43.

Utopia and the rise of the detective novel-two bio-markers of the Victorian mainstream
orientation

- the rise of the detective novel-radical-liberal society----the detective novel(as the “logic”
solution, the cause and effect logic solving social problems; evil conveniently dwindled to a
manageable size, isolated in the criminal, with the elimination of which society can pursue its
progress) and utopia(symptom of liberal minded societies and their idealistic trust in the good
human nature, untouched by the Fall) (William Morris- News from Nowhere; even M. Arnold
can be at times utopic, as in “Sweetness and Light”)

- in former times, exorcism of evil in radical societies was more violent (Inquisition, Witch
hunts and trials). In short, every radical society develops of scapegoating mechanism to
project evil outside itself and eventually eliminate it. A sublimated scapegoating happens in
the Victorian age. As early as 1859 w. Collins publishes The Woman in White, opening the
path for further detective novels(Sherlock Holmes).

- In her course, professor Bottez states that “Through their debate of the topical problems of
their day, the high Victorian poets (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold) offer to poetry the high
social function that Shelley did in his “Defence of Poetry”, where he named poets “the
trumpets which sing to battle” and “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”(A. Bottez,
Course on Victorian Literature, 2017). Shelley was the Romantic poet who had radical
tendencies; a wish to effect a change and the engagement with the problems of the day.

44. Name and explain briefly three different developments in the Victorian novel after the
1870’s

after the 1860’s, once Thackeray put a diagnosis on the “puppeteer” narrator, and exposed the
ridicule of the situation, writers felt free to go in other directions, although the didactic vein
remains.

There is a forked development of the novel.

The detective novel, starting with Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White; The Moonstone) and
continuing afterwards by Arthur Conan Doyle, catered to the tastes of a society in which
narrative tension, temporary suspension of disbelief and the vicarious experience of the worst
possible evils, came to crown a logical solution, understood in terms of cause and effect.
Solving a crime became tantamount to having the ultimate sleuth skills and finesse.

However, there was also investment in the thrill and the delicious shivers down the spine,
reason for which this short escape into irrational, preternatural fears, became later an aim in
itself. Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, Dracula are obvious examples (to be discussed in a separate
course).

Another line of development, standing out from the others is represented by Thomas Hardy.
He almost denies a logical solution to the social wrongs and promotes a fatalistic view, in
which meaning seems to be baffling and teasing human beings, an absurd universe in which
he is raising pre-existentialist questions regarding the meaning of life. If in the moralizing
novels there is a sense of Providence at work, in Hardy’s novels there is a reversed
providence, in the sense that the concatenation of tragic events verges on impossibility and
disbelief. He promotes a sceptical vision ; the novelist has no power to correct the world/
society, or to unite destinies (happy ending marriages.

Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. On the wings of the aestheticist movement, an English fork of
the decadent movement on the continent, they promote a view of art in which “life imitates art
more than art imitates life”, steering clear of symbolism as well. Art should be enjoyed via
pleasurable sensations. Therefore the nerves become very important as receptors of these
sensations (on the continent people talked about Die Aesthetik der Nerven). Hedonism and an
affirmation of pleasure away from moral bounds are a side-effect, of which we had a taste
while discussing Swinburne. The didactic vein remains active, this time teaching a lesson
about art and artistic life.

45. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait – exemplify – la alegerea fiecareia

46. Marginal and central characters in a novel you have read

In the works of Dickens, Bronte sisters, George Eliot and many others, the protagonists start
as marginal character and gradually they evince themselves to be the center. At the same time,
the centers of authority fail to fulfil their social duties and evince themselves as margin.

Possible centers of power:

• 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

• the political leader

• the priest

• the teacher

• the lawyer or judge

• the policeman, the officer/the soldier

They are seen as alienated, corrupt, false puritans, upstarts or machiavellian.

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

In Victorian literature, the margin is represented by:

outsiders (Pip, Alice, Magwitch, Lucy Snowe), eccentrics (Silas Marner, Dr. Jekyl, Mr.
Jaggers), non-conformists (Rochester, Becky Sharp), utopian dreamers (Dorothea, Dr.
Lydgate)

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

The margin moves towards the centre, exposing its inconsistencies.

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. It is his/her
message of endurance and spirituality which places him/her in the centre of the fictitious
community.

The characters representing the center of authority are usally static, they do not evolve (how
much of a change do we get in Broklehurst, or Aunt Reed? How about Compeyson?)

