L'Età Vittoriana e la letteratura inglese, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica L'Età Vittoriana e la letteratura inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE Victoria became queen in 1837 and reigned for 64 years in stability, She was the head of a constitutional monarchy thanks to her sense of duty. She married Albert in 1840 and they had 9 children becoming a model of respectability. Albert became prince consort and after his death in 1861 was built the Albert memorial. Queen Victoria promoted many reforms regarding: voting privileges extended to large industrial towns and later to male workers, limitation of working hours for children (48 h/w),introduced the secret ballot and created workhouses (in order to fight laziness) in which people (poor,orphans, sick people) could receive lodging and food (insuficient diet and starvation) in return of work Chartism spread through working-class radicals who claimed universal male suffrage, annual election of parliament and secret ballots. In 1845 the rise of population and the destruction of crops due to bad weather and plant disease led to the Irish potato Famine and caused 1 man deaths and 2 mlns emigrated. The “great exhibition was organised with the final aim to show Uk’s scientific and technological power. In foreign policy Uk gained Hong Kong and free access to Chinese ports, dealt with the Indian mutiny and Crimea war against Russia and Turkey to limitate their power (alongside w/ France). THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE The Victorian age was a complex and contradictory era: it was an age of progress, stability and great social reforms; but it was also characterized by poverty, injustice and differences between social classes. Victorian moralists promoted a code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it, based on work, respect and charity. These values were mainly made by the upper and middle classes, but they were the same for everyone. Middle-class ideals dominated Victorian families. The family was headed by the husband, while the woman had to look after the children and the home. If a woman was left alone with her child, they were marginalized by the society as 'fallen women'. In addition, sexuality was repressed and its most extreme manifestations, such as nudity in art, were denounced. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL During the Victorian era, the middle class was characterized by great readers: in fact, there were great exchanges of interests and opinions between writers and readers. In the beginning, Victorian literature was published in the pages of periodicals, allowing the writer to feel in constant contact with the audience. The novel became a form of entertainment as it was read within families. The novel became a form of entertainment as it was read within families. Being very successful, novelists decided to deal with themes such as the social changes taking place at that time, for example the Industrial Revolution, in order to make readers aware of social injustices. Most of the writers of the Victorian era were women: this was very surprising, because they were not allowed to make decisions, but had to be under the control of their husbands. In addition, women were also the majority of purchasers and readers of novels, because they spent a lot of time at home and had a lot of time for reading. However, it was not easy for women to publish their novels because in this era creative writing, like art and public activities, was considered 'masculine'. Therefore, when women published novels, they used masculine names. The early part of the Victorian era was associated with social and humanitarian novels, with the major representative being Charles Dickens, and psychological novels with the works of Emily and Charlotte Brontë. CHARLES DICKENS In the Victorian age, childhood was a cruel time of life. Many children were exploited in factories and mines, as servants or chimney sweeps. Therefore, some government acts, such as the “Ten Hours Act”, tried to improve the working conditions of children by decreasing the working hours. Victorian literature played a very important role in the sentimental representation of childhood. For example, Dickens is an author who perfectly portrayed childhood, where at the beginning every child lived in a negative situation but which eventually resolved itself into a happy ending. Charles Dickens had an unhappy childhood: his whole family was imprisoned for debt and he worked in a factory until he was fourteen. At the age of fifteen, he studied stenography and in 1832 he became a journalist for a newspaper. In 1833, he published his first work and started his career as a writer by becoming a novelist, but always kept his job as a journalist. In 1837 he started a very important novel, Oliver Twist, which he finished in 1839. This novel described the sad childhood that Victorian children experienced. OLIVER TWIST Oliver Twist is a novel that reflects the economic insecurity and humiliation Dickens suffered as a child. The main character is a poor orphan boy who is sold to an undertaker. The cruelty and unhappiness of this job lead him to run away to London. In London he falls into the hands of a gang of pickpockets, who try to turn him into a thief, but the boy is helped by a gentleman. One day, however, the protagonist was kidnapped by pickpockets and forced to commit a theft. Finally, the boy was adopted by a middle-class family, who gave him