Romantic Literature & Social Issues in Victorian Era: Byron, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Romantic Literature & Social Issues in Victorian Era: Byron, Austen, Dickens, Eliot e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND FRENCH REVOLUTION The American revolution broke up for two main reasons: the colonies had to pay very taxes without having a representation in the parliament, and couldn't elect their own governors. George Washington had the military command. On 1776 was signed the Declaration of independence where it was said that every citizen had the right to be happy and could abolish the government. The French revolution began in 1789 and England became the leader of the six Europeans coalitions formed against France and Napoleon. He was defeated in the battle of waterloo and it was decided to re- established the monarchies in Europe. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ROMANTICISM Romantic means something marked by feeling rather than intellect, above all melancholy and sadness. Goethe used this name firstly. Romanticism was born in Germany with the sturm und Drang. In England the poets are usually divided in two generations. The first comprehends poets as Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth. They had optimistic philosophy because they came from the enlightment. They thought that even in the most terrible situation if you follow the way of the intellectual you'll be able to get out of it. After The Terror years the second generation was characterized by desperation and tragedy. Romanticism's main characteristics were the presence of subjectivity, feelings and a strong individualism. The romantic hero was a person who wants to reach the infinity but he recognizes that he can't. The poet is generally isolated. WILLIAM BLAKE William Blake was born in London in to a lower-class family. He studied to become a painter. When he was twenty started writing poetries to associated visual arts to his poetries. His first work was songs of innocence, which was later added to songs of experience. They were written to show the two parts of human's soul. The world of innocence is happy, full of joy and fearless. It seems to be a sort of Eden peopled by figures as the lamb and the child. The perfect innocence of the lamb makes the author asks himself who made the animal. The answer is God. The perfection of the world of innocence is opposed to the world of experience. The morality is changed by the experiences. The subjects are the same but they are seen by a different point of view. The world of experience is characterized by selfishness, injustice and cruelty. Its symbol is the tiger, which is both the symbol of cruelty and a charming figure. The poem finishes with a question where the author asks if It possible to understand the universe through the reason and senses. He is very interested in children's world and their imagination: the language is similar to the children's one and he said that he had seen a child sitten on a cloud telling him the verses of his poems. He was one of the first to denounce children exploitation. The two worlds coexist together and they are both important. Contraries are focused by blake even in the marriage of heaven and hell: both are necessary and complementary. For Blake faith and intuition were the only source of knowledge. His symbolism is explained well through his paintings, while his language is simple: he painted only from his inner eye. Two paintings: one represents Isaac Newton while he is studying science with a compass in one hand, sitting on a rock. The nature is behind him: too much concentration may lead to the sleep of reason. If he lost his balance he would end as Nebuchadnezzar: the Babylonian king who is a primitive image of Newton. ALEXANDER POPE He was born in a catholic family and as a catholic he was excluded from university and had to pay taxes. His melancholy was aggravated by his poor health. His first work is the pastorals: where he sees himself as a painter aware of the beauty of the English countryside. In essay on Criticism is explains the laws that should guide the reading of a critical essay. His model was Horace for his ars poetica and for his simple language. For Augustan poets coping the ancients means coping nature. Nature teaches men eternal and universal lessons. This though was in contrast with locke's empiricism. His is known for The rape of the lock in which he describes the frivolity of the aristocracy. The story tells about a beautiful young lady name Belinda. One day a lock is cut off from her hair by her admirer (the baron). This is the reason why a war breaks between the two families. The story is solved by the gods, who raise the curl to heaven where it becomes a star. The subject matter is light and meaningless but it criticized the aristocracy of the time. Characters aren't heroes. The style is classical because of the presence of the gods as deus ex machine. The language is refined. Belinda is seen as a divine figure. ROBERT BURNS Robert Burns was an example of the Romantics' ideal of the ‘natural’ poet, able to write poetry without the benefit of education or access to literary tradition. Burns was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of an unsuccessful farmer who died in poverty in 1784. He worked on the farm as a young man, though suffering from the heart trouble he died in 1796 at the age of only 37 - another Romantic characteristic. He was largely self-taught and was first inspired to write by falling in love at 15. After a period of town life during his more successful years, he returned to farming in his later years. Burns's reputation as a precursor of the Romantics needs explaining. He wrote mainly in the Scottish popular dialect and his songs, based on folk culture and legends, are certainly Romantic. But most of his poetry, though written in dialect, is more typical of the 18th century, featuring satire, epistle, mock-epic and so on, and inspired by Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and other Scottish Chaucerians of the Middle Ages, rather than by the classical models adopted by Pope. Also, Burns's use of dialect is not entirely consistent, but he skilfully plays English words off against the Scottish. The use of vernacular and the rediscovery of regional (Scottish) identity is evident in Poems Chieffly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). Burns wrote over 300 songs, mainly about friendship, love, women, drinking, animals and so on. A Red, Red Rose is one of Burns's most famous songs. It is written in the simple language of folksongs, but its apparent simplicity adds to the strength of the sentiment. The hyperboles it contains (for example, | will love you till the seas run dry) are timeless and represent feelings common to everyone expressed in figurative language, rather than a single poet's attempt at originality, with prophetic pronouncements. The metre used here is that of the traditional ballad: quatrains of eightsyllable lines, with the second and fourth lines rhyming. Burns's ‘uneducated’, ‘natural’ poetic talent, featuring the use of ordinary speech, the choice of ordinary subjects and his generosity and communicativeness, brought him the admiration of the Romantics. Morevore, he is remembered for his egalitarian vision of society. He is Scotland's greatest poet; Auld Lang Syne (Long Ago) is still one of the best known songs in British literature. William Wordsworth William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the Lake District, which became a scenery of the Grand Tour. His village was the inspiration for his poetries due to its natural beauty. After grammar school, he went to St John's College in Cambridge, where he graduated. After he went to France, where he committed to the cause of the revolution. There he got married, but due to the lack of money he had to go back to England and move to Dorset with his sister Dorothy, who was his main supporter until his death. In 1797 he met S.T Coleridge and the result of this friendship was the production of the Lyrical Ballads, that first apperead in 1798. The edition of 1800 also contained the preface, his poetical manifesto. Turkey. While on the tour he wrote the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which relate adventures set in the countries Byron was travelling through. The cantos