Section 1.2 Victorian Literature The Victorian Novel A mirror of life In some senses the Victorian period can be considered the golden age of the novel, After an initial period of experimentation, the novel had become the artform most capable of reflecting the increasing complexity of the modern world. It was also the main source of entertainment for the educated middle classes. 19th-century novelists frequently published their work in instalments in lite rary magazines and periodicals. This form of publication created a certain type of expectation in readers, who awaited the following instalment, anxious to find out what happened next in the story. Thus the idea of linearity — a story with a beginning, middle and end — became an important feature of the 19th-century novel. One of the most popular genres was the Bildungsroman (the novel of formation) which traced the life of the protagonist from infancy to early adulthood. Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre and Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations are among the most famous examples. The main concem of these novels was the relation of the individual to The individual society, in particular the way the individual could find his or her place in society through and society compromise and a degree of conformism. Unlike their 18th-century counterparts, the novelists of the Victorian period were portraying a society in rapid transition, They felt a social and moral responsibility to portray society in a realistic way, denouncing its injustices and iniquities, but also expressing their faith in progress. Typically the plots of Vietorian novels revolved around questions of money ~ the making and losing of fortunes. However, the main source of this wealth (the British Empire) is rarely mentioned, The narrator of the Victorian novel is typically omniscient, serving both as a moral guide and as an instrument for analysing the psychology of the characters. In late Victorian novels. however, faith in progress and society begins to recede. Individuals are increasingly portrayed as alienated from the world in which they live and powerless to alter their destiny. The characters’ interior world — their dreams, their illusions, their despair - becomes more important while their external reality becomes increasingly alienating and mechanical Omnibus Life in London (1859) by William Maw Egley. Tate Gallery, London.L2 Victorian L aa Early Victorian novelists Charles Dickens is probably the most representative literary figure of the whole Victorian age. The course of his development as an artist closely mirrors the history of the period. He is the first truly urban novelist, who in many ways anticipates the themes and language of 20th-century fiction. Most of his novels are set in London, and in them The he captures the incredible vitality of life in the city, as well as the squalor and multiplicity deprivation that many of its inhabitants were forced to endure. Dickens claimed to know of the city London better than anyone else on earth and would go on frequent walks around the city. These walks exposed him to the incredible variety of life to be found within the capital, from people living in abject poverty to the upper classes, as well as all those in the middle: clerks, bankers, landlords, brokers, shopkeepers, postmen and so on. Indeed Dickens’ characters give voice to the whole panorama of social classes and professions which were emerging in the modem city, of which London was the prime example. The comedy of his novels partly comes from the way he brilliantly imitates their different speech patterns, mixing ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ uses of language. But as well as celebrating the energy of the city, Dickens is also fiercely critical of certain aspects of the ‘Victorian compromise’ such as the greed and hypocrisy of the rich, absurd bureaucracy, and indifference to the problems of the poor. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63), like Dickens, began his literary career as a journalist, writing humorous sketches and satirical pieces. His most important novel is Vanity Fair (1847-8). Set during the Napoleonic wars it tells the story of Becky Sharp who, although she is a poor orphan, manages to pass for a lady of high society. Throughout the novel she is contrasted with Amelia Sedley who is rich and spoiled but who has none of Becky's wit or intelligence. The novel is highly critical of the shallowness of the Victorian world, which is based on money and appearances. The Public Bar (1833) by John Henry Henshall. Christopher Wood Gallery, London 31Giving a voice to outcasts Women’s voices The Victorian idea of a woman's role in society can best be summarised by the phrase ‘an angel in the home’. Women’s rights were extremely restricted. They could not go to university, nor could they inherit property if there was a male child in the family. The education of girls from middle-class families typically consisted of the kind of accomplishments that would make them attractive wives, such as playing the piano, drawing and embroidery. Yet several of the most important Victorian writers were women. The Bronté sisters, particularly Charlotte and Emily, rebelled against Jane Austen’s world of order and restraint. Their novels, which borrowed considerably from the Gothic tradition, were Romantic in spirit and explored extremes of passion and violence in a way that the novel had not done before. Of the sisters, Charlotte is the more = Victorian in sensibility. In her most The Chorale (1878) by Atkinson Grimshaw. famous novel Jane Eyre, the heroine Mallett and Son Antiques, London. eventually marries, thus fulfilling her female destiny as the good wife, while the mad, bad Bertha Mason dies in a fire. In Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Heathcliff, the heroine and hero, are bound together by destructive pa they cannot control. There is no place for such dangerous, irrational pa civilised society and they both die as outsiders, Emily herself died shortly after finishing the book. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) in novels like Mary Barton (1848) provided a valuable study of the way the new industrial society affected the lower classes. Mary Barton is unique for its time in the fact that all its characters are working class. Another highly radical Gaskell novel is Ruth (1853) which attempted to portray so-called ‘fallen women’ e.g. prostitutes, streetwalkers and unmarried mothers, in a more sympathetic light than Victorian novels did normally. The novel was a condemnation of the ostracism of women who had been seduced and abandoned by their employers and expressed a belief in the possibility of their moral rehabilitation. The novels of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) were written in opposition to what she called ‘silly novels by lady novelists’ ie. the superficial Romantic fiction that women were supposed to write. Like the Brontés, in order to be taken seriously, she adopted a ions male pseudonym. Her novels addressed many of the social problems of her day, such as unmarried mothers, marital problems and social marginalisation, and together form a portrait of rural life which is as accurate and detailed as Dickens’ vision of the city. Eliot's profound psychological insight into the minds of her characters and therelationships between them, which reaches its height in her last two novels Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, prefigures the Modernism of Woolf and makes her one of the major novelists in European literature, ‘A ‘fallen woman’ remembering her lost innocence: Thoughts of the Past (exhibited 1859) by J.R. S. Stanhope. Tate Gallery, London. Late Victorian novelists Victorian novels can more or less be divided into two groups — before and after Darwin. The novels after Darwin are representative of a growing crisis in the moral and religious values which formed the base of Victorian ideas about society Thomas Hardy’s novels display a pessimistic, essentially tragic view of the world. Many of Hardy’s characters are outsiders, people who live according to the laws of their own natures which are often in conflict with the values of a narrow-minded society. For Hardy, soc iplined human nature as a crime which must be punished. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the heroine is punished for her sensual, passionate nature; seduced and abandoned by a man who is her social superior she takes revenge and kills sty sees undis nim, an act which must be punished by law. Jude in Jude the Obscure is punished first or his ambition to rise above his social class through education (though he knows more than most of the undergraduates he is never permitted to enter university), and then for ais and his girlfriend Sue’s wish to raise a family while remaining unmarried. The couple are forced to move from town to town, living a nomadic life outside the conventions of society, but eventually their eldest child kills himself and his brother and sister, somehow realising that illegitimate children are not accepted. Many of Hardy’s novels aused a scandal in his lifetime and he stopped writing novels completely after Jude the Obscure was burned and banned. \s opposed to Hardy, the characters of Henry James’ novels are usually people from the pnvileged middle and upper classes who are forced to live within the narrow confines of is society. But like Hardy, James is also interested in the experience of the outsider. An American by birth, he was an outsider himself and in his early novels he is our The world of the outsideA ‘helping’ ———hand Check what you know interested in comparing and contrasting American and European ideas of high society. James is also concemed with the role of art in shaping life. Art, for James, can be a moral force which reveals new possibilities of life, but it can also be a sterile prison which oppresses people. Lastly Lewis Carroll is a writer of children’s books whose true importance was only recognised in the 20th century. Carroll, especially in his Alice novels, playfully explores the paradoxes of language and its limits in representing the world. Today his work stands as a precursor to much modern experimental fiction and also to certain currents in philosophy. Colonialist fiction In the major novels of the Victorian period there is little mention of Britain’s colonies. Occasionally they appear at the margins of the plot: a character in Dickens’ Great Expectations is sent to a prison colony in Australia; in Charlotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre we leam that the madwoman Bertha Mason is originally from the West Indies. The fiction that is set in Britain’s colonies consists mainly of popular adventure novels for boys. In this way the project of imperialism was presented to people in a very simple and misleading way as a great adventure in which the colonisers were the heroes who ‘helped’ the native people. However, a more complex picture of imperialism did eventually begin to emerge. The novels and stories of Rudyard Kipling are a good example of this. Kipling was born in India and he saw Western rule in the colonies, not simply in terms of profit, but as the spiritual mission of the white man. Although he is generally not considered a major writer, Kipling’s work helps us to see some of the obsessions, contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of the imperialist project. His famous Jungle Books were also used by Baron Baden-Powell in the development of the Scout movement. The Bildungsroman recounted the life of the 1 Look back at the main features of the Victorian novel. Are the following statements true or false? Correct the false ones. The Victorian period is generally consid golden age of the English novel The novel was the artform most suited to the task of describing the complexity of the modern world. 1 It was also the main source of entertain for the working classes. 