Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.

com 1

COURSE ON VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Unit 5

Centres of Power

A. The Centre and the Margin

A. 1. As Different

The Centre
In modern European history, the centres of power have been represented by various institutions:
 economic,
 financial
 administrative
 political
 religious
 educational
 legal
 military

In the literary world of the 19th century Britain, all the above mentioned establishments were fully portrayed as
spheres of central power.
If we are to take into account a certain typology of Victorian characters, the above mentioned institutions have
their embodied illustration in:

 the land/factory owner or capitalist

 the banker
 the mayor or the minuscule clerk They are mainly seen as
CONFORMISTS or
 the political leader ALIEANATED or
 the priest FALSE PURITANS or
 the teacher UPSTARTS or
 the lawyer or judge MACHIAVELLIAN
 the policeman, the officer/the soldier

As a rule, the representatives of central authority are punished to stay in the margin of the novel in the sense
that these characters are
 mainly secondary
 punished by the author to be unhappy/ isolated/ publicly exposed/ dead
 mocked at

The Margin
Victorian writers, poets and essayists did NOT consider themselves and their cultural institutions (the Theatre,
the Opera, the Royal Academy of Arts, magazines, Publishing Houses) as centres of power.
Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.com 2

In Victorian literature, the margin is represented by:

 outsiders
 the artist- Pygmalion, Basil
Hallward*
 the child-Pip, Alice
 the woman- Lady Dedlock,
 convicts- Abel Magwich**  spinsters-Miss Havisham,
 madmen- Mr Dick***  widows- Miss Trotwood
 self isolated characters- Mr Jaggers,
 eccentrics (who are also outsiders): Mariana, Prosepine, Silas Marner
 the detective- Sherlock Holmes,
 the lonely scientist- Dr. Jekyll

 social rebels-Caliban
 non-conformists:  upstarts (Becky Sharp)
 sentimental rebels (Edward
Rochester)

 utopian dreamers are those who want to change their community for the better (Dorothea
Brook and Dr. Lydgate)
 dependants  Jane serving Mrs. Reed and Mr. Rochester,
 David being at the mercy of the Murdstones,
 Pip depending on his sister Mrs. Joe Gargery
 Estella totally dependent on Miss Havisham
 the Duchess of Ferrara depending on her cruel husband

*Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man
of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such
public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

**Magwitch in Great Expectations

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken
shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and
smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briers;
who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled, and whose teeth chattered in his head as he
seized me by the chin.

***Mr. Dick (Richard Babley) in David Copperfield

'Do you recollect the date,' said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it
down, 'when King Charles the First had his head cut off?' I said I believed it happened in the year
sixteen hundred and forty-nine.
'Well,' returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. 'So the
books say; but I don't see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people
about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken
off, into mine?
Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.com 3

These are (almost) socially marginal and they critically comment upon the centre (the corrupted, the false, the
rotten representatives of institutions).

THE MARGIN COMMENTS UPON THE CENTRE UNDERMINING IT.

In Victorian literature the stress mainly falls on marginal characters in the sense that they are the main
characters; if so,

the margin tends to move towards the centre in terms of the author’s interest.

A. 2. The Centre and the Margin As Complementary:

 The Cinderella Complex (a critical term used by Monica Pillat in her book Cultura ca Interior, p. 271)
deals with the fact that the centre is disguised in the margin.

 It refers to the main hero/heroine who is in the centre of attention, but who, socially speaking, is
placed at the very periphery/margin of the community at the beginning

 the servant,
 the governess,
 the orphan,
 the penniless

 At the end of this character’s road, her/his high qualities, virtues and values become publicly
recognised and respected by everyone and especially by her/his kindred spirit.

The protagonist has become/revealed what he/she really is, and this makes him/her
CENTRAL.
It is his/her message of endurance and spirituality which places him/her in the centre of the
fictitious community.

B. Representation  they do not change,

I. Writers portrayed the characters in the centre of authority as being STATIC:  they do not learn
anything from
II. The characters in the margin are described as FLEXIBLE: experience
because they represent
they evolve: the old generation of
 a./ from inexperience or misunderstanding to understanding, oppressive system.
wisdom and (half) social integration (positive characters)
 b./ from inexperience or misunderstanding to decay and alienation
(negative characters) (Becky Sharp, Heathcliff- the servant becoming
the master)
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C. Voices of the margin and of the centre

I. The above mentioned typology of characters (central vs. marginal, static vs. flexible) is based on two voices
distinctly heard in the literary texts between the lines:
 The Mercantile voice of ambitious characters, upstarts and social climbers
 The Puritan voice of positive evolving characters. This voice echoes the medieval morality play whose
structure consists of the split between an angelic approach to life and satanic temptations. Transcribed onto
Victorian features of characters, the morality play opposition is turned into characters who are pure at
heart, generous and loving (the marginal victims of society) and the evil doers, the social oppressors (the
centre of authority representatives)

II. Sometimes within the same character or with complementary characters (Dorian Grey, the painting- Dorian
Grey, the real man; Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson), the reader can hear two distinct voices:
 A diurnal voice which expresses the pragmatic, scientific perspective of the character (diurnal Alice-
nocturnal weird animals and cards in Alice’s Advetures who represent the voices of human frustrations and
repressed wishes that turn law and convention into a nightmare)
 A nocturnal voice (of Romantic influence) which is anti-social or quite strange and which the Victorians
consider to be negative: Mr. Hyde, the real Dorian Grey

D. The artist
In literature:
1. The artist criticises the centre of authority (Fra Pandolf, Basil)
2. The artist becomes socially involved (Ladislow, Matthew Arnold’s theory of the elite)
3. The artist/ the scientist comments on his own creation or on himself. The creation rebels (the Lady of
Shalott- the artist cannot be understood by the public anymore, Dorian Grey, Pygmalion) fight to liberate
themselves from authority (aesthetic authority)