The Victorian Literature, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Victorian Literature e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE Timing: 1830/37-1901/20, immediately after that we have Modernism, but it took some time for the complete transition between these two periods. This is the age during the reign of Queen Victoria, a period of progress , in all the branches of knowledge: science, technology, industry, means of transport (locomotives and networks of railway) and means of communication, as a result of the Industrial revolutions. A period in which the society changed its face, an epoch characterized by the great expansion of the British empire, by Colonialism and Imperialism that are the symbols representing the power of Great Britain. Another key topic is mobility: people started moving and travelling around the globe, this is due to the great developments in technology and in means of transport, but also to the colonial expansion for gathering raw materials: people begun to move to some exotic places (in Heart of Darknessthe journey to Africa; in Mrs. DallowayPeter Walsh travelled to India). In this period the gradual industrialization of cities begun: London was the most important center, but other cities became gradually more important. Besides all these positive aspects we have also a negative side of the industrial revolution: poverty, diseases and injustice. Poor people become even poorer and the difference between poor and well-off people got stronger. In factories people have very bad hygienic conditions, with little food and with a very low salary which could not satisfy them in economical terms: they were forced to work several hours per day, uninterruptedly, in those unhealthy environments. Poor people lived in slums or in overcrowded dormitories without any king of right. People did not have any rights, they were treated as animals and exploited; even child labor was exploited, poor children were forced to work in industries to gain more money (this fact was denounced by Dickens in his works). During this period there were various riots by poor people claiming more equal rights (luddites, suffrage movement and so on). This era opened with a series of great achievements: There was the Great Exhibition (1851) in London, at Crystal Palace, in which queen Victoria wanted to show to the world Britain’s industrial and economic power. This is the symbol displaying Britain superiority over the other countries (founding ideas of Colonialism and Imperialism). Literary domain: the mindset of this time was marked by the publication of Darwin’s book: “On the origin of the species” in 1859. This date is symbolic because it represents the conventional separation between the Early Victorian age to the Late Victorian age. The idea at the basis of this is the “ theory of evolution” by natural selection (as opposed to the theory of creation from the Bible), which had a great influence at any level (from science to literature, sociology…). Darwin thinks we are not created by God but, on the contrary, we evolved throughout the eras by natural selection (stronger species dominated over the weaker ones). Absolute faith in God started to crumble also because people begun to have doubts about what is truth and what is not truth and about their existence, they started to be annihilated by uncertainties and begun to look at life with a pessimistic glance. This happens at the end of the first part of the Victorian Age in which faith in God and trust in progress were key words. Past viewhope that god would make things right. Now there’s a more pessimistic view, things were not created by God who adjusts them. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE A compromise is something that has both positive and negative aspects. The term refers to all the contradictions that somehow characterized the Victorian age. Industrial revolution has led to diseases, poverty, disparities in the lower classes. Issue of prostitution: linked to the fact that Victorian Age was a puritan period in which people used to show a good façade which represented morality (chastity, pureness of Victorian society), but on the other side cities were full of brothels and prostitutes, considered as impure people. Rise of the middle classes, capitalistic bourgeoisie (richer, more power and rightsminority of pop); working classes were exploited, children had to work, no rights, bad conditions. In this period the first laws to protect workers conditions were introduced, as a result of several riots (luddites -beginning of XIX centuries and more). Workers unions that stand for their rights started to spread throughout Europe. First laws to protect children were signed. Colonialism: thanks to the colonies British resources they became more powerful. Negative aspect of imperialism: racism, exploitation of people and natural resources. (heart of darkness= describes colonialism;). Victorian