Il contesto storico e culturale dell'Inghilterra nel XVIII secolo, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Il contesto storico e culturale dell'Inghilterra nel XVIII secolo e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! "RESTORATION AND THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY [1660-1780] ● 1660 Restoration of the monarchy [Charles II] ● 1688 The Glorious Revolution [James II → William III and Queen Mary II] ● 1702-1714 Anne Stuart [Augustan Age] Charles II [1630 - 1685] → reopened the Theaters, which brought to the scenes a reinvention of the genres. One of the big novelties that the king imported from France was the possibility for women to finally act as female actresses, giving them the permission to eventually cross the stage to be part of the play. Charles will reign until 1685, bringing some changes after the Commonwealth and ruling with the parliament. In terms of religion he developed the act of uniformity → the exclusion from the established Church of England, the Episcopalian structure of the Anglican or English church of radicals from Scotland, nonconformists roman Catholics and non Christians. So those who didn’t follow the monarchy and at the same time the church, the so-called dissenters, were excluded, they couldn’t go to universities or have social roles. These parliamentary acts are connected to literature because all the excluded people wanted to be a part again of society and so they wrote about it, in order to protest and have a chance to be reintegrated. After Charles II, Charles’ brother, James II, became king. As it often happens, after a king that imposes religious acts, the second one often discharges them, creating chaos. James in fact was against the act of uniformity, he was a catholic, so he violated the text act and approved the declaration of indulgence [1688], that allowed the free celebration of religion. The parliament didn’t agree with the king, so it decided that he was not suitable for his position. In order to dispose of the sovereign, the government called a foreigner to be king, William III of Orange and his wife Mary II Stuart. It’s a kind of revolution, a bloodless one, the Glorious Revolution. In the parliament we usually have two opposed factions recognized as the Tory and the Whigs, that in this case both agree on the new king and queen, proclaiming the abdication of James, who was sent to France. His followers tried to organize a revolution but without success. The division between Whigs and Tory is still distinguished: ★ Tory → identify themselves as the supporters of the church of England and of the monarchy with conservative ideas ★ Whigs → support the landowning families and the financial interests of the wealthy middle classes who promote social reforms. They were supported by the dissenters and wanted to change society with reforms supported by the parliament and promote religious tolerance Queen Anne Stuart → she’s the last of the Stuart dynasty and she had no children, so as William Orange. Anne had 5 failed maternalities. Before her reign there was a period of expansion, in which we remember the act of union with Scotland in 1707 that brought us to talk about “Britain” as it is. After the queen a new house began to reign, the Georgians, creating the Georgian period, composed of 4 kings all named George, who reigned from 1714 to 1830. This period inserted itself in between two queens, queen Anne and queen Victoria. George I and II were born in Germany, so they were not really influenced by British culture or politics, leading to a complete rule of the country by the parliament. On the contrary George III and IV were born, educated and raised in England, so they were part of the society. George III ruled during a turbulent year, the beginning of the romantic period, full of revolutions. He lost 2 times his mind, so he was unable to rule the kingdom because of this mental disease. Britain is expanding abroad and this illness influenced some great losses of colonies so that during the period of insanity, the king’s son became prince regent because the country needed a king to rule during 1811 - 1820, the so-called regency period, time during which Jane Austen started to publish almost all of her works. The most turbulent is the period, the most turbulent is the artistic production. When George III died, the prince regent eventually became king. SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT During the XVIII century we had a big growth of population and cities → during the 1750 we encountered the enclosure act, that means an enclosure in between agriculture fields, there’s no open space left. Many of the writers that were dealing with nature during this period complained about this act. This enclosure is a sort of imposition of the parliament in the countryside. Humans invaded the landscapes, fencing and building walls in between countries, modifying nature and the composition of England itself, affecting the relationship between humans and nature, who can walk freely only in some spaces owned by landowners. London has grown in population, reaching almost 1 million citizens also because of the migration. The topography’s changing in places and meaning, peculiarities of the so called modernization and urbanization period. London became the capital and the largest city in Europe. After the big plague, new churches, places and buildings were built, new spaces for public meetings, squares, gardens [Vauxhall gardens] became objects of literary description → they were the places where to be seen. It was the time of industrialization that provided more wealth, allowed more industries to create more products that were not just the one that were needed to survive. New fashion, spas and baths were opened, galleries, theaters, the British museum. Middle-upper social classes started to rise. The Bank of England itself was founded in 1694. A capitalist type of society. The union of England and Scotland in 1707 created Great Britain, a new kingdom that started to create its identity with the anthem Rule Britannia, period during which was published the Encyclopedia Britannica too. Like every other situation, even the consumer society had another side of the coin: the poverty class, composed of the degradation in city life and the countryside, the aftermath of capitalism, criminality, abuse. THE ENLIGHTENMENT The term enlightenment was discussed for many years → there’s a difficulty in pinning down the meaning of the name. This period characterizes itself for a decline in religion, men are starting to study and analyzing thanks to science the human beings, putting the human as the center of the world and not God anymore, the capacity of the human being to debate, question, that everything is not given as it is by God, but is evolving because man itself is part of the change. The main characters in this landscape are the French and German philosophers like Voltaire, Montesquieu and Kant. It’s the time of questioning. In England we remember Bacon, Newton and Locke, who made the major contribution to emerging discourses of modern science. WOMEN’S WRITING FOR WOMEN’S MAGAZINES If the previous journals were written only by men for men, women started their own periodicals that provided a forum for women writers and readers. They were different, not meant to compete with men, covering other spheres. One of the most important was The Ladies Mercury [1693] that included all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behavior, dress and honor of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows. Women at the time didn’t have any social rights, were not allowed in universities and were basically at the same level of children or dissenters; they needed a male figure in order to have a social role and voice, so it was a great risk for a woman to put herself out. For this reason they started to talk about child and marriage mostly, all that was allowed. Generally speaking, the best condition for a woman was to be a widow, they already had children and a marriage, so they were finally free. Ladies mercury was addressed to a female public, but we’ve also got the Female Spectator written by Eliza Haywood, more challenging than the first one, especially for the title, addressed to a man's journal. It was the first magazine entirely by and for women and was extremely popular. It was a collection of essays that allegedly originated in letters from readers that provided an ideal forum of discussion, which gave Haywood direct contact to her public and vice versa. Haywood concerned herself with how women might operate better in a society that held restrictions upon them. She knew the difficulties of female life within a patriarchal system, so she wrote to show how not to see such difficulties as a limit to women's possibilities. Haywood gave explicit recommendations to women, urging them to work within the existing system, gain an education and a strong sense of personal power. The lady’s magazine was for entertaining companions for the fair sex, appropriate to their use and amusement. CIRCULATING LIBRARIES XVIII Century → Circulating Libraries exploded during the 1700s, while there may have been a few circulating libraries prior to this period, by the end of the century there were almost a 10000 in England. XIX Century → by the 19th century circulating libraries had become well established in British culture. They provided consumers with reasonably cheap access to the must read novels of the day. Furthermore they quickly became ingrained into the lifestyle of individuals with money and leisure time. They became fashionable daytime lounges, where ladies could see others and be seen, where raffles were held and games were played, and where expensive merchandise could be purchased. They encouraged popular literature also for entertainment. A fee must be paid in order to take part in these libraries, but it was not so expensive considering all the books offered. These libraries allowed to come across operas or novels that otherwise probably would never be read or bought by someone, so it truly was an amazing opportunity. They were full of novelties but also of books from the past. Women were the main assets of these places, they couldn’t go to universities so they started to study and read by themselves. The shelves were full of sermonts, history books, romances, tales and novels. BLUESTOCKINGS Talking about circles, one of the main that needs to be remembered is the Bluestockings → a reading circle composed only by women who met in aristocratic palaces in order to discuss what was going on in artistic fields. Even though the group was made mostly of women, men were also invited, so it was not exclusive. It was a sort of mimic of what was going on in the salons of France, following a sort of sociability encouraged and shared during the enlightenment. From the 1750s until the 1770s, they gathered together in order to discuss literature and encouraged new artists to publish new works, helping in circulating operas. It was an informal sociability based on an important intellectual community. The guests that were invited were political and cultural figures, such as Samuel Johnson, Raynolds, novelists, painters, mixed kind of artists. The name “bluestockings” came from an episode in which one day, a man, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was welcomed in the group even though he was wearing blue stockings, out of fashion for men, used especially by working men and not the elegant pair to show up into at a meeting. The name underlines the fact that it was an informal meeting but still a prestigious one because it was held by aristocratic people. A member of the Bluestockings, a poet, Hannah More, also published a poem dedicated to the members of the group, The Bas Blue or Conversation, underlining the electric, sparkling conversations of people, their capacity to advance the circulation of new ideas. She compared the bluestockings with a mineral that shines, comparing their spark of intelligence to the minerals. In the 70s/80s they developed a network that helped to shape a more civilized society not only in London. This modern network of friendship gave support to writers, like William Blake, who came from a working class background, but, thanks to the interest shown by the group, was encouraged to publish his works, otherwise impossible because of his lack of money. Novels were printed only if the book promised to sell a lot of copies and this was something that could be ensured only by a group of aristocrats, that could provide the printer with a list of subscriber that was sent to the publisher enlisting all the people that would buy the book once it was on the open [system of subscription] Bluestockings at the time could find a lot of people that would buy and enlist for a book → Hannah More for example was conservative in politics and in literature and she met a milk woman who worked on a farm who had a natural talent, who was a genius, so she encouraged her to publish her points with the support of the bluestockings. The circle was perceived by the public with a mixed perception, on one hand they were seen as geniuses of the art and portrayed by Samuels in the nine living muses of Great Britain as classical figures, perfect, almost from another faraway time and world. On the other hand, others were not happy about the thought that women could find a circle for discussing the world. Related to this negative view, a critic, Rowlandson, realized a satiric drawing portraying a negative image of the gathering, a mess full of fighting. So on one hand they were celebrated, but on the other were full of prejudice → educated women were not accepted. Numerous articles were written against these members, defined as an outrageous show off. Bluestocking was considered a hideous product of narcissism. Women were starting to get out and insert themselves in society, even though some of them were seen as aristocratic and smart, others were seen as someone who could only stay in the kitchen, and the danger began exactly when they started to get mixed up in the bluestocking. AUGUSTAN AGE Novel and literary criticism, although were respectively the main genre and main influence during the 70s, were not the only genres existing. Poetry was another important type of writing for this age. It was not the most popular genre, it was considered too formal, topical, simple, excessive in some elements, it used an unnatural language, too refined, too sophisticated. The Augustan kind of poetry was directed only to learned men and not to women. With the advent of restoration there was a general emphasis on Greek and Roman culture, presented as the origin of literature, so if you didn’t have a classical education you would probably miss the point and the references. During the 18th century the knowledge of Greek and Roman cultures was seen as an essential requirement for anyone who attempted to write in English; it was an exclusive kind of knowledge. The writers venerated the ancient poets and this, added to the themes of the poems, gave birth to the so-called augustan age in the first decade of the 18th century. Many of the poets translated the classics, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, that were also imitated in english. These poets combined the influence of the classics with English traditions that were not forgotten but fused and combined. In contrast with early poets such as Milton and Donne, the 18th century poets wanted the language to be simpler, but referred also to the classical tradition, especially in the syntax, that was similar to the Latin one and really complex. The key word was “balance”, required between the natural elements and the strict rules of composition. The rhyme scheme was also really important because it had to show the knowledge of the writers. Like the classical poets who inspired them, the English Augustan writers engaged the political and philosophical ideas of their day through urbane, often satirical verse. References to the political situation were not omitted, but masqued by using images from the past in order to criticize the present. The satire was really dangerous during the 18th century and could cause death and often censorship. Pope studied the Mock Heroic as a kind of popular form of satire, epic in narration but also full of satire. The Rape of the Lock is a complicated story written first anonymously and then signed by Pope, who talked about a lady, Belinda, who was deprived by a lock of hair → quite frivolous as an issue, but arranged as the great battle of the century. The description of the battles in the background seems almost stupid compared to the event of the lady. The language is really complicated, with a lot of references to the classical world. The poem satirizes a minor incident of life, by comparing it to the epic world of the gods. The scheme of rhymes will be rejected later, in favor of the blank verse. This kind of poem was exclusive, and could not circulate long in a world in which the public grew exponentially, especially in the reading of novels that were more accessible. begs on her knees her father not to be in an arranged marriage [novelty - the body communication is extremely powerful], but it’s not sufficient. Meanwhile we’ve got through the other correspondence that Robert, a friend of Clarissa's brother, is trying to marry Clarissa's sister. As it clears through the narration, Clarissa refuses the arranged marriage, and her family increasingly isolate her, putting her in a room by herself. Her life becomes very difficult, she’s put in a corner → modern element, a girl that is opposing herself becomes a stranger in her own family. At this point of the narration, Robert suggests Clarissa to escape in order to build a new life outside of the family, so she leaves [rebellion]. Eventually the new situation is not very liberating, Robert has a plan of his own and tries to seduce her. She’s resisting him, claiming that she has no interest in marriage to anyone, she’s not in love and she chooses not to be a married woman [4 element of novelty] But Robert is very imposing, he’s not accepting a no as an answer, so he eventually grabs and rape her. We don’t obviously know the details about the act, but we know that it happened thanks to the letters. Clarissa loses the will to live, she gives up eating and in a couple of months she dies. It’s not a passive way of responding to events, Robert is a sort of empowering force that brings her to die, it’s her decision. Robert then is rejected from society, goes to France and dies alone and miserably, as he should. The history is defined as a tragedy composed of 1500 pages. Even though the length is considerably long, we should consider the novel as a very effective one → through the letters the readers can sympathize with her situation, and thanks to the epistolary form we can listen and compare the versions of the story. The writer is not declaring his own judgment or conclusions, he disappears. The way in which the letters are used is different, so as the way in which Clarissa and Robert are writing, against the stereotype. Robert is a letterate man, while Clarissa doesn’t know much, but her letters are extremely straightforward, clear, compared to Robert that is pompous, frivolous almost. Clarissa narrates the story of an independent woman at a time in which woman independence is not so accepted. The woman, who could be financially independent, is not allowed to choose for herself → it’s not the case of Pamela, a servant, Clarissa on the contrary, even though she was a woman of means, can not rely on freedom. This is a major contribution to enlightenment and to society, it’s a tragedy and wants to spread more knowledgement. Richardson was not facing the privilege of his position → he was a working class man, not educated and this lack of education is probably why he adopted the female position. He was really fond of literary criticism and gave importance to new directions in form. Henry Fielding wrote a novel called “An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews”, a parody of the Richardson novel “Pamela”, as a reply to it. Shamela is a prostitute → he’s writing the story from the other side of the coin’s perspective, from the perspective of irony, something that Richardson couldn’t do. Richardson lacks irony → Shamela is a prostitute that writes letters, she’s a hunter, she searches for a rich man, so she’s the opposite of Pamela. As Fielding says, in real life you cannot meet only Pamelas rewarded for their capacities, there are different types of women, prostitutes too, not only heroines. There are women who surrender to challenges of life, it’s an hypocrisy to believe that everything is Pamela, there are shapes in reality. The novel could be defined as a sort of burlesque. The masterpiece of Fielding is Tom Jones, a novel that condemns the hypocrisy of society → it’s a comic novel, staging the difference between public career and private motivation, reality and appearance, the human nature, the ideas, the mind of humans, corruption, vanity of aristocratic people. He wants to show the differences between who you are and what you show, people without masks. Tom says what he thinks. He has a handsome face and soul but he’s not perfect, he sins, but he’s prone to repent, he’s human. We can sympathize with both Pamela and Clarissa, but it’s simpler to feel Tom. Fielding is employing the external narration in the novel even though sometimes he’s intruding. He gives comments about the situation, he’s manipulating the characters as well as the readers. We’re not encouraged to make our own judgment. There's a complicity between protagonists, writer and reader. Laurence Sterne represents another type of writing. He’s representing the cult of sensibility. He wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by overthrowing the chronological order of the events in the novel. Everything is narrated with backwards and forwards [modern kind of novels]. The narrator himself admits that he found it difficult to keep track of the novel. Both the content and the form of the novel are controlled, but the character is left to talk about himself freely, so it’s difficult to understand where we are in the story. The story begins at the moment of his conception and diverts into endless digressions, interruptions, stories-within-stories and other narrative devices. Sterne is recognized as one of the most important forerunners of psychological fiction. THE CULT OF SENSIBILITY What is the cult of sensibility? What does sensibility mean? it’s difficult to translate it in italian, maybe it’s the correspondent of sentimento, emotività, commozione, empatia. During the 18th century authors and philosophers started to stress the importance of emotion, feelings in human relationships and in the 1840s argued that all humans possess an innate human sense or sensibility inside. Sensibility manifests itself through emotions, feelings such as sympathy or benevolence for other people. The origin of the cult is very complex, but it was a movement which combined empiricism notions of human knowledge coming from Locke with the beliefs expressed by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who said that humanity was in a state of nature, in which the man is naturally good and benevolent, but it is corrupted by society and civilization. Hume, a scottish enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism and naturalism. He said that everyone should follow emotions as a guide → if you follow your emotions, you’re not going to fail. Women were seen as primarily humans with deep feelings, but then men too. We’ve also got opponents to the cult, the ones who were concerned with self interest of the man, those thinkers who promoted an improvement of society through economy and self interest [Crusoe]. Selfishness was considered from those as an asset in society, something positive, associated with financial benefit in the consumer society. The cult of sensibility promotes the responses to human suffering, saying that acts of benevolence improve society more than selfishness. It’s an individual kind of attitude, but if everyone acts like that society can benefit from it. Edmund Burke, a british statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, says about sympathy that “It is by the first of these passions that we enter into the concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of the nature of those which regard self-preservation, and turning upon pain may be a source of the sublime or it may turn upon ideas of pleasure; and then whatever has been said of the social affections, whether they regard society in general, or only some particular modes of it, may be applicable here. It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself.” → we’re moving from philosophy to painting, literature and other kinds of art, all pertinent to what was produced. The arts are not separated, they’re in dialogue during the romantic period with each other, they’re communicating this sympathetic effect in order to move the reader, to promote this kind of substitution in order to promote society, arts are useful to improve society, it’s a sort of pleasure. Adam Smith, another scottish philosopher, in the same line as Burke affirms in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that → "However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian or most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it." → he says that we need to show sympathy, but also remember that even bad people are entitled to compassion. This theory will then be perfect for the gothic type of literature, in which a lot of criminals are not condemned but studied → depending on how the villain is described and the author's presentations, especially if we know his backstory, we can sympathize with him and try to understand his motives. WOMEN AND MEN OF FEELINGS In this type of novel we find men and women authors talking about men and women feelings, with protagonists of both sexes. We remember here: ★ Eliza Haywood or “Mrs. Novel”, that wrote Love in Excess in 1719 with sexual intrigues; following a new taste of sentiment concording to the requests of the public; ★ Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, not competing with her brother. She wrote about education, rape and The Adventures of David Simple ★ Oliver Goldsmith that wrote The Vicar of Wakefield ★ Laurence Sterne who, in A Sentimental Journey described the traveling of a man who’s sharing in this novel what’s happening to other people that he meets in his travels. ★ Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling, a novel in which a man, whose name we don’t know, talks and sympathizes with poor men and incarcerated women, weeping through the story because of the sympathy. The following quotations represent a sort of cliché of the men of feelings. After this movement followed a rejection of this sort of stereotypes of men and women crying, who became subjects of satire and irony. Eventually the sensitivity will be renowned in other forms. L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey → “I look’d in Maria’s eyes, and saw she was thinking more of her father than of her lover or her little goat, for as she uttered them, the tears trickled down her cheeks. I sat down close by her; and Maria let me wipe them away as they fell, with my handkerchief.