L'età vittoriana e le sorelle Bronte, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

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INGLESE di 1 16 VICTORIAN AGE QUEEN VICTORIA • When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, she was just 18 years old. • She was to rule for almost 64 years and gave her name to an age of economic and scienLnc progress and social reforms. • Her own sense of duty made her the ideal head of a consLtuLonal monarchy: she remained apart from poliLcs and yet provided stability. • In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. • They had 9 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 185/ she gave him the Ltle of Prince Consort. in recogniLon of his importance to the country AN AGE OF REFORM • The 1830s was the age of reform: • THE FIRST REFORM ACT (1832), had transferred voLng 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, daLng from (risalenL a) Elizabeth I, with the creaLon of workhouses, insLtuLons where the poor received board and lodging in return for work. WORKHOUSES AND RELIGION • Life in the workhouses was appalling on account of (era spaventosa a causa di) their system of regimentaLon, hard work and a monotonous diet. • The poor had to wear uniforms and their families were split (le loro famiglie erano divise). • This apparent hard line was due (era dovuta) in part to an opLmisLc faith (fiducia ofmista) in progress and to the Puritan virtues of hard work, frugality and duty (dovere). • The idea behind the workhouses was that awareness of such a dreadful life would inspire (la consapevolezza di una vita talent terribile avrebbe dovuto ispirare) the poor to try to improve their own condiLons. • Workhouses were mainly run (principalmente gesLL) by the Church. • Religion was a strong force. • In industrial areas the nonconformist Churches, such as Methodists, promoted study and absLnence from alcohol. CHARTISM • In 1838 a group of working-class radicals drew up a People's Charter demanding (un gruppo di radicali della classe operaia elaborò una Carta popolare chiedendo) equal electoral districts, universal male suffrage, a secret ballot, paid MPs (parlamentari pagaL), annually elected • Parliaments and aboliLon of the property qualificaLons for membership. • No one in power was ready for such democracy and the CharLst movement failed. • However, their influence was later felt when, in 1867, the Second Reform Act enfranchised (affrancò) part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first Lme and, in 1872, the secret ballot was introduced with the Ballot Act. di 2 16 THE BRONTE SISTERS LIFE AND WORKS • Charlope, Emily and Anne were the daughters of an Anglican clereyman: • They spent a lot of their Lme in isolaLon in Yorkshire and they were self-educated. • They read books from the father's library and took inspiraLon from periodicals and public libraries. • To publish their novels, they used pseudonyms. • Charlope published Jane Eyre, Emily Wuthering Heights and Anne Agnes Grey; only the first one was immediately successful. Emily and Anne soon died of consumpLon; Charlope married Reverend Arthur and died the year later probably of an illness due to pregnancy. JANE EYRE PLOT • Jane had a very unhappy childhood. • She grew up with her cold aunt and then she went to the Lowood School, a very strict school, where she became a teacher. • Then she accepted a job as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she fell in love with Mr Rochester, the owner. • In this house there were strange noises and frightening events. • Mr Rochester proposed to Jane but two nights before the wedding she woke up and saw a strange figure in front of her and her wedding veil was destroyed. • A man revealed that Mr Rochester already had a wife, a madwoman, Bertha, who lives in the afc of the house. • So Jane ran away and went to her cousins house. • Here she met St John Rivers, a religious man, who proposed to her. • She refused and decided to come back to Thornfield Hall. • The house was destroyed by a fire, caused by Berta, in which Mr Rochester lost his sight and a hand. • They finally met again and decided to marry. • Then they had their first child, and Mr Rochester recovers his sight. SETTINGS • The novel is set in the last decades of the 19th century and is structured around five locaLons in northern England. • Every place has an important role in Jane's life and the houses have symbolic names. • Gateshead is the place where Jane spends her unhappy childhood and it stands for gateway; • Lowood means "low wood" because the school was built in a low vally beside a wood and it represents a low Lme in Jane's life; • Thornfield means "field of thorns" and it represents mystery and temptaLon; • Moor House is the place where Jane tries to find a sense in her life; • Ferndean is the place of the new happiness. CHARACTERS • Each secLon of the novel represents the phases of Jane's life. • She is