a1b20 lecture 4: transcendentalism & the victorian age i ... · c. towards naturalism later in...
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A1B20 – Lecture 4: Transcendentalism & the Victorian Age
I. The Victorian Age in England (1837-1901)
-industrialization & urbanization at home; colonization abroad
-from confidence of 1850’s (cf. London’s Great Exhibit’) to doubt & uncertainty
A. The Rise of Realism (mid- to late-19th century trend)
-linked to rising urbanism / industry / poor city workers
-realism ‘seeks to represent the familiar or typical in real life, rather than an idealized, formalized, or romantic interpretation of it’ (Collins)
-social Darwinism
-greatly influenced by French Realist Movement [Honoré de Balzac (La comédie humaine, 1842), Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, 1857), or Emile Zola (Les Rougon-Macquart, 1871-1893)
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Victorian society
-industrialization (railways, cotton mills, textile industry, urbanization)
-mechanization of agriculture = a move to the cities to work in factories
-by 1850, urban population more numerous than rural one
-esp. in North: industrial cities like Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow developed
-overcrowding & poverty, & gap between rich & poor
-with bigger urban proletariat, call for political and social reform:
The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 & 1884 extended the right of vote (not just wealthy), more democracy, better representation of new industrial areas in gov’t
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-poverty = “Condition-of-England question”(term from Carlyle)
-‘Workhouses’ created after Poor Laws of 1843-1845: asylums to shelter & feed poor in exchange for work. Soon criticized, as repressive as prisons.
-late 1800’s- urban strife leads to Communist and Socialist doctrines—
Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx & Engels) in 1848—
-union movements developed
-contrast: Victorian middle-class (wealthy manufacturers/businesspeople); respectability & hypocrisy, strict moral standards, like Queen herself
B. Realism and the social novel
-novel reaches maturity in late 1800’s
-new genre: the ‘social novel’ / ‘industrial novel’ to arouse social consciousness
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1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) :
Oliver Twist (1837-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-61)
-most popular and influential novelist of period
-even comedies set in poorest & harshest areas of London; humour & social awareness
-takes us to jails, workhouses, poorest homes: shows failure of Victorian social system
-recurrent theme of exploitation of children (e.g., Oliver Twist 1837-39)
-key work of realism: Hard Times (1854) [see booklet p. 32]
-portrayed a Lancashire milltown in the 1840s (“Coketown”)
-greatest good for greatest number, but people reduced to numbers/tools.
Automatic & not humanistic system (Utilitarianism, by Bentham & Mill)
-humour: sign of some optimism, faith in progress
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2. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863):
“The Book of Snobs” (1846-47),
Vanity Fair (1847-48)
-just as popular as Dickens
-focus more on upper middle-class
-focus on realism of presentation and cruel satire of snobs & hypocrites
-used interrupting authorial voice to moralize & criticize;
his ‘ideal’ is very traditional (love, marriage, family)
-Vanity Fair (1847-48)
-contrast between 2 young women: outgoing & unscrupulous Becky Sharp & virtuous but stupid/helpless Amelia; a study of high society
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3. George Eliot (1819-1880):
-chiefly a moralist, saw novel’s main function
as teaching & encouraging reform
-novels focus more on small country communities of England
-focus on character’s tough choices, on social environment shaping individual
-deep sympathy & compassion for her characters & their struggles
-The Mill on the Floss (1869):
happy childhood of Tom & Maggie Tulliver, then suffering & differences & hardships, then death in each other’s arms in final flood (deus-ex-machina) – “…in death they were not divided”
-Adam Bede (1859)– main character in love with a woman condemned to die for killing her illegitimate child
-Middlemarch (1871)– her most mature work, interweaving both sympathy and criticism for her characters (Woolf felt Dorothea Brooke’s story was only novel ‘for adults’ of Victorian period)
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C. Towards Naturalism later in the period:
-harsher, starker & more pessimistic strain of realism
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928):
The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
-sombre realism on simple peasants; their harmony of life always destroyed by change or by high aspirations
-hopes always dashed, man never free: fate & suffering cannot be beaten
-his ‘pastoral novel’, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) [booklet p. 36-37]:
(Tess vs. a hypocritical & harsh society, a rural world in transition, full of uncertainties; more pessimistic view of life.)
-The Return of the Native
(intellectual reformist, Clym Yeobright, wants to help & educate poor of his region; he is quickly disillusioned by emotional hardships (esp. an unfaithful social-climbing wife)
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D. Towards Modernity:
1. Technical Perfection
& Questioning the morality of colonization:
(Victoria = Empress of India in 1876)
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
-most settings outside England (the sea, the Congo, the Far East)
-beneath adventure, romance & violence: study of nature of man & moral conflicts
-not moralizing; technical perfection of the works – a master craftsman; remarkable narrative technique & mastery of language (born Polish: learned English at 23!)
