Riassunto esame Cultura e Letteratura Inglese II, prof. Polopoli, libro consigliato Storia della Letteratura Inglese, Bertinetti

Cultura e letteratura inglese II A.A 2017/2018

The Victorian Era (1837-1901) – The Novel and the Age

The Victorian Age is so called after the name of queen Victoria who ruled the United Kingdom for more than 63 years. Indeed, the era covers the period that runs from 1837, year of Victoria’s birth, to 1901, year of her death.

Since the period is so long it’s difficult to generalize about it; also, it was characterized by dramatic changes, which brought Britain to its highest point of development, making it the larger empire in the world. But above all, the period was marked by the transition from a way of life based on the ownership of land to a modern urban economy. The rapid growth of industrial cities was the result of industrialization, closely linked to urbanization.

The only key to this period of unprecedented change is change itself, which led to several elements, such as:

• The imperialist expansion created an empire of unprecedented size and might.
• The unprecedented increase of population.
• The rapid urbanization as a result of industrialization. There is no doubt that industrialization shaped the landscape, thus leading millions of people to industrial cities to work in factories. There was a shift of population from the country to urban areas, meaning the growth of the middle class and the decline of the aristocracy.
• The spectacular growth of industrial cities especially in the north of England.
• The industrial city and the railway engine are the most striking symbols of the age. Perhaps the symbol that better describes Britain industrial change of this period is the locomotive, which introduces a new way of perceiving the two important coordinates of space and time, introducing a new way of seeing reality.
• Optimism and hope constituted the ideological framework of a nation that by its enormous scientific and technological achievements inevitably believed that anything was possible.
• Darwin published the Theory of Evolution in 1859.
• The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London in 1851 exhibits technical and industrial advances of the age. The period was marked by a deep spirit of faith.
• A deep insight of the age revealed that contradictory tendencies marked the era, so we have optimism and anxiety.
• The birth of a powerful working-class movement, the Chartism, protesting against the injustices of the industrial system and demanding a radical reform of Parliament. The movement took its name from its call for a new People’s Charter, based on universal manhood suffrage and equal electoral constituencies.
• Trade Union Act in 1871.

Division of the Victorian Age

According to a tripartite division of the period, the Victorian age can be divided as follows:

• Early Victorian period (1832-1851). It’s marked by change and crisis, and two important non-literary events: railway expanding and the Reform Bill of 1832 that gave voting rights to industrial cities, thus balancing countries, and industrial cities. It’s a period of troubles because industrialization was producing social issues, such as the working conditions, children working in mines, poor people living in slums.
• Mid Victorian period (1851-1870). It can be defined as a period of balance and economic prosperity. England was proud of its science, technology, and progress. It was marked by the inventions of photography, telegraph and so on. The Great Exhibition of 1851.
• Later Victorian period (1870 to the end of the age). It’s marked by a general mode of anxiety and decay of Victorian beliefs, and a sense of dissatisfaction prevailed. There is a society in transition to another unknown destination, less hopeful. From a literary point of view, the novel was the protagonist of the age.

The Novel in the Victorian Age

The supreme literary achievement of the Victorian Age is prose fiction, since Victorians were novel reading people and the novel was a very popular form. The story of the Victorian novel is the story of the novelists’ attempt to interpret their changing world. The difficulty of generalizing about the Victorian novel is similar to that of the period itself. There is a close relationship between the novel and era, because the novel interprets its time, the society, the changes, and transformations of the era, giving voice to the hopes and fears of the time. It became sort of magister vitae of the age. Its main aim was amusement, but it often had a didactic purpose. Victorian novelists were conscious of the fact that they were writing for a middle-class audience, who read for escape and diversion. They wanted realistic books, not too complex, that could be read by the whole family and that had a didactic and moral quality. Novels had the role to make readers finer people.

Ways of Publishing Novels

There were three ways of publishing novels:

• The first one was the publication in book form, which characterizes the first period. It was in three volumes and very expensive.
• There was the serialization in a periodical published in regular instalments.
• The third one was the serialization in monthly parts at the price of one shelling. It was very successful. Novelists published 20 monthly instalments in 19 (the last one was double, containing two episodes).

Features of the Serial Method

• It created a unique intimacy between authors and its readers, because they lived with the characters, thus creating a long relationship.
• It gave an episodic structure to the plot, encouraging the creation of episodes and incidents.
• It influenced the style, because the use of the sensation was very employed in order to create expectations from the reader.
• It led to an excessive length of books.
• It assumed the image of an ideal unified family as a readership group, which shared literary taste and it’s crucial to the development of the Victorian novel and its subjects and topics.

