LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

The Reception of the Victorian Novel

Lecture Notes

BY ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER

SIBIU 2008

Table of Contents

By Way of Introduction: Course Description 3 Lecture I: Introductory; The Victorian Ethos .. 6 Lecture II: Theories and Prescriptions 17 Lecture III: The romance of Merry England and the triumph of Realism .. 23 Lecture IV: Narratives as Modes of Knowledge. Historical, political, and social fiction . 31 Lecture V: Biography and Images of Femininity 44 Lecture VI: Late Victorianism and the Drama of Inadequacy .. 53

DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES LECTURE AND SEMINAR: THE VICTORIAN NOVEL AND ITS RECEPTION OPTIONAL COURSE in the branch of the theoretical disciplines of literature THIRD YEAR, ENGLISH MAJORS AND MINORS Dr ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER, Room 54 karina.schneider@ulbsibiu.ro SECOND SEMESTER: 14 weeks, weekly meetings. ACADEMIC YEAR 2007-2008

COURSE UNIT DESCRIPTION

The objective of this course and seminar is the discussion of the British novel in the 19 th century. It will focus on the particularities of the emergence of novelistic discourse in England and it will revise conventions of narrative as they appear in specific novels of the time. Instead of investigating novelists and their work, the course will revise individual novels, biographical and critical texts in an attempt to establish a taxonomy of the English novels written roughly during the reign of Queen Victoria. Emphasis will be laid on the range of rhetorical devices available to novelists, particularly on those discursive modes that depart from the novel conceived as an exclusively realistic genre. The course will also investigate the impact of such alternative modes of narration on 20th-century English literature, literary studies and film. It will focus on the relationship between novel, critical prescription and critical reception, on aspects and formal elements of narration, and on various interpretive grids elaborated by 19th- and 20th-century critics and theorists of the novel. Therefore, various re-contextualisations will be performed in keeping with current critical theories. PREREQUISITE: Completing the survey courses in The History of English Literature (especially semesters 2 and 3). REQUIREMENTS: Evaluation will be based on a final take-home project, but the students activity in class will also be taken into consideration. Students are expected to submit 10minute research papers during the seminar hours, on topics of their own choice within the range announced in the List of Seminar Topics, and to attend at least 80% of class hours. Take-home project: Write a 2500-word research paper in which you compare and contrast the reception by Romanian criticism of two Victorian novels of your own choice. Your bibliography list must comprise at least 5 bibliographic sources available at ASTRA Library or the Central University Library.

LIST OF LECTURE TOPICS

1. Victorianism and the novel. Generic aspects. Theories of narrative: N. Frye, W.C. Booth,
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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Structuralism, Poststructuralism. New tendencies in Narratology. The romance of Merry England and the triumph of Realism: Charles Dickens Narratives as modes of knowledge. Historical, political, and social fiction: W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Samuel Butler, and historiographic metafiction Biography and images of femininity: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the devotional, didactic and moralising literature of their day Late Victorianism and the drama of inadequacy: Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the scandalous modern self Victorianism and the twentieth-century novel: Intertextuality and parody: Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jean Rhys Cinematic avatars of the Victorian novel

LIST OF SEMINAR TOPICS

1. Introductory considerations and revisions; Kate Flint: The Victorian novel and its readers (in Deirdre David) 2. Morality, sentimentality, and their trial: the prescriptive realism of Charles Dickens Hard Times, Joseph W. Childers: Industrial culture and the Victorian novel (in Deirdre David) 3. W. M. Thackerays Vanity Fair and the Condition of England Question; History and politics in Samuel Butlers dystopia Erewhon 4. George Eliots rebels: Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss; Elizabeth Gaskells taming of Charlotte Bront: The Life of Charlotte Bront (chapters I and IV, available in books.google.com); Linda M. Shires: The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel: Form, Subjectivity, Ideology (in Deirdre David) 5. Early modern voices and feminist readings; the New Woman: Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure and John Galsworthys The Man of Property (first volume of the Forsyte Saga) 6. The Victorian legacy: John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman or Kazuo Ishiguros Remains of the Day 7. Corollary: Victorian novels on film

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allen, Walter. The English Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954. Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. Brantlinger, Patrick and William Thesing. A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Oxford, Uk, Malden,
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MA: Blackwell, 2002. Burgess, A. English Literature: A Survey for Students. Longman Group, 1991. Coyle, Martin, Peter Garside, Malcolm Kelsall, and John Peck, eds. Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism. Detroit and New York: Gale Research Inc., 1991. Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd edition. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Currie, Mark. Postmodern Narrative Theory. London: Macmillan, 1998. Daiches, D., A Critical History of the English Literature. vol. 3. London: Secker and Warbourg, 1979. Daiches, D., Critical Approaches to Literature. London: Longmans, 1964. David, Deirdre, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge U.P., 2001. Doody, Margaret Anne, The True Story of the Novel. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997. Elfenbein, Andrew. Byron and the Victorians. Cambridge UP, 1995. Farser, Hilary, with Daniel Brown, eds. English Prose of the Nineteenth Century. Longman, 1996. Ford, Boris, gen.ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. vol. 2, 3, 4. London: Penguin Books, 1982. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1973. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. 1985. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1979. Legouis, E. A History of English Literature. J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1967. Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism, 1996. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mas.: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1998. Sampson, E., ed. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. London: Bentley House. Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford U.P., 1994. Schorer, Mark. The World We Imagine, 1968. Scott, Foresman and Co. The Literature of England. vol. 1., 1947. Sejourne, Philippe. The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, 1999. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1957. Wheeler, Michael. Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians. Cambridge U.P., 1994.

Lecture I: The Victorian Ethos

Chronology of Main Events: 1799-1814, 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte / Napoleonic Wars 1815 victory of Waterloo, followed by a Pax Britannica that lasted until 1870 1798-cca. 1830 Romanticism 1807 slave trade is declared illegal in Britain 1819, 16 August Peterloo Massacre (Manchester) 1830, autumn first railway line: Liverpool-Manchester; Reform Parliament 1832 first Reform Bill 1834 abolition of slavery in Britain 1837 accession of Queen Victoria; beginning of the Victorian Age 1841 Punch (until 2002) 1845-1852 The Great Irish Famine 1859 Charles Darwin publishes The Origin of Species 1861-1865 American Civil War 1863 abolition of slavery in the United States of America 1867 2nd Reform Bill 1870 Education Reform: elementary education becomes universal and compulsory 1880-1881 First Boer War 1899-1902 Second Boer War 1901 death of Queen Victoria Few other ages have had such a strong sense of being an entity. Similarities have been established with the Elizabethan age in this respect as well as in others, in that, unlike the Romantic age, during the period we call the Victorian age people actually thought of themselves as living in a distinct age bearing the name of the queen whose reign (1837-1901) it encompasses. This may be so because of its auspicious beginnings, after a decade of lull, with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first locomotive-operated line in the world, in the autumn of 1830, which coincided with the opening of the Reform Parliament, which two years later was to transform Englands social structure. These two events were tightly connected, and the Reform Bill of 1832, by extending the right to vote to all males owning property worth ten pounds in annual rent, was passed in response to the demands of the middle classes, who were gradually taking control of Englands economy and who were also committed to technological and industrial change; but it also marked the recognition of their importance in the new direction that the world was taking. This new direction brought England to its highest point of development as a world power. Its highly industrialised and modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing transformed its whole geography, driving people towards the industrial centres (London, for instance, expanded from two million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half million at the time of her death), and conquering a quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth by 1890. After England had become the worlds workshop, London became, from 1870 on, the worlds banker. By the end of the century England was the worlds foremost imperial power.
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But the Victorian epoch allegedly meant, first and foremost, an age of strong religious and moral principles and ideals. It was an age in which rationalism, reinforced by scientific progress, held the centre, although attacked from many sides; and the royal family set an example of piety, generosity, and respectability, which all people were eager to imitate. Indeed, Walter Allen speaks of the way in which the word respectability, which in the mideighteenth century referred to persons worthy of respect for moral excellency, gradually came to apply first to people of good or fair social standing, and then to anyone who was honest and decent in behaviour and clean in habits, irrespective of social class. This evolution shows how the idea behind this word changed so as to accommodate an ever increasing number of people belonging to various social classes, until eventually a worker and his family could be considered respectable just as the Queen and her family were. To be respectable was to be at once orthodox and fashionable. But in fact respectability meant much more than honesty, decency, and cleanliness; it meant thrift and hard work, as well as conventionalism, complacency, and even prudery, or the taboo on the frank recognition and expression of sex, which went as far as the banishment of Henry Fieldings books. This was another of the victories of Protestantism, to which the Wesleyan and Evangelical movements were giving a new impetus; other such notions were practical-mindedness, earnestness, responsibility, duty, self-denial, self-control, etc. But at its highest, respectability represented the belief in the perfectibility of man, the conscious desire for betterment, moral and economic, the controlled impulse to self-improvement. Numerically, the respectable may not have been large, but it was the respectable who were articulate, who had opinions, who read, and it was for the respectable that the great Victorian novelists wrote. The optimism that was such an important part of the Victorian world outlook was further reinforced by the legislative and civil reforms that had started with the Reform Bill. In 1867 a second Reform Bill was passed, extending the franchise to sections of the working class; laws were also passed which made elementary schooling universal and compulsory, limited the working hours for all workers and established the conditions in which children and women could be employed, and opened up new possibilities for the schooling of young women (franchise for women was only granted in 1918). Even some of the most important male sociologists (like John Stuart Mill, for instance) supported the cause of women, while feminists like Florence Nightingale promoted the movement through personal example by bringing about radical changes in hospital management; John Henry Cardinal Newman in his early career took it upon himself to reform the Anglican Church, and Dr. Thomas Arnold and his son Matthew Arnold brought about the education reform. Yet the Victorian values were not quite as easily attainable, and the Victorian society not quite as open to reform, as it might seem. Although there was considerable social mobility and Charles Dickens in both his work and his life illustrates the rise of the poor to respectable social status and to success the society was very carefully organised hierarchically, on a model that went back to the Middle Ages and which the aristocracy was still not ready to let go of. At its apex were the gentlemen, a denomination which excluded two thirds of the English male population; they not only held the power, but also, paradoxically (hypocritically?), were the ones who preached the values that were needed for rising in the world, especially self-improvement through learning, while at the same time they were almost paralysed by anxiety about social stability and the individuals social position.
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And this anxiety was carried to such extents as to divide society into two different worlds, whose members knew (chose to know) almost nothing about the other, and even to ignore its existence. This situation has come to be known as the double standard, but it does not only apply to social classes; Walter Allen speaks about another double standard of morality there was one law for the man, another for the woman, and in each case the law seemed to be the translation into morals of biological fact. This gendered double standard had belonged to the age of Fielding, but it applied to Victorianism as well, surviving in spite of the movements for the professional and social emancipation of women. The double standard is one expression of the opposite tendencies at work at the core of Victorianism; the religious controversies, the diverging attitudes towards tradition and reform, and the general impulse to form and utter opinions are similar instances of the fact that the Victorian cultural phenomenon meant in fact holding in balance forces that were pulling in opposite directions: individualism and self-denial, material pursuit and idealisation of existence, the influence of science and the force of religion, interest in the Middle Ages and reverence for technological progress. If the Victorian age generally regarded itself with optimism and self-assurance, in the 1890s and especially after the turn of the century the mood was one of disillusionment and Victorianism was associated with traditionalism, acquiring a pejorative sense. But it can hardly be expected for peoples fundamental attitudes not to change at all over a stretch of seventy years. Historians have distinguished four phases: the Early Victorianism (118301848), a time of social troubles; the Mid Victorianism (1848-1870), a period of economic prosperity but also of religious controversy; the Late period (1870-1890) of the decay of Victorian values; and the Nineties (1890-1902), a bridge between the two centuries. For purposes of literary history Walter Allen divides this epoch into two great parts, conventionally and conveniently the first and the second halves of the Victorian period. According to him, the writers of the first part (Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot) were perfectly integrated in their time and shared the convictions of their contemporaries. This was encouraged by the general progress and prosperity that constituted the climate of ideas and feelings in which they wrote. This sense of identity with their times is of cardinal importance in the understanding of their work, as it was the source of both their strength and of their weaknesses. It is not exactly that these Victorians were not critical of their country and age, but their criticism was much less radical and of a different kind from that of their contemporaries in, say, France or Russia, or from that of the late Victorians. The forces set in motion by the industrial revolution they did not know how to control, and the working of what seemed to be the iron laws of economy outraged the conscience of the best and most intelligent of the time. But on all sides was the plainest evidence of enormous increase in material wealth and progress, so they could not help believing that all evils were only temporary and accepting the society they lived in without much question. At the same time, the reading public was ever widening, and the writers drew power and confidence from the sense that they were inhabited by the same assumptions as their readers. Moreover, the distinction between the writer as artist and the writer as public entertainer had not yet been made, and their power and authority were the greater because of that. Sharing the preoccupations and obsessions of their time, rooted in the popular life of their age and
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encouraging its hopes as well as its black-and-white view of morals, these writers were able to produce art that was national, that satisfied, if not at all levels, certainly at more than have been possible to the English novelists that followed them. The writers of the late Victorian period (Samuel Butler, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy), on the other hand, took very radical positions which, however, even though they were not understood at that time, came to be generalised after the turn of the century and to grow into the modernist paradigm. The growing social discontent and unrest, as well as the new discoveries and developments in science (among which the most climactic was Darwins evolutionism, which disrupted not only traditional social hierarchy, but the position of God Himself) led in the second half of the Victorian age to a gradual crisis of its values, until in the 1890s there was an outburst of disillusionment, manifested in aestheticism, socialism, existential pessimism, which culminated in the 1910s in that disintegration of all values which is modernism.

Highlights: An age of unprecedented progress: Great Britain becomes the leading nation of the world Steady reforms in all areas of social and political life: electoral reform, educational reform, etc. Great Britain: an industrial, metropolitan, mass society Respectability, optimism, but also the double standard Questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. Define the term ethos. Characterise the Victorian ethos. What does Walter Allen mean by respectability in the Victorian context? Enumerate three reasons for Victorian optimism. Were there any reasons for scepticism? Explain the concept of double standard and its concrete consequences in social terms.

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL If in other ages poetry or drama had been the favourite literary genres, in the nineteenth century it was primarily prose. Travel books and scientific tracts (often combined), social reportage, biography and autobiography, journals and diaries, letters, essays were eagerly devoured by an ever-larger reading public. Yet the nineteenth century was par excellence the great age of the English novel. This was partly because this essentially middle-class form of literary art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle classes rose in power and importance, partly because of the steady increase of the reading public with the growth of magazines, lending libraries, and of publishing generally, and partly because the novel was the vehicle best equipped to present a picture of life lived in a given society against the stable background of social and moral values by people who were recognisably like the readers themselves, and this was what the realistic-minded middle-class readers wanted to read about. The purely escapist impulse to read about a high aristocratic world of ideal gallantry and beauty is as lacking in the typical Victorian novel-reader as the desire to see the problems of everyday human experience projected imaginatively and symbolically through the presentation of great figures acting out their destiny on the grand scale. The Victorian reader did want to be entertained, and in a sense he wanted to escape. But he wanted to be
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entertained with a minimum of imaginative effort and literary convention, a minimum aesthetic distance and suspension of disbelief. As his other literary preferences point out, the Victorian reader wanted to read about his own world, to be able to pretend that literature was journalism, that fiction was history, and that the best things described in novels could happen to them. And the novelist of the age found patterns of creation that gratified all these expectations: women as well as men from the middle and lower classes became the protagonists, but the publics favourites were those who transcended social barriers, either through marriage (especially for the women) or through education and hard work, or even through a sudden discovery of affluent family relations or legacies. Other favourite themes include: death and the deathbed, childhood and work, childhood and education, growing up, dreams, etc. But the best Victorian novels transcended the requirements of their audience and can be read by later generations for different and perhaps profounder reasons. The same can be said of the best Elizabethan drama. The requirements and expectations of a given audience can help to explain the rise and flourishing of a given literary form, but cannot explain its true nature and value. Two great tendencies are discernible among the members of the first generation of Victorian novelists, as part of the general tendency to accept the complementary action of opposite influences: on the one hand, most Victorian writers were staunch realists, whose writing was the expression of the revolt against the previous age and of their allegiance to truth and hard facts. Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope are very well integrated in their world and render it with the realism of first-hand experience, although not in very sophisticated ways either from the stylistic point of view or from that of ideas. W.M. Thackeray subverts ideals and illusions, offering a philosophic meditation on human existence to which his plots and characters are subordinated. George Eliot holds the balance between the more idealistic realists and those later writers who reject, deny, or reverse the Victorian illusions: Samuel Butler with his satire and deconstructive tendencies, and Thomas Hardy with his tragic, anthropologic view of life. On the other hand, there were those who felt the appeal of previous literary trends and moods. In their works the harshness of reality is softened by a romantic vision and poetic language. This proves the still existing appeal of sentimentalism, romanticism, and Gothicism to readers and writers. Myth is displaced but its essence remains: the creation of worlds at the limit of human desire and the eternal return to or reiteration of the essential patterns of life. The novel has affinities with the romance, the allegory and the fairy-tale. The support of affirmative values testifies to the writers confidence in progress and high moral values. The exploration of the deep levels of consciousness is expressed in cases when dream and reality get imperceptibly confused. The rendering of mania, lunacy, and obsession is achieved through devices and imagery taken over from Gothic literature. The representatives of this trend are the Bront sisters, who chronologically belong to the early Victorian period, and Charles Dickens.

