Scarica The Age of Anxiety: British Society and Literature in the Early 20th Century e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE MODERN AGE pp 156-157 Edwardian England When Queen Victoria died in 1901, Edward became king (Edward VII) . At that time : ● British empire covered a fifth o the total land of the globe ● British town was the wealthiest in Europe ● British ships carried 80% of world trade But, at the same time, France, Germany and the USA competed with Britain. Germany ,in fact, had imperial ambitions, building a navy to challenge Britain’s supremacy at sea. In the meantime, the King was a skilled diplomat and in 1904 signed and agreement with France, the Entente Cordiale, which established that Britain could pursue its interests in Egypt, and France in Morocco. Moreover, Britain joined an alignment with France and Russia against Germany, Austria and Italy. Apart from that, the English society, was similar to the Victorian one, which was characterized by class distinctions and poverty. The seeds of the Welfare State The political landscape changed in England. In 1906 the Labour Party was founded and in the general election of the same year The Liberals won. They were divided into 2 groups: ● Those who supported the traditional liberal values of laissez-faire and self-help. ● Those who supported New Liberalism, which was in favor of State intervention in social life. The most important man of this group was Lloyd George, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer in charge of the country’s finances at the time. ● Furthermore, in this period the Welfare state was founded, and some reforms were actuated: ● Old-age pension of one to five shillings for people over 70. ● Free meals and regular medical inspections in schools ● In 1909 minimum wages were fixed ● In 1911 workers had medical treatment and sickness benefits. In 1910, Edward VII died and his son George V became King, and other reforms were written : ● In 1911 the Parliament Act removed the Lords’ right to veto money bills passed in the Commons and stated that general elections would have been held every 5 years. In the same year, there were many strikes of miners, seamen, dockers (=portuali) and railway workers and Lloyd responded with unemployment benefits and health insurance. The suffragettes In 1903, Mrs Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The Suffragettes wanted women to get the right to vote and organized protest marches in London. Several militants were sent to prison and went on hunger strike. At the end, women over 30 gained the right to vote in 1918 and in 1928 the right was granted by women over 21 too. The outbreak of the war In 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand (heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne) and his wife Sophie was assassinated by Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, triggering a series of reaction : ● Austria began to bombing Belgrade, Serbia’s capital ● The German Kaiser, Wilhem II, declared war on Russia and then on France. The event that brought England into the war was the invasion of Belgium by Germany. In Fact in 1831 England had guaranteed neutrality to Belgium, and now Germany violated this. So Britain declared war and a force of 130.000 soldiers crossed the Channel to fight on the Western Front in northern France THE AGE OF ANXIETY pp 161-165 The crisis of certain The First World War left Britain in a disillusioned and cynical mood: some soldiers celebrated their return home with searching for pleasure; others were haunted by a sense of guilt for the horrors of trench warfare, or missed the sense of purpose the war years had given them. The gap between the generation of the young and the older one, regarded as responsible for the terrible waste of lives during the war, grew wider and wider. An increasing feeling of rootlessness and frustration, due to the slow dissolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth, led to a transformation of the notions of imperial hegemony and white superiority. Writers like Edward Morgan Forster became averse to political subjection and thought in terms of personal relationships based on equality and feeling. The committed writers of the 1930s and 1940s like Auden and George Orwell warned their readers against totalitarianism. Nothing seemed to be right or certain: scientists and philosophers destroyed the old universe which had sustained the Victorians in their optimistic outlook, and new views of man and the universe that had emerged at the beginning of the century spread through society Freud’s influence Important new ideas had been introduced by Sigmund Freud in his essay “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). Freud’s view of the developing psyche emphasized the power of the unconscious to affect behavior; the discovery that man’s action could be motivated by irrational forces of which he might know nothing was very disturbing. His theory also placed enormous importance on the demands of the ‘libido’, particularly those manifested in the Oedipus and the Elettra phase. The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered; the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early development, and childhood regained a status it had only with Rousseau; the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted, also thanks to the movement for women’s suffrage. Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of ‘free association’ (his patients were invited to speak about whatever entered their mind at the moment, without censorship), which deeply influenced the writers of the Modern Age
