L'Età Vittoriana e il Monologo Drammatico, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica L'Età Vittoriana e il Monologo Drammatico e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian age represents a long and eventful period in the history of England. This age borrows its name from the queen Victoria (who ruled from 1837 to 1901) and this means that the queen was really important. She could be defined as a guardian of defender rights and the emblem of moral values like respectability, honor, loyalty, and also paternalism. In fact it was a complex and contradictory age, marked by political, social and religious unrest. Thanks to the industrial revolution people left the countryside to move to cities to get a work in factories; the living standard was better than before, so the population grew and England was populated by six million inhabitants. During this age England expanded its political power and became the so-called “empire on which the sun never sets” (it means that the Empire was huge, there were a lot of colonies, the size of the Empire was really big). England’s economy became the largest in the world and this brought prosperity and wealth to the country: the progress improved Victorians lifestyle: things like railway, electricity, photography, were improved. But all these good conditions had a high price and England was forced to pay it: there was a deep gap between aristocratic people (that became richer than before) and the common people, who were forced to live hard and unhealthy conditions, full of diseases, degradation and poverty. Children were exploited and women too. Moreover there were a lot of issues related to an high criminality and prostitution. The ruling classes just tried to ignore and hide all the issues and unpleasant aspects that characterized the poorest classes through an optimism based on a theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarianism that shows how the worth of human life could be calculated avoiding pain and achieving pleasure. Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist attacked this theory and denounced all the social problems that there were in the workhouses. Victoria was only 18 when she went to the throne and reigned for 64 years, she was to become the symbol of a whole Era. In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. They had nine children and their family life provided a model of respectability. Prince Albert was a clever man and Victoria relied more and more on his advice and help. In 1857 she gave him the title of Prince Consort, in recognition of his importance to the country. She found a country in a difficult situation, there was much discontent among the working class owing to a slump in industry and to a period of bad crops, which led to about ten years of widespread misery ( the “hungry forties”). 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, like Birmingham and Manchester. 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, dating from Elizabeth I, with the creation of workhouses, institutions where the poor received board and lodging in return forwork. A direct consequence of this crisis was the birth of the chartist movement, a movement formed by English working classes, which emerged in 1836. It tooks its name from its most important document “People’s Charter” which requested:  universal suffrage  vote by ballot  annual parliament  payment of members of parliament The Chartists were politically immature and their projects were doomed to failure. The Trade Union Act passed and became legal. The class which benefited most from the changes of the time was the Middle Class ( bourgeoisie): manufacturers, merchants and bankers. However, their influence was later felt when, in 1867, the Second Reform Act enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England andWales for the first time and, in 1872, the secret ballot was introduced with the Ballot Act. The Great Exhibition, was a fear organized in London, housed in the ‘Crystal Palace’, in 1851: it wanted to show all the wonders obtained through the industrial process from around the world and to celebrate the triumph of England in fields like science, technology and especially in industry. Its structure was composed only of iron and glass and inside there were pavilions with statues and a lot of trees, and even a fountain: the structure was really important because it highlights the triumph of man over nature. In the mid-years of the 19 century, England was involved in the two Opium Wars against China, which was trying to suppress the opium trade. The First OpiumWar (1839-42) was fought between China and Britain, while the Second OpiumWar (1856-60), also known as the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Britain and France against China. England gained access to five Chinese ports and control of Hong Kong. The CrimeanWar was the first conflict reported in newspapers by journalists ‘on the ground’. Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) volunteered to lead a team of38 nurses at Scutari base hospital during the war and she became known as the ‘Lady with the Lamp’ for her night rounds giving personal care to the wounded. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The VictorianAge was marked by complexity: it was a time of unprecedented change but also 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. 