Gulliver's Travels and Frankenstein: Authors and Their Displaced Heroes, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Gulliver's Travels and Frankenstein: Authors and Their Displaced Heroes e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Jonathan Swift Life ● Born in 1667 in Dublin of English parents. ● He and his family left Ireland for England at the time of the Glorious Revolution in 1688. ● Started to work for Sir William Temple, a scholar and Whig statesman. ● Encouraged by Temple to write his first satirical works. ● Returned to Ireland in 1694 and became an ordained Anglican priest. ● Produced writings in opposition to the Whig administration. ● Was appointed Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in April 1713. ● He was a strong opponent to the Whigs, defending Ireland and the Church ● Later years were marked by the decay of his mental faculties. ● Died in 1745. ● Still regarded as a national hero in Ireland. Works ● A Tale of a Tub (1704), a satire about the two opposing religious parties, Catholics with their superstition and Dissenters with their fanaticism. ● The Battle of the Books (1704), a satire about the merits of ancient and modern literature, in which Swift supported Temple's defence of the classics and mocked the self-satisfaction of modern scholarship, criticism and poetry. ● Travels into Several Remote Countries of the World, also known as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a satirical novel. ● A Modest Proposal (1729), a satire suggesting that the poverty of Irish people should be relieved by the sale of their children as food for the rich. ● A satire is a direct criticism and attack on the society or the politics of the time, with some specific techniques: ○ distortion, ○ exaggeration, ○ deformation, ○ caricature. ● He also wrote pamphlets to denounce the injustices suffered by Ireland. Among them, the most famous one is The Drapier’s Letters (1724-25), a series of pamphlets written as an imaginary character, M.B. Drapier, who attacked the government’s proposal for a new coinage that would’ve increased poverty in Ireland. A controversial writer ● He is one of the most controversial among English writers. ● He has been regarded as: ○ a misanthrope, ○ a lover of mankind, ○ a man with a morbid attitude, ○ a monster. ● He: ○ was concerned with politics and society → wrote against intitutions; ○ had a pessimistic attitude; ○ did not share the optimism of his age, the faith in reason and the pride of his contemporaries; ○ had a conservative attitude. ● He considered himself neither English nor Irish, so he: ○ felt displaced since he had a more European outlook; ○ criticised: ■ English people blaming them to be oppressive against the Irish; ■ Irish people considering them too submissive. ● Swift described himself as a hater of man, defining him as “an animal capable of reason”. Reason was an instrument that needed to be used properly: too intensive a use of reason is an error of judgement and therefore unreasonable. Therefore he insisted on the need to take a common-sense view of life, a rational approach to life. ● Common sense is the ability to take the right decisions for the suitable situations. He replaces reason with it, as reason is only an instrument, while common sense is an ability. ● He saw in irony and satire the means that perfectly suited his temperament and his interests. ● Combining the ironic intent with the simplicity of his style and his diction, he pursued the effect of parody. ● The traveller invites the reader to see something familiar in a ridiculous, funny or disgusting way. ● The perspective on human behaviour is constantly changed. Gulliver’s Travels ● Printed in London in 1726. ● It consists of four independent books linked to four different settings (Swift provided illustrated maps of the places Gulliver visited): ○ the land of Lilliput; ○ the land of Brobdingnag; ○ the island of Laputa; ○ the land of the Houyhnhnms. ● All the books have a beginning and an ending, but they have the main characters in common. At the end of each book Gulliver always comes back to his land, but every time he finds it more difficult to fit back into European society. ● The hero is the ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, a middle age man, well educated and, lead by curiosity, he investigates different form of government ● In each book there is a satirical target ● Every place Gulliver visits is not a bare place but a high developed country, however he never finds a place to live because: ○ the first 3 lands he explores had cons while ○ in the fourth, the horses (leader of the country) banish him because of his similarities with the Yahoos (stupid creatures associated with the humans) ● The novel expresses an opposition between rationality and animality Book 1 ● Gulliver sails from Bristol, however, after six months, he is ship-wrecked somewhere in the South Pacific. ● He is cast upon the shore of ‘Lilliput’. ● The inhabitants, the ‘Lilliputians’, are only six inches tall (15 cm). They are selfish, greedy, mean and petty; their height is proportionate to their empathy (tiny creatures ⇾ tiny feelings) ● When he arrived, he was asked to help them fight their enemy though later he is arrested and condemned to be blinded ⇾ Gulliver, with the help of a friend, escaped and returned to England like nothing