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870) Charles John Huffman Dickens, born in Portsmouth as the son of a clerk in the Navy pay
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office, started work at the age of twelve in a rat-ridden blacking warehouse, while his family was in the debtors prison. The writer confessed later on that his mothers anxiousness that he should work in that warehouse had been one of the most traumatising experiences of his life; so traumatising, in fact, that he never told his children anything about that period, and they learned about it from Forsters biography. He then worked as an office boy in a lawyers office, and learned shorthand; later on he became a reporter of debates in the Commons for the Morning Chronicle, and went on to contribute to the Monthly Magazine (1833-35), to the Evening Chronicle (1835), and to other periodicals the articles subsequently republished as Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of EveryDay Life and Every-Day People (1836-37). These attracted much attention and led to an approach from the publishers Chapman and Hall, who wanted him to illustrate drawings of comic sportsmen by the artist Robert Seymour; Dickens however managed to convince the publishers to change their original idea and invented the character of Mr. Pickwick, around whom he created a series of comic characters and events. Dickens soon became the senior partner in the collaboration of artist and writer, and his position was strengthened when Seymour committed suicide and his place was taken by Phiz. But nothing like enormous success attended the publication until the appearance of Sam Weller in Chapter X. Immediately Dickenss problem was solved: he was no longer at the mercy of constant improvisation; the diverting incidents could be governed by the characters to whom they happened. With these two characters set in juxtaposition Dickens had the archetypal situation of the benevolent, idealistic, unworldly master and the hard-bitten, humorous, realistic servant, the Quixote-Sancho Panza theme. The twenty monthly episodes of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (published beginning with April 1836) appeared in volume form in 1837 when Dickens was only twenty-five years old, and with them Dickens, with his young wife Catherine Hogarth, embarked on a promising future, courted by publishers, admired by the public, and befriended by celebrities. On Christmas Day 1836 he met John Forster, who was to become his close friend and biographer. With The Pickwick Papers one side of Dickenss genius was made manifest. Here is Dickens the pure humorist, rejoicing in his ability to dash off character after character, diverse as the world itself, yet bearing his stamp, rejoicing too in the language he put in their mouths, a language so fertile and exuberant in comic invention as to have a lyrical quality almost of poetry. But this was only one side. Almost at the same time with Pickwick Dickens was writing another, very different, work: Oliver Twist, which began to appear in 1837 in Bentleys Miscellany (a new periodical of which Dickens was the first editor). The fairy-land, the merry England of the previous book was becoming a nightmare in the latter a childs nightmare, in which grown-ups are odd, arbitrary, incomprehensible, sometimes absurdly comic, sometimes terrifying, sometimes both at once. In creating this childs world, a childs view of the human beings, with all the idiosyncrasies and oddities that the grown-ups have but no longer notice, and which make of them walking caricatures of themselves, Dickens is at his best. When he attempts to draw character not as a child sees it but as the adult does, as neither comic nor melodramatic, when he tries to present the normal view of human beings, he fails, and generally fails badly. It is only when writing more or less in his own voice, as David Copperfield or as Pip, that he succeeds in presenting characters as commonly seen. But then he is writing like an adult remembering his childhood.
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The retention of this childlike vision of the world was to a large extent the result of having been exposed in the cruellest way possible to the full horrors of life in Regency London as a child. And this vision conditioned his view of the world and made it a universe at times crude in conflicting black and white, at times sinister, a heightened version of the squalid, brutal, smelly, rowdy London of his boyhood. But it also proved very effective with his readers. Make em laugh, make em cry, make em wait, was his friend Wilkie Collinss formula for the novel. Dickens had made his readers laugh with his Pickwick Papers; now he was making them cry, supplying all the melodrama they could wish for in his next books: Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) (in which he put his mother as the exquisitely ridiculous Mrs. Nickleby), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Dombey and Son (1848), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorritt (1855-57), Great Expectations (1860-61). But he was doing much more than that. In 1842 he and his wife visited America, and his impressions, especially his disappointment, were put into American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewitt (1843-44); in 1844 he visited Italy, which produced Pictures from Italy contributed to the Daily News, a new radical paper founded by Dickens in 1846; Dombey and Son was begun during a visit to Switzerland in 1846. He was travelling; he was becoming acquainted with further aspects of the world; his vision was becoming more complex. Beginning with Dombey and Son, even the structure of his books was becoming more complex and cohesive, as he was abandoning the episodic picaresque pattern of his earlier novels and adapting form to the requirements of a richer and subtler social and psychological content. It is worth noticing that at the same time that he was writing these books, Dickens was also editing and publishing a variety of periodicals (Household Words, 1850-59, All the Year Round, 1859-70) as well as books for children (A Christmas Carol, 1843, The Chimes, 1844, The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845, The Battle of Life, 1846, The Haunted Man, 1847, A Childs History of England, 1851-53, etc.). Furthermore, he threw much of his restless energy into public readings of his own works. These, though immensely successful, were physically and emotionally exhausting. He revisited America in 1867-68, delivered a series of readings there, and on his return continued to tour the provinces. He died suddenly in 1870, leaving unfinished his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As Dickens grew older his mood became darker; success could not heal the wounds of his childhood. In the novels written after 1848 the criticism of his age becomes increasingly more radical, the savage comedy more savage, ferocious, and contemptuous; the comedy becomes more integrated with the melodrama; and the whole more and more saturated with his symbolism. Some of his most effective symbols are money, dust, landscape or simply atmosphere, but also, very often, characters. In these novels the onslaught on the age is fundamental. The sufferings of his childhood had turned him into a violent revolutionary without his even realising it; now he was attacking a whole social system in all its complexity wherever it seemed to him to impede or prevent the flow of generous impulse between man and man, the exercise of natural kindness and trust. His caricatures are no longer mere figures of fun, but sometimes they become grotesque puppets larger than life, symbols of the evils of society. There are two groups of comic characters in Dickens: when he accepts them without intervention of moral scruples, rejoicing in them for their own sake, the result is pure humour: Pickwick, the Wellers, Micawber,
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Boffin, Mrs. Gamp; but when sympathy is withheld or he feels a strong moral disgust or contempt, the result is a character of savage comedy with no good nature in it at all. Other classifications and clarifications of Dickenss characters have been attempted. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, after dividing fictional characters into round (complex) and flat (simple, characterised by only one trait), stated that Dickenss were almost always flat. Critics like George Santayana and Walter Allen, however, point out that Dickenss characters are not humours in the tradition of Ben Johnson or caricatures like those of Smollett, although the influence of these two favourite writers is not neglectable in Dickens, but rather that his characters are presented with a high sense of what people really are like, with their faces and grimaces and gestures and obsessions and habits of speech. Northrop Frye, on the other hand, does not hesitate to speak of Dickenss humours and of his structuring his novels on the pattern of New Comedy, with coincidences and fairies and all, but he emphasises that this disregard of plausibility is not the result of incompetence or of bad taste, but rather of his relish of the absurd, and of a genuinely creative instinct, and therefore, in fact, not only more realistic and plausible, but also more challenging for the reader. Robert Liddell discusses the absurdity of most of Dickenss characters and plots, their mechanical quality which almost deceives the reader into disregarding the emotional springs of life, but which also points to the deep psychic conflicts, the disturbed minds that were the results of the pressures of society. In their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities Dickenss characters suggest the desperate isolation of the individual; by becoming the norm of his novels, the grotesque suggests that life is atomistic and irrational and that patterns of communication can never be real. These characters can also be regarded as creatures of dreams or nightmares, welling up from the deepest, darkest recesses of Dickenss mind, and this would explain the plethora of grotesque characters, of circus companies, of puppet shows, theatres, twins, psychopaths, monsters, ghosts and ghostlike people, etc. Their manifestations are acts of destructive passion and violence, but they come from the world of dream and death out of which all the energy of human life also comes. What most critics do agree upon is that Dickens was not a realistic novelist, and that when he attempted to write realistically he failed. His province is essentially comedy, and comedy, even when savage, is anything but realistic. Dickenss genius for dialogue has also always been acclaimed by critics: he creates dialogue that has the vitality and humour of the best of comedy. Yet, what is most interesting is that his characters never seem to communicate: they are isolated, self-soliloquising beings borne along each upon his balloon of individual fantasy (as Walter Allen put it), and in this he is more realistic than we are prepared to admit. Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: Of all my books I like this the best. He had several reasons for liking it so much, one of the most important being that, in some of its details, it was a veiled autobiography; another was the fact that with it he tried an experiment in a new mode of writing, better organised, more cohesive, and more realistic; and he did nothing finer than the opening chapters that are in the new style, but in the remaining of the book he returned to his older ways. The final result, nevertheless, is a book in which autobiography is subdued into art with remarkable skill, and whose richness, flexibility and strength make it a remarkable achievement. David Copperfield is born a posthumous child and for a few years lives happily with his
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mother and their servant Clara Peggotty. But his mother, a pretty, gentle, weak woman, marries again, and her second husband Mr. Murdstone, by cruelty disguised as firmness and abetted by Miss Murdstone his sister, drives her to an early grave. Young Copperfield, who has proved recalcitrant, is sent to school, where he is bullied by the tyrannical headmaster Creakle, but makes two friends in the brilliant and fascinating Steerforth and the goodhumoured, plodding Traddles. Thence he is sent to menial employment in London, where he lives a life of poverty and misery, enlivened by his acquaintance with the mercurial and impecunious Mr. Micawber and his family. He runs away and walks penniless to Dover to throw himself on the mercy of his aunt Betsey Trotwood, an eccentric old lady who had renounced all interest in him from his birth because contrary to her expectations he had been born a boy instead of a girl. He is kindly received and given a new home, which he shares with an amiable lunatic, Mr. Dick. This poor gentleman is perpetually engaged on a memorial regarding his affairs, but is unable to complete it owing to the inevitable intrusion into it of King Charless Head. Copperfield continues his education at Canterbury, living in the house of Miss Trotwoods lawyer Mr. Wickfield, whose daughter Agnes, a girl of exceptionally sweet and high-minded disposition, exercises a powerful influence on the rest of his life. He then enters Doctors Commons, being articled to Mr. Spenlow of the firm of Spenlow and Jorkins. Meanwhile he has come again into touch with Steerforth, whom, ignorant of his true character, he introduces to the family of his old nurse Peggotty, now married to Barkis the carrier. The family consists of Mr. Peggotty, a Yarmouth fisherman, his nephew Ham, and the latters cousin Little Emly, a pretty simple girl whom Ham is about to marry, as well as Mrs. Gummidge, another dependent and a widow, whose peevish laments for her forlorn condition are patiently borne by Mr. Peggotty. Steerforth induces Emly to run away with him, thereby producing intense misery in the Peggotty household. Mr. Peggotty sets out to find her, following her through several countries, and finally recovering her after she had been cast off by Steerforth. The latters crime also brings unhappiness to his mother and her protege, Rosa Dartle, who has long loved Steerforth with the suppressed violence of a passionate nature. The tragedy finds its culmination in the shipwreck and drowning of Steerforth and the death of Ham in trying to rescue him. Meanwhile Copperfield, blind to the affection of Agnes Wickfield, marries Dora Spenlow, a pretty empty-headed child, and becomes famous as an author. Dora dies after a few years of married life and Copperfield, at first disconsolate, awakens to a growing appreciation and love of Agnes. Her father has fallen into the toils of a villainous and cunning clerk, Uriah Heep, one of Dickenss most brilliant caricatures, who, under the cloak of fawning humility has obtained complete control over him, reduced him to the verge of imbecility, and nearly ruined him. Uriah also aspires to marry Agnes. But his misdeeds, which also include forgery and theft, are exposed by Mr. Micawber, employed as his clerk, with the assistance of Traddles, now a barrister. Uriah is last seen in prison, under a life sentence. Copperfield marries Agnes. Mr. Peggotty, with Emly and Mrs. Gummidge, is found prospering in Australia, where Mr. Micawber, relieved of his debts, appears finally as a much esteemed colonial magistrate. The book develops on two levels, the private and the social: on the private one, the story does not lack the inevitable Dickens sentimentalities (Davids unhappiness as a child, the fate
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of Little Emly, Davids relation with Dora); on the social level, however, comedy and his realism are devastating. The theme is the clash of different ways of life; different strata of society each with its own ideals of gentility and worth come into conflict with each other, and in the process Dickens explores once again the relationship between convention and reality, between private and public standards. Great Expectations has been described as one of Dickenss variants on the theme of money, money as the agent of isolation, for Pip, perhaps Dickenss finest character in a more or less naturalistic mode, is perverted in his natural affections and cut off from those nearest and most loyal to him, by the expectation of money. The wonderful opening chapter, with the description of the marshes and the confrontation of the boy Pip with the escaped convict, sets the key to the whole book. The novel recounts the development of the character of the narrator, Philip Pirrip, commonly known as Pip, a village boy brought up by his termagant sister, the wife of the gentle, humorous, kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery. After the episode with Abel Magwitch, whom he tries to help, Pip is introduced to the house of Miss Havisham, a lady half crazed by the desertion of her lover on her bridal night, who, in the spirit of revenge, has brought up the girl Estella to use her beauty as a means of torturing men. Pip falls in love with Estella, and aspires to become a gentleman. Money and expectations of more wealth come to him from a mysterious source, which he believes to be Miss Havisham. He goes to London, and in his new mode of life meanly abandons the devoted Joe Gargery, a humble connection of whom he is now ashamed. Misfortunes come upon him: his benefactor proves to be Abel Magwitch, the former convict, whose help and money Pip rejects in horror; his great expectations fade away and he is penniless. Estella marries his sulky enemy, Bentley Drummle, by whom she is cruelly ill-treated. Taught by adversity, Pip returns to Joe Gargery and honest labour, and, in an ending requested by readers rather than dictated by Dickenss creative instincts, is finally albeit ambiguously reunited to Estella, who has also learned her lesson. Great Expectations explores, with more subtlety and control than Dickens displays anywhere else, aspects of the relation between gentility and morality, and though, again, it has its melodramatic moments (the haunting Miss Havisham theme), there is no other of his novels where the characters and incidents are so perfectly subdued to the central moral vision. From beginning to end the ironic vision never falters: Pip seeks to become a gentleman and to wash from his mouth forever the flavour of his early life and especially of his encounter with the convict Magwitch, while it is precisely Magwitch that has provided the money with which to pursue his genteel ambitions, for supreme irony the convict, too, conceives that there is no higher reward than the achievement of gentility. The recognition by Pip of the convict as the author of his fortunes shows Dickens at the very height of his genius, and if the final working out of the action seems too full of complicated coincidences, this is no great matter, for the real story has by now been told. It was perhaps the recognition of this fact that determined Dickens to concede to change the original ending of the novel (in which Pip and Estella go their separate ways) in deference to the advice of his friend Bulwer-Lytton and to the letters of the reading public. In spite of contradictory critical appreciations of his work, and perhaps because he has whatever it takes to incite so much criticism, Dickenss position in English literature is secure. F.R. Leavis wrote about him that he was a great poet: in range and ease [of command of
15

word, phrase, rhythm and image] there is surely no greater master of English than Shakespeare. David Daiches wrote: He had that joy in the varieties of human character that Chaucer and Shakespeare had, and to a degree, shared by none but those; he had both a richness of pure comic invention and an extraordinary gift for irony and caricature; he had a pressing sense of the moral and social problems of his day and the genius to illuminate them through the presentation of character in action... Northrop Frye speaks of him as a shrewd master of the absurd, and in this a forerunner of twentieth-century literature. In addition to this, Walter Allen points out, he was supremely an entertainer, the greatest entertainer, probably, in the history of fiction.

Recommended reading:

David Copperfield Great Expectations Hard Times Bleak House

Highlights: The two faces of Dickens: the flamboyant dandy and the moody successful old man The two faces of England in Dickenss novels: merry England vs. the industrial slum, or the romanticised realism Two traditions in Dickens criticism: E.M. Forsters flat and round characters and Northrop Fryes humours vs. the complexity of character predicated by George Santayana, Walter Allen and David Daiches Questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Journalism was Dickenss introduction to literature. Where in his work can we notice this? What was the impact of the serialisation of novels in the Victorian Age on Dickenss output? In what way was Dickens influenced by his love for the theatre? Why did Dickens choose children as protagonists in most of his books? How does he present these children? Which of the four novels listed above do you consider to be Dickenss best creation? Why?

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Lecture II: Theories and Prescriptions

1. Victorianism and the Novel Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens and in our nurseries. (Anthony Trollope, 1870) Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers daughters, by old lawyers and by young students. (Anthony Trollope, 1883) What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? (character in The Odd Women (1893), by George Gissing) What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean? (Henry James) Why read novels? See Kate Flint in David 33-34 2. Reception Reception: the activity of reading, the construction of meaning, and the readers response to what he is reading (Inge Crosman & Thekla Zachrau, trans., in Karlheinz Stierle, The Reading of Fictional Texts, 1980: 83 n 1). Reception Theory (according to J.A. Cuddon): A school of literary theory which is associated particularly with the University of Konstanz and the journal Poetik und Hermeneutik (published from 1964). Main representatives: Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Karlheinz Stierle, Stanley Fish, etc. Jauss is concerned with the general response to literature in terms of reception-aesthetics rather than the individuals response, and he suggests that literary work should be studied in terms of the impression or impact it makes on its contemporary audience, and that literary value is judged according to how much the view of a text alters over time. Aesthetic distance is the term used by Jauss to denote the difference between the contemporary view of a work of art (at the time of its first publication) and the present-day view. But still the idea holds that the reader has a contribution to make in the process. So there is a kind of balance and co-operation between text and what it provides and what the reader contributes. However, all readers are different and therefore may be supposed to bring a different response to any text. Similarly, critics are different and therefore allow the reader a variable amount of impressionistic or individual interpretation. Fish, for instance, holds that it is only within a given community or institution that the facts of literary study (i.e. genre, periods, authors, texts) are available and that these facts are as
17

much a product of the community as they are of the interpreters. Fish contends that all interpreters are extensions of communities. He calls them interpretive communities, made up of informed readers, a hybrid between the ideal reader and the actual living, chronotopically circumscribed reader. Wolfgang Iser, on the other hand, defines the literary work as the result of the interaction between text and reader, in which the text anticipates and within certain limits imposes the sense that the reader actively makes of the text. They all speak about reading as an activity, a diachronic, progressive process, and an experience. Reader-Response Theory has been prominent from the seventies on. Its major achievement is that it does away with the ideal reader or narratee of formalist and structuralist criticism, focusing instead on the psychology and sociology of an actual reader and the ways in which these modify the outcome of the reading. Its main representative, Stanley Fish (b. 1938) argues that the meaning of the poem is to be located in the readers experience of it, and that the form of the poem is the form of that experience; the outer or physical form, so obtrusive, and, in one sense, so undeniably there, is, in another sense, incidental and even irrelevant (Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 1967). Thus, he rejects the idea of the primacy of the text, and dismisses the traditional form-content dualism, which he replaces with a monism (readers experience = meaning = form), which earlier the New Critics had labelled the affective fallacy. Methodologically, he proposes a phenomenology of time, in which meaning exists only at the time of the readers experience, but it is rigorously controlled by the text and the author behind it. The reader in Fishs theory is an informed reader, a hybrid between the ideal reader and an actual living, chronotopically circumscribed reader, a notion which Fish replaces in 1976 with that of interpretive communities, signalling his shift to poststructuralist and Marxist modes of thinking (see Interpreting the Variorum, 1977, Is There a Text in This Class?, 1980). Norman Holland (b. 1927) focused on the transactions between text and reader, using the findings of ego-psychology to understand the nature of text reception. He propounded a model (for which he used the acronym DEFT see below) in which the identity (or personality) of the reader affected the perception and interpretation of literature, and argued that there is no such thing as uniformity of response or good and bad interpretations: interpretation is a function of identity. Conversely, identity re-creates itself in the transaction of reading in four phases which involve the re-shaping of Defences, Expectations, Fantasies, and Transformations (see 5 Readers Reading, 1975). Other representatives include: Terry Eagleton, Judith Fetterley, Peter Rabinowitz. Narratology: a new theory of myth as the organising principle of the narrative, the result of the movement from syntax to rhetoric to discourse. It focuses on all possible narratives, from literature to stain-glass windows and graffiti, and from dance to pantomime and relief sculpture. It is variously classified under Formalism, Structuralism, Anthropological Criticism and Postmodern theory. Representatives: Claude Levi-Strauss, A.J. Greimas, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye, Mark Currie.

THEORIES OF NARRATION; ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS OF THE NOVEL Instead of a definition, I propose a prototype of the novel: The individual in search of himself, struggles to define his own identity, and in doing so
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also produces/ improves it. In order to better circumscribe these identities, the authors devised a number of fairly simple conventions: the hero must be severed from family ties (orphan, kidnapped/ lost, or simply travelling), encounters people belonging to all social strata, and must learn how to form judgements about them. In the process he also achieves selfknowledge (the Enlightenment ideal). The pieties of social hierarchy do not always obtain: the poor and undeserving often prove kind and moral, while the rich and educated are corrupted and decadent. However, the justness of the class system per se is never openly challenged. The countryside is safer, whereas the city seduces/ ensnares the hero and confuses his scale of values (Rousseauvian notions of Natural Man etc.); yet for the Victorian novel the city is the site of predilection, reflecting the large concentration of potential readers that accrued as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The journey is from innocence to knowledge, although a good dose of social and moral idealism is a sine-qua-non ingredient that ensures the didactic function of the novel and therefore remains a constant. the novelists medium [is] language rather than life (David Lodge, The Language of Fiction 17); Jacques Lacan: the unconscious is the product of language.

