Appunti di Letteratura Inglese I "Il Settecento"

Crusoe.

Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift is an Irish satire author and poet. This is a Neoclassical feature, because satire was a style cherished

by ancient prose. His masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, has a multi-level context, as a travel and adventure novel, an

encounter with otherness, a satire over British society, and misanthropic reflection. As a travel and adventure novel,

it’s a typical book of those times, with a man of the middle class busy in travelling, trade, and meeting different

people. The novel is divided into 4 parts: A Voyage to Lilliput, A Voyage to Brobdingnag, A Voyage to Laputa, and A

Voyage to the Country of Houyhnhnms. At Lilliput people are tiny, ridicolous, with political problems, targeting

Whigs. At Brobdingnag, people are so giant that they look very ugly, but their moral is considerable. In this way, the

size of people is a metaphor of their moral structure both at Lilliput and at Brobdingnag. Laputa is inhabited by

scientists and thinkers, but they are lost in their thoughts and have lost their practicality and sense of reality,

warping, in a satire of extreme rationalism, deism, and experiments of the British Society. Houyhnhnms are highly

civilized horse-shaped humanoids, living in a savage condition. Their utopic society is completely based upon

rationality, with its extremes. The main themes, therefore, are morality, utopia, the limits of human knowledge and

otherness.

Poetry in the XVIII c.

Poetry reader were less than fiction reader. They are part of an educated upper middle class. Poetries, anyway, are

often published in magazines, generally read at clubs like Coffee Houses or the Scriblerus Club. But poets of previous

generations were published more than the new ones, due to political themes like in Milton. The most important new

poets are Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Thomas Parnell. Poetry included several themes, modernity, politics,

war, the union with Scotland, kings, gossip, love. Poetries could also be the base for polemics or discussions. In XVIII

c. poetry refers more to a social sphere than to interiority, dealing with experiences in society.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope thinks that poetry is a way to support political ideas and to state the position of man in the universe.

This is the main theme of Essay on a Man, a philosophic poem in heroic couplet in which he analyses man’s

relationship with God, ending up with the conclusion that man is not the center of universe and that he must be

conscious that he’s part of a comprehensive design. Eloisa to Abelard is a story with a real background, set in France,

where the cleric Abelard lives a passionate and impossible love with his student Eloisa. In the end, Abelard gets

castrated and Eloisa is imprisoned in a monastery, from which she writes letters to Abelard. In order to represent

Eloisa’s conditions, Pope’s writing gets gothic, playing consciously the part of the “other”. In Elegy to the Memory of

an Unfortunate Lady, poetry starts showing the uneasiness of Romanticism. It deals with a ghost woman, suicide for

love, wandering on earth. It is a typical poetry of the beginning of the XVII c., with the aim to get men closer to

Nature, a Nature which is an expression of divine perfection.

William Blake

William Blake was a poet, engraver, artist, and a visionary, fond of mysticism, insomuch as during his life he was

considered even mad. He is considered a preromantic, because the prevalent themes of his poetries and paintings

are religion, esoterism, the sense of mystery and mysticism, which move up the uneasiness of the XIX c. and has

something gothic. He is the typical romantic figure of artist as a prophet, convinced that only intuition and

imagination overcome reason. His masterpieces are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, representing the

two opposite conditions of the human adventure on Earth, the first looking at humanity with trust, innocence,

ingenuity and pureness, the second realizing that humanity is characterized by a violent struggle for survival, based

on suppression, con, arrogance and strength. In the songs we can perceive the eternal dualism between good and

evil, paradise and hell, happiness and sorrow, love and hate. As his contemporaries, Blake was convinced that good

is innate in the baby and that evil is brought in by human laws and institutions.

Romanticism

Romanticism takes its origins from the German movement called Sturm und Drang, trying to overcome the limits of

human reason through mystic and religious experience. There is a very strong philosophical concept of infinite, not

chronological but linked to reason as an unlimited conscience, giving us the possibility to build our ego. Therefore

reason does not disappear, but changes shape. This spirit includes positivism, which is an idea of progress and

evolution of the whole world, of the whole humanity. It is relevant, because it was a way to justify colonialism as a

civilizing mission. The right European rationality wanted to dominate the rest of the world, but colonialism didn’t

need to be violent and people had to taste sublime in the landscapes and wonders of explorations and colonisations.

Burke describes sublime as fascinating terror, one of the strongest emotions ever. This led also to exoticism and

orientalism, which are a relevant example of otherness. Exhibitions started showing spectacular examples of savage

life and otherness, like the Hottentot Venus. In the other, European men could find their need to explain the entire

world. Victorian society could project in the other its unaccepted sexuality. British romantic literature took part in

colonialism, with racial, economic, cultural and political speeches. In arts Romanticism seeks the realization of

infinite by extreme contrasts, harmony and dramatic shapes.

