, the narrative is recounted almost completely from the point of view of a child’s consciousness and understanding: Maisie is 6 years old when her parents divorce and she is forced to live alternately with both of them. James was always deeply concerned with art, and how art both shapes and reflects life (The Golden Bowl). James’s language and syntax are carefully modulated – at the same time delicate and convoluted. The novel begins to represent a worldview rather than a national or regional concern, and its horizons begin to expand outwards geographically at the same time as the earliest studies in psychology begin to expand characters’ inner horizons as well. In the twentieth century, as concepts of society changed and things began to “fall apart”, the fragmentation of all that held society together was expressed in the novel partly by the use of “stream of consciousness” and by a fluid expansion and contraction of time. Rudyard Kipling, although awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, is seen more as a Victorian figure than a modern writer. His novels, such as Plain Tales from the Hills, are usually read as children’s stories, even though they reflect a significant understanding of the culture of the Indian subcontinent. The Jungle Book (1894) is a vital text in establishing a colonial ethos and has been used by the British hero General Sir Robert Baden-Powell for the basis of discipline for the Wolf-Cubs (now known as Cub Scouts). Victorian poetry Victorian poetry is generally considered to be in the shadow of the popular genre of the novel: a reversal of the situation in the Romantic age, largely due to the success of the novels of Walter Scott. It Is, however, of major importance, and the most popular poet of the age, Alfred Tennyson, is as much a representative figure as Dickens. In Memoriam A.H.H., his key work, is a series of closely linked but separate poems (in fact, it is an elegy on the death of a close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. Note of doubt and despair, tone of melancholy). The best of Tennyson’s early poems are dramatic monologues, a form which became highly developed in the hands of his contemporary, Robert Browning, author of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (his most intense and mysterious poem). Said work, whose title is a reference to a line from Shakespeare’s King Lear, exploits the figure of the “childe” (a kind of apprentice knight associated with Arthurian legend) in the narration of a journey across a frightening wasted landscape to the mysterious “Dark Tower”; the poem ends with his arrival (no sign of what happens next). In many ways, this poem is an anticipation of twentieth-century themes: the proto-“wasteland”, the lack of identity or purpose in the hero, the non-resolution of the story, the mysterious symbol of the tower itself (poetic certainties diminished and romantic ideals disappeared into history). Browning’s was a very productive career (The Ring and the Book being his greatest single success. It employs the dramatic monologue in a multi-viewpoint historical reconstruction in blank verse, telling the story of a seventeenth-century Italian murder, examining relative “truth”, “imagination”, character and setting, in a “novel in verse” quite unlike any other).Browning used his verse to go beneath the surface appearance given by his speakers, exploring a wide range of moral scruples and problems, characters and attitudes (many of his poems have Renaissance settings which enabled Robert Browning to explore differences and continuities between Renaissance and Modern world). Elizabeth Barret Browning is now best remembered for her “novel in verse” Aurora Leigh (the life story of a woman writer, which anticipates Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in its strongly feminine affirmation of an independent viewpoint. The poem is a portrait of the artist as a young woman committed to an art which embraces social and political realities) and is one of the earliest female writers on the social responsibilities of the woman writer (like Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot). Her poetry records a constant search for poetic identity (a search which that, like Robert’s, sometimes involves masks and disguises). Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold brings together the major concerns of mid-Victorian writing: it is set in a room overlooking the Straits of Dover and describes love, faith, and desolation, bringing together classical and modern allusions. Arnold begins with a version of a world of endless sadness and ends with a vision of bleak nothingness in which meaningless wars are fought for meaningless causes (human love has no purpose. This is the twentieth-century wasteland). Arnold starts from social observation rather than philosophical reflection, and stresses the importance of seeing “things as they really are”. Culture, seen as a striving towards an ideal of human perfection, is regarded as the opposing spirit to barbarism, philistinism, and the consequent anarchy. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and after At about the same time that Tennyson was returning to Arthurian myth for his subject matter, the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood emerged as a new movement in art and literature that stressed their admiration for the Italian art of the period before the High Renaissance (mediaeval simplicity, closeness to nature, deep moral seriousness of intent). Nature for the Pre-Raphaelites is different from the nature of the Romantics or of Tennyson: there is mysticism in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, which uses lilies and a white rose for essentially symbolic purposes (his writing carries an erotic charge which is new in Victorian verse). The Pre-Raphaelite influence, however, was stronger on the visual arts than on writing. The poetry of Algernon Swinburne (emphasis on sadism, sexual enchantment and anti-Christian outlook. Ave Atque Vale, elegy to Charles Baudelaire preoccupied with death and with the extremes of pleasure, pain, and suffering) and William Morris (The Yellow Book) bring together many of the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites, developing aspects that were to characterise the Aesthetic movement. Victorian despair in verse reaches its climax in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he wrestles with doubt, sensuality, and the glories of nature. Hopkins is negotiating with a God who must exist, but can only truly be seen in nature (Thou art indeed just, Lord, in which he rejects an ultimate despair, because he continues to believe in the existence of God and questions a world in which right and wrong appear to him to be reversed). Hopkins also experimented and innovated in his poetry and influenced many other poets’ forms and techniques (he believed that every object, experience, or happening had its own unique pattern, and much of his poetic technique aims to reveal that uniqueness or “inscape”, thus breaking with conventional poetic rhythm and linguistic rules to produce this unique “inscaped” description. Inventive collocations of words, grammatical inventiveness, individual use of rhythm). Victorian drama The censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain, between the Theatres Licensing Act of 1737 and its abolition in the Theatres Act of 1968, meant that for some 230 years a wide range of subjects could not be handled in dramatic form. The censorship then expanded to cover religious and moral themes, “bad” language and “indecency”, anything which was “likely to deprave and corrupt” the potential audience. The trend towards a kind of realistic drama began in the 1860s, with the plays of Tom Robertson (who insisted on the stage-setting of a room having a real ceiling, and on real properties, his plays being called “cup and saucer” dramas). The social issues, presented fairly uncontroversially by Robertson, became highly controversial in the 1880s and 1890s with Oscar Wilde’s works (illegitimate birth in A Woman of No Importance, obscure social origins in The Importance of Being Earnest). While Wilde’s career flourished, the other main figure in the theatre was Arthur Wing Pinero, whose The Second Mrs Tanqueray successfully touched on the theme of social scandal (also handled by Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan), though his comedy lacks the bite and wit of Wilde.