Perhaps the most effective method of defining as complex a literary genre as the novel is precisely that of enumerating and classifying its defining features. Such lists open up the way to thematic and historical interpretation. Margaret Anne Doody chooses to discuss the novel in terms of some of its tropes or motives, that is, those elements around which the whole structure of the novel is organised. She speaks, for instance, of the Breaking Trope, the Mending Trope, the Marshes, Shore and Muddy Margins series, the Threshold Trope, the Tomb, Cave and Labyrinth series, Eros, etc. More complex systems of classification were devised by Northrop Frye and Wayne C. Booth at the height of the Formalist era. Formalism is by definition concerned with breaking down texts into their smallest units and demonstrating how those units converge into wholes characterised by unity, complexity and harmony, but also ambiguity, irony and paradox. Both Booth and Frye move beyond the strictly formal bounds of contemporary criticism in order to accommodate more comprehensive forms of interpretation. Fryes anthropological narratology approaches the novel from a variety of perspectives theories, he calls them: Theory of Modes, of Symbols, of Myths, and of Genres, in the four essays that make up his Anatomy of Criticism, respectively. Three of the elements of the Aristotelian diagram1 shape Fryes theories: mythos is the verbal imitation of action, or structure of imagery in movement (Aristotles plot: characters are revealed in and by action); ethos refers to human nature, human situation (characterisation); dianoia is the verbal
1

the 6 formative elements of tragedy: spectacle (acting), diction (the verses the characters recite), melody (rhythm), character, thought (or dianoia, i.e., an element in the personality of the dramatis personae: their intellectual capacity for reasoning and persuasion as evinced in their language and rhetoric), and plot (the most important element because it contains and conveys the meaning of the tragedy). Plot is the way in which the action works itself out, the whole causal chain which leads to the final outcome. Its most dramatic parts are Peripeties (sudden reversals of fortune) and Discoveries (sudden revelations of concealed or mistaken identities and unravelling of mysteries). 19

imitation of thought, or static structures of imagery (Aristotles thought). The main part of Fryes theory that refers to the novel is the Theory of Mythos (the second part of the third essay), in which the mythos of Spring is assigned to Comedy, that of Summer to Romance, that of Autumn to Tragedy, and the mythos of Winter to Irony and Satire (especially ironic realism). In this context Romance is defined as an analogy of innocence, closer to Heaven and designated as Americas literary mode, whereas Realism is an analogy of experience, closer to Hell and assigned to European literature. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye distinguishes five elevations of characters, whose presence in the literary work produces generic distinctions. They may be: 1. superior in kind to both men and the environment of other men hero = divine being; story = myth, i.e. story about a god, outside the normal literary categories (33). 2. superior in degree to other men and to his environment hero of romance, human being, but the ordinary laws of nature are suspended; legend, folk tale, Mrchen etc. (33). 3. superior in degree to other men, but not to his natural environment hero = leader; high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy (34). 4. superior neither to other men nor to his environment hero = one of us; low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction; hero = not heroic (34). 5. inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves ironic mode; reader feels he is or might be in a similar situation, as the situation is judged by the norms of a greater freedom (34). Traditionally, then, type four is the sort of character encountered in novels, although types three and five are also common. As Northrop Frye notes, Western literature over the last fifteen centuries has steadily moved its centre of gravity down the list (35), turning to irony as the dominant mode of the 20th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the nonheroic protagonists of sentimental and realistic novels fulfilled the difficult task of both imitating and prescribing current manners and morals, while at the same time entertaining an ever-wider spectrum of readers. In fact the most interesting feature of the novel is that under the guise of refurbished classical and more recent (e.g. medieval) genres it managed to promote an ethos that was typical of the emerging bourgeois capitalism. Wayne C. Booths Rhetoric of Fiction proposes to recuperate rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, for literary study. He distinguishes between two notions of rhetoric: the rhetoric in fiction as overt and recognizable appeal (the most extreme form being authorial commentary) and fiction as rhetoric in the larger sense, an aspect of the whole work viewed as a total act of communication (415). In other words, he opposes technical matters (rhetorical conventions) to the whole art of storytelling viewed as rhetorical (416). Booth also discusses the various voices, or presences in the novel. The writer, according to Booth, has the purely mechanical function of putting down the story, and has therefore no importance in this discussion. The implied author is the one who makes the decisions about what story should be told and how it should be told so as to achieve the effect desired by the author; his voice is usually supremely objective. The narrator may be a participant in the action of the book (1st person narrator), or an objective observer and recorder of the participants mind (3rd person narrator), or he may be the omniscient writer, a god-like figure moving the characters around. The characters, too, may have different positions in the book: they can be active participants, they may constitute something like the
20

Greek chorus, commenting on the characters actions, or they may be what Henry James had called reflectors, helping the reader get a grip of what does not happen in front of him/her. In this context, the persuasiveness of a literary work is a matter of controlling the distance between reader and the different voices, and that often requires creating deliberate confusion in the reader by using a narrator or observer who is himself confused. Structuralism stresses the discovery of unity, of organising principles which make words converge towards a message. The message is not always immediately obvious but it is gradually disclosed through a series of semiotic transformations performed by the reader, because a poem can never be openly mimetic. The logical end-point of this transformation of mimesis into semiosis, Steven Connor points out, is a poem that has polished away the last speck of reference to a real world and left itself free to flex its own autonomous verbal substance a poem about words alone, or a nonsense poem (1991: 740). Yet even in this denial of referentiality the structuralists are capable of finding references to the word nothing. Thus, for the structuralists, a sign is only a relationship to something else and it will not make sense without a continuous translatability from component to component of a network (Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry, 1978: 11). Controlled by its matrix, the poem is a single sign, a structure wherein nothing is loose. But the vast range of characters in novels allows not only for a faithful and varied illustration of human types, but also of types of discourse. What results, more often than not, as we have seen, is a text that is heteroglot, in good Puritan and democratic tradition that is, a text that comprises the complex diversity of human passions and voices. The term heteroglossia was coined by the Russian theoretician Mikhail Bakhtin in Discourse in the Novel (1934-35) to describe the variety and diversity of languages artistically organised in the novel. Heteroglossia is the mode of the novel, in which all speech types or social, economic, historical levels of discourse come together and interact. The novel accommodates different speech types through the voices of characters and narrators. According to Bakhtin, fiction at its best distinguishes between the language used to represent the attitudes and opinions of the author and that used by individual characters.
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization this is basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. Language like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives is never unitary. Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal ideological and social belief systems; within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with his own different sound. (in Rivkin&Ryan 32)

Literary language is stratified according to genre (see Fryes classification of characters above, but also as in oratorical, publicistic, journalistic, etc.), and the professional and social class of the characters (33). Moreover, there are not neutral words and forms. All words have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and
21

contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life, all words and forms are populated by intentions (35). In other words, [l]anguage is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speakers intentions; it is populated overpopulated with the intentions of others (35). That is to say, language is a system of quotation, which carries into the speech of the individual the socio-ideological undertones that inform it (as we have seen in Robinson Crusoe). Comic novels, according to Bakhtin, are particularly adept at including a wide range of strata of literary language, which they also parody and stylize (Fieldings novels are brilliant instances of that parodic stylization). The dialogue that takes place at the level of characters between different discourses, also takes place at the broader level of different literary texts. This is commonly known as intertextuality:
A term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have gone before it. Her contention was that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the absorption and transformation of another. She challenges traditional notions of literary influence, saying that intertextuality denotes a transposition of one or several sign systems into another or others. But this is not connected with the study of sources. Transposition is a Freudian term, and Kristeva is not merely pointing to the way texts echo each other but the way that discourses or sign systems are transposed into one another so that meanings in one kind of discourse are overlaid with meanings from another kind of discourse. It is a kind of new articulation. For Kristeva the idea is part of a wider psychoanalytical theory which questions the stability of the subject (Cuddon)

Another similar psychoanalytical theory regarding the dialogue between texts, though focusing specifically on poetry, is that expounded by Harold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973). Bloom
advances the idea that every poet (especially since Milton) is, in a sense, belated and oppressed by anxiety because of precursor poets the great ones above all. This poet stands in the relation of son to them, or to one of them in particular, and feels oppressed by that relation. Carrying through the Oedipal idea, Bloom suggests that such a son is a rival to the father poet who is a castrating precursor. The son, powerfully influenced by a parentpoem or poems of the father, experiences ambivalent feelings, compounded not only of love and admiration but also of envy and fear and perhaps even hatred. The fear and hate are caused by the sons great need to reject and rebel against the father, to be autonomous and original and find his own voice. (Cuddon)

M.H. Abrams explains this predicament in A Glossary of Literary Terms:

The belated poet unconsciously safeguards his own sense of autonomy and priority by reading a parent-poem defensively, in such a way as to distort it beyond his own conscious recognition. Nonetheless, he cannot avoid embodying the malformed parent-poem into his own doomed attempt to write an unprecedentedly original poem; the most that even the best belated poet can achieve is to write a poem so strong that it effects an illusion of priority that is, an illusion both that it precedes the father-poem in time and that it exceeds it in greatness.

In other words, the writer who unconsciously feels the influence of a precursor, will do his best to both erase and outrank that influence, but the process is never complete witness the plethora of criticism dealing with texts comparatively and pointing out influences.
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Mark Currie, in a seminal book on Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998), explains the transition from Structuralism to Poststructuralism along the lines of the shifts undergone by theories concerning narrative in the 1980s. He begins by showing the widespread circulation attained of late by the concept of narrative, which has come to encompass the representation of identity, in personal memory and self-representation or in collective identity of groups such as religions, nations, race and gender (2) and has acquired a quality of instability. Currie explains this new quality as the result of the shifts from discovery to invention, from coherence to complexity, and from poetics to politics (2). Thus, while Structuralism hoped to deploy scientific linguistics methods in order to discover the inherent structure that contains the meaning of any narrative, Poststructuralism insists that any structure that can be associated with a certain narrative is in fact put there (invented) by the reader as part of the reading (i.e., interpretive) activity, and therefore any number of different, even contradictory, meanings can be attached to any one text. This amounts to a deconstruction of earlier narratology; it involves the destruction of its scientific authority and [points] to a less reductive kind of reading which [is] not underpinned by notions like the coherence of the authorial project or the stability of the language system in general (3). The number of possible readings, deconstructionists and historicists alike argue, is only limited by the ideological discourse that surreptitiously informs language itself (see Michel Foucault). Poststructuralisms effort to reinstate historical perspective in the literary studies could thus be said to have put the narrative back in narratology. Like the Deconstructive and Historicist trends, this subversion of structuralist narratology began in the late 1960s and attained its most coherent theoretical expression in the 1980s.

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Lecture III: The romance of Merry England and the triumph of Realism: Charles Dickens

A BRIEF HISTORY OF REALISM, OR THE CONTROVERSY OVER ITS ORIGINS Traditionally, the beginning of the novel is placed in mid-18 th century. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the English Novel, links the invention of the novel with the secularisation and individualisation of the mercantile middle class and proclaims Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1840) the first English novel in the modern sense of that term, assigning previous long prose fictions to the realms of satire and romance. On this view, the beginning of the novel is also the beginning of realism. Many other critics, however, challenge such neat demarcations and broaden the definition of the novel so as to accommodate sub-genres such as novellas, romances, lives/ histories, picaresques, tales of adventures, prose allegories and satires (e.g., Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia, Bunnyans Pilgrims Progress, Swifts Tale of the Tub and Gullivers Travels, Defoes Robinson Crusoe etc.). According to Margaret Anne Doody, a feminist critic, the true story of the novel actually begins in the antiquity, especially Greek, Egyptian and Roman, and the genre should be defined in terms of the key tropes that recur in and to a large extent shape the plot and character delineation. Nonetheless, for the practical purposes of the present discussion, it is much more useful to locate the beginnings of the English novel in the 18th century and examine the history of this genre in terms of the defining characteristics of the age in which it came into its own as the widest spread and most popular kind of literature. If the seventeenth century had been tormented by religious problems, the eighteenth seemed to be dominated by a polite, gentlemanly belief in the power of reason to solve all misunderstandings and to find solutions for improving human existence. Philosophy, philosophical detachment, the development of the sciences, the economic increase, and especially, paradoxically enough, the Protestant insistence on personal interpretation of the scripture, created the conditions for an optimistic relative independence from religion. This was the century in which people believed in the science of chronology, which established that the Creation began on 23 October 4004 BC, that the Flood started on 7 December 2349 BC, and that the passage through the Red Sea was opened on 11 May 1491 BC, which was a Monday. Yet, as Melvyn New states, the most widely read and often discussed collection of narratives in eighteenth-century England was scripture, both in the form of the Bible itself, and in the form of literary comment on it (Modes of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, in Coyle et al. 1991: 506). The critic states that almost all the fiction written during that century was in fact a combination of a number of literary modes which had already had quite a long tradition in English literature: history, romance, apologue/apology, biography, autobiography, and satire. The novel is defined as the natural outcome of the tendency for combining these genres under the influence of a changing attitude towards scripture (see Appendix). This changing attitude consisted mainly in the transition from the innocent, optimistic belief that the holy writ is true on its own terms and that it is not to be inquired into from an
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anachronistic standpoint, to the equally optimistic trust that the mind could attempt to reach a deeper understanding of scripture from the perspective of the more advanced, enlightened intelligence of the Augustan man. Melvyn New explains the fallacy that led to the invention of the novel: it was basically the loss of belief in miracles and the beginning of questioning the motives behind them.
Certain questions do not exist in scripture because reality precludes them; when, in the course of commentary, curiosity, imagination, or simply the art of elaboration and adornment leads to such questions, the Word is put in jeopardy and the world begins to define itself anew. The term novel arises amidst enormous generic confusions during the century it is a splendid appellation, for what it does indeed label is the revision of commentary in the face of a new order. That is to say, the parallel to the novel is not the romance or any other narrative mode, but the source of narrative modes, scripture in the case of much Western fiction. The novel is not an individual story or even a way of telling a story, but the collective force of stories told under the influence of a different way of looking at the world. (ibid., 515; emphasis added)

This definition of the novel also explains the variety of species listed under that heading. What they had in common in the 18th century was the fact that they were all stories that commented partially upon scripture, partially upon a world in which miracles had ceased, and [that] the creating and sustaining power of the Word had less sway than previously over the minds of authors and readers alike (ibid., 515-6). Margaret Anne Doody speaks about the fact that in the 18th century, with the rise of the novel, we also witness a feminisation of fiction,2 which had been essentially oriented towards the ideals of masculine behaviour and Christian morals since the Middle Ages. The most important disruption it effects is separation of the private from the public sphere, redefining civic life in terms of the domestic in addition to the traditional male ethos that had dominated social and political life. Consequently, the reading public also starts to develop a phobia towards novels, which are regarded as softening and detrimental to mens character. The critic emphasises, however, that this new tendency meant primarily a reorientation towards feelings, and especially love in all its aspects, and towards domestic life, without excluding moral ideals and economic politics. Moreover, precisely in order to preclude such a sceptical attitude towards the potentially pernicious effect of novels, writers and supporters alike insisted on the educational and moral role it was meant to play in the lives of the young, ignorant and idle. However, it was not before it acquired a rigid prescriptive realism that the novel became fully acceptable in polite English society (The True Story of the Novel, 1994). Another critic, John Dwyer, explains the emergence of the sentimental ethic in the th 18 century from a social point of view, emphasising the fact that it was not, as is generally believed, merely a result of the rise of the bourgeoisie, although it was soon and rapidly assimilated by that class, but the reaction of the refined intellect of the classically trained moralist when confronted with an increasingly commercial empire which made selfishness and the pursuit of luxury ruling principles of social behaviour. Sentimental authors believed that economic improvement needed to be balanced not only by an abstract humanity, but by a well-cultivated appreciation of the communal bond (The Sentimental Ethic, ibid., 1040). As Dwyer puts it, [t]he sentimental genre was, first and foremost, a characteristic literary
2

Isobel Armstrong speaks about the feminisation of literature in the 19th century, as a result of the romantic invention of depths in the self (i.e., the renewed interest in introspection, psychological analysis, empathy). 25

product of the European Enlightenment (ibid., 1030). As such, it had an obvious moralising aim, which became even more effective than that of Calvinistic preaching. This was the aim of all the literary species enumerated by New, and it did not focus on morals exclusively, but also on attitude, behaviour, and even dress. The efficiency and widely-spread influence of this didactic tendency was primarily due to the fact that the latent fellow-feeling was aroused by recourse to a concept which had a long cultural history in Britain, namely melancholy, the so-called British disease (ibid., 1036). The tradition of melancholy in English literature included Miltons Il Penseroso, where detached contemplation of the world was preferred to the dynamic enjoyment of its pleasures. Sentimentality was not a unitary, programmatic movement, and it certainly did not have any literary dictators as the previous age had in Pope and Dr. Johnson. It began as a rebellion against the restrictive norms of Neoclassicism and in fact against any form of authority, that of the church included, and it was mainly defined by empathy with nature and with the fellow human beings. Neoclassicism was regarded as an exaggerated and stifling cult of the intellect to the detriment of feelings, while at the other extreme Sentimentalism came to be characterised as an over-indulgence of sentiment. Early on, Henry Fielding had remarked on the fact that, to the exclusion of almost all other subject matters, the point of interest common especially to all women, but to many of the men of the late 18 th century was love, and the portrayal of woman in love. It was not until the middle of the 19th century, with the novels of the Bront sisters and of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot that writers and readers alike discovered that the picture would be much more convincing and informative if it included something of the mans approach to the problem as well. In the 18th century, women writers conception of what would make the hero more sympathetic was describing him as sharing the qualities that belonged to women (sensibility, delicacy of feeling, interest in the minor arts etc.). Emily Bront especially tried to prove that it was women that often shared or should share in the aspirations of men (freedom, financial independence, intellectual pursuits etc.). The range of issues dealt with in novels covers the aspects of life that were traditionally ascribed to women, that is, the home, child rearing, marriage, fantasy, and a vast palette of negative feelings stemming from isolation and deprivation of personal and civic freedom. As the expression of such feelings and the product of unchecked flights of imagination, as well as by foregrounding women, the novel posed the danger of stimulating women to think more highly of themselves and consequently demanding more from society in terms of personal rights and respect. In other words, the novel represented a threat to the established social order by suggesting that change was possible at the level of social organisation as well as technology, of mentalities as well as manners. The chief attitude is, then, dual: on the one hand, the rejection of conventions, social order, the authority of formal religion and church; on the other, an alleged empathy with the simple, the uneducated, the exploited victims of industrialisation. It is for this reason that at the same time as the novel was reaching an ever wider readership, theoreticians of the novel were already devising fetters for it in the form of a revaluation of the Aristotelian demands for probability and verisimilitude. This is what is called prescriptive realism, which is meant to control not only the modes of expression that were available to the novel, but also what could be expressed by it, and thus turn it into an
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instrument of moral education. Yet, while tying the novel down to the domestic province, these demands/prescriptions also made the plight of women more immediately visible and credible. Thus, as Nancy Armstrong points out, while the 18th century invented femininity i.e., being possessed of a certain cultural equipment that enabled women to perform their social role 19th century invented femaleness i.e., the feminine body in a state of crisis to be investigated in terms of how the interiority that body was supposed to contain relates to the new notions of bourgeois masculinity (in David 108-9). The main theme of the Victorian novel is traditional femininity in an agonistic struggle with female nature (Armstrong in David 108). The feminisation of fiction thus threatens to amount to a slackening of morals, for which solutions are sought in prescriptive criticism by women novelists as much as male. As women turn to novel writing and thus claim the province of reason by becoming realistic, men enter the realm of sensibility and turn to romantic poetry. Thus, literature becomes, more and more, a means of subversion and indirection, of expressing social criticism and gender rebellion. What this unmasks is the mistaken assumption that novels were written mostly for and by women: Firstly, most novelists were in fact men, although there was an incredibly large number of women writers in 19th-century England (unlike in any other country). Secondly, the womens subordinated social position could very easily be assimilated to the subordinated position of the lower classes generally. Hence the sympathy for and widespread interest in the fates of the feminine protagonists of novels.

THE ROMANCE OF MERRY ENGLAND Another aspect of the rebellion against neoclassical restrictions was that of the rejection of enclosed spaces and the preference for landscape or seascape instead. The grandeur or the picturesque of nature, the wilderness as well as the delicate rose, became clichs of Preromantic prose as well as poetry. Moreover, the feelings of the people who lived in the middle of it and did not merely contemplate it passively, were often either caused by the beholding of the scape or projected onto nature, which thus became an active participant in the emotional life of people. Yet as industrialisation advances and engulfs the lifescape of the lower and middle classes, the novel forsakes its pastoral origins and turns to the industrial town with its insalubrious agglomeration of dramas and melodramas. In the novels of Charles Dickens the distant countryside preserves its escapist connotations but ceases to be the habitat of his protagonists: it is inadequate both as the background for the realities they are confronted with and as the site of their ambitious rise from rags to riches. Provincial life, when it makes an appearance in the novels of George Eliot, is never out of sight of the political and social reforms that preoccupy London (see Middlemarch). When the countryside becomes the setting in the work of the romantically minded Brontes, it is as the site of unspeakable mysteries and abnormalities. The myth of Merry England was not however restricted to rural pastorality. It included an element of happy-go-lucky picaresque, as in Henry Fieldings Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, a sense that God is in His heaven and all is well with the world (Robert Browning). This optimism is perpetuated in the often improbably happy endings to Charles
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Dickenss novels, and the hope they transmit that virtue carries the day in the end and families, in being formed or reunited, can restore order to the world. Furthermore, novels accommodated men and women from the lower classes as their protagonists, but the publics favourites were those who transcended class barriers, either through marriage or through education and hard work, or through a sudden discovery of affluent family relations or inheritance. These were also some of the favourite themes of novels, and their judicious deployment rendered Dickens works bestsellers. Indeed, the Victorian ethos remained, at least officially, one of social mobility, and both Dickenss novels and his life testify to the possibility of progressing from poverty to huge financial success. As Hilary Fraser and Daniel Brown point out, Nineteenth-century England was a dynamic society, an unprecedented experiment in social mobility and middle-class social and political power (10). The epitome of this social experiment was represented by the two Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867, which granted political suffrage to middle-class men with property, but also by the radical educational reform that occupied the minds of the foremost social thinkers of the age, Matthew Arnold being only the most illustrious of them.

