L'EPOCA INGLESE SOTTO LA REGINA VITTORIA, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica L'EPOCA INGLESE SOTTO LA REGINA VITTORIA e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she was just 18 years old. She ruled for almost 64 years. In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha and they had nine children. In 1857 she gave him the title of Prince Consort. The 1830s had seen the beginning of what was to be called an ‘age of reform’. The first Reform Act (1832), also called the Great Reform Act, had transferred voting privileges from the small boroughs, controlled by the nobility and the gentry, to the large industrial towns. The Factory Act (1833) had prevented children aged 9 to 13 from being employed more than forty-eight hours a week, and no person between 13 and 18 could work more than seventy-two hours a week. The Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) had reformed the old Poor Laws with the creation of workhouses, institutions where the poor received board and lodging in return for work. Life in the workhouses was appalling on account of their system of regimentation, hard work and a monotonous diet. The poor had to wear uniforms and their families were split. The idea behind the workhouses was that awareness of such a dreadful life would inspire the poor to try to improve their own conditions. Workhouses were mainly run by the Church. Religion was a strong force. In 1838 a group of working-class radicals drew up a People's Charter demanding equal electoral districts, universal male suffrage, a secret ballot , annually elected Parliaments and abolition of the property qualifications for membership. No one in power was ready for such democracy and the Chartist movement failed. However, in 1867, the Second Reform Act enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time and, in 1872, the secret ballot was introduced with the Ballot Act. Bad weather and an unknown plant disease from America caused the destruction of potato crops in 1845. Ireland, whose agriculture depended on potatoes, experienced a terrible famine and many emigrated, mostly to America, in search of a better life. The Irish crisis forced the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, to abolish the Corn Laws in 1846. These laws imposed tariffs on imported corn. In the mid-years of the 19th century, England experienced a second wave of industrialisation which brought economic, cultural and architectural change. In 1851 a Great Exhibition, organised by Prince Albert, showed the world Britain's industrial and economic power. The exhibition was housed at the Crystal Palace, a huge structure of glass and steel designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. People became very fond of exhibitions, so money was invested in setting up several museums, including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and what is now called the Victoria and Albert Museum. Entrance was free. The building of the London Underground began in 1860. In the mid-19th century, England was involved in the two Opium Wars against China. The First Opium War (1839-42) was fought between China and Britain, while the Second Opium War (1856-60) was fought by Britain and France against China. England gained access to five Chinese ports and control of Hong Kong. The most lucrative colony of the British Empire was India. In 1857 widespread rebellion, known as the Indian Mutiny, against British rule began. Britain also supported some liberal causes like Italian independence from the Austrians. When Russia became too powerful against the weak Turkish Empire, the Crimean War (1853- 56) was fought. It began as a dispute between Russia and the Ottoman Turks, but soon France and Britain got involved since they wanted to limit Russia's power in the area. The Crimean War was the first conflict reported in newspapers by journalists ‘on the ground’. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) volunteered to lead a team of 38 nurses at Scutari base hospital during the war and she became known as the ‘Lady with the Lamp”. . Once back in England, she formed an institution for the development of the nursing profession. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The Victorian Age was marked by complexity: it was a time of great contradictions, often referred to as the ‘Victorian compromise’. It was an age in which progress, reforms and political stability coexisted with poverty and injustice. Religion played an important role in people's lives; Evangelicalism, in particular, encouraged public and political action and created a lot of charities. Philanthropy led to the creation of societies which addressed every kind of poverty, and depended especially on the voluntary efforts of middle-class women. The Victorians believed in God but also in progress and science. Freedom was linked with religion as regarded freedom of conscience, with optimism over economic and political progress, and with national identity. Increasing emphasis was placed on education, and hygiene was encouraged to improve health care. Self-restraint, good manners and self help came to be linked with respectability, a concept shared both by the middle and working classes. Respectability was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy, since the unpleasant aspects of society - dissolution, poverty, social unrest - were hidden under outward respectability. There was growing emphasis on the duty of men to respect and protect women, seen in order to see their work in print. Creative writing, like art and other public activities, was considered ‘masculine’. The Late Victorian Novel The realistic novel: The late Victorian novel