values: • focused on morality, family and idea of respectability present in literature; it was only appearance they only showed their respectable facade. • Puritan society and repressed sexuality expansion of prostitution. • Idea of morality, church, family home. • Patriarchal unity: the father is the head of the house. Women relegated to domestic sphere. • Patriotism: idea of the nation, racial superiority of the white man. associated with social abuses because he was the most persuasive and influential voice. He was faithful to the teaching of Christianity as a moral basis for his thought and writing. There was something wrong with the society and this became the nature of his fiction, which was multifarious, digressive and generous: it reflects the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies, its eccentricities and its constrictions. ♦ Sketches by “Boz”: They are his own first experiments and they reveal an acute ear for speech and an acute observation of gesture, habits and misery of London interiors. The Sketches are anecdotal and descriptive; ♦ The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: series of anecdotal stories concerning the members of a London club. The characters move around England and make various comic encounters. ♦ Oliver Twist: it is the reflection of the darker side of Dicken’s imagination. He attacks the effects of the workhouse system in the opening chapters, but he succeeded in damning workhouse abuses in the popular imagination and even in eliminating them from reality. A contrast of scene, mood and narrative style describe the opposition of the insecurities of criminal life middle-class respectability. ♦ Nicholas Nickleby: Dickens took the exploitation of unwanted children in a Yorkshire school as the focus of this story, but he attacked also the aristocracy, the inefficiency of Parliament and the aggression of market capitalism. Its strengths are its comedy and its characters. Dickens was the dominant novelist of his time. He had an intimate relationship with his readers and in the earlier fiction he readily responded to the evident popularity of his novels and characters. ♦ The Old Curiosity Shop ♦ Barnaby Rudge: Dickens’s most neglected work. It is a historical novel set in 1780s. ♦ David Copperfield: there is a use of semi-biographical material and the first-person narrator. The novel is central in Dickens’s career chronologically but also from the novelist’s acute awareness of his own boyhood reverse. Its detailed observation and its description of the “discipling” of the heart allow the transmutation of tragedy. ♦ Bleak House: the use of a double narrative, one narrator employing the present and the other the past tense, helps to create a sort of confusion and mystery. The main object of the novel is satire. • Hard Times: it describes the modern condition of England out of London and there is a bitter satire on the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England. ♦ A Tale of Two Cities: there is the description of two different prisons, New gate and Bastille and it is set in London and Paris during the 1770 and 1780s. It has Dickens’s most constructed plot. ♦ Great Expectations: Pip is manipulated, gentrified and left empty. It uses a confessional first-person narrator. Pip is of a lower social class than David Copperfield and lacks is ebullience. ♦ Our Mutual Friends: London is described as dusty and dreary and in the four-character’s independence any hope appears to rest. It contains some of Dickens’s most fluently inventive dialogue. ♦ The Mystery of Edwin Drood : it an unfinished, unfinishable, obsessive, mystery story with a tantalizing narrative. Main themes: He describes poor people and brings the problem of poverty to the attention of people. Poor people were not able to read. Characters of middle and lower classes. Role is didactive to show negative aspect of industrialism, show poor people conditions. Defined as an urban novelist: focuses on the condition of the cities. Also describes life in the factory (industrial and urban novelist). Group of novels focusing on children, their exploitation and bad conditions. Poor children in slums and factories, the way in which they’re treated. Other novels: focus on condition of the poor and working classes in general. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865): she is generally associated with industrial Manchester (defined as the urban phenomenon of that age and a prophetic city). ♦ Mary Barton: First “Tale of Manchester Life” and dramatizes the urban ills of the late 1840s, an era marked by industrial conflict, enforced employment and growing class-consciousness. Its strengths are its detailing, its observations and its establishment of contrasted ways of living, working and perceiving. ♦ North and South: Second Manchester novel. It views class-conflict from a new politically optimistic viewpoint. It contrasts the snobberies of the country gentry of the South of England with the anti-gentlemanly world of North England. The novel also points to the independence of the industrial workers. ♦ Ruth: she treats the problems of an unmarried mother. She’s the real industrial writer of the time. She’s a didactive aim and goal (like Dickens). Focus in Manchester, the city where she lives. She creates a comparison and contrast of the values and way of life in the country and how things have changed in the citydifferences between North and south. Social problems of people working in industries Parnassian language Pre-Raphaelite: the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of anti-Establishment painters and one sculptor had begun a scheme for revolutionizing the pictorial arts in 1848. The scheme rejected the norms of painting current since the late Renaissance in favour of those artists who worked before the time of Raphael. What was special about the Pre-Raphaelite revolution was its frequent reference to cultural heroes who were not exclusively painterly, such as Christ or Shakespeare, Chaucer and Keats. The group’s journal was The Germ, a mix of poetry, prose and essays. ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti: his poetry is decorative and descriptive. He idealizes women both sexually and spiritually, he distances them as objects of desire and worship. George Eliot (1819-1880): George Eliot is the pseudonym used by Marian Evans, because she wanted her works to be taken seriously and she finally won respect as a writer on the merits of her work alone. What she learned during her self-education touched her fiction, providing her narratorial reflections and shaping the nature and arguments of her novels. The narrative voice of Eliot advocates a slow and gradual evolution. Also, Charles Dickens wanted her to write a novel for him and for serialization. Eliot has an acute sense of historical conditioning and of progressive development. ♦ Adam Bede: it sustains the values of an old-fashioned England and it explores a society in the edge of change. ♦ The Mill on the Floss: it shows provincial English society, which reinforces family values and serves to stifle aspiration. The heroin Maggie is both an aspirer and a victim. ♦ Middlemarch: it is the apogee of Eliot’s studies of provincial life. It has a delineation of aspects of contemporary economic, social, artistic, scientific and religious life. The novel undermines epic by stressing that women are constricted and silenced by the social conditioning inherited. The only true feminist that Eliot created is Romola de Bardi. ♦ Daniel Deronda: it represents the new themes of the late 1870s, with the Darwinism theories and the ideological prospects opening for European civilization. There is the view of an inevitable and not always welcome progress into an uncertain future. Portrays the situation and position of women. Doesn’t really follow the usual rules of the Victorian writers no real good vs bad, more ambiguities. Focus in position of women, injustices they had to live. For her the role of art was to deepen the role of women, to feel for women, have sympathy for people living in worse condition. Rebellion + tradition reform rather than revolution. Ideas are more moderate. Try to promote a reform, didactive role, showing people how things were going bad, leading a change to improve society. idea of still being linked to tradition, things can get better, no necessity of revolution. The Brontë Sisters: all the three sisters had maintained the use of the non-specific pseudonyms. Charlotte Brontë: she admired Thackeray, she also dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. ♦ The Professor: it is her first mature novel and it was written after her return from Brussels, where she had worked as pupil-teacher. In this book she describes her sensations, she felt that she was turning away from the “ornamented and redundant” to the “plain and homely”. This word homely tends to conflict with the Brussels setting. Jane Eyre: (When the novel begins, the title character is a 10-year-old orphan who lives with her uncle’s family; her parents had died of typhus. Other than the nursemaid, the family ostracizes Jane. She is later sent to the austere Lowood Institution, a charity school, where she and the other girls are mistreated; “Lowood,” as the name suggests, is the “low” point in Jane’s young life. In the face of such adversity, however, she gathers strength and confidence. In early adulthood, after several years as a student and then teacher at Lowood, Jane musters the courage to leave. She finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall, where she meets her dashing and Byronic employer, the wealthy and impetuous Edward Rochester. At Thornfield Jane looks after young Adèle, the daughter of a French dancer who was one of Rochester’s mistresses, and is befriended by the kindly housekeeper Mrs. Alice Fairfax. Jane falls in love with