Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

•subtlety of Austen’s narrative technique

•Austen’sstance towards her main character is not static

• narrative voice endorses Elizabeth’s estimate of Mr Collins, Lady Catherine, and the Bingley sisters

• narrator’s ironic detachment fromElizabeth with regard to Wickham and Darcy

• Readers make the same mistake as Elizabeth before they complete the first reading 

• Problem of knowledge enacted on readers

•Written – stable text

• Elizabeth’s reads it in widely different ways

• Strong prejudice and the decision to discredit

• Rejects letter

• Reopens letter

• Attemptsto be impartial – reappraises Wickham, his relation to Miss King 

• Lingering struggle to excuse Wickham

• Realization, blind, partial prejudiced, absurd.   

• Pride

• Mr Bennet thinks that Darcy “a proud, unpleasant sort of man”. Elizabeth can now respond that  “he has no improper pride” (Ch56).

Tom makes profit “by sending out a bit of cargo to foreign ports” (323; bk. 5, ch.2)

Description of monster: "His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriancesonly formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colouras the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelledcomplexion and straight black lips."

• Novels were used for education in the colonies to teach the indigenous people about England and the English way of life.
• Most of the first English novels take place in a colonial context.
• Critics ignored the role of culture and literature for the production of empire. A lot of colonial discourse strengthened through novels.

Said:

“It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored.”

"I do not mean that only the novel was important, but that I consider it the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study. The prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island. "

• James Cook, 1770: Botany Bay, Possession Island

• Formal European settlement: 1786 British government decision

• Loss of American colonies – need for new penal colony
• Secure prime position of power in south east for purposes of trade and expansion

• First Fleet: sailed 1787, 730 convicts (570 men, 160 women), 250 free persons (mainly naval)

• Difficulties: poor soil, conflicts with indigenous population, diseases

• 1820 British possession extended to whole continent

• 1852 end of transportations to New South Wales

• 1850-1868 transportations to Western Australia

• ~151,000 convicts sent to eastern Australia, ~ 10,000 to Western Australia

• Acceptable way of dealing with social ills: 

• poverty, unemployment, prostitution, crime

• Safety valve to relieve pressure produced by excess population

• People the world with Anglo-Saxon stock

John Macarthur, pioneer of Australian sheep and cattle industry:

• Next to agriculture, sheep/cattle farming the only occupation that defrays the costs of transportation and seeing convicts established in New South Wales
• Moral component: working with the land and with animals = morally beneficent
• Moral component: solitude of agriculture leads to self-examination and reflection; less temptation than when convicts herded together in towns

Colonial hardships: “I lived rough, that you should live smooth”

• Conditions in the Australian bush extremely rough – nothing like rural life in England
• Convict servants received two suits of clothes/year, plus food (wheat, beef/pork, tea, tobacco, sugar); wages at master’s discretion.

• Written in the Crimean War and published as a serial novel.
• Empire represented my Magwitch:
  Resilience, will, self-determination
  Action and hard work, rigorous self-application
• “Action is the first great requisite of a colonist; to be able to do anything, to need the least possible assistance, to have a talent for making shift.” (Samuel Sidney. Sidney’s Australian Hand-Book 40)
• Self-improvement and industry

• Moral component: 
  • working with the land and with animals = morality beneficent
  • solitude of agriculture leads to self-examination and reflection; less temptation that when convicts heeded together in towns.

• They were the most important part of the settlement in Australia.
• Great Expectations shows us AUS as a land for great opportunities.
• “By far the greater part of trade of the Colony is in their hands. … In fact, to them we owe our existence as a Colony” 

• New concern with the quality of water: a new system of sewarage was introduced to London (and other cities). It did not only have significance as a technological innovation but also changed the shape of the city.
• Before the change the shores of the Thames consisted of polluted mud banks. With the new sewage system they also wanted to change the banks of the Thames (-> Embankments).
• The Embankments came to house also new modern technolgies like the tube and the railway. 
• The chaotic impression of the shores was changed into a ordered embankment.
• This shows how the first purely technological change became also one in society.