affection. Research revealed that Oliver's half-brother was part of the gang and they were arrested. The novel is set in London and three social levels are described. The lower-middle class society, as calculators and people insensitive to poverty. The criminal world, which were pickpockets and murderers who used violence to achieve their ends. The middle-class world, people who respected moral values towards each other. COKETOWN Coketown is a town of red brick or blackened by smoke and ash. There are a lot of machinery and tall chimneys producing smoke constantly. It has a black canal and a purple river (because of the discharge and pollution). In this town there was monotony, it was all the same: houses, streets, and people were doing the same jobs and the same things. But against all this there were comforts and the luxuries of the “fine lady” who endured the noise and was not interested in anything. The narrator contrasts life in the industrial city with the goods produced in the factories and their eventual destination, and the nature of this contrast it that the goods produced in Coketown are destined for the homes of the rich who don’t want to know where they come from (example: the Fine Lady) SCIENTIFIC PART Darwin, I più forti sopravvivono i deboli si estinguono, la specie si evolve e sopravvive solo chi ha le caratteristiche adatte. Il mondo è in continua evoluzione. THE LATE VICTORIAN NOVEL In the second half of the 19th century, novelists were more interested in the study of their characters’ psycology and in formal problems. In the late Victorian novel characters’ social background, physical features, language, and the houses they live in are carefully described. In these years a tendency toward realism developed as reaction against Romanticism. Its main features are: • The study of the influence of the social environment on man; • Direct presentation of its objet, avoiding any judgement or comment; • The aim to photograph the reality. Its main features are a reaction to moral and literary Victorian standards, the modification of Romantic trends, detachment from any ethical stance and metrical experiments in the direction of free verse. THOMAS HARDY He adopted a materialistic vision of the world, deprived by the consolation of divine order. His works are full of considerations about life, death, man and universe. His family was christian but he eventually abandoned his faith after having read classics, from which he derived the notion of indifference gods, cruel nature and hostile faith. After “the origin of species” he denied the existence of God. He saw life as a process in which man had no power, but he wasn’t a total pessimist and claimed need of altruism and kindness. The themes are the difficulty of being alive, nature (indifferent to human faith and sets the pattern of grow and decay, regeneration through seasons) and difficulty of communication. JUDE THE OBSURE Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a young woman named Arabella, is tricked into marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their marriage goes sour and Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last. However, he finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm. Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries not to fall in love with her. He arranges for her to work with Phillotson in order to keep her in Christminster, but is disappointed when he discovers that the two are engaged to be married. Once they marry, Jude is not surprised to find that Sue is not happy with her situation. She can no longer tolerate the relationship and leaves her husband to live with Jude. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON For Stevenson the novel was a flight into adventure where human beings escape from the incidents of everyday. He belief in predestination and one of his great them is the conflict between good and evil and this is at the base of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide. DR. JACKYLL AND MR. HYDE A moral allegory and a thriller, a psychological study and a horror story. His masterpiece The novel is about the Dr Jekyll, a scientist who is obsessed with the idea that his evil tendencies can be separated from his good side, giving birth to two beings. He deepened psychological analysis and most of his stories are based on one character speaking in the first person. He was a novelist, a poet and wrote many letters. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde talks about Dr. Jekyll who studying the human psyche, creates a potion that can separate the two natures of the human soul, the good and the evil. His personality is divided into two parts and can’t revert. The bad side is called Edward Hyde, a strong and bad person that makes every iniquity. When Dr. Jekyll is transformed back, he can’t live like himself so orders his servant to obey Hyde. Later the bad part takes over and he committed suicide with poison to avoid being caught by the police. The structure of the novel presents the shift of the narrative point of view. There are three narrators: • The third person narrator who closely folloes Mr Utterson’s movements; • Dr Lanyon, a doctor who having seen Jekyll turn into Hyde, writes down his own version f the story • Dr Jekyll himself, whose narrative and final confession takes up the last chapter of the book, in the form of a letter. This thriller deals with some of the most relevant issues for modern man at an ethical level and posed alarming questions