THE TRIUMPH OF REALISM The shift from the countryside of Rousseauvian purity and innocence to the fallen Eden of the industrial town effects the transition from the literary mode of romance to that of verisimilitude. The ethos of romance, with its virtuous protagonist presented under duress and the good and worthy acceding to riches, points to the possibility of altering social norms and hierarchies. This social optimism comes to be regarded as dangerous after the turn of the 19th century, as the democratic ideals of the French Revolution degenerate into the Napoleonic regime and the Napoleonic Wars that shake the foundations of Europe. As a consequence there is a sense that the novel should not know its own power to effect change or influence society beyond the private sphere. In the 19th century the emphasis is on the exemplary nature of the novel strictly in terms of personal virtue and there is resistance to the idea that literature had an impact on the creation of reality. Despite the severe limitations to the educative function of the novel that this sets, the Aristotelian imperatives of verisimilitude and probability are introduced to discipline the form of the novel and make it socially acceptable. It has been said that in England no novel can be good which gives an account of the passions and actions of men, i.e., a novel which is a display of vice, involving the reader in fantasy and getting his mind imbued with ideas that were not there before. Prescriptive realism is a narrative construct, a set of literary conventions that limit flights of imagination. Its imperatives are: - write strictly from experience - do not step away from the civic sphere - eliminate (especially continental European) predecessors whose foreigness and fictionality were too obvious (e.g. Cervantes) - worship in the cult of the normal and of the real (especially at the prescriptive level) - exclude fantasy and experiment Naturally the most immediately obvious outcome is that prescriptive realism limits
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certain forms of psychic and social questioning. The second most important outcome is the extent to which this reveals a social double standard: Victorian society both encouraged the pursuit of personal improvement through learning and denied the possibility and advisability of social mobility. On the other hand, the devotion to realism was invented by the English as an efficient excuse to shed tradition: it opposes the heteroglot text of Puritanism and democracy to the monoglot discourse of monarchy typical of the classical epic and of romance. As early as the 18th century, most novelists denied, explicitly or implicitly, that they were writing novels or romances, preferring instead to call their work histories, lives, biographies, or memoirs (see the titles) i.e., they dissociate themselves from the frivolous, improbable, sometimes immoral aspects of the romance. This democratisation of fiction through realism, however, cannot conceal the growing 19th-century anxiety over social stability. Prescriptive realism attempts to reconcile these opposing tendencies by insisting that social mobility is only possible for extraordinary individuals, preferably the estranged descendents of affluent families, who are restored to their rightful position in a move that extols the justice of the English class system and the advantages of its stability. Fundamentally, the aesthetic of realism always strives towards coherence: in plot, character, narration/ narrative strategy, ideology etc. Yet while the conventions of coherence turn reality into realism, they also have the merit of cementing the relationship between author and audience by creating a horizon of expectations. Charles Dickenss (1812-1870) trajectory from sentimentality and melodrama, through comedy, to social pessimism is the most eloquent illustration of the dynamics of the English novel between the myth of Merry England and the imperative of realism. His literary career is in fact often periodised into two phases: 1) optimistic, almost romantic the Merry England phase, characterised by the idealisation of the Victorian age and of social mobility; and 2) the late, pessimistic, disenchanted phase, during which he foregrounded the exposure of industrialisms negative effects, especially the dehumanisation of both capitalists and workers. This period is characterised by disillusionment with human nature at large. In an essay on Dickens and the Comedy of Humours, Northrop Frye proposes that
What [Dickens] writesare not realistic novels but fairy tales in the low mimetic displacement. Hence there has grown up an assumption that, if we are to take Dickens seriously, we must emphasize the lifelikeness of his characters or the shrewdness of his social observation; if we emphasize his violently implausible plots and his playing up of popular sentiment, we are emphasizing only his concessions to an undeveloped public taste. (537)

Yet the fact remains that when he is most actively pursuing his plot he is careless, to the verge of being contemptuous, of the inner logic of the story (538). Frye goes on: This disregard of plausibility is worth noticing, because everyone realises that Dickens is a great genius of the absurd in his characterisation, and it is possible that his plots are also absurd in the same sense, not from incompetence or bad taste, but from a genuine creative instinct (539), and therefore, in fact, more realistic and plausible. Dickenss main achievement is said to be his creation of the largest gallery of human types. Critics have noted that most of his characters are flat rather than rounded (E.M. Forster), lacking moral and psychological complexity and the capacity to evolve or change to
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any significant extent. Dickenss admiration for Ben Jonson and his comedy of humours is put to good use in the creation of chorus characters. Yet his most memorable characters remain in fact those simplified caricatures (see Mr Micawber in David Copperfield or Bounderby and Gradgrind in Hard Times), rather than his heroes and heroines. His feminine characters in particular are based on the two main women in his life: his wife (the sloppy matron, foolish, unattractive breeder of children, unsympathetic, unsophisticated) and her sister and Dickenss life-long love (the intelligent, sensitive, sophisticated, warm but contained lady par excellence). Compare Agnes in David Copperfield or Estella in Great Expectations with the matron Mrs Micawber but also Mrs Heep in David Copperfield and to a certain extent Mrs Joe in Great Expectations. However, his male characters are far better drawn and more memorable, and their types more varied. They include characters obsessed by an idea or dominated by a trait, but also the so-called tagged characters who repeat the same phrase over and over again, and the humour of stock response. Northrop Frye explains the humour (i.e., character type) of stock response: it is the humour whose obsession it is to insist that what he or she has been conditioned to think proper and acceptable is in fact reality (545) (e.g. Mr Gradgrind). Their participation in social life affords Dickens ample opportunity to investigate the dynamics of congenial society vs. obstructing society. Frye states that the obstructing society is shown to be a self-imprisoning society, locking itself in the invariable responses of its own compulsions (548). It is both parasitic it sets up false values and loyalties which destroy the freedom of those who accept them and tyrannise those who do not and pedantic i.e., it is guided by theoretical approaches to life typical of humours who cannot escape from their reflex responses, instead of being guided by experience. Dickens sees this pedantic pragmatism as a threat to imagination, and that is one of the reasons why he creates fairytalelike plots. Dickenss huge inquisitiveness pits the secret world of privacy against the world of the presentable. Frye explains: There is a hidden and private world of dream and death, out of which all the energy of human life comes. The primary manifestation of this world, in experience, is in acts of destructive violence and passion (555). Symbolically, it is represented by the grotesque world of circus companies, puppet shows, theatres, the convention of the twins (usually also aligning two cities), monsters, ghosts etc. This presentable world of monstrosity signifies the private realm of Victorian sexual mores, repressions, infantile fixations, and romantic interests; that is to say, the inner energies that threaten to disrupt the idyll of Merry England.

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Lecture IV: Narratives as Modes of Knowledge. Historical, political, and social fiction: W.M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Samuel Butler

There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism Walter Benjamin

What kind of knowledge can be derived from novels? The answer is, of course, that it depends on at least two crucial and largely interdependent factors: the kind of novel and the readers angle. Thus, historical, political and social fictions are particularly amenable to historicist and culturalmaterialist approaches. As Steven Connor shows, The novel has always been a useful resource for history and historians. Typically, the novel promises a view of that fine grain of events and experiences which otherwise tend to shrink to invisibility in the long perspectives of historical explanation. Novels seem to have some of the authority of the eye-witness account, in providing the historian with enactment, particularity and individual testimony. They do so by concentrating together representations of how the world is, or seems to be, with the shaping force of fantasy or imagination; in other words, they balance reality and desire. Moreover, Connor continues, novels represent the meeting point between the individual and the general, bridging the isolated subjectivity and the peopled world, and giving an individual dimension to the otherwise abstract or disembodied nature of shared norms and values (2001:1). They do so by taking specific generic and stylistic forms. Geoffrey Galt Harpham explains the significance of genre: The concept of genre organizes literature, but the effect of genre, according to John Frow, is to organize the world, or, as he puts it, to actively generate and shape knowledge of the world (Genre 2) (in PMLA 2007: 1635). It does so by means of formal conventions, language registers and specific stylistic devices. The interrelation between genre and reading is exemplified by Fredric Jameson in his 1981 The Political Unconscious, where he affirms that genre carries social constraints, i.e., it is not an exclusively literary category but has extraliterary, as well as transperiodic, significance. In Bruce Robbins words, From the perspective of historical materialism, there are social tasks that cause a genre to be seized on at a given historical moment and invested with special energy and representativeness. The same process causes genres to be dropped and replaced by others, but also picked up later and refunctioned (in PMLA 2007: 1650). What follows will serve to illustrate the impact of approach on the meanings of novels. Literature and/ or/ vs./ in/ as History

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The novel since its inception and throughout the nineteenth century enacted the Enlightenment transition from moral knowledge to empirical knowledge. Questions to bear in mind: 1. Why history? 2. History or history? 3. How can history be represented in fiction? 4. What does the representation of history do to fiction/ the novel? (i.e., how can it be made to add to its value?) 5. Whose history gets told? Or, Who writes our history for us? Common feminist argument: History = his + story question: Why did women choose male pen names?

6. What is the social status of writers?

Definition of the historical novel in 3 steps: i. It is a novel which has at least one actual historical figure in it = wrong definition ii. It is a novel that descends from, and shares the formal conventions and thematic concerns of, Sir Walter Scotts books = slightly better definition iii. It is a novel that reveals something about the movements of historical process = the most interesting kind of historical novel. Dictionary of Literary Terms definition: It is a form of fictional narrative which reconstructs history and re-creates it imaginatively. Both historical and fictive characters may appear. Though writing fiction, the good historical novelist researches his/ her chosen period thoroughly and strives for verisimilitude. => Q 7. Is the historical novel the product of the need for authenticity or for romance? Linda Hutcheon: History = equal (?) shares of discovery and invention of the truth History = a means of relativising the facts: History history his story story/ies (i.e., it is hard, in our times, to think of history as one of the grand narratives)
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In the 18th century, however, the European vision of history had 2 aspects: a)history as synchronic, systematic whole; b)history as the sum of diachronic mechanisms. In fact, one of the paradigmatic modifications brought about by the narrativisation of history operated by the novel was precisely the shift from a conception of history as synchronic system to an understanding of history as a chain of causalities and overdeterminations. => Georg Lukacs preferred the second approach, which enabled Q 8. How does a given novel reveal the progression of history? Q 9. What does the historical novel do with history? What effects does it achieve by employing history? In what ways does it incorporate historical structures into its own literary structures? A: 3 ways of using history: A. to vivify or make more poignant a story that might as easily have been set in the present because history is more exotic, more dramatic B. a pastoral region, providing a screen onto which present persons and cultural concerns can be projected and play themselves out because history is more relevant C. a combination of synchronic and diachronic interests in the working of history + Didactic function of historical fiction: A. interpret the past and present comparatively, establish a scale of values B. offer examples of courage, moral rectitude, integrity, loyalty, etc. C. provide information about society in its evolution D. explain causality Increasingly, in the first half of the 19th century, the role of historical fiction becomes to record social realities. Hence, the emergence of the social novel, a body of fiction written on urban and industrial issues and published between 1830 and 1850, according to Louis Cazamian (see Louis James in Coyle et al. 544), but having powerful later avatars. Realism = the attempt to rationalise consciousness = attempt to rationalise time and causality by presenting temporal sequence (i.e., a common horizon) from a stable future perspective. This is done by means of a unified narrative voice which slides from one individual site of consciousness to another, creating coherence out of plurivocalism. e.g. Dickens expands his circuit of consciousness far beyond the private understandings of narrator, occasional character, and appreciative reader to the point that he often qualifies his realism in the process. The entire world is galvanized by consciousness in Dickens, furniture included; the circuit of communion runs through the whole social universe (Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth in Coyle et al. 571) and anthropomorphizes institutions. e.g. George Eliot, whose realism is historical: the narrative consciousness in her
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novels is a kind of generalized historical awareness, often hardly distinguishable from the readers own, a power of transition between minds and moments, an implied historical awareness that makes the realistic series possible (ibid. 572). => Realism paradoxically limited the novels ability to explore social issues, for the focus on accuracy of description, the emphasis on objective truth, emptied the subject of its symbolic and metonymic significance (James in Coyle et al. 544). Prescriptive realism is meant to control not only the modes of expression that were available to the novel, but also what could be expressed by it, and thus turn it into an instrument of moral education. It does so by urging a revaluation of the Aristotelian demands for probability and verisimilitude and it results in a clear resistance to the idea that literature has an impact on the creation of reality. By limiting the exemplary nature of the novel strictly in terms of personal virtue, the educational function of literature was in its turn severely restricted. Moreover, this cult of the normal and the reasonable limited certain kinds of psychic and social questioning. Yet, while tying the novel down to the domestic province, these prescriptions also made the plight of women more immediately visible and credible. At the stylistic/discursive level, the tension is between (1) the masculine discourse of rationality and authority (illustrative of the centripetal force of language: orderly, coherent) and (2) the feminine discourse of sentimentality and madness (disruptive, centrifugal force of language: incoherent, fluid, resisting). Similarly, personal features were gendered: - agreeableness is typically feminine (i.e., having to do with socialisation) even when encountered in men. When lacking in women (an abnormal condition), its absence needs to be investigated in the novel. - competitiveness is typically masculine: competition against each other for domination of the community (within the same class); & competition with each other, often across class divides, to attract women, who then choose if a family is not happy/prosperous, the woman is at fault for not having chosen well see Darwins natural selection (later version) in Armstrong (in David 101-104). Popular genres: - Novels about The Condition-of-England question (Thomas Carlyle) / State-of-the-nation novels: the Victorian avatar of the modern novel of the Romantic Age (e.g. Godwins Caleb Williams); - Realistic novels a term generally regarded as synonymous with the Victorian novel; - Detective fiction: a later avatar of the quest romance, re-inscribing maleness and male values in the feminised space of the novel; Dickens the father of detective fiction in Britain - Novels of manners after the Richardsonian Revolution of the 18th century depicted the life of the aristocracy for the enjoyment of the upwards-moving middle-class readers who had expectations of social mobility but were increasingly conscious of separate identity and power e.g. the work of women novelists such as Frances Burney, Frances Sheridan, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith etc. is continued in the Victorian Age by Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot in a minor register, with the aristocracy occupying an
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increasingly marginal social role. These writers exploited [womens] conventionally accepted expertise in silent suffering to advance bourgeois values and practices by representing the inward self as authentic and the external social world, controlled by aristocracy and gentry, as divided, relative, and hostile to authentic selfhood. Accordingly, many a fictional heroine or hero relies on subjectivity [and sensibility] as a professional middle-class discourse of merit to negotiate accession to the gentry (Gary Kelly in CC to British Romanticism 200). Critical reception of the social novel: - Louis Cazamian, Le Roman social en Angleterre ([1903] 1973) (and for others): the social novel was a historical fact, a group of fictional works growing from and influencing the Victorian period. In form, it combined the arts of reportage and literature, and was affected by biographical and historical factors (James in Coyle et al. 545). - F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948) influence in the 1950s: focus on reader response to the life-enhancing values of literature (ibid.) - Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (1936-37; trans. 1962), Arnold Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel (1951-53), Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), David Craig, The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change (1974), Igor Webb, From Custom to Capital: The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution (1981), Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power (1975): Marxist awareness of class perspectives; fiction as documentary evidence. - Sheila Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s (1980), Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty (1984): the discourse of the social novel; representations of the poor. - Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (trans. 1981): Dialogism declares that a single literary form does not exist: it is made up of a variety of forms and meanings, all of which affect each other, so that the total meaning can only be understood in terms of interaction within the greater whole (ibid. 546). Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867 (1985): conflicting rhetorics and the mixture of forms of fiction within a single novel point to uncertainty and confusion within the attitudes of the Victorian author (ibid. 546). To all these critical approaches to the social novel, Marxism brings a sharp edge that sets off not only the social aspects dealt with in minor, generally marginalised novels, but also their attempt to effect social and political change. Marxist criticism thus achieves its hallmark double move: it both devalues and re-valorises literature: it rejects and discredits any notions of high literature and canons, replacing them with the more generous notion of writing (which includes non-fiction writing, such as biographies, periodical essays, diaries etc.), and endows it with political and social power. Prescriptive realism is founded on the insistence that fiction cannot effect social and political change; Marxist criticism shows that it can and it does, materially, contributing to the establishment of democratic forms.

