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UNIT 1: THE VICTORIAN ERA
The Victorian era of the United Kingdom marked the height of the British Industrial Revolution and the apex of the British Empire. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and other non- English speaking countries.
Queen Victoria ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901. The word "Victorian" connotes respectability, church-going, the patriarchal family circle, the businessman. Victorianism was a creation of the middle-class, an expression of their new self-confidence, and they found the perfect figure-heads in Victoria. Mid-Victorian society was held together by the cement of Christian moral teaching and constricted by the triumph of puritan sexual customs.
Queen Victoria had the longest reign in British history, and changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable. When Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was primarily agrarian and rural upon her death, the country was highly industrialized and connected by an expansive railway network.
Free Trade is the doctrine that states that an economic system functions best when there is no interference by the government.
"Free trade" exemplified a whole philosophy of political, social and economic organization. The presumption was that the State should stand aside. Individualism, self-respect, self- reliance, and the organization of voluntary and co-operative societies were the key notes of Mid-Victorian liberalism. The economy should be self-regulating, and the individual, should be free to make what way he could in it. This view of individualism gained from the widely popular writings of the social evolutionists.
The country grew increasingly connected by an expansive network of railway and cities became more and more accessible.
The mid-Victorian period witnessed significant social changes: an evangelical revival occurred alongside a series of legal changes in women's rights. They gain the legal right to their property upon marriage through the Married Women's Property Act, the right to divorce, and the right to fight for custody of their children upon separation.
The period is often characterized as a long period of peace and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War. Towards the end of the century, the policies of New Imperialism led to increasing colonial conflicts.
In the early part of the era the House of Commons was dominated by the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. From the late 1850s onwards the Whigs became the Liberals even as the Tories became known as the Conservatives.
The British Empire: The British did not as a whole look for increased direct imperial authority. They successfully sought to devolve authority, passing the Dominion of Canada Act in 1867 and the Commonwealth of Australia Act in 1900. The last forty years of the century saw the annexation of vast areas of land in Africa, the Far East, and the Pacific British interests were to be found wherever there was trade. When a trading company with governmentally guaranteed rights to trade and administer an area went bankrupt, the British government had to assume its administrative responsibilities.
Victorian Morality is a distillation of the moral views of people living at the time of Queen Victoria in particular, and to the moral climate of Great Britain. It can describe any set of values that espouses sexual repression, low tolerance of crime, and a strong social ethic.
The Victorian era was a time of many contradictions. The apparent contradiction between the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint and the prevalence of social phenomena that included prostitution and child labour were two sides of the same coin: various social reform movements and high principles arose from attempts to improve the harsh conditions.
The Fin-de-Siécle reaction: new views of the state: At the end of the century, the British policy of "splendid isolation" began to look dangerous. German expansion made this country seem a potent threat. British foreign policy took a new course, signing at the beginning of the 20th century agreements with France and Russia.
There was much discussion about Britain's relative economic position. The USA, Germany, France and Russia were now all substantial industrial powers. Yet for the most part British society and government behaved as if nothing had changed.The liberal state continued, almost as carefully guarded under Tory as under Liberal management. In the 1880s and 1890s this situation came under increasing criticism.
The free trade state had always had its critics. The most influential was John Ruskin, who in some prose works attacked the aesthetics of industrial society. His aesthetic criticisms were taken up by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters, writers and craftsmen who emphasized the values of pre-industrial England. The aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites, and their general critique of middle-class morality, was given fresh impetus by the aesthetes of the 1880s and 1890s, the most notable of whom was Oscar Wilde. From 1884 these leanings towards socialism were supplemented by the London-based Fabian society, whose members included George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. The Fabian's criticism of the Liberal economic order was not so much that it was unjust, but that it was inefficient and wasteful.
Popular discontent with the limitations of Liberalism was also developing. There was a view that the unionized working class must have its own representatives in the House of Commons, and the socialist Labour Party was founded in 1893.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 60s.
[Naturalism: a branch of Realism.]
Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about supernatural forces that control the universe. Also, Hardy showed in his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits. Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals. Some attributed the bleak outlook of many of his novels reflecting his view of the absence of God.
into a terrifying situation involving her perceptions of the ghosts of a lately deceased couple- her predecessor.
The Ambassadors (1903), is a dark comedy that follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of his fiancée's supposedly wayward son. Strether is to bring the young man back to the family business, but he encounters unexpected complications. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view. The theme of liberation almost starved emotional life into a far more generous and gracious existence plays throughout The Ambassadors. Strether learns to evaluate every situation on its merits, without prejudices of any kind. The final lesson of his European experience is not to trust preconceived notions from anybody or anywhere but rather to rely on his own observation and judgment.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class. He was excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic and a humanist.