passionate, intense, rebellious and always looking for affecLon. • She undergoes many struggles, such as the conflict between spirit and flesh. di 5 16 • In the novel is very important the theme of the rebellious spirit, who wants to assert himself and to achieve self-respect. • Mr Rochester is a Byronic Hero and his seducLon becomes a kind of nobleman of passion, who is apracted to Jane's soul and personality. THEMES • Jane Eyre is a novel of GROWING UP, so the themes of childhood and educaLon play an important role. • Jane wants to be loved as a human being and with his job as a teacher she achieves independence and she refuses a marriage proposal twice, because she thinks that marriage represents a relaLonship between equals, not a social contract. • This reveals the most important theme of the novel: the social posiLon of a governess in Victorian society. • Charlope, criLcizes the Victorian social class system and gender relaLonship, in a period characterized by a lot of rebellions of women to obtain more rignts. • The Gothic component is present in the descripLon of Jane's unhappy childhood and the scary cimate of Thornfield Hall. STYLE • Jane is the narrator of the story and everything is seen from her point of view. • The story is told in the first person and language is used in different ways in accordance with the situaLons and human relaLonship. • There is also the repeLLon of symbols and images. WUTHERING HEIGHTS PLOT • The novel takes place in two houses: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the first one inhabited by the Earnshaws and the second one by the Lintons. • At the beginning of the story Mr Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, visited Mr Heathcliff, who lived at Wuthering Heights. • Lockwood had to spend the night here because of a snowstorm and during the night he dreamt of a girl, Catherine, who was tapping on the window, asking to be let in aner 20 years of wandering on the moors (che bussava alla finestra, chiedendo di entrare dopo 20 anni di vagabondaggio nella brughiera). • The next day Lockwood came back home and Nelly, the housekeeper, told him the whole story of the house of Wuthering Heights: • Mr Earnshaw, Catherine and Hindley's father, one day came back from Liverpool with a foundling, called Heathcliff. • Catherine and Heathcliff became closer and closer, they roamed the moors together and they promised to stay together forever. • But one night Catherine had to remain at Thrushcross Grange and met Linton. He proposed to her and she accepted. • Catherine confessed to Nelly that she didn't want to marry Heathcliff because he was socially inferior and when Heathcliff overhears some of the conversaLon, he decides to escape. • He returned three years later, richer, more handsome and very determined to take his REVENGE. • He married Isabella, Lintons's sister, and aner Catherine's death he obliged Cathy, her daughter, to marry his son. • So he obtained Thrushcross Grange and also Wuthering Heights. di 6 16 • Aner this story, Mr Lockwood len Yorkshire and came back one year later and found out that • Heathcliff was dead and Cathy and Hareton, Hindley's son, were going to marry and to live in happiness. SETTINGS • The novel takes place in two different houses: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. • Wuthering Heights is severe and gloomy and reflects the moral and the passion of Heathcliff. • Thrushcross Grange instead reflects the vision of life based on stability, kindness and respectability. • These opposite principles will be connected with the marriage of Cathy and Hareton. CHARACTERS • Heathcliff is a sort of Byronic hero, moved by irresisLble passions and to a total idenLty with his love, Catherine. • He also appears as a Gothic hero, because of his terrible behaviour with his wife and his son. • Catherine is driven by social ambiLons, but she is also prompted to violate social convenLons. Catherine represents the RomanLc nature THEMES • In the novel basic human emoLons are presented, like love and hate, always in accord with the RomanLc climate, in which there is a correspondence between the violent passions of the characters and the wild nature. • Death is an important theme, but unlike other Victorian novels, deth in Wuthering Heights is a libera;on of the spirit. • The Gothic element is very present and it is useful to represent the contrast between love and hate. STYLE • The novel is a concentric system of narraLves. • There are two narrators: Mr Lockwood, who narrates what he sees and writes down what Nelly says to him. • Nelly is the second narrator. She is involved in the story and narrates the whole story of Heathcliff and Catherine. • The narraLon doesn't proceed in a chronological order; it starts at the end of the story and develops a narraLve within the narraLve (sviluppa una narrazione all'interno della narrazione). • This complex system creates a sense of suspense. • Wuthering Heights