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. There was general agreement on the virtues of asserting a social status, keeping up appearances and looking after family.These things were ‘respectable’. However, respectability was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy, since the unpleasant aspects of society – dissolution, poverty, social unrest – were hidden under outward respectability. In 1901 Queen Victoria died. She had been one of the most beloved of English monarchs; in her long life she had represented all the solid civil and domestic virtues that England believed in: duty, morality and love for the family. When she died an age died with her. THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE The dramatic monologue is a narrative poem in which a single character may address one or more listeners. In a dramatic monologue the speaking character is different from the poet himself, and is caught in a crucial moment of crisis; there is a non-speaking listener, whose presence has to be inferred from clues in the speaker’s monologue, who conditions the development of the monologue. In the dramatic monologue, the tone of the language is argumentative, aiming at revealing the main character’s thoughts, thus reflecting a great interest in human psychology. because the characters were selected from all the social classes through a cross selection. He was a campaigning novelist and his books highlight all the great Victorian controversies:  The faults of the legal system: Oliver Twist, Bleak House.  The horrors of factory employment: David Copperfield, Hard Times.  Scandals in private schools: David Copperfield.  The appalling living conditions in the slums: Bleak House. OLIVER TWIST Oliver Twist is the most prominent example of his unique abilities. It was initially published through instonements in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany and eventually published in a three volume book in 1838. Its plot is really eventful and is about an orphan, Oliver Twist that was forced to live in a workhouse after his mother’s death. One day he decided to ask for more food for him and his mates, and this caused the rage of Mr Bumble and his expulsion from the workhouse. So Oliver was sold for 5 pounds to an undertaker, Mr Sowerberry, who treated him well; but the child was deeply scared by Mr Sowerberry’s wife and decided to escape. He reached London, where met Jack Dawkins, a boy his own age. Jack offered him shelter in the house of his benefactor, Fagin. After some days Oliver discovered that Fagin was a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him. Mr Fagin sent Oliver on a pickpocketing mission with two other boys: when he saw them swipe a handkerchief from an elderly gentleman, Oliver was horrified and ran off. Mr. Brownlow, the man whose handkerchief was stolen, saved Oliver and took him to his home. But two young adults in Fagin’s gang, Bill Sikes and his lover Nancy, capture Oliver and return him to Fagin. Oliver now was obligated to take part in a burglary and was shot by a servant of the house. After Bill escaped, the child was cured by the women who lived there, Mrs. Maylie and her beautiful adopted niece Rose: they also helped Oliver to find Mr Brownlow that finally adopts him. THEMES AND STYLE Dickens wanted to show London from all the points of view, and this can be possible thanks to the characters, that belonged to all social classes and were witnesses of all the aspects of this contradictory age. His aim was to make people aware, to make them know of the other side of London, which was invisible to the eyes of upper classes. Dickens aimed also to create a novel of formation to the upper classes: he in fact showed in the novel how an orphan, belonging to the lowest poor class, could get a happy ending thanks to the help of a man of the upper class. Poor people could be helped only from the upper classes, they were the only hope to improve the conditions of the poor side of London. Oliver certainly embodies the values of goodness and innocence, instead Fagin or Mr Bumble were the emblem of evil; Mr Brownlow is the character related to respectability and kindness, a guide or a sort of mentor. Despite all the contradictions of the age, his works were also rich of an humorous side, that make the literature more pleasant and captivating; we can find a lot of irony and liveliness in his dialogues. OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde, the son of a surgeon and of a literary woman, was born in Dublin in 1854 into an upper middle-class family. After attending Trinity College in his home city, he was sent to Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree in Classics and distinguished himself for his eccentricity: he started to create his image of eccentricity dressing extravagantly and paying great attention to his elegance. He was influenced by the art critic 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’. 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. After his first and only novel, he developed an interest in drama and revived the comedy of manners. In the late 1890s he produced a series of plays which were successful on the London stage. However, both the novel and Salomé (1893), a tragedy written in French, damaged the writer’s reputation: the former was considered immoral, and the latter was prevented from being performed on the London stage due to its presumed obscenity. 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 (which was considered as a crime). He was sentenced to two-years’ hard work. While in prison, he wrote an epistle, known as “De Profundis” to his friend Bosie where he expressed his bitterness and despair openly criticizing society for bigotry. When he was released, he was a broken man; his wife refused to see him, and he went into exile in France. he died of meningitis in 1900 in a hotel in Paris. WORKS He was expert in all of the different genher:  short stories: The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, The happy Prince and Other Tales  novel: The picture of Dorian Gray  tragedy: Salome  drama: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest. WILDE AND THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT It is a literary movement originated in France with Théophile Gautier expressing a sort of reaction against the emotions and subjectivity of