mirrored a society linked to a growing crisis in the moral and religious fields. Darwin's evolution theory influenced the structure and the organisation of the realistic novel, which started to follow an evolutionist pattern. The best representatives of the realistic novel were Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. While Eliot focused on the psychological and moral complexity of human beings, Hardy presented strong individuals, the manifestations of the strong forces of nature to whom he opposed the strong social forces of history and human civilisation. The psychological novel: Robert Louis Stevenson's TheStrangeCase of DrJekyIl andMrHyde tried to capture the monstrous, illogical aspects of life and described the double nature ofVictorian society. Stevenson seems to be concerned not only with the duality present in every individual but also in Victorian society as a whole, where aristocracy was only superficially kind and refined, but hid dark secrets in their beautiful houses. Most of the action in the novel takes place at night and much of it in the poorer districts ofLondon, considered the place of evil- doers. Colonial literature: The Victorian period marked the highest point of British imperialism. The most obvious influence of colonialism on Victorian literature can be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. His novels and short stories are set in the distant lands colonised by Britain. Kipling exalted the British imperial power as a sacred duty in the poem The White Man's Burden. Here he legitimised the belief that it was the task of the white man, and in particular of the British, to carry civilisation and progress to the savages. This type of literature is divided between colonial and post-colonial: the colonial one defends the monarchy while in the post-colonial one we find objective English authors and then we find authors born in the colonies who are however bilingual. Aestheticism and Decadence The Aesthetic movement was one of the many reactions of intellectuals against the Victorian puritanism. In this period, there is a fracture between the Artist and the Society. In fact, the artist does not recognize himself in the world around him because that world is conventional. So, He turns to a world that is opposed to reality, a world of refined, unusual and precious beauty. The Aesthetic Movement developed in England at the end of 19th century; French 19th century poets, especially Théophile Gautier, influenced the British aestheticism. The aesthetic movement reflects the reaction of the artist against a conventional and mediocre society. So the artist redefines the true role of art that is exemplified in the slogan “Art for Art's sake”. This Slogan express the idea of beauty in itself, and an equilibrium of interior and exterior beauty. Another reaction against the monotony and vulgarity of middle class life is the behavior as “Bohémien” of the writers, that is to say, an existence against conventions and rules. The father of the Aesthetic movement is considered Walter Pater. He was a philosopher and an intellectual, but he wrote an important novel, that is considered the first aesthetic novel. In fact this novel is also a kind of manifesto of the movement, in which are listed the principles of the movement. The novel is Marius the Epicurean. When it was released, it created so much scandal, because the main character, Marius, was an epicurean, and so he lives the pleasure of life, not only in material field, but also in intellectual field. So he lives without limits. In this novel we can found the most important principle of aesthetic movement: “Art for art's sake” So this novel is opposed to the Victorian Puritanism. The religion is refused and art becomes the only way to stop the time and to live every experience with emotional intensity. The Aesthetic Movement developed in the universities and intellectual circles in the last decades of the 19th century. lt began in France with Théophile Gautier (1811-72) and reflected the sense of frustration and uncertainty of the artist, his reaction against the materialism and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie, and his need to redefine the role of art. . As a result, French artists withdrew from the political and social scene and ‘escaped'’ into aesthetic isolation, into what Gautier defined ‘Art for Art's Sake' (arte fine a se stessa). This doctrine was imported into England by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), an American painter who worked in England. poet John Keats, as well as to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was a remarkable example of an artist dedicated wholly to his art. John Ruskin too, in his search for beauty in life and art, even while insisting upon moral values, paved the way for he works ofWalter Pater (1839-94), who is regarded as the main theorist of the Aesthetic Movement in England. The theorist of English Aestheticism is Walter Pater: He rejected religious faith and said that art was the only means to halt the passage of time, the only certainty. He thought life should be lived in the spirit of art, namely ‘as a work of art’, filling each passing moment with intense experience, feeling all kinds of sensations. The task of the artist was to feel sensations, to be attentive to the attractive, the courteous and the cheerful. So the artist was seen as the transcriber ‘not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it'. The main implication of this new aesthetic position was that art had no reference to life, and therefore it had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic. Pater's works had a deep influence on the poets and writers