Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.

com 1

COURSE ON VICTORIAN LITERATURE

UNIT 5B

VICTORIAN ESCAPISM

Some of the Victorians felt the need to escape from everyday reality (social rigours, laws, mentalities, conventions)
in:

- a world of their own

- times \ populated by previous generations
- spaces /
- nature

I. Romantic and Victorian Differences

Victorian ways of escaping are slightly different from Romantic ones:

Victorian escapism Romantic escapism

-less violent -violent
-more decreased in intensity -more intense
-less passionate -outbursts of passion
-it lacks dramatic flow -cosmic dramatic intensity
-it is reduced to a delicate,
sensitive, tamed element

II. “Places” of escape:

1. Nature, 2. Exotic spaces, 3. Religion, 4. Eros, 5. Cultural past, 6. Childhood, 7. Dream,
8. Art
If we take into account the various levels of connotation of the word NATURE1, it would be easy for one to consider that all
the other escaping places can also be subordinated to NATURE. The only exception is ART which remains an isolated
territory, at least in the Victorian perspective.

II. 1. Tamed, Mild, Domesticated Nature (?):

A. An optimistic perspective on domesticating nature:
 exotic nature: the wallpaper decoration and textiles and paintings of William Morris(1834-1896).* He drew and
designed mild natural elements: flowers, plants, trees and non-ferocious animals (bees, birds, a tamed lion). They build up
a symmetrical pattern of decorative nature which gives a sort of hypnotical effect and creates a sweet, pleasant
atmosphere.
 nature is reduced to a temporary pleasant retreat in Kensington Gardens (Matthew Arnold: Lines Written in Kensington
Gardens).
 Kipling’s Jungle Book is placed in an exotic space where nature is wild and dangerous (Mowgli learns how to make
friends and how to control nature – the nature of the jungle, the nature within himself and within the village people he
goes to. He makes use of animals’ wisdom in order to tame the wild nature of man )

II. B. a pessimistic perspective on nature seen as an indomitable evil exterior force, as wild (and evil) human nature:
 Sadness and loneliness are suggested in/by the presence of the unweeded garden:
—Burnett’s Secret garden
—Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (the garden of Miss Havisham which represents the fallen garden)
Great Expectations
It [the garden] was quite a wilderness, and there were old melon frames and cucumber frames in it, which
seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots,
with now and then a weedy offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.
1
A./ the physical power causing all the phenomena of the material world, B./ an uncultivated or wild area, condition, community,
etc., C./ Human nature, D./ inherent impulses determining character or action. (from Concise Oxford Dictionary CD-Rom)
Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.com 2

—the abandoned garden in Tennyson’s Mariana (stanza 4: blackened waters, creeping moss, one poplar tree with twisted
trunk)

Mariana, stanza 4 sluice- sliding gate for water

About a stone-cast from the wall gnarled bark- twisted bark
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook away,
All silver green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding grey.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

—Proserpine’s garden of death: stanza 4 (Swinburne’s)

Nor growth or moor or coppice, coppice –area of small

No heather-flower or vine, trees
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Proserpine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.

 eroticised nature seen as an evil woman:

—Matthew Arnold opposes the violence and cruelty of nature to the mildness and kindness of man (here also understood as
male): in the poem called In Harmony with Nature he says: “… In harmony with nature?/ Restless fool… the last
impossibility/ Nature and man can never be fast friends.” He can refer to nature:
a./ as the violent phenomena of the material world or
b./ as the nature of women. “Nature is fickle” = inconstant, changeable, especially in loyalty.
In this context nature becomes eroticised

—Sometimes, Victorian literature described some of the men as effeminate characters (melancholy, sad, wailing, sighing,
weeping) which might have led to the opposite reaction with woman characters: the Proserpine type alluring men in their
closed space of power- la femme fatale in an eroticised space (Arabella, Becky, Miss Havisham via Estella, Proserpine- men
come to her garden and are lulled to the sleep of death: “She waits for each and other/ She waits for all men born…”)

—In works like The Garden of Proserpine, In Harmony with Nature, The Lady of Shallot, Wuthering Heights, Jude the
Obscure one cannot speak about pure love anymore, but about a power game in a battle of the sexes. The meeting with the
other is suicidal or brings about death. Nature must be controlled as a woman should. She represents the anti-social principle
of wilderness, the irrational.
By extrapolation the irrational feminine principle can become man’s alter ego (Carl Jung’s animus- anima). For example
Bertha Mason is Edward’s anti-social ego, Arabella is Jude’s irrational subconsciousness, Catherine is Edgar Linton’s wild
suppressed self. Any attempt to domesticate, tame these feminine natures becomes oppressive and leads to madness,
dizziness, sickness and death because they CANNOT be tamed.

II. 2. Escape in Religion

There is a feeling of escape from the Puritan to the Catholic approach to divinity (Hopkins), from atheism and industrialism to
the Christian religion.
Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.com 3

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti has several poems which remind one of Dante’s and in which the divine acquires a feminine touch
through the presence of the departed/dead woman

—Alfred Tennyson wrote In Memoriam (for the death of his friend Arthur Hallam) in which he addresses God for helping
him overcome despair in spite of His being doubted by Science

—Arthur Clough wrote The Latest Decalogue and other religious poems because he was a believer. The Latest Decalogue
expresses his worry and grief that Victorian society had reached such a high degree of mercantilism. He uses irony and
sarcasm in order to bring people back to a regenerated state.