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WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863) Thackeray came to the writing of novels much in the same way which led Dickens to fiction. More interested at first in drawing and painting than in writing, he came to literature through journalism and his early work consists of sketches, essays, satires, and much miscellaneous humorous and descriptive writing. But from the beginning he had a keen eye for social pretensions, for the disparity between professed and actual motives, for all the hypocrisies with which social man learns to cover up his true intentions, and this came to be the hallmark of his oeuvre. During the 1840s Thackeray began to make his name as a writer. He first came to the attention of the public with The Yellowplush Papers, which appeared in Frasers Magazine in 1837-38, followed by Catherine in 1839 and A Shabby Genteel Story in 1840. His first fulllength volume, The Paris Sketch Book, appeared in the same year, and it was followed by a series of other works published under various pseudonyms, of which the most familiar are Michael Angelo Titmarsh and George Savage FitzBoodle. The Irish Sketch Book of 1843 has a preface signed, for the first time, with Thackerays own name. Thackeray began his association with Punch in 1842, and contributed to it caricatures as well as articles and humorous sketches. The Snobs of England (later republished as The Book of Snobs) appeared there in 1846-47, and Mr. Punchs Prize Novelists, a series of parodies of the leading writers of the day, in 1847. His children returned to live with him in 1846. In 1867 his first major novel, Vanity Fair, began to appear in monthly numbers, with illustrations by the author. Pendennis followed in 1848-50. In 1841 Thackerays increasing love for Jane Brookfield, the wife of an old Cambridge friend, led to a rupture in their friendship, and his next novel, The History of Henry Esmond, shows signs, as he confessed, of his melancholy at this time. It was published in three volumes in 1852 and followed by The Newcomes, published in numbers in 1853-55. As well as the major novels, Thackeray continued to produce lighter work; he wrote for Punch until 1854, and produced a series of Christmas Books which he illustrated himself. In 1851 he gave a series of lectures on The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century, and in 1855-57 he lectured on The Four Georges. He twice visited the United States to deliver his lectures, in 1851-53 and 1855-56. The Virginians, set partly in America, appeared in numbers in 1857.59. In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine, for which he wrote his Roundabout Papers. Lovel the Widower, The Adventures of Philip, and the unfinished Denis Duval all first appeared in the Cornhill. Thackeray died suddenly on Christmas Eve 1863. Although in his lifetime and for three or four decades after, Thackeray shared with Dickens the empire of Victorian fiction, many of his works are no longer read today. At his best in these works he provides a vivid record of his main objections to the way man had evolved as a social animal or creates skilful historical pastiches. He was neither a great innovator, like Scott, nor a great original, like Dickens, and his main achievement is the withering realism with which he exposes the follies and foibles of his age, the hypocrisies, vanities, snobberies, and all-pervading selfishness that lay behind the charming masks of the socially successful. The life of the great seen through the pitiless eyes of a valet, the successes of an unscrupulous scoundrel narrated by himself in a tone of apparently innocent selfcongratulation, exposure of snobs and double-dealers in every phase of society these are
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characteristic achievements of The Yellowplush Papers, The Luck of Barry Lindon, and The Book of Snobs. Yet Vanity Fair is definitely a masterpiece. The story is set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and gives a satirical picture of a worldly society which Thackeray intended to be applied also to his own times. It follows the fortunes of two sharply contrasted characters, Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, the penniless orphaned daughter of an artist and a French opera dancer, and Amelia Sedley, the sheltered child of a rich London merchant. The two characters, as unlike in character as they are in fortune, have been educated at Miss Pinkertons Academy for young ladies. Becky, having failed to force a proposal from Amelias elephantine brother Jos, becomes governess to the children of Sir Pitt Crawley, a coarse, brutal old man who bullies his fading second wife. Becky manages to charm the Crawley family, and becomes a favourite of Miss Crawley, Sir Pitts rich and capricious sister. When his wife dies, Sir Pitt proposes to Becky, but she has to confess that she is already married, to his younger son Rawdon. The young couple abruptly fall from favour with Miss Crawley, and have to live on Beckys wits. Meanwhile Amelias apparently secure life has been disrupted. Her father has lost all his money, and her engagement to George Osborne, the handsome but vain and shallow son of another London magnate, has been broken off in consequence. William Dobbin, Georges awkward, loyal friend, who is secretly in love with Amelia, persuades George to defy his father and go on with the marriage, and Mr. Osborne disinherits his son. George, Rawdon, and Dobbin are all in the army, and Amelia and Becky accompany their husbands to Belgium, where Becky carries on an intrigue with George Osborne. George is killed at Waterloo, and Amelia, with her baby son Georgy, goes to live in poverty with her parents, while Becky and Rawdon manage to make a brilliant display in London society on nothing a year. Amelias devotion to her son is contrasted with Beckys neglect of hers, but she is forced by poverty to part with Georgy, who is growing up to be much like his father, to his grandfather. Dobbin, despairing of ever winning Amelias love, has spent ten years in India. Becky and her husband part, after Rawdon has discovered his wife in a compromising situation with Lord Steyne, who has, it turns out, been paying for Beckys extravagances. Becky leads an increasingly disreputable life on the Continent, and it is hinted that she may be responsible for the death of Jos Sedley, who has insured his life in her favour. Rawdon, who has become governor of Coventry Island, dies of fever. Amelia steadfastly refuses to marry Dobbin, until a chance meeting with Becky, who tells her of George Osbornes infidelity. Disillusioned, she marries Dobbin, but by then his love for her has lost much of its intensity. In this dazzlingly brilliant novel Thackeray was consciously attempting what no other English novelist of the time was doing, though George Eliot was to essay something similar a decade later: a study of men and women as they actually had their being in society; and the result was a marvellous panorama of upper-middle-class London life of the generation beginning about 1810. The subtitle of the novel is A Novel without a Hero: Thackeray aimed at a consciously unheroic novel, a portrayal of modern manners, and he succeeded superbly. The enormous canvas vibrates with most vividly realised characters, one of whom, Becky Sharp, is among the greatest in world fiction; and her husband Rawdon is not much inferior. Thackeray conveys the passage of time as few other novelists have been able to: we have the illusion of watching his characters change from youth to middle age and grow old;
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they are plastic to the pressure of events and the years. There are great scenes, the greatest the accounts of the Waterloo of the civilian hangers-on of the army. There is brilliant comedy. And always there is the utmost vividness, characters caught in mid-gesture, as it were, and a wonderful ease of narration, a wonderful ability to make rapid transitions from scene to contrasted scene. Here is the social life of man, the whole business of getting, of social climbing, and of putting one over ones neighbour. And everything has the appearance of being completely natural: this is social life as it is. Thackerays style, urbane, elegant, exquisitely modulated and not lacking in irony, was based on that of the 18th-century essayists, and like theirs, it captures the tone, the spirit of civilised conversation. Vanity Fair is an extended monologue: Thackeray, at ease, middleaged, a man who has seen the world and has no illusions, is talking to his readers. But this also represents a major drawback for this novel: as the reader can never escape the point of view of the author he becomes aware that it is a limited, subjective one, that the book is nothing more than the expression of the authors mind and attitude toward life. The title of the book is taken from Bunyan, but the meaning of the word vanity is very much changed becoming a social rather than a Christian concept. Vanity is no longer that which is empty and worthless, a snare and a damnation, a tripwire in the path of salvation; it is simply self-esteem, the desire to be thought well of by ones neighbours. This for Thackeray has become the motive of human behaviour; and snobbery, the jockeying for social position and the pretence to a status higher than the persons true one are here the main driving forces of man in society. While this is the magnificent substance of the novel and it was certainly an important aspect of the society the novel deals with, it is also a rather narrow and unsatisfactory vision of human nature. Some other of the shortcomings of Thackerays books include his incapacity of dealing with women and sex. His women are either good or bad. When they are good, they are also silly, yet at the same time when he exposes their stupidity Thackeray swiftly shifts to a sentimental praise of their maternal feelings or maidenly virtues. When they are bad, even if beautiful, his female characters are frigid, and therefore not very convincing temptresses. Becky Sharp is, then, an exception, for she is one of the most completely and roundly conceived characters in all fiction. This dichotomy, on the other hand, is only one instance of the way in which the whole novel is organised, counterpuntally, symmetrically, and carefully balanced for the greatest part. Vanity Fair remains the quintessential Thackeray. As he grew older he became more and more at the mercy of his defects; and his creative range was much more limited than we might at first suppose from the greatness of his intentions. Pendennis fails because, as a strongly autobiographical novel, it is dominated by Thackerays inhibitions. The History of Henry Esmond was meant to be written in the tradition of 18th-century novels, yet its hero is a man of Thackerays own time, and therefore out of his context; its structure is well devised, however, and stylistically it is a piece of virtuosity. David Daiches aptly points out that Thackeray never quite found a way of coming to terms simultaneously with his age and with his art. Walter Allen suggests as a key to Thackerays books the admission of the fact that he was a minor writer: Once this is recognised, his merits stand out in shining clarity.

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Recommended reading:

Vanity Fair
Highlights: Realism without illusions The satirical vein The clash between the educated style of an 18th-century essayist and the Victorian social and literary exigencies Questions: 1. What may account for Thackerays relative neglect by todays reader? Why did Thackeray give his novel Vanity Fair the subtitle a novel without a hero? Explain the paradoxical relationship between Thackerays magnificent satire of man in society and his unsatisfactory vision of human nature.

2.
3.

GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880) With George Eliot and then with George Meredith we are clearly moving toward new developments in English fiction. Both of them had a higher education than the common walk of earlier novelists and, although not directly influenced by the literature that was being written throughout Europe, they clearly belonged to the same movement of thought that was shaping the novel anew. This mutation, as Walter Allen calls it, consisted mainly in a growing self-awareness of the artist as artist and in a shift in emphasis from content to form and style and then gradually to a refashioning of the very concept of prose and of language itself. George Eliot was the first English novelist to move in the vanguard of the thought and learning of her day, and in doing so added new scope and dignity to the English novel. George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans, pursued her education rigorously, reading widely, and devoted herself to completing a translation of Strausss Life of Jesus, which appeared without her name in 1846. In 1850 she met John Chapman and became a contributor to his newly acquired Westminster Review; the next year she moved to 142 Strand, London, as a paying guest in the Chapmans home, where her attachment to him became an embarrassment. She became assistant editor to the Westminster Review in 1851, and in the same year met the philosopher Herbert Spencer, for whom she also developed strong feelings which were not reciprocated, though the two remained friends until her death and he warmly praised her intellect and her works, especially Middlemarch. In 1854 she published a translation of Feuerbachs Essence of Christianity; she endorsed his view that religious belief is an imaginative necessity for man and a projection of his interest in his own species, a heterodoxy of which the readers of her novels only gradually became aware. At about the same time she joined George Henry Lewes, a writer of many talents, in a union without legal sanction (he was already married) that lasted until his death; they travelled to the Continent that year and set up house together on their return. He was to be a constant support throughout her working life and their relationship, although its irregularity caused her much anxiety, was gradually accepted by their friends. The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, appeared in Blackwoods Magazine in 1857, followed by Mr. Gilfils Love-Story and Janets Repentance. These at once attracted praise for their domestic realism, pathos and
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humour, and speculation about the identity of George Eliot, who was widely supposed to be a clergyman or possibly a clergymans wife. In 1858 she began Adam Bede (1859), which was received with great enthusiasm and at once established her as a leading novelist. The Mill on the Floss, a novel with autobiographical touches, appeared in 1860, and Silas Marner, a little fairy-tale which only the genius of a writer of George Eliots strength could make acceptable, in 1861. In 1860 she visited Florence, where she conceived the idea of Romola, and returned to do further research in 1861; the novel was published in the Cornhill in 186263. By this time she was earning a considerable income from her writing. Felix Holt, the Radical appeared in 1866. She travelled in Spain in 1867 and her dramatic poem The Spanish Gypsy (conceived on an earlier visit to Italy, was inspired by Tintoretto) appeared in 1868. Middlemarch was published in instalments in 1871-72, and Daniel Deronda, her last great novel, in the same way in 1874-76. She was now at the height of her fame, and widely recognised as the greatest living English novelist, admired by readers as diverse as Turgenev, Henry James, and Queen Victoria. Impressions of Theophrastus Such appeared in 1879. In addition to the novels for which she is remembered, George Eliot also wrote poems, including O may I join the choir invisible (1867), Agatha (1869), Brother and Sister (1869), a sonnet sequence recalling her happy childhood, The Legend of Jubal (1870), and Armgart (1871), as well as the short stories The Lifted Veil (1859) and Brother Jacob (1864). In 1878 her beloved friend and supporter G.H. Lewes died. In 1880 she married the 40year-old John Walter Cross, whom she had met in Rome in 1869 and who had become her financial adviser. The marriage distressed many of her friends, but brought the consolation of a congratulatory note from her brother Isaac, who had not communicated with her since 1857. She died seven months later. After her death her reputation declined somewhat, and Leslie Stephen indicated much of the growing reaction in an obituary notice of 1881, which praised the delicate charm and autobiographical elements of her early novels, but found the later novels painful and excessively reflective. His daughter Virginia Woolf, almost forty years later, defended her in an essay in which she declared Middlemarch to be one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Finally, after the late 1940s, a new generation of critics led by F.R. Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948) introduced a new respect for and understanding of her mature works; Leavis praises her traditional moral sensibility, her luminous intelligence, and concludes that she is not as transcendentally great as Tolstoy, but she is great, and great in the same way. Having an eye for character, an ear for dialogue, and a clear sense of the social and economic conditions which govern mans daily living, as well as strong mind and an unusual intelligence and knowledge, George Eliot can be said to have made the novel intellectually respectable without losing anything of its qualities of liveliness or entertainment. The sentimentality of Dickens and the intrusive moral platitudinizing of Thackeray derive from the fact that, unable to accept simple supernatural sanctions for morality, they did not find anything else to replace it with than the facile appeal to feeling, and as a result were unable to cope convincingly with the really disturbing moral problems. George Eliot, who was both idealist and agnostic and derived both her idealism and her agnosticism from her own intellectual inquiries into moral and religious questions, had her own answers to these difficulties. And her mixture of idealism and realism are a source of great strength when
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transmuted into terms of characters doing and suffering in a novel. It can enable irony and tenderness to coexist, as they do in Adam Bede; it can produce the kind of humour which manifests itself in the portrayal of the scatterbrained but not unsympathetic Mr. Brooke of Middlemarch and the relentless analysis of the dilemma and the deterioration of Dr. Lydgate in the same novel; it can make possible that impressive combination of censure and sympathy with which Gwendolyn Harleth is presented in Daniel Deronda. At the same time, that terrible earnestness can produce the unbelievable and oracular virtuousness of Daniel Deronda himself and of Felix Holt in the novel of that name, and is responsible, too, for the note of excessive idealisation which occasionally obtrudes itself in even the best of her novels. And this always within an environment of pulsating life, a comprehensive panorama of English society which accommodates the characters as perfectly integrated human beings with everyday activities and preoccupations. The Mill on the Floss is one of George Eliots best and most widely read novels. Tom and Maggie, the protagonists, are the children of the honest but ignorant and obstinate Mr. Tulliver, the miller of Dorlcote Mill on the Floss. Tom is a prosaic youth, narrow of imagination and intellect, animated by a conscious rectitude and a disposition to control the others. Maggie, in contrast, is highly strung, intelligent, emotional, and, as a child, rebellious. From this conflict of temperaments, and from Maggies frustrated sense of purpose, spring much of her unhappiness and the ultimate tragedy. Her deep love of her brother is thwarted by his lack of understanding, and she turns to Philip Wakem, the deformed son of a neighbouring lawyer, for intellectual and emotional companionship. Unfortunately lawyer Wakem is the object of Mr. Tullivers suspicion and dislike, which develop into hatred when Tulliver is made bankrupt as a result of a litigation in which Wakem is on the other side. Tom, loyal to his father, discovers the secret friendship of Maggie and Philip, and forbids their meetings: Maggie reluctantly complies. After Mr. Tullivers death, accelerated by a violent scene in which he thrashes the lawyer, Maggie leaves the mill for a visit at St. Oggs to her cousin Lucy Deane, who is to marry the handsome and agreeable Stephen Guest. Stephen, though loyal in intention to Lucy, is attracted by Maggie, and she by him. A boating expedition on the river leads, partly by accident and partly by Stephens design, to Maggies being irremediably compromised; Stephen implores her to marry him but she refuses. Her brother turns her out of the house and the society in St. Oggs ostracise her. She and her mother take refuge with the loyal friend of her childhood, the packman Bob Jakins. Only Lucy, Philip, and the clergyman Dr. Kenn show sympathy. The situation seems without issue, but in the last chapter a great flood descends upon the town, and Maggie, whose first thought is of her brothers safety, courageously rescues him from the mill. There is a moment of recognition and reconciliation before the boat overturns, and both, locked in a final embrace, are drowned. The portrayal of childhood, of rural life, and the characters of Mrs. Tullivers sisters, the strong-minded Mrs. Glegg and the melancholy Mrs. Pullett, with their respective spouses, delighted most readers, though the book was felt to lack the charm of Adam Bede; Maggies lapse into passion, the character of the light-weight Stephen, and the arbitrary tragedy of the denouement displeased others. Indeed, the novel is more successful in its first part, where Maggies childhood is wonderfully described, with all the warmth of identification; when the protagonist reaches womanhood, the pervasive emotion and the high pitched tone in which the book is written become excessive and at times sound a false, even hysterical note. The
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character of Stephen is very convincingly drawn in his vulgar pretentiousness, but that a girl of Maggies intelligence should remain for long infatuated with him is highly unlikely. The main failure of the novel, however, is the ending: it is very much unlike George Eliot to avoid making her characters resolve the moral dilemma in which they found themselves and live by its consequences. With Romola a series of more sophisticated novels begins: it was as if George Eliot realised that she had exhausted the source of inspiration that had produced the previous works, and was probing into deeper regions. George Eliots unquestioned masterpiece is Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, having as its protagonist the whole town of Middlemarch. The time is the period of agitation immediately preceding the Reform Bill of 1832 and the author successfully creates a provincial society of a greater scope than any she had attempted before. It has become a commonplace to compare this book with Tolstoys War and Peace for the tact with which George Eliot manages to integrate all the parts of the novel and to create a beautiful composition. There are four major plots: the story of Dorothea Brooke; the story of Lydgates marriage; the history of Mary Garth; and the fall of the banker Bulstrode. All these are related one to another without strain, and they have as it were their satellite minor centres of interest; together they make a network that encloses the whole life and movement of opinion and events in a provincial town. But the novel can also be said to be one of moral discovery, each of the important characters learning the truth about himself or herself as a result of what happens to them and of the interaction with the others. Dorothea Brooke, an ardent, intelligent, idealistic woman, under the negligent though affable care of her eccentric uncle, marries the elderly pedant Mr. Casaubon, despite the doubts of her sister Celia, her neighbour and suitor Sir James Chettam (who later marries Celia), and Mrs. Cadwallader, the rectors outspoken wife. The marriage proves intensely unhappy; Dorothea realises during a disastrous honeymoon in Rome that Casaubons scholarly plans to write a great work, a Key to all Mythologies, are doomed, as are her own aspirations to share and aid her husbands intellectual life, and her respect for him gradually turns to pity. She is sustained by the friendship of Casaubons young cousin, Will Ladislaw, a lively, light-hearted, idealistic, good-natured young man, detested by Casaubon, who begins to suspect that her feelings for Ladislaw are questionable; his irritation is increased by the fact that he fears he has acted justly but not generously by his impoverished kinsman. Shortly before he dies, with characteristic meanness, he adds a codicil to his will by which Dorothea forfeits her fortune if she marries Ladislaw. At the same time we follow the fortunes of Fred and Rosamund Vincy, the children of the mayor of Middlemarch; the extrovert Fred, unsuitably destined to be a clergyman, is in love with his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth, a practical, shrewd young woman, daughter of Caleb Garth, a land agent. Mary, who at the opening of the novel is nursing her disagreeable and aged relative Mr. Featherstone, will not pledge herself to Fred unless he abandons his fathers plan for him to enter the church and proves himself stable and selfsufficient. Rosamund, the towns beauty, sets herself to capture the ambitious, idealistic, and well-connected doctor Tertius Lydgate; she succeeds, and their marriage, wrecked by her selfishness, insensitivity, and materialism, proves as unhappy as the Casaubons. Lydgate finds himself heavily in debt, and against his better judgement borrows money from Mr. Bulstrode, the mayors brother-in-law, a religious hypocrite. Lydgates career is ruined when
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he finds himself involved in a scandal concerning the death of Raffles, an unwelcomed visitor from Bulstrodes shady past. Only Dorothea, now widowed, maintains faith in him, but she is severely shocked to find Rosamund and Ladislaw in what seem to be compromising circumstances. Rosamund finally rises above self-interest to reveal that Ladislaw has remained faithful to Dorothea, although with no prospect of any happy outcome. Dorothea and Ladislaw at last confess their love to one another; she renounces Casaubons fortune and marries him. Fred, partly sobered by the spectacle of Lydgates decline, and encouraged by Garth to enter his own profession, marries Mary. Lydgate is condemned to successful and fashionable practice, and dies at fifty, his ambitions frustrated. Dorothea Brooke is brilliantly drawn both in her relation to the others and in her relation to herself, and it becomes clear that the author put much of herself in creating her. She is a self-righteous idealist, enamoured of intensity and greatness, driven by the aspiration to serve and be good, but she also has the frailties necessarily associated with such ambition, an imperfect knowledge of her self and of her will-power. George Eliot conceived her as she suggests in the prelude to the novel as a St. Theresa born in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Walter Allen characterises her as a heightened Maggie Tulliver, a Maggie Tulliver with the advantage of social position, wealth, and independence. In a sense, these are her undoing, for she is, one cant help thinking, drunk with the splendour of her aspirations The only point on which George Eliot fails is Dorotheas acceptance of Ladislaw as a second husband: this marriage seems an exclusively symbolic one of idealistic femininity to masculine virtues, of morality to common sense, and of rigid traditionalism to free thinking. Moreover, the character of Ladislaw is somewhat too dimly defined to occupy so central a position. Casaubon, on the other hand, is one of Eliots supreme achievements, unerringly drawn: he is the epitome of desiccated pedantry and a terrifying figure of haunted futility devastatingly rendered. Laurence Lerner closes his essay on George Eliot in the New Pelican Guide to English Literature by mentioning the different reactions that various generations of critics have had to her work, and concludes:
What she has to offer us today will be slightly different even from what she offered a generation ago. Two things seem best worth emphasising now: oneis her concern with the individual as a social being, with character as formed within a medium; the other is her realism, for after some of the intense post-modernist concern with literature as being about its own processes, to return to George Eliot is to discover that a great novel is not simply a game, but a view of the world. (284)
Recommended reading:

The Mill on the Floss Middlemarch Daniel Deronda

Highlights: The traditional moral sensibility (F.R. Leavis) Social criticism: the individual as social animal Feminist issues The magnificently integrated texture of her best novels

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Questions: 1. How do you explain the discrepancy between George Eliots belief in the fundamental Christian values, on the one hand, and her unconventional personal life, on the other? Comment on the autobiographical elements in The Mill on the Floss. What is the significance of Maggies refusal to comply with the prescriptions of Victorian womanhood? 3. George Eliot characterises Dorothea Brooke as enamoured of intensity and greatness. How would you characterise her?

