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The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1693)

Queen Victoria(1837-1901)

England became a naval power by defeating Spain in 1588. (Strongest in Europe)

England became the richest industrial country in the world. (Strongest in the world)

Drama

Novel

I. Three periods

A.1832-48, time of social unrest

1. 遠因Industrialization brought wealth to the middle class: first Reform Bill (1832)—right for wealthy middle class to vote, extended the influence of the bourgeoisie over the old aristocrats.

2. 近因Industrialization brought misery to the working class: workers’ demonstrations, second Reform Bill (1867) —right for all men to vote. (Women 1928).

B. 1848-79, time of economic prosperity and religious controversy, heyday of the Victorian age

1. Economic prosperity:

a. Worldly—workshop (great industrial inventions, e.g. train replaced stage wagons), banker (labor conditions improved)

b. Nationally—factory

c. Worldly and nationally major event: Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace (1851)

2. Religious controversy: time of complacency, stability and optimism.

C. 1870-1901, time of crisis

1. Economically: 1890 British Empire, colony, the sun never sets.

2. Politically: rivalry powers like Germany, US, Japan, Russia.

II. Philosophy and Ideas

        A. Utilitarianism& opponents

l   Utilitarianists:

I.       Leader: Bentham

=>Value of institution depends on usefulness judged by human reason, and contributions to the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Interests of bourgeoisie=economic policy-- laissez faire.

II.    Influenced/Prophets of Progress: Thomas Macaulay, John Stuart Mill: most representative thinker of his age, greatest proponent of English empiricism.

A.    Faith: agnostic不可知論者

B.     Science: positivistic實證論者

C.     Modifications of the rigid views of Bentham: more sympathetic, values spiritual and philosophical cultivation, a wide liberalism.

l   Opponents:

I.       Thomas Carlyle

A.    →mercantilism=>spiritual force to revitalize man--spirit of renunciation自制, duty, work and reverence=>heroes to reorganize society, “Hero and Hero Worship”

B.     Condition of England issue =>Disregard: rationality, logic, use: powerful intuitive force, exclamations and shock methods.

II.    Culture critics

A.    John Ruskin: art be moral, essential part of meaningful culture. The rise/fall of art depends on the moral/immoral temper of the state=>Never demand an exact finish to art for its own sake; never encourage imitation or copying of any kind.

B.     Matthew Arnold(1822-88)Mill

1.      Essays in Criticism “Function of Criticism at the Present Time”

a.       →barbarians(aristocrats) essentially crude in soul despite their grace and good clothes

b.      →narrow utilitarianism, philistine middle class: prejudice, provincialism偏狹, materialistic, overemphasizes the Hebraism: conduct and obedience(+Hellenism:seeing things as they really are, the will of God=Western culture)

2.      Rule of these two classes+rise of individualism and democracy=a state of anarchy=>via balance, a harmonious and enlightened culture can be born, via culture can anarchy be avoided.

3.      Moral guide: Poetry replaces religion, be “criticism of life”=>reconcile faith + rationalism(science), poetic imagination+ objective fact(science)=>disinterested search for truth and the high place of university

B. Social commentary, Naturalism: Exposure of the cruel and darker side of life, inequality, lack of social justice, condemned industrialization, longed for rural life.

1. Social/class problems: Dickens v.s. Thackeray

2. Women Question: Women’s colleges established in Cambridge in 1869 and Oxford in 1879, women could not take degrees until 1920.George Eliot& the Brontës: Currer, Ellis, Acton Bell.

 

Brontës

Other Victorian writers(follow Austen)

Style

strong romantic elements about their private passions

e.g. epitomize passionate femininity to which love is all important

strong moral concerns about social problems

e.g. epitomized decorous femininity to which manners are all important

Characters

Byronic hero;♀of strength and passion=>Never before does an English novel trumpet that a woman’s passion can equal or exceed a man’s.

l   Primitive vitality生命力e.g. Jane Eyre,Cathy in Wuthering Heights

e.g. cultured gentility優雅

Theme

Gothic

Nature: offers comfort and peace in

a struggle of archetypes representing universal forces.

