A1B20 – Lecture 4: Transcendentalism & the Victorian Age

I. The Victorian Age in England (1837-1901)

-industrialization & urbanization at home; colonization abroad

-from confidence of 1850’s (cf. London’s Great Exhibit’) to doubt & uncertainty

A. The Rise of Realism (mid- to late-19th century trend)

-linked to rising urbanism / industry / poor city workers

-realism ‘seeks to represent the familiar or typical in real life, rather than an idealized, formalized, or romantic interpretation of it’ (Collins)

-social Darwinism

-greatly influenced by French Realist Movement [Honoré de Balzac (La comédie humaine, 1842), Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, 1857), or Emile Zola (Les Rougon-Macquart, 1871-1893)

Victorian society

-industrialization (railways, cotton mills, textile industry, urbanization)

-mechanization of agriculture = a move to the cities to work in factories

-by 1850, urban population more numerous than rural one

-esp. in North: industrial cities like Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow developed

-overcrowding & poverty, & gap between rich & poor

-with bigger urban proletariat, call for political and social reform:

The Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 & 1884 extended the right of vote (not just wealthy), more democracy, better representation of new industrial areas in gov’t

-poverty = “Condition-of-England question”(term from Carlyle)

-‘Workhouses’ created after Poor Laws of 1843-1845: asylums to shelter & feed poor in exchange for work. Soon criticized, as repressive as prisons.

-late 1800’s- urban strife leads to Communist and Socialist doctrines—

Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx & Engels) in 1848—

-union movements developed

-contrast: Victorian middle-class (wealthy manufacturers/businesspeople); respectability & hypocrisy, strict moral standards, like Queen herself

B. Realism and the social novel

-novel reaches maturity in late 1800’s

-new genre: the ‘social novel’ / ‘industrial novel’ to arouse social consciousness

1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) :

Oliver Twist (1837-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-61)

-most popular and influential novelist of period

-even comedies set in poorest & harshest areas of London; humour & social awareness

-takes us to jails, workhouses, poorest homes: shows failure of Victorian social system

-recurrent theme of exploitation of children (e.g., Oliver Twist 1837-39)

-key work of realism: Hard Times (1854) [see booklet p. 32]

-portrayed a Lancashire milltown in the 1840s (“Coketown”)

-greatest good for greatest number, but people reduced to numbers/tools.

Automatic & not humanistic system (Utilitarianism, by Bentham & Mill)

-humour: sign of some optimism, faith in progress

2. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863):

“The Book of Snobs” (1846-47),

Vanity Fair (1847-48)

-just as popular as Dickens

-focus more on upper middle-class

-focus on realism of presentation and cruel satire of snobs & hypocrites

-used interrupting authorial voice to moralize & criticize;

his ‘ideal’ is very traditional (love, marriage, family)

-Vanity Fair (1847-48)

-contrast between 2 young women: outgoing & unscrupulous Becky Sharp & virtuous but stupid/helpless Amelia; a study of high society

3. George Eliot (1819-1880):

-chiefly a moralist, saw novel’s main function

as teaching & encouraging reform

-novels focus more on small country communities of England

-focus on character’s tough choices, on social environment shaping individual

-deep sympathy & compassion for her characters & their struggles

-The Mill on the Floss (1869):

happy childhood of Tom & Maggie Tulliver, then suffering & differences & hardships, then death in each other’s arms in final flood (deus-ex-machina) – “…in death they were not divided”

-Adam Bede (1859)– main character in love with a woman condemned to die for killing her illegitimate child

-Middlemarch (1871)– her most mature work, interweaving both sympathy and criticism for her characters (Woolf felt Dorothea Brooke’s story was only novel ‘for adults’ of Victorian period)

C. Towards Naturalism later in the period:

-harsher, starker & more pessimistic strain of realism

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928):

The Return of the Native (1878), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

-sombre realism on simple peasants; their harmony of life always destroyed by change or by high aspirations

-hopes always dashed, man never free: fate & suffering cannot be beaten

-his ‘pastoral novel’, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) [booklet p. 36-37]:

(Tess vs. a hypocritical & harsh society, a rural world in transition, full of uncertainties; more pessimistic view of life.)

-The Return of the Native

(intellectual reformist, Clym Yeobright, wants to help & educate poor of his region; he is quickly disillusioned by emotional hardships (esp. an unfaithful social-climbing wife)

D. Towards Modernity:

1. Technical Perfection

& Questioning the morality of colonization:

(Victoria = Empress of India in 1876)

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

-most settings outside England (the sea, the Congo, the Far East)

-beneath adventure, romance & violence: study of nature of man & moral conflicts

-not moralizing; technical perfection of the works – a master craftsman; remarkable narrative technique & mastery of language (born Polish: learned English at 23!)