happened. Book 2 ● Gulliver wanted to arrive in India, however he found himself in Brobdingnag, a country near Alaska, where everyone is giant. ● The inhabitants' body is as huge as their egocentricity ● He is rescued by a farmer who sold him to the monarchs, surprised by the tiny aspect of the human. ● Gulliver becomes the king’s pet: he is imprisoned in a cage and transported while talking to the king about the system of the government in England and Europe. ● One day, Gulliver’s cage is lifted up by a huge bird and dropped in the middle of the ocean, where he is rescued by a ship that returned him home (after this experiences he lived like nothing happened) ● Sterne breaks the rule of the conventional biography: while Defoe starts Robinson Crusoe with the protagonist’s birth, the birth of Tristram appears in the third volume (the novel breaks the chronological order of events). He is baptised and given the wrong name (the protagonist is unlucky throughout all his life). ● His father, Walter Shandy, slowly works on an encyclopedia for the upbringing of his son. ● Aged five, Tristram is accidentally circumcised by a faulty sash window. It was the fault of Uncle Toby’s servant (uncle obsessed with the war) that had used the weights to make miniature cannons for their model fortifications. ● This is a short and inevitably incomplete summary for a very long novel, but what happens in Tristram Shandy hardly develops a storyline. ● The plot is inconsistent and has a really complementary function, since the narrative consists of episodes, personal observations and frequent flashbacks, flashforwards and digressions (often on irrelevant topics) which represent Tristram’s mental life, not being built on experiences. Sources ● Sterne was influenced by numerous earlier writers, even if Tristram Shandy is very original. Part of his comic method clearly derives from Don Quixote by MiguelCervantes (1547-1616). ● Swift’s satire greatly impressed Sterne, who imitated Swift’s parodies of literary conventions. Their satire is very different, however, since Sterne is gentle and humorous. ● Sterne was inspired by the philosopher John Locke and his theory of the association of ideas, that is the irrational linking together of thoughts without any apparent logical connection; Sterne was indeed convinced that the mind’s workings were essentially irrational, and that individual mental behaviour was in some measure eccentric. Sterne with his work makes an experiment of giving voice to the irrational association of ideas, anticipating the interior monologue ● Sterne’s antinovel is a parody of the previous literature, but it is different from Swift’s satire, which was harsh, since it was humorous and funny. Characters ● Sterne focuses much of his characterisation on the portrayal of a dominant trait or, rather, obsession, which to him is an accurate indication of personality. ● This obsession or ruling passion is called a hobby-horse: Uncle Toby is obsessed with war, Mr Shandy with names, etc. ● As a method of characterisation Sterne also concentrates on the description of external signs, gestures and attitudes of his fictional people. ● While the male characters are always portrayed with great sympathy for their inconsistencies and faulty vision of the world, the female ones are the object of his deepest scorn. ● Women are neither important or interesting, they do not have philosophies or opinions ● of their own, but they are created by the author only in terms of their relationship with men. Their sensuality is in opposition with men’s impotence. ● Sterne never relates the conversation of a group of women and his approval of women in the novel is limited to those who excite men’s sexual feelings. ● If Walter Shandy represents intellect, and Toby Shandy emotion, women seem to represent sexuality, set against male impotence. ● The protagonist is an anti-hero, since he’s dull., Themes ● While optimism, happy endings and a moralising aim are present in the novels of Defoe and Richardson, pessimism is the dominant quality of Sterne’s work; even the name of the protagonist has a negative connotation: Tristram comes from the Latin adjective ‘tristis’ meaning ‘sad’. ● All the characters undergo misadventures and accidents of every kind; ● Tristram Shandy is not a sentimental novel, but it is full of sentiment and feeling: indeed the necessity of love, sympathy and laughter is one of the central underlying themes of the novel. Style ● Tristram Shandy is narrated in the first person singular, so that everything and everyone is seen through the eyes of Tristram himself. ● Tristram’s role is twofold: he is both chronicler/narrator and a dull, inconsistent character. ● He never plays the role of the hero, since his life is uninteresting and his nature and body are faulty; he lacks dignity, courage and social credibility. ● The reader has an important role: Sterne addresses him and leaves out words, indicating them by asterisks or dashes, so that the reader is forced into active participation not only in the reading but also in the ‘writing’ of the novel. ● If the content and the structure of the book are complex, the same can be said for the language: the sentences are long and contain several subordinate clauses. ● It is as if Sterne is writing as he thinks, following the wanderings of his mind, rather than working