• fantasies of reverse colonization are more than products of geopolitical fears. They are also responses to cultural guilt. … 
• Reverse colonization narratives contain the potential for powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies, even if that potential usually remains unrealized.
• As fantasies, these narratives provide an opportunity to atone for imperial sins, since reverse colonization is often represented as deserved punishment. (623)
• … reverse colonization narratives are obsessed with the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic. (624)

• The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. 
• Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies; it also drew on the gothic and romantic genres of fiction.
• The genre's popularity was conjoined to an expanding book market and growth of a reading public, by-products of the Industrial Revolution. 
• Whereas romance and realism had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature, they were brought together in sensation fiction. 
• stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties of the Victorian era.
• The loss of identity: common social anxiety. In Britain, there was an increased use in record keeping and therefore people questioned the meaning and permanence of identity. 
• novels such as The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) and Lady Audley's Secret.

Henry James on Collins' sensation novel:

• To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors. 
• This innovation gave a new impetus to the literature of horrors. 
• It was fatal to the authority of Mrs Radcliffe and her everlasting castle in the Apennines. What are the Apennines to us, or we to the Apennines? 
• Instead of the terrors of ‘Udolpho’, we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.

Dracula:

"The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Westernof splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule." (9; ch.1)

“It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains.” (11; ch.1)

Lucy’s hair:

• her death scene: her hair “lay on the pillow in its usual sunny ripples” (146; ch.12)

• In the cemetery, she appears as “a dark-haired woman … bent down over what we saw to be a fair-haired child”(187; ch.16)

• Anglo-Irish civil servant and amateur naturalist

• Bestselling author with controversial text, Social Evolution, 1894

"The first step to the solution of the problem before us is simply to acquire the principle that in dealing with the natural inhabitants of the tropics we are dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the development of the race that the child does in the history of the development of the individual."

“Ah! there I have hope that our man-brains that have been of man so long and that have not lost the grace of God, will come higher than his child-brain that lie in his tomb for centuries, that grow not yet to our stature, and that do only work selfish and therefore small.” (294; ch.25)

“This criminal has not full man-brain. He is clever and cunning and resourceful; but he be not of man-stature as to brain. He be of child-brain in much. Now this criminal of ours … he too have child-brain, and it is of the child to do what he have done.” (296; ch.25)

• Problem: men enlisted in the army not allowed to marry
• Homosexuality illegal
• Prostitution: sexually transmitted diseases (venereal disease)

• “Solution”: inspection of women, confinement in locked hospitals• Opposition became feminist cause
• Repealed 1886

"This petition is comprised in a few short sentences, and sets forth that the possession of property in this country carries with it the right to vote in the election of representatives in Parliament; 
that the exclusion from this right of women holding property is therefore anomalous;
and that the petitioners pray that the representation of householders may be provided for without distinction of sex."

"The fear that a womanly nature could be corrupted or hardened by politics, would strike at the root of our Western and Christian civilization"

"..all these are subjects which already, by common consent, are included in the peculiarly feminine province of home and charity. If the possession of a vote should induce more women to extend their interest to the comfort and happiness of other homes besides their own, it will certainly not have exercised a deteriorating influence on their character."

"it was a part of her amiable and gentle nature always to be light-hearted, happy and contented under any circumstances. Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam."

- beautiful, kind, lovely

Wife

• domestic sphere (home)
• moral and reproductive labour

Sexual Theory:

• sedentary – conserves energy
• nurtures
• biologically less evolved: energy spent physically on continuance of life (menstruation, pregnancy, child-rearing)
• sexually innocent and passive, no sexual pleasure

Husband

• public sphere (commerce, industry, politics)

• productive labour: competitive, economic

Sexual Theory:

• active – expends energy

• fertilises

• highly evolved: capable of abstraction (reason, mental energy)

• sexually experienced and active

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except "suckling their fools"; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world or to others, but that they can throw it up at the first "claim of social life." 