Rochester, though he is expected to marry the snobbish and socially prominent Blanche Ingram. Rochester eventually reciprocates Jane’s feelings and proposes marriage. However, on their wedding day, Jane discovers that Rochester cannot legally marry her, because he already has a wife, Bertha Mason, who has gone mad and is locked away on the third floor because of her violent behaviour; her presence explains the strange noises Jane has heard in the mansion. Believing that he was tricked into that marriage, Rochester feels justified in pursuing his relationship with Jane. He pleads with her to join him in France, where they can live as husband and wife despite the legal prohibitions, but Jane refuses on principle and flees Thornfield. Jane is taken in by people she later discovers are her cousins. One of them is St. John, a principled clergyman. He gives her a job and soon proposes marriage, suggesting that she join him as a missionary in India. Jane initially agrees to leave with him but not as his wife. However, St. John pressures her to reconsider his proposal, and a wavering Jane finally appeals to Heaven to show her adaptation seem to confirm Hardy’s sense of universe and nature, which have to be understood without the idea of a benevolent Creator. Hardy’s novels develop from relaxed expositions of tragedy comedy farce, to the over-complex stratifications of his later work. in poetry Hardy found the expression of his intellectual evasiveness. The 1860s were the years of the “New Woman”, and Hardy’s women were more determined and sophisticated than his male characters. Hardy’s discussions of sexuality scandalized some important professors of the late Victorian ♦ Jude the Obscure: Christian religion and morality are seen as irrelevant to the complexities of modern experience, religion complicates the destinies of the characters. ♦ The Dynasts: Hardy’s poetic drama, in which delusions and ambitions of humankind are watched over by choric forces who undercut any assumption of heroic action. ♦ The Trumpet Major: historical novel. History emerges in his work as a partial realization of universal consciousness. It presents a delicate study of character’s choosing. ♦ Tess of the D’Urbervilles: it is concerned with character wrenched from their roots, there are also literary, biblical citations, scientific references, etc. Late Victorian writer. Perfect expression of the loss of faith and hope of the late Victorian period. Lower middle class is in-between. Aspirations of mobility are very frustrating to its character. Pessimistic view of human life. Possibility of social mobility is something good but for him this is actually a negative. No romantic view of life. Even rural life is hard, nature is an enemy (opposed to romantic). No more faith in god, humans are fighting against nature. People have to work hard to make nature do what they want. MISTERY AND HISTORY: late 19th Century literature remained insular in its styles and preoccupations. Its concerns were with English society and its ills, with English religion and its development and with England’s position within the United Kingdom. Two contrasting movements developed: one outward to a wider world and one inwards to a new social self-awareness. The awareness that answers to domestic problems and social and spiritual ills , were not to be found in conventional Christian teaching, but in other religions, in scientific alternatives to religion. An obsession with crime, anarchy and decadence developed in the literature of crime in the late 19th Century. Conan Doyle (1859-1930): he is the creator of Sherlock Holmes. First, he is introduced in his first story A Study in Scarlet, but his success dates from the series of short stories published from 1891 in the Strand Magazine. In these stories there is the representation of a foggy, disordered London. Bram Stoker (1847-1912): he wrote Dracula, a masterpiece of horripilation. Is wrought narrative intermixes diaries, letters, journals and extracts from newspapers, suggesting a new kind of mythmaking. The novel is charged with sexuality and a sense of mental and spiritual disturbance. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): he is the writer of “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and it is a case in point. It is set in England and it centres on the horrid possession of a successful London physician Dr Jekyll and his alter ego, Mr Hyde. It is an uncanny story, with the examination of the divided self and it is a story of disparate perceptions and actions, which leads to Jekyll’s suicide to release from Hyde. Jekyll: “man is not truly one, but truly two: an angel and a fiend” Stevenson in his works represents the crisis of faith in the Late Victorian period, and they are particularly centered on the theme of the double, the dualism of human beings: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide, they’re the same person, but the one is good and the