is a unique in Victorian literature, because it reflected the emoLons and the passions of the part of society onen hidden. di 7 16 OSCAR WILDE He was born in Dublin in 1854 and undertook classical studies in Oxford. They describe him as a very eccentric person. Pater's theories regarding art for art's sake resumes that art should be seen as a cult of beauty and only in this way can it prevent the death of the soul: this makes it the dandy par excellence. AestheLcism is seen by Wilde as a search for beauty. Moreover, according to Wilde, the different forms of art are an expression of the same truth, as he says in the work Poems. His presence, even in a mediocre event, became highly anLcipated as he was a skilled speaker. He is said to have had an affair with the poet Douglas, so he was taken to court on charges of homosexuality and was imposed on him two years of forced labour and subsequently suffered exile in France. He lived the last years of his life in poverty dying of meningiLs. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY It is set in London at the end of the nineteenth century and the protagonist is Dorian Gray, a very handsome young boy, whose beauty fascinates the painter Basil, who portrays him. Dorian aner meeLng Lord Henry leaves himself to a life of pleasures, selling his soul to the devil, who in return grants him eternal youth. But the signs of Lme and an unhealthy life can only be seen picture and not actually on Dorian. But aner Basil sees the picture with the signs of ageing that prevailed over Dorian and therefore kills him. He will then tear the picture that portrays him, ashamed of himself and what he had become. He will then tear the picture apart and fall dead. Dorian represents the ideal of youth, beauty and innocence, but these beauLful values will turn into vanity and selfishness. Lord Henry represents eloquence and criLcises the insLtuLons. Basil is an example of how a good arLst can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art and is also the cause, according to Dorian, of his bad existence. The sale of the soul to the devil has allegorical meaning. di 10 16 VIRGINIA WOOLF He was born in London in 1882, living in an intellectual and literary atmosphere. Aner the death of his mother he began to have mental collapses and only aner the death of his father, an aggressive, misogynisLc and tyrannical man, he began his literary career. He joined, together with his sister, the Bloomsbury Group where the first avant-gardes of the twenLeth century developed. He strongly despises tradiLonal morality and Victorian respectability, rejects the arLsLc convenLon and sexual codes of the bourgeoisie: it is therefore configured as a revoluLonary personality. From a literary point of view, in her producLon Virgina Woolf widely uses the technique of the flow of consciousness and deals with social, poliLcal and arLsLc issues. With the stream of consciousness Virginia Woolf analyses It was also an important literary and essayist criLcism. She had a great impact on the feminist movement, introducing reflecLons related to economic problems and female arLsLc independence (A Room of One's Own). He died suicide aner the beginning of World War II, drowning. MRS DALLOWAY It all takes place on a Wednesday in June 1923, in a small area of London, when Clarissa Dalloway is going to buy flowers for a party she will give in the evening. Meanwhile, a car passes very noisily near where SepLmous and Lucrezia Smith, his Italian girlfriend, pass. SepLmous hears these car rumbles as if they were the noises of war, as a result of his post-traumaLc stress; Lucrezia calls the doctors so that they can help him. Clarissa goes home, where she receives a visit from Peter Wolsh, a man she had loved in her youth. Peter leaves aner the visit and meets the Smiths on the street, who were going to meet a new doctor, who invites SepLmous to go to one of his clinics. At 6:00 pm SepLmous throws himself out his window and at the party Clarissa discovers of his death, feeling a strong connecLon with him. Woolf intends to demonstrate the deep humanity of men under the masks of the bourgeoisie and uses the tunnelling technique, allowing the reader to experience the conversion with the past of the different characters, making people understand the past of each character. All the characters are part of the upper middle class. Clarissa feels two opposite feelings: the need for freedom and class consciousness. To overcome his weaknesses, he imposes very strict restricLons on himself. SepLmous is a very sensiLve man connected with war: he has post-traumaLc events and is similar to Clarissa in many things, so much so that some define him as Clarissa's DOUBLE, but he is not able to disLnguish between internal reality and external reality, which leads him to suicide, while Clarissa understands unlike him that external reality does not correspond to the inner Very important in the work are the representaLons of the changes in the social life of Lme: the presence of machines, airplanes and clocks, which also represent in addiLon to social progress but also the passage of Lme. Despite using the technique of flow of consciousness Virginia never allows the thoughts of the character to flow without control and maintains a logical and grammaLcal organisaLon. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN A Room of One's Own, is an essay by Virginia Woolf from 1929 and which concerns the relaLonship between genre and wriLng. He opens the work with what takes the name of 'minor point' in which he basically explains the Ltle of his essay and states that "a woman must have money is her own room if she wants to write novels", staLng that they are by far 500 pounds is preferable, rather than the achieved universal suffrage, which unlike the laper, would allow the woman financial independence and therefore the opportunity to write novels. She also emphasizes the exclusion of women from social and poliLcal insLtuLons throughout history and for example she herself, as a woman, would not be able to access a manuscript kept in di 11 16 a male college. She then reflects on the portrayal of the female figure by men, who appear determined to keep women in a condiLon of second-class ciLzens. She then thinks about the condiLon of women, in relaLon to the acLvity of a man of lepers, creaLng an imaginary character: Judith Shakespeare, (ficLonal) sister of the great writer William Shakespeare. At this point she inserts an accurate and controversial reflecLon: she imagines that this woman was born with the same genius and the same potenLal as her brother, to become a great writer. However, she finds it impossible to access elementary educaLon and also the impossibility of earning a living by becoming an actress at the Elizabethan theater. So Judith will never be able to reach the levels of her brother, simply because she is a woman, as she is not a great writer by birth, but she becomes one also thanks to an adequate cultural training. She then examines writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and George Eliot; and the first in parLcular, according to Virginia Woolf, should be praised by all women for showing that the professional writer could become a reality. All these writers are united by the choice of the novel as a literary genre. This, however, was not dictated by the abiliLes of the writers themselves, but by an educaLon dictated by the right-thinking influences of the bourgeoisie and the common living room, which had sensiLzed in the observaLon of characters and in the analysis of emoLons. Therefore women had to bend their talents so that they coincided with a socially acceptable literary form, which corresponded precisely to the novel. Woolf's Judith is seduced by an actor-director in London theaters, she becomes pregnant and takes her own life in poverty and misery; however, she could never have become a great writer since she lacked economic independence: the financial arrangements for women were centered on the preparaLon of marriage and motherhood, as indeed the life of a woman itself: it within a marriage did not enjoy a proven room in which to devote herself to study and wriLng, much less wealth and property, which passed into the hands of her husband. A Room of One's Own, precisely because it describes the material limits that prevent women from being socially and culturally independent individuals, is onen defined as a feminist work. di 12 16 Vivid descripLons of the brutality of war and violent chaos are given in the novel, but in any case the work cannot be considered as a criLcism of war as it is presented as something inevitable in a world that refuses to recognise true love. Hemingway offers a deep analysis of the nature of love, analysing the relaLonship between Henry and Catherine, which gives them only temporary happiness. Hemingway also says that loyalty is linked more to a personal need for love and relaLonships, rather than something abstract. di 15 16 MODERNISM It is an internaLonal movement that involved all the arts in the first decades of the twenLeth century, especially in the first post-war period, in which a feeling of disillusionment and division made its way. The will was to break with the past and find new fields to study and invesLgate, such as war, speed and technology. The main characterisLcs of modernism can be found in Cubist painters, in breaking the limits of space and Lme, emphasising subjecLvity, with the use of an allusive lynching. They give great importance to the unconscious, but also to conscious life, bringing back the complexity of urban life in arLsLc forms. One of the main techniques used by modernists is the flow of consciousness, in parLcular it is used by James Joyce and takes up the philosophies of Freud, Bergson and William James. English literature, with modernism, was becoming cosmopolitan. di 16 16