They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their "duty" to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

Now, the ladies being together under these circumstances, it was extremely natural that the discourse should turn upon the propensity of mankind to tyrannize over the weaker sex, and the duty that developed upon the weaker sex to resist that tyranny and assert their rights and dignity.

It was natural for four reasons: firstly, because Mrs Quilp being a young woman and notoriously under the dominion of her husband ought to be excited to rebel; secondly, because MrsQuilp’s parent was known to be laudably shrewish in her disposition and inclined to resist male authority; thirdly, because each visitor wished to show for herself how superior she was in this respect to the generality of her sex; (ch. 4)

‘If ever you listen to these beldames again, I’ll bite you.’

"The ladies were as desperate as the gentlemen; indeed, I think they were even more so. They threw themselves into committees in the most impassioned manner and collected subscriptions with a vehemence quite extraordinary."

"There she lay dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, and grinding her teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them to splinters! Mr. Linton stood looking at her in sudden compunction and fear. He told me to fetch some water. She had no breath for speaking. I brought a glass full; and as she would not drink, I sprinkled it on her face. In a few seconds she stretched herself out stiff, and turned up her eyes, while her cheeks, at once blanched and livid, assumed the aspect of death."

The failure to protect women: 

Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights failing to protect both his sister (who was ejected from the family)

and his daughter (who suffers by the hand of Heathcliff), Catherine and Heathcliff are also not protected by their father

• 1870-1908: Married Women’s Property Acts: until then married women could not own or handle their own property.

• Unmarried women: could hold and handle property, hold land, etc.

• 1857: Divorce and Matrimonial Clauses Act

• 1839: Custody Act

“'August the 4th - Have just heard that B - has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear she was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place tolay her head. What a fall hers has been!'”

“Past & present” Triptych:

• case of adultery
• women cast as sinful Eve
• symbolic paintings in the background
• open door symbolizing where she now has to go
• house of cards which is collapsing
• French literature in the shelf which was seen as morally wrong
• narrative of infection and disease and moral corruption (prostitutes)
• woman is then “cleansed” by committing suicide / drowning

"That little girl is watching it too; she has been standing on just the same spot at the edge of the water"

"telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded some day"

"That old woman in the water’s a witch. (...) But what good would it do her then, you know, when she was drowned? Only, I suppose, she'd go to heaven, and God would make it up to her."

The Victorian fallen woman:
drowning as redemption
forgiveness as reward for expiation of sins

Maggie:
drowning as rehabilitation
proves innocence (after suspected fall)
drowning exposes moral double standard of society

• “fundamentally inauthentic (because arbitrary)”

• “flood imagery as such is not sufficiently foregrounded to act as a prefiguration of

  the novel’s ending”

• "it feels, aesthetically, like a surrender”

• an unprepared ending: it is an objection to the bad faith that contrasts so strongly with the authenticity of everything that comes before.”

• Divine order behind nature (and society)

• Partly based on a religious framework for science; nature is charged with religious significance

• Teleological view of nature/natural history

• Humanity holds a special place in creation, situated between God and nature. “Man” is created in God’s image.

• “Darwin’s chief discursive act” is “the displacement of ‘Man’from the apex of creation. After Darwin, the human being was just an animal like any other. – although, admittedly, the top animal.” (3)
• "Darwin’s denial of teleology. Humans, those upstart beasts, are no longer the final aim of natural history – not to mention a divine plan – but the contingent products of natural selection.”

• Human ascendancy over nature is compromised

• “Man” is a part of nature, not outside it

• “animalisation” of humanity

• Natural selection acts at random

• There is no ulterior purpose to natural history

“The question of questions for mankind – the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other – is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.” (57)

Central questions:

• Where does the human species come from?

• Balance of power humans/nature

• Teleology?