2.

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Lecture V: Biography and Images of Femininity: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and the devotional, didactic and moralising literature of their day

We have seen how complex the relationships in which the novel engages history are. The relationships between society and the novel are similar; indeed, the Marxists would say identical, since history, according to tem, is primarily the story of socio-economic evolution. We will focus in what follows not on the way in which social realities are transformed into social realism, but rather on some of the paradoxes of such practices: 1. the stratification of language: a) standard vs. sociolect/ dialect/ idiolect b) standard vs. discourse of sensibility/ romance c) monoglot vs. heteroglot d) male discourse vs. female

i.e.: At the stylistic/ discursive level, the tension is between (1) the masculine discourse of rationality and authority (illustrative of the centripetal force of language: orderly, coherent) and (2) the feminine discourse of sentimentality and madness (disruptive, centrifugal force of language: incoherent, fluid, resisting). e.g. Lydgate vs. Rosamund in Middlemarch 2. two attitudes towards ideology: a) sensibility = interest in subjectivity as the site of ideological struggle b) anti-Jacobin emphasis on sociability and the individuals duty to social conventions and laws.

3. These two fundamental attitudes taken by the novel towards reality correspond to the two basic philosophical lines concerning reality that Cuddon mentions in his long definition of realism: Correspondence theory a) The external world is knowable by: Scientific enquiry, accumulation of data, documentation, definition b) Referential language c) Objective point of view d) Victorianism Coherence theory Intuitive perception, insight Emotive language Subjective point of view Sentimentality, Romanticism, Modernism

=> even realism is not in fact real, but rather a construct mediated by a number of conventions regarding perspective. 4. late 18th century: shift in perspective and point of view, from omniscient and objective to
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partial (i.e., both incomplete and taking sides) and personal. 5. feminisation of the novel, yet with 2 provisos: a) most writers were in fact men, although there was an incredibly large number of women writers in the 19th century; b) the womens subordinated social position could very easily be assimilated to the subordinated position of the lower classes => hence the widespread interest in and sympathy for the fates of the protagonists of novels, especially those who transcend social barriers (which is easier through marriage than any other means). Novels of manners after the Richardsonian Revolution of the 18th century depicted the life of the aristocracy for the enjoyment of the upwards-moving middle-class readers who had expectations of social mobility but were increasingly conscious of separate identity and power e.g. the work of women novelists such as Frances Burney, Frances Sheridan, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith etc. is continued in the Victorian Age by Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot in a minor register, with the aristocracy occupying an increasingly marginal social role. These writers exploited [womens] conventionally accepted expertise in silent suffering to advance bourgeois values and practices by representing the inward self as authentic and the external social world, controlled by aristocracy and gentry, as divided, relative, and hostile to authentic selfhood. Accordingly, many a fictional heroine or hero relies on subjectivity [and sensibility] as a professional middle-class discourse of merit to negotiate accession to the gentry (Gary Kelly in CC of British Romanticism 200). Main female representatives of Realism, in order of popularity and influence, with reference especially to the way in which they represented feminine characters: I. Jane Austen Her most important achievements: she made the domestic and the common interesting and exciting; she showed that women were not so much the victims of wicked men as of their own weakness and foolishness; she demonstrated that they had a choice. e.g. Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey: Men have the advantage of choice; women only the privilege of refusing. This very sentence is a little revolution in itself: it tells women to know themselves better, as that is the key to every right decision. II. The Bront Sisters Emily Bront points out that rather than feminise men and turn them into drawing room pets, it is women who should aim to appropriate some of the values of the male ethos, such as selfassertion, initiative, moral judgement, loyalty, privileging reason over passion, etc. These values are dramatised in conflict with the traditionally feminine ones, and are equally disruptive. Charlotte Bront domesticates the gothic and shifts the stress from the sensational
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events to the dramatisation of the category of voice i.e., tellers, as entities distinct from the author, who are empowered to speak. e.g. Jane Eyres voice (her narration) is a quest for discursive authority an act of resistance to authoritative institutions and ideology. Also, her confrontation with Bertha Rochester is in fact a confrontation with her alter ego, her repressed Other. III. George Eliot Her most important achievements: she created a social gallery comparable to that of Tolstoy and openly raised and debated some of the hottest issues of the day, from womens right to choose their husbands to public elections, and from the need to improve and discipline womens minds to the housing problem. IV. Elizabeth Gaskell Author of realistic novels North and South and Mary Barton, but also of a biography, The Life of Charlotte Bront (1857).

These women novelists especially go a long way towards appropriating the male discourse of sanity and reason, whether they dramatise it contrastively in dialogue with that of the mad other or with the monolithic ideology of the patriarchal Victorian society. Their novels, along with others written especially in the 1840s, 50s and 60s and dealing explicitly with the new social and economic aspects of the Victorian Age were called Condition of England Novels. This was a new and very daring species of the novel, which tackled the side-effects of the Industrial Revolution, such as poverty, squalor, illiteracy, child exploitation, untimely death, and the struggle for universal (male) suffrage, issues which had previously been regarded as too vulgar even for the novel to deal with. It might also be interesting to know that the 1840s, the decade when the Bront sisters wrote and published (1847) their masterpieces, when Dickens was starting to attain fame, later became known as the Hungry Forties. Not a very propitious time! But the main merit of female writers whose work we will discuss today resides precisely in the fact that they chose to depart from this new fashion in the writing of novels, and to turn to a strain that had been made essential by Jane Austen in her novels: the psychological analysis of characters. Moreover, although none of the novels that we will discuss today is directly autobiographical, they all contain revealing self-representations of their authors and their hunger for a higher understanding, for a superior relationship with the others, rather than for their daily bread.

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THE BRONTS The qualities most frequently associated with Romanticism are best illustrated in fiction by the writings of the Bront sisters, and especially in those of Charlotte and Emily, although they belong chronologically to the Victorian age. Because of the fascination which the lonely life they shared in a bleak stone parsonage in Yorkshire has had for biographers (starting with Elizabeth Gaskells book on Charlotte), the Bronts are generally considered together. Yet they form a unit to more than the biographical eye, for they shared an imaginative as well as a physical life. Only two of the four children of Patrick and Maria Bront who lived to reach maturity are of real literary interest: Charlotte (1816-1855) and Emily (1818-1848); Anne (1820-49), who shared the passionate introversion of her sisters, lacked their imaginative vitality, and her novels and poems are dull affairs, as Daiches puts it; and the unfortunate Branwell (1817-48), who in childhood had shared fully in the private dream worlds that all four of them created continuously from a very early age, proved quite unable to come to terms with his imagination and his ambitions and is remembered only for his membership in that remarkable family. Their father was a clergyman. Their mother died in 1821, leaving her five daughters and a son to the care of their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell. The children spent most of their lives in the small village of Haworth on the wild and bleak Yorkshire moors, which they only left for short stretches of time for schooling or employment. Despite the isolation of Haworth, the Bront family shared a rich literary life. Mr. Bront discussed poetry, history, and even politics with his children, and the children themselves created an extraordinary fantasy together. When Mr. Bront gave his son a box of wooden soldiers, each child excitedly seized one and named it. The soldiers became for them the centres of an increasingly elaborate set of stories that they first acted out in plays and later recorded in a series of book-length manuscripts, composed for the most part by Charlotte and Branwell. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, later started a separate series, a chronicle about an imaginary island called Gondal. In Charlotte Bronts preface to the second edition of Wuthering Heights, she tells the story of how she and her sisters came to write for publication. One day when she accidentally came upon a manuscript volume of verse in Emilys handwriting, she was struck by the conviction that these were not common effusions, not at all like the poetry women generally write. With some difficulty, Charlotte persuaded her more reticent sisters to publish some of their poems in a selection of poetry by all three of them. Averse to personal publicity and afraid that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne adopted the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Although the book, which appeared in 1846, sold only two copies, its publication inspired each of them to begin work on a novel. Charlottes The Professor never found a publisher in her lifetime; but Annes Agnes Grey and Emilys Wuthering Heights were accepted by Thomas Newby in 1847 and published the next year. Undeterred by her own rejection, Charlotte started work on Jane Eyre (in Manchester, where her father was undergoing an operation for cataract); it was published in 1847 by Smith, Elder, and achieved immediate success, arousing much speculation about its authorship. To quell the suspicion (encouraged by the unscrupulous Newby) that the Bell pseudonyms concealed but one author, Charlotte and Anne visited
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Smith, Elder in July 1848 and made themselves known. The sisters also started work on new novels, and Annes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall appeared in 1848, while Emily died before she could complete her second book. Yet Charlotte was not able to enjoy her success and the many invitations now extended to her: Branwell, whose wildness had caused the family much distress, died in September 1848, Emily in December of the same year, and Anne the following summer. Through this tragic period she persevered with the composition of Shirley, which appeared in 1849. The loneliness of her later years was alleviated by her friendship with Mrs. Gaskell, whom she met in 1850 and who was to write The Life of Charlotte Bront (1857). In the same year she prepared and published a memorial edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, with the well-known preface to the former, a Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, and a further selection of hitherto unpublished poems. Villette, founded on her memories of Brussels, appeared in 1853. Although her identity was by this time well known in the literary world, she insisted on continuing to use the name Currer Bell. In 1854, after much persistence on his part, and hesitation on hers, she finally accepted to marry her fathers curate, A.B. Nicholls, but died a few months later of an illness probably associated with pregnancy. Emma, a fragment, was published in 1860 in the Cornhill Magazine with an introduction by Thackeray, and many of her juvenile works have subsequently been published, adding to our knowledge of the intense creativity of her early years. In her lifetime Charlotte Bront was the most admired of the sisters, although she was not spared harsh criticism by the Victorian moralists in fashion. Yet she was, of the three of them, the most closely involved in the external world, and she even made some attempt to cast her fiction in a mold that at least bore some resemblance to that of her more conventional contemporaries. Paradoxically, one of the critiques that is most often levelled against her work nowadays is particularly the shrill didacticism and morality of some of her writings. Jane Eyre, at its best, shows her writing with an almost melodramatic abandon, out of her own passions, dreams, and frustrations; parts of the book are practically autobiography, and other parts represent the sort of wish-fulfilment that few Victorian women had the courage or the power to translate into their fiction. The eponymous heroine, a penniless orphan, is left to the care of her aunt Mrs. Reed, but the latters harsh and unsympathetic treatment of her rouses her defiant spirit, and a passionate outburst leads to her consignment to Lowood Institution. There, consoled by the kindness of the superintendent Miss Temple and a fellow orphan, Helen Burns, who dies in Janes arms of consumption, she spends some miserable years, eventually becoming a teacher. On Miss Temples marriage she obtains a post as governess at Thornfield Hall to Adele, the illegitimate daughter of Mr. Rochester, a Byronic character of grim appearance and sardonic temperament. Rochester, despite Janes plainness, is fascinated by her sharp wit and independence, and they fall in love. After much resistance Jane agrees to marry him, but the wedding ceremony is interrupted by Rochesters brother-in-law from the West Indies who reveals that the former had a wife living in the attic of Thornfield Hall as a raving lunatic, whose fits had previously been assigned to a servant. Despite Rochesters full confession and pleadings with Jane to stay with him, she flees and is taken in by her cousins, Rev. St. John Rivers and his sisters. Under the influence of the strongly dedicated Rivers, she nearly consents to marry him and share his missionary vocation in India, but is prevented by a telepathic appeal from Rochester. She returns to
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Thornfield to find the building burnt down and Rochester blinded and maimed from his attempt to save his wife from the flames. She marries him and restores him to happiness, and in the last chapter we learn that his sight is also partially restored. David Daiches wrote about Jane Eyre:
The book moves at high speed, and its emotional temperature never drops. There are elements of masochism as well as wish-fulfilment, and some scenes are stark melodrama, but they are all fused in the high temperature of the narrative so that they do not stand out as such. Normal conventions governing the relations between the sexes are not so much defied as simply ignored, so that when Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester confront each other the fierce interplay of emotions has complete scope. The novel is sometimes preposterous, sometimes plain silly, but it is carried along from beginning to end through sheer power. Here is clearly a case of the imagination and passions creating their own art form.

The novel stands or falls by the protagonist, as both the plot and the character of Rochester are implausible enough. What makes it a great book is the reality of Jane, who is a projection of Charlotte Bront just as Childe Harold is a projection of Byron. Indeed the two writers have much in common, as neither was quite aware of their shortcomings or willing to see beyond their self-righteousness; and in its self-assured subjectivity Jane Eyre is the first romantic novel in English. In Walter Allens words, Everything in the novel is staked upon the validity of the authors sensibility; Charlotte Bront is concerned with truth to her own feelings; the value of the feelings she never questions, it is taken for granted because they are her own. Allen here touches upon a very important aspect of Charlotte Bronts work: she was at her best only when she wrote from personal experience, and became conventional and trite when she got out of herself in order to meet the expectations and exigencies of her time. That is why Shirley is merely a book written in the manner of Elizabeth Gaskell and nothing more, while Jane Eyre, in spite of its melodramatic incredibilities, survives: although it is not always true to observable reality, the book is true to Charlottes shaping dream, which even has the power of unifying the book by establishing its tone, a tone of rebellion and of innate consciousness of superiority. Emily Bronts only published novel and her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, met with more incomprehension than appreciation at the time when it appeared. In the preface to the 1850 edition Charlotte herself proved little sympathy when she felt obliged to comment on the horror of great darkness that seemed to brood over the whole work. Emilys response to her apparent lack of success, like so much in her character, remains enigmatic. Unlike Charlotte, she had no close friends, wrote very few letters, and had few but very strong loyalties. The vein of violence, of stoicism, and of mysticism in her personality have given rise to many legends but to few certainties. She is now, however, established as the greatest poet of the three sisters, and indeed one of the most interesting poets of her age, remembered for her lyrics (e.g. The night is darkening round me), for her passionate invocations from the world of Gondal (Remembrance and The Prisoner), and her apparently more personal visionary moments (No coward soul is Mine). All her poems share a drive to break through the constrictions of ordinary life, whether by the transfigurative power of imagination, by union with another, or by death itself. Like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the speaker of Emily Bronts poems yearns for a fuller freer world of
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spirit, transcending the forms and limits of mortal life. Her concern with a visionary world links her to the romantic poets, particularly to Byron and Shelley, but the hymn-like stanzas have a haunting quality that distinguishes her individual voice. Wuthering Heights is a novel that requires to be judged according to the standards it sets itself. Daiches describes it as
a work of stark grandeur in which a wholly nonmoral world of fierce symbolic action is localised quite precisely in the authors familiar Yorkshire the bleak Yorkshire of the remoter moors so that we have on the one hand the most careful realism in the description of physical objects and on the other a world of human relationships in which the whole pattern of behaviour is built on a purely imaginative conception of the nature and meaning of human emotional life and its relation to action. The natural description is geared so cunningly to the picture of human passions that it seems to render them convincing and even inevitable The prose is firm and biting, and the action is deployed through the cunning interposition of intermediate narrators in such a way as to emphasise at once the uniqueness and the power of this strange and compelling series of events. There is nothing quite like Wuthering Heights anywhere else in English literature. It is the work of a woman who whatever the psychological explanation cut herself off deliberately from normal human intercourse and lived throughout her short life in a private world of imaginary passion. she could learn nothing at all from others, and her one remarkable novel represents the one impressive prose example in English of induced emotion creating its own objective correlative by the sheer force and conviction of its expression.

The story of Wuthering Heights is narrated by Lockwood, temporary tenant of Thrushcross Grange, who at the opening of the novel stumbles unsuspecting into the violent world of Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord Heathcliff. The narration is then taken up by the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who had been witness of the interlocked destinies of the original owners of the two houses, the Earnshaws and the Lintons. In a series of brilliantly handled flashbacks and time shifts, Emily Bront unfolds a tale of exceptional emotional and imaginative force. Events are set in motion by the arrival at Wuthering Heights of Heathcliff, picked up as a waif of unknown parentage in the streets of Liverpool by the elder Earnshaw, who brings him home to rear as one of his own children. Bullied and humiliated after Earnshaws death by his son Hindley, Heathcliffs passionate and ferocious nature finds its complement in Earnshaws daughter Catherine. Their childhood collusions develop into an increasingly intense attachment, but Heathcliff, overhearing Catherine tell Nelly that marrying him would degrade her, and failing to stay to hear her declare her passion for him, leaves the house. He returns three years later, mysteriously enriched, to find her married to the insignificant Edgar Linton. Heathcliff is welcomed by Hindley, by now widowed with a son, Hareton, and a hardened gambler and drunkard. Heathcliffs destructive force is now unleashed: he marries Isabella, Lintons sister, and cruelly ill-treats her, hastens Catherines death by his passion as she is about to give birth to a daughter, Cathy, and brings Hareton and Hindley under his power, brutalising the latter in revenge for Hindleys treatment of himself as a child. Edgar Linton dies, after doing his best to prevent a friendship between Cathy and Heathcliffs son, young Linton. Now Heathcliff completes his revenge by luring Cathy to his house and forcing her to marry the sickly young Linton in order to secure the Linton property. Young Linton however soon dies, and an affection springs between Cathy and Hareton, whom she does her best to educate. Heathcliffs desire for revenge has worn itself out by now, and he longs for the death that would reunite him with Catherine. At his death there is a
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promise that the two contrasting worlds and moral orders represented by the Heights and the Grange will be united in the next generation, in the union of Cathy and Hareton. The device of plunging the reader into the middle of the action is as old as the epic, but Emily Bronts merit lies in the way in which she steps back and lets her spectator-narrators tell the story, while the reader is in a way forced to identify with them as he only sees the protagonists and their actions through the eyes of these mediators; moreover, the awe in which both of them stand as they contemplate the unfolding of this incomprehensible story of passion and mysticism is a tribute to it. This technique dictates what we shall see and how we shall respond to it, and it also creates a frame like that of the stage, that enhances our sense that we are witnessing a drama of a richness and intensity comparable to that of Shakespearean tragedy. Walter Allen speaks of Wuthering Heights as the most remarkable novel in English. It is perfect, and perfect in the rarest way; it is the complete bodying forth of and intensely individual apprehension of the nature of man and life. That is to say, the content is strange enough, indeed baffling enough; while the artistic expression of it is flawless. Artistically, neither Jane Austen nor Henry James not Joseph Conrad, the great masters of form in the English novel, did anything to surpass it. The novel can be read as a dream, a vision, a mystical experience, or an allegory, in which everything has a significance that transcends its immediate nature. It manages to avoid stock descriptions of nature although nature is overwhelmingly present, for the elements of nature, alongside the two houses, serve as symbols in a great and complex web in which Emily Bront wove the findings of her mystical intuition concerning the nature of man and life; although they often seem to exclude or to seek to devour each other, the opposites eventually complement each other and combine to create harmony, and this is the meaning that must be read into the ending of the novel. It is important that it should be an outsider who breaks the initial equilibrium of this world, but it is even more important that he does so under the pressure of this world itself. Heathcliff, with his mysterious origins and strange nature, heralds from the very beginning the transcendence of the natural order which is completed by the appearance of Catherine as a ghost and his eventual union with her in the realm of spirits. The novel is a realistic one, but it is a spiritual reality that Emily Bront takes as her province; and in this realm the natural and the supernatural are one, just as death is only the beginning of another life of the liberated spirit. The characters are so convincing because they so completely express in themselves the laws of their own being. It is a self-contained world, which contains in itself the power to disintegrate and reintegrate itself, and the language and style, in their unique plainness and balance, render it perfectly. There is one more aspect worth mentioning in connection to the Bront sisters: their contribution to the emergence of feminism. Although never quite explicitly, both of them positioned women as superior to men in their novels. In Jane Eyre the proud Rochester, a powerful symbol of virility more than a man, lofty in his scorn for women, is not only made to stoop to wish to master a plain, elfish young girl, but is half killed, blinded and maimed before he becomes fit for happiness i.e., he is humiliated to such a degree as to set Jane in a superior position and to exhibit her generosity in having him: his mutilation is her triumph in the battle of the sexes. This might however be too extremist an interpretation of Charlotte Bronts intention in the book; yet it is quite obvious that the author intended to demonstrate
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the redeeming power of woman over mans evil drives, just as she deals with the redemptive power of moral solitude and suffering and with the realistic assessment by a woman of her situation and role in society. But the novel is also feminist in its dealing with love - which is for the first time in high literature equated with passion and appears first in the heart of the female protagonist, who also has the courage to confess it and with sexual attraction, which is no longer a sin, but the natural manifestation of love. Moreover, the book supplied one of the central symbolic images of feminist criticism, the mad woman in the attic, rejected by society because she failed to measure up to its conventions and standards of sanity and acceptability. In Wuthering Heights we have a similar frankness in dealing with a womans feelings: woman no longer waits to be loved, she loves, for better or for worse, and this is the most important and most obvious theme of the Emily Bronts novel. Yet she goes even further in her daring presentation of humanity: suffering does not redeem, it is simply part of the human condition: Catherine suffers because of her dual nature, and Heathcliff because of his passionate nature; woman does not have any power of changing man; it is only passion that has redeeming power. Along with Jane Austen and George Eliot, the Bront sisters are the forerunners of feminism and two of the most important and innovative novelists of the 19th century.