• The characters in the margin are described as FLEXIBLE: they evolve, from
inexperience or misunderstanding to understanding,

• wisdom and (half) social integration (positive characters)

Later in the age we have a split of these dichotomy inside the same character: Dorian Gray,
Mr. Hyde…
47. Utopia and satirical utopia in the Victorian age

utopia(symptom of liberal minded societies and their idealistic trust in the good human nature,
untouched by the Fall) (William Morris- News from Nowhere; even M. Arnold can be at
times utopic, as in “Sweetness and Light”)

Utopia is countered by satirical utopia at the end of the century. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (a
pun on “nowhere”) portrays the shallowness at the core of the hypocritical moral superiority
claimed by the brits (see chapter “The Musical Banks”). It satirizes various other aspects of
the british society, including religion, criminal punishment (offenders treated as ill people, ill
people treated as if they were criminals).

The satire on Victorian mores is further promoted in the plays. “Major Barbara”, by G. B.
Shaw, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, by O. Wilde.

48. Fabian socialism in Major Barbara

Major Barbara, which begins with another drawing-room scene, just as The Importance of
Being Earnest and advances through a lot of witty comedy of manners exchanges, the
problem raised (and farcically solved thanks to coincidences) is the one of solving the
Victorian problem of poverty.

Confrontation between upper class religious charity (the solution embraced by Major Barbara
who administers her Salvation Army shelter) and the pragmatic solution of providing new
jobs for the poor to secure their financial independence and dignity, rather than giving them
alms and maintaining them in a subaltern state (the solution implemented by Major Barbara’s
father, Andrew Undershaft, who administered a canon factory and created jobs for the social
underdogs).

In fact it is a confrontation of utopian socialist ethics in the guise of a utopian religious

establishment with a practical brand of socialism, such as the Fabian socialism (a brand of
socialism advocating reform, not revolution )whose partisan Shaw was.

The question of identity is treated more seriously than in The Importance of Being Earnest
because both Major Barbara and her father are cast as Nietzschean supermen who stand out in
respect to the crowd of Victorian types (the respectable matron, Lady Britomart, a slightly
more intelligent Lady Bracknell; the helpless old liberal scholar, Adolphus Cusins; Stephen,
Barbara’s brother, a young man tied to his mother’s apron strings and patronized by her).

49. The anthropomorphic house in Dicken’s prose (example with Satis house required)

- The house – a symbol of character – e.g. the description of Mr. Gradgrind’s house in
Coketown (Hard Times, Ch. V) – a fictional city standing for real life industrial mill towns.
Coketown was inspired by places like Preston. - The house is anthropomorphised; the
windows and the portico are an analogy to the owner’s eyes and eyebrows. The adj. square is
used for both descriptions – literally and figuratively. It metaphorically echoes Mr.
Gradgrind’s belief in facts and in the exact sciences.
In Satis House, Dickens creates a magnificent Gothic setting whose various elements
symbolize Pip’s romantic perception of the upper class and many other themes of the book.
On her decaying body, Miss Havisham’s wedding dress becomes an ironic symbol of death
and degeneration. The wedding dress and the wedding feast symbolize Miss Havisham’s past,
and the stopped clocks throughout the house symbolize her determined attempt to freeze time
by refusing to change anything from the way it was when she was jilted on her wedding day.
The brewery next to the house symbolizes the connection between commerce and wealth:
Miss Havisham’s fortune is not the product of an aristocratic birth but of a recent success in
industrial capitalism. Finally, the crumbling, dilapidated stones of the house, as well as the
darkness and dust that pervade it, symbolize the general decadence of the lives of its
inhabitants and of the upper class as a whole.

50. The „other” Bronte and her important contribution

Anne Brontë (1820-1849): novelist and poet; published as Acton Bell

- She was also a governess (1839-1845)

- Agnes Grey, based upon her experiences as a governess, was published in 1847.

- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) – considered to be one of the first sustained feminist
novels.

- Charlotte, as Anne’s heir, suppressed the republication of her second novel, The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall(because too expressly feminist).

The narrative technique is harking back to 18th c epistolary novel.

-Anne Bronte’s feminist novel-a series of letters exchanged between men, published under a
male pseudonim.

Yet she managed to expose and challenge basic standards and rules imposed on women in the
19th century. Helen’s diary, quoted by Gilbert Makham gives an insight into the domestic
felicity at the time. Sarcastic comments refer also sideways to Victorian expectations.

