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UNIT 2: THE EDWARDIAN AGE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The Edwardian period or Edwardian era in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.
The era was marked by significant shifts in politics as sections of society which had been largely excluded from power in the past, such as common labourers and women, became increasingly politicised.
Socially, the Edwardian era was a period during which the British class system was very rigid. Economic and social changes created an environment in which there was more social mobility. These changes were to be hastened in the aftermath of the First World War.
Britain’s economic and military success was now relative. Its rate of economic growth was stagnating, and its naval supremacy was being actively challenged by the rapid expansion of the Imperial German Navy. Britain was far from consolidated and at peace with itself. Standards of living might have risen for employed working people since the 1880s, but a significant proportion of the population was shown to live in poverty. That was shocking, but it also meant that 70 per cent were living in relative affluence. The Liberal governments of 1905-14 made a considerable attempt to begin to come to terms with these questions. The reforms accepted that capitalism was wasteful, inefficient, and punishing to individuals regardless of personal merit.
The movement for women’s suffrage became stronger and even violent. The Edwardian years also saw a very considerable expansion of the trade union movement, and the Labour party grew considerably in strength.
When events in the Balkans and Central Europe in June and July 1914 led rapidly to war, the British could bring little influence to bear. Britain had less to gain from war than any of the other major European powers. Britain was remarkably unprepared psychologically and physically for a Continental land war. The first industrial nation had offered the world a remarkable public experiment in liberal, capitalist democracy whose success was based on free trade and world peace. 4 August 1914 brought that experiment to an abrupt halt.
Poetry: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and published collections until his death in 1928. Although not as well received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has been applauded considerably in recent years.
Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human suffering.
Hardy resented the label of “pessimist”. He professed rather to be a “meliorist”, one who thinks that the human race, has the capacity to improve its lot. But in his verse there is too much emphasis on the decay of beauty, the likelihood of mischance and the certainty of death.
He had a peculiar sensitivity to display the vividness of a particular moment. Much of his poetry recalls images, scenes or incidents from a personal past and an immediate
history which touches other histories. Love recalled is love lost, sometimes perversely, and perception is frequently accompanied by a process of disillusion.
[War Poems: The Man He Killed (1902)
This is a very skilful poem heavily laden with irony and making interesting use of 0 0 colloquialism. The title is slightly odd, as Hardy uses the third (^) 1 Eperson pronoun “He”, though the poem is narrated in the first person. The “He” of the title (the “I” of the poem) is evidently a soldier attempting to explain and perhaps justify his killing of another man in battle.
In the first stanza the narrator establishes the common ground between himself and his victim: in more favourable circumstances they could have shared hospitality together. This idea is in striking contrast to that in the second stanza: the circumstances in which the men did meet. “Ranged as infantry” suggests that the men are not natural foes but have been “ranged”, that is set against each other (by someone else's decision). The phrase “as he at me” indicates the similarity of their situations.
In the third stanza the narrator gives his reason for shooting the supposed enemy. The conversational style of the poem enables Hardy to repeat the word “because”, implying hesitation, and therefore doubt, on the part of the narrator. He cannot at first easily think of a reason. When he does so, the assertion (“because he was my foe”) is utterly unconvincing. The speaker has already made clear the sense in which the men were foes: an artificial enmity created by others. “Of course” and “That's clear enough” are blatantly ironic: the enmity is not a matter of course, the claim is far from “clear” to the reader, and the pretence of assurance on the narrator's part is destroyed by his admission beginning “although”
The real reason for the victim's enlistment in the army, like the narrator's, is far from being connected with patriotic idealism and belief in his country's cause. Economic necessity: he was unemployed and had already sold off his possessions. He did not enlist for any other reason.
The narrator concludes with a repetition of the contrast between his treatment of the man he killed and how he might have shared hospitality with him in other circumstances. He prefaces this with the statement that war is Αquaint and curious≅, as if to say, “a funny old thing”. This tends to show war as innocuous and acceptable, but the events narrated in the poem, as well as the reader's general knowledge of war, make it clear that conflict is far from “quaint and curious”.
This is a rather bitter poem showing the stupidity of war, and demolishing belief in the patriotic motives of those who confront one another in battle. The narrator finds no good reason for his action; Hardy implies that there is no good reason. The short lines, simple rhyme scheme, and everyday language make the piece almost nursery rhyme like in simplicity, again in ironic contrast to its less than pleasant subject.]