-bridges gap between Victorian novel & modern novel

-Heart of Darkness (1899)- Marlow’s tale of his quest for Kurtz through the Belgian Congo

-Lord Jim (1900)- tortured wanderings of a sailor, looking for redemption for saving himself from a sinking ship and leaving the others to die

2. Experimental nonsense literature

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) –

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

[booklet p. 34]

-although written for a little girl called Alice, for adults too

-clever twisted reasoning that goes against conventions and prevailing logic.

3. ‘Decadent’ works of ‘Aesthetic Movement’: art for art’s sake, no moralizing: enjoyment of beauty & art only aim in life

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900):

-flamboyant aesthete and dandy, aimed at offending

and criticizing upper-class society for its hypocrisy

-known above for his WIT, one the most oft-quoted authors after Shakespeare

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – story of a man given to pleasures of beauty & art with no morals; the painting and not the man show the signs of his corruption

-his plays most remembered for their use of repartee & wit:

An Ideal Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

-more pessimism at end of century

-more questioning of greatness & value of ‘Empire’

II. The Second Half of the 19th Century in the U.S.

A. The Transcendentalist Club

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):

“The American Scholar” (1837), “Nature” (1836),

“Self-Reliance” (1841)

-great influence not recognized during lifetime

-defined & defended truly American way of thinking & writing; US’s ‘own voice’.

-1837: speech at Harvard: “The American Scholar”

-denounced foreign cultural domination, urged scholars to self-confidence, &

announced an American Renaissance.

-1841: essay ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841) *booklet p. 27+

-argues not to follow the thought of great thinkers and sages: “Believe your own thought” & “trust thyself”; encouraged individualism, ‘self-reliance’

-laid foundations of specifically American philosophical, religious (Emerson was at first a Unitarian pastor), social and economic thought.

-part of Transcendental Club (cf. Thoreau)

-philosophy influenced by American Puritanism, Protestant dissent, English

Romanticism

-springing from notions in Coleridge & Wordsworth, developed in US

-doctrine focused on man’s conscience and intuition, believing:

in unity between material world & human mind

man’s relationship with God was personal, not mediated by a Church

that man could find his true self by being close to Nature (similar to Wordsworth in Preface to Lyrical Ballads)

each soul is divine (= God speaks within each man): self-reliance / individualism should be developed and authority rejected.

2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Civil Disobedience, 1849

-actually tried out Emerson’s theories of self-reliance and nature (lived over two years at Walden Pond – meditation on material world: Walden (1854)

-then wrote many works against modern civilization & capitalist society; called for self-study & meditation

-not completely cut off: spoke out against slavery & the Mexican War

-famous for having preached civil disobedience (1848) through passive resistance: (especially for freedom for slaves, rights for women & workers

-that way, transcendentalism became linked to social reform

B. The American Renaissance

-influenced by Transcendentalists and Frontier & Gothic writers of early century

-for many a ‘naisssance’

-Poe & Hawthorne cf. last lesson) fathers of the American Renaissance (already much more pessimistic than transcendentalists)

1. Herman Melville (1819-1891): Moby Dick (1851)

-early successes of sea adventures, turned down

fame for metaphysical meditation

-Moby Dick (1851) [booklet p. 31]:

-relied on the author’s personal experience at sea as a cabin boy

-very complex novel, relies on myth and symbolism.

-confrontation of two points of views:

-Ahab, the captain of the whaling ship, who thinks the universe is dominated by evil, embodied in white whale; revenge plot

-Ishmael, a sailor, who rejects this view and sees the whale, like the world, as mysterious and impenetrable

-like Poe & Hawthorne- knew of Transcendentalists but more preoccupied with dark side of the world that lies beneath its surface.

2. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) –

-called himself a “kosmic poet” *sic+ – prophet

& seer of past & future

-as optimistic as the others were pessimistic,

an extension of the transcendentalist school

-a poet celebrating the potential of America as a new land.

-also notion of self-reliance, of God’s presence in everyone, of oneness with universe

-even the simplest object or human being was ‘holy’

-would continue adding to main work Leaves of Grass after first publication

-celebrates the human body and sexuality, esp. in ‘Song of Myself’ *booklet p. 33].

-musical poems in free verse also celebrate America: land, people, a future without slavery

-believed in breaking from pattern/rhythm/set forms of the past; all free verse and ‘vocalism’ (a human voice uniting body & soul)

3. Henry W. Longfellow (1807-1882)

-most internationally successful poet

of Am. Renaissance

-the ‘fireside poet’ or ‘schoolroom poet’, brought poetry into everyone’s homes

-poems on American folklore (e.g., “The Song of Hiawatha” 1855), & epic poems idealizing the past & romanticizing historical events (e.g., “The Courtship of Miles Standish” 1858 – source of story of Pocahontas) & bereaved “graveyard meditation poetry”.