—I then steep’d it in my own—and then in hers—and then in A lot of philosophers and artists started to study visual arts. They saw the advancement in the studies of modern sciences and natural philosophy. In the 1790s, Coleridge wrote that “philosophers and intellectuals were united in their endeavors to solve the mysteries of human and natural life, and that science was strongly tied to ethical, religious, political and literary concerns.” Although their methods were different, scientists and poets had similar goals in interpreting and revealing the natural world. Poets were not isolated anymore, but men living in a society and responding to it through the verses of their poems in order to discover something [pivoting]. The goal is not dissimilar to the scientist one, they want to know more about themselves, the world, the nature, and share it with people, confronting the readers. Knowledge is not exclusive anymore, it needs to be accessible to everybody. In this new panorama, the cult of sensibility is not fading away, it’s transforming, people are interrogating themselves. While Locke provided the philosophical bases for the interest in the selves, Coleridge considered sensibility the creative art for writers and imaginations. He rejected the content of the mind as a passive receiver of sensation. Wordsworth and Coleridge supported the idea that the mind creates the word, it has a power, the one of imagination. Romantic poets define themselves as scientists who can create new words and content. In his ideas, Coleridge was influenced by the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that categories inherited within the mind shaped the external world as it was perceived. Coleridge considered the mind as a plant, absorbing oxygen and light while emitting vapor and fragrance, which was a vital activity as growing and fading in mutual relationship with the outside world. In this sense the mind receives from the outside in an active way and gives back something in return. Poets are inventing and describing new ways of interpreting and analyzing reality, the poet must now speak the language of common people, he’s choosing a simpler language, the popular one, he’s opening up to everybody. The romantic theories about aesthetics helped the romantic to interpret the word of science using aesthetic categories, and Burke is one of the most influential romantic who defined two of these categories in one of his writings. Through an important statement, Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, gives us two definitions of sublime and beautiful. They both are qualities of the human mind, both ideas of a very different nature → sublime is associated with pain, fear and danger while beauty is pleasure, smooth and polished. If we apply these definitions to the aesthetic, we get two different methods of measurements: the sublime is needed to be something big, strong and overwhelming, as it was a metaphor for men, while the beauty is something little, light and delicate, associated with the female form. These two distinctions are useful because they can be used in visual arts and also in general distinctions. How deep can man feel pleasure and pain? Is it deeper the reaction to pleasure or to pain? Is there a bottom, something that we can overcome thinking about pleasure, a level to which we can sustain pain? We can appreciate something and find something beautiful, but how deep can we immerse ourselves? Pain is much more complex to deal with, first of all we can experience pain as far as we can endure, there are different levels of it and also we can share the pain of others as long it does not belong to us, until the deepest level of it, death. “Whatever is fitted to the ideas of pain and danger, whatever is in any sort terrible, [...] is a source of the sublime. It is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” Pain is defined as the strongest emotion, “because the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. [...] The torments which we may suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the liveliest imagination, and the most sound sensible body, could enjoy.” Men are more attracted to the idea of pain according to Burke, especially during the French Revolution, when people were executed in public, because pain gives strong emotions, in this specific case that we can share with the one that is being killed. Even though we’re not risking our life, we’re empathizing. We can also sympathize with the happiness of others, but it’s not as deep an emotion as sympathizing with the sorrows of others. At the end, Burke says that “as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are very few pains which are not preferred to death. [...] When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, they may be delightful, as we experience every day.” The sublime is a quality of the human mind, a very broad category and is way more influential than beauty, even though sublime is linked to painful feelings. It’s such a powerful and overwhelming experience that we find it difficult to describe, but in the end it gives us more pleasure. Not everybody is obviously agreeing with Burke, he’s referred to but also discussed. His position is not the only one, it’s just an idea, a theory, but it’s so influential that it will be reproposed in the written and visual arts. Together with Burke, another important figure is William Gilpin, a clergyman, religious writer, school manager and travel writer, but most famously known as the one who theorized how to portray picturesque scenes on paper. This aesthetic category is explained and represented in Three Essays, on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; on Sketching Landscape: to which is added a poem, on Landscape Painting, where it becomes clear to us that the picturesque is the center of his investigation. Gilpin is important to understand the gothic novel, as is Burke. Why is it important to add the picturesque image? Because as he says that “sublimity alone cannot make an object picturesque” sublime and beautiful are not seen as enough in order to describe the world, there are other ways to look and describe the shape and different dimensions that we can find out there. Gilpin’s essay begins with an invitation “let us then…” because in the essay writing there’s often a sort of invitation for the reader to participate in the discussion. Gilpin is inviting to search for after effects. He’s very different from Burke, who was very assertive. Gilpin has a different approach to his theories, inviting the reader to search with him something less obvious, more hidden in nature. But how do we do that? With traveling, not just by reading or watching, but by going outside [grand tour] in order to travel. When you travel you see new things, especially from a different perspective, to see is a sort of amusement, is something that you do with pleasure. Gilpin is making a list of ingredients, like a cooking recipe, guiding the reader in order to discover new things in nature, in the English landscape, needed to be faced because common and so needed to be seen from a distance. Looking at things from different perspectives gives us another kind of view of the landscape. He's giving a guide in order to let others perceive the world by a perspective of variation, combination, lights and shades. He has a polemical attitude towards Burke, but he’s not considering him as wrong, just different. In one of Radcliffe’s novels, he’s using Gilpin’s guide in order to describe an Italian landscape that he’s never seen. He’s only using imagination and this guide, through which he’s capable of painting a magnificent representation of our Italian world. Gender and domesticity will be arguments of discussion. Masculine and feminine sphere will be analyzed by two spheres of activities, public and private and especially underlined by the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft. There’s a dichotomy in the romantic period in every kind of field, everything is open to discussion. We have already discussed the importance of circulating libraries in the disclosure of the new artistic productions. Consumers are now participating actively; professional writers are now paid and discussed, also for what concerns women, even though there always was a consciousness of social class, in which the upper one dictated the market. All this consumer kind of literature was pivotal for the social consumer and for social change. Public institutions, in which people gathered to be listened to, are gaining importance, especially because they’re the places where to listen to new scientists narrating discoveries. Periodicals, journals, started to circulate in the 18th century and were pivotal for literary journalism. Journals were not anymore just receivers of news and events → this new kind of literary journalism became a literary genre, providing reviews and introducing new, more accessible forums for critical discussion. Literary journalism multiplied and diversified the opportunities for critical expression; it fostered new critical values, drew attention to new literary genres, systematized the treatment of established ones and expanded the audience for criticism. In subtler ways it affected canon formation, the reception of history, the emergence of affective criticism, the assimilation of foreign influences, the segregation of ‘women’s literature’ and ultimately, the politics of culture. That is what criticism is also doing today. What is excluded in anthologies that we study today? We’re used to looking at an anthology and think that everything that we need to know is in there, but are we sure about that? what about the text of secondary school? is there a comprehensive list of author in there? or just a list of them? There’s always a choice that has been made for us by others. This is the type of literary criticism that started to form in this period and created a canon, a list of the most important artists and works of the time, but who’s forming these canons? The journalists started to make a list of who’s in and who’s out, foreign influences were also very important. English writers were translated. The Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle by Edward Cave is one of the first literary journals. It’s composed of a collection of letters and a bit of everything, even popular topics. It’s a mixed type of journal, including poetry and essays on diverse popular topics, many in forms of letters received by the editors, in addition to news about births, marriages and deaths, commodity prices, lists of new publications and parliamentary reports. This kind of journal was directed to and thought of as being read by the class that was growing in that period, the middle class. Through this escamotage, journals were appealing to an audience that would include both progressive members of the gentry and the professional middle classes. It had the purpose to be a mirror of the states of art, politics and the economy at both national and international levels. The Analytical Review, or New Literary Journal by Joseph Johnson, one of the dissenters and radical editor and publisher-bookseller, was one of the major contributions to the genre. Since he was a dissenter, he promoted a lot of publishing about reforms, having a radical and political view. Johnson encouraged a lot of women writers to publish and circulate and though he was a Whig and sustained the American Revolution, he declared himself against the French one. Burke was indeed in favor of keeping all the privileges of the aristocratic people. In her letter, Wollstonecraft begins by saying “let us sir reason together” → she's not apologizing because she’s a female entering a male dominion, she’s saying that she’s a woman of reason with her own political beliefs. She then realized that all the discussion left out the other half of the society, women, so two years later she wrote a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, focusing on women. Here she’s questioning women's education, because at the time, books written by men were perpetuated to women in order to be studied, giving them control over their education. She confronts men's publications and challenges them. She talks about the rights and involved duties of mankind considered, the prevailing opinion of a sexual character. She makes observations on the state of degradation to which women are reduced by various causes and on the effect which an early association of ideas has upon the character. She talks about morality, undermined by sexual notions of the importance of a good reputation, about the pernicious effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society and about parental affection; duty to parents and national education. Wollstonecraft is contrasting the idea that Rousseau wrote in his Emile, in which he ruled women only to the domestic sphere and as men pleasers, she says that women were not meant just for that, but were rational creatures. Even though the ideals of Rousseau were supported, Wollstonecraft was taking a radical starting point on women, if women were indeed treated as rational creatures, not only the female genre would have benefit of that, but also the family, the society and consequently the world. She does not want to make women better than men, but she advocates for an equal society for all genders. Mary Wollstoncraft is widely recognised as a Feminist Pioneer, being one of the principal architects to enter the fight for sexual equality. Her work is still published around the world. The ebbs and flows of Wollstonecraft‘s reputation are inextricably tied to society‘s wider view of women‘s rights. Her rehabilitation has been championed by some of the most preeminent feminists of the 20th century, suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett and writer Virginia Woolf among them. By the time the bicentenary edition of Rights of Woman was published, Mary was an established feminist icon. Today she remains an enduring symbol of the ongoing fight against misogyny and sexual injustice. In her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” she’s engaging the reader into the discussion by asking questions in her texts. She is not giving an ultimate truth in her writing but rather opening it up for discussion. Furthermore, she is employing rhetorical devices as well as the natural world as a metaphor in her writing. She admits to the physical superiority of men over women, but she emphasizes that in other aspects women could and should be men‘s equals. She says the fault not only lies with men but also with women who are only interested in flattery. She writes, however, that women are often only at fault for this due to their own ignorance which results from the patriarchy. She wrote specifically about the middle class, as she considered the aristocrats as parasites who only exist for their own amusement. She makes a comparison between women and soldiers as both are trained to obey orders, but unlike women, soldiers have potential for advancement in life, can travel to many places, and can enjoy physical freedom that women are not allowed to have. Rousseau argues that „a woman should never, for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a mere alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man whenever he chooses to relax himself“ to which Wollstonecraft responds calling all of this as nonsense. The generation that came next to Wollstonecraft was more conservative → they saw that the aftermath of the French Revolution wasn’t so optimal. If we think about poets of the romantic period, we can say that they saw the beginning and the aftermath of the revolution, and still considered it and its principle as something right, even though they condemned the period of terror and massacres, turning their visions into an utopian one. They knew the promises of the revolution and had faith in the future, during a period in which everything that was promised would be applied for a more fair society. When the revolution ended and half of the promises weren’t fully accepted, in their mind they just thought that the time wasn’t probably ready for such rights, especially for what concerns the second generation of romantic poetry. In England there were a lot of books dedicated to female education that were reflecting Rousseau's ideas. English intellectuals, priests, didactic novels, dedicated lessons, surmounts, were created in order to focus on the importance of keeping women education limited to music or languages, the basis for being capable of entertaining a nice conversazione to be ready to mingle in society. Women needed to know some accomplishments in order to attract the attention of a suitable husband, nothing more. Wollstonecraft is contesting Fordyce, Gregory, all who were supporting the french author. She said that women were rational, more capable than just being right for cultivating futile accomplishments, what was left when beauty faded? women needed to be educated as men. The conservatives were agreeing on some social reforms, but women and men, following their opinions, didn’t need to have the same education. The illustration of Gillray of “The Fashionable Mama” shows how women were perceived → the illustration presents the domestic field, they needed to be mothers, wives, but also be beautiful and capable of accomplishments in order to represent beauty. They should follow the fashion of the time but at the same time need to feed the baby and be maternal. There’s a sort of paradox. Breastfeeding was a controversial practice, still today, is natural but not seen as such if done in public. Mary Wollstonecraf acquired acknowledgement about women's education from her own experience because she was both a teacher and a writer. In her “Thoughts on the Education of Daughters” published in 1787 by the radical publisher Johnson she talked about this sphere that she knew so well. Johnson took a great interest in her work → Mary was so part of his family at the point she was going on holidays with them in order to help with their daughter. She knew the aristocratic world, even though she wasn’t part of it. In 1787 she spent a year as a governess to Lord and Lady Kingsborough’s family in Ireland. Back in London she published other educational works, including Original Stories from Real Life and The Female Reader and her novel Mary: A Fiction, writing one of the most important genres of the time. In 1791 she met William Godwin and Thomas Pain, together with the painter Henry Fuseli, as she took part in many multicultural centers. After the French Revolution she lived in Paris with the American land-speculator Gilbert Imlay, in a period not so amazing for foreigners that were not seen so well. After she married Gilbert, from whom she had a child, she returned to London, making a plea-for-help suicide bid in her efforts to win Imlay back, a man that didn’t want anything to do with her. In 1796 she published her successful travel-book Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, originated in the business visit she undertook on Imaly’s behalf, who at this time was living with another woman. On her return to London she made another, more serious, attempt at suicide. She was against any rules about marriage or love. One of Mary's friends reintroduced her to the radical philosopher, political theorist, and novelist William Godwin,who became her lover. They married in March 1797 when she was pregnant, but they didn’t live together or tell anybody about the marriage because they were anti conventional. On 10 September she died of an infection incurred in childbirth, ten days after the birth of their daughter Mary, Mary Shelley, who never had a chance to meet her mother even though she had a huge inheritance from her. She was an exceptional woman who did a lot for society and women in general. She was free, independent, liberal, defined as a sort of dangerous animal, to keep at distance. Godwin was so in love with her that when she died he published a memoir of her “Memoirs and Posthumous Works”, in which he included an incomplete novel of the woman, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, compromising the image of the woman at the end of the century. She was really philosophical; she entered into dialogue with Rousseau in the Vindication using all the rhetorical devices of the 18th century. We've got a lot of observations, especially about reality in order to better understand the world. She's analyzing the prevailing opinions, the state of the degradation of women. She describes the ideals behind modesty and morality of society. She’s not vindicating the right of women above the right of men, she’s just asking for equality. Only when they’re equal can society really be improved. She’s organizing a discourse in order to get women on the same level as men, in order to let them rule together and give an example of good society to children. Mary is a pioneer in women’s rights. She’s recognised as a principal architect in the fight for sexual equality and her work is still published around the world. Her rehabilitation has been championed by some of the most preeminent feminists of the 20th Century, among them we can remember the writer Virginia Woolf, who in A Room of One’s Own is looking back in time in order to find a genealogy of women writers that had to struggle in society and time in order to be heard. Mary was an established feminist icon. Today she remains an enduring symbol of the ongoing fight against misogyny and sexual injustice. To celebrate Wollstonecraft’s inheritance was built a statue for the women, a controversial one that some critics defined as something too revealing. Why was the mother of feminism being celebrated with a naked Barbie doll at the top of it? One aim was to stimulate debate. To say it has done that is an understatement. Immediately owners and their overseers sought to obliterate the identities of their newly acquired slaves, to break their wills and sever any bonds with the past. They forced Africans to adapt to new working and living conditions, to learn a new language and adopt new customs. They called this process 'seasoning' and it could last two or three years. For Africans, weakened by the trauma of the voyage, the brutality of this process was overwhelming and