Romanticism. The slogan of this movement was “art for art’s sake”: art has no moral or social function, art is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. In England the Aesthetic movement ( whose leader was Walter Pater) was a reaction against the Victorian moral ethics, against the ugliness of industrialization and it focused attention on the importance of beauty in a period of misery and depression. Wilde adopted the aesthetic ideal: “my life is like a work of art”. He played the double role of rebel and dandy. Wilde’s dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit. Wilde’s interest in beauty – clothes words or physical 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 characterized the Victorian novel in the first half of the century. The concept of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ (the manifesto of the moviment) 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 is not concerned about communicating his theories to his fellow-beings; it should not try to improve people by telling them stories with morals, or teach them life through realism, but should aim only at the creation of beauty STYLE Wilde did not want to be serious or to write seriously because he believed that seriousness was boring and was only an attitude adopted by people who had little imagination. He felt that a writer could not communicate important ideas simply but had to suggest them by comedy and paradox. When he spoke or wrote he tried to make people laugh, but also think, by saying things that were surprising and provocative. He did not always believe what he said, but this was the actor in him, the actor who considered the mask more important than what was behind it. In Wilde’s opinion, the artist should not worry about what was true or false, right or wrong, but about what made good or bad art. It was not the artist’s duty to instruct people. Wilde believed that art was superior to life because it could be controlled and made perfect. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 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 HenryWotton, 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. 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 of Dorian’s death, the picture returns to its original purity. All 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. Heis first introduced by whatthepainter says ofhim, 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.  Lord Henry Wotton is intellectual, a brilliant talker, apparently superficial but extremely sharp in his criticism of institutions, considered sacred by his contemporaries, such as marriage and the Church.  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's 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. This story is profoundly allegorical: , 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 darkside Dorian's personality, his double, which he tries to forget by locking it in a room. The years in Trieste were difficult, filled with disappointment and financial problems; in 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich together with his family and Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist had established him as a writer and received the first of several anonymous donations which enabled him to continue writing the novel Ulysses, which began to appear in serial form in The Little Review in 1918, but was suspended in 1920 on charge of obscenity. In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where the American-born bookseller Sylvia Beach agreed to publish Ulysses in 1922. This novel drew both praise and sharp criticism; Pound acclaimed and T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses 'was the most important expression which the modern age has found’. This period of success was also characterized by the worsening ofLucia’s mental illness. Lucia’s condition deteriorated and she was sent to a mental hospital. Although this final decade of Joyce’s life was darkened by his daughter’s illness, his increasing blindness and his father’s death, he continued to write. In 1940, when France was occupied by the Germans, Joyce returned to Zurich. Following an intestinal operation, he died at the age of 59 in January 1941. WORKS  A portrait of the artist as a young man;  Dubliners;  Ulysses;  Finnegans wake Dublin is the set of all his works as London for Dickens. Dublin represents paralysis. It is both physical and moral (linked to religion, politics and culture). All the Dubliners are spiritually weak and fearful people, the are slaves of their familiar, moral, cultural, religious and political life. The main theme is the failure to find a way out of paralysis. The objective of the work was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and living ordinary lives. He revolutionized the traditional novel through the psychological and emotional development of the characters, which would often be incoherent and never in chronological sequence. He was convinced of the impersonality of the artist (as T.S. Elliot) that is why he uses different points of view. The artist must be outside society in order to be objective. The most important characteristics of his works are:  Stream of consciousness technique: the narrative proceeds along the flux of the characters thoughts instead of being told by an external voice;  The interior monologue;  The epiphanies (the sudden revelation which can often be set off by apparently trivial or ridiculous incidents) through which a character is led to a sudden self- realization about himself or about the reality surrounding him/her. In spite of his Jesuit education, Joyce challenged Catholicism. ULYSSES It is a realistic novel, but also highly symbolic. It has no traditional plot. It Is set in Dublin on 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday) - first walk with Nora Barnacle and it covers only the events of that single