 

C. Aestheticism/aesthetic movement

l   Pre-Raphaelists: Dante Rossetti, William Morris, A. Swinburne.

1.      Alliance of painting and poetry, compose verse comment on their painting which emphasizes dreaminess, sensuousness, decorative medievalism. Their poetry: simplicity of manner, archaic vocabulary, visual detail, ballad or other “medieval” verse form, twilight and autumn scene.

2.      Emulate medieval art before Raphael for individuality, imagination and rich color→Raphael (1483-1520) too conventional and sentimental.

=>Predecessor: French symbolism of Baudelaire

=>Cause: Late Victorian reaction against materialism, along with everything social, political, moral and Victorian.

=>Effect: literary achievement>capturing the fin de siecle mood: decadence and depression.

l   Aesthetes

I.       Leader:Walter Pater

 

Re-def. of art:

Deny: utility of art

Ignore: object in life=morality→Ruskin

as artist’s pure subjectivity, art for art’s sake. 

Advocates:

Object in life=hedonism

Duty(of an aesthete): develop aesthetic sensibility, enjoy diff. artistic and sensuous experiences

capture the fleeting moment, the present=> carpe diem

art=only true basis for unity in life

II.    Oscar Wilde (1845-1900)
Witty description of an elegant fin de siècle society, famous epigrams. The Importance of Being Earnest is the most famous English drama of the 19th century, with the most brilliant dialogue. Beneath a surface of triviality and luxury, is an implied critique of a frivolous and vacuous society.

A.    →The Victorian well-made play:
- First created by the French playwright Augustin Scribe in 1815 in reaction against the formlessness of romantic drama.
- characters from the upper middle class. Four to eight characters, each with equal number of lines.
- simple plot focused on one problem, usually love and marriage. Logic of events in which a hopeless knot is finally smoothly resolved. Full of coincidence, mistaken identity and incredible endings
- realism in stage setting and costume, convincing the audience it is about their own life
- smooth dialogue

B.     =>George Bernard Shaw: Draw of Ideas. Social problem drams of Ibsen: surprising audience into thinking about themselves, fusing ideas into the well-made play, realistic portrayal of characters and events. He added wit and humor.

III. Religion declines, natural and human science: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) shook the foundation of Christianity; worship of science, skepticism, religious uncertainty, spiritual unrest and inquiry, and interest in other non-Christian religions.

IV. Rise of the Novel:

A. Reader population: Urban population↑+ Education Acts (1870)= new reading public

B. Technology and facility: Printing and paper-making innovation, book prices↓=serial publications appear+ libraries set up by philanthropists.

C. Writer: possible as profession.e.g.Dickens

D. Specific reader’s need: middle class women living in leisure, need for recreation=> female characters esp. by female writers, women’s struggles for equality and better life.

E. General reader’s need: religion declined, novel= powerful secular form to reflect life.

V. Victorian novel:

A. Early: Charles Dickens

1. Characteristics:

a. Reflection— Background and characters: broader social background, complex relations => rapidly changing society.

b. Revision— Plot: “linear causation,” a motive giving rise to an event, leading to an effect on character, prompting him to do something leading on to another event; cause-effect sequence=> better constructed than before.

c. Promotion—Form: published in serial by installments(連載) before full publication in a single book(單行本), author responds immediately to readers’ reaction to keep them interested.

d. Ideology— Theme and purpose: morality (to success), e.g. being earnest. Didactic. Appeal to reform.

                2. Compare and contrast btw. Dickens and Thackeray

 

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

W. M. Thackeray (1811-1863)

Predecessor

1. Restoration comedy: comedy of manners (predecessor: Shakespeare’s Renaissance comedy, French form) by Ben Johnson, characters each have their own peculiar habit, or catch phrase; stock characters=> comedy of humors.

2. Melodrama: popular at that time.

18th prose: graceful, fluent and lucid.

