Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.

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COURSE ON VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Unit 4 B

CLOSED SPACES

The term “closed spaces” refers

 to a character’s inner world, dismayed or frustrated with unfulfilled wishes & dreams
 to the social space (represented by family and other institutions) in which the character feels
entrapped.

1. LITERATURE & THE ARTS: A MIRROR OF REALITY

The Victorian present (society and its institutions) was being judged and criticised in the epoch by every
member who could voice an authorised opinion in some field of activity.
All its abnormalities, derelicts, crimes come into focus and debate.
This attitude shows a strong SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY and not a rebellious romantic phase of destroying
a social system.

A Stage of Debate
The 19th century witnesses, thus, returns to facts (from abstractions to facts) in its urge to represent
society realistically.

social representation

Literature and the arts become instruments of

criticism

offer an unhistoric version of history. In the name of a literary realistic

description, details and debates grow in importance describing and
discussing social, religious, ideological, philosophical, economic
matters.
This triggered the development of the novel
the essay
the newspaper work.
The country becomes a stage for debating. Literature gets involved in this large movement:

examples:
 writers or essayists (like Dickens, B. Shaw, Carlyle) scour the country, the Continent, sometimes
America (Dickens-toured America 1867-8 as a paid reader) in order to deliver conferences, reading
from their works on the above mentioned problems.

They also publish their novels or essays serially in newspapers and magazines (Dickens, Thackeray,
George Eliot),
The poet Alfred Tennyson becomes a member of House of Lords in 1884, getting thus involved
in politics.
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We notice that the writer assumes larger responsibilities: The writer is, then,
 he is in a more direct dialogue with his reader  an entertainer,
 his task is to entertain him (the reader)  a didactic and authoritarian
 to give the reader a clear perspective of the society teacher
he lives in and an understanding of his own self.  an accuser of society in general,
of the law system, in particular.

In order to see how the 19th century creators and thinkers (especially writers) focused upon the reality of their
world and considering it a closed space, a prison, I would like to first make a short digression on
Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish in which he speaks about the history of
punishment in the European prisons.

2. THE PUNISHMENT OF THE SOUL

a./ Foucault says that punishment undergoes a change: from the physical torture of the convicts’
bodies (up to the end of the 18th c) to the torment of their soul as part of social justice. Starting with
the period mentioned above, the body is no longer excessively and legally tortured, crushed, quartered,
maimed, burned at the stake and theatrically displayed in public.

THE BODY IS NO LONGER A TARGET OF PENALTY IN THE 19TH CENTURY

As a curiosity, England remained the country that last accepted the disappearance of physical torture in public
(abolished in 1772- Peine Forte et Dure-death by crushing in order to accept trial). Notably in the 19 th c.,
punishment turns from unbearable pain of the body to suspended rights: lack of freedom, short food supplies…
These suspended rights were believed to influence the prisoner’s inner world: his feelings, thoughts, will,
inclinations.

PUNISHMENT BECOMES INTERIOR

b./ Michel Foucault also notices that at the turn of the 19th c., there is another transition when it comes to those
who punish (the executioners): from the visible (the hooded executioner, muscular, feared, huge ax in hand) to
the less visible or totally invisible executioner.
Punishers (judges) also get discrete, they are no longer present near the scaffold, in public, they get lost in the
background, behind the walls of the Court of Justice.

Judges did not judge crimes or criminal cases so much,

 but the criminals’ souls and minds,
 the factual and psychological causes that led to the crime,
 the origin of crime within its author.
The legal system tried to find the means to change the criminal and integrate him in society.
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3. VICTORIAN WRITERS’ PERSPECTIVE ON CRIMINALS, JUDGES AND PRISON

I have made use of Foucault’s book because I find useful to apply his theory on punishment, criminals and
prison to a Victorian writers’ perspective regarding society and its members.