about man’s goodness. AESTHETICISM Walter Pater is the theorist of the aesthetic movement in England. He said that art was the only certainty and that life should be lived as "a work of art". According to him, it was necessary to experience all kinds of sensations, without morality. The aesthetic movement reflects the reaction of the artist against a conventional and mediocre society. So the artist redefines the true role of art that is exemplified in the slogan “Art for Art’s sake”. This Slogan express the idea of beauty in itself, and an equilibrium of interior and exterior beauty. In this novel we can found the most important principle of aesthetic movement: “Art for art’s sake” So this novel is opposed to the Victorian Puritanism. The religion is refused and art becomes the only way to stop the time and to live every experience with emotional intensity. So the consequences of the Aesthetic movement in the artistic and human field are: • Excessive attention to the “self”, an attention to the subjective experience over standard codes of behavior. • Hedonistic and sensual attitude. • Detachment from the mass society, that is to say the perversity of arguments. • Evocative use of language. OSCAR WILDE He became a fashionable dandy; not only about his clothes, but above all about his way of thinking. He adopted the aesthetical ideal: he affirmed “my life is like a work of art”. He lived the double role of rebel and dandy. Wilde’s dandy is an aristocrat whose elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit; he uses his intelligence to shock and he is an individualist who demands absolute freedom. His interest in beauty (clothes, words or physical beauty) had no moral attitude. His aestheticism was in conflict with the didacticism of Victorian novels. DUBLINERS Structure and setting: consists of 15 short stories ◆ all lack obvious action ◆ disclose human situations and moments of intensity ◆ lead to a moral, social or spiritual revelation The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin; the others, advancing in time and expanding in scope, concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affairs. Joyce ≠ to most most Victorian writers that celebrated the developments in civilisation that came along with the rise of cities -> being a Modernist novelist, was hostile to city life, finding that it degraded its citizens Dublin is a place where ◆ true feeling and compassion for others do not exist ◆ cruelty and selfishness lie just below the surface The stories are arranged into four groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life “My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order” ఌ The Dead, the last story ◆ a late addition ◆ can be considered Joyce's first masterpiece ◆ it summarises themes and motifs of the other 14 stories of the collection, but it functions more as an epilogue ◆ it anticipates Joyce's move away from the short story toward the novel Characters: ᴥ the oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural and economic forces on the lives of lower- middle-class Dubliners provided Joyce with the raw material for a psychologically realistic picture of Dubliners as afflicted people. Everyone in Dublin seems to be caught up in an endless web of despair. Even when they want to escape, Joyce's Dubliners are unable to because they are spiritually weak. Realism and symbolism: description in each story ◆ realistic ◆ extremely concise ◆ an abundance of external details, even the most unpleasant and depressing ones the use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since external details generally have a deeper meaning ➤ the name of certain objects is carefully chosen and stands out from the naturalistic context in which they are placed. ᴥ the choice of the term street organ, which is also called harmonium in Eveline, in contrast to the everyday words for the rest of the furniture in the sitting room, takes on a symbolic meaning It points out the general disharmony' of Eveline's family, where the dead mother was a victim of the aggressive father and Eveline now shares the same destiny • religious symbolism can also be found, like the holy chalice which is mysteriously broken and is crucial to the real meaning of The Sisters • colour symbolism is widely employed in the collection: brown, grey and yellow frequently suggest the pervading atmosphere of despair and paralysis. The use of epiphany: Joyce thought that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of life through the analysis of the particular ◆ he employed a peculiar technique called EPIPHANY = the sudden spiritual manifestation caused by a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character's inner truths So at these revelatory moments the reader's attention focuses on the real meaning of the narrative. Style: Joyce's major innovations in style come in his more mature works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. his style in Dubliners is characterised by two distinct elements: 1. the interior monologue 2. patterned repetition of images; chiasmus ◆ Joyce employs a third-person narrator X he often shares a particular character's perspective X tends to reflect the language and the sensitivity of the person who is being described * NARRATOR tends to disappear in the interior monologue, which is in the form of free direct speech: the protagonist's pure thoughts are introduced without any reporting verbs, which implies the disappearance of the narrator from the text. This