were published on his return to England, in 1812. The success of Childe Harold was followed by a series of Oriental verse tales - The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara (1813-1814) - all immensely popular. They all share the qualities that satisfied audiences hungry for Romantic and Gothic stories: they are tales of love and adventure, set in Oriental countries, with a simple yet effective plot based on contrasted love, forced separation, death and revenge. Their heroes are proud and courageous, never bending to social requirements; they were thought to be like their author, and the term ‘Byronic hero’ became current in Europe. Byron's many love affairs with fashionable ladies were public knowledge. However, scandal broke out after his marriage to Annabella Milbanke. The marriage lasted less than one year, ending in legal separation; his wife accused him of mental cruelty, ill treatment and cheating on her with his halfsister. Byron was shunned by nearly all good society and was practically forced to leave England in April 1816. He would never return. From then on he lived on the Continent, mainly in Italy. The travels of these years are described in the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold. He first went to Geneva, joining a group that included the poet Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin. The poet then moved on to Venice, where he had many love affairs with noble and common women, but was also very active as a writer. Often working when he came home late at night, he wrote a tragedy, Manfred, continued Childe Harold, and composed Beppo, a light verse narrative in the style of Luigi Pulci's Morgante - a genre which he would later use successfully in Don Juan. While in Venice, in 1819 Byron fell in love with the 18-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, a noblewoman married to an elderly Italian count. She became Byron's mistress, and was the one woman he was faithful to and for whom he wrote beautiful lyrics. Influenced by her family, who were ardent patriots, Byron became an active supporter of the revolutionary society of the Carbonari. When Teresa's family were exiled Byron followed them to Pisa, and then to Genoa. Meanvrhile he was writing Don Juan, his masterpiece which he left unfinished at his death, as well as the series of his ‘closet tragedies’: Marino Faliero, Cain, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari. In his last years Byron increasingly felt a desire for action rather than literature. He often wished for ‘a soldier's grave’, that is, for death in battle. He had been one of the most influential voices in favour of the independence of Greece and Turkey, and in 1823 he sailed from Genoa to Greece, where he became one of the leaders of the revolution. He devoted time, energy and money to the Greek cause, training mercenary troops himself. He died of fever in the small town of Missolonghi, on the lonian Sea; to this day, Byron is considered a national hero in Greece. Style and Themes. Of all English Romantic poets, Byron was by far the best known in 19th-century Europe. His fame swept all over the Continent like a fever becoming an icon. He was the best-selling poet of histì time and was the only one “who managed to eclipse Walter Scott’s primacy”.He influenced major poets and novelists, such as Goethe in Germany, Balzac and Stendhal in France, Dostoevsky in Russia, as well as painters and composers, Beethoven in particular. But he was also worshipped by the leisured classes of Europe: he was invited everywhere, people imitated his way of dressing, his talk, his mannerisms. Byron was the incarnation of the Romantic hero: bold, impetuous, though at times melancholy; he loved solitude, and while in company he always seemed to be distant, haunted by some grief or remorse. His idea of heroism was derived by Blake (Songs of Experience) and Milton (Paradise Lost). He provided his age with a living model of the Romantic rebel and so close was the identification between the man and his work that his poems were read as autobiographical. Byron embodied the aspirations of freedom and the hate of social hypocrisy typical of the Napoleonic generation (Byron himself celebrated Napoleon in verse). He was against the glory of war and the myth of the Grand Tour. Though Byron was himself the epitome of the Romantic hero, his poetry was not clearly like that of either Wordsworth and Coleridge or any of his contemporaries: $ Byron’s great models were Pope and the Augustan writers. He was influenced by them in many ways, as some of the main features of his work amply show: an aristocratic distrust of progress and the modern world; an ironic attitude towards the middle class and all forms of social and political enthusiasm; a mock-heroic attitude: Don Juan is a version of the neo-classical satire against mankind and modern civilization, closer in spirit to Pope, Swift, and Voltaire than to Byron's contemporaries (a sense of humour, with occasional cynicism and scepticism). $ Byron was clearly a Romantic writer, in particular, for: - His individualism, which has heroic or aristocratic traits; - His heroes, who are strong, proud characters who feel wild passions and openly defy social conventions; - His love of the exotic and the Gothic; - His love of nature, not in itsmost common aspects, as in Wordsworth, or in the supernatural, as in Coleridge, but in its most dramatic aspects (the roaring sea, precipitous mountains); - His love of liberty and freedom, the only love to which he proclaimed he could be faithful (this also took the form of support for the Greek and Italian struggles for political independence; indeed, in that period most European countries were scarred by sociopolitical conflicts and people were suffering); - His choosing as the subjects of his poetry, stories of love, death and adventure set in Renaissance Italy or in exotic places in the Mediterranean. Mary Shelley She was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1814 she met Shelley, who often visited her house because of his father. They fell in love and started dating in secret because he was already married. When she discovered that she was pregnant they started travelling for all Europe and then they settled in Geneva where Byron joined them. There she wrote Frankenstein thanks to a sort of competition among them where they had to write a ghost story. After his husband's death, she devoted her life to publicizing his works and to writing herself to provide for her son. She wrote five novels such as The last man and The Transformation (a study of a dual personality like in Dr jukyIl and Mr Hyde). The success of Frankenstein derives from two factors: 1 She exploited the horrific and macabre of the Gothic tales, which were very appreciated. 2- It was based on the interest in the effects of science on men: 18th century’s experiments had demonstrated the power of electric current to induce spasms in dead tissue. The story can be read in two ways: on one hand Dr. Frankenstein is an update of Faust and he wants to acquire God's powers and overcome man's limitations. At the end he succeeds in creating the monster but he is horrified by what he had done (he talks about him as demoniacal corpse). On the other hand Frankenstein is the symbol of the isolation of the individual by society. In fact, Frankenstein is the counterpart of Shelley's Prometheus, they are both outcasted by society who suffer for no specific fault of their own. Frankenstein explains why he became a murder: he saved a child and then he was shot by the man who is with her, scared by his appearance. Wounded, he hides in the woods and there he sees a boy, with whom he decided to bound: the boy, who is the doctor's little brother is scared by him and Frankenstein kills him. Dr Frankenstein is the first to be scared by his creation and for this reason he will be killed at the end of the novel because of the lack of compassion towards him. The interesting element in this novel is that it is told in the first person narrator by three different narrators: 1 The first is written in an epistolary form by an English explorer in the Arctic regions, Robert Walton, to his sister. He tells her about him saving a Swiss doctor (his narration will return at the end) 2- Dr Frankenstein's own story 3- Frankenstein explains the reasons why he became such a monster. None