Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

“... the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.” (36)

"Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me? Agatha fainted, and Safie, unable to attend to her friend, rushed out of the cottage."

"Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe—gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness."

"superhuman speed"

• Threat of emasculation (Jonathan Harker)

• Threat of corruption (Lucy Westenra, Mina Harker)

• Threat of reverse colonisation (East – West)

• Threat of degeneration

"Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone, why may not another body go? I have seen him myself crawl from his window; why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window? The chances are desperate, but my need is more desperate still. I shall risk it. At the worst it can only be death; and a man’s death is not a calf’s ..."

• The Ecotechnic (c.1660): 
  wind and water as prime movers; wood as a basic material; merchants as controllers; windmills and wagons as tools; typical power unit — a turret windmill of 14 horse power.
• The Paleotechnic (c.1860): 
  coal and steam as prime movers; iron as a basic material; laissez-faire capitalists as controllers; mobile and static steam engines as tools; typical power unit — Newcomen steam engine of 75 horse power.
• The Neotechnic (c.1960): 
  electricity as prime mover; specialized alloys as basic material; governments as controllers; turbines and computers as tools; typical power unit — a turbo-generator of 75,000 horse power.

Technological innovations changed the way people looked at the world and important aspects of their life.
„The world seemed to shrink“ -> travel and communication became faster and cheeper (e.g. railway). Nevertheless, the different ways of transportation coexists.

• In Frankenstein the people travel by carraige or on foot (early and cheap way of travel; also Jane Eyre). -> The journeys take very long
• In Dracula the characters travel by train. ->  shows the progress. This is also only possible, as they are being financed (it was often quite expensive to the extent of the novel)
• In the late century sensation fiction many villains know how to use the new technology and therefore can organize things extremely quickly. This helps them to organize a devious plot without others noticing. 

"By steam-locomotive power distance has been comparatively annihilated, and in conjunction with steam navigation, it has practically reduced the dimensions of the earth"

• Also ‚normal’ people invested in railways, as they saw it as a good new technology and wanted to be a part of it.
• The railways developed very quickly in Britain.

The Penny post

• new system of postage that revolutionized mail. It allowed every letter up to 1oz to be posted to any destination in the UK to be posted for 1 penny. This would make it affordable to the broad masses.
• Before the penny post it was never known how much one letter would cost and it was not affordable to the working classes, as it was very expensive.   -> first modern stamps
• 10 January 1840
• 1839: 76 million letters posted in the UK• 1840: 168 million letters.
• 1850: 347 million letters.

telegraph

• 1st intercontinental telegraph, 1861
• 1890: telegraph connections throughout British Empire --> used in Dracula
• it made the circulation of information very quick, around the whole empire. 
• Modern approaches to Frankenstein and Dracula: In Frankenstein there are new scientific methods involved in bringing back the dead and approaching the body. 

• Phonograph

• Characters are constantly taking notes: this gives the text a semi-scientific atmosphere, as you are making notes to write down your observations in an experiment (also when regarding Dracula as a new species). 
• Harker wants to collect scientific facts and sets a rational discourse against the supernatural things he recorded.
• Being emotional makes Van Helsing exotic and as soon he comes back to scientific facts, he is regarded as ‚sane’ again. 
• But the novel also questions rational discourse:
  „nothing but a mass of type-writing”
  „We could hardly as anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these proofs”.
• Mapping: Maps were used in the 19^thcentury to make things intelligible. Harker does not find a such detailed map in transylvania and but a very old one. This shows how Harker moves into a ‚different age’ as he travels east. 

Jonathan Harker “is blinded to danger by his very modernity, his inability to comprehend the supernatural as a threat.” (Sandner 294)

• The characters are very modern and cannot see anything supernatural anymore, as they are ‚mythical’ creatures. 
• Transylvania does not fit into Harker’s modern world and he has to shift into ‚the old ways’. 

Harker about shorthand:

“It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”

• It is set in the past; just as so many other Victorian novels. Dracula is the only novel set in its own time.
• The Mill on the Floss questions the myth of rural England and that it cannot survive into modernity. 
• The past is renegaded into dreams and is being viewed nostalgically (romantization of the village, that is based on traditional trade and agriculture). 
• -> New technologies that drive on the plot and eventually wipe out rural England. 
• Everything that happens in the plot is based on modernization.
• However, it is shown how there is no possibility for evolvement for women in the village. 
• The returning of the mill does not bring any new technology -> everyone is killed off by new machinery standing for new global capitalism. 