out what he wants to say beforehand and suiting his prose to his thoughts. ● The chapters vary in length from several pages to a single short sentence. ● Punctuation is arbitrary. ● The time is subjective and its dilatation is given by the perception of intensity. The Gothic novel ● The word “Gothic” was used at the beginning for architecture, while it was used in literature for the first time by Horace Walpole. ● It was the result of a new sensibility, a taste for what is: ○ Unpredictable, ○ Strange, ○ Exotic, ○ Mysterious. ● There is the feeling that the evil can overcome the good feelings → prevailing sense of fear, expressed by the novels too. ● The sense of fear reflects the historical moment, with its increasing disillusionment with Enlightenment rationality and the French and American bloody Revolutions. ● The main characteristics of the gothic novel are: ○ Isolated places (castles, ruins, graveyards) → the setting in place is necessarily uncomfortable and it gives a sense of fear and mystery; ○ The story happens during the night, often with fog → tension, fear, threat, gloom, oppression and mistery; ○ A female heroin who escapes from a villain, a bad creature, which resembles the evil; ○ Suspense, the sense that something horrible is next to happen; ○ Crimes committed by humans and supernatural creatures; ○ The hero is usually voluntarily or involuntarily isolated; ○ The outcast is the symbol of isolation, wandering the earth in perpetual exile, as a form of divine punishment. Mary Shelley ● Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born in 1797 in London. ● The daughter of two excellent intellectuals of the time, both believers in the Enlightened power of reason: ○ Mary Wollstonecraft, seen as the first feminist, ○ The radical philosopher and theorist William Godwin, a strong supporter of the French Revolution. ● In her childhood she was surrounded by intellectuals and she developed a romantic sensibility, revolutionary ideas and concern for the rights of people. Their house was the center of cultural debate of the time, so she had the largest possibility of learning. ● Ten days after Mary’s birth, her mother died. ● Four years later her father married again. Her step-mother and one of her step-sisters were the cause of Mary Shelley’s sufferings and troubles. ● Her father William was only worried about her upbringing: he only trained her mind rather than her soul. ● In 1814 she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was an admirer of her father and often visited their London house. He was one of the most famous romantic poets of the time and was a libertin. ● Mary and Shelley fell in love and they met secretly. The man was in love with her mind and her potential, not her soul, so he had great expectation in her that she had to accomplish. ● When she found out she was pregnant, he convinced her to elope to France. ● In 1816 the couple settled in Villa Diodati, on the banks of Lake Geneva, where Byron soon joined them. ● The writing of Frankenstein took place at Villa Diodati. It was the result of: ○ Her personal experiences, ○ Her nightmares and anxiety, ○ The new scientific discoveries and experiments (electricity and reanimation of corpses) ● In 1814 she met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was an admirer of her father and often visited their London house. ● Mary and Shelley fell in love and they met secretly. When she found she was pregnant, they fled to France. ● In 1816 the couple settled in Villa Diodati, on the banks of Lake Geneva, where Byron soon joined them. ● The writing of Frankenstein took place at Villa Diodati. ● In 1822 the Shelleys moved to Lerici, where one day Percy set sail in a storm and was found drowned ten days later. ● At twenty-four, Mary found herself a widow with a son, since Shelley died in a storm near Livorno at 29. After his death she could live a normal and free life, so she felt a sense of relief. ● In 1823 Mary returned to England where she continued to write and to publish her husband’s literary works. ● She wrote five more novels and some short stories. ● She died in 1851. All her life she had to prove herself to others, especially her father and her husband. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus ● Frankenstein has become the starting point of a specific horror genre: monster literature. ● The creature in Frankenstein is the first in a series of monsters that populated 19th century British literature, such as Dracula, Dr Jekill and Mr Hyde and the Mummy. The origin of the novel ● The idea of the plot originated one stormy night in 1816, when Mary was together with Shelley , the poet Byron and the writer John Polidori in their house on Lake Geneva. They decided to engage in a contest and to write a ghost story each. ● The weather was unusually cold because of the eruption of the volcano Tambora in Indonesia. The ash and the gas spewed by the volcano blocked the sunlight. So it was ‘the year without summer’, a perfect context to sit indoors and read ghost stories. ● In the southwestern Germany there is a castle called Frankenstein which Mary Shelley may have visited and where she may have found the inspiration for the novel. ● Two hundred years ago, on 1 January 1818, the novel was first published anonymously. ● A second edition of the novel appeared in 1831 with the name of its