of the narrator is omniscient. Frankenstein belongs to Gothic tradition and to the 18th century philosophical tradition: what makes Frankenstein so modern? Its characters’ psychological analysis: each character is portrayed by different views. For example, for what concerns Dr Frankenstein we are given an ideal portrait by Walton, then Dr Frankenstein portrait himself and finally Frankenstein speaks about him as a selfish and cruel man. it differs from Gothic tales because of the lack of certain feature as castles and medieval or catholic elements. Percey Shelley He was born in 1792 (That's a very significant month as it happens it was a crucial turning point in the course of the French Revolution so just under a week after Shelley was born that Tuileries Palace in Paris was stormed and this was the beginning of the fall of the monarchy in France) into a rich family: his father was a Member of Parliament and Percey initially followed the family tradition going to school at Eton. But at Eton he became a rebel against general social tyranny in the world outside. For this reason he was named ‘mad Shelley’. He was expelled from Oxford for writing The necessity of Atheism. In 1810 he married sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook and they lived together for three years until he met Mary Godwin at her fathers house and went with her to France, abandoning Harriet. On returning to London Shelley was accused of atheism and immoralism and his wife killed herself. The next year Mary and him went to Italy, where he composed his best poetry, enthusiastic of Italian landscapes. He wrote the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound near Venice. He lived in Italy for several years with Mary, Byron and other friends. His loves are important in his work: he celebrated his friendship with Byron in Julian and Maddalo and he expressed his sorrow for Keats’ death in Adonais. His best lyrics belong to the period he stayed in Italy and show his truly Romantic temper: they are characterized by natural scenery and the communication between the poet and the universe. Moreover they are full of his social ideas. His best know poem is Ode to the west wind, which is a sort of prophecy of political and social revolution because he expresses his desire for things to change. The wind is a sort of metaphor: it hasn't a voice but it moves something in nature. Prometheus Unbound was also composed in Italy and it is a sort of remake of the myth of Prometheus celebrated by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus. Prometheus was one of the Titans who stole the fire from the Gods to give it to men. For this he was punished by Jupiter who condemned him to be chained to a rock on a Mont where an eagle came each day to feed on his liver. In the tragedy, at the end he gives up and admits that Gods are superior than men. In Shelley's work he is a champion of mankind and never compromises with Gods, who are the oppressors. Jupiter represents the state and the church and has power on everybody except for Prometheus. For Shelley rebellions are the only means to defeat social oppression. Moreover he shows great technical ability in his poems John Keats He was born in 1795 in London. His father died when he was eight and his mother when he was fourteen. At first he wanted to pursue the carrier of doctor, but he abandoned to became a poet. Thanks to Leigh Hunt he published On first looking into chapman's Homer and Sleep and Poetry, in which he decided to devote his life to poetry. His interest for beauty is clearly seen in his poems: a thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Two events changed his life: an attack on Keats and the Cockney School of poets and the illness of his brother. He had to turn to badly paid journalistic work to provide for his brother. Moreover he got sick himself and he died in Rome in 1821. All through his life he had been haunted by the thought of death and it is reflected in his work. As Shakespeare and Milton he spoke about shortness of life and precariousness of man. He recalls Shakespeare ‘s sonnets even in the metrical system. He became one of the main example of the romanticism despite his poverty and humble origins. His poetry is based on sensory experience: the five sense produce something expressed in words only. He looked at an object and lost his identity. This sense of separation is called negative capability. He developed comes into contact with another group and lives with them for a while; he finally returns to his old world with a new awareness that will enable him to mediate between the two groups. This central figure has a marginal role compared to the great historical events, battles and other heroic actions. Each novel also contains some ‘love interest’. Scott was able to place large groups of characters into turbulent historical settings. His profound knowledge of Scottish history and customs enabled him to recreate it carefully to make what we would now call a ‘social historian'; he enabled his reader to see what it was like to be alive at the time, to feel historical difference. Later he started writing also regional novels. Scott's novels are told by a third-person all-knowing or omniscient narrator. He also makes use of: historical documents, whether real or invented, to prove the truth of the story he is telling (the historical novel is characterised by a combination of fact and fiction); detailed descriptions of places and people, and the summarising of events and inside information by the omniscient narrator; flashbacks, to follow the adventures of different characters in different settings. Scott is often credited with having ‘invented’ the historical novel, a novel whose story takes place in a historical past. This is not strictly true, but he was instrumental in perfecting it and establishing it as a recognised genre. Scott was very careful to distinguish his own interest in history and the past from the work of Gothic school, which used the past merely as a picturesque setting. In the introductory chapter of Waverley he criticises the absurdities of the Gothic novels and explains that he desires to record great historical events faithfully, while also describing the way of life of all classes Manzoni vs Scott: 1. while scott usually writes in dialects and in the talk of the people, manzoni’s language is clean, high and refined (he wanted to create a common language in Italy). 2. The main aim of promessi sposi is to teach and be didactic, while Scott's stories are adventurous. What do they have in common? 1. The both mix fiction elements and real historical events 2. Theyare both patriotic and deal with political conflicts The Victiorian age The Victorian age started in 1837 and finished in 1901, when Queen Victoria came to the throne. The reform bill of 1832 partly satisfied the middle class, but not the working class. A workers’ movement, The Chartists, so called because of the People's Charter, asked for the extension of the right of vote to the working class, but their proposal was rejected and only in 1867 with the second Reform Bill they obtained the right to vote for town workers and in 1884 for all male workers. The policy of protectionism was abandoned for the free trade. In 1851 the Great International Exhibition of London held in the Crystal palace revealed Britain: a flourishing state concerning science and industry. The triumph of industry coincided with the invention of the steam locomotive, the development of railways, the regular steamboat services from England to America, the study of electricity which brought to the creation of the telegraph and gas lighting in city streets. On the other hand, poverty increased and due to The Poor Law of 1834 the poor were put in workhouses which were sort of jails. During the Victorian age several important reforms were enacted: - The mines act, which forbade the employment of women and children in mines. - The Emancipation of Religious Sects, which allowed Catholics to hold government jobs - The trade union act which legalized the activities of the unions of workers. The Tories became the Conservatives and the Whigs became the Liberals. Moreover, it was founded the Labour Party in 1900. For what concerns foreign policy the relationship with Ireland worsened and the English empire greatly expanded: Australia and New Zealand became flourishing for cattle and England started ruling over India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda, Kenya, etc and obtained the majority of the shares of the Suez Canal. The term ‘Victorian’ has acquired a negative meaning in our century, suggesting an idea of ‘prudery’ (extreme decency, often hypocritical, in behavior or speech, and especially in sexual matters). These kinds of behaviors were inherited from the previous age: for example, the strict range of feelings and social interaction that we have already seen in Jane Austen's novels survived into the Edwardian and Georgian Age, and so were not only Victorian. The triumph of industry coincided with the steam engine. In a few years the new mechanized means of transport (such as steamboat and trains) would put an end to the old England. The invention of the stamp was fundamental for the development of the very efficient British postal system. It also had an impact on writers: many of the crucial incidents in the novels and stories of Dickens, Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, would not occur if sending and receiving letters had not become a commonplace. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), claimed that everything had to be judged according to standards of utility and how much they made happy the people. This is the best explanation of the Victorian Compromise: even if England was the best state in science, industry and new machines and it was a very rich country, the population starved and there was an exploitation of people and natural resources. they tried to cover the unpleasant aspects of progress under a veil of respectability and facile optimism. The outward strictness of Victorian morals and behavior was highly inconsistent with what was actually happening in society. The upper and middle classes could not tolerate the word ‘leg’ spoken in polite society, but were responsible for social conditions that pushed tens of thousands of starving women into prostitution. Despite the prosperity brought about by trade and the new technology, the poor endured terrible conditions. The New Poor Law of 1834, founded on utilitarian principles, was far from a solution to the problem. The foundation of many famous British charitable institutions also goes back to the Victorian Age. In particular, much was done to improve living conditions in hospitals, prisons, and schools. Women started to influence the society they were living in through philanthropic work: from 1850 on this represented a decisive step in the progress of the feminist movement. The first colleges for women were founded at about the middle of the century and soon women began to take on jobs formerly reserved for men: they worked not just as governesses or teachers, but also as nurses and even doctors and journalists. The first petitions to Parliament asking for women's suffrage date back to the 18405, but women did not get the vote until 1918. The Married Women's Property Acts (1870- 1907) finally gave women the right to own their own property after they got married (before, it passed to their husbands). Many Victorian writers, from Dickens to George Eliot, from Elizabeth Gaskell to Harriet Martineau, deal with such problems of the age as the exploitation of children at work, the workers’ struggle to get decent living conditions, the new role played by trade unions and the position of women in society. As far as the British Empire was concernedì, it was considered essential to possess a very large empire. The British empire was fundamental throughout the 19°" century until the first world war and was a lucrative market for business men. When the Boer War between the British and the Dutch broke out over control of South Africa, the Empire was defended by the most powerful navy and its defense cost twice more than Germany's and France's one. Moreover the expansion of France and Russia brought to the end of the British empire at the beginning of 20" century. Between 1840 and 1872 Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Cape Colony achieved independence for what concerns internal affairs. It was created the Commonwealth. Two powerful rivals emerged at the end of the century: Germany, which under Bismarck's guidance was beginning to challenge Britain's naval and industrial supremacy seriously; the United States, which had recovered well from the Civil War (1861-1865). It is not strange that socialist theories took root in a country where the conditions of the working class were so miserable. The condition of the British working class contributed much to the revolutionary theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who both lived in England and together wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848). Even a religious movement like Evangelicalism was based on a democratic conception of life and on a moral code that condemned the irresponsible exploitation of men at work. Victorian morals and religion were deeply shaken by the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and by the conclusions of geologists. By proclaiming that man was the result of gradual evolution, scientists challenged the Christian belief in the creation of man by God as told by the Bible. Victorian standards broke down above all on the role of family, which had been the base of Victorian respectability: Women felt oppressed by being confined at home with little to do except look after their families; Some writers began to expose the fundamental hypocrisy of the Victorian family. More typical of the last years of the century were a relaxed attitude to life, a less strict observance of social customs, a conviction that life's moments of joy must be enjoyed without giving much thought to the future. The heir to the throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, was typical: pleasure-seeking and openly immoral, as opposed to his father, Prince Albert, who was extremely serious, pious, and intellectual. It is possible to distinguish two main indicative phases in Victorian literature: - EARLY VICTORIAN: in this phase poets like Alfred, Lord Tennyson or novelists like Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray seem to be critical of their age but still to identify with it, and particularly with their readers. - LATE VICTORIAN: the poets and authors started reacting and denouncing the society, such as the novels by George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, or in exoticism or aestheticism as in Oscar Wilde. The Victorian Age is the first to be characterized by two literary movements: 1- REALISM-NATURALISM: prescribed a detailed imitation of life even in its less pleasant aspects; life should not be idealized, and the artist should be objective 2- AESTETICISM-DECADENTISM: claimed that the artist had no moral obligations, and that he should not take up the issues of the time. The famous doctrine of Aestheticism was ‘Art for Art's sake’, which means that art does not need any external justification. In general, the main literary features are: - MASS PHENOMENON :: Literature becomes a mass phenomenon - SERIALIZATION OF THE NOVEL: Novels were usually published in instalments in newspapers. The public could follow the story from week to week, like a modern TV serial CRITICISM : Literature as criticism against the flaws of Victorianism - POETRY ASA WITNESS OF CIVIL PROGRESS - Victorian architecture is characterized by the revival of the Gothic and Elizabethan styles. The Early Victorian Novel The novel became the leading genre. It talked about scientific discoveries and ethical problems raised by the Industrial revolution. them. His novels dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation: this is why we talk mainly about “novel of manners”. he enjoys commenting on his stories . He speaks as if the reader were sitting next to him at his desk, looking at the spectacle with him. CHARLOTTE BRONTE Emily Bronté was born in 1818, whereas Charlotte in 1816, of an Anglican priest of Irish descent (he later changed the family name into Brontéè as a sign of admiration for Horatio Nelson, who had been made Duke of Bronte, in Sicily) and a Cornish woman. Both parents were thus of Celtic origin, and this meant for the Bronté children a background of fantastic story-telling and a belief in feeling and impulse over reason. The other great influence on Emily was the landscape in which