Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Condition-of-England novel

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65; North and South), 

• Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881; Sybil, or The Two Nations)

• Prosperity and expansion

• Ideal of English energy, wisdom, sense of duty

• Ideal of middle-class domesticity

• Sense of stability, complacency, optimism

• Technological developments

• Geology: extinct species; deep time

• Biology: challenged position of humankind -> Charles Darwin, evolution, natural selection

• Jubilee years (1887, 1897) – achievement

• Colonies as source of goods and wealth

• Internal and external conflicts

• Empire: rebellions and massacres

• Working Class as a new economic and political force

• Different values: Prince of Wales

• Fin-de-siècle pose

• “degeneration”

• Beginning of modernist movement

• A development that starts in c18: increasing opposition to the tradition of highly regulated poetic expression (as in Dryden, Pope) 

• Dissent and opposition formulated as a coherent theory in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

• Wordsworth’s “Advertisement” in the first edition (1798)

• “Preface” in 2ndedition (1800), 3rdedition (1802)

• Coleridge, BiographiaLiteraria(1817)

• John Keats, letters

• Artistic conventions as crucial filters

• poetry as an imitation of human life, a mirror held up to nature

• the impression derived from this mirror is ordered and put into a form intended to instruct and please.

• C18 regulations seen as artificial conventions that interfered with free and natural expression

• Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth); the “expression”/“utterance” of the poet’s emotion (Charlotte Smith); an embodiment of the poet’s imaginative vision (William Blake, Percy B. Shelley)

• Source of subject is the poet rather than the outside world – feelings, mind, imagination

• Major form: lyric poem written in the first person

• Lyrical speaker – “I” – also recognisably close to poet

• Alternative way of telling stories

• Sense of belatedness, melancholy (see Arnold, “Dover Beach”, from session 1)

• Art for art’s sake: Rossetti & the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne

• New form: dramatic monologue (Browning!)

• Lyric in expression

• Dramatic in principle

• Told by speakers ironically distanced from the poet

• Reading public

• More varied forms of literature

• Founding of modern reviews and magazines (1802:Edinburgh Review)

• Professional reader: “the critic”

• “The familiar essay”

• Didactic mission

• Wide range of topics (religions, political, social, aesthetic)

• Writers seek to convince readers: sense of urgency

• Claim a place for literature

• Literature provides meaning in an increasingly materialistic and scientific world

• Arnold: moral experience; Pater: aesthetic experience

• Basis for modern literary criticism

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. 

• Sir Walter Scott – historical fiction, “romance”

• Jane Austen – novel of manners, satire; provincial life, English gentry

• Inaugurated by Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, 1864

• Set in the past (originally: the Middle Ages)

• Gloomy castle, dungeon, decaying mansions, …

• Tales of mystery and terror

• The (pseudo-)supernatural and the irrational, nightmarish quality

• Persecution, sexual perversion, sadism, diabolism

• transgression

• Women writers! (Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe)

• To propagate current political and social theory

• Combines didacticism with Gothic terror

• E.g. William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794); Shelley’s Frankenstein

•Realism

•Period

•Genre/style

• Reality effect

• Realisms/realism

• Attempt to convince readers of shared horizon, resemblance to external, “actual” life.

• Convention

• Social relations

• Focus on middle classes

• Social class: negotiation of the individual’s position

• Condition of England novel

• Gothic novel (the Brontës)

• Sensation fiction (WilkieCollins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon)

• Psychological realism (George Eliot)

• Social and political realism (Anthony Trollope: Barchesterseries, parliamentary novels – Palliser series)

• Satire (William Makepeace Thackeray)

• Detective Fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle)

• Science Fiction  (Robert Luis Stevenson; H.G. Wells)

• Traditional view: the “big six”

• William Blake; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; William Wordsworth• George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats

• Nowadays: more inclusive

• abolitionist songs, ballads, Turkish tales, different kinds of nature poems

• travelogues, Gothic novels, historical romances

• women writers

• Walter Scott, Anna Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, John Clare

• “Advertisement”, 1798:

• Poems are “experiments” (3)

• “They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain howfar the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poeticpleasure” (3)

• Lyrical Ballads “was published as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure might be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart.” (95)

- not a theory as such, but WW anticipated a reaction -> new rejuvenated style, new feeling
• Their poems are “materially different from those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed.” (96)

• The “principal object” of the poems is to “chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men
-> (the language of the middle classes is now the real language)

• People’s “essential passions of the heart” are less “under restraint”

• People’s “passions ... speak a plainer and more emphatic language” (97)

• “elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity”

• This makes possible more clarity and forcefulness of communication (97)

• The manners of rural life are “more durable”.

-> closer to nature / natural life / non-artificial life , closer to emotions, no restraints 

• Nature // painting

• Artistic tradition of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Claude Lorrain (1604/5–82), Salvator Rosa (1615–73)

• Characterised by tolerable irregularity, pleasing variety

• Pretty decay (also seen in Wuthering Heights: grey, lonely, churchyard, graves, solitude, sweet, delightful scenery)

By around 1870, “the tour had become commercialised and impersonalised. ... By the end of the [eighteenth] century at least eight pleasure-boats, equipped with coverings against the sun and rain, and tables for drawing or writing, were carrying tourists back and forth from Ross to Chepstow throughout the summer months.
(Andrews, Malcom. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760-1800. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989. 89)

Its special characteristic, as Geoffrey Hartman has noted, is the doubling of words to give a rich and cumulative effect of abundance, which corresponds to the sense of overflowing beneficence in the poet’s mind.

His greatest passages move towards the sublime with a gradual development through the sentence: an early phrase is picked up and echoed, given a stronger expression, and then completed.

