Riassunto esame Letteratura Inglese 2, prof. Partenza

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE SACRED

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- Austen’s works centre on what ought never to be made into a commodity (women, marriage)

- A sacred contract became a mercenary calculation: violation of morality

- Heroines struggle to maintain their moral principles and face poverty and contempt in a society that

values money above all

- In S&S Willoughby has a life-long regret for a marriage for money: each of her heroines must weigh

the hazards of a poor life against selling oneself for security

• In her novel MANSFIELD PARK

- She explores the consequences of a marriage with profit

- Motif of slavery: Mrs Price eloped for love (big family, small income) sells her daughter Fanny Price

to Sir Thomas and became Servant of Mrs Norris

Nobody cares about family’s feelings

She is considered an inferior human being because of her frailty

For the Bertrams, her class status and poverty, along with her frail constitution, serve to condemn

her as an inferior species of human, leading her to a life of humiliations

- The Bertram have mercantile values and hate Fanny for her possessions, both material (sashes =

sciarpe)

and personal (language) (she had never learnt French)

- They preferred performance and consumption over emotion and relationship

- At that time women’s ability were used to snare a rich husband

- The novels open with the calculation of the monetary value of the Ward sisters; Maria was the most

highly valued, but she was not beautiful

Sir Thomas made a bad bargain by buying an overrated commodity

- This novel confronts religion and secularization

- The novel works metafictionally rather than representionally: it offers an ideal portrait of world rather

than a realistic one

- The religious values of society, embodied by the “Father Sir Thomas” have decayed.

Chapels are no longer used for praying

Clergymen are no longer in residence

- Edmund’s idealistic view of prayer VS Mary’s cynical estimation of the physical discomfort of the

prayers: she was sceptical about transcendence

- Mary’s speech desacralizes Anglican practices by representing them as example of feudal tyranny,

the exercise of power rather than the invitation to worship

- Mary is cynical but like her brother (who prefers a Bertram to Fanny) she prefers the instant

gratification, avarice to spiritual purity. That’s the end of disillusionment.

- Fanny wears an amber-cross at the coming-out ball and from servant she became a bride-forsale

The cross:

- It’s a gift from her favourite brother William, that represents both the bond of love between the

siblings and Fanny’s innate, spiritual virtue: not only it symbolizes Christianity, but also its material

talismanic power of long life and health

- In the context of Fanny’s ball, the cross is used to attract a buyer.

- She didn’t possess a chain to suspend the cross: she didn’t know how to reconcile its spiritual and

practical significance

- At the end she uses a chain given by her beloved Edmund: symbol of marriage\a holy union

• In other novels jewels are symbols of vanity, delusion and materialism: in S&S a ring should

represent love fidelity, but since Edmund no longer loves Lucy because he’s in love with Elinor, it

stands for the entrapment

• Marriage, women and religion are reified and lose their moral power.

Austen has a satirical view of sentimental fiction in which characters invest objects with memory and

meaning because of their emotions: her novels depict objects as embodiments of misdirect values,

they represent a materialistic society where there is the commercialization of feelings.

PAOLA PARTENZA: Alfred Tennyson’s desacralization of

• the afterlife

- Alfred Tennyson’s poetry marks a turning point between Romantic and Victorian epistemology. He

was greatly influenced by the philosophic and scientific thought of William Whewell

- The works of Lyell’s “Principles of Geology” and Chambers’ “Vestiges of the natural history of

creation” destabilized the common idea of a creation based only on God, they introduced Scientific

evolution and Genetic development. Whereas Chambers in his works tried to include natural

sciences within a history of creation, he didn’t deny the existence of a superior intelligence, but he

believed in adaptation and progress in creation. Nature was the expression of change and

development of higher forms.

- Tennyson takes from Lyell: the nature as a violent struggle; from Chamber: the concept of evolution

- In undertaking the analysis of concepts such as time, space, flux and change, he analyses nature

and universe with the purpose of searching for man’s logical significance of the existence of God.

