Appunti completi di Letteratura Inglese 1

II. PROSE

1. Narrative Forms in the Transition from the “Romance” to the “Novel”

1.1 Mary Wroth and Aphra Behn

In the seventeenth century, metaphysical poetry had opened the way to the exploration of

interiority and the self, particularly through the experience of love and the confrontation with

the divine. However, toward the end of the century, with Dryden and his contemporaries,

literature turned toward a declaredly “social” and “civil” function, characterized by “urbanity,”

“reasonableness,” and formal “balance,” even in satirical or polemical moments. This led to

an almost total abandonment of introspective narration in favor of devotional, essayistic, or

diary writings, alongside genres such as travel narratives, picaresque novels, sentimental

fiction, biographies, and collections of letters, which would contribute to the formation of the

eighteenth-century novel.

The seventeenth century was therefore not very favorable to “pure” storytelling not aimed at

didactic or religious purposes. Fantastic escapism appeared more often in short lyric poetry

than in prose or longer texts. However, this apparent “disappearance” of narrative actually

created the conditions for the affirmation of prose narrativity in the eighteenth century.

An empirical measure of this change is provided by the comparison between two key female

authors: Mary Wroth, probably the first woman to publish a book in England, and Aphra

Behn, the first professional English female writer.

Mary Wroth (c. 1586?–c. 1651)​

Lady Mary Wroth, an aristocrat and patron, is the author of The Countess of Montgomery’s

Urania (1621), a long pastoral romance composed of intertwined stories, inspired by Philip

Sidney’s Arcadia. The work reflects the “ornate” (painted or courtly) style typical of

Elizabethan elites and presents an Arcadian and chivalric world dominated by Neoplatonic

and Petrarchan loves, which help create a mythicized image of court life.

An innovative element is the “feminization” of the novel: the protagonist, Pamphilia, is a

woman faithful to a tormented love, unable to give up her passion for the fickle

Amphilanthus. Mary Wroth portrays women of great nobility of spirit, aware of their

subjectivity and capable of expressing feelings with full consciousness, overturning the

traditional female passivity in love discourse.

Urania is also a “roman à clef,” with allusions to contemporary people and scandals that

forced Wroth to withdraw it, along with its sequel and the pastoral drama Love’s Victory.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689)​

Aphra Behn, a well-known playwright, is the author of two fundamental works for the

evolution of the novel.

Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) is the first English epistolary novel,

inspired by La Princesse de Clèves (1678). The text explores the psychology of the

protagonist Sylvia, who is motivated by amorous desire in conflict with rigid family and social

codes. The realism and introspection make the representation of human relationships

plausible, while still maintaining traditional romance themes.

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave (1688), published shortly before the end of the Stuart

monarchy, is a short novel with strong “autobiographical” connotations. The first-person

narration, with the narrator as an eyewitness, recounts the tragic story of Oroonoko, an

African prince of high lineage reduced to slavery and deported to Suriname, where he dies

stoically after a failed rebellion attempt alongside his beloved Imoinda.

Contrary to the cliché of the “noble savage,” Oroonoko is described as a man of great

culture, European education, and a sense of honor, similar to an ancient Roman. The novel

presents a harmonious convergence of the codes of honor and spiritual love.

It is not a universal anti-slavery novel: the immorality of slavery is related primarily to the

nobility of the protagonist, while his companions of lower status evoke less compassion.

Oroonoko is a transitional “Tory novel,” where the ideal aristocratic narration of the romance

clashes with the new bourgeois demands represented by greedy and violent merchants,

colonizers, and traitors in the New World.

While Daniel Defoe, a Whig, in 1719 with Robinson Crusoe would offer a perspective

favorable to colonialism, Behn denounces the loss of traditional aristocratic values (honor,

loyalty, love of truth) before capitalist accumulation. In this context, the absolutist hero like

Oroonoko is inevitably overwhelmed.

At a metanarrative level, Oroonoko can be read as an elegy for romance, spoken from within

a work that is already partly a novel.

1.2 John Bunyan

John Bunyan (1628–1688), a tinker by trade and a soldier in Cromwell’s army during the civil

war, became an “unauthorized” preacher after the Restoration, enduring long periods in

prison. A Baptist pastor, he authored numerous devotional and moral texts.

His spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), offers a vivid

and dramatic account of his existential journey, but deliberately “disembodied” and

“de-individualized”: the narrating self avoids specific references to places, events, and

people, who appear as functional figures in the narration (the Wife, the Young Man, the

Shopkeeper). This strategy serves to universalize the story, facilitating the reader’s

identification with the “reborn” Christian pilgrim in search of God.