—at other times God is replaced by the spirit/metaphysics of nature: God is absent but there is an energy of nature, a sort of
pantheism which makes the text very poetic- a Romantic reminiscence (Wuthering Heights, In Harmony with Nature, Jude
the Obscure, Tess of the D’Ubervilles).
Nature becomes then a malignant form of divinity, it is the place of sin (a jungle of passions), it can be a weird ritualised
nature (Stonehenge)
The place was all doors and pillars, some connected above by continuous architraves.
"A very Temple of the Winds," he said.
The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway
wide enough for a carriage; and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped upon the
grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into this pavilion of the night till they stood in its
midst.
"It is Stonehenge!" said Clare.
"The heathen temple, you mean?"/ "Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d'Urbervilles!

II. 3. Escape in Eros

—the protagonist (Jude) is atopos: he is caught between the bad angel (Arabella) and the good angel (Susan)

—the lamented beloved woman (The Blessed Damozel, My Last Duchess) become a ghostly presence. The dead woman
becomes objectified because now that she is dead she is completely controlled. (Allan Edgar Poe said that the most interesting
subject of poetry is a dead woman. He must have said that because the poet can infinitely explore the diversity and intensities
of love. He becomes in love with love and not with a certain woman)

—as mentioned before, the woman as an evil beauty (Prosepine, Arabella). They are believed to be initiated in the mysteries
of birth, love and death.
Short digression: Georges Duby (French medieval scholar, 1919-1996) wrote a book called Doamnele din Evul Mediu,
secolul xiii in which he says that starting with the Middle Ages women always looked after the newly born babies (as
mothers and midwives) and after the bodies of the dead (preparing them for burial). Women are linked with the mystery of
birth and death because they are close to them and they are in the know.

Proserpine initiates men into evil love and death,

Arabella initiates Jude into physical love to finally contribute to his destruction.

—in Victorian literature both men and women can be seduced and abandoned.
In almost each novel and in many poems there is a seducer (Heathcliff, Ulysses, the Duke of Ferrara, Lockwood, Rochester,
St. John Rivers, Drummel, Alec D’Uberville.
Mariana was seduced and abandoned by Angelo, but in the poem she is seducing the reader. So, the victims can be characters
or the reader
Up to the 18th century literature, the relationship between the author/character and the reader was based on equal terms, it was
a happy complicity, but with the 19th century literature, the author/character begins a game of power seducing the reader
through a technique of sudden effects and desire. Now it no longer matters all the time whether things in the book/poem/play
are true or not, are good or bad, what matters is the beauty of the effects, the plot, the character, the thoughts he produces in
the reader’s mind. The reader then is trapped.
Lecturer Dr. Eliana Ionoaia email: elianaionoaia@yahoo.com 4

II. 4. Return to past cultural models:

—the Pre-Raphaelites** (Dante Gabriel Rossetti- poet and painter, John Everett Millais- painter, William Holman Hunt-
painter, Madox-Brown, William Michael Rossetti- art critic, Dante’s brother). See units 3-4.

II. 5. Retreat into Childhood and into Dream.

—Surprisingly enough, instead of being a space of safety and bliss, childhood is felt as
 a prison ( for Dickens: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations),
 a nightmare ( for Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass), for Alice, it is a
nightmare to grow up and enter the world of the adults.

II. 6. Escape in art because it is superior to reality:

—Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray ( art for art’s sake doctrine). Art is believed to create its own universe, it is self
sufficient (My Last Duchess)

* William Morris was an English poet, designer, and socialist reformer, who, in an increasingly industrialised age, urged a return
to medieval traditions of design, craftsmanship, and community. He was the prime figure in the formation of the Arts and Crafts
Movement. He became friendly with the English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
(Movement). In 1861 he formed a decorating firm in partnership with Rossetti, the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and other Pre-
Raphaelite painters. The work of Morris, both in poetry and in the applied arts, is characterised by an emphasis on decorative
elements, especially on those that he thought to be characteristic of the art of the Middle Ages. His designs for books and
wallpaper recall the precision and elegance of illuminated manuscripts, and his poems and epics treat medieval themes with a rich
imagery and a simplicity of diction derived from the ancient epics and sagas. Encarta’97 CD-Rom)

** The Pre-Raphaelites developed a cult of the heroes whom they called “the immortals” and focused upon the images and
personalities of Jesus Christ, Homer and his work, King Alfred, Shakespeare and his plays, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Davinci.
They reacted against Victorian materialism and the Neo-Classical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-
religious works. The group was inspired by medieval and early Renaissance painters up to the time of the Italian painter Raphael.
They were also influenced by the Nazarenes, young German artists who formed a brotherhood in Vienna in 1809 to restore
Christian art to its medieval purity.

The Pre-Raphaelites deplored the imitative historic and genre painting of their day. Together they sought to revitalise art through a
simpler, fresher vision. In portrait painting, for example, the group rejected the sombre colours and formal structure preferred by
the Royal Academy. Having an essentially Christian outlook, they found their inspiration in the comparatively sincere, religious,
and scrupulously detailed art of the Middle Ages.
Though the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had dissolved by 1853, the movement itself continued to be influential. Edward Coley Burne-
Jones and William Morris were for a time associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement and it was ardently supported by John Ruskin.
Pre-Raphaelite art became distinctive for its blend of archaic, romantic, and moralistic qualities, but much of it has been criticised as
superficial and sentimental, if not artificial.)