Treasure Island (1883) is an adventure novel, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". It is an adventure tale known for its superb atmosphere, character and action, and also a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality unusual for children's literature then and now.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a novella first published in 1886. It is about a London lawyer who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and Edward Hyde. The work is known for its vivid portrayal of a split personality, split in the sense that within the same person there is both an apparently good and an evil personality each being quite distinct from each other. This novel represents a concept in Western culture, that of the inner conflict of humanity's sense of good and evil. Hyde is the physical expression of moral lowness. The novel is a critique of the strict repressions of the Victorian moral code.
Stevenson never says exactly what Hyde takes pleasure in on his nightly forays, saying generally that it is something of an evil and lustful nature; thus it is in the context of the times, abhorrent to Victorian religious morality. Hyde may have simply been revelling in activities that were not appropriate to a man of Jekyll's stature. An obsession with crime, with anarchy, with decadence, with reversion, with the animal, or simply with the paraphernalia of horror can be seen running through the work of many of the key writers of the end of the century (Hardy, Wilde, Yeats, Wells, and Stevenson).
Stevenson used the stock features of the genre of Gothic fiction and the sensation novel to explore contemporary concerns.
William Morris (1834–1896) was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, socialist and Marxist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868–1870), and the utopian novel News from
Nowhere (1890). He found the Socialist League in 1884.
News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction. In the book, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature.
The book explores a number of aspects of this society. Old Hammond is both the communist educator who teaches Morris the new world and the wise old man of romance. Dick and Clara are good comrades and the married lovers who aid Morris in his wanderings. The journey on the Thames is both a voyage through society transformed by revolution and a quest for happiness. Ellen, the symbol of the reborn age and the bride the alien cannot win. Ellen herself is a multidimensional figure; a working class woman emancipated under socialism, she is also a benign nature spirit as well as the soul in the form of a woman.
In the novel, Morris tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism; the supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist society. Morris' response is that all work should be creative and pleasurable. News From Nowhere was written as a response to an earlier book called Looking Backward (1888), by the American Edward Bellamy, a book that epitomizes a view of Socialism that Morris abhorred.
Oscar Wilde. Aestheticism
The Aesthetic Movement is defined movement in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design in later nineteenth-century Britain. It represents the same tendencies that symbolism or decadence stood for in France, and may be considered the British branch of the same movement. It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and had post-Romantic roots. It took place in the late Victorian period from around 1868 to 1901.
The British decadent writers were influenced by the Oxford don Walter Pater and his essays published in 1867-68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. Decadent writers used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake”, coined by the philosopher Victor Cousin and promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, and asserted that there was no connection between art and morality. The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure. They did not accept John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold's utilitarian conception of art as something moral or useful. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects-that is, correspondence between words, colours and music. Aestheticism had its forerunners in John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and among the Pre- Raphaelites. In Britain the best representative was Oscar Wilde.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) wrote by Oscar Wilde, is scarcely a defence of aestheticism. The true Wildean aesthete in Dorian Gray is Lord Henry who is smitten with Dorian and attempts to lure him into a life devoted to art and hedonism. Dorian's descent into
much of the well-intentioned, thought-provoking, socially directed drama of the Shavian period may seem dead today.
"My business” Shaw said, "is to chasten morals with ridicule", and part of his technique was to reintroduce to the drama. There can be no doubt that his plays amused, stimulated, exasperated, and shocked his contemporaries. Shaw used the play form as a means of debate. Some plays have next to no plot or action, just dialogue. He is at his weakest when he relies on surprising turns of the action. He castigates hyprocisy, obscurantism and the entrenched interests that prevent the betterment of society.
Shaw's plays are much more polemical than those of Ibsen, and cheerfulness keeps breaking in more often. He aspired to a dramatic reflection of Dickens's comic energy, social diversity, political observation, and subversive power to deflate pomposity.
Most plays of any literary merit produced during the first half of the twentieth century exhibit the influence of what we might call the Shavian of the Yeatsian point of view. Though naturalism was dominant, there were many besides Yeats who were dissatisfied with what they felt to be the imaginative poverty of realism, and who tried to bring poetry back to the theatre.
George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893)
Shaw said he wrote the play "to draw attention to the truth that prostitution is caused, not by female depravity, but simply by underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together." But despite Shaw's claims, the play barely touches the theme of prostitution. Rather, it focuses on the conflicts related to the "new women" of the Victorian era - issues arising because middle-class girls wanted greater social independence in work and education. Other themes include criticism of the sexual mores of the times and equality in the workplace for working women.