19th c. English writers seem to transpose the changes concerning criminal punishment in prisons (from physical
torture to inner torture) from the system of justice to the space of the whole society; for Dickens, Thackeray,
Eliot, Thomas Hardy, L. Carroll, inner torture is the way in which:

 officials apply the social system that becomes tormenting

 laws are interpreted by the central authority members that are instruments of torture
 the social units ( family, school, church, Court of Justice, Police, monarchy,
government) turn into unbearable prisons (closed spaces) for some of their members:

 the innocent,
 the handicapped,
 The judges, executioners or guardians of these social  the unprotected,
victims are the officials. They are:  the feeble,
 the honest,
 the sensitive
 the corrupted, they become the victims,
 the liars, the “criminals” that are
 the dishonest, imprisoned
/ and punished
 the hypocrite,
within the social units
 the false Puritans,
mentioned above
 the vain,
 the mean,
 the materialistic ones
 the greedy
they themselves are imprisoned
within the weaknesses of their
own limited minds

The conclusion to 3. is that, in the opinion of the 19th c. English writers, society itself (represented by its
authoritarian members belonging to social institutions:(family master, schoolteacher, priest/vicar,
policeman…) are considered to be instruments of torture, tormenting the minds and the souls of their innocent
victims.
These “criminals” are temporarily pushed to the limit of their unhappiness and human misery. Temporarily,
because, in the good Puritan spirit, the best of them suffer immensely and finally survive, ending up as
shattered winners.
In the 19th c., writers more and more develop the idea that the universe and society are both hostile to man; he
(man) becomes or is frustrated because his dreams, wishes and goals remain unfulfilled or come to pieces.

FICTION

-deals now with the reflects the multi-

search for the forces in dimensional complexity
which the individual or of the factors involved in
social classes are caught the human destiny
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4. THE WRITERS’ PERSPECTIVE ON THE HOSTILE UNIVERSE (18th c-19th c)

a./ For 18th c and early 19th c writers, ( Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen) characters and/or
their fate and/or the environment (universe) they move in are in harmony with one another.
By means of individual wisdom, intelligence and self-control, heroes can win over their own destinies finding
their happiness (fulfilling their wishes) by family and social integration. There is no gap between wishful
thinking and reality, between the main character and the social class.
The happiness of Fielding’s heroes is attained when they find a good relationship with a well-established
prosperous family: society as family is an open space.

b./ For mid-Victorian writers (Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Ann Bronte, George Eliot), the character has to
go on a sort of Puritan Pilgrimage

from innocence, experience,

through temptation, suffering,
to sublimation and self-contentment.

that is:

Society (the universe) works like a predetermined force meant to build obstacles for the
character and thus to put him/her to a test.
The protagonist has to earn his/her happiness, through pain and emotional deprivation (David
Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Rochester from Jane Eyre, Hellen Huntingdon and Gilbert
Markham from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Ann Bronte.
The environment they live in presents that degree of hostility which enables them to prove their
qualities as fighters and survivors.
The influence of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress is obvious.
These writers still create worlds in which values are known as primarily social, mankind is still
good on the whole.

c./ For the special Emily Bronte ( an exception) and the Late Victorians (Thomas Hardy),

society,
nature or frustrate and doom the individual, harmony becoming the
ultimate impossibility.
the inner nature of characters

economic forces,
exterior nature, create a hopeless barrier between the character’s wishful
internal conflicts thinking and exterior reality

.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights deals with the difficulty of precisely determining what controls the
destinies of characters (“He is a gift from God”)
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For Thomas Hardy’s characters, society, the individual (who becomes his/her own prison) and nature are
closed spaces which destroy the human being.

In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair the social climber becomes the prisoner of her own self (Becky Sharp)

In George Eliot’s novels, characters are misfits (Silas Marner, dr. Lydgate, Maggie).
The Puritan approach Eliot develops expresses the idea that Puritanism acts as a constant act of determinism:

characters are punished for their vitality instead of being rewarded for their virtues.

In Middlemarch, some of the characters try to break the limits of determinism and fail.

the doctor-Lydgate,
the scholar-Causaubon,
the artist- Ladislaw,
the humanist-Dorothea

that is:
The happy ending is questioned.
The doctor is caught between his duty as a doctor and the frivolity and vanity of his wife.
The artist, Ladislaw, between art and social involvement. The artist as a moral fighter, should consider art
as serving society.
Dorothea, the humanist, hesitates between the dry Causaubon (the scholar) and the hedonistic
PreRaphaelite painter (Ladislaw).