[“Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” (1913)
In “ Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave ?” Hardy not only surprises the reader as to content, but also form. His technique involves a consistent employment of “cunning irregularity”
In the English-speaking world, the closest counterpart to symbolism was aestheticism. Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism, and its traces can be seen in the work of many modernist artists, including William Butler Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in Hispanic letters.
The poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The career of Yeats epitomizes the history of English poetry in his lifetime. He attempts to assert the power of a mystical vision and an often passionate sexuality and sensuality. He is a seeker of redefinitions, verbal as much as intellectual. In his poetry, he presses for commitment, political and spiritual. Yeats continued to find a fresh vitality and variety in the potential explored by earlier generations of Romantics.
He began under the influence of Spenser, Shelley, Rossetti and the Aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century. But Yeats was Irish, and Irish influences were also working on him. Dublin introduced him to Irish literary nationalism. Yeats hated Victorian science, and he felt it had made belief in orthodox Christianity impossible, so he continually sought for a new religion, at first an aesthetic one.
His early poetry mixes post-Paterian aestheticism with a Celticism which is both nationalistic and escapist. It was not long before the exoticism of Yeats’s earliest poetry gave way to a quieter handling of folk and fairy themes deriving from his deep sense of a basic dichotomy in the universe. The imagery in these poems is arranged in pairs of contrasts: man and Nature, the human world and the fairy world, the domestic and the adventurous, the transient and the eternal, are paired against each other.
Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English language poets. He can be considered a Symbolist poet in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats chose words and assembled them so that in addition to a particular meaning they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant.
Yeats was a master of the traditional poetical forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period.
His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include meditations on the experience of growing old. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone. Yeats' middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early. Yeats' later work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism.
Yeats’s progress as a poet can be compared to that of a man speaking in a succession of voices; his styles redefine his preoccupations and his images and they variously express his system of art and symbols. His later poetry proclaims the independence of the artist who creates and expounds a new spirituality.
Some examples of symbols in Yeats’s verse
Water: the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the fruitfulness of dreams. The Sea: life itself, but often a symbol of the drifting indefinite bitterness of life. The Wind: a symbol of vague desires and hopes. The North: night and sleep. The East: hope. The South: passion and desire. The West: fading and dreaming things. The Rose: synthesis of all things into perfect order.
[ “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897)
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” reiterates the recurrent motif in Yeats’s early work that the beckoning of the fairy world afflicts the human heart with unappeasable self-destructive longing. the poem articulates a version of the transcendental aspiration and frustration that is the conceptual tension of romanticism. The poem is the self-told story of Aengus, here apparently a mere mortal him with his namesake, “the old Irish God of love and poetry and ecstasy”. Having been troubled by a fire in his head, Aengus took himself off to the hazel wood to do some fishing. He dangled a berry from a hazel wand and snared a “little silver trout.” While he tended to the fire, the fish transformed into a “glimmering girl” who called his name and ran away, fading “into the brightening air.” Ever since, he has been wandering in search of the girl. Yeats identifies the girl as one of the Sidhe, the “gods of ancient Ireland,” he adds that the Sidhe “can take all shapes, and those that are in the waters take often the shape of fish”. The allusion to the “fire” in Aengus’s head is both crucial and ambiguous. It conceivably suggests a transcendental propensity, restlessness, or readiness. In the second stanza, Aengus goes to “blow the fire aflame,” an ostensible reference to a campfire for the roasting of the fish, but, by an inevitable slippage, equally a reference to the fire in the head. The veiled suggestion seems to be that the call of the fairies allegorizes or reifies the fire in the head, that it is the heart calling to itself out of its own yearning and aspiration. The climactic image of Aengus plucking the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun is less an image of sexual consummation than of achieved transcendental aspiration. The image is Edenic, but it resolves the biblical opposition between the garden and the apple. The silver and gold of the apples is an important detail, for, as F. A. C. Wilson writes, “fused gold and silver, the solar and lunar principles indissolubly knit, is an alchemical emblem of perfection”. Many commentators associate the apple blossom in the fairy girl’s hair with Maud Gonne. In “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” however, the fairy girl is fey, slight, and retreating, none of which suggests the intensity and majesty of Gonne]
[ “A Woman Homer Sung” (1910)
In this poem Yeats exalts Maud Gonne, his lover, into Helen of Troy, the woman "Homer sung" about in his epic the "Iliad." The myth becomes more important to Yeats than the physical body of Maud Gonne. This poem describes vividly his feelings for Maud Gonne.The theme of the poem reveals how he sublimates his physical desire for her body into a spiritual and mystical state by the process of mythologizing.