day. It is divided in three parts because it follows the physical and psychological wanderings of the three main characters:  Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertisement canvasser;  Molly Bloom (Penelope), a singer;  Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus), though not his real son. Stephen Dedalus (1st part): He is the central character because he is the Joycean alter ego. He is a young man with intellectual ambitions, the enemy of his own country. Leopold Bloom (2nd part): He is a middle-aged Jew married man. He is a modern Ulysses, an archetypal hero. Molly Bloom (3rd part): She is a singer, an unfaithful woman, a modern Penelope. THE MOLLY MONOLOGUE Molly is in her bed early in the morning and she is thinking. Joyce uses the stream-of-consciousness to convey her thoughts: there is no punctuation and connectors. The use of the stream-of-consciousness implies the absence of the narrator’s mediation and there is no use of the conventional and orthographic elements. The result is that for the reader it is difficult to understand Molly’s thoughts. Time is the first concept that Molly connected to people who get up in China. When she thinks China, she also thinks about their hairstyle. Her thoughts switch from a geographic image again to time and she starts to think about nuns ringing the angelus. So the reader can understand that it is early in the morning because the angelus is a morning religious function. Molly is thinking about the future. In modernism there is a new concept of time: while during the Victorian period time was linear, in the modern age there is a mixture of past, present and future in the character’s mind. There are new thoughts about nature: She likes nature. Joyce uses an anaphoric structure and metonymy :and he uses the language of senses impression ,in order to provide the most realistic rendering of all that crosses the female character ‘s consciousness. DUBLINERS Dubliners consists of15 short stories. The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time their social, political or religious affairs. His Dublin is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist, where cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface. The stories are arranged into four groups and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The description in each story is realistic and extremely concise, with an abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones. The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning. Religious symbolism can also be found, Even colour symbolism is widely employed in the collection: brown, grey and yellow frequently suggest the pervading atmosphere of despair and paralysis. Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular. To this end he employed a peculiar technique called ‘epiphany’, that is, ‘the sudden spiritual manifestation’ caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character’s inner truths. It can be positive or negative. STYLE It starts in middle res; his style in Dubliners is characterised by two distinct elements: the interior monologue and patterned repetition of images, that is, chiasmus. In the first three short stories, which make up the childhood section, Joyce employs a first- person narrator, who remains nameless and not identified. For the other 12 stories a third-person narrator is employed: he often shares a particular character’s perspective. THEMES OF PARALYSIS Paralysis is a pervasive theme in Dubliners; it is present from beginning to end and becomes gradually more powerful and universal. The paralysis which Joyce wanted to portray is both physical (resulting from external forces) and moral (linked to religion, politics and culture). Joyce’s Dubliners accept their condition either because they are not aware of it or because they lack the courage to break the chains that bind them. However, the moral centre of Dubliners isn't paralysis alone but its revelation to its victims. Coming to awareness or self-realisation marks the climax of these stories; The main theme is the failure to find a way out of ‘paralysis’. The opposite of paralysis is ‘escape’ and its consequent failure. EVELINE The protagonist of this short story is Eveline, a nineteen-year-old girl, who, at the beginning of the story, looks out of the window. While she is looking outside, she listens to a pipe organ playing, which recalls to her mind a song she heard before her mother’s death. She remembers her childhood. She is terrified by his father who abuses her and she feels frustrated because of her unpretentious job as a shop assistant. Yet, she has planned to go with a sailor called Frank to Buenos Aires (she had the possibility to change her life). Before leaving, she is in doubt: the memory of her mother’s dull and sad life pushes her to leave. However, when she arrives at the port with Frank and they are embarking, Eveline thinks again about her past, especially to the vow she made to her mother, promising she would have kept the family together. Consequently, she stands still and doesn’t follow her boyfriend. Frank, who has already embarked on the ship, shouts at her inviting her to join him. At the end of the story, though, he is forced to leave without her. GABRIEL’S EPIPHANY In this text, Gabriel and his wife, Gretta, are at the annual Christmas party. When the party is about to end, Gretta hears a song that reminds her of the boy, Michael Furey, who died for her when she was 17. After the party, the couple return to their room in a nearby hotel: Gabriel is consumed by physical passion but Gretta is thinking of Michael. She falls asleep and Gabriel looks at her with pity and thinks of her. This extract is a combination of realism and symbolism. Everything is described in detail, but also overloaded symbols. The personal names are symbols, too. Gabriel, according to the Bible, is both the