-bridges gap between Victorian novel & modern novel
-Heart of Darkness (1899)- Marlow’s tale of his quest for Kurtz through the Belgian Congo
-Lord Jim (1900)- tortured wanderings of a sailor, looking for redemption for saving himself from a sinking ship and leaving the others to die
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2. Experimental nonsense literature
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) –
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
[booklet p. 34]
-although written for a little girl called Alice, for adults too
-clever twisted reasoning that goes against conventions and prevailing logic.
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3. ‘Decadent’ works of ‘Aesthetic Movement’: art for art’s sake, no moralizing: enjoyment of beauty & art only aim in life
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):
-flamboyant aesthete and dandy, aimed at offending
and criticizing upper-class society for its hypocrisy
-known above for his WIT, one the most oft-quoted authors after Shakespeare
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – story of a man given to pleasures of beauty & art with no morals; the painting and not the man show the signs of his corruption
-his plays most remembered for their use of repartee & wit:
An Ideal Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
-more pessimism at end of century
-more questioning of greatness & value of ‘Empire’
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II. The Second Half of the 19th Century in the U.S.
A. The Transcendentalist Club
1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):
“The American Scholar” (1837), “Nature” (1836),
“Self-Reliance” (1841)
-great influence not recognized during lifetime
-defined & defended truly American way of thinking & writing; US’s ‘own voice’.
-1837: speech at Harvard: “The American Scholar”
-denounced foreign cultural domination, urged scholars to self-confidence, &
announced an American Renaissance.
-1841: essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841) *booklet p. 27+
-argues not to follow the thought of great thinkers and sages: “Believe your own thought” & “trust thyself”; encouraged individualism, ‘self-reliance’
-laid foundations of specifically American philosophical, religious (Emerson was at first a Unitarian pastor), social and economic thought.
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-part of Transcendental Club (cf. Thoreau)
-philosophy influenced by American Puritanism, Protestant dissent, English
Romanticism
-springing from notions in Coleridge & Wordsworth, developed in US
-doctrine focused on man’s conscience and intuition, believing:
in unity between material world & human mind
man’s relationship with God was personal, not mediated by a Church
that man could find his true self by being close to Nature (similar to Wordsworth in Preface to Lyrical Ballads)
each soul is divine (= God speaks within each man): self-reliance / individualism should be developed and authority rejected.
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2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Civil Disobedience, 1849
-actually tried out Emerson’s theories of self-reliance and nature (lived over two years at Walden Pond – meditation on material world: Walden (1854)
-then wrote many works against modern civilization & capitalist society; called for self-study & meditation
-not completely cut off: spoke out against slavery & the Mexican War
-famous for having preached civil disobedience (1848) through passive resistance: (especially for freedom for slaves, rights for women & workers
-that way, transcendentalism became linked to social reform
B. The American Renaissance
-influenced by Transcendentalists and Frontier & Gothic writers of early century
-for many a ‘naisssance’
-Poe & Hawthorne cf. last lesson) fathers of the American Renaissance (already much more pessimistic than transcendentalists)
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1. Herman Melville (1819-1891): Moby Dick (1851)
-early successes of sea adventures, turned down
fame for metaphysical meditation
-Moby Dick (1851) [booklet p. 31]:
-relied on the author’s personal experience at sea as a cabin boy
-very complex novel, relies on myth and symbolism.
-confrontation of two points of views:
-Ahab, the captain of the whaling ship, who thinks the universe is dominated by evil, embodied in white whale; revenge plot
-Ishmael, a sailor, who rejects this view and sees the whale, like the world, as mysterious and impenetrable
-like Poe & Hawthorne- knew of Transcendentalists but more preoccupied with dark side of the world that lies beneath its surface.
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2. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) –
-called himself a “kosmic poet” *sic+ – prophet
& seer of past & future
-as optimistic as the others were pessimistic,
an extension of the transcendentalist school
-a poet celebrating the potential of America as a new land.
-also notion of self-reliance, of God’s presence in everyone, of oneness with universe
-even the simplest object or human being was ‘holy’
-would continue adding to main work Leaves of Grass after first publication
-celebrates the human body and sexuality, esp. in ‘Song of Myself’ *booklet p. 33].
-musical poems in free verse also celebrate America: land, people, a future without slavery
-believed in breaking from pattern/rhythm/set forms of the past; all free verse and ‘vocalism’ (a human voice uniting body & soul)
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3. Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)
-most internationally successful poet
of Am. Renaissance
-the ‘fireside poet’ or ‘schoolroom poet’, brought poetry into everyone’s homes
-poems on American folklore (e.g., “The Song of Hiawatha” 1855), & epic poems idealizing the past & romanticizing historical events (e.g., “The Courtship of Miles Standish” 1858 – source of story of Pocahontas) & bereaved “graveyard meditation poetry”.