authress. ● In the preface to the novel, Mary Shelley gives her own account of Frankenstein’s origin. ● The preface is commonly supposed to have been written by her husband. ● The reading of ghost stories, speculation about the re-animation of corpses, her personal anxieties connected to the loss of her mother induced Mary to create the novel. Plot ● In a series of letters, Robert Walton, the captain of a ship travelling around the North Pole, writes to his sister in England the progress of his dangerous mission. ● His ship is trapped by ice. While Walton and his crew are waiting for the ice to melt, they meet Victor Frankenstein and rescue him. Weakened by the cold, Frankenstein is wandering on a sledge across the ice. ● Frankenstein-the monster: Frankenstein and his creature are complementary: ○ They both suffer from isolation; ○ Both begin with a desire to be good but become obsessed with hate and revenge; ○ The monster is a haunting presence in Frankenstein’s life. Even if Frankenstein initially flees from his creature and even if their direct confrontations are few, the monster is nevertheless constantly present in his life. Social criticism ● The creature is an innocent victim of social prejudices. He is rejected by society because he is ugly. ● He demands that Victor takes responsability for his happiness because he is his creator. He wants to have a father-like figure, but as Victor refuses him, he feels an outcast. His forced isolation drives him to commit evil and to become a murderer. ● Experience causes Frankenstein’s intellectual and emotional development. ● Frankenstein highlights the social injustice which tranforms an innocent creature into a murderous monster. The sublime ● ‘The sublime’ is a literary and philosophical concept defined by Burke as the overpowering sense of greatness we have when we see a natural landscape which arouses a sensation of terror and beauty, horror and pleasure, like a thunderstorm or a giant waterfall or a starry night sky. ● In “A philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas or the sublime or the beautiful” (1756) Burke said: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror”. ● A major scene in which nature and the sublime are combined is when Victor goes to the peak of Montanvert. After escaping his troubles to find peace, he reflects upon his astonishment for the grandeur of the natural surroundings. ● To capture the sublime moment, Shelley uses words like “awful” and “majesty” to reflect a divine presence. Death and revenge ● Death is an important theme in the novel. The creature is made up of parts of corpses. ● The monster becomes a murderer and causes a large number of victims. ● The creature strangles Victor’s young brother as an act of revenge against his creator. Then the creature kills Victor’s childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s wife. ● Dr. Frankenstein also looks for his revenge when he follows the creature to the North Pole in order to destroy him. Literary influences Rousseau ● Mary Shelley was influenced by Rousseau’s ideas. Rousseau believed that man was born innocent and uncorrupted, then the unjust social system and its prejudices spoil him. ● This is just what happens to Frankenstein’s creature who is naturally good when he comes to light, then he turns into a monster because of his sense of frustrastion developed after the experience of people’s rejection because of his ugly appearance. Locke ● In his «Essay concerning human understanding», Locke argued that a child is a «blank slate» and knowledge is made up of education and experience. ● At the beginning the monster’s mind is a tabula rasa. Education and experience create his personality and lead him to self-awareness. The gothic novel ● The ghost stories read at Villa Diodati provided a source of inspiration to Mary Shelley. ● Frankenstein shares some features with the Gothic tradition: fear, suspence, horror, danger and a macabre atmosphere. ● Frankenstein differs from the Gothic novel since it is not set in a dark castle and does not deal with supernatural events. It replaces the supernatural with science. The romantic poets ● The most meaningful source of inspiration was Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both Shelley’s novel and Coleridge’s ballad are tales of a crime against nature: Frankenstein’s creation and the mariner’s shooting of the albatross. Science ● Mary was interested in science so she was updated about the latest scientific theories and experiments in the fields of chemistry, evolutionism and electricity. ● Mary was informed about galvanism. Galvani was an Italian professor of anatomy who made some experiments on animal tissue using a machine which could produce electrical sparks. He proved that animal muscles can contract in response to an electrical stimulus. Narrative structure ● The form of the novel is epistolary. ● The story is told by three different male narrators through a series of letters written by: ○ Walton to his sister, Margaret Saville. (Her initials, MS, are the same as those of Mary Shelley); ○ Frankenstein to Walton, who informs his sister; ○ the monster to Frankenstein, who informs Walton, who informs his sister. ● So the whole novel has Walton’s sister as the receiver. ● Frankenstein is a multiple frame story, a story within a story, a sort of Russian nesting