allows the reader to acquire direct knowledge of the character's mind. SUMMARY OF THE DEAD, GABRIEL’S EPIPHANY, the last story The protagonists of this passage are Gabriel, an Irish teacher and journalist, his wife Gretta, and, in Gabriel's thoughts, his aunts and Michael Furey. Gabriel and Gretta are in a hotel room after a Christmas party given by Gabriel's aunts. They have just come back from the party where Gretta, after listening to an old song, bursts into tears. Once at the hotel, she has told Gabriel she is crying for a boy, Michael Furey, who died for her. He was in love with her and wanted to say good bye before she left for college. He waited for her to appear through the window all night long in the rain, fell ill and died of pneumonia. Gabriel who, while walking back to the hotel, was 'consumed with physical passion' for his wife, first feels disappointed and then his feelings turn into pity for her while he is looking at her sleeping. There is very little action, i.e., Gabriel is looking at Gretta sleeping and he starts thinking. His thoughts wonder to present, past and future; he thinks of aunt Julia and how she will soon die, of the words that might console aunt Kate; then his mind wonders to Michael Furey and how his wife has 'locked him in her heart for so many years'. He feels he has played a poor part in his wife's life and that Michael, although physically dead is more alive in her heart than he is. Looking at the snow falling through the window and hearing its 'light taps upon the pane', he has the impression he is losing his identity and becoming one with the dead. In the passage there are some examples of Joyce's complex technique; from line 14 to 16 there is a detailed description of Gretta's clothes. The external reality triggers off a psychological reaction, and Gabriel after observing the scene, lets his thoughts go freely. Some powerful symbols are used. Personal names have a double meaning; they are connected with angels. Gabriel is the prince of fire and the angel of death. Gabriel, the protagonist, is associated with warmth/fire and is spiritually dead. Michael is an angel, too; he will live forever in Gretta's memory, winning the weak presence of her husband. The snow is a symbol of death because it covers the dead and the living alike; it is the symbol of hopeless solitude and incommunicability or the isolation of the artist in Dublin and Ireland; at the same time, it is the symbol of purification and life since it clears the world of all the negative images. Therefore, the final image of the falling snow creates a symbolic reconciliation between life and death. The journey has multiple meanings. Gabriel feels that the time has come to 'set out on his journey Westward'. Traditionally, 'going West' means 'dying' and, to Joyce, it also means 'leaving Ireland'. However , to Gabriel and Gretta, it also means to face reality and life. Gabriel goes towards the West to meet life and death. From line 5 to 7 and in the last lines of the passage we find two examples of 'epiphany'. Gabriel suddendly realizes how poor a part he has played in his wife's life and then, while his identity fades, he understands that he is no longer alone, he is part of the community of the living and the dead. This happens despite the dramatic extinction of the protagonist's personality and the awareness of not being loved. Although, in Gabriel's thoughts we can find the conflict between life and death, what finally emerges is the triumph of love. The most effective antithesis of this excerpt is the metaphorical pattern of life and death. Throughout the story the living are shown as spiritually dead, and, although Michael is physically dead, he is alive in Gretta's heart. EVELINE Eveline Hill sits at a window in her home and looks out onto the street while fondly recalling her childhood, when she played with other children in a field now developed with new homes. Her thoughts turn to her sometimes abusive father with whom she lives, and to the prospect of freeing herself from her hard life juggling jobs as a shop worker and a nanny to support herself and her father. Eveline faces a difficult dilemma: remain at home like a dutiful daughter, or leave Dublin with her lover, Frank, who is a sailor. He wants her to marry him and live with him in Buenos Aires, and she has already agreed to leave with him in secret. As Eveline recalls, Frank’s courtship of her was pleasant until her father began to voice his disapproval and bicker with Frank. After that, the two lovers met clandestinely. As Eveline reviews her decision to embark on a new life, she holds in her lap two letters, one to her father and one to her brother Harry. She begins to favor the sunnier memories of her old family life, when her mother was alive and her brother was living at home, and notes that she did promise her mother to dedicate herself to maintaining the home. She reasons that her life at home, cleaning and cooking, is hard but perhaps not the worst option—her father is not always mean, after all. The sound of a street organ then reminds her of her mother’s death, and her thoughts change course. She remembers her mother’s uneventful, sad life, and passionately embraces her decision to escape the same fate by leaving with Frank. At the docks in Dublin, Eveline waits in a crowd to board the ship with Frank. She appears detached and worried, overwhelmed by the images around her, and prays to God for direction. Her previous declaration of intent seems to have never