Recommended reading:

Jane Eyre Wuthering Heights

Highlights: The Byronic figure in the novel The gothic and the romantic The beginnings of the Victorian ethos The mythopoeic power of the writer (especially of Emily Bront) Questions:

1. 2.
3.

Compare the two male protagonists of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Make separate lists of romantic and Victorian elements in Jane Eyre. Compare the two lists. Would we be justified in considering Charlotte Bront a feminist writer? Enumerate some reasons. Discuss the role of nature in Wuthering Heights. Speak about the stylistic excellence of Wuthering Heights.

4. 5.

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Lecture VI: Late Victorianism and the Drama of Inadequacy: Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the scandalous modern self

THE NINETIES In his essay The Nineties, Helmut Gerber offers a useful definition of the fin-de-sicle spirit. According to Gerber it seems that at the end of centuries ... human beings, but artists in particular, are infected by a sense of death, decay, agony, old gods falling, cultural decline In 1893, an Austrian critic, Max Nordau, summed up what seemed to him to be happening, in a book that was as sensational as its title: Degeneration. For many people the golden glow of mid-Victorianism lingered on through the Jubilee years of 1887 and 1897 (years celebrating the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the Queens accession) down to the end of the century and even beyond. This was a time of serenity and security, the age of house parties and long weekends in the country. Yet, gradually, in the 1870s some of the flaws of the apparently smooth-working Victorian institutions started to be evident. One of the issues out of which these flaws developed was the relations with the Irish alongside the related question of the status of Roman Catholics in England. The Irish Question, as it was called, became especially divisive in the 1880s when Home Rule for Ireland became a topic of heated debate. Outside of England, the emergence of Bismarcks Germany after the defeat of France in 1871 was progressively to confront England with powerful threats to its naval and military position and also to its exclusive preeminence in trade and industry. The recovery of the United States after the Civil War likewise provided new and serious competition not only in industry but also in agriculture. In 1873 and 1874 severe economic depressions occurred because of the cheap grain coming from the American prairies, and this caused the emigration rate to rise to an alarming degree. Moreover, in 1867, under Disraelis guidance, a second Reform Bill had been passed that extended the right to vote to sections of the working classes, and this, together with the subsequent development of trade unions, made labour a political force to be reckoned with. The Labour party represented a wide variety of shades of socialism, from Ruskins Tory-socialism, through Shaws Fabianism, to William Morriss lenient Marxism. All these changes grew in intensity and combined in the 1890s to give a sense of an age coming to its end. Throughout the empire at its outposts in India and Africa, the English were building railroads and administering governments and fighting wars (most notably the Boer Wars in South Africa, 1899-1902) with the same strenuous energy as in the mid-Victorian period. But at home Victorian standards were breaking down on several fronts. One colourful embodiment of the changing values was Victorias own son and heir, Edward, Prince of Wales, who was entering his fiftieth year as the nineties began. A pleasure-seeking, easygoing person, Edward was the antithesis of his father, Prince Albert, an earnest-minded intellectual who had devoted all his life to work and to administrative responsibility. Edwards carryings54

on were a favourite topic for newspaper scandal, and the familiar epithet Gay Nineties, however inadequate to characterise the decade, evokes the rakish life-style of Victorias son. Much of the writing of the decade illustrates a breakdown of a different sort. In almost symbolic fashion, the chief representatives of the Victorian spirit, Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, died within four years (1888-1892). Melancholy, not gaiety, is characteristic of the spirit of the nineties. Artists of this period, representing the Aesthetic movement, were very much aware of living at the end of a great century and often cultivated a deliberately fin-desicle pose. A studied languor, a weary sophistication, a search for new ways of titillating jaded palates can be found in both the poetry and the prose of the period. The Yellow Book, a periodical that ran from 1894 to 1897, is generally taken to represent the aestheticism of the nineties. The startling black-and-white drawings and designs of its art editor, Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), the prose of George Moore and Max Beerbohm, and the poetry of Ernest Dowson illustrate different aspects of the movement. They were proponents of art for arts sake: they believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues such as politics and morals, and that it should be restricted to celebrating beauty in a highly polished style. The aesthetes, as these young writers and artists were called, included in their group painters such as James McNeill Whistler, critics such as Arthur Symons, and the Rhymers Club poets, among whom the young W.B. Yeats. Among this coterie, an admiration for the writings of Walter Pater was a badge of membership; the French poet Theophile Gautier was another essential influence. Yet they also had roots that went back through Rossetti and Tennyson to Keats and their appeal to sensation, but they developed their sensationalism more histrionically than their predecessors, seeking compensation for the drabness of ordinary life in melancholy suggestiveness, anti-bourgeois sensationalism, heady ritualism, world weariness, or mere emotional debauchery. What makes the nineties important as a period of English literary history is not, however, its writers sensationalism and desire to shock. It is their strongly held belief in the independence of art, their view that a work of art has its own unique kind of value which has most strongly influenced later generations. There were still, however, writers who continued the literary developments of the midVictorian period. The predominant note in the works of the poets William Ernest Henley and Rudyard Kipling is strenuously affirmative, especially of the values of a life of action; for them imperialism was almost a religion. Another essential characteristic shared by the two writers is realism. Thomas Hardy in his novels also represents a continuation of Victorian realism and at the same time a great step forward, although his all-pervading pessimism is nowhere near these two late Victorians. His poetry, on the other hand, became known only in the twentieth century, even though many of the attitudes towards life and literature are recognisably Victorian. But Gerbers quotation with which we have begun this chapter goes on like this: or by a sense of regenerationon the other [hand]. This sense of regeneration, of the possibility of a new beginning, was represented by H.G. Wellss scientific humanism and by G.B. Shaws Fabianism. Yet these represent already the first step into a new age. In Dickenss David Copperfield (1850) the hero affirms: I have always been thoroughly in earnest. Forty-five years later Oscar Wildes comedy The Importance of Being Earnest turns this typical mid-Victorian word earnest into a pun, a key joke in this comic spectacle of earlier Victorian values being turned upside down. As Richard Le Gallienne (a
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novelist of the nineties) remarked in The Romantic Nineties (1926): Wilde made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of the laughter.

Highlights:

Fin de sicle the sense of an ending, disillusionment, anxiety about the future
Social reforms: Socialism, The Salvation Army, Suffragettes Symbolism, Aestheticism, the crisis of values (Nietzsche, Freud, Marx) Questions:

1.
2. 3. 4.

Why is it that at the end of every century there is a so-called spirit of the age, a shared sense of crisis, dissatisfaction, uncertainty, even anxiety? Describe the atmosphere in Britain at the end of the 19th century. Some writers active during this decade decided to take action, others withdrew from the arena of social and political interests. Enumerate some of the writers belonging to these two categories. Can you distinguish the two different directions in which writers belonging to the latter category above moved? Where does Thomas Hardy fit in? Define aestheticism as both an artistic trend and a social attitude.

In this regard it is relevant to approach literature from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical criticism, according to Cuddon, is concerned with quest for and discovery of (and the subsequent analysis of) connections between the artists (creators, artificers) themselves and what they create (novels, poems, painting, music etc.). As far as literature is concerned, it analyses characters invented by authors, the language they use and what is known as Freudian imagery (and the way they reflect the authors most secret thoughts and preoccupations). Thus, in the Freudian method a literary character is treated as if a living human being; whereas, fro e.g., in the method of Jacques Lacan literature is seen as a symptom of the writer. Lacan bases his theory on linguistics and the importance that language and symbols achieve as substitutes for the world as well as for the self, which thus becomes equally un-explorable. He believes that the ego is not in control of the unconscious, that instincts and drives are more essential and revealing to psychoanalytical work, and that human behaviour is the result of the tensions between the unconscious and superego, or nomde-pre. Fundamental principles of psychoanalytical criticism: 1. the work of art is at some level a manifestation of the creators psyche (i.e., at a far deeper level than that of his/her intellect; 2. the individual is not one, but many, split between inner instinctive drives (the unconscious) on the one hand, and, on the other, the socially constructed position he is forced into, or, in other words, the socially constructed identity he is forced into; 3. => schizophrenia, split personalities etc. (e.g., Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde; Heathcliff is more myself than I am in Wuthering Heights); 4. in order to become socially acceptable and functional, the individual must repress his/her instinctive drives, conceal them from both society and him/herself. These
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instincts and drives, however, do not disappear completely, they coexist, in a permanent state of tension, with the superego of education and social conventions. Occasionally, the repressed id (instincts, drives, anxieties) returns/ resurfaces in the form of Freudian slips, neurosis, psychosis, madness etc. As people had more leisure time and paid more attention to education and manners, there was, in the 19th century an increasing feminisation of socialising practices and a domestication of the novel. As part of the ideology of the home, the strategies of subversion and indirection are the most acceptable forms of dissimulation, and they are not confined to female writers. Dickens, too, takes such liberties quite frequently in his fictional autobiographies of self-improvement. An even more cunningly disguised form of critique of standards of normality and social order is the gothic science-fiction of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and R.L. Stevensons Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. But the more important achievement of the domestic novel was that, in complicity with the High Romantic poetry, it led to what Isobel Armstrong calls the invention of the depths in the self, the production, through certain kinds of literary experimentation, of a modern psychological subject open to (and further carved out by) new technologies of surveillance and self-discipline. It is these depths of the self that the Bronts are fascinated with and render in their masterpieces. Moreover, we should add that, being, as they were, both temperamentally Romantic and socially isolated, it was mostly their own selves that they explored, and their protagonists are, to very large extents, their own alter egos. Yet many of the hard-core Victorians (e.g. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy), too, take as their main subject matter the issue of reality in Victorian England filtered through the sensibility of the protagonist. They play on the duality realism (empiricism) fiction (romance), the former depicting the dichotomy individual-society in the traditional manner of Defoe, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, and the latter emphasising myth, allegory, feeling, in the tradition of Richardson, Sterne and later Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (20th century). Hence, for the former, the most effective critical approach is Lacanian investigation of socialisation processes as part of identity formation focus on this dichotomy; for the latter, the Jungian anthropological approach to psychoanalysis the collective unconscious which delves into what is universally valid in human nature is a most revealing mode of reception. The central themes of the novels which explore the psychology of sensibility: a)enclosure, claustrophobia, and escape b)anger and social and existential rebellion c)pilgrimage to maturity d)inner conflicts between feelings and social dictates e)doubles and mirror images f) escape through/ into madness Degeneracy (Max Nordau) - general anxiety about the nature of human identity in the late Victorian culture, resulting in a horrific re-making of the human subject (multiple, split, potentially dangerous, arbitrary in its choices, driven by the dark forces of the body rather than by reason, etc.)
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- manifested as a revival of the Gothic phenomenon: Gothic body, existing across multiple categories of being and conforming to none of them; the uncanny, i.e., that which is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, violating the crucial binary that organises what we can know about our world; etc. => the double - the implosion of modernity as based on reason: the recognition that the highest achievements and ideals of civilisation are inseparable from instinctive urges towards pleasure. - sensationalism - the modern man/ woman: intellectual, inadaptable, conflicted - art for arts sake: autonomy of the aesthetic from conventional morality and didactic imperatives + impact of art on our sensorial perceptions + Epicureanism Representatives: - visual arts: Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, John William Waterhouse, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris - prose: Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, R.L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells - poetry: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, W.B. Yeats, Hardy - drama: Wilde, G.B. Shaw As psychology began to diagnose the degeneration of the age, it also examined, classified and labelled normality. To do so, it also enlisted many other sciences, most notably medicine and forensics. The narrative of the transformation of persons into identities is the central story of modern civilization; it is the story of the disappearance of the Victorian character in the modern bureaucratic world of professional expertise (Ronald Thomas in David 189). Thomas explains:
The introduction of the literary detective into the history of the novel converts the romantic tradition of a criminal biography that celebrates individual freedom into the Victorian account of criminal detection that subjects the self to some objective social authority. Seen in this light, detective fiction must be regarded as an equal accomplice in the important cultural work often ascribed to the biographical novel in this period. It is the expression of bourgeois democratic forces policing and disciplining the subversive energies of an earlier revolutionary era. (in David 171-2)

According to Lukacs, in the Victorian novel the protagonist constructs his own authority; by contrast, the detective novel maps the limits to the subjective authority of the biographical novel (171). Thomas goes on: In the post-Benthamite world of what Michel Foucault called the panoptical machine, where the individual is not so much repressed by the social order as fabricated and scrutinized by it, the literary detective provides a new kind of hero, dramatizing the powerful and productive role of the social order in the process of making modern citizens (176).

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THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) Thomas Hardy was born near Dorchester, in that area of Southwest England that he was to make the Wessex of his novels, and where as a boy he was a notable fiddler at dances. He attended local schools until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect with whom he worked for six years. In 1861 he went to London to continue his studies and to practice as an architect. Meanwhile he was completing his general education informally through his own erratic reading and was becoming more and more interested in both fiction and poetry. After some early attempts at writing both short stories and poems, he decided to concentrate on fiction. His first novel was rejected by the publishers in 1868 on the advice of George Meredith, who nevertheless advised Hardy to write another. The result was Desperate Remedies, published anonymously in 1871, followed the next year by his first real success (also published anonymously) Under the Greenwood Tree. Hardys career as a novelist was now well launched; he gave up his architectural work and produced a series of novels (of which the best known are: Far from the Madding Crowd, 1874; The Hand of Ethelberta, 1876; The Return of the Native, 1878; A Laodicean, 1881; The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886; The Woodlanders, 1887; Wessex Tales, 1888; Tess of the DUrbervilles, 1891; Lifes Little Ironies, 1894) that ended with Jude the Obscure in 1896. The hostile reception of this novel sent him back to poetry. His remarkable epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, came out in three parts between 1903 and 1908; after this he wrote mostly lyric poetry. Hardy published eight volumes of poetry: Wessex Poems (1898), Poems of the Past and Present (1902), Times Laughing Stock (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows (1925), Winter Words (1928), The Collected Poems (1930). Hardly is generally considered a pessimist, but he denied that he was one, calling himself a meliorist, i.e., one who believes that the world can be made better by human effort. Yet there is little sign of meliorism in either his most important novels or his lyric poetry. In his poems many of his characteristic attitudes and ideas and many of his favourite situations can be found. A number of his poems are verse anecdotes illustrating the perversity of fate, its disastrous or ironic coincidences. But his best poems go beyond this mood to present with quiet gravity and a carefully controlled elegiac feeling some aspect of human sorrow or loss or frustration or regret, always projected through a particular, fully realised situation. Hardys poetry, like his prose, often has a self-taught air about it; both can be odd or pretentious or awkward or clumsy. But at their best both his poetry and his prose have an air of persuasive authenticity, of utterance actually wrung from the author. This sense is heightened by the fact that Hardy would use an antique or a poetic word or phrase (thereby, a-wing) if it fits in with the movement of the poem and keeps him from having to stop and search for something more deft: the result is an effect not of artificiality but of spontaneity. Hardys use of ballad rhythms often helps to give an elemental quality to his poetry, suggesting that this incident or situation, carefully particularised though it is, nevertheless stands for some profound and recurring theme in human experience. The sadness in Hardy his inability to believe in the government of the world by a benevolent God, his sense of the waste and frustration involved in human life, his insistent irony when faced with moral or metaphysical questions is part of the late Victorian mood.
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We can see something like it in A.E. Housemans poetry, and there is an earlier version of the Victorian pessimism in Edward FitzGeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published when Hardy was nineteen. What has been termed the disappearance of God affected Hardy more deeply than many of his contemporaries, because until he was twenty-five he seriously considered entering the church. Yet his characteristic themes and attitudes cannot be related simply to the reaction to the new scientific and philosophical ideas (determinism, evolutionism, the theory of degeneration, etc.) that we see in so many forms in latenineteenth-century literature. The favourite poetic mood of both Tennyson and Arnold was also an elegiac one, but this is not Hardys mood. The sad-sweet cadences of Victorian selfpity are not to be found in Hardys poetry, which is sterner, as though braced by a long look at the worst. It is this sternness sometimes amounting to ruggedness together with his verbal and emotional integrity, his refusal ever to surrender to mere poetic fashion, his quietly searching individual accent, that has helped to bring about the steady rise in Hardys poetic reputation, so that today he is regarded not only as a distinguished novelist but also as a great English poet. Poetry was Hardys first love and he never stopped writing poetry. Some say he turned to the novel because it was the dominant form of the time, but that he had little interest in the novel as an art-form. Of current theories of criticism he was highly critical. But he turned naturally for his standard of reference to the primitive oral tale: We story-tellers, he said, are all Ancient Mariners, and just so much of his lyric poetry is based on the rhythms of country dances, country airs, and folk songs is a new expression of ancient music, so behind his novels we feel the shaping presence of the ballads of love, passion, and betrayal that he knew as a boy. He was a provincial, indeed, a primitive, despite his wide knowledge of literature, science, philosophy, and architecture. It is in his provincialism that his strength lies, and whenever he tried to depart from it he failed as badly as any novelist. With this all-pervading influence of the ancient rhythms of life goes Hardys view of nature: it is never separated from people, it pre-conditions them. Against a background of immemorial agricultural labour, with ancient monuments like Stonehenge or an old Roman amphitheatre to remind us of the human past, people are subject to the forces of nature just as inexorably as they are to the forces of destiny. Hardys view of life is cosmic. The greatness of conception, the sense of cosmic scope behind the action, puts his novels apart from any other fiction in England in the 19th century and sends us for comparison to the great works of poetry. The Return of the Native, the first novel in which he achieved the tragic level, is one of his finest works. In no other does the setting of the natural world so dominate the characters. Perhaps the dichotomy between the human being and the nature in which he lives is too acute in the novel; in the tragic works that follow, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the DUrbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, one has the feeling that the tragic heroes and heroines more and more take nature into themselves, and to this extent the importance of the natural setting as something apart from man diminishes. In his study of The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Marxist critic Raymond Williams describes this anguished attachment to place and the new experience of mobility of Hardys Jude as follows:
It is more than a matter of picking up terms and tones. It is what happens to us, really to us, as we try to mediate those contrasted worlds: as we stand with Jude, but a Jude who has been let
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in; or as we go back to our own places, our own families, and know what is meant, in idea and in feeling, by the return of the native. The Hardy country is of course Wessex: that is to say mainly Dorset and its neighbouring counties. But the real Hardy country, I feel more and more, is that border country so many of us have been living in, between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and an experience of change. This is of special importance to a generation, who have gone to the university from ordinary families and have to discover, through a life, what that experience means. (98-99)