this is why many died or committed suicide, the ones who resisted were then punished. From an economic point of view people were treated as merchandise because they increased the level of the nation, while on ships they were seen as animals, punished if not responding to commands, chained on board and not free to enjoy the open air. They were often forced to eat with a mechanical instrument that kept their mouths open. This selling obliterated the identity of these people, original names were changed, adapted with an European one in order to erase what was their life before the middle passage. These are the passages that the abolitionist condemned, the fact that they were almost erased for what concerns their life before, as they were given the chance to be reborn in another reality, an unfair destiny for those who had families, names, languages, religions, societies and communities in Africa. POLITICS OF RESISTANCE: THE ABOLITIONIST The influential Scottish economist Adam Smith was one of the first important figures to speak out against slavery from an economic point of view, which then became an humanitarian issue and started to be questioned first as an economic practice. He saw the slave trade as incompatible with a system of human intellectual advancement founded on free will. Slavery was against the principle of free will. While Smith’s opposition to slavery was based on reason, other anti-slavery protesters were motivated by religion and emotion [cult of sensibility]. The questioning started from the economy and then was carried out on other aspects of reality for very different reasons. Adam Smith’s economic philosophy considered free will the motor that would improve national economics. However, most abolitionists, including Smith, did not consider slaves their equals, arguing for an end to the trafficking of human beings without much concern for those humans’ intellectual capacities; he was not campaigning for equality. Anti-slavery sentiment reached its peak around 1740 – even though the trade started almost two hundreds years before – but did not see reform until 1807 when the Atlantic slave-trade was abolished. Although slavery and slave welfare had long been issues of considerable public and parliamentary concern, only in 1833 was the slave ownership abolished. The abolitionist agenda found support in political circles, radical intellectuals, religious movements, and, of course, slaves themselves. The campaign was not dividing people, but uniting them in front of the same political views. Slavery and the slave trade was a political issue that involved the entire population thanks to advertisements, petitions, sermons, literature and personal narratives. Along with politics and religion, social and class conflicts were also factors in abolitionist arguments, with many viewing the anti slavery campaign as a battle of ‘self-interest’. By supporting the rights of slaves, those who belonged to classes outside the traditional system, like Quakers, Dissenters and members of the working class, also supported their own. In this way, women and Dissenters were driven not by economic but social interests, petitioning for social improvement in a broad sense; women were not so different from slaves, especially for what concerns their rights. William Wilberforce was not a dissenter, but in the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade he welcomed dissenters. He was perhaps the best known of the abolitionists. Wilberforce was the speaker in support of his Abolition Bill before the House of Commons and was part of the parliament. He was a conservative, but as a spokesperson in the parliament, he collected all the petitions and presented them in front of the court. In order to abolish the slave trade, England had to issue a law against it. The abolitionists were not just sympathizing with the slaves, they wanted to change society by improving the law. We've got quite interesting speeches addressing the parliament in very different ways, one of his discourses in particular is considered as a piece of literature for its strangeness. Eventually he’s using this type of rhetoric advancing proposals by not attacking the government and the laws, but by facing his fellow citizens by talking about something he knows through observations. He wants to speak about the trade giving his opinion and persuading the others not through accusations, but letting them be moved, using a rhetoric of sensibility, especially because most of the people in the government were landowners and supported the slave trade. They claimed that slaves enjoyed good food, weather, could sing, so the life that was offered to them was better. Some English people lived in a more horrible situation than the one from the slaves. “I will not accuse the Liverpool merchants: I will allow them [they are aware of the situation, he’s talking to people that are well aware of everything, he wants them to change their point of view], nay, I will believe them to be men of humanity; and I will therefore believe if it were not for the enormous magnitude and extent of the evil which distracts their attention from individual cases, [...] they would never have persisted in the trade” → He’s describing the middle passage, the voyage of these slaves. How can we bear to think of such a scene as this? → he’s trying to convince the men of the government to open their eyes, basing his speech on proves, on the many deaths, on Jamaica reports, on diseases. “How then can the House refuse its belief to the multiplied testimonies before the privy council, of the savage treatment of the negroes in the middle passage?” → the numbers talk for themselves, he would never rest till it ended This speech had a response to it → Wilberforce had to face an opposition that complained about his parliamentary discourse, considered as a long rhetorical strategy, complaining that Wilberforce was refraining to get people to know the truth. The opposition, in response, started his discourse by talking about British economy that would collapse if the slave trade would have been given up. If they gave up the slave trade how would the other countries profit from them? It would be a loss, but at the same time England had to be the first to let go of the practice. Thomas Clarkson → tried to stop slave trade. He was travelling around the colonies in order to collect evidences about slave trade. He wrote an essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species focusing on the Africans Olaudah Equiano → a black writer who composed an autobiography. He was also called Gustavus Vassa, in order to remember the name that was given to him by his owners. He affirms his own identity by recollecting his original name. He got married, lived in London, was part of the society and promoted the action of the abolitionist. John Henry Newton → an ex-slave trader who turned minister and abolitionist. He wrote the lyrics for the hymn Amazing Grace and became Wilberforce's spiritual counselor, setting his young protégé on the path of service to humanity. It was only after Wilberforce underwent what he later described as his "great change" or embrace of Christianity, that he became a reformer. Newton considered himself as a wretch, he was repenting, in the hymn he says “I once was lost, but now am found Was blind but now I see” → he was lost in human trafficking but now he found the light and god. He understands, he cannot avoid reality anymore. Interesting because at the end of his life he truly was blind. The Wedgwood Seal was the official seal of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade [1787]. It was used in writings, dresses and bracelets. The Society’s seal is among the most famous of all political images and also one of the most controversial. It appropriates and perpetuates the image of the subservient “kneeling slave,” suggesting that freedom is a privilege to be bestowed upon a passive rather than an active subject. In fact, resistance and action on the part of the enslaved themselves was crucial to the abolition of slavery in Britain. To sum up, the chronology opens with ● Mansfield → in 1772, a judgment that ended slavery in Britain by ruling that enslaved persons landing on English soil were free. Such a sentence came at the judge because there was a famous case involving a slave, the Somerset’s Case, in which the judge had to judge the case of Somerset vs Stuart. Charles Stuart was the owner of James Somerset, who was bought as a slave in Africa. Stuart came to England with the slave and wanted to sell him again, but the judge was asked to give a sentence about the rights of Somerset to be free in England. According to the law indeed, Stuart could not force the slave to move or be sold, because Somerset, by touching the English soil, was a free man. Everyone in England was free, even though in theory it’s a contradiction, even though everyone was free slavery was permitted in the colonies. Mansfield is remembered because he judged slavery illegal. ● SEAST → In 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade [SEAST] was formed by gathering all abolitionists, following the idea of Wilberforce together with other people. The abolitionists choose Wilberforce as their leader. He was elected by the Yorkshire district as a member of the parliament in London. After he left the UK he was a bit unsure if his life would be dedicated to politics or to the church but eventually, his friends encouraged him to take in politics for his capacities, and not by chance, his first campaign in parliament was dedicated to the rights of the animals. The abolitionists saw him as the correct person to rule the cause. ● Zong Massacre → In 1781 a fact happened, the Zong Massacre, in which again, judge Mansfield was involved. In 1781 a British slave, Zong, left Gana with a ship overloaded with slaves in order to arrive in Jamaica. Eventually, the ship’s owners claimed that due to navigational errors the journey took longer than expected and the water was running below, so the crew threw more than 100 slaves overboard. When the owner went back to London, they claimed that they ensured the cargo, but it was half covered so they wanted a refund. But Mansfield ruled that in this case insurance cannot be paid because the life of people was involved. Per se the judgment wasn’t a big deal, but the fact that it was brought in front of the court gave the Zong Massacre a great publicity. It was clear that something went wrong in the middle passage, that did not concern water, but probably a disease or something similar. Ann Yearsley, the milk woman from Bristol, composed “A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade” Helen Maria Williams wrote “Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade”. Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Amelia Opie wrote several poems engagin in slave trade as economic transaction, using this issue to discuss human rights at large, as many dissentors did. They both embodied the class of dissenters representing the dissenting community, and since they came from this economic class and were women, they were particularly interested in those who were excluded by society. In their poems both conveyed a double message to the readers → they were supporting human rights and liberty for all people and living beings at large, but especially for those belonging to the dissenting community and African slaves. These intellectuals also considered the private and domestic sphere as the starting point of their works and expanded this view on society in general. They used the language of sensibility for articulating a very effective political and economic discourse. Anna Laetitia Barbauld was part of the Bluestockings with other women but also part of the dissenting community, among the radical ones, the same as Wollstonecraft and Amelia Opie. She was part of the Academy and had editorial support by J. Johnson and J. Priestley, not mentioning she was very into social commitment. She started her career as a poet, thanks to her Poems which gained fame in 1773. She combined the domestic sphere and the public one, trying to keep both spheres together. She was also a teacher, she wrote Lessons for Children in order to educate the small ones. She then published Epistle to William Wilberforce responding to the parliament’s refusal to abolish the slave trade, entering in a debate discussed in parliament, a political discussion. She composed the Rights of Woman, literary criticism as a contributor to the Monthly Magazine and edits the Female Speaker. She composed With an Essay, and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical by Mrs. Barbauld in 50 volumes; which included the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing” She eventually published a long poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, written because she was moved by the prolongation of England’s war against France and by the economic deterioration resulting from it, her last publication. She's against such exhausting and consuming war and she’s expressing her concern in this poem for which she received a very strong criticism. It wasn’t conceivable that she was antiwar, she was seen as anti nationalist for not supporting the government in the war. [A.L.Barbauld.pdf - cartellina] Epistole to William Wilberforce on the rejection of the bill for abolishing the slave trade, was written way before the bill was accepted. The audience of this long poem is the ruling class. It’s an epistle, a sort of letter that she writes to a member of the parliament. She opens with violent language trying to stop Wilberforce, she's addressing her words not only to Wilberforce himself, but to the parliament at large. She's dealing with a language that is very straight forward, it's not about private feelings or matters, it concerns the whole nation and country, showing her political interest in the matter. It’s the reflection of the abolitionist campaign, animated by preachers, poets, senators, figures who communicate to the public and agree with Barbauld's vision. It’s a ballad made of metaphorical meanings. It’s a questioning, a sort of conversation with Wilberforce, without using persuasion. Wilberforce speech was quite different in rhetoric, he knew the audience and adjusted his speaking to it, here Barbauld is infuriated, she cannot restrain herself She wants to make everyone aware of the shame. It's not a sentimental poem, but a reaction, the sentimental can be seen through the references to the senses, but the reaction is strong, not edulcorate The poem is full of political and poetical references. It’s not a harmless deed, it will mark and stain British history. She knows the traffic is human, she knows the whole country knows and does not do anything to stop the African bleeding Eventually whigs and tories will join together, even though she initially refers to them as “hostile forces”. Barbaud language is effective in 2 levels → it’s firstly addressed to Wilberforce talking from an economic and political point of view, but she also sometimes uses the language of young people like in the Mouse’s Petition. The Mouse's Petition is addressed to a larger public, even children, but the message focuses always on the same need to be aware that every creature that lives on earth deserves to be free. From the very title we’re facing a great innovation in poetry, that has now a mission, to change society, to improve it. Petitions are quite slavery familiar, they were used by abolitionists as a plea to ask for hearing, to share what was going on. The petition is here a call for sympathy, for compassion. It’s a poem that involves science, because it is addressed to a scientist, Joseph Priestley, maybe a friend of the woman, who was making experiments involving the lives of mice. It’s structured as a debate → she was very close to Wilberforce even with the arguing about animal rights. She wrote The Caterpillar, which she defined as “a fellowship of sense with all that breathes”, that deserves to live. She says that “Worms, angels, men, in every different sphere are equal all”. The Mouse’s Petition is advocating the life of a little mouse who’s trapped into a cage because of Priestley for the sake of making experiments with gas. The Mouse’s Petition is very different, as it’s understandable from the title. It’s a petition from the point of view of a mouse. It involves the invention of a story and comes from a specific social ladder, the lowest part of the chain. The mouse, if it's contextualized in the 18th century’s discoveries and scientific experimentation, was the one that was most employed by scientists for experimenting any kind of thing [it still is]. It’s a mouse trapped into a cage destined to be used by a scientist for an experiment very soon. It’s a metaphor, the mouse can be read as a human being, a slave, deprived of his liberty and probably about to die, talking about the mouse she's advocating for everyone. It’s a story from an unprivileged point of view, from a living creature destined to die very soon. The cage represents being deprived of freedom and human rights. We can read it as a petition from the point of view of the slaves, dissenters, women or any living soul deprived from the right of living for any good reason. The mouse is not a sinner, a criminal, he’s innocent, unprivileged. It’s a powerful metaphor. So we can read it as an appeal for everybody. Barbauld was into this kind of provocative appeal, she supported any kind of human creature. In her poem “The Caterpillar'', she says that all creatures must be free, even the caterpillar. All the living creatures must be respected. Even though it’s a petition coming from the mouth of a woman is an order, a call for being listened to, she’s using exclamation marks. This petition was found in the trap where the mouse had been confined by Dr. Priesley [a friend of Barbauld, also a preacher]. It’s ironic, because she’s said to have written the poem after spending the night with him, when he showed her the laboratory and she saw the mouse. It’s very easy to read. It’s a refrained ballad, addressed for any kind of reader. There’s a use of the alliteration. It’s a passionate call for sympathy. The word “wretch”, found in every slavery poem, can be interpreted as the cry of a slave, it's a negative word depending on how we read and apply it. A wretch is who’s reacting, it's not a passive receiver of death. Barbauld is repeating that all lives matter, everyone deserves to live freely, if someone deprives the human beings of something simple as air, food or light, it's going to perish [probably a reference to the slave ships too]. Every creature must be free because they’re born free. So why do we allow the imprisonment of such creatures? There’s a sympathy you must feel for everybody. Big or small there's always a soul in everybody, there's a sort of brotherhood implicated and you should not crush a fraternal soul or mind, it's a serious and dangerous crime. Amelia Opie was a dissenter, member of the radical circle, a friend of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. She wrote for children and was an educationist. Her literature, addressed to children, gave her the opportunity to mask her real intention of judgment. She wrote The Negro Boy’s Tale, a poem addressed to children with a didactic purpose, to acquaint young readers with slave’s conditions in the West Indies, a poem supported by philanthropic ideas and by Wilberforce. We've got three characters in the tale, giving us a new type of poetic form of writing. It has an easy scheme. The characters are Zambo, a black boy; Anna, his friend and Trevannion daughter’s, a plantation owner. In the first scenes, Anna is leaving the West Indies on a ship in order to go back to England [third part of the trade triangle] with her father, Trevannion. The ship is ready to leave but Anna is not to be found, she’s talking to Zambo who’s begging her to take him with them in order to go to England, so that he can finally be free. He’s asking her to “listen to a Negro's prayer” → the word negro locates the poem in the 19th century; the negro's prayer is the petition, he already knows that the girl will listen to him, she represents the englishness, the abolitionists that are ready to listen. Zambo left Africa and his mother when was very young. He faced the middle passage all alone and now he’s asking the young English girl to help him, even though the father won’t bring him on board. The ship is sailing and Zambo is desperate. Treviannon said no, so he threw himself into the water in order to join the ship, but he’s struggling, he cannot swim. At this sign Treviannon is moved by compassion and asks to help him immediately, but it’s too late and he’s dying. Eventually at the end we’ve got Opie’s opinion, but the first part, narrated through a dialogue obscures the writer’s voice, letting the boy speak, the vocabulary is the one of a boy. The poet decides to adopt the language used by the character in real life, Anna and Zambo use the children’s language, Anna in English and Zambo, who had to learn english orally, uses the language that he knows. The language is not used to make fun of the character, but the spelling of the african inflation gives the opportunity to him to express himself without losing his own identity. During his speech we realize that he’s worried his mom won’t recognize him, the boy who suffered that much. He was constricted to change his religion to christianity, but even though the christian principle says that you should not do to others what you wouldn't want others to do to you, here it's not applied, if everyone applied what everyone preached, maybe Zambo wouldn't had been a slave. Amelia is making a cross reference to Blake saying that the soul is equal to everybody, there's more under the color of the skin → she's using a simple language in order to let out an universal truth; she's questioning human race and racism 1. Primary imagination → is the faculty to perceive the world through the senses. Everybody possesses this kind of power 2. Secondary imagination → is something exclusively possessed by poets, it’s the poetic vision, a deeper kind of level, which creates reality and the world, it’s a creative power. “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” Fancy and Imagination are not synonyms → fancy is a faculty of the brain that makes association of images, but imagination involves the creative power that poets are gifted of. Romantic poems started to treat nature as a starting point, a focus during the 19th century with the new faith in technologies, new visions of the world imposed and questions about the role of the poet. Thomas Love Peacock wrote a satirical [in tone not content] poet, The Four Ages of Poetry, saying that “A poet in our time is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community” he’s questioning the pivotal role of the poet, he’s not assigning him a special role but says that they’re old fashioned, useless, anchored to the past and not fit for the society of improvement and advances. He compares the poet's writing to a crab that is going backward instead of forward, not following the progress of society. “Poetry can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life a useful or rational man”. → Poets for Peacock are not rational nor useful, in a society of rapid advancement poets have lost their powers. We’ve got a reply to Peacock advocating the role of the poet written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Defence of Poetry. Here he’s defending poetry in general from such detractors as Peacock was. He says that poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called world legislators or prophets. A poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. He argued that poetry's role in society is still important. “Poets are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers'' → they’re not all comprehensive artists, but are linked even to legislators. Poetry is something divine, it’s revealing, it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. The defense closes with “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration”; they’re seen as interpreters of the mysteries of life, breaking the law in order to discover more, something that cannot be stopped or refrained. “The words which express what they understand cannot” → they can see what others cannot. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” → Shelley is going back to Wordsworth and Coleridge in order to represent poets and their identities Mary Robinson too in the preface to Sappho and Phaon is very close to what Shelley said, she says that the task of a poet is not an easy one, he should be regarded and respected more, especially when is a woman. They should “be cherished as a national ornament”. Women poets are equal to men and should be included in British literature. In 1798 the same year during which Coleridge and Wordsworth published the lyrics ballad, Robinson wrote “Thoughts on the Condition of Women” and “The Injustice of Mental Subordination”, underlining the dignity of women poets. Some more romantic poets are Anna Laetitia Barbauld; Charlotte Smith; William Blake and Mary Robinson. The first generation is composed of William Wordsworth; Dorothy Wordsworth; Coleridge; Roberth Southey; while the second generation of Lord Byron; Percy Bhysse Shelley; Felicia Hemans; Lamia Letitia Elizabeth Landon; Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh WILLIAM BLAKE One of the big six, William Blake is remembered not just as a poet, but also as an innovative artist. He’s a visionary artist, not just because he treats his poems like visions, but because he paints and describes his writings through images. He's creating imaginary worlds by using written worlds and paintings. His work was undervalued, even though his production is unique and not so simple to understand → the visions sometimes are difficult to interpret. His uniqueness is because he wrote illuminated books, inventing a unique style in order to portray his personal obscure mythology. Sometimes this mysterious mythology conveys some visions difficult to understand. He was born in London from a working class background. At the age of ten he was enrolled in a drawing school, where he learned to sketch the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient statues. The influence of his early exposure to Greek and Roman sculpture can be seen in Blake’s later works. In 1772 the 14 year old Blake began his apprenticeship under James Basire, an engraver to the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society [manual craft and work]. In Basire’s shop in London, Blake learned the craft of copy engraving as it was practiced in England at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1779, at age 21, Blake completed his seven-year apprenticeship with Basire and became a journeyman copy engraver, making his living by working on projects for London book and print publishers. The same year, he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy of Art’s Schools of Design. In 1780 he assisted at the Gordon Riots spread through London, burning Newgate and releasing 300 prisoners first hand; and was arrested on suspicion of spying. As he was released, while he was working on commercial engraving projects, was also preparing himself for a career as a painter. In the early 1780s, he started to publish the private Poetical Sketches, a collection of poems he had written over the previous fourteen years, comprising a number of voices and genres, whose purpose is blending human figures with landscapes. He was inspired also by the pre romantic poets and the poets of sensibility. In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener; illiterate but he taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. Blake had then a moderate prosperity, giving also drawing lessons, illustrated books, and engraved designs made by other artists. In addition to his own manuscripts and illuminated books, he continued to engrave illustrations for London booksellers, particularly Joseph Johnson, providing also illustrations for Erasmus Darwin’s scientific poem The Botanic Garden and both composed and engraved the six designs for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life, a work of didactic fiction. His work for Johnson may have given Blake an opportunity to meet some of the more prominent radical thinkers and writers in England. The member of Johnson’s circle who played the most important role in Blake’s life, however, was Henry Fuseli, a Swiss artist who had emigrated to England. He and Blake greatly admired each other’s work. He’s combining his words with illustrations, conceiving the poem as a vision, and in order to give light to such a vision he needed words together with illustrations, that don’t just accompany the words but are part of the creative process. Blake was interested in adopting several point of views and voices, we’ve got for example: Songs of Innocence → a collection of songs, meaning something that is narrated out loud, a collection of short lyrics poems that were accompanied by designs in which he’s adopting the point of view of innocent people like children but treating matters that are of great importance in society. The Little Black Boy → deals with slavery and abolition, a political, economical and social issue from the point of view of a boy, as Amelia Ophie did. Songs of Experience → by contrast is a similar kind of collective poem adopting the point of view of adulthood. Again, Songs of Experience are dealing with issues of contemporary society from the perspective of the grown ups who got experience in life, showing a completely different vision. All these different narratives compensate for each other, the different points of view employed give us a different view about something that the other characters are not capable of seeing. The society is the one of London, full of corruption and pollution after the industrial revolution Blake combined these two perspectives, that of the Songs of Innocence and Experience in the third edition, where he combines the two versions, illustrating the two different states of the human soul → Songs of Innocence and of Experience - 1794 to illustrate the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul → “contrary state” meant that he thought that Songs of Experience probably were seen in a way in which the point of view of the adults was contaminated by society and so was not innocent anymore. Of course the urban experience, and the life of poor children are current topics in this collection of songs, they’ve got popular context, but the genre is a popular one. Another kind of publication, an illuminated poem is The Book of Thel, a mark that is opening up the new work of Blake dedicated to visionary poetry. He’s also interested in myth making as a subject so he’s retelling mythical stories from his perspective and revolutionary tales, talking about the historical events from a revolutionary perspective. He also wrote America: a Prophecy, where the American Revolution was seen as an event with mythological as well as historical dimensions. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, can be put in the middle of prophetic and mythical books. In 1800 Blake left London and moved to a cottage near the home of another patron, William Hayley, in Sussex. Hayley was a popular poet. Blake moved back to London in 1803. It was a period of isolation, misunderstandings and poverty. It was at this low point in his fortunes, in 1818, that Blake first met John Linnell, the friend and patron who was to provide him with a circle of dedicated followers and a series of creative projects for the remaining years of his life, especially the pre-rafaelian group. So Blake's poetical works drove from the prophecy, political conflict, but also he was inspired by great writers such as Dante, Milton, Spencer and Shakespeare. He was also keen in illustrating operas like Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy, illustrations that are still famous and evocative. He's choosing both Milton and Dante because both are writers of visionary poems. Theotormon, governor of the waves, is the one who’s waiting for her, calling the soft soul of America, is expecting her to arrive. During the trip Oothoon is struck by the thunder of Bromion, attacking her and consequently raping her. Subsequently Theotormon is very jealous and condemns both the victim and the rapist to stay bonded together in a cave, while he puts himself in front of it. There's then a series of monologues, because the dialogue is not happening, everyone is turned at the other. There's a refrain to the daughters of Albion who are echoing Oothoon. The daughters that represent the female condition, are those who collect the woman’s crying, amplifying it. It’s a simple kind of poem, a drama, but with a lot of compressed allusion and multiple meanings. All the characters, the events and the words employed are full of metaphorical references. Othoon represents the sexual disability and the slave status of women in general in a male dominated society, but since she’s referred to as “the soft soul of America” she also symbolizes the revolutionary nation, America, that has recently acquired a political emancipation and continues to tolerate slavery in its agricultural system. At the same time the character is represented as a black female slave who is abused by her owner, who has raped and impregnated her. Bromion is not only the tyrannical figure, is the cruel slave owner, the master who subjugates others, especially women, as a representative of an oppressive and a religious system based on the abuse of freedom. He's imposing himself with violence. Lastly, Theotormon is even more shamefully represented, because he’s the one who’s jealous, broken, paralyzed. He conceives what happened, but cannot see a future in between the two lovers, he’s paralyzed by the prohibition of the puritanical religion. He’s the one who denies any possibility of joy in the world, he’s lost any kind of hope or faith, especially in the ability of the human imagination to improve the human condition. He’s the one who is not able to think about the possibility that after an act of violence there could be another chance of a future happiness. He’s the one who’s not ready to face a fear, to start a relationship again, to love again. He’s firm, fixed, not ready to forgive and forget. Blake sees it as a condition that is even more despicable than wrong. Apparently Theotormon has no fault, but for Blake he’s even more despicable for his incapacity to move on, because of his religious blindness. He cannot use imagination and if you lose the power to imagine, you cannot improve the human condition, you’re a useless person, you must think that there’s another possibility, a new society. [Wollstonecraft] When Oothoon speaks, she’s asking for compassion, for sympathy, but Theotormon cannot look at her, he sees just what has happened, nothing more. At the end of the poem, Blake gives an image of Theotormon as he was a victim, while Oothoon is celebrating her sexuality despite everything. She’s ready to embrace life again because she’s got imagination, she’s able to overcome her fears, evoking a sexually and liberating life → I cry: Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind! → love should not be caged, but freed. Love is taken from the natural world. Not the plot is important, but the vision, the opening argument introduces us to a female background, the woman is not ashamed to say that she loved Theotormon and was a virgin. I hid in Leutha's vale! → mythological sphere, she’s hiding in a private sphere that protects her, as long as she stays in this veil she’s protected but she’s ready to face difficulties, obstacles. the terrible thunders tore My virgin mantle in twain → theme of rape ROMANTIC NOVELS The years from 1780 to 1830 were crucial for the book trade as they witnessed a rapidly expanding publishing industry. An important factor in this process was the massive production, distribution, and reception of novels. This growth was reinforced by innovations in the mechanics of book production that created the circumstances to seize a larger market for literature, and the physical form of the novel became standardized with the dominance of the three-volume octavo, commonly known as a “three-decker” in the 1830s, the novels were composed of three volumes. Romantic novels developed new and creative experimentations of different forms and narrative practices. Literary review, circulating libraries and critics also stimulated the development of novels. Despite this large circulation, books remained a luxury possession, more frequently they were borrowed by the circulating libraries that were stocked with novels, the most common kind of literature thanks to women subscribers who demanded them as literary production. Novels were considered as an entertainment kind of literature. One of the genres that attracted most was the gothic novel, considered a bit dangerous for the female mind. The origin of gothic fiction developed from the ancient romance, a kind of literature meaning an heroic fable. Clara Reeve, a writer of the period who published also gothic stories, in her The Progress of Romance gives us a definition of the word romance and differs it from the word novel, saying that → “The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen, while the Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.” The romance usually includes a tyranus villain, heroes, a beautiful princess and other stereotypical characters. It’s an ancient and popular narration, whose most important part is the plot, made of several adventures. The novel was developed in the 18th century. It was a modern kind of narration, in prose, realistic, depicting real people in contemporary society, where characters were not stereotyped. In the romantic period writers mingled the origin and the characteristic of romance and novels, creating the gothic. The fusion gave birth to a new form of romance that fused elements of the supernatural with more believable situations, still investigating the reasons of the mysterious. Gothic fiction developed through the ages but the name gothic eventually existed long before being linked to a literary genre → the name derives from the population of the goths, and has medieval associations with the words primitive, barbarous and savage in contrast to the neoclassical style. Gothic was associated with everything that came after the roman empire, everything that was middle aged. With the revival of the medieval, there was a growing interest in the power of the “sublime”, underlining an experience that created a sensation of terror. Anna Barbauld in her “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terrors'' dealt with an unresolved argument between rationality and more suggestible and mysterious states of mind, something that is inexplicable with rationality, undermining and manipulating the logic of the enlightenment rationalism, a sort of reaction to the enlightenment. It’s impossible to explain everything only by using reason, so as the romantic complained with the use of imagination, Gothic novels seek to undermine, manipulate and critique the logic of Enlightenment rationalism. It was a kind of popular literature for a newly enlarged reading public. Barbauld said that when we’re reading or facing something that is difficult to understand, our mind and imagination start to work, creating a sort of attraction to what we’re reading → “imagination rejoices in the expansion of its powers, passion and fancy cooperate and elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement” → if we’re reading something that is dealing with wild, even horror, we receive pleasure from it. In an open dialogue with Burke, she’s giving credit to his theories about the sublime and the horror. The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764 by Walpole, was the very first gothic novel written in England, a very spirited modern attempt upon the same plan of mixed terror, adapted to the model of Gothic romance. Walpole, who published the book anonymously, knew he was dealing with something new and was breaking the rules. It's a new kind of romance, so his identity will be revealed only in the second version of the romance, which will include a preface in it. Walpole was then followed by Ann Radcliff, who wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho, a terror Gothic romances and M.G. Lewis, with his The Monk, a horror novel. The 1800 is the year in which the gothic novel reached its peak and when the largest number of Gothic novels was published in England. In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a scientific gothic novel. The difference between horror and gothic is specified and described in a piece of writing, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” by Radcliffe, in which she says that “Terror and Horror are so far opposite; the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them”. Terror is based on suspense, it’s made of something that does not require acknowledgement of what has happened before, something that requires imagination in order to create possible explanations to what you see. Horror on the other hand, it’s when you see a dead person in a pool of blood, when someone is killed in front of you, something that doesn’t require imagination but instead paralyzes your mind by happening in front of you. For Radcliffe the sublime experience can be perceived only by the terror of gothic. Radcliffe is basing 672 pages of her romance on the power of imagination. She’s building up suspense and different possibilities of horror without showing a horror scene directly. She won’t leave anything to pure mystery or supernatural but explain all the terror she’s creating. Talfourd's Memoir of the Author, undoubtedly written under the instruction of Radcliffe's husband, categorically denies that she was insane → her doctor issued a statement after her death, maintaining that she was in perfect mental health Her predecessor, Walpole, influenced her with The Castle of Otranto as much as the ideas of Edmund Burke and of Gilpin with his rules of Picturesque Beauty and Picturesque Travel. Through her works we can admire and observe nature, which can be considered as the main character of her works. In a way we can interpret Radcliffe as using the gothic in order to reshape the aesthetic theories linking to the natural world, not the other way around. Radcliffe is giving attention to italian settings, starting writing gothic novels with A Sicilian Romance, she then published Romance of the Forest, in which she talks about a Gothic castle that almost takes on the role of the central character, in which an influence of the paintings by Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa for the landscape descriptions can be seen; The Mysteries of Udolpho that made her earn £500, The Monk, a series of poems and The Italian for which she was paid £800. Italy was not a unified state, it was divided in several states commanded by a tyrannical figure, full of castles associated with the gothic landscape, antiquities, ruins, it was unique. It had an historical background connected to the goths, the grand tour, full of art, faced political turbulence, and the catholic church considered as the place for superstition. The Pope in charge of the empire was seen as a tyrant that owned a part of the territory so it was the perfect subject for Radcliffe’s writings. She never left the country, so everything she knows about the place is acquired by her readings. However her most celebrated work is The Mysteries of Udolpho → a romance, formed by a lot of different references from numerous and diverse genres. It's a total work of art. It's a gothic romance, with a plot full of mysteries, stereotypical characters, poems, the representation of the natural background through the use of the picturesque and a great use of music. The romance is considered “a total work of art” where she attempts to invest the novel form, still in its first experimental stage, with the qualities of poetry, music, and painting. It’s unique and original, recognised as a hit of the day even at the time of its publication, it was reviewed. The subtitle of the book is the same word “romance” → there are no references from reality as it is a novel, in order to get the point of the book you need to read it as it’s a romance, as something innovative, a romance that follows the general conventions of the stereotypical character → we’ve got here the villain, Montoni, who’s talking with an italian accent, something that creates a sort of attraction; the main character, Emily, the heroine who needs to face a lot of adventures, Valancourt, the chevalier, the lover, as soon as he met Emily it’s love at first sign even though they need to face a lot of trouble in order to be together and, lastly, Madame Montoni, Emily’s aunt, who’s marrying the enemy, who’s going to be the guardian of Emily after the death of her parents. The plot is not easy to summarize, it’s too long, but it’s one of the major points of the story itself. It's complex and builds up a suspense kind of narration, a suspense that is eventually explained sooner or later, there’s no need for the supernatural. The reader, following Radcliffe's ideas of the terror, has to use his imagination in order to understand the story. At the end who reads is going to be excited and peaceful, thanks to the reconciliation and the explanation. In romance there’s no space for judgment, every character is either good or bad, there’s no middle way, just general qualities. Chapter I - V.1 → Starting from the very opening of the story, the place that is described does not seem gothic, it’s a pastoral landscape, a green and peaceful one. There’s a sort of serene description, Radcliffe is experimenting with the description, nature is the first and main protagonist of her novel, she’s letting the eye record everything, as if it was a camera. We can summarize all these sentences simply saying that it was a beautiful landscape in a valley, even though she’s giving us a series of botanic references, applying Gilpin’s rule. She's applying a picturesque description to the point that it would be possible to create a painting starting from all the details presented. It’s the place in which Emily is born, this would be functional when she would see the gothic castle far on. Emily’s got a very nice family, with loving parents, there’s no mystery, no fear or pain. The reader is becoming the viewer of the landscape, of the living space. We’re then entering in the social context, the very domestic area is full of happiness, there’s a social comment in the first part in which contemporary society is criticized. They’re living in the country even though they’re not country people because they had experience of the city life, the life in community, which they didn’t like. Contemporary society is corrupted, city life does not suit St Aubert’s idea of life. The countryside gives the opportunity to cultivate music and art, they transferred here in order to enjoy a “pastoral simplicity” [Wordsworth] Chapter IV → following Locke's principles, the character starts to travel around in order to gain new visions of the world, to see the natural landscape from different perspectives. They’re traveling to the Pyrenees in order to get to Italy. Traveling is here used not only as a change of place, but as a metaphor of the self and the experience of the world, a way to allow the character to grow and experience mysteries. Everything in Chapter IV is described as a painting. We’re going to see the emotion of the characters while traveling, even though they had no words in order to express the emotion felt after the sublime. St Aubert is a person of feeling, facing such an experience he wept, his heart was full entering in sympathy with the landscape. Valancourt on the other hand is kind. They meet him when the carriage broke down and he helped them; he’s open to conversation, moved by the landscape, he has all the right characteristics apart from a detail, he’s lacking in experience, he has a limited experience of the world. In St. Aubert’s opinion this is not great, he had a very limited experience of city life, on the contrary, he experienced the corruption and difficulties of society. Valancourt would then go to Paris but won’t be immune to tentations, he’ll gamble, lose money, have a lot of female friends, but then will go back to Emily asking for forgiveness. Gothic elements are introduced by banditti and other characteristics of the landscape by reaching the Pyrenees. The travel through the mountain is described through the definition of Burke’s sublime: it’s breathtaking, tears are here the sensorial response to the sublime Chapter VII → Mr St. Aubert is here dying. Emily’s father was the kind of loving father, educating his daughter to be self-sufficient, she must take care of herself by herself, she needed to be compassionate but also a rational creature, not to be moved too much. In this passage, a sort of ethic of sensibility is claimed: the father is evoking a sort of balance, it’s important to be passionate but also rational, creating a midway between sense and sensibility. The writer is here committed to sensibility in order to cultivate the emotions, we don’t need to be subjugated to feelings, we need to find a midway. Radcliffe's stressing the importance of being in balance. Emily's overwhelmed, she’s looking at her dying father experiencing a very moving experience, her imagination is probably working too much, is over sensitive but the