His work is full of confusion and fear: he saw blind mechanisms and vacant immensity in his darker

moods

- For Tennyson, Darwinism seems to appear before Darwin himself

- After Hallam’s death Tennyson searched for a response to death; he desacralizes afterlife defining it

as a mere illusion:

1) religion was responsible to reduce life as a preparation for another life

2) religion unsatisfied him

3) he was all the verge of refusal and acceptance

- The poet’s main concern seems to be involved more with the rational consolation of life that is

reabsorbed within a natural cycle, rather than the living one

- Afterlife: traditional conceits of asylum and redemption, which collides with his belief in natural and

genetic evolution

In his poetry there is conflict between spirit and matter, imagination and existence

- His aim is to give an optical truth to life on a scientific basis and to give his sufferings a sense of

limitation to a secular mode of reality and wanted to eliminate the illusionistic perception given by

religion

- Problems of the origin of life and its stability and fluidity

- Humans are usually part of the kosmos - subject to the same principles as nature and he used that

motif in his poetry, but he tries to create a symbolic world that opposes to the misleading world of

religion

- Romantic tradition saw spirit + breath: right way to interpret creation

- Tennyson: fuses spirit and breath into the scientific tradition, and God has nothing to do with origin of

universe.

- He desacralized the original spirit of creation, and the soul’s immortality in the afterlife.

- He creates the symbolic world of poetry, which is Tennyson’s response to man’s dream of

immortality, that stimulates imagination and reflection, which leads to appreciation of nature and the

human beings as they are, liberated from the chains of the eschatological tradition.

- The meaning of life: man’s reabsorption in nature

- Man lives in a world of suffering, they have to accept the distance between the real and the ideal,

that distance is an abyss.

- Abyss: dynamic location, alludes to the poet’s creative sphere, here and only here only the ideal

work of art can achieve eternity (similar to Hegel’s = artist imagines a shape for the meaning)

- Translate his anxiety in a poetic form

- Afterlife became enigmatic and irrational rather than eschatological

- Poetry = a tool to understand the concept of immortality

• In 1860 he published Tithonus which was a re-work of an earlier poem (Tithon)

- It’s an example of classic imagination intruding into a philosophical work

- Some scholar thinks that he represents the view of other thinkers, while other believe he represents

its own

- There is tension between inwardness and thought, sense and conscience

- Tithonus is a meditative character who binds myth and thought in a web of sensation: as Hegel,” the

content of myth is thought” but “the mythic dimension remains formal end exterior”

- Tithonus is consumed by “cruel immortality” (=main symbol): in this case Tennyson highlights the

dualism between temporal and eternal, which mirrors the poet’s anxiety for an answer to the

theological issue

- The poem focuses on the relationship between mortals and God and the response will show

Tennyson’s intellectual journey

- At the beginning Tithonus is objectified (“Me only”) and is eternal, while the nature undergoes the

natural process of renovation. He feels he doesn’t belong to any world, nor Goddess’ nor men’s

- “The quiet limit of the world” (L7) is the exact border which divides man’s possibility from his

realization

- Lines 28-29: describes relationship between man and Goddess as a clash

- He reflects on his conditions, comprehending that the quiet limit is the antithesis of man’s idealized

paradise: the relationship with Goddess is denigratory and distressing and it dethrones man from

sovereign command and agency in nature

- Heroines of his past existence make Tithonus aware of what he has lost: the quiet limit. He

understands that what gives man immortality is the power to die.

- The poet has a scientific position and says “restore me to the ground, I earth in earth”

- The mortal cycling life is reassuring

- The character inner torment is unbearable because he lives in an un-historical temporality, he has an

everlasting duration without essence

- Oxymoronic use of the words “immortality” and “consumes”

- Last line: phenomena of heaven and dark deduced from 2 elements: dark light, time and space

- In that cosmology all phenomena are related; linguistically he uses the indicative mood as a matter

of fact

- At the end he returns to his origins

- Tithonus’ life was reduced to a shadow:

1) It doesn’t imply measurableness of time

2) No beginning, end or middle

3) With death it disappears and remain only what he did

- Tithonus is “maim’d” and this echoes the figure of St. Simeon Stylites who was an exposé of

superstition, fanaticism and imposture. “He is unfit for heaven and unfit for earth”: decontextualized

- He was a monk; introduces heaven into the secular concept of the world in a dangerous way:

introduces the criterion of the free choice of the will that was used to achieve the heaven; so he

desacralized religion, ritual and hierarchy. It’s an acephalous position: a position that doesn’t

recognize the apex of institutions.

- He meditates in the desert which is not symbol of sterility but it allows St. Simeon Stylites to observe

both earth and heaven from a right position. He is aware that the gap between the two worlds is

unbridgeable

- Tithonus is doomed to contemplate the perennial transformation of the Goddess as a spectator, and

he is aware of his deformity and inadequacy

- Temporality characterizes human beings: Tithonus’ being in betwixt, located in a place where time is

suspended, makes him clearly see the uselessness of his condition. Losing the dimension of time

has made him lose his belonging to a genre, he doesn’t find anymore a sense to his life and the

world around him, leading him to the loss of identit