Keats: Atypical romantic poet: Cockney poet, medievalist style, ridiculed

• Formal experiment: stanza form (Shakespearean quatrain, Petrarchan sestet) – search for a larger lyric form

• Thematic experiment:

• Keats’s “odes resist the eighteenth-century practice of self-summary at a high level of abstraction”
  (Paul D. Sheats. “Keats and the Ode.” The Cambridge Companion to John Keats. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 88)

• Keats’s odes do not offer pre-formed solutions:

• They form “a poetry that does not so much pre-resolve thematic issues as represent them in ways that invite resolution, and completion, by the reader.” 
  The odes don’t offer pre-formed solutions: invite resolution and completion by the reader 
• Susan Wolfson calls this “a ‘poetics of cooperation,’ which predicates its art on the reciprocal activity of an imagining, desiring reader, and which ideally embodies an ethic of openness and generosity toward both reader and subject.” (Sheats 88; my emphasis)

Scott on Austen: 

- self confident claim of literature

- what counts are extravangant events / extremes

- sensation novel: the Gothic novels taught women to express what they were supposed to suppress 

- seductiveness of literature

• Setting:

•  abroad
• antiquated or seemingly antiquated space (E.g. Frankenstein’s laboratory; old-fashioned closet bed in Wuthering Heights)

• Hidden Secrets

• Creation of monster; Cathy’s ghost

• Hauntings

• Heathcliff’s deterioration, Cathy’s ghost; monster’s pursuit of Frankenstein, doubling

• The supernatural vs. the mundane: (possibility of) boundary crossing

• Terror Gothic
• Horror Gothic
• Frankenstein? – suspension of disbelief

• Addresses and disguises anxieties and forbidden desires

• Stability – chaos

• Collapse of boundaries

• good/evil, life/death, etc.

• Threats and desires given concrete form

• Racial mixture, class fluidity, (d)evolution, homo-/bisexuality, incest

• Dynamics: move towards containment

• => domestic fiction

• Shrinking distance: Victorian Gothic => sensation fiction

• Peri Hupsous, 1st century AD, Longinus (?)

• translated into English as “On the Sublime” in 1652.
• argument: an object can inspire a sense of awe in addition to beauty.

• Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury: the natural sublime

• Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (l757)

• codified the natural sublime

• the natural sublime defined in relation to the beautiful

• fear born of ignorance; terror born of magnitude and power

• the sublime causes emotion – astonishment and rapture/terror

• purpose: an expansion of perception, of consciousness

• both the sublime and the beautiful are mental affects

• produced by the “primary sensations” of perception being transformed and expanded by the “secondary pleasures” of the imagination.

• an aestheticisation of fear – a “painful pleasure”

"It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy."

"The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life.

"My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed"

"As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man. I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me, but I was quicklyrestored by the cold gale of the mountains."

"I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach and then close with him in mortal combat."

"The stars shone at intervals, as the clouds passed from over them; the dark pines rose before me, and every here and there a broken tree lay on the ground; it was a scene of wonderful solemnity and stirred strange thoughts within me. I wept bitterly; and, clasping my hands in agony, I exclaimed, “Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about to mock me: if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as nought; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.”

These were wild and miserable thoughts; but I cannot describe to you how the eternal twinkling of the stars weighed upon me, and how I listened to every blast of wind, as if it were a dull ugly siroc on its way to consume me."

• French Revolution

• Napoleonic Wars

• Brothers had distinguished careers in the Navy

• Austen followed battles in the newspapers

• Knowledgeable about the Navy (Persuasion)

• Jacobin and anti-Jacobin struggle which went on in England. 

• radical clubs supported by religious Nonconformists

• Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was circulated in British and Irish clubs 

• openly sympathetic to France and therefore increasingly hostile to the British Constitution.

-> Major shift of sensibility, major social changes taking place 

• Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790) 

• French Revolution brought great harm to society. 

• Burke checking libertarian optimism

“Jane Austen partly remains within the ideology of her class and partly (and increasingly) transcends it.”

• life and values of the Royal Navy. 
• a class based on merit rather than inheritance.
• Anne Elliot separates her social values from those of her aristocratic father. 
• gradual change to rigidclass structure.
• Austen’s interest in society: only apparently restricted to upper classes
• Austen: very well aware of the French Revolution and its implications for British society
• Allusions to momentous changes
• Subtle,  missed by generations of critics.

The point is that Jane Austen was brought up on eighteenth century thought and was fundamentally loyal to the respect for limits, definition and clear ideas which it inculcated. Jane Austen was writing at a time when a major shift of sensibility was taking place, as indeed major social changes were taking place or were imminent, and to some extent, she was certainly aware of this.

[…] worth while to search out the bounds between knowledge and opinion; and examine by what measures, in things where of we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our persuasion. 

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

• In her violent condemnation of Darcy and the instant credence she gives to Wickham, no matter how understandable the former and excusable the latter, Elizabeth is guilty of ‘Wrong Assent, or Error’, as Locke entitled one of his chapters. 
• Elizabeth is guilty of “Wrong Assent, or Error” after John Locke by condemning Darcy

• ‘Government has no other end but the preservation of property’John Locke TheSecond Treatise of Government,1690.

• an increasing emphasis on property

• Social order seemed to depend on property 

• ‘rights of property’

• a law of nature

• ‘the rights of property’ could not be maintained only by force

• inculcated into the lower  classes 

• Upper classes must adopt paternalistic mode of behaviour 

• graciousness, justice, generosity and mercy.

• But in addition (to the emphasis on property), and equally important, there was a new emphasis on the need for good manners and morals among the propertied class. Since they did not rule by police and force but rather by a system of deference and obedience, they had to be exemplary – in every sense.