Anne Brontë's books are primarily concerned with morality; she is preoccupied with the
ethical principles which, for good or ill, govern human behavior. Her two novels present a
closely observed, occasionally satirical, rarely humorous, and often melancholy view of what
she regards as a profoundly imperfect world. Her prose frequently achieves elegance through
its simplicity; her direct and didactic manner is tempered with a disarming sincerity, so that it
succeeds in persuading rather than alienating the reader. The philosophy guiding her intent as
a writer is that "the end of Religion is not to teach us how to die, but how to live; and the
earlier you become wise and good, the more of happiness you secure." Nevertheless, as the
critic Terry Eagleton has observed, "for such a resolutely moral writer, Anne Brontë is
remarkably unsmug."

More significantly, Anne Bronte’s works openly challenged the social convention regarding a
woman’s “place” in English culture in a way no other women writers had dared to do before.
Anne published only two novels during her lifetime, but they were both excellent. The first,
Agnes Grey, was excellent literary revenge on the horrible family with whom she had her first
position as a governess, and the second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, “is considered to be one
of the first sustained feminist novels”. The heroine of the work, Helen Graham, is slowly
reavealed be a ‘runaway wife’ … one who had left her husband because of his alcoholism and
dissolute life. Moreover, Helen had taken her young son into hiding in order to protect him
from his father’s abuses, as well as his father’s example.

51. Impressionism – the movement away from Victorian consensus

the fin-de-siècle context (the 1880s and 90s) no longer allowed for consensus on cultural
values.

The depression of the mid-seventies put an end to general self-satisfaction. Social conflicts,
doubts and anxiety arouse. Novelists like Hardy even expressly deny a rational solution to
social problems.

52. The plot is the meaning – where?

However, prof. Zirra shows that women narratives in the Victorian age bear their own
mark.”Victorian women’s novels stand out through the fact that, in them, the plot is the
meaning of a book as a whole and characters or incidents are subordinated to them. As
narratology analyses the angle (point of view, or narrative method) from which the story is
told as an important factor of the plot, and the significance of the novel’s choices of
settings/contexts for the narrative, in the Victorian women’s novels, the implied author’s
choices/intentions appear more clearly. . ……..Mixing the narratological with the feminist
perspective, the first observation to make is about the systematic construction of Jane Eyre,
Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and Silas Marner is seen here to transcend the fact that
(apart from the last novel with a single male protagonist) they are novels focused on
sensibility, and the feminine sensibility, for that matter, and its problems. “

Therefore the meaning usually radiates from a feminine center.

53. Gothic elements in early Victorian fiction

Gothic Novel

the element of horror is created by the use of apparitions, supernatural manifestations, chains,
dungeons, tombs, and nature in its more terrifying aspects.

—The first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764).

Gothic influences coming from Romanticism: violent, thrilling feelings, dark atmosphere.

NOVEL: Dickens (Great Expectations, David Copperfield ), The Brontes, George Eliot (Silas
Marner), Thomas Hardy.

With the Bronte sisters the Gothic is gradually explained away and exorcized.
- aici mai merg exemple de elemente gotice din romanele citite

54. The doctrine of laissez-faire

The free market was based on the doctrine of laissez-faire which gave complete freedom to
capitalistic enterprise (“minimum governmental interference in the economic affairs of
individual and society.” The British economist John Stuart Mill was responsible for bringing
this philosophy into popular economic usage in his Principles of Political Economy –1848)

Laissez-faire economics is a theory that restricts government intervention in the economy. It

holds that the economy is strongest when all the government does is protect individuals'
rights.

Laissez-faire is French for "let do." In other words, let the market do its own thing. If left
alone, the laws of supply and demand will efficiently direct the production of goods and
services. Supply includes natural resources, capital, and labor. Demand includes purchases by
consumers, businesses, and the government.

The only role of government in a laissez-faire economy is to prevent any coercion against
individuals. Theft, fraud, and monopolies prevent rational market forces from operating.

Laissez-faire policies need three components to work: capitalism, the free market economy,
and rational market theory.

55. What is the influence of queen Victoria in literature?

Queen Victoria and her contribution:

She brought to the British monarchy such 19th-century ideals as:

• a devoted family life

• earnestness

• public and private respectability

• obedience to the law .

• Christian morality also put a stress on the virtues of family responsibility and
happiness.

In the Victorian era, morality becomes extremely important. It is the badge of respectability
and also the cement holding together the empire. But it is a morality embedded in the British
race (another cultural construct used to legitimate “British superiority”).