Much of Grace Abounding shows the non-linearity of the spiritual path, made of sudden

illuminations and falls into despair, with consciousness as a battlefield between a distant but

present God and a physical, deceptive Devil ready to sabotage conversion. Existence is a

continuous struggle, interrupted only unilaterally by God if the believer maintains listening

and the will for inner dialogue.

On this autobiographical basis rests the Christian allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress from

This World to That Which Is to Come (1678), one of the most widely read and influential

texts in the following two centuries in the Reformed Christian context, reaching a very broad

social level. Its success led Bunyan to write a sequel, The Second Part of the Pilgrim (1684),

which follows the wife and children of Christian, the protagonist of the first book. Christian is

the name assumed by the convert (previously called Graceless), a sign of the narrative

transparency and simplicity of the text, which avoids complex allegorical constructions of

Dantean or Spenserian type.

In Puritanism, allegory was suspect because it allowed for arbitrary readings and

represented an additional distance from “truth” compared to literature in general. For this

reason, Bunyan justifies himself in an Apology, a poetic self-defense, explaining that

allegorical writing was imposed by divine will and inspired by the metaphoricity of the Bible

itself. Pilgrim’s Progress minimizes allegorical ambiguity by limiting interpretative margins

thanks to biblical glosses in the margins and the combination of literal and moral meaning,

reducing the story to a single level. Thus, the text reprises the simple and popular allegorism

of medieval morality plays (such as Everyman) and religious poems like Piers Plowman, and

reintroduces the frame of the dreamer-narrator who wakes and resumes the vision,

emphasizing realism and connection with the everyday experience of common people.

A key moment is the episode of the Interpreter’s House, where Christian learns to decode

divine signs and correctly interpret Scriptures and the “writing” of God’s will, an essential skill

for salvation. The Interpreter shows animated emblems to which Christian always asks,

“What means this?”, receiving unequivocal explanations. The dialogue turns into a

monologue when Christian feels he has understood the meaning, anticipating his election

among the righteous. Here an identity is created between the Christian reading the narrative

world and the real Christian reader, for whom the correct interpretation of reality and the text

is vital, since a wrong interpretation can lead to perdition.

A symbolic example is the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where Christian is so terrified by

dark presences that he can no longer distinguish his own voice from those of demons nor

recognize blasphemies as external.

The most famous passage is Vanity Fair, a permanent fair founded by Beelzebub, where

everything is traded, not only material goods but also careers, titles, people, bodies, and

souls. Bunyan, quoting Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, criticizes attachment to the world as an

“intransitive” love (cupiditas), opposed to the “transitive” charity that recognizes the

underlying spiritual reality. Christian and Faithful (one of the three theological virtues) are

judged eccentric and mad by the citizens, but choose the “madness” of imitatio Christi and

seek truth rather than profit.

The ensuing trial, a self-parodic satire of the judicial mechanisms of the time, depicts the

city’s nobles, courtiers of Beelzebub, as allegories of vices with noble titles (Lord, Sir), an

image recalling Milton’s “demonization” of the aristocracy. Although Milton’s Paradise Lost

and Pilgrim’s Progress are very different texts in destination and genre, they share the

creation of new models of individual, family, and social life, and new narrative forms that

prepare the ground for the modern novel.

Indeed, Robinson Crusoe, considered the first true English novel, presents itself as an ideal

follow-up to Milton and a rewriting of Pilgrim’s Progress, narrating the loss of the secularized

bourgeois paradise and its reconquest through exile and inner pilgrimage toward happiness.

2. Bacon and the Re-foundation of Knowledge

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), with his unfinished work The New Atlantis (1624), fits into the

tradition of the utopian narrative, which was very widespread in Europe at the time (such as

Campanella’s The City of the Sun, 1623). This genre, unlike others, does not focus on the

character or the interiority of the narrator (who in Bacon’s case is anonymous), but on the

encounter with an "other," superior and more rational culture compared to the original one.

However, Bacon shifts the focus from the political sphere to the scientific one, abandoning

the description of the ideal state to invent an imaginary civilization on the island of

Bensalem. Here scientific knowledge, experimentation, and technological development are

central and are managed by the House of Solomon, a research foundation whose purpose is

the deep understanding of natural causes and the expansion of human empire over all that

is possible to achieve.

In apparent contrast with this ideal of expanding knowledge, Bacon proposes, in his

Advancement of Learning and The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619), an elitist, almost