Yeats opens the 21-line poem by wryly recalling the tormenting jealousy of his youth: if any
others. 'Love of God seems dying'; the simple Christianity which he had once believed seems inappropriate. The last verse suggests that one more night in the open will finish them off.
The final version of this poem belongs to September 1918, a few weeks before Owen was killed, and it is mature and brilliant work. There are some daring half-rhymes - 'knive us/ nervous', which come off, as does the short, simple, hanging line at the end of each verse.
The Edwardian Novel: H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster
The work of H. G. Wells (1866-1946) has an evident political edge and a sometimes perversely "scientific" programme. Wells is one of the few English writers to be well read in modern science and in the scientific method; he was also ambiguously persuaded both of the advantages of a socialistically and scientifically planned future and of the inherently anti- humanist bent of certain aspects of scientific progress. His science-fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898), are alarmist prophecies.
Wells's English social fiction contrasts starkly with such fantasies. This group of novels evokes in comic and realistic style the lower-middle-class world of his youth. In Kipps (1905), the story of an aspiring draper's assistant undone by an unexpected inheritance and its consequences, the critique of capital is very emphatic, and the socialist characters are rather sympathetic and influential, but the nation and the society observed in the book are seen as ruled by Stupidity. Tono Bungay (1909) and The New Machiavelli (1911). Like Ann Veronica (1909), the book is forthright in its discussion of marriage and of women's rights.
E. M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels. He intermixes a sharp, observant, and sometimes bitter social comedy with didactic narrative insistence on the virtues of tolerance and human decency. His concern with the awakening of repressed sexuality, which was looked at from a heterosexual viewpoint in his first three novels - Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908)- was also treated in Forster's homosexual novel, Maurice (1914, published 1971). A Room with a View it is essentially a love-story, but one shaped around reiterated contrasts between English emotional repression and the freedoms allowed to the passions by the far more "civilized" Italians. Howards End (1910).
Forster's most ambitious and persuasive novel, A Passage to India , was published in 1924. The novel offers a distinctly less generous and complacent picture of the British than had Kipling. This is not a novel that preaches integration or even toleration. The kinds of contact which are made between English and Indian are odd and inexplicable.
Forster had one theme -human relationships- and when he had exhausted it on fiction he wrote no more novels. All his novels illustrate the English liberal imagination at its best - humane, intellectually honest, and modest.
The early twentieth-century (Edwardian) novel.
Attitudes towards Imperialism: Kipling and Conrad:
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) His stories of the British in India in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and other collections have a brilliance of outline because they all deal with a world on which Kipling has imposed his order. K im (1901). Kipling in his novels and stories can be preposterously inadequate or narrow or offensive in his political and moral views; he was not a thinker, and never clarified to himself his own view of society, or morality, or even of empire; but the same qualities that produced his faults also produced his virtues, and made him at his best the storyteller of an epoch.
He was in many ways an outsider, a colonial articulator of a commonsensical, philosophy and a conservative upholder of the powers that be, but not a cultivator of the styles and codes of the London literary scene. His values may well be those of a world of masculine action, but he is also a writer who, is always alert to subtleties, to human weakness, to manipulation, vulnerability, and failure. His large-scale attempt at multifocusing, the novel Kim , allows for many voices and conflicting traditions, exploring a fictional India through the cultural and geographical wandering of its boy-hero, the orphan son of an Irish sergeant.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was an outsider in search of integrity. Conrad, born in Poland, was naturalized as a British citizen in 1886. Conrad's career had begun and developed as a merchant seaman and it was as a writer of sea-stories set in the East Indies and the Pacific. It was only with the appearance of his more obviously political fiction in the early years of the twentieth century that the true bent of his art became clear.
Conrad deals with the intrusion and interference of Europeans in the Pacific, in the East Indies, in South America, and in Africa. In Conrad's work, colonialism generally emerges as both brutal and brutalizing, alienating native and settler alike. This idea reaches its apogee in Heart of Darkness (1902). Society is necessary, yet inevitably corrupting: this is a theme which Conrad explores again and again. Nostromo (1904) is concerned with silver, insurrection, and external interference in an unstable South American republic. In it, Conrad shows how "material interests" corrupt human relations yet at the same time the attempt to escape from such interests into solitude results in destruction. When all the threads of this complex novel come together and we see the total pattern, it becomes clear that Conrad is not protesting against anything, but only illustrating a permanent aspect of the human condition. The Secret Agent (1907) is concerned with revolution, observed in a seedy, untidy London.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902):