other is evil (Dr Jekyll by night morphs (turns, transforms into) into a bad creature, a urban creature as if he were influenced by the darkness of London). This distinction reminds us of the Victorian compromise. OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) He was a Dubliner and so he lived the question of Irish Home Rule in the 1880s. He studied in Oxford and r became famous in England and also in the USA. Underlying his life and works there were a seriousness and an awareness that he was acting. He had a homosexual affair with Lord Douglas, which led him to prison. The contrived style of his prose, the excessive elaboration of his poetry and the paradoxical wit of his plays are all subversive: they reject mid-Victorian values in life and art in the name of aestheticism and they provoke a response to difference. Wilde always questions institutions, moral imperatives and social clichés; he enjoyed his chosen roles as an aesthete and an iconoclast. His central arguments derive from an awareness that art is more than an imitation of nature. ♦ The Decay of Lying: it is a platonic dialogue, with Pater’s sentiments and Wilde’s lexical virtuosity. ♦ The Picture of Dorian Gray: it is his most important work of fiction. In the preface there is the quote “All art is quite useless”. The narrative is melodramatic, a Faustian demonstration that art and morality are quite divorced. There ae lot of contradictions and qualifications: aestheticism is both damned and upheld; hedonism is both indulged and disdained. It is a tragedy with the subtext of a morality play. Its central character is both self-destructive and a suicide. ♦ Salomé: it is his most powerful and influential tragedy. ♦ The Importance of Being Earnest: his most popular comedy. Theatre section wrote nine plays and only one novel “The picture of Dorian gray” (manifesto of aestheticism, it gave birth to this artistic movement). Theme of the double, Victorian compromise, good and evil. The picture of Dorian Gray Preface as the manifesto of the artistic movement of aestheticism (25 aphorisms) “the purpose of life is to have no purpose”. It’s not important to ha a moral purpose but it needs to criticize. Criticized as scandalous and immoral. 19th century version of the myth of Faust: refers to a myth in which the protagonist wants to achieve total knowledgetherefore sold his soul to the devil. Dorian his purpose is to remain young, he does not want to get old. So, he decided to sell his soul to devil. His portrait (as dark side of Dorian) gets old instead of him metaphor for the Victorian compromise, he does many bad things in life and tries to hide them with his beauty. Figure of the dandy: key figure in aestheticism someone who dresses very elegant and lives life as a form of art. AESTHETICISM ♦ It is a movement that rejects the moral rules and conventions of Victorian society. ♦ Founded by Walter Pater (at late Victorian period), he is regarded as the theorist of the Aesthetic Movement in England, his quotation is very notorious: “Art for art’s sake”art should be art in itself. ♦ “Art for art’s sake” slogan, giving pleasure to who produces it and who reads it. ♦ Life should be lived in the spirit of art, namely “as a work of art” ♦ No didactic aim, nor morality ♦ Figure of the dandy: Living an artistic life which apply also immorality. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): born in Poland, in 1886 he became a British citizen. He worked as a sailor and this influenced all his literary career. Conrad deals with the intrusion and interference of Europeans in the Pacific, in the East Indies, in South America and Africa. Most of his colonizers are intolerant and uncomprehending. In his work colonialism emerges as both brutal and brutalizing and power is corrupting and opened to abuse. ♦ Lord Jim; ♦ Heart of Darkness: apogee of imperialism. Imperialism is initially expounded as a variety of brutish idealism; His Polish background influenced him a lot: he started to write about the Russia under Western Eyes; Born in Poland, sailor, experience in Congo. A late Victorian, belongs in the late section of books. He’s a novelist. Heart of darkness 1902: represents a bridge between Victorian period and modernism. It’s about imperialism: shows the brutality of imperialism, and madness of characters. Formal level: frame a story within a story. Criticized as a racist novel in the article of Achebe. HEART OF DARKNESS Background: between Victorian and modernist period. first published in serialized in 1899 and then as a book in 1902. • Critique against the brutality of imperialism. • Madness is closely linked to imperialism. • Story within a story: filter, lack of faith in coherence/truth… • Critique by Chinua Achebe: a racist novel? Strict convection and polite society of the Victorian age, + modern attitudes = : sought to explode old conventions and invent new literary forms to convey human experience more fully.