-entertaining but moralizing and didactic

-relied on all traditional forms (odes, elegies, sonnets –and especially the ballad)

4. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

-a reclusive poet in Amherst, Massachusetts

(does not deal with slavery or civil war,

as Whitman does)

-wrote nearly 1,800 poems, nearly all untitled,

but only 7 published in her lifetime

-themes of despair, mortality and immortality, joy and sadness

-wavered between religious faith and skepticism

-a constant awareness of death; “death is the hinge of life” she wrote to cousin, yet felt presence of God in all things (cf. Emerson & Whitman)

-irregular rhythms & rhymes, originality & sensibility of perceptions = pre-modern

C. The American Novel during “The Gilded Age” [= ‘l’Âge du toc’]

-late 19th century: term from Mark Twain, referring to post Civil War U.S.

& extremely wealthy US industrialists/capitalists (had houses & lifestyles of Old World aristocrats

-North’s victory also that of industry over a traditional agricultural world of South

-North’s quick expansion (industry, railways, big business & materialism—quite different from the ideals of Transcendentalists.

-rise of wealthy industrialists & more & more ex-slaves & immigrants in the city as working poor

1. Mark Twain (1835-1910):

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

-conveys spirit of his native South & its tradition

for oral story-telling, for Negro folklore

-remarkable use of SKAZ

-favored theme: discovery through eyes of an ‘innocent narrator’ on a picaresque journey through the South and the West

-beneath humor & endearing characters is sharp social criticism

key works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

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towards realism…

-labour unrest & political corruption brought realist trend

-realism : predominant mode 1865-1914

-presenting unidealized reality, & critical of consequences of capitalism.

-realists believed the role of literature was to expose & to criticize.

2. Stephen Crane (1871-1900):

The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

-young journalist, novelist and poet

-pioneer in realism & rebellion against the

romantic imagination of his time

-direct & simple presentation; no moralizing; accurate language and speech

-on cruelty & indifference of society to man,

-Maggie (1893)– the first Naturalistic American novel – decline of a girl from the slums to prostitution & suicide

-The Red Badge of Courage (1895): brutality & absurdity of war, emptiness of heroism; only touch of romanticism is young man’s dreams & delusions, his fear and shame

-used color to create an impression, like impressionist painters of the time

3. Frank Norris (1870-1902) (naturalism):

McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901)

-deeply influenced by Zola; 1st Am naturalist

-jungle of urban America

-yet good deal of sentimentality, lyricism

(influence of Romantics)

McTeague – new novel of industrial America; destructive city, obsession with money (story of downfall of a dentist in San Francisco – poverty, murder, flight, victim of others’ greed – powerless characters

-also novels on corruption of money during conquest of the West (e.g., The Octopus 1901- railroad the octopus driving out farmers)

4. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

-best represents naturalism in the US

(pessimistic form of realism; human beings seen

as animals in the natural jungle of the world:

instincts, social Darwinism

-equivalent in French literature: Emile Zola (a generation earlier)

-The Financier (1912-1914) (in booklet, p. 39) illustrates social Darwinism:

-key scene: young boy realizes that the same laws of sealife/animal world prevail among men.

-determinism: environment & heredity decide your fate (against Am belief in self-reliance & myth of success)

The novel of manners…

5. Edith Wharton (1862-1937): The House of Mirth (1905),

Ethan Frome (1911), The Age of Innocence (1920)

-adapted the novel of society and manners on the European model to the American upper class she knew

-The House of Mirth (1905) – Lily Bart (frivolous but honest, intelligent) turns down man she loves in search of more wealth & recognition – despises society she so tries to impress – ends in scandal, poverty & suicide

-The Age of Innocence (1920) depicts the Gilded Age society in which she grew up, being from a wealthy New York family.

-works mix tragedy (with conflict between society & individual) and satire (portraying the ‘tribal behaviours’ of social groups).

-characters must face moral dilemmas in a narrow & cut-throat society

-counter-example: Ethan Frome (1911)

6. Henry James (1843-1916) – “Daisy Miller” (1879), “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) -such enormous production, hard to categorize; known as one of the most difficult authors in English (“le Proust Américain”) -also moved to England in 1876 & stayed, so both countries claim him -dominant themes: -The International Theme (began with “Daisy Miller” 1879)- contrast morals and society in US & abroad through Americans in Europe -often on the corruption of innocence by the ‘sophisticated’ and the manipulative

Many experiments in form: 1880-85 –focuses on using young women as ideal ‘innocent’ point of view 1885-90 – tries to create realist works in image of French realists that rely more on the consciousness of the main character 1890-95 –failed attempt to write plays for the London stage 1895-1900 – Experimental Period – tried to find the perfect blend of drama & fiction, tried to perfect the ghost story, returns to use of women focalizers (e.g., “The Turn of the Screw” 1898) 1900-1905- his ‘Major Phase’, including his most complex narratives, such as The Golden Bowl (1902) -Wrote many reviews and studies on writing, especially on point of view (characters as ‘mirrors’, ‘reflectors’ & ‘centers of consciousness’) -would take first steps to apply his brother William James’s idea of a “stream-of-consciousness” (The Principles of Psychology, 1890) to literature.