father is urging her not to be subdued by the excess of emotions. She cannot be “a victim of her feelings'' , she needs to find a way to be rational. Chapter I - V.2 → There’s a scene of fancy through which sublime is described. Radcliff is here breaking the boundaries between an objective description of the natural landscape by including in the reality outside imaginary illusions. Emily, accompanied by Montoni and her aunt in a carriage of 4 people, is crossing the Alps in a very dangerous journey. Emily, a creature of extreme sensibility is looking outside the window contemplating the scenery and imagining a scene, a new world, a paradise or a hell. The sublime experience is removing every other possible feeling, there’s no space even for Valancourt [irony]. She’s listening to a conversation and watching outside, imagining a reality that is true and exists only in her mind. She’s imagining a scene of Hannibal commanding his army to cross the Alps, she’s reliving her own experience by the figures of people from the past, sharing Hannibal and the soldiers' fears in the crossing, listening to the soldiers marching, it’s a multisensorial kind of experience. It’s not just a description, there’s a shared feeling. The other passengers are paying no attention nor to her nor to the landscape, she’s the only one to have the power to imagine something, to use the sublime experience on an even deeper level through the eye of fancy. Chapter II → Before reaching Montoni’s castle, there’s a quick stop in Venice. The passage is another scene of fancy linked to Venice, represented as a magical place. It's unique, especially because of the streets in forms of canals and water, beneath which there’s free territory for imagination. Venice is a magical space in a magical panorama, she’s crying. Emily's eyes were full of tears because of the sublime. She imagined magical creatures swimming around, sea nymphs and at a certain point she also joined them in the water figuratively. Chapter V → They then reach Montoni’s residence in the Apennines, the Castle of Udolpho, the image of the gothic. It’s the metaphorical representation of the abusive power: full of dangers, fears and mysteries. The travel had continued from the bottom up to the mountain, where the castle is situated: there’s a change of perspective given by the position of the castle itself. Lights and shades are changing because of the time employed to reach the castle at night. We’re approaching the gothic core. It’s a stereotypical castle, a sort of labyrinth in which you can lose yourself [Dracula], where abuse and danger are combined. Sofort Emily is a virgin, but Montoni has plans for her. The travel is presented through the sublime experience, where the natural world plays a pivotal role again, the eye is again guiding us in this voyage, perceiving the external landscape and the changes in lights and perspectives, stimulating Emily’s imagination. There's a mixture of the gloomy atmosphere that is influencing the imagination of the character. We’re traveling with her in this new experience, about which the character knows nothing. She knows that Montoni will want something from her, she’s scared, through an increasing suspense she’s exploring with her mind the possibility of what is going to be asked of her. There’s a strict link between the gothic as an atmosphere but also the gothic as a sensation that has a physical reaction in the social environment: living as a young, unmarried and unprotected girl. The novel is mentioning a date in which the story takes place, that is not mentioned again in the story; we’ve got no reference to historical events because Radcliffe is indirectly referring to her society, to the social condition of the woman in her own time. Historical studies, devoted to the social-literary context of the author, gender studies, have imposed a different kind of Austen, perceived not only as the symbol of Englishness, but also eccentricity, mystery, subversion, because she’s dealing with irony and satire. It’s difficult to read Jane Austen and to get an univocal interpretation of her text, new approaches are born everyday. Who’s the real Jane Austen? → starting from portraits in Watercolour by Cassandra Austen, dated 1804, we perceive a faceless sketch that “reaches us in much the same way as the celebrated irony of her writings does, only by turning away”. It’s an ambiguous representation of the writer, something not revealing, kept obscure In another Cassandra’s sketch, dated 1810, the woman is presented from the front, the eyes are dark and penetrating and there is a thin lipped, unsmiling mouth and a severe expression. The message received is not reassuring, the crossing of the arm also shows a judgmental attitude. She’s probably unsophisticated in dress, even though the sketch is unfinished. The family, after the death of the writer, thought that the sketch was really ugly, so they commissioned another one In this Victorian Jane Austen, we perceive the traces of the previous sketch made by her sister but with some changes, it’s an improved version made by James Andrews. Here we can see a smile, a different position of the arms, rounder eyes, a more sophisticated dress… Austen is a unique kind of author, disposed by the readers and critics all along the decades, we’ve got modified versions of her In this engraving, made by William Lizars, the painter used the previous sketch in order to present a writer he never met. The engraving was printed in James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen and was commissioned by her husband The victorians started a revisionism of Jane Austen’s portrait, turning her into almost a sanctified lady, worshiped as something perfect in writing and looks. She was perceived and read in a domesticated way, as something reassuring, dealing with all the values of house life. She had a lot of admirers that looked at her as someone too perfect to be real. The wider adoption of the word Janeites is dated from between the late 19th and the 20th century. Janeite is a term that remains in use today and it refers to Austen’s appreciators or fans. It’s a word used by those appreciators themselves, as well as by those who would dismiss them as overly enthusiastic or uncritical ‘superfans’. It was used to indicate one’s belonging to a community of readers that collectively admired and together discussed Austen’s fiction. The novelist Kipling published a short story, ‘The Janeites’ [1924] where he imagined Austen’s fiction being read among soldiers in World War I, knowing Austen’s fiction created a bond among strangers in wartime and helped soldiers survive battles. The Austenites are, on the other hand, those who are studying Jane Austen from the perspective of critics and analyzers, using her in context, dealing with her text and words, not analyzing just the principles that she was representing as an icon. In the past there was a sort of general disagreement between these two groups, the Austenites wanted to read her under a scholar perspective, while the Janeites wanted to read her as something that was a piece of their heart. Nowadays these kinds of labels are not so used anymore, because the two groups are more in dialogue. Anyway, in 2000, Lynch wrote Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, in which the writer interrogates himself and the public about how and why she became so famous. Her popularity is similar only to the one of Shakespeare, not only in the literary panorama but as a cultural phenomenon. The modern kind of Jane Austen is a new one, with a new face, makeup, new body, new attitude and new messages for the viewer. She’s still serious, but eventually is a softer version, a domesticated one compared to Cassandra’s sketch. She’s rounder, reassuring, composed, not impatient, the one the fans mostly like. This recreation through the years tells us about how readers like to see her and what they like to read “in her” and why. There’s still a curiosity to know how Jane Austen really looked. This is the same image used in 2017 by the government for the 10£ note. Apart from the Queen, Jane Austen is now the only woman featuring on an English note. In the today edition of the Mondadori’s “Meridiani”, a collection of correctly translated books from the most famous writers, the adopted version of Jane Austen is the modern representation of her, the one that the public wants. There’s a striking dichotomy talking about Jane Austen: how did she acquire international fame just talking about marriage and love during the 19th century? Since the end of the 19th century she has held a celebrity status, but why? She's attracted fans from all around the world, there’s a commercial phenomenon connected to her, including films, series, covers, dolls, bottles... She has occupied a position within english-speaking culture that is both popular and canonical, it is accessible and complexly inaccessible, fixed and certain, yet wonderfully flexible to shifts of sensibility and cultural assumptions, and that is the central dichotomy. She’s a commodity for both market and literature, an historical piece of English heritage. She’s become a “cultural fetish”, giving life to what we call the Austenmania, going beyond what she wrote. She’s also been turned in a “juvenilia” kind of writing, into films like “Persuasion” on Netflix and series like “Sanditon” about her unfinished romance. A subversive reading allowed Austen to be adapted to new and innovative ways, in a critical approach that confirms and increases her figure as an icon. Virginia Woolf was one of the first to observe that Austen’s characters were so substantial and rounder that readers treated them as if they were living people. Her fame comes from the way in which she creates her characters, depicting them and scenes that seem to be alive. Woolf saw in her works an invitation to enter into her novels. Especially in the last ones we perceive the feeling that we want to know more about the characters, about what’s happening after a specific event, a possible happy ending, is there more to be said? A metafictional way to reinterpret Jane Austen is the one that we can see in the remediation of Pride and Prejudice, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The story seems to be a co-writing experience between the creator of the new book, Steer, and Jane Austen, but the writer is simply using a part of her writing mingling it with new descriptions and events, perfectly recognizable. The Bennets’ sister are depicted in Jane Austen’s work as warriors, fighters, and Steer uses this characteristic by exploiting it [The Austens were a very close-knit family: Jane had six brothers and one sister, Cassandra; and they lived in the village of Steventon, in Hampshire county, England, where Jane’s father was rector. She never traveled much, spending most of her life in England, but the Austen family had an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. The minor landed gentry and the country clergy, the village, the neighborhood and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to London, that she was to use in the settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels is the world she was accustomed to. They had a big library, composed of 500 books c.a., even though it was not an aristocratic family. They’re home became a boarding school for people who wanted to become clergy men. She knew very well the social pattern of the aristocratic world because of her mother and used her relation with her brothers who traveled much in order to know the outside world and the countryside. She wrote in a letter that her brother, George, who was adopted because had some sort of disability, maybe was deaf, while Edward was adopted by a rich family without heirs in order to inherit the properties. The other 2 brothers joined the army instead, giving her a background about the British empire and the wars. Harry, the last one, became a banker and then entered the church in order to avoid bankruptcy. The girls on the other hand were tutored and attended boarding schools, getting an education about the female refinements.] Jane enjoyed social events, and her early letters tell of dances and parties she attended in Hampshire and also of visits to London, Bath and Southampton. As a child, she began writing comic stories, now referred to as the Juvenilia, composed of parodies and stories written with the intent of making fun of someone or some situations in order to keep her family happy and, as she was 25 years old, she and Cassandra moved with their parents to Bath. Here, she was probably much in social entertainment and relationships, a fact that caused a pause in writing. In her early twenties she wrote the novels that later became Sense and Sensibility [first called “Elinor and Marianne”] and Pride and Prejudice [originally “First Impressions”]. Austen continued writing, revising “Elinor and Marianne” and completing a novel called “Susan” [later to become Northanger Abbey]. She also received a marriage proposal, but she refused the offer after firstly accepting it because she did not love the man, creating a sort of family embarrassment for the situation. After Mr. Austen's death, Austen’s brothers contributed funds to assist their sisters and widowed mother, providing the women a comfortable cottage in the village of Chawton, near his Hampshire manor house. All the members of the family were enthusiastic readers, even of the gothic genre and very keen in organizing collective reading and theatrical representations. This was the beginning of Austen’s most productive period → in 1811, at the age of 35, she published Sense and Sensibility, which identified the author as “a Lady”, beginning her career as a writer, resuming her literary activity. Encouraged by the immediate acclamation and success of the first book, she published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, followed then by [copyright was not in use at the time - if you sign a contract you give up your property]. If she wanted the manuscript back she would have needed to give the money back. In 1816 “Susan” was brought back from Crosby and revised as “Catherine” but never published by Austen. Northanger Abbey was finally published in 1818, one year after her death, with Persuasion and Henry Austen’s “Biographical Note” by the publisher of Emma, the publisher of Lord Byron. If we consider the span of time going from 1798 to 1818 [20y.], the negotiation, the literary market and the dissatisfaction of Jane Austen, we need to read first the Advertisement in order to understand the real means of Austen She’s considering her book as “her little work” and was intended for immediate publication. As the advertisement says “any bookseller should think it worthwhile to purchase what he did not think it worthwhile to publish seems extraordinary. [...] The public are entreated to bear in mind that 13 years had passed since it was finished, more since it was begun, and during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.” But what did she care about all these changes? the trend has already passed but probably she thinks there’s still something good in it, she wants to underline the fact that the material that she’s dealing with in the novel is referred to a different period of time, the one in which she was writing, when she knew the taste of the public, the language, the places, so she’s entrusting the new public of reading to be attentive and reach all the reference despite the span of time. Austen is referring to political opinions that shifted drastically from the 1790 to the early 19 century. The period to which she’s referring to, suffers the influence of the turbulent historical moment, the horrors and riots associated with the revolutionary turmoil in France, the aftermath of the France Revolution in England, the Napoleonic wars and threat of invasion, the Gordon Riot of 1780 and the St. Peter’s Fields [Manchester] also known as the Peterloo Massacre. She’s referring to Bath as a place in fashion at time, where nobles went in order to cure illnesses, assembly, dance, read in the visitor book and where they could experience first love thanks to the affluence of people. By 1818 new locations became in fashion, first among all Brighton thanks to the Royal Pavilion, in which the court was relocated. It was a sea location, where baths could be enjoyed, lots of women and men went there in order to reinvigorate their hearts → in Persuasion or Sanditon, Jane Austen adjusted the location to Brighton. Manners also changed during the 19th century compared to 15 years before → we’re in the regency period, princes are out of fashion, criticized in graphic representation as someone who used the money of the crown not for the public but for private amusement. Books also had change, Northanger Abbey is considered a mock gothic, using the gothic issues and characters in order to mock that kind of literature, creating a dialogue between parody and intertextuality. The mock gothic interests the superficial kind of reading, not the genre itself. The gothic fashion was so much reproposed, abused and copied in order to stereotype places and characters that the genre was considered in the 19th century as a sort of trash literature by the time N.A. was out. Jane Austen has to be collocated in the time in which the gothic was in peak. For a long period of time the list of the horrid novels that Catherine Moralnd was invited to read by Isabella Thorpe in the novel was considered to be an invention of Jane Austen, but all of the books were the ones in peak in the circulating libraries, even though now are not considerate because they’re replicating something that has already been wrote. The sentimental novel of the 18th century also was there → Jane Austen entered in dialogue with more than 17 novels, referring to titles and novels of the time, even with open references to Henry Fielding or Frances Burney [sentimental novel]. She’s rewriting the mock heroic kind of fiction using the female Quixote novel by Charlotte Lennox [satirical novel]. Lennox invented a female protagonist before Austen, Arabella, who’s been reading French sentimental novels and she believes that she should behave like the heroines of such books in real life. Interpretation of the novel→ Austen follows Lennon in depicting Catherine, the protagonist. She’s an unaware reader, because she’s not educated, she’s just enjoying her book, she’s into the voracious readeing, which is compromising her behavior following the path of the heroines that she’s reading about. She’s living as if she was a gothic heroine. Her favorite author is Ann Radcliffe, who she venerates, and this is why she’s retracing Emily's adventures in her life. Catherine Moorland is introduced by an external narrator as a naive girl, not very bright, unattractive and opposite in a way to the characters of the sentimental and gothic fictions. Jane Austen is doing a parody of such a heroine → Catherine is the opposite of every character, and here stays the irony of the author who’s presenting the protagonist from a different perspective. Especially in the opening it’s said that “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.” → the irony could be understood only by knowing Ann Radcliff and the context. Also the situation of her family is different, in an open contradiction to the bucolic representation of Emily’s family, everything is against Catherine, they’re not rich, they’re living in the countryside because they cannot afford to live anywhere else, they’re a numerous family and cannot strictly follow the education of every single child. Catherine reads novels in order to escape from her boring life. Real Gothic novels instead are full of real adventures. The father was a clergyman, the mother “was a woman of useful plain sense”, she’s practical, she’s living in reality, following a reason and has a “good constitution”, another reference to the tradition of the gothic story where usually the heroine is often an orphan or has parents or other family members in ill health. The gothic characters were stereotypes, coming from the tradition, Catherine is not a stereotypical character. The repeated use of the word “plain” in the opening chapter is remarkable and emphasizes the irony that Jane Austen uses to describe her characters. There’s a precise description of the characters, coming from the modern tradition → we’re going to know everything about her, even her physical appearance, descriptions that help us face her completely and feel a sort of sympathy or antipathy for her. Here the heroine is not just perfect and beautiful as in the gothic, where you can substitute yourself in her, Catherine is perfectly depicted so that this substitution does not happen, there’s no personification. “She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features - so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief - at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.” → everything is against her, the irony of Austen is given an outlook about the heroine and her behavior. This is the presentation of our heroine, full of irony. From this beginning it’s impossible to say whether or not Catherine is a good character, plainness and ugliness are not enough for judging her, you cannot judge someone from the outside. The reader is driven into forming an opinion about Catherine, which most likely results in sympathy for her. Catherine is not very accomplished in the many things women of her age were supposed to be knowledgeable about. She had no taste for music nor drawing, nor French, the language in which women were supposed to be fluent in, she’s standard. She is a bit of a wild child who, at the age of ten, enjoys “rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”. She hated confinement and cleaness, she was difficult to restrain. She’s not really the accomplished girl of the time. How would she turn out? At 15 she began to curl her hair, her complexion improved and she developed quickly into a better looking and smarter individual [irony again - cleaning of the mind and of the body following the education of heroines] Her parents on occasion call her “almost pretty”, to be pretty is a great achievement for her, who has been considered plain for so long. She considers herself to be in training to become a heroine. She reads writings that heroines should read in order to supply her mind, such as Pope, Gray, Shakespeare, and others. At the age of 17 has come the time to go into society, she’s leaving her home in order to accompany one of the families in the neighborhood to Bath. “But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.” → but how can a perfect hero be found for such an imperfect heroine? During the summer Catherine has the opportunity to go to Bath, a new place to see and where she’s trying to establish social relations, even though at the time, people needed to be introduced by their other relations. As neither Catherine, nor the Allens have many relations, they have a rather difficult time in getting to know other people; but here she has the opportunity to experience love and friendship. During a social gathering she’s introduced to Henry Tilney, the hero. He’s not the prototypical Gothic hero. He is a well educated gentleman, but is not as remarkable as for example Mr. Darcy or other protagonists in Austen’s writings. He is the second son, which means he has fewer responsibilities than his older brother and he’s destined to become a curate later on → sign of a somewhat boring life as opposed to other characters who are in the military or the navy and get to explore the world. As soon as Catherine meets Tilney, she is immediately infatuated with him; her love is settled from the very beginning. For what concerns friendship, Catherine becomes friends with Isabella Thorpe, an opposite character, the handsome girl of her family and experienced in life → she’s been to balls, knows how social gatherings are managed… The only thing that they have in common is the passion for gothic. She likes to gossip and is into fashion, she’s concerned with how she appears in society. Isabella is also not highly educated, only like a coquette. Catherine’s attracted to Isabella as she can learn from her experience and Isabella is attracted to Catherine because she can easily manipulate her → What is the real point of friendship? Probably not what is described between Isabella and Catherine. As readers we can immediately perceive how Isabella is using Catherine’s friendship to go where and when she wants, to meet who she wants, she’s using her inexperience and ingenuity. Isabella wants to go to the Castle on the same day in which Catherine is supposed to go with Henry to the cliff, but since the weather is not so good, she pushes and persuades her friend to join her on the trip. Catherine, caught between her passion for the Gothic and her good manners, decides to follow Isabella, even because Henry is not picking her up. Passion prevails over manners. The irony is that the castle is located up in Bristol, but since they're going with a small carriage and the distance is very long, they never make it to the castle, as it is too far away. Catherine is disappointed that she has neither been able to visit the castle, nor see her love interest. Chapter 14 is really important → Beechen Cliff is very close to Bath and can easily be visited in a day. The cliff offers new perspectives on Bath, offering an insight on the city. There’s an intertextual dialogue between Jane Austen and Gilpin → the company’s admiring how the landscape is changing through a displacement form to a point of another → Catherine is observing the view from the perspective of Ann Radcliffe’s view of the picturesque, she knows how to admire the landscape through her view of Gilpin, while on the contrary, the Tilneys, educated people, have read Gilpin and know the original thoughts on the picturesque, talking about prospective and knowing how to sketch a landscape. Henry Tilney, an educated gentleman, admits having read hundreds of novels and says that he enjoys Radcliffe’s ones [“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has no pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”] a kind of literature often relegated only to women, but unlike Catherine, he reads Radcliffe enjoying the suspense and the terror, but he does not mix fiction with reality. She enjoys the Gothic and cannot distinguish the gothic romance from reality; but however, at least, they have common ground for discussion and confrontation, even though Henry after the discussion is making fun of Catherine’s ignorance [“It is amazing; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you as far behind me as—what shall I say?