Similar theme: contrast between human pretensions/vanity and human weaknesses.

Personality

Sentimentalist: appeal to reader’s emotion, enthusiastic crusader for good causes and social changes

Cynic(犬儒,愛譏諷的人), classicist: detached from novel, under control, humorist and satirical critic of English society

Character and class

 

l   Flat character: excessive virtue or evil

l   Lower class: grotesque and absurd underdogs and the unprivileged.

l   Round character: come in pairs and contrasts. Convincing, faithful to life, good together with bad. Vanity Fair

l   Upper and middle classes

Narration

Romantic, full of imagination

Restraint

        B. Mid: George Eliot, Influenced by Comte’s positivism, religious belief should give way to a religion of humanity, love and compassion for all mankind should triumph. No villains in her work, all acting with the influences upon them. Middlemarch her masterpiece.

                1. Characteristics:

a. Character: women as central

b. Theme: Individual self realizationàagainst conventions and social pressure, questions middle-class ethics, yet still concerned with the right moral choice.

c. Style: Psychological inner states of characters more than social behaviour

                2. Mill on the Floss: unsentimental portrait of childhood a renovation in Victorian novels. The Tullivers stand for the inner life, passion and bonds with a pre-industrial life, while the Dodsons stand for commerce and pragmatism. Maggie’s father lost out in a commercial age and the mill, standing for childhood harmony and unified consciousness to Maggie, is gone. Tom and Maggie set out for their individual quests. Tom submits himself completely and at great emotional cost to the commercial system which defeated his father, to focus on getting the mill back (family duty). Maggie is torn by this passion and inner life that is rejected by Tom, the dreams and demands of the self (individual passion), reconciled to the world through a reciprocated love (first in Philip, then Stephen, finally and always Tom and in the mill). Looking for love to fill a torn self. With the incident with Stephen, she recognizes the duties to others and thinks of others like Lucy’s feelings. Tom is the means, the other complementary half, to the pastoral holism of childhood. The first separation comes when Tom goes away for school. They drift increasingly apart, with only the final flood bringing them finally together, unified and restored to harmony. Two lines here: Childhood as pastoral harmony and adulthood as separation and alienation; self and concern for others should go together, just as spiritual life and pragmatism should go together.

C. Late:

1. High art: Thomas Hardy, achieves the tragic intensity of Shakespeare, ancient Greek dramatists. The tragic flaws in men as built in by natural forces that compel them irrevocably to pain and defeat. Yet man still achieves dignity and integrity in their doomed struggle against fate, the immanent will. Everything in the universe is determined by the Immanent Will, which is impartially hostile toward human beings’ desire for joy and happiness.Tess

l   Character:

Alec=body, Angel=a. spiritual in Tess, imprisoned by his ideas and spirituality (more so than Tess) and only loves the idea of Tess as a pure country girl, not as a living woman.

Tess=limited by education to forsake the body in her, though she is very much of the body herself. She is pure because she did not commit the crime of rape (Hardy does not think sex is wrong, though violence in sex is). Society (her mother) expects her to marry her rapist in order to stay pure, which is actually impure, but she refuses because she doesn’t love Alec, which is really pure. She has pride and would not beg Angel’s parents for help. It is only after she despairs of Angel’s love that she agrees to be with Alec again.

l   Theme: natural law (more real, everlasting) v. human moral law (temporary, hypocritical). Ex.(1). people’s fate determined by their inner nature (Tess’s heredity and her passion) and external hostile fate. (2).Priest’s struggle between human sympathy and rigid Christian morality

l   Setting: Nature, also as a character=>Elemental man-nature relationships set in remote, rural countrysideàother Victorian novels: middle-class’ social relationships in towns

2. Mass art (best-seller, popular novels): Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865), imperial adventure novels by Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island; sentimental novels. Detective stories. Science fiction of H. G. Wells The Invisible Man (1897)

3. Colonial novel: Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, E.M. Forster A Passage to India

a. Def:

Time: most popular since the 1870s till the 1930s, during the peak of the British empire.