-entertaining but moralizing and didactic
-relied on all traditional forms (odes, elegies, sonnets –and especially the ballad)
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4. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
-a reclusive poet in Amherst, Massachusetts
(does not deal with slavery or civil war,
as Whitman does)
-wrote nearly 1,800 poems, nearly all untitled,
but only 7 published in her lifetime
-themes of despair, mortality and immortality, joy and sadness
-wavered between religious faith and skepticism
-a constant awareness of death; “death is the hinge of life” she wrote to cousin, yet felt presence of God in all things (cf. Emerson & Whitman)
-irregular rhythms & rhymes, originality & sensibility of perceptions = pre-modern
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C. The American Novel during “The Gilded Age” [= ‘l’Âge du toc’]
-late 19th century: term from Mark Twain, referring to post Civil War U.S.
& extremely wealthy US industrialists/capitalists (had houses & lifestyles of Old World aristocrats
-North’s victory also that of industry over a traditional agricultural world of South
-North’s quick expansion (industry, railways, big business & materialism—quite different from the ideals of Transcendentalists.
-rise of wealthy industrialists & more & more ex-slaves & immigrants in the city as working poor
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1. Mark Twain (1835-1910):
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
-conveys spirit of his native South & its tradition
for oral story-telling, for Negro folklore
-remarkable use of SKAZ
-favored theme: discovery through eyes of an ‘innocent narrator’ on a picaresque journey through the South and the West
-beneath humor & endearing characters is sharp social criticism
key works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
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towards realism…
-labour unrest & political corruption brought realist trend
-realism : predominant mode 1865-1914
-presenting unidealized reality, & critical of consequences of capitalism.
-realists believed the role of literature was to expose & to criticize.
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2. Stephen Crane (1871-1900):
The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
-young journalist, novelist and poet
-pioneer in realism & rebellion against the
romantic imagination of his time
-direct & simple presentation; no moralizing; accurate language and speech
-on cruelty & indifference of society to man,
-Maggie (1893)– the first Naturalistic American novel – decline of a girl from the slums to prostitution & suicide
-The Red Badge of Courage (1895): brutality & absurdity of war, emptiness of heroism; only touch of romanticism is young man’s dreams & delusions, his fear and shame
-used color to create an impression, like impressionist painters of the time
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3. Frank Norris (1870-1902) (naturalism):
McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901)
-deeply influenced by Zola; 1st Am naturalist
-jungle of urban America
-yet good deal of sentimentality, lyricism
(influence of Romantics)
McTeague – new novel of industrial America; destructive city, obsession with money (story of downfall of a dentist in San Francisco – poverty, murder, flight, victim of others’ greed – powerless characters
-also novels on corruption of money during conquest of the West (e.g., The Octopus 1901- railroad the octopus driving out farmers)
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4. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
-best represents naturalism in the US
(pessimistic form of realism; human beings seen
as animals in the natural jungle of the world:
instincts, social Darwinism
-equivalent in French literature: Emile Zola (a generation earlier)
-The Financier (1912-1914) (in booklet, p. 39) illustrates social Darwinism:
-key scene: young boy realizes that the same laws of sealife/animal world prevail among men.
-determinism: environment & heredity decide your fate (against Am belief in self-reliance & myth of success)
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The novel of manners…
5. Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The House of Mirth (1905),
Ethan Frome (1911), The Age of Innocence (1920)
-adapted the novel of society and manners on the European model to the American upper class she knew
-The House of Mirth (1905) – Lily Bart (frivolous but honest, intelligent) turns down man she loves in search of more wealth & recognition – despises society she so tries to impress – ends in scandal, poverty & suicide
-The Age of Innocence (1920) depicts the Gilded Age society in which she grew up, being from a wealthy New York family.
-works mix tragedy (with conflict between society & individual) and satire (portraying the ‘tribal behaviours’ of social groups).
-characters must face moral dilemmas in a narrow & cut-throat society
-counter-example: Ethan Frome (1911)
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6. Henry James (1843-1916) – “Daisy Miller” (1879), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) -such enormous production, hard to categorize; known as one of the most difficult authors in English (“le Proust Américain”) -also moved to England in 1876 & stayed, so both countries claim him -dominant themes: -The International Theme (began with “Daisy Miller” 1879)- contrast morals and society in US & abroad through Americans in Europe -often on the corruption of innocence by the ‘sophisticated’ and the manipulative
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Many experiments in form: 1880-85 –focuses on using young women as ideal ‘innocent’ point of view 1885-90 – tries to create realist works in image of French realists that rely more on the consciousness of the main character 1890-95 –failed attempt to write plays for the London stage 1895-1900 – Experimental Period – tried to find the perfect blend of drama & fiction, tried to perfect the ghost story, returns to use of women focalizers (e.g., “The Turn of the Screw” 1898) 1900-1905- his ‘Major Phase’, including his most complex narratives, such as The Golden Bowl (1902) -Wrote many reviews and studies on writing, especially on point of view (characters as ‘mirrors’, ‘reflectors’ & ‘centers of consciousness’) -would take first steps to apply his brother William James’s idea of a “stream-of-consciousness” (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) to literature.