19th-century novels were frequently published in instalments in literary magazines and periodicals, One of the most popular novel forms was the Bildungsroman (the novel of formation). o a ° > protagonist from adulthood onwards. [T] [F] ‘The novelists of the Victorian period felt morally and socially obliged to give 2 realistic portrayal of society, criticising its injustices and iniquities, while at the same time expressing some fai progress. The plots of Victorian novels typically concerned questions of money — the makin and losing of fortunes. The narrative voice of the Victorian novel is, ever omniscient. oH In late Victorian novels, faith in progress and society becomes an even more crucial element. Te2. For each of the following writers, note down the 3 Now look back at the section on colonialist fiction main theme/s their novels deal with, and explain the following Novelist Theme/s a what type of novels it included Charles Dickens b its ideological function ‘William Thackeray | Criticism of Victorian values fey a eee ¢ what Rudyard Kipling’s work shows Emily Bronté Elizabeth Gaskell | Criticism of ostracism of ‘fallen women’ George Eliot Thomas Hardy Henry James Lewis Carroll American prose in the 19th century No American writer should write like an Englishman Herman Melville The main problem for American writers of the 19th century was how to escape from the influence and traditions of European, in particular English literature and how to find or reate from the English language they had inherited, a distinctly American voice and The search for consciousness that would be able to express the identity of the society and the new idea an American of life it represented, American writing prior to the 19th century still carried the mark of voice ts European origins. It was after the Revolution, with the gradual westward movement of expansion and colonisation of the rest of the continent that American literature found ts own specific and unique territory. First amongst the many-voiced multitudes who were put to work to construct the American nation, and second, in the country’s listurbing size and scale, its vast spaces and alienating distances, the mountains, nrests, deserts and canyons that ade the European landscape ok decidedly picturesque in mparison. The so-called ‘Leatherstocking vels of the pre-eminent writer the early 19th century, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), st famously The Last of the fohicans, imagined an America which it was possible for the te colonisers and the native Americans to co-exist peacefully. wever, Cooper's vision was alistic, still heavily influenced ;bsiding of the Waters of Deluge (1823) by Thomas Cole. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C.American Puritanism Fraternity Check what you know by European Romanticism, in particular, the idea of the noble savage and the harmony of man with nature. By contrast, Edgar Allan Poe in his stories, was fascinated by the decay and disintegration of European values and consciousness in the American context. In equating modem beauty with death and perdition, he anticipated and strongly influenced a current of European writers that ran from Baudelaire to Oscar Wilde, for whom decadence and sensualism were the only weapons the individual spirit had to defend itself from the perceived forces of mass industrial society. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was also greatly concerned with the American consciousness and its relationship with its European past. His most famous novel is The Scarlet Letter, an allegorical romance set in the 17th century whose underlying subject is the mutation of the Puritan spirit in America. The novel’s heroine Hester Prynne is an adulteress, the seducer of a preacher who is forced to wear a scarlet letter A (for Adulteress but also America and Alpha ~ symbol of a new beginning) everywhere she goes. The symbolic meaning of the letter becomes more ambiguous, however, as Hester in her own life becomes 2 model of Christian virtue. The child, Pearl, becomes a symbol for the new American spirit. At once innocent and diabolical she is the one character in the novel who seems completely freed from the logic of sin and retribution of the past. Hawthorne, together with a number of writers and thinkers who also included Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), formed a current of thought that became known as Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists rejected much of the Puritan outlook of their American forefathers such as the Quaker doctrine of original sin and predestination. They affirmed the essential goodness of man and his freedom, campaigned for the emancipation of women and experimented with ideal communities such as Brook Farm where the pleasures of the mind were mixed with the more practical virtues of manual labour. Perhaps the most important American novelist of the 19th century is Herman Melville whose most significant works include the prose epic Moby-Dick and the stories ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and ‘Billy Budd’. From the transcendentalist school of thought, Melville developed a humorous pragmatism in his writing that gave expression to the American idea of fraternity ~ a society not of fathers and sons but of brothers and sisters, whose relations to each other would be determined by an ethic of truth and trust. But at the same time he outlined the dangers that threatened such a vision, the return of megalomaniac father figures and opportunists who would betray others’ trust. Melville's works were little understood in his own time and his failure to find a wide audience for his work showed that the moment for his society of brothers of all nations had sadly already passed. 11 What was one of the main aims of American 4 Discuss the allegorical implications of Hawthorne's writers of the 19th century? The Scarlet Letter. 2. Describe Cooper's vision of America 5. What was the Transcendentalists’ attitude towards 3 What were Poe's main literary concerns. In what Puritanism? way are they connected to European literature? | 6 Explain Melville's idea of ‘fraternity’ and name some of his main works.