Theme: journey by a white person, often male, to the colonies=>justifies the colonial conquest as a generous act to save or civilize the colonized people.

West

Colonies

l   Masculine, civilized, advanced

l   reason, knowledge, light

l   Feminine, barbaric and chaotic, backward

e.g.Indian houses, no boundary between the inside and outside

l   lack of reason/control, ignorance, darkness

b. Ex. showing that India and England are differently described: racial prejudice, colonial mimicry(Aziz)

l   People: Indian's emotionality, lack of rationality

l   Event: (1) Bridge Party, (2) trip to the Marabar Caves.

l   Place: Marabar Caves, river Ganges.

                        c. Rape narrative and the issues of race and gender: Def. of the rape narrative in the colonial novel, how it usually describes the non-white man as both barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant, as well as physically and sexually superior, and thus both a danger and attraction to the white woman. The white man both warns the white woman from this danger but is also secretly afraid that the white woman might be attracted by the non-white male, who will thus rob the white man of their property (the white woman). (British Men>British Women>Indian Men>Indian Women)

d. (1) E. M. Forster's central idea: Only Connect. He believes that as long as people use humanism and liberalism, different classes and races can connect with each other. Use his other works together with this novel to show how this is his central idea. Why does he have this idea? Any influence? (2) This idea belongs to liberal humanism. Def. of liberal humanism, how this idea may seem rational, but is actually connected with colonialism, because behind this idea that believes that there is a common human core and essential self that all people share in common, this "common" self is actually composed of the white middle-class standards of reason and rationality.

VI. Victorian Poetry

A. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), leading the “age of Tennyson,” poet laureate, champion of bourgeois orthodoxy and ethos

1. Mature work “Ulysses”: blank verse, dynamic force makes it popular

 

Dante

Tennyson

Attitude

Condemn: daring beyond the limits ordained by God

Praise: forward-looking spirit,19th-century drive for fullest achievement and experience regardless of age and physical weakness.

2. Early work “In Memoriam A. H. H.” iambic tetrameter (4-feet), riming abba, infrequently used in English poetry, In Memoriam stanza. Portrayal of tortured soul makes it valuable. E.g. “Break, Break, Break” daring and effective.

a. Full of different poetic effects: meditations on death &scientific factàto gaiety of wedding&New year parties.=>Gradual rise of spirit with the Christmas seasons.

b.“Way of the soul”:bitter grief &doubtàprogress to acceptance, fear: universe governed by indifferenceà to certainty: by love.

B. Robert Browning: bold, unconventional, unbiased and objective portrayal of the psychological states in his characters.àagainst Tennyson’s moody monologue, interpretation of the poet himself through poetry=> dramatic monologue: imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience.

1. Early monologue: “My Last Duchess”

2. Mature monologue:“Andrea del Sarto”: painter neither loved nor honorable, his craftsmanship is faultless but he lacks the soul for great art.

C. Matthew Arnold: preeminent university poet in England. Withdrawal from chaotic world into intellectual thought and feelings. “Dover Beach”: spiritual unrest, modern dilemma, sad and gripping depiction=melodic lyric(audile)+sharp visual symbols==>e.g. flinging in and out of the pebbles=rise and fall of human faith

D. Gerard Hopkins: forerunner of modern poetry, famous for “sprung rhythm”—imp.=number of stress in line of verse, not imp=number of unaccented syllables=>old Anglo-Saxon verse.

1. Tone: colloquial+unusual=“explode”

2. Language: density in words and feelings, no superfluities(多餘)

3. Overtone: multiple meaning and ambiguity, leaps from image to image to show the inner mind and division.

4. “The Windhover” (1877)

a. 20th 雙璧: “The Waste Land”

b. His most daring sprung-rhythm sonnet; the most commonplace things of Nature can suddenly flash out their own peculiar beauty and symbolization of Christ’s wounds and suffering.

 

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