Mudie’s Select Library was the largest and most famous circular library of the Victorian period; it made books available for a large audience, because of its economic mode of distribution, according to which people bought books by paying a pre-book.

Victorian novels must be considered as responses to the time of change, which were ambivalent, because some writers felt they needed to engage against society, and others to retreat from it and find a refuge in a stable past.

The Sense of Presence

The nineteenth century Britain was the high of the social realist novels and major Victorian writers like Dickens, Eliot, Disraeli, and Gaskell, who diagnosed the condition of England in their works. Now the term “the Condition of England novels” is used to refer to a body of narrative fiction, also known as Industrial novels, Social Travels, or Social Problem Novels, published in Victorian England. Conditions of England novels are directly engaged with the social and political issues and with a specific concern about the social consequences of the industrial revolution in England. That’s why these novels are also called Industrial Novels, in which is strong the sense of the presence, all marked by social realistic descriptions.

These novels have some features in common, such as: criticism of the effects of industrialism; the exploitation of children in factories, the abuse of child labour and the miserable conditions of the industrial working class.

“Condition of England” novels: Mary Barton and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell; Dombey and Son, Hard times, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens; Coningsby and Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli.

The Sense of the Past

“We who have lived before the railway were made, belong to another world [...] railroads start a new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.” This sense of division, of belonging to two ages was strongly felt by some novelists who are concerned with the recent past of their society but also with their personal past.

The sense of the past as a sense of the self: the bildungsroman. Some writers to escape looked back to the past, but this idea cannot be understood from a chronological point of view, since it’s personal, it’s a dimension where memories and nostalgia were the protagonists.

In an age of rapid change, the individual had to re-orientate himself in relation to both past and present. The result of this introspective tendency is an exploration of the continuities and discontinuities inside of the self, often with autobiographical tone. The personal past is presented to find new meanings. That’s why many novels dealing with this sense of the past are bildungsroman, novels of formation or education, following the development of the individual towards maturity. Memories play an important role, with the influence of Wordsworth. They dealt with selfhood in a context of cultural crisis.

Examples of the “Fiction of the Self”: Cranford by Gaskell; Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, by Eliot; Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre by Bronte’s sisters; David Copperfield, Great Expectations, by Dickens.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

No single category can contain Dickens. He is the greatest Victorian novelist: his novels offer a unique interpretation of the age, testifying England’s shift from a rural country to an industrial one. In the 40 years of his writing life, he registered changing England in the succession of his books with wonderful vividness. Dickens satisfied Victorian readers’ demand for realist fiction. He set his novels in contemporary England. In his works, he focused on social problems and denounced the evils of industrialization, describing the squalor of the slums and children’s condition. His novels are usually defined as social novels or ‘humanitarian novels’ but he wasn’t a social reformer, because he didn’t advocate any change.

Pickwick Papers, first novel. Dickens’s Pickwick Papers initiates a new era, immortalizing a stage-coaching England that was passing away and he presented the individual and private man as hero. Pickwick, far from the aristocratic hero, typical of the historical novels, full of war heroism, is an anti-aristocratic hero, meaning his virtue, his heroism, is private and domestic. There is an elevation of the private man and of his private life to honour in literature. Dickens dealt with the old values of the old world with irreverence, comic energy, and vitality, and that’s what gives power to his language. Pickwick was plump.

Our Mutual Friend, last novel. This novel has to do with the precariousness of urban living. There is an evolution of fiction and time from the first to the last novel. Dickens remains an urban novelist, because he writes in an urban kind of way, since in the city we consume impression in a rapid and quick way, because what we perceive is what is real. In a city, images and appearances are important, as a result, Dickens’ style is exaggerated, marked by comical exuberance. The description of his characters is always rich in detail, because they are analysed from an external point of view. His descriptions through physical appearances give readers the idea of a round character. He doesn’t create types (universal) but individuals. He is the first novelist to place children at the centre of his fiction. Entertainment and amusement are the main aim of his novels. He mingles human and pathos.

George Eliot (1819-1880)

Pen name of Mary Anne Evans. Domestic realism marked her novels: art as a necessary commitment to the real. She was a novelist of the past and Victorian Age is largely absent from her fiction. Her aesthetic of realism is based on scientific method, observation, and experiments.

Dickens and Eliot are opposites. The first one is the great popular entertainer, the second one was the voice of higher culture, she was complexed, a great intellectual, a positivist who accepted scientific laws to explain the universe. She’s the novelist historian, sociologist. She observes society in a scientific way and believes in the influence of the environment. History is a science, by analysing it she is able to see different methods that interact. She set the novel in the past and she observes a period far from the present because, for her, through distance it is possible to achieve realism and objectivity. The search for coherence and stability inside the self becomes an important task for her, because she analyses the individual when he is confronted with the discontinuities of the world, and their effects on the characters.