she grew up.. Mr Bronté often discussed poetry and history with his children, and family compositions were encouraged and read out aloud. Charlotte and her sisters were sent to Cowan Bridge School for Clergymen's Daughters(the basis for Jane Eyre's grim Lowood) where she endured the harsh conditions that killed her two eldest sisters. Charlotte and her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, were later sent to another, more humane school, where Charlotte was eventually started teaching. The book of her and her sister's poems came out in 1846 as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Ann), but sold only two copies. Charlotte, Emily and Anne were all gifted novelists. It was only in 1847 that the Bronté sisters’ work met with success. They published three novels: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights, by Emily, and Agnes Grey, by Anne. In December 1848 Emily died of consumption, as did Anne a few months later, in 1849. Style and Themes. They express a desperate need of a freer world of the spirit where the limitations of mortal existence may be left behind. Because of this, and the transcending power of her imagination, her verse recalls the work of Byron and Shelley. Wuthering Heights (1847) is one of the greatest and best- known modern love stories. It describes the life-long passion between Heathcliff, a dark Romantic hero (unknown origins, self-destructive for her and haunted by a mysterious restlessness and sense of guilt), and Catherine Linton, a passionate young woman torn between love and social conventions. In it, Emily confronts human passions with the requirements of society, and the clash is one of extraordinary violence. The presence in the novel of passionate love, which appears for the first time in Victorian literature, and Jane Eyre was Charlotte Brontè's first novel to be published and to this day it remains her bestknown work. It reflects much of the writer's own life experiences (the sub-title is An Autobiography) with a typically melodramatic plot of passion and adventure. Charlotte, like Jane Eyre, was treated cruelly as a young girl at boarding school; and Charlotte too had loved a married man hopelessly. Rochester, on the other hand, is clearly modeled on the Byronic hero (dark, intense, impetuous, and with a terrible secret in his past). The novel made a great success in its time since the heroine shows a courage, a determination and self-respect (typical of men only) which contrast with Victorian ideals of female delicacy. The reader shares Jane's point of view and feelings because it is through her that the story is narrated. Contemporary readers were fascinated by the power and the vividness of her tale. Early Victorian Poetry In the years from the accession of Queen Victoria to about 1850 two outstanding poets emerged, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, who were to be fundamental reference points for the poets of the second half of the century. They were complementary since their characteristics were different, though their basic attitude was similar: broadly didactic and concerned with the age’s most pressing ethical problems (political engagement). In general, we can say that: - Tennyson was more concerned with the individual in society, and his poetry was harmonious and of classical inspiration, - Browning was concerned with the individual as an eccentric, and his verse was more abrupt and difficult to follow. The early Victorian poets owe a great deal to their Romantic predecessors, in particular Shelley and Keats. Tennyson, for instance, was indebted to Keats's verbal sensuousness, while Browning owes much to Shelley's prophetic force. That is why the criticism talk about a 3rd generation of Romantic poets, even because they also used related thematic features (nature, past as a shelter, rediscovery of origins and traditions, uniqueness of the individual). The past becomes the means to show the flaws of their time and was used as form of escapism. It may not be a coincidence that as the novel was emerging as a genre, a strong tendency to tell stories in long narrative poems developed. It was in the first phase that the dramatic monologue was invented by Browning and Tennyson, and that the long autobiographical poem became recognisably modern in spirit. Acommon theme of Victorian poetry was love. ROBERT BROWNING Robert Browning was born into a rich family at Camberwell, near London. Apart from writing, he liked music, sports, travelling. With his love of the exotic and the picturesque he was a typical upper-class Victorian, sharing the values of his age though intelligently critical of them. Browning met his future wife, Elizabeth Barrett, in 1845. She was already famous as a poet, much better known than he was. After having moved to Italy, Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861. This coincided with the greatest crisis in his life which is well told in in his major work, The Ring and the Book. Browning returned to England to live in London with Pen, the son he had had by Elizabeth Barrett. He then started what is sometimes called the third phase of his career. He enthusiastically took upon himself the role of great poet and became a public figure, known for his conversation and wit. Dramatis Personae, a collection of dramatic monologues, appeared in 1864. Style and Themes. Browning's poetry was highly original. Using the typical Romantic mode of self- expression in first person lyrics, in his poems ‘the story is told by some actor in it, not by the poet himself?. This ‘actor’ is a single character faced with an ethical problem; the language is colloquial and Rhyme and alliteration are also used in an unconventional way. Browning is the acknowledged master of the dramatic monologue, though he did not invent it. The characteristics of his dramatic monologue can be summarised as follows: - it is recited by a first-person speaker; - this speaker is obviously not the poet but a historical figure - it is set in a precise historical and geographical background - there is a listener who usually does or says little but who is essential to the dramatic -it centres on a crucial point or problem in the speaker's life; by talking about it he/she reveals himself/herself; - the tone and language are consistent with the speaker, with his/her psychology and cultural level; - the language is made to appear colloquial and spontaneous -the use of irregular or unusual syntax, punctuation, and rhythm. These features emerge from his best dramatic monologues, such as My Last Duchess, set in Ferrara (Italian cities were favourite subjects with British artists), presumably in the Ducal Palace. The dramatic monologue is really a study of personality. It establishes three distinct poles of reference in a work: the reader, the speaker and the poet himself. We hear the character speaking without his or her being aware of our presence. One natural consequence of this use of the dramatic mode is that Browning's characters ‘speak’ (live speech). The characters jump from one idea to another, and change their line of argument, and this often gives Browning's poetry the feel of prose. His main antecedents are John Donne, Shakespeare in his soliloquies and Chaucer. Careful reconstructions of the way the human mind works and formulates motives for often unjustifiable actions or views is an essential feature of 20th-century prose. Browning's dramatic monologues also had a strong influence on Modernist writers of the early 20th century, especially on the poetry of Ezra Pound. Browning's central perception is that people are driven by ideals which, through force of circumstances or human weakness, are compromised and spoiled. He then shows how they try to hide the knowledge of their personal failure not only from other people, but also from ‘themselves’ (My Last Duchessis a case in point. Many of his creations are archetypal studies of human weakness. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the son of an Anglican minister. Alfred's formative years were passed in the Lincolnshire landscape; Alfred was the fourth of twelve children and. Alfred’s talent for verse showed itself early in Poems by Two Brothers, a collection of verse, mainly imitative, that also included poems by his brother Charles. At Cambridge, Trinity college, his poetry developed quickly, especially through contact with the ‘Apostles’, an undergraduate group of writers and intellectuals. The leading figure among them was Arthur Hallam, who was behind the verse Tennyson published in 1830 in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical and in 1833 in Poems. The sudden death of Hallam in 1833 was the most tragic and deeply-felt event in Tennyson's life. It traumatised him for the next seventeen years until he was able to write it off in the series of lyrics that were finally published in 1850, under the title In Memoriam. This brought him full critical acceptance and national fame which culminated in his being made Poet Laureate in the same year. After 1850 Tennyson married Emily Sellwood, whom he had been engaged to for fifteen years. He was made a baron in 1884 for artistic merits, having refused the honour twice before. He died in 1892 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Tennyson's fame had been steadily growing since 1842, when the two volumes of his Poems had come out. What made him famous was his eclecticism, which combined romantic and classical features. In fact he was a huge admirer of Virgil. Tennyson's poetry was the product of his personal experience and of his convictions (he believed in the poet's public role as a prophet. The Lady of Shalott is his best known short poem . the story is set during the reign of king Arthur: the protagonist is a lady who lives by herself on her island near Camelot. She can't go outside and when she goes out she dies. (unire appunti) Ulysses is his best known work. He wrote the monologue when its depression was at its deepest level. Ulysses is a complex figure: he is both the Homeric warrior and the Dante's version more ambiguous and charming. He is restless and doesn't want to stop his life: he wants to know new things, discover new lands. He was shocked by the new scientific discoveries. VICTORIAN ISSUES None of the problems facing Victorian society (the consequences of industrialisation, the degradation of urban life, pollution, women's rights issues, a certain loss of religious sensibility, the emergence of the working class)was new. The growth of the population made it more difficult to control these problems, especially in big towns. At the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign London was a city of about two million people; by her death over six and a half million. Most of the discussion about current problems went on in the magazines of the time. They were both ‘intellectual’ and highly popular. The central issue of the age was role of men in front of industrialization. Machines have changed not only the ways of production but also the ways of life. The most formidable weapon against the all-powerful machine was thought to be art. John Ruskin (1819-1900) became a sworn enemy to modern mechanized production-line systems. He attacked it in many pamphlets, articles, letters, and lectures. He began writing as an art critic: his Modern was interested in the interplay of human lives in a definite time and place, usually describing groups of characters that display the social and economic forces at work in a community. She was the first English novelist to perceive that there is a direct relation between a person's character and his/her environment, but she insisted that he/she could and should make moral choices, that he/she still had a certain measure of free will in spite of all conditioning. George Eliot frequently likened herself to a historian and a scientist, distancing Salvatore Zumbo 81 herself from the melodramatic style of the first generation of Victorian novelists, Dickens in particular, and stressing her careful observation of life in its minute details. Eliot's realism works at different levels: she realistically portrays geographical places, exterior and interior scenes, people, clothes, speech. George Eliot’s work is thus a bridge between 19th-century realism and the psychological analysis of the early 20th century. In her novels the hero or heroine is no longer the focal point of the story; ordinary people are investigated instead and opened up to show the many contradictory aspects that make up a single personality. Eliot's omniscient narrator not only knows everything but also intrudes upon the narration, comments on a character's actions and choices, and even on the narrator's own narrative choices. This clearly derives from the tradition of Henry Fielding's all-knowing narrator. The omniscient narrator discriminates and organises the events and social opinions presented in the story and gives us a complete vision both of their psychology and their social interaction. Furthermore, she uses it to put forward her main moral lesson in which we can see traces of her rigid Evangelical background: we are constantly faced with ethical problems, since making the right choice may determine one's future happiness or unhappiness. LEWIS CARROLL Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in 1832 as the eldest boy in a family of 11 children. His father, a clergyman, raised them in a rectory. Lewis Carroll was his pen-name. He became a deacon in the Anglican Church and a mathematics lecturer at Oxford. He wrote pamphiets, poetry and essays. Carroll had two interests: portrait photography, an art in which he was a pioneer, and writing books for children (“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” on one hand can appeal to children, but it also has a more complex level, thus producing double level of interpretation). Carroll was not only obsessed with photography (his archive contains more than 3000 photos, but many were destroyed because they were considered unacceptable), but also with young children. Carroll had the look of a very respectable man, but his life was very controversial, especially because of his obsession for children, even if there's no evidence that he was a paedophile. Religion was also very important for him; in this sense his sexuality was filtered by his close relationship with religion. In 1898 he died leaving an enigma behind him. Carroll’s works are prose stories containing a few nonsense poems. Both verse and prose show their author's passion for puzzles and word games. Carroll explores imagined situations in which rational control is absent or much reduced. Nonsense is also based on the manipulation of language: we can find words with no real meaning or words that do not exist, all paired with drawings made by himself. This complexity makes the ‘Alice’ books interesting reading for adults as well as children. His two most famous books are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The main character in both is Alice, a young girl. There are other iconic characters such as the Mad Hatter or Humpy Dumpy people the world of Alice's adventures, which take place in her dreams. The novelty and charm of the books lies in their combination of naivety and authentic dream atmosphere; the events of the stories and their language do not follow a common logic but the logic of dreams. Among Carroll’s many ways of playing with words two are most prominent: he uses words literally, depriving them of much of their meaning, and he uses words of his own invention. In both cases poor Alice is helpless since she is led into a game whose rules she does not know. Through Alice questions throughout the book, Carroll shows a modern awareness of the arbitrariness of words. The control of words is a great form of power. Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Carroll’s world-famous Alice in Wonderland. It came out in 1871, after the great success of the first Alice story. Alice's new adventures are still set in world which is in precarious and fascinating balance between gentle folly and strict logic, dream and reality. Alice takes a trip to a country that is beyond a looking-glass. She goes through the glass and soon finds herself in a fantastic country shaped as a chessboard, through which she moves from one square to another, as if she were a chess piece. In the world beyond the glass everything seems to be upside down. The relationship between Alice and the Caterpillarshows that Alice is eager to start a conversation and he starts it even if he is bored and doesn't really like being there. The Caterpillar is not interested in Alice at all. Alice is not very happy with the beginning of this conversation because she finds his question (“Who are you?”) very difficult, she cannot answer it. The main difference between Alice and the Caterpillar is that the Caterpillar is not as confused as Alice about his identity, he doesn't understand why it is so hard for Alice to answer that question. It is not a case that she says “very queer to me”: it involves the reader as well, he/she confused as well as Alice by the whole conversation. This type of exchanges implies chaos, which was very dangerous at that time (Carroll tries to find refuge from reality into another world, one made of dreams). The structure of the text is circular, the Caterpillar asks the same question (“Who are you?”) at the start and at the end of the dialogue. The end of the conversation is the beginning (typical of the Theatre of the Absurd, like Beckett in “Waiting for Godot”). Nonsense in fundamental in this text and in the whole novel. He puts to question the typical way of having a conversation, giving importance to nonsense. He was a photographer, so he took reality for what is was, while in his works he used nonsense. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (forse conviene unire appunti di ali) Born in Edinburgh, the only son of a successful civil engineer, Stevenson went to the University of Edinburgh where he first studied engineering and then law. However, he always preferred literature and by 1875 had already decided to become a professional writer. He also rebelled against his father's Calvinistic religion and for a while enjoyed a Bohemian life in Edinburgh. In 1873 Stevenson went to the French Riviera to recover from severe respiratory illness. During one of his many subsequent trips to France he met his future wife, Frances Osbourne. The years in France produced An Inland Voyage, describing a canoe tour in Belgium and France, and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, the account of a tour with his donkey Modestine. 1879 was a critical year for Stevenson. Without consulting his family he went to California to join Frances Osbourne. They got married in 1880. He returned to live in Bournemouth in England for three years in 1884. There he established a lasting friendship with Henry James, the great American novelist. He had already collected his essays, short stories and travel impressions in book form: Virginibus Puerisque, Familiar Studies of Men and Books, and The New Arabian Nights. His first adventure novel, Treasure Island, a pirate story, brought him immediate fame. Success increased with the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a short novel where he follows the example of the American Edgar Allan Poe, with his tales of terror. The success of the novel is well explained by the dramatic conflict between good and evil and how these two forces are in humans’ bodies and how they fight each other. Plot : The protagonist is Dr. JekyII, a respected doctor from London. With his experiments he manages to obtain a potion capable of separating the two natures of man: the good and the evil. He decides to experiment with the drug on himself. He thus turns into the repulsive and evil Mr Hyde and, as such, can unleash his lower instincts. With the passing of time, however, the doctor can no longer control the other himself and must increasingly ingest the potion. The months pass and a heinous crime occurs in London: Hyde is found guilty. Dr. Jekyil is questioned about Hyde's disappearance, as he has always been seen entering and leaving his home. Jekyil states that his relationship with Hyde has been completely broken. Months follow in which Jekyll resumes the life of a society he had interrupted for a time, but then returns to lock himself in his laboratory. One evening his servant, worried about the screams coming from the doctor's office, goes to Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer and friend. The two break through the door of the doctor's office and find Hyde dead and wearing Dr. Jekyll's clothes. Jekyll preferred to kill himself because Hyde, the evil part of himself, was completely replacing the good part, that of the doctor. The novel closes the long written confession of the doctor, read by the lawyer Utterson, which clarifies the whole story. We have three different narrators : - The third person narrator who most tells the story and follows Mr Utterson's movements and is not omniscent - Dr Lanyon, an old friend of Jekyll, who saw mr Hyde and wrote down his version of the story. He shows up only in the last chapter - Dr Jakyll, who is not an omniscent narrator and is not aware of what is happening. Asa traditional thriller the threads of the story are well explained in the last chapter by the doctor who eventually explains the mystery. The title « case » suggests a sort of detective story, such as the setting : a foggy London. Originally he wrote a Gothic tale, but later his wife suggested him to deepen the characters and the story, because according to her it has potential. Stevenson's story is important for the Victorian compromise: Dr Jekyll attempts to separate good and evil because he restrained himself from pleasure, that in the long run proves not to be practicable. The main questions that rise from the story are: was Jekyll's evil side stronger than the good side? Are men the result of the impositions of the society or evilness is inborn? BRAM STOKER He was born in Dublin. In 1868 he entered the Civil Service but his real vocation was the theatre. He began writing as a drama critic for the Dublin Mail and in 1878 became the acting manager of London's Lyceum Theatre. In 1875 he published his first horror story and in 1890 began research on a novel, The Un-Dead, later to become Dracula. This, his most famous work, came out in 1897. The story of Dracula and its main features (Transylvanian castles, supernatural transformations, vampire legends) are well known. Count Dracula lives in his castle in Transylvania. He never appears in daylight, sleeps in a coffin, and is endowed with superhuman powers (he can tum into a bat-like creature and crawl up and down the steep castle walls). In general: e On a first level, Dracula reads like a horror story exploiting exotic Transylvania and the popularity of stories about mysterious creatures of the night also featured in much Romantic literature. e Ata deeper level, however, Dracula may be read as a metaphor of the cracks in imperial British Victorian society. The fear of invasion by foreign monsters was really the fear of atavism, or reversion to a primitive or sub-human state in which dark instincts would come out: Dracula, like Stevenson's Mr Hyde, is a projection of the Victorian Age's fear of its secret and less clear aspects, the ones that had been carefully removed apparently by the Victorian compromise. Dracula draws heavily on Gothic tales of horror for its sceneries and situations: decaying castles, nocturnal cemeteries, the Un-Dead or creatures of the night and the ghastly rites associated with them. On the one hand, Dracula brings out the conflict between science (which tries to explain everything) and magic and superstition (which include many inexplicable phenomena and impulses). LATE VICTORIAN POETRY Its most distinct features are a reaction to moral and literary Victorian standards, the continuation and modification of Romantic trends, and new tendencies that looks to the modern age such as a detachment Oxford scholar and the author of an essay on Aesthetic Poetry (1868), had an extraordinary influence on a whole generation of young writers, including Oscar Wilde. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which celebrated energy and egotistic individuality in figures such as Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, became something of a cult work for its insistence on the tragic brevity of human life, and the assertion that the only way to combat the meaninglessness of existence is to live hedonistically, devoting oneself to pleasure. One of life’s pleasures was art. Pater argued that it should have no moral basis or purpose: it was good in its own right, an end in itself. This followed the French writer Théophile Gautier's theory, summed up in his slogan ‘l'Art pour l’Art' (Art for Art's sake), implying that art was to be free of all moral and didactic restraint. Although Pater did not mean that pleasure had to be immoral, his doctrine was read as a reaction against Victorian standards of morality. As the century progressed this attitude was taken to extremes by some French writers who, between 1880 and 1890, came to be called Decadents because of their life-style and ‘immoral’ writings: Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue. These writers were also known as Symbolists. OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde was the perfect Dandy, a man who is concerned with how he looks. His way of dressing follows his attitude towards art in general, and it was known in The Continent and even in New York. Wilde was born in Dublin and his fathe was a surgeon while his mother was a poet. He studied at the Trinity College and then at Oxford. There he read a lot about The Aesthetic Movement and Walter Pater. After graduating, wilde moved to London and became the most refined and provoking aesthetic young man. In England in 1883 he married Constance Lloyd and had two children. His first important works were written in this period such as The Portrait of Mr W.H or The Happy prince. He liked writing tales for children to educate them and to show to parents how to behave towards them. Wilde's literary success came in 1890 with the Picture of Dorian Gray, which mixes aesthetic features and a mystery story. The success of the novel is related to the aesthetic theoris inside it. The plot is well known: The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter Basil Hallward, who decides to portray him. Once the picture is finished, Dorian, expresses a wish of eternal youth (desiderio di eterna giovinezza): the portrait would absorb all the sign of age while he remain forever in his youthful perfection. The wish comes true (il desiderio viene esaudito), over the years while the portrait grows old and ugly (diventa vecchio e brutto) while Dorian's appearance remains unchanged. Dorian lives only for pleasure, making use of everybody and letting people die because of his insensitivity. When Dorian, totally corrupt and evil, sees the corrupted images of the portrait decides to destroy the portrait and begin a new life. But in doing so he kills himself. The portrait is magically restored to its original image of Dorian's youthful perfection while the real Dorian's features in death become those of a hideous (orribile), disgusting old man. The Picture of Dorian Gray has some elements in common with fairy tales, where the whole story depends on a magic object. The character of Dorian is very charming and reflects Wilde's ideas of beauty and life, which is the first form of art. he is able to transform a material experience into an aesthetic experience. (per la preface usare appunti) The novel was commissioned by an American publisher who wanted two mystery stories, one of Sherlock Holmes and one from Wilde. This explains the element of mystery and the ending which is typical of classic horros and crime stories. (like Stevenson) The novel has no moral basis, but Wilde seems to suggest that a life of pleasure has a price: in fact, Dorian has to pay the cost of three lives and at the end he dies. The story has some anologues with Wilde's life (he finished his life in prison). He dedicated himself also to light comedies such as Lady Windermere's fan, a woman of no importance, an ideal husband and the importance of being Hernest. The last one belongs to the genre of ‘artificial comedies’ ,is his masterpiece and is a critic against the hypocrisy of th upper class. The main characteristics of his comedies were: the absurd dialogues of the characters, the events that despite being traumatic seem funny and they suspend the necessity of moral judgement. His literary success came to an end in 1895 when he was arrested for homosexuality and spent several years in prison who deeply changed him. During this period he wrote The ballad of Reading Gaol (where he talks about the life in prison) and De profundis (a set of letter sent to Douglas). When he left prison in 1897 he was a broken man, so he changed is name In Sebastian Melmoth and moved to France. There he died in misery. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Shaw was born in Dublin of English parents. After leaving school at the age of fourteen and working in an estate agent's office for five years, he went to live in London in 1876, accompanying his mother who had gone there to improve her prospects as a music teacher. Shaw began his career as an unsuccessful novelist, but he was also a good theatre and literary reviewer, and a musical critic of genius. In London Shaw became interested in social reform and the Socialist movement, and in 1884 was one of the founding members of the Fabian Society, for which he wrote political and economics tracts. He also involved himself in journalism and public speaking, activities that taught him how to understand and manipulate audiences as he was to do later in his plays. When Shaw did finally turn to playwriting, his theory of the theatre was already formed by years of work as a theatre critic and by his thorough study of the plays of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, whose works examine the tragic lives of men and women limited by social conventions. Shaw admired Ibsen for having been the first to introduce real debate and discussion into his plays, seeing him as a realistic reformer of middle-class convention and hypocrisy. This view was exposed in his The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Thus, a mixture of personal reforming zeal, and admiration for Ibsen enabled Shaw to use the theatre as a brilliant propaganda device, a platform from which to declaim against the social evils of his time. This is clear in his Plays Unpleasant, so called because ‘their dramatic power is used to force the spectator to face unpleasant facts’, as Shaw put it. The collection included Widowers' Houses, performed in 1892, and Mrs Warren's Profession, which came out in 1898. Salvatore Zumbo 116 Plays Unpleasant were followed by Plays Pleasant; the two were later published together in 1898. Plays Pleasant were less shocking but equally clear in pointing out the main problems of modern life. Among them were Arms and the Man and Candida, performed in 1894 and 1897. Shaw's subsequent plays, collectively known as Three Plays for Puritans, begin to explore the relation between history and the individual. Shaw had begun as a vehement critic of the Victorian compromise, but he soon evolved his own philosophy based on ideas taken from Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson. For Shaw, evolution involved both the physical instincts of Darwin and intellectual development that leads to the emergence of a ‘Superman’: this is what Shaw called his ‘ideal’ 20th-century man, translating Nietzsche's Ùbermensch. Shaw thought social evolution must be wanted by individual men and is driven by a creative will which he called the Life Force. The Life Force runs stronger in woman, who is the agent of procreation, the supreme end of all species. In 1898 Shaw had married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an affluent Irish woman who was also much concerned with social reform and an excellent critic of her husband's work. His improved financial situation allowed Shaw to dedicate himself to playwriting only. In these later plays Shaw's satire was tempered by a tolerant and sympathetic view of humanity, and his bitter irony partly turns into humour. This is clearly visible in some of his best-loved plays, such as Major Barbara (1905) and Pygmalion (1913). With the years for Shaw came fame and success, sanctioned by the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. When he died, in 1950, Shaw left a considerable fortune which he directed should go into a fund for the reform of the English language. With Shaw, the theatre is a play of ideas, an animated prose for the discussion of current political, philosophical and social topics. All his great plays are essentially debates (people exchanging ideas and points of view) and the action follows the interplay of ideas created by bringing characters together on the stage. Intellectual tension and development replace physical tension and development. Plot has little importance and the characters are mostly mouthpieces. Shaw's plays are never boring, due to his prose, among the finest produced in his century, and to the wit of the dialogues, full of paradoxes and unforeseen verbal puns.