of the 18905, especially Oscar Wilde, as well as the group of artists that met in the Rhymers' Club and contributed to TheYellowBook. This periodical, published from 1894 to 1897, reflected ‘decadent’ taste in its sensational subjects. The term ‘decadent’ generally implied a process of decline of recognised values. By the end of the century it was used as an aesthetic term across Europe. The features of Aesthetic works: A number of features can be distinguished in the works ofAesthetic artists: * excessive attention to the self; * hedonistic and sensuous attitude; * perversity in subject matter; * disenchantment with contemporary society; * evocative use of language. The European Decadent Movement Decadence must be seen as a European movement. In the late 18805 a group ofFrench writers contributed to the journal Le Décadent; they were the Symbolists Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue, who were much influenced by Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857). Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) wrote À rebours (1884), a novel whose hero, Des Esseintes, tries to create an entirely artificial life in his search for unusual sensations. This character became the model for Wilde's dandy. The main representatives of Decadence in Italy were Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), with his novel Il piacere (1889), and the poets Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Guido Gozzano (1883-1916). The poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was one of the most remarkable expressions of the Decadent sensibility in the German language. CHARLES DICKENS Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. When his father was released, he was sent to a school in London. At 15, he found employment as an office boy at a lawyer's and studied shorthand at night. By 1832 he had become a very narrow-minded, materialistic philosophy. The fictional city of Coketown stands for a real industrial mill town in mid 19th-century Victorian England. The machineries of factories are like mad elephants, and their smoke looks like serpents. All the buildings, which are covered with soot coming from the coal burnt in factories, are the same. However, nothing seems to bother the mill owners. They seem to be proud of the polluted air of Coketown. Hard Times is divided into three sections, or books, and each book is divided into separate chapters. The philosophy of Utilitarianism comes forth largely through the actions of Mr Gradgrind and his follower Bounderby: as the former educates the children of his family and his school through facts, the latter treats the workers in his factory as emotionless objects that are easily exploited for his own self-interest. Mr Gradgrind believes that human nature can be measured, quantified and governed entirely by reason. Indeed, his school tries to turn children into little machines. Dickens's primary aim in Hard Times is to illustrate the dangers of the teaching method called ‘object lesson’. THE BRONTE SISTERS Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49) were the daughters of an Anglican clergyman of Irish origin, who had an important influence on their artistic inclinations. The Bronté sisters spent most of their life in isolation in a remote part of Yorkshire, in northern England. They were mainly self educated. To express their intellectual creativity and their emotions, they began to write chronicles of imaginary countries and, in 1846, they published a volume of poetry, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Like many female writers of the period, they decided to use pseudonyms. lt was under these pen names that each of the sisters published their novels the following year: Charlotte (Currer) published Jane Eyre, Emily (Ellis) Wuthering Heights and Anne (Acton) Agnes Grey. Only Jane Eyre was immediately successful. Emily died in 1848 and Anne in 1849. Charlotte married Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854 and died the following year. JANE EYRE (1847 Jane Eyre is a novel written by Charlotte in 1847. Jane is a penniless orphan, brought up at Gateshead by her cold and hostile aunt, Mrs Reed. Jane is then sent to Lowood School, a very strict school. When she grows up, she becomes a teacher there, but finally she decides to accept a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she soon falls in love with Mr Rochester, its owner. Her stay at the Hall is disturbed by strange noises and frightening events. After spending some time at her aunt’s deathbed, Jane returns to Thornfield and Rochster proposes to her. She agrees to marry him, but two nights before the wedding she wakes up and sees a figure standing by her bed and her wedding veil torn into two pieces. The wedding is interrupted by a stranger who declares that Rochster already has a wife, Bertha Mason, a madwoman he married in the West Indies and who lives in the attic of the house. Rochster asks Jane to stay with him, but she leaves Thornfield and goes to live with her cousins at Moor House. There she meets St John Rivers, a religious man and proposes to her. Jane refuses and one night she hears Rochster's voice calling her. She returns to Thornfield Hall, but the house has been destroyed by a fire caused by Bertha, who then threw herself downstairs and died. Mr Rochster lost his sight and a hand in the attempt to save his wife from the fire. He now lives in Ferndean, where Jane visits him and agrees to marry him. He finally recovers his sight when their first child is born. The novel is structured around five separate locations. Every house or place represents a stage in her life and has a symbolic name. Gateshead-the