Bronte’s Sisters

Emily, Charlotte, Anne. They gave romantic voice to the Victorian age. Their novels are romantic and imaginative and the supernatural is an important aspect. They are also social, not because they dealt with social problems, but because they were conscious of writing regional novels, in which there’s an awareness of life far from the city. In their novels, there is always a strong conflict inside the characters, thus making them psychological, dealing with the private and personal life of the individual. Also, they are characterized by a particular conception of time and space, and we find important experiments with time, full of backwards and flashback.

Introducing Modernism

“On or about December 1910 human character changed…” Virginia Woolf.

The reference of this sentence is the shift in human relationships. The change was not sudden, so Woolf is provocative in giving us a precise date, but took place in British society, closely linked to political, social, and historical events. Indeed, the enthusiasm, the faith in progress, that had characterized the previous age, were slowly replaced by disillusionment. It’s also true that scientists, philosophers, and thinkers in general, destroyed the predictable, stable universe of the Victorian era. In the past, the idea of history and humanity moved towards a linear progress, accepted by everybody. However, something changed, and some thinkers started attacking this idea of linear progress. The roots of Modernism are also present in the thoughts of these thinkers. Wagner criticised contemporary civilization, saying that progress means individualism. German philosophers Nietzsche, Schopenhauer were also influential with their pessimistic ideas. In the field of political science, Marx argued that the modern capitalist system is against freedom, and egalitarian values.

In the last two decades of the 19^th century, the system of Victorian values had ended and the pervasive feeling was of general loss. The positivistic faith in progress and science declined. Nothing seemed to be certain and even science and religion seemed to offer little security. As a result, a new view of man and universe emerged. Individuals lost their coordinates, their certainties and felt like strangers in a world that was unknowable. They couldn’t recognize reality around them, because it lost its objectivity and knowability.

This period of anxiety runs from 1876 to 1915 and is known as Modernism, characterized by crisis, both real and symbolic. This affected the consciousness of the individual, penetrating their souls. The causes for dissatisfaction were many in the collapse of all established values.

Modernism Historical Context

The effect of WWI on the individual consciousness was traumatic and produced despair, fear, uncertainty. Also, the emancipation of women and feminism took place, with the Suffragette Movement. In 1920, the economic collapse happened, and the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Finally, there was the emergence of Fascism and the WWII.

In the creation of this context, war was the event that changed the world definitely. It was a terrible break and rapture with the past and tradition. It changed the world and humanity, destroying the psychological side of the individual. There is a strong sense of discontinuity between before and after the war and a lack of solid points of reference. Broadly speaking, modernist arts gave voice to these traumas.

Modernism in its broadest definition is modern thought, character, or practice. Specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements arising in Western society in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. At first labelled “avant-garde”, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, trying to grasp a new meaning. There are different expressions of conveying this idea of modernism in different fields, such as futurism etc; “All that is solid melts into air.” Solid has to be understood in both a literary and metaphorical way. In the field of arts, as a response to this sense of general tension and confusion, modernists rejected the old traditional style, that of the past, thus giving emphasis to the idea of experimentation and innovation. The most paradigmatic feature is its rejection of tradition.

The imagist poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) expressed the aspirations of modernism: his famous injunction “make it new!” is the motto of modernists and conveys their desire for novelty, renovation, innovation. Modernist experiments rejected traditional methods of representation and traditional (literary) forms. He moved from America to England. He was also the most important figure of the imagist movement, which emphasised clarity of expression, simplicity, going against Romanticism.

Far from traditions: Picasso’s les demoiselles d’Avignon Since now the world has lost its unity, art has to represent fragmentation. Reality changed and accordingly, art changed. There are five women, but not in a traditional sense. Modernism rejects the ideas of Enlightenment. Modernists were conscious of these changes, which is very important to understand their works. The five figures are not represented in a classic but in a modernist way; they are constructed simultaneously from different, multiple perspectives. There is not an objective world to be represented. There is not a single point of view. Cubism fragments the world into parts of atoms. Formal experiments affected also literature, it has to do with the questions of how to live within a new context. Individuals were in search of new paths. They asked themselves how they could cope with reality. This is the reason why modernist art is self-conscious.

Traditional English Novel remains anchored to the world of middle-class throughout the 18^th and 19^th century. The novelist shared...