On the other hand, the sense of the existence of a relationship between man and society that was characteristic of the Victorian writers is almost completely absent from Hardys books: he preferred to go directly for the elemental in human behaviour with a minimum of social detail. People are at the mercy of the indifferent forces of the universe that manipulate their behaviour and their relations with the others; they have no control over them, just as they have no control over the passions that drive them from the inside; but they can achieve dignity through endurance and heroism through simple strength of character. Hardy explores the bitter ironies of which life is capable with often an almost malevolent staging of coincidence to emphasise the disparity between human desire and ambition on the one hand, and what fate has in store on the other. Men and women are driven by the demands of their own nature as much as by anything from outside them. Tess of the DUrbervilles; A Pure Woman is the story of an intelligent and sensitive country girl who is driven to murder and so to death by hanging by a concatenation of events and circumstances so bitterly ironic that many readers find it the darkest of Hardys novels. The subtitle was very much to Hardys purpose. Tess Durbeyfield is the daughter of a poor villager of Blackmoor Vale, whose head is turned by learning that he is descended from the ancient family of DUrberville. Tess is cunningly seduced by Alec, a young man of means, whose parents, with doubtful right, bear the name of DUrberville. As a result, Tess gives birth to a child, which dies after an improvised midnight baptism by its mother. Later, while working as a dairymaid on a prosperous farm, in a beautiful summer, she becomes blissfully engaged to Angel Clare, a clergymans son. On their wedding night, after several unsuccessful attempts, she confesses to him the seduction by Alec, and Angel, although himself not innocent, cruelly and hypocritically abandons her. Misfortunes and bitter hardships come upon her and her family, and accident throws her once more in the path of Alec DUrberville. He has become an itinerant preacher, but his temporary religious conversion does not prevent him from persistently pursuing her. When her pathetic appeals to her husband, now in Brazil, remain unanswered, she is driven for the sake of her family to become the mistress of Alec. Clare, returning from Brazil and repenting of his harshness, finds her living with Alec in Sandbourne. Maddened by this second wrong done her by Alec, Tess stabs and kills him to liberate herself. After a short period of bliss in concealment with Clare in the New Forest, Tess is arrested at Stonehenge, tried and hanged. The novel ends with Angel Clare walking away hand in hand with Tesss younger sister, a purer version of her. Hardys closing summary reads: Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess. Despite all its falsities and fatalism, its insipid hero and diabolic villain, Tess is the most poignant of all Hardys stories. This is not because of anything that the heroine may be thought to symbolise, or any thesis that may be implied, but because Hardy is here writing
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more singly than in any other work about casual wrong, the will to recover, the growth of love, faithfulness, frail happiness, and death. It is a much simpler novel than most of Hardys, and it contains some of his best writing as well as some of his worst. Much of Tesss suffering results, of course, from Angels obduracy, yet in the end he is redeemed - he has had his share of suffering, too or at least forgiven. The message that Hardy is struggling to put through, here as elsewhere, is that because everything is fated, the characters can only suffer as they follow their appointed courses. This is also the way in which Tess must be seen as a pure woman. Tess disputes the title of Hardys darkest novel with Jude the Obscure, the disturbingly powerful account of an ambitious rustic trapped between his intellect and his sensuality and as a result delivered to destruction. In the authors words, it is a story of a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit. Jude Fawley, a young Wessex villager of exceptional intellectual promise, is encouraged by the schoolmaster Phillotson, and conceives the ambition of studying at Christminster (which represents Oxford). But he is trapped into marriage by the coarse, handsome barmaid Arabella Donn, who feigns pregnancy to win him, and shortly afterwards deserts him. He moves to Christminster, earning his living as a stonemason and continuing his studies, hoping one day to be admitted to the university, the vision of which still dominates him. There he meets his cousin, Sue Bridehead, an unconventional, hypersensitive, Swinbourne-quoting young woman who works in a shop selling ecclesiastical ornaments. They fall in love, despite efforts on both sides to avoid one another, and Sue, in what appears to be a fit of desperate masochism, suddenly marries Phillotson, who had long been interested in her. She is driven from him in physical revulsion, and flies to Jude; they begin to live together in Christminster, but do not consummate their love until Arabella reappears on the scene. Jude, who had been planning to enter priesthood as a licentiate, as a substitute for his thwarted intellectual ambitions, is now doubly defeated. He and Sue become free to marry, but Sue shrinks from the step, partly because of her apprehension that a conventional union will destroy love, and partly from a superstitious fear that the Fawley family are doomed to marry unhappily. Under the pressure of poverty and social disapproval their relation deteriorates, and tragedy overtakes them in the death of their children: the eldest, Little Father Time, son of Jude and Arabella, hangs the two babies and himself, leaving a note saying, Done because we are too menny. In an agony of remorse and self-abasement, Sue returns to Phillotson and the church, and Jude, deeply shocked by her abandoning of her free-thinking principles, begins drinking heavily (a weakness to which he had always been susceptible) and is inveigled back by Arabella. He dies wretchedly, not yet thirty, and his last words are: Wherefore is light given to him who is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul? The novel caused an uproar, and the Pall Mall Gazette set the tone by castigating it as dirt, drivel and damnation; even Hardys friend Sir Edmund William Gosse found it grimy and indecent. Hardy himself described in the preface to the 1912 edition how a bishop burnt the book probably in his despair at not being able to burn me. The reception of the book was one of the reasons why Hardy wrote no more fiction. The novel was Hardys attempt to be modern in the way that Flaubert, Tolstoy and Zola were modern and to write literature that was liberated from the Victorian pruderies and moral
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conventionalism. As Walter Allen put it, the design was still grand, even though the plot was thin and many of the elements that Hardy was best at had to go. The story is set in Hardys time and for the first time in his books there is a sense that the industrial revolution has become to tell on people; also for the first time there is a keen class-consciousness in Judes situation and in the fact that he is not admitted to university. On the other hand, the chorus of the village is no longer there; the texture of the world described and the links that bind man to nature and to the nature of things have become very thin. Moreover, there is no place for heroism or poetic scenes here, and although these are great losses, they are perfectly in keeping with the sort of novel Hardy is writing here: those qualities stand for the way of life from which Jude and Sue, by virtue of being working-class intellectuals, are totally uprooted. Walter Allen writes:
Those great poetic and heroic scenes are exactly what compose the design that lies behind Hardys other novels, and gives them their sense of timelessness. One cant say that design, as opposed to plot, is absent from Jude, but it is much shrunken; it has become an ironic symbolism The most explicit statement of Hardys view of the tragic situation of man, Jude suffers artistically from its explicitness. Nevertheless, Jude is a most powerful and impressive novel, and part of its power and impressiveness certainly derives from Hardys very refusal to employ hi great poetic qualities in it. These may, at times, mitigate or at least make more acceptable the tragic horror, but in Jude everything is subordinated to the depiction of increasingly tragic situation of Jude and Sue. They are described from a much closer range than is usual with Hardy. Jude is the characteristic Hardy hero hypersensitive, high-minded, essentially soft-minded, to use William Jamess term made actual in a Victorian working man But she is much more than Hardys version of the New Woman Sue survives because of her ambiguity, her sexual ambivalence, which she is aware of all the time and cannot quite understand Perhaps the key to her is in Hardys word intellectualized.

Indeed, throughout the novel Sue is of a wonderful mobility and has an exquisite, delicate quality of being alive, in spite of her frigidity and of her quoting philosophy, or perhaps precisely because she is characterised by these as well as by sensuousness and an enormous craving for love. Hardy is far from perfect as a novelist: his plots are not always very convincing, his villains are often absurd, and his style is at times more than clumsy. Yet, to quote Walter Allens assessment of him again, the true index of Hardys stature is that he is almost the only tragic novelist in our literature and that when we consider him we have ultimately to do so in relation to Shakespeare and Webster and to the Greek dramatists.

Recommended reading:

Tess of the DUrbervilles Jude the Obscure Far from the Madding Crowd The Mayor of Casterbridge The Return of the Native
Highlights: The imaginary country: Wessex (based on Hardys native Dorset) Pessimism vs. meliorism; Fate as juggernaut vs. self-determination; the Modern Man, the Modern Woman

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The poetry of nature, in verse and in prose Questions:

1. 2.

Both in his poetry and in fiction, Thomas Hardy created his own world of undeniable sensual and social intensity. Describe the imaginary Wessex and comment on the creative powers of its maker. It is said that Hardys best poetry is to be found in his novels; yet, towards the end of his literary career her turned exclusively, once more, to poetry. What triggered this change? Comment on the literary significance of this change.

3.

In his novels Hardy tends to regard human life as being at the mercy of pitiless forces, such as juggernaut or the President of the Immortals. What is the role of the human being in such a predetermined existence? What is the role of society?

4. 5.

In what way can Tess of the DUrbervilles be said to be a Pure Woman, as the subtitle of the novel calls her? Compare Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead to other couples of star-crossed lovers in English literature. What is it that keeps these two apart?

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900) In Oscar Wildes comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) there is an account of a rakish character, Ernest Worthing, who dies in a Paris hotel attended only by the manager. Five years later, Wilde himself was to die in Paris (where he was living in exile) attended by a hotel manager. The coincidence seems a curious paradigm of Wildes whole career, for with him the connections between his life and his art were unusually close. Indeed, in his last years, he told Andr Gide that he seemed to have put his genius into his life and only his talent into his writings. His father, Sir William, was a distinguished surgeon in Dublin, where Wilde was born and grew up. After majoring in classical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, he won a scholarship to Oxford and there established a brilliant academic record. At Oxford he came under the influence of the aesthetic theories of John Ruskin (who was at the time professor of fine arts) and, more important, of Walter Pater. With characteristic hyperbole, Wilde affirmed of Paters Renaissance: it is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it. But it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written. After graduating in 1878, Wilde settled in London, where his fellow Irishmen, George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats, were also to settle. Here Wilde quickly established himself both as a writer and as a spokesperson for the school of art for arts sake. In 1882 he visited America on a lengthy and successful lecture tour during which he startled audiences by airing the gospel of the aesthetic movement. In one of these lectures, he asserted that to disagree with three fourths of England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity. For his role as a spokesman for aestheticism, Wilde had many gifts. From all accounts he was a dazzling conversationalist. Yeats reported, after first listening to him: I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous. Wilde delighted his listeners not only by his polished wordplay but also by uttering opinions that were both outrageous and incongruous, as for instance his statements in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray:
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
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No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

In addition to his mastery of witty conversation, Wilde had the gifts of an actor who delights in gaining attention. Like the dandies of the earlier decades of the 19th century (including Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Dickens), Wilde discovered that a flamboyant style of dress was one of the most effective means of gaining attention and favoured coloured costumes in marked contrast to the sober black suits of the late-Victorian middle classes. A green carnation in his buttonhole and velvet knee breeches became for Wilde badges of his youthful iconoclasm, and even when he approached middle age, he continued to emphasise the gap between generations. In a letter written when he was forty-two years old, he remarked: The opinions of the old on matters of Art are, of course, of no value whatever. This ambition to stay young, the refusal to conform, has been discussed by critics as a sign that Wilde remained emotionally adolescent and that he was afraid to be other than superficial. This is not to say that he was not aware of the realities of his time; at heart, he knew much more than he said but refused to live up to that knowledge. On the other hand, this flippancy is a sign of self-assuredness. Holbrook Jackson defines decadence as a form of imperialism of the spirit, ambitious, arrogant, aggressive, waving the flag of human power over an ever wider and wider territory. Indeed, Wilde really expresses the self-confident expansiveness of a secure age much more than does Kipling, for instance, who often reminds one of a man cheering to keep his courage up. Wilde felt that the age needed, Kipling that it could not afford, aestheticism. It was one more territory to conquer. Wildes successes for 17 years in England and America were, of course, not limited to his self-advertising stunts as a dandy. In his writings he excelled in a variety of genres: as a critic of literature and society (The Decay of Lying, 1889, and The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891), and as a novelist, poet, and dramatist. Much of his prose, including The Critic as Artist, develops Paters aestheticism, particularly in the sense of the superiority of art to life and its lack of obligation to any standards of mimesis. He also argues that art should only be beautiful (All art is quite useless, he says in the Preface to Dorian Gray), an opinion derived from French art-criticism, which held that tone, line, and mass were the only things that counted in painting. Yet, on the other hand, in his wonderful essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, stimulating, witty, well-argued, he makes a superb attempt to reintegrate art and society. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which created a sensation when it was published in 1891, takes a somewhat different perspective. The novel is a strikingly ingenious story of a handsome young man and his selfish pursuit of sensual pleasure. Until the end of the book he himself remains fresh and healthy in appearance, while his portrait mysteriously changes into a horrible image of his corrupted soul. Although the preface to the novel emphasises that art and morality are totally separate, in the novel itself, at least in its latest chapters, Wilde seems to be expounding a moral lesson on the evils of self-regarding
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hedonism. As a poet Wilde felt overwhelmed by the Victorian predecessors whom he admired: Browning, Rossetti, and Swinbourne, and had trouble finding his own voice. Many of the poems in his first volume (1881) are highly derivative, but such pieces as The Harlots House and Impression du Matin offer a distinctive perspective on city streets that seem to anticipate early poems by T.S. Eliot. His most outstanding success, however, was as a writer of comedies, which were staged in London and New York from 1892 through 1895, including Lady Windermeres Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. It has even been said that in his plays he wrote for success: he took formulas from the Victorian farce and melodrama, but treated the dialogue with a polished wit which really removed the whole action into a never-never land of ultrasophisticated stylisation. The plots are ridiculous, sometimes even degenerating into cheap farce. But the dialogue imposes the order of an ideal wit on the society it portrays. He achieves this most perfectly in The Importance of Being Earnest, a play wrought entirely out of the studied wit of the dialogue, which projects the society of upper-class leisure as an English world so emptied of earthiness and genuine emotional, moral, or physical reality, that it is pure style, a world where action exists in order to make possible the appropriate conversation and where the appropriate conversation is a ballet-like exchange of epigrams. Wilde himself described his overall aim in writing it: It has as its philosophythat we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality. The paradox of the sincere and studied triviality is symptomatic of Wildes entire creation. As Ian Gregor has showed, Wilde combines the resources of paradox in language and of farce in plot to create a completely realised idyll, offering itself as something irrecoverably other than life, not a wishfulfilment of life as it might be lived. It may not be a profound art, but it is a brilliant one. And Wildes perfect mastery of witty wordplay and paradox is still unsurpassed. By the spring of 1895 this triumphant success suddenly crumbles when Wilde was arrested, convicted for homosexuality, and sentenced to jail, with hard labour, for two years. The revulsion of feeling against him in England and America was violent, and the aesthetic movement itself suffered a severe setback not only with the public but among writers as well. His two years in jail led Wilde to write two atypical, sober and emotionally high-pitched works, his poem The Ballad of Reading Goal (1898) and his prose confession De Profundis (1905). His literary output also includes fairy-tales written for his two children and published as The Happy Prince and Other Tales. After leaving jail, Wilde, a ruined man, emigrated to France, where he lived out the last three years of his life under an assumed name. Before his departure from England he had been divorced and declared bankrupt, and in France he had to rely on friends for financial support. Wilde is buried in Paris in the same cemetery as the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleures du Mal had profoundly affected his attitudes toward life and literature.

Recommended reading:

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Importance of Being Earnest

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An Ideal Husband De Profundis The Happy Prince

Highlights: Art for arts sake and degeneracy the two labels most frequently attached to Wilde Essayistic prose, between reckless aestheticism and dead seriousness Combining the resources of paradox in language and farce in plot = the perfect recipe for comedy Questions: 1. More than art for arts sake, aestheticism meant making life imitate art, rather than vice versa. Did Wilde live up to his ideal? The principles of aestheticism are succintly and memorably expressed in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Paraphrase and explain them. 3. Does the rest of the novel conform to these prescriptions? Can you distinguish any traces of social satire in The Importance of Being Earnest or is it a pure comedy?

2. 4.

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After Victorianism
Most famously, Virginia Woolfs essay titled Modern Fiction, in The Common Reader (1925), accurately and influentially diagnosed the early 20th-century need to move on from the realism of the Victorians to a new understanding of reality:
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being like this. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressionstrivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it. It is, at any rate, in some such fashion as this that we seek to define the quality which distinguishes the work of several young writers, among whom Mr. James Joyce is the most notable, from that of their predecessors. They attempt to come closer to life, and to preserve more sincerely and exactly what interests and moves them, even if to do so they must discard most of the conventions which are commonly observed by the novelist. Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small. ...the problem before the novelist at present, as we suppose it to have been in the past, is to contrive means of being free to set down what he chooses. He has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer this but that: out of that alone must he construct his work. For the moderns that, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors.

As this shift begins to register and becomes ever more widespread in 20th-century fiction, criticism, too, leaves behind techniques that account for stylistic devices and genres and focuses instead on language. Mark Currie, in Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998), clarifies several aspects: the transition from Structuralism to Poststructuralism is explained along the lines of the shifts undergone by theories concerning narrative in the 1980s widespread circulation attained of late by the concept of narrative narrative has come to encompass the representation of identity, in personal memory and self-representation or in collective identity of groups such as religions, nations, race and
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gender (2) and has acquired a quality of instability this instability is the result of the shifts from discovery to invention, from coherence to complexity, and from poetics to politics (2): o Structuralism hoped to deploy scientific linguistics methods in order to discover the inherent structure that contains the meaning of any narrative o Poststructuralism insists that any structure that can be associated with a certain narrative is in fact put there (invented) by the reader as part of the reading (i.e., interpretive) activity any number of different, even contradictory, meanings can be attached to any one text. This amounts to a deconstruction of earlier narratology: it involves the destruction of its scientific authority and [points] to a less reductive kind of reading which [is] not underpinned by notions like the coherence of the authorial project or the stability of the language system in general (3). The number of possible readings, deconstructionists and historicists alike argue, is only limited by the ideological discourse that surreptitiously informs language itself (see Michel Foucault). Poststructuralisms effort to reinstate historical perspective in the literary studies could thus be said to have put the narrative back in narratology. Like the Deconstructive and Historicist trends, this subversion of structuralist narratology began in the late 1960s and attained its most coherent theoretical expression in the 1980s. Hence the interrelated questions: What is narrative? and What is identity? And the answer: They are constructs. Or, in other words, identity is the stories we tell ourselves to explain where we fit in the world. More post-structuralist questions: What is postmodern fiction? What is heritage drama? How do narratives persuade us? And the answer to the latter: Narratives have three levels of language at their disposal:

Grammar, corresponding to the order of events Logic corresponding to concepts (rational) Rhetoric corresponding to concepts (rational, emotional and ethical)3

This is the classical trivium (the foundation of the medieval liberal arts education). 69

Appendix

Enlightenment and the Novel

The novel is not just a new way of telling stories, but a new way of seeing the world. The novel is when two or more of the older literary genres are combined (e.g. biography, autobiography, romance, satire etc.), as long as the mixture remains domestic. As soon as a Sarasine or Arab is mentioned, what we deal with is romance. The novel is a xenophobic genre. The novel is that which emerges in the place of the truth of scripture (Melvin New in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism 515). It emerged when questions about the old order started to be asked questions about scripture. pietys hostility to narrative and the consequent insistence upon the priority of the moral (New 509). The Bible reinforced the priority of the Word over the world. 18th century still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook. The novel initiated the demise of the traditional public vocabulary with its stress upon military prowess, manly independence and the idealization of man as citizen (Joseph Dwyer in The Encyclopedia 1030). It also made an effort to displace the vulgar vocabulary of commerce and interest. It attempted to introduce a more refined notion of morality, a domestic ethic, and ethic of sensibility, in which women were allocated a stable position, and which aimed to establish an equilibrium between personal emotion and social conscience which could reinforce group harmony and the stability of an increasingly complex and differentiated modern society (Dwyer 1031). Social and economic mobility artificiality becomes a way of life: everybody had an interest to appear what they were not. manipulating emotion in the cause of virtue (Dwyer 1032): sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling. The role of women becomes, especially in Victorian times, to soften the harshness of an aggressive and insensitive world (Dwyer 1041, citing Gorham 1982) a contribution whose full psychological, ethical and sexual potential was exploited by the bourgeoisie. Hegel: the secularisation of spirituality typical of the modern world begins in the late 18th century. widespread general interest in a relaxation of artistic restraints and an increased desire for imaginative freedom (Robert D. Spector in The Encyclopedia 1044).

=> Sentimentality could be defined as an attempt to counteract the current tendency of reason to become enmeshed in technological and economic progress and turn into a mercantile instrument.

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