happened. When the boat whistle blows and Frank pulls on her hand to lead her with him, Eveline resists. She clutches the barrier as Frank is swept into the throng moving toward the ship. He continually shouts “Come!” but Eveline remains fixed to the land, motionless and emotionless. ULYSSES Ulysses (1922), generally regarded as Joyce’s masterpiece . It is a multi-layered complex work and it is set in Dublin on a single day ,June 16th 1904. The protagonists are three Dubliners Stephen Dedalus, a young man with intellectual ambitions , the enemy of his own country and a martyr to art.Leopold Bloom, the Ulysses of the title. He is a middle aged married man, who wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wandered around the Mediterranean, encountering adventures roughly parallel to those of the Homeric hero. The third character is Molly Bloom , Leopold’s wife, who corresponds to Ulysses’ wife Penelope, just as Stephen represents Telemachus and Leopold Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus dominates the first part. He is the Joycean alter ego that the writer has introduced in the Portrait. Leopold Bloom is the central character of the second part, while Molly of the third. The book is divided in eighteen sections or chapters, each one corresponding to one of the Odyssey by Homer, though not in the same order. For example the first episodes is called “ Telemachus “ and it echoes the theme of the first book of the Odyssey , which describes Ulysses’ son forced to share his home with his mother’s suitors, who maltreat him and deprive him of his rights. Discontented and neglected , he seeks for news of his father. In Joyce’s Ulysses , Stephen lives in a tower on the Irish coast with companions who mock him and evict him from home. The second chapter is called “Nestor” , after the wise king in the Odyssey , who gives Telemachus good advice; in Ulysses the counterpart of Nestor is Mr Deasy , the headmaster where Stephen teaches for some time. In the chapter called Hades , Mr Bloom attends a friend’s funeral and at the cemetery he meditates on death. In the Odissey Ulysses visits the underworld and speaks with the souls of the dead. Chapter 15 is called “Circe”, referring to the Homeric story of Ulysses’ sailors turned into pigs; Joyce’s parallel is a visit to a brothel by Stephen and Leopold . The mythological dimension gives the book a symbolic value and make Leopold Bloom a modern Ulysses, an archetypal hero who can stand for humanity. The human quest continues unchanged even if the circumstances have changed. Molly’s monologue is contained in the chapter called “Penelope”. After wandering in Dublin with Stephen, Leopold is safe at home again, in bed asleep beside his wife, who lies awake reflecting on her past and her present. The episode is made up of the thoughts and the sensations that follow one another through Molly’s mind in an unbroken river-like flow. The monologue starts with the word “Yes” and it finishes with the same word, as if her thoughts flowed in a circle. All the men she has known become one man- her father, her lovers, her husband merge indistinctly into the “he” of her monologue. The monologue is divided into eight long sentences for a total of about 30,000 words. VIRGINIA WOOLF EARLY LIFE • born Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 • daughter of Leslie Stephen, an eminent Victorian man of letters she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere • education consisted of private Greek lessons + access to her father's exceptional library apart from a few courses at King's College, London 🦋 summers at St Ives, Cornwall together with her parents and her three siblings, ➪ the sea remained central to her art as a symbol ▶ 1895, death of her mother, when Virginia was only 13 affected her deeply and brought about her first nervous breakdown then she began to revolt against her father's aggressive and tyrannical character and his idealisation of the domesticated woman The Bloomsbury group: 1904, Virginia’s father died = she felt free to begin her own life and literary career Decided to move to Bloomsbury, a neighborhood of central London together with her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, she became a member of the Bloomsbury Group which included the avant-garde of early 20th-century London For these writers, artists and thinkers, the common denominators were ‣ a contempt for traditional morality ‣ Victorian respectability💙 ‣ a rejection of artistic convention ‣ a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes Bloomsbury members virtually defined the social, political and artistic themes of the coming mid- century: ❥ unconventional sexual practices ❥ anti-war sentiment and socialism ❥ the fragmented perspective aesthetics of both Modernism and PostModernism. A MODERN NOVELIST ‣ interest in giving voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory ‣ saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions ‣ the events that traditionally made up a story were no longer important for her because, what mattered was the impression they left on the characters who experienced them In her novels: ▶ the omniscient narrator disappears ▶ 𒊹point of view shifts inside the different characters' minds through - flashbacks - associations of ideas - momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux * contribution to Modernism is made clear by a statement in her essay Modern Novels (1919, revised as Modern Fiction in 1925); an ordinary day