The play was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain (Britain's official theatre censor) because of its frank discussion and portrayal of prostitution. It became possible in England to mount a public showing of Mrs. Warren's Profession for the first time only in 1925. What was truly shocking was the play's whole-hearted attack on the domestic imprisonment of women by the male-dominated culture of the period. Perhaps even more shocking was the suggestion that Mrs. Warren not only survived prostitution, but actually prospered from it in very real ways.
The "well-made" play was the typical form employed by playwrights in the second half of the nineteenth century. These plays adopted the Aristotelian primacy of plot. Well-made comedies depended on accident rather than character development to achieve the inevitable happy ending. Shaw refused to follow what he considered to be the artificial form of the well-made play, insisting that they bore little resemblance to real-life situations. The conclusion of the play also breaks with tradition. Shaw frustrated the audience's expectation that comedies end with all conflicts resolved. Vivie does appear happy at the end of the play as she turns "buoyantly" to her work. Her conflict with her mother, however, has not been resolved. While Vivie appears momentarily relieved, Shaw suggests through his characterization of her that she may later regret her treatment of her mother.
The Irish Literary Theatre
During the greater part of the nineteenth century the enthusiasm and idealism of the country tended to politics rather than literature. But from 1890 onwards, nationalist fervour started seeking an outlet outside politics. The Gaelic League and the national theatre movement (the Irish Literary Theatre) were the principal beneficiaries. Both date from this time.
W. B. Yeats's original ambition was to achieve a "poetical or legendary drama" which would have "no realistic or elaborate, but only symbolic and decorative setting". The acting "should have an equivalent distance to that of the play from common realities". It marked a turning away from the "common realities" of Ibsen's work. Poetic drama had been chosen to inaugurate the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899. Yeats and his ideas evolved, he shifted towards a concept of theatre which might draw from Irish traditions, both Celtic and Christian, and which might provide a focus for future national, and nationalist, aspiration. The acquisition of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904 gave Yeats and his associates the base that they required.
The Abbey Theatre Company came into being with Yeats, Lady Gregory and later J. M. Synge as directors. It was the acclaim and financial success of visits to London and other British cities which kept the company solvent and it was the style of acting that took English audiences by storm. The essentials of this style were realism in dress, scenery and language (except for the verse plays), a refusal to allow any "star" acting to dominate the group, and a studied absence of unnecessary gesture.
Many Irish playwrights dealt in the Ibsen manner with the typical problems of contemporary Irish life: the hunger for land, the role of the priests, emigration, etc. Apart from Yeats, there is an Abbey dramatist who outshines the rest, J. M. Synge. His plays, written in the period between 1903 and 1909, create their singular effects through a language which struck its first Dublin audiences as "strange". Synge too sought to minimize conventional action, but his stress fell less on ritual than on distinctive ways of speaking which echo the rhythms of the English of Western Ireland. In his masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Synge perfected a distinctively Irish comic form. The play rejects the "joyless and pallid words” and transforms dialogue into something both more lilting and wild. Words, and the illusion words create, dominate the action. Synge's strength lies in the juxtaposition of the most earthy realism. His characters speak a language which is imaginative and exuberant. Synge's world is a small pre-civilized world of the imagination.
W.B. Yeats's evolution as a playwright
In 1897, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn decided to found the Irish Literary Theatre. The culminating achievement of their ambition was the opening in 1904 of the Abbey Theatre as the permanent Dublin home of a company of Irish actors with Irish producers. But Yeats had begun to conceive the idea of a national drama and of a company pledged to stage it long before 1897. He had completed The Countess Cathleen in 1892, and the folklore that he was collecting would inspire him the subject for a second play, The Land of Heart's Desire (1894).
warrior (Cuchulain) politic mind that delights only in cerebral scheming and values only material security (Conchubar). Other plays in the same group are Deirdre (1906) and The Green Helmet (1910). In these plays, Yeats explored possible ways of effecting surprising. In the final sequences of the play the two worlds fuse, so that Cuchulain confronts the horror of learning that the young man he has slain is his unknown son while seated in the company of Blind Man and Fool, who will not or cannot identify with his suffering out of fellow-feeling. By the time he completed these plays, Yeats had evolved an approach to dramatic form and related theories about style in performance that were firmly opposed to what conventionally passed for realism and naturalism. His preoccupation was with returning qualities of wonder and strangeness to the art of theatre. To this end his plays increasingly pursued modes of stylization.