—I want an appropriate simile.—as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy. Consider how many years I have had the start of you. I had entered on my studies at Oxford, while you were a good little girl working your sampler at home!” “Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?” “The nicest—by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”]. He’s a bit superior and likes to display such superiority, he’s patronizing her, but Jane Austen is sort of encouraging her to talk about her passions. Henry is manipulating her not because he wants something from her, unlike Isabella, he’s manipulating her only with knowledge, not feelings. Henry is superior to Catherine not only in wealth, but also in knowledge and education and she’s trying to do her best with what she’s been given. Jane Austen is here commenting for the second time with her own voice the ignorance of the conception of women into society: in a way she’s excusing Catherine for not knowing something because she’s not educated. If the woman is educated and can speak her mind, if she’s open and ready to share her opinions, it is better not to reveal such skills because contemporary society prefers a woman who’s following others, “if a woman has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” Society prefers ignorants women, but Catherine did not know her own advantages, that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail to attract a clever young man. In a following passage in the same chapter, after the landscape, the novel, the ignorance, another interesting reference is made, another one that Catherine is misunderstanding because of her ignorance. She does not know anything about politics, she only has a perception of what is explained in circulating libraries. A character is referring to some “horrible events that are taking place in London”, threatful and horrible events, that Catherine associates with some new Gothic novel or elements. She is completely ignorant of what is really happening in London at the time of writing, such as riots where people were protesting about social discrimination. Jane Austen lets us know about the political situation of the time through Tilney’s comments, even though she does not offer her own political view of events of the times. “Government,” said Henry, endeavoring not to smile, “neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and the government does not care how much.” In the second part Austin’s dealing with the gothic matter. Catherine is here introduced to General Tinley, Henry’s father, the most important member of the family. General Tinley thinks that Catherine is a rich heiress and to secure her friendship with Henry, decides to invite her to Northanger Abbey. Catherine thinks that Northanger Abbey is a true Gothic location, full of mysteries, adventures, terror, but is soon disappointed to find out that it does not hold as many horrors and secrets as she had previously imagined; also, it is a modern building. All the fancy that she was building up was destroyed as soon as she arrived. Catherine, stubborn as she is, still tries to find Gothic elements in this home, and suspects horrors behind every corner in a sort of quest in order to find gothic elements. She imagines that Henry’s mother was killed by his father [similar to the Mysteries of Udolpho], but in reality she suffered from a severe illness. Catherine sneaks into “forbidden” parts of the house such as the room of Henry’s mother, but she’s soon disappointed to find nothing special in this room, which is simply modern. There’s a really evocative description of the gothic atmosphere. She is then surprised by Henry and she’s ashamed to have been caught, especially by him. He asks her what is she doing in the room, and she admits that she was thinking something secret and horrible must have happened to his mother, only to find out about her sudden illness and that he and his brother were taking care of her along with frequent doctor’s visits. Still, Catherine persists to talk about her suspicions that General Tilney had something to do with his wife’s death, an accusation to which Henry is completely shocked by Catherine’s imagination. He points out that they are English, modern and enlightened people, not some Gothic fiction set in far away lands and in different times. After this interaction with Tilney, “the visions of romance were over. Catherine was completely awakened. Henry’s address, short as it had been, had more thoroughly opened her eyes to the extravagance of her late fancies than all their several disappointments had done. Most grievously was she humbled. Most bitterly did she cry.” Eventually, Catherine learns at least a bit that reality is not like in the novels, that England is different from the lands of the Gothic novel. There’s no perfect hero, heroine or villain. Catherine must face a last final challenge even more gothic that the adventure she invented so far, it’s a new kind of gothic scenery made up by Austen for her character → as soon as General Tinley realizes the true nature of Catherine, she is sent home by herself without money. The villain is imposing such act, he’s in England, it’s not the typical novel villain but just a man in society that discriminates poor people and especially women. She suffers humiliation and shame from this experience as a gothic heroine, but she’s accepting her situation. Unlike her expectations of the Gothic, this trial is not in the least exciting: it’s a kind of social Gothic that reflects the harsh reality that many people at the time had to face. The Gothic still persists around Catherine, although in different forms from what she had read about in novels. It would have been helpful for Catherine to read Radcliffe more attentively, as her works contain many aspects of the social circumstances of contemporary England that Catherine is suffering from → reading helps to understand reality better, but it’s important not to misread texts. Still, there’s a happy ending eventually, even though it is shaded by the rest → at the end Henry asks for her hand in marriage in spite of his father’s objections. After all, Henry is the second son, so he is not as important as his brother. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN SHELLEY Mary Wollstonecraft’ daughter, Mary Shelley had a very heavy family background and is the author of one of the most popular novels of the English world: Frankenstein. Putting her in context, we can find her in the romantic period, the age of revolutions, full of literary debates about the French Revolution, especially discussed by Burke, Wollstonecraft, Pain and Godwin; during the development of modern sciences, such as chemistry, biology, electricity and their applications; sciences from which she gathered the knowledges used in order to explain the supernatural in her novels. Her works can be put in the literature of her time, considering the gothic influence between 1780s and 90s and the following romantic poetry. Talking about the literary background, Mary Shelley was born in 1797, the year of her mother’s death, Mary Wollstonecraft, which died 10 days later due to pregnancy. She was influenced by the thoughts and writing of her parents. William Godwin, her father, was a political philosopher and popular novelist who wrote about social justice, equality, fearless self-expression, Romantic ideal of social progress and an important pamphlet An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, addressing an inquire in order to address a large public to politics. He also used the novel form in order to talk about politics, such as Caleb Williams, where the gothic elements were used in order to discuss social gothic. Mary Shelley often sent her works to Godwin in order to understand what he thought about them, since he could give her great advice about her works. She followed his radical ideas, especially regarding the improvement of the human mind. After the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin remarried and had another child with his new wife. Clare, one of his daughters, established a really deep connection with Mary because they were the same age. In 1812 Godwin started a relationship of friendship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who admired him as a young student and aspired to be like him. Mary became acquainted with Percy when she was 16 years old and he was 21 and already married, but he did not get along well with his wife. They soon became lovers and started an affair, meeting frequently at St. Pancras churchyard, where Mary Wollstonecraft is buried nowadays. discovery that was then advanced by an english chemist, Sir Humprhy Davy, a contemporary of Mary Shelley and one of the greatest scientists of his era. For him chemistry had a pivotal role in life → in his lectures he discussed the powers of electricity in breaking down physical materials, all references that can be found directly in Frankenstein. Davy was a friend of Coleridge, man of science and poetry were part of the same community, and was probably the first professional scientist that considered chemistry as the basis of many other sciences and fundamental for common life. He also embodied the master kind of scientist, who’s capable of manipulating materials and interfering with nature in order to discover something new and hidden, manipulation that can be interpreted as something that the poets were doing in their works. If we read Elements of Chemical Philosophy, we can detect Victor Frankenstein at work. Mary Shelley used Davy’s words in order to recreate her scientist. In the extract he says that “the man of science has powers which may be almost called creative [as a poet] which enabled him to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power” → He’s describing man with powers which are intruding in the natural world that is described as a female → this is the process that Mary is describing with Victor, the man of power who’s trying to steal the power of nature to recreate human bodies that naturally belong to females. Humphry inspired Mary Shelley, he’s trying to modify nature in order to investigate profound secrets Frankenstein is giving us new possibilities that now are actually taking place. Davy is described as an intrusive kind of scientist, actually dangerous, how much can we experiment in nature? What are the consequences? This kind of intruding can be labeled as bad science, there’s a strong power that is revealing secrets of nature. Together with this kind of science there was another kind of scientific investigation developed by Erasmus Darwin, a physician, poet, inventor, natural philosopher and abolitionist, interested in observing nature from the perspective of a scholar, a passive kind of observator, in order to understand not to manipulate [Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life] Scientific observation was also very open to women, especially active in the botanic area. They were keen observers of the details of nature. The Botanic Garden, another Darwin’s work, is not just describing gardens, but it’s also advancing new hypotheses without manipulation, made always by observation, that were considered investigative at the time, as much as the anatomy studies. But what is anatomy? the study of the human body. Anatomy studies were carried out on dead bodies and was also taking place as a teaching subject, even though it was not considered so included, but a low kind of study in terms of prestigiousness. At the time it was not so easy to perform such anatomical classes because there were laws that forbid the use of corpses unless they were from people sentenced to death for criminal acts. Mary Shelley story is very linked to this scientific background → Frankenstein is not just a recreation of the human body without any bases, it’s not just a supernatural event without explanation, it’s still a supernatural event [we know it's improbable to give life to inanimate parts of bodies], but still it has a scientific ground of basis. Frankenstein is not a magician practicing magical spells, he’s following the rules of science opening up new possibilities. Mary Shelley dedicates entire chapters to science, especially to natural philosophy, anatomy, electricity, chemistry and biology but only one paragraph to the actual realization of the body. Frankenstein is fusing science with gothic mystery and also rational inquiry, the desire of knowing more about the principle of life. But actually, how did the story originate? In Villa Diodati in 1818 Mary was not already 18 years old when she was stimulated by the surrounding landscape and the people. During the summer spent with Shelley and Byron talking about the latest scientific discoveries, they read a lot of ghost stories and discussed what they were writing and in one of these occasions, explained in the introduction of the second edition of Frankenstein dated 1831, Mary was allowed to invent her story. The very first edition came out anonymously in 1818 and in the preface there was a dedication to William Godwin, so as soon as the novel came out, people thought that Frankenstein was a work of Percy Shelley. Even though Frankenstein was initially perceived with a sort of mixed perception, as soon as the novel was out it received great applause through the first theatrical adaptation. The theater of the time immediately perceived the potentiality of the play and adapted the story to the stage. Mary at the time was in Italy but she received letters about what was happening, so her identity was soon discovered as the real author of the novel. In 1831 Frankenstein was already very famous, so much so that the publishing house asked Mary to add Frankenstein to a comprehensive edition of “Standard Novels”, a collection of literary traditions of the time. She was also asked to write an introduction to it, in order to understand how it was possible for a young girl of 19 years old, to conceive and write such a strange and successful story, satisfying the curiosity of the audience. In the 1831 introduction we come in contact with the genesis of the novel: The publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me. 'How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon such a very hideous idea?’ […] It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. […] My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enroll myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce anything worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter. Still I did nothing. Traveling, and the cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, in the way of reading or improving my ideas in communication with his far more cultivated mind, was all of literary employment that engaged my attention. In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland and became the neighbors of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him. But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from German into French, fell into our hands. […] I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday. 'We will each write a ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa . Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole - what to see I forget - something very shocking and wrong of course; […] The introduction goes then on → Mary is explaining how difficult it is to write a ghost story especially if each morning you’re asked about it. Many were the conversations with Lord Byron and Shelley in which she was often only just a listener → at night, after all that she had listened to, she couldn’t sleep because of the flow of her imagination. “I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, showed signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking at him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.” → She has the idea of the story, an idea that shocked herself and probably as a consequence every reader. The creation of the monster is just a part of the story, there’s much more after and before that. In the introduction Mary is saying goodbye to her novel, defined as an hideous progeny that is going forth and prosper → she knew that her work would continue to be read and appreciated in the future. The novel has a narrative structure, a sort of concentric kind of tale composed of different layers → an external tale narrated by letters [epistolary novel] by Robert Walton, an explorer who’s narrating his stories to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville [M.W.S.], the receiver and the one who is put in charge of transmitting the story to the reader. Walton is an overreacher, a man who wants to discover something new. He’s the one who’s meeting Frankenstein and receiving his own story orally. We’ve got then the Creature’s tale, narrated to Victor, to Walton and lastly to Margaret, and in the same way the last story of Lacey is narrated to all of them → different perspectives. Multiple narrators address multiple topics, including science, education, justice, monstrosity, issues of identity and the power of imagination. At the end of all these different perspectives that compose the jigsaw, the reader is called to create his own opinion about the character. Walton’s story is about an explorer who’s doing an expedition in the North Pole, where he meets a strange individual → through the external frame is mediated the impossibility of the even stranger Frankenstein story. There’s a parallel between the two → they’re both men of science, overreachers, solitary, projecting the domestic sphere in order to reach something more, risking their life and the one of others pursuing their own ambitions. They’re both obsessed by what they want to obtain and discover, they’re neglecting their families, sentimental beauty and domestic love and not without consequences. The story of the creature is important not for the fact that he’s coming to life, something that pertains to the creator, but because he’s being rejected by his own creator and so has to live by himself as a natural creature. He comes to life with a strong body, but with the Chapter X → The path between Victor and the creature crosses again. He’s now capable of speaking, he knows everything. It is also in a sublime landscape in the mountains when Victor re-meets the creature, who begs him to take responsibility for his creation, to treat him with kindness. A request to which Victor responds by rejecting him over and over again. The creature then tells Victor his story, [Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous] who is eventually moved to make him a female companion. Chapter XX → In terms of scientific experiment he’s brilliant, he can replicate what he has done before collecting new materials and creating a new companion, but what’s the difference between then and now? When he first created the monster he was only thinking about himself and his ambitions, but now he’s thinking about consequences, possibilities. He now knows that he cannot manipulate the mind and the feelings of the creature, the new one could be even more malignant, they could hate each other, the risks are too many. He’s now thinking about everybody, not just himself. So, at the last moment, Victor destroys his new creation, considering the potentially awful consequences she might have. The first creature, behind him during all the procedure, obviously wants revenge for the killing of his future companion. Victor then left the room, locked the door and made a solemn vow never to resume his labors THE ROMANTIC THEATER recap: in 1737 the Licensing Act was issued by the government, giving the Covent Garden and Drury Lane the title of official theaters. During the romantic period the censorship was really strict: theaters were pivotal, the audience was large and made of people from several classes attending. Theaters were important in diffusing political ideals, and this is why it was important to control them. The public was divided in terms of classes according to the chosen place and the tickets that were bought. The gallery was dedicated to the rich, while the pit was for the poor. Another important distinction was the difference between legitimate theater, where the spoken drama, the traditional one made of dialogue was performed and illegitimate theaters, more hybrid, involving the use of ballet and any kind of other performances. The experience was very different from the one that we have today → in the 19th century there was no silence, an interaction between artists and public, an immediate feedback and continuous noise was needed. During a representation not only one play was performed, but multiple, 5 / 6 hours were required in the theater in order to assist with the main play and the tragedies and comedies before and after the play. It was a comprehensive kind of experience, with different tickets depending on the duration of the stay. Not everyone was happy about the way the theater was, many were worried about the possible corruption. The closet drama, the one written not for a public display, not for the stage, but for a private reading, for a small shared kind of performance, was more psychological, with few stage effects or lights, more introspective; while the subgenres were the pantomime; melodrama; ballad opera… Hannah More, educationist, professor, writer, friend of the blue stockings, wrote also plays, she thought she was very didactic in writing, and said that “The theater conveys doctrines, not simply expressed, as those of Sunday are [in church], in the naked form of axioms, principles, and precepts, but realized, embodied, made alive, furnished with organs, clothed, decorated, brought into sprightly discourse, into intersecting action”. One of the most important theater managers was David Garrick, in charge of selecting the best plays. He was also an actor and playwright, knowing the theater from every point of view. It was in the 18th century that the actors became celebrities. Garrick influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice and management throughout the eighteenth century. He became famous as Richard III, in whom was able to convey the passion of the character, improving the way in which Shakespeare was acted. He pioneered a more ‘natural’ style of acting, meaning: more spontaneous, more expressive, and more attuned to scenic context. He improved scenery, giving more attention to special effects, lightning and costumes. Garrick was complaining also on some of the elements of the theater: the audience in his opinion was very noisy during the performance; he sought to reform undisciplined spectators, clearing them from the stage. Kemble, also actor and theater manager, became famous for his performances of Shakespeare’s plays. He began the systematic study of the principal Shakespearean characters, displaying the peculiar originality of his genius. Also female actresses were performing, among whom Sarah Siddons was one of the bests. She came from a family strictly involved with theater, acting and