Reed's home, the place of Jane's childhood. Lowood School-the place of Jane's education. Thornfield-Mr Rochester's house, the place of independence and young love. Moor House-the Rivers’ house on the moor, the place of temporary banishment. Ferndean-Mr Rochester's rural mansion, the place for a new start. The protagonist's character is developed very clearly: she is intense, imaginative,passionate,rebellious,independent,yet always looking for warmth and affection. Jane undergoes many struggles such as the conflicts between spirit and flesh, duty and desire. The novel also establishes the theme of the outsider, the free spirit fighting for recognition and self- respect. In Rochester the old lustful villain is seen in a new prospective: he has the quality of a ‘Byronic hero’. Jane Eyre is a novel of growing up, so the theme of childhood and education plays an important role. Jane wants to be loved as a human being deserving affection and worth of value. As she grows up, Jane gains autonomy and economic independence and refuses a proposal twice so as not to sacrifice her moral integrity. Marriage is presented as a relationship between equals, not as a social compromise. Jane is refined and has educated manners; however, she is treated like a servant. Charlotte clearly criticises the strict Victorian social class system. If Jane had been a man, she might have attempted to improve her position. Being a woman in her social class, the only chance she had was working as a governess. The use of the heroine as narrator gives unity to the novel. Everything is seen from Jane's point of view. Jane often addresses the reader explaining how she feels and makes decisions. The story is told in the first person and the emotional use of language conveys the author's concern with the nature of human relationship. Gateshead: the Reeds’ home, the place of Jane's childhood. Lowood School: the place of Jane's education. Thornfield: Mr Rochester's house, the place of independence and young love. Ferndean: Mr Rochester's rural mansion, the place for a new start. Moor House: the Rivers’ house on the moor, the place of temporary banishment. Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy was born of humble parents at Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in June 1840. As a boy he learned to play the violin and he always loved music and dancing. He was also a voracious reader. When he left school in 1856, he was apprenticed to a local architect and church restorer. By 1862 he was working and studying architecture in London and he began to write poetry. He also read the works of Comte, Mill, Darwin and Schopenhauer. In 1872 he published a novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, but he gained fame thanks to Far from the Madding Crowd, which appeared in serial form throughout 1874 in the monthly issues of The Cornhill Magazine. After this success he devoted his life to writing. His second great work of fiction was The Return of the Native (1878), followed by a sequence of four remarkable tragic novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and his last one, Jude the Obscure (1895). This book scandalised Victorian public opinion with its pessimism and immorality; one copy was even burnt publicly by a bishop. After publishing Wessex Poems in 1898, Hardy decided to give up fiction and turn to poetry. He died in 1928. HARDY'S DETERMINISTIC VIEW: Hardy's works are full of considerations about life, death, man and the universe; they express a deterministic view, deprived of the consolation of divine order. In his earlier years Hardy was influenced by the Oxford Movement; his family members were Christians and he himself considered entering the clergy. However, he eventually abandoned his faith in God, probably influenced by his reading both of the classics and of contemporary authors. From Greek tragedy he derived the notions of cruel gods, indifferent nature and hostile fate. After reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species n the 18605, he perceived the intellectual consequences of that scientific theory and denied the existence of God. He could see no intelligent direction of the universe, only the control of ‘insensible chance’ over everything. THEMES: John Ruskin and became a disciple of Walter Pater , accepting the theory of ‘Art for Art's Sake'. After graduating in 1878, he moved to London, where he soon became a celebrity for his extraordinary wit and his characteristic style of dress as a ‘dandy’. In 1881 Wilde published, at his own expense, a collection called Poems and was invited to undertake a speaking tour in the United States: his lectures amazed the American audiences. On his arrival in New York he told reporters that Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for the relationship between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were simply different forms of the same truth. The tour was a great success for Wilde, who became famous for his irony, his attitudes and his posing. On his return to Europe in 1883, he married Constance Lloyd, who bore him two children. At this point in his career he was most noted as a great speaker. In the late 1880s Wilde's literary talent was revealed by a series of short stories, The Canterville Ghost Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, written for his children, and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). After his first and only novel, he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners. Oscar Wilde's years of triumph ended dramatically when, in 1891, his intimate association with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’, led to his trial on charges of