57. (a sarit peste 56 aia e) Epistolary novels in the Victorian Age

58. Thomas Hardy – symbol and tragedy

he claimed that “ the novel is an impression, not an argument”, and realism is not art.
If we start from this statement, let us consider the symbolism of red and white in Tess..(first
Tess wears a white dress with a red ornament; in the last episode “the oblong white ceiling,
with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the apearance of a gigantic ace of hearts”; Tess’s
sleeping on the stones of Stonehenge)

Hardy studied a lot ancient tragedies and that somehow got into his writing style. He denies
an ultimate rational solution to social problems in Britain, yet he is relying on the logic of
cause and effect to explain Tess’s impossibility of escape from a society which is her doom.
The last man who could have saved her, had he acted timely, chooses to dally on account of
social influences and preconceived ideas.

To a certain extent Tess is more acted upon than acting. Aso, in order to have a proper
tragedy, ancient style, one needs a crown, or some titled apes. Tess is of peasant extraction/.
Yet there are hints at a former lineage which gradually lost its grip on power. Therefore we
see the fate of the descendants of the once great family in a rural setting. However, the nasty
stuff happens on account of the interference of modernization and civilization.

- The characters’ actions are determined by elemental forces running through human nature
(this he has in common with the deterministic strain in Europe and US): internal factors
(biological and psychological make-up; the role of heredity); by external factors (economic
pressure of social class; social norms, conventions and prejudices; and sheer Chance
manifested in accidents and coincidences (Fanny going to the wrong church; horse’s accidents
which makes Tess work for Stoke D’Urbervilles; external nature (Forest – Tess’s seduction)

It was then… that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a
visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her
Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she
did not understand them.

“Call me Tess”, she would say askance, and he would. (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. 20)

Probably the best way to see Hardy’s symbolism of colour at work would be to read together
“Neutral Tones”.

The form resembles Tennyson’s In Memoriam.

To sum up:

- Symbolic landscape and incident: Stonehenge, Talbothays (spring; rebirth), Flintcomb Ash
(autumn; hopelessness; finds Alec again; fork in hand – devil) (farms where she works); the
encounter with the dying pheasants (sleeps in the open; wakes up surrounded by dying
pheasants; they had been shot; red colour of blood anticipates the stain of blood on the
ceiling).

59. Nature in Victorian literature

The Victorian poets’ attitude towards Nature – complete divergence from the Romantic one.
The great Romantics viewed Nature mystically. (pantheism)

The significance of nature is apparent in Victorian poetry. There are Victorian poets who view
the connection to nature of human beings. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Coventry Patmore, and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti exemplify nature as being exuberant, indifferent, and sorrowful in a
variation of their poetry.

If you have ever read the Romantic lyrical poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Keats and
compared it to the poems of late-Victorians such as Thomas Hardy, then you might be
surprised at how nature became completely reinvented within less than a century. The
Victorian Age witnessed a radical metamorphosis in artistic representations of the natural
world from inspirational and benevolent to malignant and competitive. The pastoral, imagistic
treatment of nature as a sublime force akin to a god was usurped by the idea of a nature that
was indifferent to human lives. It also gained a persona. No longer was nature simply an
environment; it was an autonomous agent that could exact its will on living beings. This new,
pessimistic model can clearly be seen in poems like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam
(1837-38), an elegy to his friend Arthur Hallam, with lines like “Nature, red in tooth and
claw,” which evoke a blood-thirsty conception of the world.

Thomas Hardy. His novels and poetry, especially later in his life, were preoccupied with
understanding how nature operates and how to reconcile compassion and ethics with the
nihilism suggested by material science. New antagonistic renderings of nature, one critic
observes, were an unavoidable consequence of scientific progress and the erosion of religious
faith that often accompanied it.

Nature contains the potentialities for savagery but also grace. And while Darwinism may have
overthrown dogmatic models of the natural order, rather than leaving a moral vacuum, it
could also be a replacement. In other words, the world was not shown to be without order, but
operating in accordance to laws of nature, even if those laws were not well understood.

Turner and the sublime

When viewers encounter Joseph Mallord William Turner’s artworks, they undergo an
aesthetic experience of the sublime. One of Turner’s famous admirers—Ruskin defines
sublimity as “another word for the effect of greatness upon the feelings—greatness, whether
of matter, space, power, virtue, or beauty.”1 Turner expresses this very effect of eminence of
nature over man. His maneuver of light, air, and space is shown in his use of color,
brushwork, and objects.