managing. She started her career at the age of eleven playing Shakespeare’s female characters and her most successful one was Lady Macbeth. She was the greatest tragic actresses of the time, emphatically defined as ‘tragedy personified’ Mary Robinson also was an actress best known for her role as Perdita, the heroine of Shakespeare's “Winter's Tale” Eliza O’Neill was a popular star at the Covent Garden theater, suggested by P.B. Shelley for the role of Beatrice in his drama, together with Kean as the Count Cenci. Fanny Kemble also was part of the circle, remembered as a great actress, but also as an abolitionist, diarist, and prolific autobiographer, she was accepted within social and intellectual circles in both England and the United States. The plays were following the main trends of poetry and novel writing: the gothic, in fashion during the 18/19th century also took the stage. Frankenstein attracted a lot of attention not within the first publication, but in the adaptation for the stage. The contamination between films, theater and novels was common. The gothic was a very much loved genre → Walpole, the writer of The Mysterious Mother, Lewis with The Castle Specter, Shelley’s The Cenci were the main plays. Historical drama also was very diffused, performing ancient times and battles. It was important because the focus was on locations [the vespers of palermo] and revolutions [the siege of valencia], aiming to shake the public and bring it to react. The placing in time and place in ancient time could allow writers to discuss very contemporary issues without falling victim to censorship. Joanna Baillie wrote “A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind”, in 1798; in which she was talking about the importance of nature in the theatrical production. She started a great adventure dedicating herself to a series of plays exploring human passions in any kind of shade, moment and aspect in their relations with the natural world. The Introductory Discourse, a pre text, is the main theater of her ideas → if we’re naturally curious about knowing something more about the human nature in everyday life, think about it engaged in extraordinary situations of difficulty and distress. “It cannot be any pleasure we receive from the sufferings of a fellow-creature which attracts such multitudes of people to a public execution, though it is the horror we conceive for such a spectacle that keeps so many more away” resemblance of Burke. Entering in dialogue with Burke, she says that also in the theater the spectator is entering in a sympathetic curiosity with the play and the actors in order to want to know more. MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS Matthew Gregory Lewis was born in London into a family whose wealth derived from their ownership of sugar plantations in Jamaica. He was well educated [Oxford], traveled a lot spending many days studying in Germany and was trained for a diplomatic career. Lewis’s desire to be an author revealed itself from an early age; he did indeed write steadily throughout his teenage years culminating in the production of his masterpiece, The Monk, at the age of 19. The publication turned him into a literary celebrity and from that point on he was to be known as “Monk Lewis” , even though the novel was censored for some time. The theater offered him the possibility for experiment more than the novel. Theatre offered more extreme effect, more possibility to experiment with actions and reactions of the audience. He was very keen in exploiting the possibilities of new stage machinery and techniques. The Castle Spectre is using a lot of these possibilities. He remained a part of the parliament until his death and after his father’s death he inherited all the plantations in Jamaica, worked by about four hundred slaves. He condemned the slave trade, even though he was not active in the abolitionist campaigns. He voted in favour of the abolishment of the Slave Trade, even though he did not believe in the emancipation of those already enslaved. When he visited his estates he tried to perform a sort of reform, improving the lives of his slaves, but was not persuaded to give them complete freedom. He then went back to England and spent some time during the summer in Geneva, where he shared the passion of the gothic stories, admiring Byron and Shelley. Next month he sailed again for Jamaica to inspect his properties and check on the reforms he had introduced, visits during which he kept a special journal [Journal of a West India Proprietor] with his ideas about the plantation, which was eventually to be published in 1834, after his death, really important for its historical scope. When he came back, however, he was already infected with yellow fever. He wrote the gothic novel The Monk, short stories, poems, translations, songs, equestrian spectacle, some theatrical successes like The Castle Specter, one of the most successful gothic melodramas produced in that period. He was very keen in writing something that would be acclaimed by the public. He wrote for an audience attracted from the gothic, exploiting all the elements of the genre. He was also writing footnotes, citing all the parts stolen from Radcliffe’s works. He was influenced by German theater. The Castle Spectre was performed 83 times between 1797 and 1800. It was a success. It was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, remaining in the repertoire until the late 1820s. It also toured the provincial theaters and went through eleven printed editions. Further evidence of its extraordinary popularity is given by the fact that it crossed the ocean and opened in New York. Extraordinary success for the shocking scenes exploited by Lewis to impress his audience and, above all, the presence of the ghost, he put the specter on the stage, wanting to frighten the audience, surrounding it by music and lights in order to Angela cannot resist. The scene has some reminiscences of the Castle of Udolpho, so this is why in the footnotes there’s the reference to the novel. The fourth act is out of context, in the first scene we see Osmond rushing out of a room to join his black servants, we don’t know why. We’re seeing him not composed anymore, but under another light. He’s talking randomly, frantically, because he had a nightmare in response to which he has a turmoil, both physical and mental. He’s not in control of himself, he’s worried about not being a man anymore, can a mad dream change you so much? The nightmare is revealing something from the future by looking back at the past → in the nightmare he’s recalling the death of Evelina, of his brother, and he’s seeing Angela turning into something disgusting → it’s the same dream that we’ve already seen in Frankenstein. The dream is revealing to him that the ghost of Evelina is still in the castle, and that she’ll probably complete her revenge on him In the second scene Evelina is disclosing herself, blessing her daughter’s mission not to suffer her same destiny. She’s not talking, just acting and bleeding. The ghost not evoke only fright, but it’s used as a complete character All act five is taking place in the dungeons of the castle, associated with the place where every horror displays. Angela finds here the secret passage that will help her escape. Here she meets Reginald, Osmond’s brother, who’s not dead, just enchained as a prisoner [re-encounter between daughter and father]. The dungeon is assembling all the characters, Percy is trying to win her back, while Osmond is trying to conquer her as a trophy. There’s a battle, the staging is effective, there’s confusion, the ghost is coming back, throwing herself in order to protect Percy just with her appearance that scares Osmond. He’s dropping the sword, he’s unarmed because of fear. Angela is exploiting the right moment and right time, she’s attacking Osmond, he’s still breathing waiting for receiving Reginald’s pardon. He’s a compassionate man, he’s not vengeful - “Let me hasten to my expiring brother, and soften with forgiveness the pangs of death!” - FINIS It’s difficult to classify the play, it’s a tragedy but Osmond is not dead in the end; there's happiness, especially for Percy and Angela; Reginald is alive, can live happily with his daughter, so it’s more of a melodrama, with music, effects, actions… PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY He came from an aristocratic family, destined to inherit a title like Lord Byron and Lewis. He had a very good education at Oxford from which he was expelled. In his academic career he had something that went against the government, in Oxford he published a political pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism. He then married an uneducated, 16 years old woman without the approval of his family and became a disciple of William Godwin, a radical. He traveled through France, Switzerland, and Germany and back in London was regarded as an atheist and revolutionary and also as an immoralist. After the marriage with Mary Shelley they left for Italy and never came back, especially because of his death. Italy intoxicated Shelley, italian cities, landscape, history, had an impact on his aesthetic and literary production, influencing him a lot. Italy was the place in which the two suffered domestic sorrows by losing some children, but it’s where he wrote his masterpiece. In Tuscany he arranged a Pisan Circle of British intellectuals. He started writing gothic stories when he was in Oxford, then followed by The Necessity of Atheism, addressed to the Irish. He wrote a lot of prophetic poems, poems dedicated to Italy and also A Defence of Poetry on the role of poet and poetry, the Cenci and Prometheus Unbound a poetic drama. This Prometheus is also the subtitle of Frankenstein, that suffers from this promethean power, to infuse power in raw material. Prometheus by Shelley on the other hand is representing freedom, insisting on this idea for everybody everywhere, as an universal principle. He’s defined as an utopian writer because, despite the failure of the French Revolution, he supported its principles, because he thought that in the future they were to be accepted in society. THE CENCI He intended the Cenci to be performed, so he wrote it for the stage even though at the end it wasn’t performed for his outrageous content. The stage is one great source of public amusement, not to say instruction [W. Hazlitt], it’s made for representing the sympathetic curiosity of the public. In The Defence of Poetry Shelley is agreeing with Baillie's investigation of human passion in drama, but he wants to use poetry too, combining it with drama in order to investigate the human passion, the perfection of human society, to achieve excellence. In the author's preface we see that the history of the Cenci belongs to a chronicle. Percy was inspired to write it when he was in Rome, where he wrote the first draft and finished it in Livorno,. He was attracted by a fact of history and a painting that inspired both the writing. The manuscript of the Cenci chronicle was translated by Mary in english for him in order to use it; while the painting, probably by Guido Reni was the representation of Beatrice Cenci, a figure from the Renaissance, a tragic one, an Italian woman who lived in Rome. Her father, a novel man, was very famous for his viciousness, committing lots of crimes. In 1595 he imprisoned his daughter and mother in a lonely castle and his treatment led Beatrice to murder the count, who, after a famous trial, was put to death. Shelley was moved by such a chronicle, for which he suggested at the beginning Mary to write a drama that then he wrote himself, intending it for the multitude. He also had specific actors in mind, Keen and Eliza as main character but despite the effort to persuade both theater and manager to assemble the work, the play was rejected, even though it was successfully printed and circulated as written text. Shelley knew the story of the family because of the translation of his wife but also because he was struck by the vision of the portrait that he admired, which impressed him so much to inspire him to write a play about the story Is Shelley’s drama for the stage? or for the closet? He thought it for the stage, but while we read it we see how he focuses his attention on the psychological introspection of the characters. We’ve got few stage directions, a lot of dialogues, especially monologues, and technically we see just the characters talking, without scenery effects → this is why his drama is considered more a mirror of the mind rather than a play for the stage. We don’t have a lot of action in the scenes and we respond to characters’ actions and feelings in a very sympathetic way, we’re called to judge them according to what they are thinking rather than doing. The content was considered very outrageous, even though the action of incest or murdered were part of the debate they were not put on stage because of the violence. The content is very powerful and subversive, even though it is not staged with such violence, it’s implied because it happens in the minds of the character. Count Cenci is the villain, the bad character. Contrary to what happened in Lewis’ play in which through the psychological analysis of Osmond we can sympathize with him, we still have here the psychological perspective of the character but such introspectiveness is blocking every kind of sympathy for the character. His psych is reinforcing our position against him because he is described as a villain who wants his sons to suffer, the worst for his family, he abuses his only daughter and he’s happy for his actions, he wants to share his happiness with others, he’s not considering his action against morality nor nature. Even though Count Cenci is an old man, there's still a discrepancy between his age and his behavior, he’s mischievous despite his age. He should represent the sage of the family, he should be the guide, the protector of it, but he’s a tyrant, imposing his will on the younger generation. Shelley was against any tyrannical power, so he’s describing and judging him, asking the audience to support his view on the character. Cenci is asking forgiveness to the church at the end, and the institution is allowing him to perpetuate his action. He’s ready to lend his money to the church in order to receive a sort of pardon. He’s protected by the institution, so he cannot be judged by the Lord → there’s a criticism of the church as an institution. The pope also is a character in the play, even though is taking a little part on the stage: he’s just allowing the count to carry out his action because he’s greedy and wants more money. We’ve got other religious figures in the play but all depicted in a negative way. Count Cenci is constantly challenging the laws of nature and government, and he’s successful in his challenge because protected by the church because of his power, wealthyness, and he’s unchallenged by other aristocrats of the roman city because he’s unstoppable in his goals and actions, he’s scary. His cruelty overcomes the natural boundaries. Count Cenci hates his children, he wants them all dead, he’s giving a party to celebrate the death of 2 of them during a battle. One character is able to contrast and face the count, only one is allowed to say that what he’s doing is wrong: Beatrice, who’s in an inferior position because of her being a girl, young and powerless but she’s the only one who’s facing the villain, who’s able to speak out. She’s the only one to call out Cenci for being a tyrant while everybody is just complaining about him and his behavior. Beatrice is the one who’s going to pay the highest price, while she’s calling him out, immediately after their conversation, he’s planning revenge on her in order to break her life, but Beatrice will find other resources to act against the villain. She is the abused daughter, she symbolizes the beauty, the innocence disfigured by a corrupted society, she’s a victim of the count and of an unjust world, of a violent patriarchal society, she’s the female heroine trapped within her family. Since there’s no way out for her physically and mentally, she’s going through a transformation in her nature, from the victim she’s turning into a vindictive daughter, planning the murder of her own father. How can we sympathize with an assassin? we’re following her mind and we’re ready to justify what she’s about to do because of what she suffered before. She’s still seen though as an angel. She’s disclosing will and power despite her previous inferior position. Not by chance she’s considered as a romantic heroine. Although she’s fragile because of the abuse, she’s strong, determined, she’s an intelligent young woman, she’s a prototype of Shelley’s heroines, even because at the end she will be killed for her action, she’s aware of the risk but she wants justice, she’s very sure of her action until the very end of the tragedy, until the last moment when we’re leaving her on her sentence of death. She’s not Beatrice is then leaving the stage while her father’s still drinking the wine, going to do something that is needing physical power. He needs the strength of a young man in order to perform the act that must be done; shall be done, I swear! The act is then performed even though it’s not described in detail. He’s conceiving something worse than death, that would be seen as something liberating. On stage the violence is not represented, only the psychological process, we need to desume and think what’s happening translating the mental processes. Act III - Scene I Beatrice enters the scene, but after the act is performed by her father on her, she’s changed dramatically in physical appearance and in her language. Now she’s not able to compose herself anymore, she’s disrupted inside, unable to recognize the people around her and unable to speak. Lucretia, her stepmother, is trying to understand what’s happened to her, she’s not herself, and the public is sharing Lucretia’s concern. She enters staggering and speaks wildly, not able to control nor her body nor her speech. She needs a handkerchief as soon as she enters the scene, as a symbol of recovery from the suffering, there’s a semantic crash, she needs an handkerchief in order to repair what happened to her. Her eyes are full of blood - there’s no tears to wipe, she’s bleeding but not actually, it's just a perception. Lucretia is the first female character to whom Beatrice is addressing her request for help - just wipe them for me. How can she help if she doesn’t know what’s been happening? Every sentence, even if it doesn’t seem like it, reasons with what happened to the girl. Beatrice’s hair is undone, she’s not answering logically to questions, she’s showing that there’s a sort of disorder. In the final scene, when she’s facing her death, she’s asking Lucretia to comb her hair, as a symbol of mental and physical order. The pavement sinks under my feet! The walls Spin round! → she’s living in a turmoil, not able to speak, to reason, to see, to answer properly, she feels unstable. There’s an escalation of her madness, all the natural order around her is turned into hell, all the colors are gone, only black is left. The air is being polluted, contaminated, she’s choking, but she’s not dead. For Lucretia, Beatrice is still a poor child, innocent, but the girl is turning frantically, she thinks she’s lost her father, not physically, but he’s not her father anymore because of what he has done. What did her father do? Who art thou, questioner? I have no father → she has canceled him, she thinks she’s mad and that Lucretia is a madhouse nurse. She thinks she’s the person to be blamed, she doesn't know who she is, everything has been erased by the gesture of the Count. When she recollects herself she’s back to the actual facts: her father is not her father anymore but a violent tyrant. Also from the words of Lucretia we can see how Beatrice is reacting and moving, she’s not able to tell what’s happened, even to herself - The thing that I have suffered - something must be done, she’s still recognizing Lucretia as a loving mother, even though she’s living in an upside world, but something must be done, she cannot remain a passive victim. We’re entering into Beatrice’s mind, she’s describing her revenge by using the same words that can be used for talking about the act that has happened to her, something brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying; the consequence of what it cannot cure. A violence like that cannot be said out loud, but she must endure it and do something about it. My father's blood, circling through these contaminated veins - we’re beginning to understand what has happened by using metaphors, giving a sort of more shocking effect Lucretia from the outside is perceiving that something is very wrong, but she dares not guess. She’s protecting herself from reality thinking she’s not able to guess, she’s probably ignoring the reality of the facts. Revenge is a natural consequence, such a crime calls for punishment, death and it must be inflicted to whoever is the perpetrator of the crime. Lucretia is ready to join Beatrice in conceiving the plan of murder, they will endorse their own kind of judgment and law on him. Act IV - Scene I - the plan is done, two killers are called in order to commit the crime. Cenci is questioning his actions, maybe there’s going to be a consequence for it. He’s telling himself that he’s left her vanquished and faint. The violence that Cenci performed is intended to be a painful reminder of what happened, it’s even worse than death, she’ll be reminded of what happened every time she’ll look at her father. We know that Cenci is an old man, but anyway he’s leaving a testament of his sins that will remain Scene III Olimpio and Marzio are the two villains who are to perform the act , but they’re trembling, hesitating, but Beatrice has lost any kind of hesitation. I cannot do it. - even the worst villain is esistating in killing an old and sleeping man. They’re listening to him talking in his sleep, threatened by his last crimes. Beatrice is losing her patience, she’s snatching a dagger from one of them, and raising it - she’s ready to kill him herself, she wants it done. The act of revenge is not private, Shelley’s using a family affair in order to staging a mirror of a whole society, the world is changing with the death of the Count. Beatrice is starting to change again, as soon as the two are committing the murder, she’s starting to breathe again, it's a sort of vampirism, gaining life while another person is dying. A horn is sounded, as soon as the count is dead the corpse is found and an inquiry is made in order to find the killer. Beatrice is now taking care of the family, even though she’s the one who’s been suffering the most, a sort of order has been restored. Final scene - Beatrice will be betrayed, the judge will judge her guilty, even though she’s not considering herself as so, she thinks that everything was a natural consequence. In prison she feels free [Milton], she’s innocent in her mind. Before the ending Beatrice is addressing her last words to Lucretia - bind up this hair - she wants composure. The last performance is a sort of reassuring scene, as a ritual that is done before the last goodbye. She’s physically at peace, she’s facing death in a sure way, as a sort of another normal daily act. VICTORIAN AGE When William IV died, he was succeeded by his young niece Victoria, who reigned until her death. This was the longest reign in the history of England [1837-1901], and a period of unprecedented material progress, imperial expansion and constitutional developments. The Queen agreed to give up the more active role played by her predecessors and to become a mediator above party politics. Her exemplary family life and decent code of behavior made her beloved especially by the middle classes, who shared her moral and religious views. The queen was a sort of example of the nation, she was a woman, but mostly a queen. She had a lot of children, giving the example of a large family as duty. During Victoria’s reign the British Empire reached its largest expansion, particularly in Asia and Africa, ruling over almost a quarter of the world’s population. Albert, her husband, died very early, so she soon became a mourning widow. For what concerns the economy and society sphere, it was an age of radical, social and economic change, with great economic expansion and progress. Industrial economy also reached a great expansion starting from the industrial revolution. The rise of the middle class was pivotal for society, but the other side of the coin was made of poverty and contradictions. The working class was expanding, claiming for rights. Britain had a leading industrial and economic position in the world and this was symbolized by the Great Exhibition of 1851 where goods coming