homosexuality, then illegal in Britain. He was sentenced to two-years' hard labour. While in prison, he wrote De Profundis, a long letter to Bosie which was published posthumously in 1905. When he was released, he was a broken man; his wife refused to see him, and he went into exile in France ,where he lived out this last years in poverty.He died of meningitis in 1900 in a hotel in Paris. The rebel and the dandy Wilde adopted the ‘aesthetic ideal’, as he affirmed in one of his famous conversations: ‘My life is like a work of art’. He lived the double role of rebel and dandy. Wilde's dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his wit to shock and he is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. Since life was meant for pleasure, and pleasure was an indulgence in the beautiful, Wilde's interest in beauty had no moral stance. In the ‘Preface’ to his novel he affirmed: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’ In this way he rejected the didacticism that had characterised the Victorian novel in the first half of the century. Art for Art's sake The concept of ‘Art for Art's Sake’' was not merely an aesthetic one. Wilde believed that only art as the cult of beauty could prevent the murder of the soul. He perceived the artist as an alien in a materialistic world, he wrote only to please himself and was not concerned about communicating his theories tohis fellow-beings. His pursuit of beauty and fulfilment was the tragic act of a superior being inevitably rejected as an outcast. The figure of the dandy: The dandy is the eccentric who likes to amaze and strike the attention of the public, with his attitudes, the way of dressing and living, with provocative gestures. He exhibits his "diversity" and, while making a show of it, tries to impose it and use it as a springboard to success. He therefore enjoys scandalizing and provoking, but in reality he seeks public recognition and applause. The figure of the dandy presupposes the social isolation of the artist and the thrust of competition that leads him to differentiate himself with sensational gestures; but it also reveals how ambiguous his unconventionality is: behind the revolt, the desire for success actually hides. The character of the dandy therefore expresses well the artist's destiny in the society that commodifies art and in which the artist must make propaganda to himself in order to sell his works. The Picture of Dorian Grey Plot and setting: The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. Under the influence of the brilliant but corrupt Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man's desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear not on Dorian but on the portrait. Dorian makes use of everybody, even letting people die because of his insensitivity. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it but, in doing so, he kills himself. In the very moment ofDorian's death, the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian's face becomes ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome’. Characters: AII the characters reveal themselves through what they say or what other people say of them, a technique which is typical of drama. Dorian Gray represents the ideal of youth, beauty and innocence. He is immortalised in Basil Hallward's painting as a living Adonis. He is first introduced by what the painter says of him, thus raising the reader’'s expectations. When he first appears in the novel, he is rather immature, but the reader is made aware of his purity and innocence through the narrator's words. Dorian is considerably influenced by Lord Henry, who teaches him about hedonism, and starts to look for a life of pleasure and sensations. Lord Henry Wotton is an intellectual, a brilliant talker, apparently superficial but extremely sharp in his criticism of institutions. He is able to influence Dorian and as the story goes on, Dorian's speech seems to mimic Lord Henry's style. Basil Hallward is an intellectual who falls in love with Dorian's beauty and innocence. He does not want to exhibit the picture, even if it is his best work, because he is afraid that it reflects the strange attraction he feels for Dorian. He is eventually killed by Dorian because his painting and his passion are considered responsible for the young man's tortured existence. Basil becomes a sad example of how a good artist can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art. Narrative technique: This story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator. The perspective adopted is internal, since Dorian’s apparition is in the second chapter, and this allows a process of identification between the reader and the character. The settings are vividly described with words appealing to the senses. Allegorical meaning This story is profoundly allegorical; it is a 19th-century version of the legend of Faust, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask ofDorian's timeless beauty. The picture is not an autonomous self: it represents the dark side of Dorian's personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and there is no escape from reality. When Dorian destroys the picture, he cannot avoid the punishment for all his sins, that is, death. The horrible, corrupted picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally, the picture, illustrates Wilde's theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal. The Preface The ‘Preface’, first published as an essay in a literary magazine, appeared in the 1891 final edition of the novel. It consists of a series of aphorisms, or epigrammatic sentences, considered the basic principles of Aestheticism in England. The painter’s studio