doll. ● None of the three narrators is omniscient and so they are all necessary to have a complete view of the story. ● The interplay of the three narrators provides an interesting shifting of the point of view. ● The story is not told chronologically. ● The authress uses the first person narration and an emotional language. ● Climax: the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza on the night of her wedding to Victor Frankenstein. ● Falling action: after the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza when dr. Frankenstein chases the monster to the northern ice, is rescued by Robert Walton, tells his story and dies. Message ● Frankenstein is the first embodiment of the theme of science and its responsibility to mankind. ● Frankenstein is the symbol of the dangerous consequences of human attempt to overcome nature by means of science. ● Mary Shelley reflects on the relationship between science and morals, what we call bioethics nowadays, and on progress without a moral direction. Britain and America George III (1760-1820) ● George II's grandson, George III, came to the throne in 1760. ● His reign lasted 60 years and is one of the longest in English ● history. ● To reduce the public debt due to the Seven Years' War, the king introduced new duties on corn, paper and tea, which caused opposition in the American colonies. ● The English Parliament responded to the protest by repealing some of them, but the tax on imported tea remained. ● By the 1770s, many colonists began to think that they should only pay taxes approved by their local governing assemblies. The Declaration of Independence ● In 1773 some rebels, dressed up as Native Americans, threw the British tea coming from India to Boston into the harbour (Boston Tea Party). The rebels declared that the taxes were unjust as the colonies had no political power (“No taxation without representation”) ● The Aemricans were divided into: ○ Patriots, who wanted independence, ○ Loyalists, who wanted to stay a part of Britain. ● In 1775 the War of Independence began. The Americans set up an army under the command of George Washington (1732-99) to face the stronger and better trained British army. ● On 4th July 1776 in Philadelphia, the Congress, made by the representatives from 13 of the colonies, signed the Declaration of Independence, largely written by Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a lawyer from Virginia. It claimed that: ○ all men had a natural right to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; ○ governments can only claim the right to rule if they have the consent of the governed. ● In 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown, the British army was defeated and Britain recognised the independence of its former colonies with the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. ● The new republic of the United States of America: ○ Adopted a federal constitution in 1787, ○ Had as its first president George Washington in 1789. ● The colonists who remained loyal to Britain moved to Canada. The Industrial Revolution Economic change ● The economic changes that took place in England at the end of the 18th century transformed the country from an agricultural to an industrialised nation. ● The origins of the economic transformation can be found in Black Death and the rise in living standards that followed it. ● Other factors occurring to the economic change were: ○ The population increased in the 1500s and 1600s also due to a lower death rate. ○ Agriculture was intensified. ○ Open fields were enclosed into smaller portions of land to make more efficient arable farms. ○ The soil was drained and made more fertile, so that cereal production was greatly increased. ○ Animals were bred selectively, so they produced more meat. ○ Economic activity was gradually diversified, especially through the manufacture of woollen cloth. ○ People began acquiring more goods for the house, such as wardrobes, clocks and china. ○ Banks began to invest money. ○ There was an efficient net of transport (mainly canals). ○ This period was a time of political stability with a puritan mindset, based on hard work and prayer. ● The clothing of ordinary people changed with the introduction of white linen underwear, stockings, ribbons and hats. This marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because mass consumption of machine-made goods started. ● Cotton was the leading sector of industrialisation. ● More and more people also began to consume things for pleasure, like tobacco, tea, coffee, ● sugar or alcohol. Rural, household-based production supplied these new kinds of demand. Technological innovation ● There was a succession of technological innovations that transformed and improved the productivity of workers: ○ The steam engine, invented b y Thomas Newcomen in 1712, which was able to pump water out of coal mines; ○ The Spinning Jenny, invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, which increased spinning efficiency; ○ In 1769 James Watt patented a steam engine that was more powerful and wasted less fuel than its predecessors. ○ The loom (James Hargreaves, 1787) linked cloth manufacture to water and steam power. ● Products became cheaper meeting the larger demand for goods. ● Investment in technological development increased and innovation became linked to energy generated from coal.