Oliver Twist: Themes, Characters, and Education Critique in Dickens' Novel, Sbobinature di Inglese

Scarica Oliver Twist: Themes, Characters, and Education Critique in Dickens' Novel e più Sbobinature in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! OLIVER TWIST (1837-39) ● Oliver is a child born in a workhouse. His mother dies just after his birth. ● For the first nine years of his life, he stays in a home for orphans. ● Afterwards he goes to a workhouse for adults, where he has problems with Mr Bumble because he asks for more soup at the end of a meal. ● Oliver works for an undertaker for a period of time and then he goes to the city of London. ● Oliver stays on the outskirts of London and he meets bad people. Fagin, in particular, is a criminal who teaches orphans how to become pickpockets, just to get his own benefit. He sends Oliver on a mission: together with 2 other boys he has to steal a handkerchief from Mr Brownlow, but the child is disgusted from the bad action and runs away. ● However, he is very lucky because Mr Brownlow takes Oliver home with him. Oliver is very happy with him. ● His happiness does not last very long (non dura molto) because the criminal Bill Sikes and his girlfriend Nancy capture him and bring him back to Fagin. ...Continua la trama con creatività! What are Oliver Twist’s main themes? Oliver Twist’s main themes are the failure of charity, purity in a corrupt city, and the idealization of the countryside. The novel shows how the organizations of charity run (gestite) by the church and the government were a failure (fallimento). The Poor Law of 1834 established that the poor could only receive assistance if they moved into workhouses, which, actually, were places that exploited them, putting them into forced labour and separating children from their families. As Dickens points out, this system, instead of helping the poor, they reproduced the desolate conditions in which they would live anyway. Furthermore, this system was based on the belief that the poor were lazy people, but the officials were the ones who were really lazy, greedy, and arrogant, violating the values they preached to the poor. The novel is also about the contrast between the squalor of the city, which causes injustices and violence, and the purity of the poor, like Oliver and Nancy. Oliver can resist any form of corruption, and Nancy ends up making a sacrifice for a child she hardly knows. The poor can better his living conditions only in the countryside, which is idealized in the novel. The country can purify our thoughts and erase the vices that have been developed in the city. In the country, then, poor people are neat and clean, and can find a new existence. Descrizione del posto Jacob’s island is a squalid and desolate part of London, near the Thames. It is reached through a labyrinth of narrow and overcrowded streets. The buildings in this area are dirty and close-built. It is inhabited by the poorest people of the city: unemployed people, ballast- heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, and ragged children. The environment is extremely unhealthy and filthy, because the air is filled with offensive smells and there is rubbish everywhere. In the shops, people can find the cheapest, least delicate, coarsest, and most common items. The houses of the inhabitants of this island are so broken open and filthy, that they usually have no owners, unless they have really important reasons to live and hide inside them. The island is also surrounded by a muddy canal, called Folly Ditch, from which the inhabitants pull the water up for their domestic use. Il linguaggio usato The style of writing is journalistic, as it is very precise and there are a lot of adjectives. These are often in their superlative form (e.g. dirtiest, roughest, poorest) in order to emphasize the miserable conditions of the people that live in this place. There are also many repetitions(dirt, mug, pollution, black) to underline the desolate state of the environment. Hard Times Description of the teacher Gradgrind Mr Gradgrind is characterized by his mechanized, monotone attitude and appearance. The opening scene in the novel describes Mr. Gradgrind’s speech to a group of young students, and Gradgrind physically embodies the dry, hard facts that he puts into his students’ heads. The narrator calls attention to Gradgrind’s “square coat, square legs, square shoulders,” all of which suggest Gradgrind’s rigidity. The character was probably created on the basis of the 19th-century political, economic, and social doctrine of utilitarianism, which valued only the utility of things. In education, it resulted in a teaching methodology which was mechanical and arid and destroyed imagination and individuality. Metaphors to describe the teacher and the student Mr Gradgrind is compared to a cannon and to a galvanizing apparatus, two metaphors that portray him in a mechanical and violent way. He is like a cannon because he is filled with facts up to his mouth, and he is ready to shoot them towards his students. A cannon is a military weapon, in fact with his way of teaching he wants to kill his pupils’ imagination and individualities, and he also humiliates them destroying their emotions. He also seems a “galvanizing apparatus,” because he conveys facts in a mechanical way, without arousing his students’ interests. On the other hand, the students are described as “little pitchers,” meaning little containers that are to be filled with facts. To him, teaching just means to transfer his knowledge of facts into their minds, and for this reason he doesn’t want to create any kind of relationship with them. Contrasto tra Sissy and Gradgrind Sissy and Mr Gradgrind are opposite characters. Sissy is a child, she’s female, and she belongs to the environment of the circus, a place that was believed to foster imagination, art, and creativity. It is also a circular place, with the circle representing perfection, and also the absence of angles, so open-mindedness. Mr Gradgrind, instead, is an adult, he’s a man, and he belongs to the scientific field. His world is a square one, that is, a world that can be elephant. It also has several identical streets, both large and narrow, inhabited by a multitude of identical people. This is a town that is based on facts, namely on the production. Everything has a price, otherwise it cannot exist. How are the inhabitants? The inhabitants are stripped of their personality as they go ‘in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work.’ This repetition produces the image of an ant colony, and amplifies the idea that industry caused individuals to blend into a faceless mass. To them, every day is the same, and their routine depends on the industries. These people live in an alienated state, like animals inside a cage, and are deprived of their personality. They live an unnatural life, in which they are exploited and oppressed. Jacob’s island and Coketown The inhabitants of Jacob’s Island and Coketown are alienated, exploited, deprived of their personality, and forced to live an unnatural life in a polluted, unhealthy, smelly, and noisy place, in which every day is like the other, and the routine is measured by the timetables of the industries. The atmosphere of the two cities is very dark, and highlights the oppressions that they have to suffer. Both places are polluted, dirty, filthy. Inhabitants of Coketown and students in Hard Times Both inhabitants of coketown and the students in hard times look like animals in a cage, because they cannot express their personalities and desires. In Coketown, the metaphor of the mad and desperate elephant used to describe the piston of the industry, could also represent the monotonous movements of the factory worker, who lives in a similar delusional (delirante) state. The image of the elephant also reminds of the theme of the circus in Hard Times, which cannot be mentioned by Sissy in front of Mr Gradgrind because it is a place linked to imagination. - Tra Cocketown e The definition of a horse = the unnatural life, the depersonalization, the alienation. The students, who are deprived of their life, and the inhabitants of Cocketown share the same terrible destiny. The language The language used in Hard Times / Coketown is very detailed, descriptive, and realistic. Dickes uses this kind of language because he wants to criticize the social problems of his society, and to let his readers know about them. For this reason, the novel has a didactic aim. Victorian hypocrisy = la troviamo in Oliver Twist nelle poor laws, e nella gestione delle workhouses = in reality they’re places of death, in Hard Times invece la victorian hypocrisy la troviamo nella figura dell'insegnante. Anche a Coketown = le persone ricche che non vogliono sapere da chi sono fatti i loro beni.