from all the countries of the Empire as well as from all parts of Britain were exhibited. In 1837 Victoria became Queen, and reigned until 1901, a period in which modern urban society started to form: London from 2 million inhabitants grew to 6 and 1/2 million at the time of her death. It’s a period of expansion, especially for the urban lower middle class and working class. Along with the expansion, social and economic problems were a consequence of the rapid and unregulated industrialization. There was a general satisfaction in the industrial and political preeminence of England and a sense of anxiety of something lost, a sense of being a displaced person. Technological changes were taking place along with a more preeminent position for the power of the human psyche. In 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railways opened, being the 1st public railway line in the world. Two years later the Reform Bill was enacted and transformed England’s class structure. The Act granted seats in the House of Commons to large cities that had sprung up during the Industrial Revolution, and also increased the number of individuals entitled to vote, including the lower middle class but not the working class. In 1846 The Corn Law was introduced, a system of Free Trade was applied to imported goods and in 1851 took place the Great Exhibition in London, a symbol of modern industry and science. Finally, in 1867 Victoria was named empress of India and the telephone was invented. With a lot of reforms comes a great amount of contradictions too → for what concerns poverty there was a crisis of rural economy and communities and, at the same time, a spectacular and unprecedented growth of urban population. The conditions of the working class were hard and there was widespread poverty and deprivation. Child labour was also a great problem, so that in 1833 the Factory Act was enacted: children could not be employed more than 48 hours a week and workers under 18 could not work more than 69 hours a week. Despite the act, no limits for adult workers were displayed until the Ten Hours Act [1847] that set the limit at 10 hours a day for all workers. In 1834 the Poor Laws enacted that people who could not support themselves were constrained in workhouses under very harsh conditions. The increasing poverty, the miserable dwellings, crime and health issues created the so called slums, a place in which poor people lived in the british society, often displayed in literature [Dickens] The rise of the middle class and its moral values were: • Hard work and a sense of duty → permanent in the victorian society • The idea of respectability → behave according to the rules of the class • Charity and philanthropy → in order to improve society • Family → together with social life, family life is important as much as the political sphere • Gender relationships → domestic field belongs to the female kind of activity, supposed to be the angel of the house. Both women and men had to take care of the domain associated with every gender, everyone must complete the challenges agreed to them In the Victorian Gothic Fiction we’ve got the Doppelgänger, a double or second-self. In literature it is often figured as a twin, shadow, or mirror-image of the protagonist, just as it is shown in Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Doppelganger characteristically appears as identical to or closely resembling the protagonist. Late-Victorian Decadence shows “a new beautiful and interesting disease” marked by “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, and over-subtilisin refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity”. Important gothic fiction of the period are also Stoker’s Dracula and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. There’s an interest in a different way of behaving in society, a restless curiosity in research upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity. For what concerns poetry developed in the context of the novel, poets sought new ways of telling stories in verse. Turbulent relationship of the public and the private; exploration and representation of subjective states of mind [Alfred Tennyson; Arnold] were among the most important themes. There was a strong influence of the Romantics: dramatic monologues which are “Lyric in expression” but “Dramatic in principle”; aesthetic poets influenced by the French symbolism: “ “art for art’s sake” and the dramatic monologue is a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct from the poet. The theater also is flourishing of theatrical entertainments: melodrama, pantomime, musical pieces, burlesque, extravaganza, farce and tableaux vivants. In 1843 the Theatre Regulation Act made all theaters subject to censorship. New theaters were: sensational content and techniques [popular dramatic modes]; Comedies of modern life [Oscar Wilde] representing love relationships, contemporary social pressure, class consciousness and domestic ideology [George Bernard Shaw] Arts & Crafts are a new kind of artistic development: Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, among others. The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant garde movement in art. They supported the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. CHARLOTTE BRONTË Charlotte came from Yorkshire, from the north part of England not the metropolitan urban kind of background. She was the daughter [Emily and Anne] of an anglican man and had 2 older sisters and a younger brother, all turned out to be authors. In 1820 her family moved to Haworth Parsonage, because the father was appointed as curate there. They grew up in an isolated kind of society, without a possibility to mingle with common people and an active social life. Together with Emily, Charlotte was sent to school at Cowan Bridge. Two of her sisters will die because of tuberculosis, so the father will retire them from school because of the poor and dangerous health conditions. Brontee found a way to express her poor condition in poetry, a way to communicate her feelings. She declined a marriage proposal and became governess in the household, in charge of educating rich pupils in aristocratic families. She does not enjoy her position, she’s an educator, not a servant, but she’s often treated as one, so she gives up the position and declines another marriage proposal. The family was not rich, but formed by respectable people. The sisters knew the moral values and did not compromise their happiness in order to get a husband. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels in an opportunity to leave and see the world. Here they worked as teachers and during the time spent in the city, they were protestant living in a catholic family, having the opportunity to think about religion, seeing the catholic as ruled and owned by the pope. The time at school is cut short, because of the death of their mother. In a second stay in Brussel, Charlotte falls in love with a married man but she’s not as happy as the first time. Returning to Haworth she starts writing with her brother and sisters, and then starts finance for a joint publication of Poems by Currer Ellis and Acton Bell, using a male name in order to publish their experimentation. Only two copies are sold, but they receive good reviews. They’re now turning their interest into novels, using male names and sending manuscripts around to publishers. Even though Charlotte’s The Professor is turned down by several publishers, Jane Eyre is an immediate success, published in 1847 along with Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agens Grey. In 1848 Emily and a year later Anne died. In the same year Charlotte meets Thackeray and Gaskell. She declines another proposal and eventually marries Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls at the end of her career. Charlotte Bronte died in 1855 at Haworth, after giving birth to a child. In a letter from Charlotte we read about the condition of the woman at the time, she said that eventually it’s difficult to live as a single woman in society. Charlotte was very independent, she decided to marry even though she felt uncomfortable about it, she recognized the differences between the role of women and men in society. “It is a strange and solemn and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife.” Talking about the business of a woman's life, women were trying to break boundaries. Even though Charlotte lived in a secluded place, the father was very keen in providing her an education. She read a lot of newspapers conveying news about the country and abroad. As the daughters of a clergyman, their options were quite limited, they had the status of middle class ladies that from one side prevented them to have a job of physical labor, and from the other to have a good, wealthy marriage or a job as governess and educators. All the worries about the future are expressed in Jane Eyre, where Bronte describes with a bitter tone the limited conditions for such young women. When she started to have the idea to turn her intellectual ability into writing, she gathered some pieces of writings and poems to the poet Southey, asking for advice. The poet, recognized by the crown, said that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation”. → The reply is not based on the quality of writing, but only on the role of women in society. After the first attempt in writing she was not discovered, inventing new ways to maintain herself [teacher, governor] so she decided to stick to writing. Her first attempt in the publication of Jane Eyre was published under the male name Currer Bell and was presented as an autobiography. Jane Eyre was a success for the publisher and for the public, very keen in reading it. The choice of using a male pen name is a sort of desire of the author to neutralize the question of sex, not to hide her personality but to receive a more objective perception of the novel. The question of women's proper sphere in society was pivotal, especially in the Victorian period, many critics asserted that none could have guessed that the novel was penned by a woman because of the powerful language and the aesthetic quality. Others were focused on the question of gender, because she’s not subverting any gender role or ideas, just questioning them, she’s resisting them. The protagonist, even though she’s following the imposed rules, is displaying a desire to go against them. The character is developing during the novel, from childhood to adulthood, how she’s struggling to be successful in integrating in the society she’s living in. The heroine is an orphan without looks, always described as very plain, not turning into a beautiful woman either, and without money, without a submissive and obedient temperament. She’s got a strong will and a stronger mind; as we can see in the introduction in chapter one, where she’s adopted by a family at 10. In Gateshead Hall, the new household, Jane is not intimidated by her new family. She loves reading books, spending time in the library, even though John, a cousin, is opposed to it; facing her and trying to scare her off. Jane is very vulnerable as a character, she can easily be attacked. John is declaring his power and ownership, a prerogative of men in society. John is not the first, nor the last, but one of the imposing male characters that will impose themselves on Jane, but she’ll always refuse to accept these patriarchal rules, ready to face everyone, even though she’s not always successful. In a way she’s questioning the female role in society opposing all these forces [John Reed; Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester; St. John River]. All these male characters in a way are pressuring her to conform to society rules, but they’ll be defeated because Jane is not a passive being and receiver. Society wants females to be passive, and actually there are a million women following the rules, but this does not mean that they’re happy, nobody knows how many are the possible rebels. “Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint” → there’s a sort of captivity for women, like birds in a cage. These are not words of a woman who accepts her inferiority to men, she’s going against women's self-sacrifice, she’s depicted as a strong heroine, who’s achieving a happy life, with a lovely home, husband, money [following tradition by her own rules], subverting the traditional ideas. Traditionally, the woman who follows the rules is prized with happiness, here it’s the complete opposite, it’s a contrasting kind of novel. This strong heroine is the element that is now read as the most successful part of the story, the transgression challenging the power. In 1979, we’ve got a long list of new feminist who read Jane Eyre like a revolutionary novel, Sandra Gilbert will use her in order to question and discuss women's role and starting a new kind of writing based on rebellion and subversion [The Madwoman in the Attic - the Woman Writer and the 19th century literary imagination] talking about women who are at the margin of society and gender oppression. We’re not sure about Jane’s open subversion of gender roles, but the rebellious feminine is there for sure. Interesting issues of class, gender and imperialism are questioned in the novel. Starting from social anxiety related to the gender issue is the governor question → the governess, a new kind of figure, prominent in the victorian period, was ambivalent, so that she’s reproducing the ambivalence using the governess as a sort of element in order to discuss gender roles, also because she had experiences as one. read the book as techno fiction, because of blood transfusion, photography, new devices of communications; but the final fight was involving a traditional battle, the good and the devil forces against one another. The most significant criticism about the novel comes from Stoker’s mother, saying that “no book since Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein has come near yours in originality or terror. - Poe is nowhere. I have read much but I've never read a book like it at all. In its terrible excitement it should make a widespread reputation and much money for you.” The book made him some money, becoming a best seller from the moment of its publication until now. Dracula has been constantly republished since then and immediately adapted for editorial and media versions. The literary source has suffered a misreading from the critic because such widespread success has overcome the fame of the author, obscuring his identity and the text itself in favor of the character. Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, a colonial possession. No matter the three biographies about him, we know very little about him. He went to Trinity College, saw Henry Irving acting for the first time at the Theatre Royal and developed a passion for the theater, having a great impact on him. He worked as civil servant in Dublin Castle, married Florence Balcombe and moved to England where he took up a position as secretary to his great acting idol, Henry Irving, and acting manager of Irving’ s Lyceum Theatre. He remained with Irving until the actor’s death in 1905, and under his direction Irving became the first actor to be knighted. The collaboration with Irving was very important for S. and through him he became involved in London’s high society, where he became acquainted with many famous people; working for Irving, the most famous actor of his time, and managing one of the most successful theaters in London made S. a notable if very busy man. On eight working tours of America he came to love the country and again, met and mixed with the famous intellectuals like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Theodore Roosevelt; He died in London, in April 1912 at the age of 65 He wrote 18 books in all, and a collection of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction; however the book which made him famous, the gothic masterpiece Dracula, was first published in 1897. The first film adaptation of Dracula was released in 1922 and was named Nosferatu, produced while Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s widow and literary executrix, was still alive, the reason why she eventually sued the filmmakers. The first authorized film version of Dracula did not come about until almost a decade later when Universal Studios released Tod Browning’ s Dracula starring Bela Lugos Stories of vampires have been investigated in literature way before Stoker, using the figure in order to discuss reason vs superstition, mysterious, gothic, recalling folkloristics narrations coming from Central Europe. Stories narrated through romantic and Victorian periods. In Polidori’s The Vampyre, the inspiration of our Dracula, the writer uses Byron as a caricature of the figure. Issues of gender and the threatening monstrosity in relation to society are the two main reasons of Dracula and Frankenstein → Stoker is evolving these issues using new narrative techniques. He’s using a fragmented structure novel, a multi-narration kind of story putting together many narrative fragments. The story is not chronological, but uses a patchwork of different sources → he’s narrating by using extracts of letters, diary, journal entries kept in shorthands, press cuttings, transcribed phonograph recording, memorandum, telegraphs. His narration is mingling different kinds of linguistic tradition and conversation, symbolizing this overgrowing technology in society. From this perspective we can define his novel as a collection of data and information, the more you acquire information, the more you acquire knowledge and power. The characters are acquiring power only if they’re able to decipher all these pieces of information coming from different ways. It’s a unique and modern kind of writing, it’s necessary to collect all the pieces of information in order to understand the story completely. Different perspective are used in the book, creating a difficulty in having a single opinion and vision of the story The story is about a man, a count, living in Transylvania who wants to buy some properties in London. When in London, several strange situations are caused by him, but people do not know the cause of these troubles. We’ve got pieces of news about murders, forcing us to collect information in order to understand that he’s the main reason for them. Once people understand that he’s guilty they organize themselves in an expedition in order to find him. Firstly is metaphorically invading London, spreading misery, but then he needs to fight to go back, persecuted by people who want to kill him. They chase him back and eventually kill him. The plot is narrated from several perspectives, the more characters collect information about him, the more they’re empowered to fight him back. But also Dracula is collecting information, in order to be empowered himself. In the end those who can master this information can succeed. He’s mingling the gothic in a new kind of way. Jonathan is writing letters during his journey to Transylvania, keeping track of everything in his diary. At the beginning of the story, Stoker uses travel literature in order to collect information about everything that Jonathan is doing. He’s a sort of modern tourist, talking about places, food, people, curious about everything. He’s narrating everything from an English imperialistic perspective, not being neutral but giving opinion. He’s traveled from London, a civilized place, into something mysterious. Eastern Europe at the time was a mystery kind of land, so it's a journey into the primitive, where folklore is part of reality, from the known to the unknown space, meaning new possibilities to decipher things, to discover. The journey is made by train, with time tables, modern transports, hotels booked, dinners, Stoker’s mimicking a travel guide narration; but the journey changes into something obscure, from a certain point the train is not an option anymore, forcing Jonathan to enter in a more exotic and dangerous experience. The ascending to the castle is happening into the night, mimicking Radcliffe’s arrival at the Castle of Udolpho. Reaching the castle is the mysterious part of his journey. Once he crosses the door, he enters in a supernatural kind of adventure, crossing the boundaries of uncivilized reality. If he could take a precise kind of record, after is meeting the unknown, he’s writing will be more confusionary, difficult to describe and understand Count Dracula, is doing the same kind of preparation for his travel to England, asking and collecting information about language, culture, people, the same one that Harker did. As soon as the two meet, Dracula is narrating his story and origins, exchanging information with him. All the knowledge that Harker had acquired is not sufficient to decipher the Count, belonging to the unknown world, he’s not understandable through rational or reason. New elements of the gothic are employed, found in England, the same that Dracula finds in London himself, revealing a new kind of London. Through his representation we know that London itself is full of anxiety, mystery, danger. New elements are presented by asylums, transfusions of blood in order to cure people, hypnosis → it’s an urban gothic, traditional when belonging to the castle but also modern. He’s dissolving social boundaries, between primitive and civilized, the self and the other, natural and unnatural, human and animal, life and death. The characters are incorporating all of them in a blending of elements. These anxiety and dissolution of boundaries are related to 3 areas of investigation: - the representation of women → during the victorian period the boundaries between gender roles were delineated. Throughout the century women will argue against these restrictions, starting to challenge all the laws that restrict their freedoms. They were challenging marriage and divorce laws, were aware of boundaries imposed and questioning them. They were demanding higher education, professions, rebelling against conventional rules, reaching their peak with the intervention of the new woman, a phenomenon referred to in Dracula many times on several occasions. The new woman wanted to be free in sexual and social terms, but this desire caused anxiety. Women wanted to reject the rules attached traditionally to them, and in Dracula we’ve got several women representing this request for freedom. We’ve got vampire women who reject maternity, not wanting to feed children but to feeding on children; rejecting their position as mothers and caregiver. Female vampires undermine the conventional passive femininity, they’re active. Lucy, an aristocratic, sweet, gentle portrait of femininity becomes seductive, sexually driven at a certain point in the story, undergoing a transformation. Lucy already manifested a sort of rejection before meeting Dracula and turning into a vampire, because she’s pure but suffering because of the need of choosing only one man as a husband. She already manifested anxiety about gender rules, strongly and openly. Also Mina, the third female character, apparently sexless, workaholics, is tempted by the sexual power of an external force. Even though she’ll resist his embrace she’ll be tempted and admit it. All these women, metaphorically speaking, represent anxiety. Women have different roles: the three women vampire are seducers, Lucy [passionate woman] is transgressing the rules of society because of the sexual intercourse with Dracula and Mina represents the woman who’s got intellectual abilities, she’s a secretary, an highschool teacher, she’s using all the new modern instruments of communication, she’s described with a men’s brain. When all the English men will be fighting Count Dracula, Mina will be part of them, but she’ll be taken apart from the haunting chase. The treatment of women leaves the focus on gender issues and perspective - degeneration of society → the advancement of civilization, the breakdown of gender rules, are a sort of stronger meaning in a more general social decline. The degeneration was already referred to by the evolutionary theories that dissolved boundaries between animals and humans, implying the evolution of species, that society can evolve and degenerate at the same time. This degeneration was something related to the increasing of the lower classes and poverty. The lower classes were growing in number, creating a discrepancy between lower and higher classes. Another threat was coming with the decadence of aristocracy, depicted as a sort of vampires, sucking the blood of those who produced in society. The threat of colonies also that were striking back, the contamination of Englishness by those who were leaving and arriving in London. Count Dracula, the vampire coming from the hills, is a representation of men coming from the colonies, with the desire of avenging