Romantic poetry

The main features of romantic poetry are intuition, passion, gothic, darkness. That’s why Blake is the most important

precursor of the movement. In the Preface of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Coleridge set two cardinal

points in poetry: the power to induce sympathy in the reader trusting completely the truths of Nature, and the

power to interest through the modifying colors of imagination. The first aim, written by Coleridge, is common to

both: to awake the attention of the reader towards beauty of our world. Wordsworth states the characteristics of

the new poetry: a common, simple, ordinary life, humble and rustic, with its essential and elementary passions,

described through a simple and more efficient language, without elaborated expressions, because the poet is just a

more sensible man speaking to men. He establishes a very specific relationship with its public, directing to readers.

Wordsworth’s most important poetry is I wandered lonely as a cloud. In this poetry there is a strong interiority, an

integral relationship between man and Nature, a source of beauty for the spiritual elevation of men, and a simple

language. Also Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria thinks that poet’s role is talking to simple men, but

he criticizes Wordsworth’s need of a simple language. Coleridge wants to portrait supernatural in a possible way. His

most important poem is The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner, published in Lyrical Ballads, with a strong symbolism and

the themes of supernatural, death and enigmatic darkness. In the ballad Coleridge uses an articulated language,

even archaic, in a contrast to Wordsworth. The first parts of the ballad are a perfect model of supreme poetry, while

the last live in a fantastic dimension of fragmentary images. This turnover is very typical in Coleridge.

The Uncanny

The first to introduce the concept of uncanny in psychology was Jentsch, who analyzed The Sandman of Hoffman

and considered the automaton Olympia as a clear example of uncanny element in a story. She is similar to a human

being in every part, but she isn’t. In 1919 Freud wrote The Uncanny, starting from the analysis of the word

unheimlich, which is the opposite of heimlich, meaning familiar. Uncanny doesn’t seem to be just terrifying, it’s a sort

of familiar otherness, the heimlich inside unheimlich. And Freud recognized the uncanny in Olympia in the scene

where she loses her eyes, as a fear of castration. This is an interesting situation of otherness, because in this case we

see, outside, a projection of ourselves.

Gothic

Gothic is related to mystery, supernatural, uncanny. Sublime is an important element in gothic, because it includes

terror, infinite, the exploration of prohibited. Gothic symbols like darkness, evil, mystery and supernatural creatures

were a condemnation of social problems. Gothic fiction is a genre which particularly reveals the deep

transformations of context and culture of preromanticism of the last years of the XVIII c. It is linked to the

progressive introduction of sentiment, emotion and fantasy.

“Gothic” is a movie based on the Shelleys' visit to Lord Byron Villa in Switzerland, concerning the challenge to write a

horror story. From a previous miscarriage of Mary came the desire to raise her child from the dead which led to the

creation of Frankenstein. From Polidori's homosexuality, suicidal thoughts, and fascination with vampires came the

story "The Vampyre".The most famous scene of the movie and the poster are based on Henry Fuseli's painting The

Nightmare.

Mary Shelley

From the second half of the XVIII c. gothic fiction blossoms, dealing with a monstrous technologic progress. A further

example of the other side of progress is its danger and the fear to lose control of technological and scientific

progresses, like Frankenstein, published by Mary Shelley in 1818. Frankenstein is called the Modern Prometheus as a

punishment to his challenge to God, for wanting a power which is reserved to God. Frankenstein is disgusted by his

creation at once, mirroring Prometheus eternal curse. The story, in the structure of an epistolary novel in Chinese

boxes, is introduced by the letters of Walton, an explorer at the North Pole, to his sister. Walton reports that he has

met Victor Frankenstein, alone on the glaciers, telling the story of his life. At the university, Frankenstein is obsessed

by obtaining results never reached before. He starts studying origin of life, decides to generate a human being

assembling pieces taken from corpses and creates a terrifying creature, who runs away, killing his brother after 2

years. One day Frankenstein meets his creature, who tells him in a very human way what happened after he had

disappeared. He hated his look and wanted to take revenge, but got confused with his brother. The monster asks

Frankenstein to create a partner, promising to disappear. But Frankenstein destroys the female for fear they may

breed. After the monster kills Victor’s friend and fiancée, Victor chases him for the rest of his life, and after he dies,

the monster is sorry and decides to build his own pyre. The main features of the characters are Walton’s and Victor’s

desire to overcome human limits and Victor’s and the monster’s good intentions at the beginning, and their

isolation. The main themes are l