60. Victorian writer’s relation with the audience

The Victorian writers, be they poets or novelists, have a “complicated” relationship status
with their audience.
On the one hand, they attempt to manipulate the reader into their “master” vision. On the
other hand they “pedagogically” lead the leader to the discovery of the ultimate/their “truth”,
allowing the reader to experience in a liberal way multiple versions and to “decide” for
themselves, after feeling their ground around, for the “right”

Let us remember our discussion of Goblin Market. We got a nice story, almost succumbed to
its melodious style and nursery rhyme pattern, and ended up with a high moral lesson in
which love of one’s neighbour is measured in sacrifice and readiness to bear “each other’s
burden”.

There is a second interpretation, a clever runner up, started in the remote benches (the giggle
and titter were a clear indication that 21st century readers can spot some inconsistencies and
psychoanalyze the poem. “suck my juices” gained an entirely Freudian interpretation).

61. Browning and Tennyson – poetic technique

Tennynson: extremely simple and polished; Innovation (pre-modern feature): revives the
species of the idyll -independent use of the dramatic monologue. “St. Simeon Stylites” – the
first dramatic monologue, before Browning, written in 1833, published in 1842).

Browning: - Run-on lines (enjambment); interesting rhythm rather than musicality;

- Avoided the Romantic connotation of words; his language – precise, denotative

His first dramatic monologue is Porphyria’s Lover (the lyrical I wishes to arrest the passage of
time at a single perfect moment and strangles his lover using her own hair; afterwards he
indulges in an admiration of the dead body-beautiful blue eyes, golden hair). So to claustro-
philia we should add necrophilia.

62. Alice in Wonderland – limits of a psychoanalytical approach

“Here we find the common symbolism of lock and key representing coitus; the doors of
normal size represent adult women. These are disregarded by the dreamer and the interest is
centered on the little door, which symbolizes a female child; the curtain before it represents
the child's clothes…..Goldschmidt 280”

Between the symbolic equation Girl = Phallus and the devil stands a third symbolization
which is needed for the interpretation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Girl =
Phallus symbolizes the narcissistically admired phallus-admired but not used-as the majorette
is exhibited but not used in any other sexual way.

Such a symboli-equation is most strikingly, and almost undisguisedly, presented in reality in

the form, figure, and function of the tambour majorette, a young girl, marching in front of a
large body of men, united with them but still demonstratively put in front of them, exhibiting
herself as a part of the group without interfering with the exhibition of this group. She does
not compete for more attention or applause by the crowd than the men are to get who follow
her, but she takes over a certain, always sexual component of this exhibitionistic, parading
behavior of men in the marching group. Supposedly, she is loved by the men of the unit-
actually, she is not genitally loved but narcissistically admired, and after her parade she is not
treated like a woman, but like a tired little child, badly in need of a rest. She then behaves like
a penis post coitum.

She emphasizes her symbolic meaning by her high hat, preferably adorned by a feather or
pompon; she is usually stripped down to the essentials of her clothing but it is important that
the essentials of her body remain well hidden.

At the opening of Chapter II is a picture of Alice which is almost too obvious for words, and
which could be easily misinterpreted as obscene : Alice is elongated to the extreme, has a
small head, a long neck, a trunk without shoulders or hips, which is continued without curves
into the pillar-like legs. The arms are small and practically non-existent, the dress emphasizes
the phallic appearance of the girl, asking almost teasingly : "Who in the world am I?" The
illustrating artist, John Tennie!, betrays here his secret, intuitive understanding of Carroll's
symbolism and gives it perfectly fitting visual expression.(Grotjan 310-12)

63. Irony and sarcasm in Victorian fiction

In order to better understand this, let us analyze briefly the difference between irony and
sarcasm/mockery. Irony has been touted by new formalist critics (Kenneth Burke, B.
Stefanescu) as the landmark of a conservative outlook. Irony is supposed to tell one thing,
imply the opposite without denying the first, yet allowing the opposite perspectives to coexist,
teasing the reader with the similarity of the opposite extremes (the very dogma of a radical,
hands-on approach). We get two voices, living together in one statement.(examples...)

Sarcam, mockery resemble irony a lot, in the sense that they imply the opposite meaning of
what they are saying, violating Grice’s maxims of communication and sending the reader to
look elsewhere for the meaning. But only the implied meaning holds, the literal meaning is
discarded. We get only one vision, one voice. (examples….)