• Radically modern in the way transport and communication is approached (seen in historical context).
• Travel/communication are a mundane part of life and letters are answered immediately.
• Harker’s travel to Transylvania is already pre-arranged by letter and he is going there to accommodate Dracula; the travel would not have been necessary, as everything could have been organized by letter. 

• ‚Bringing back the dead’ is an old topic, but Frankenstein uses electricity to do so.
• It is also an early novel of sci-fi. He is able to make new life out of something dead.
• Despite the modern topics, it does not have a modern atmosphere (Gothic).
• The science is ‚removed’ from the topic.
• The text also frequently refers to an older age (also through alchemy).
• Frankenstein is first oriented towards the past and almost remains a alchemist until the end. 
• Also, letter writing (infrequent answers), traveling my coach and on foot,
• Frankenstein cannot return into his home city, because the gates are closed ànot modern city. 
• Subtitle: The modern Prometheus: indicates modernity, but modernity is removed from the setting through Gothicism.

• “The Hungry Forties” (A period in the early 1840s when Britain experienced an economic depression, causing much misery among the poor)

• Laissez-Faire (the Victorian era spurned governmental solutions to acute social problems: In its fanatic embrace of self-interest, self-help, and atomistic individualism, the period can only be characterized as an ‘age of laissez faire.’)

• Protectionism: Corn Laws (The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and grain ("corn") enforced in Great Britain between 1815 and 1846)

• Critique of high Victorian ideals and normativity – of

• Middle-class family model
• Gender roles
• Progress
• Complacency

• Promotes social and artistic experimentation

• Art for art’s sake

• satirising marriage

• marriage is portrayed as "demoralising"

• a widow is portrayed as "rejuvenated"

The new woman:

• satire
• stereotype of the “manly” woman who inserts herself into the manly spheres
• in pictures: even the dress length is shorter (or she is dressed manly) to emphasize her lack of femininity

• sensual experience of Jonathan Harker
• Vampiress is described as both sweet and bitter, animalistic and beautiful
• "delightful anticipation"
• Breath of the vampiress: "Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood."
• "There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal"
• "I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart."

"Suddenly the horror burst upon me that it was thus that Jonathan had seen those awful women growing into reality through the whirling mist in the moonlight, and in my dream I must have fainted, for all became black darkness.
The last conscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. I must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one’s reason if there were too much of them."

• Term initially used for French literature (Baudelaire, Gautier)

• Characteristics:

• Celebrates intense refinement
• Values artificiality over nature
• Characteristic pose: ennui
• Interested in perversity and paradox
• Explores transgressive modes of sexuality.

• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
• The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what it considered the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. 
• Its members believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite".
• The brotherhood sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art.
• The group continued to accept the concepts of history painting and mimesis, imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art.
• They defined themselves as a reform movement.

• new subjects
• focus on beautiful form -> perfect workmanship
• strong focus on physicality, sexuality
• scandalous poem

• rediscovered the renaissance for art

• stance: "don’t adopt the morality / philosophies of others, test new experiences"

• the pleasure of fleeting moments is valued higher than Victorian morals

• He implores us as readers to seek out and find those experiences which move move us, claiming “To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.” 
• "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end"
• “What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte or of Hegel, or of our own.”
• "Only, be sure it is passion .... Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake."
• These views were far removed from the typical Victorian mindset of reserved formality and repressed pleasure. 
• The Aesthetic movement, being a response to this classification and qualification of enjoyment, is given a battle cry “To be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy... The theory or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience... has no real claim upon us.” 
• This cry went out to many artists and authors still celebrated today such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee who took Pater's advice to heart. -> huge influence on Oscar Wilde!
• While the works of Pater were never as well received generally after the publication of The Renaissance, his legacy of desiring art to be made for the sake of art was continued by those mentioned above and others, and spawned a conversation about the subjective versus objective nature of art which continues today.

• focus on colour and impression

• Pre-Raphaelites (especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti),

• Algernon Charles Swinburne

• William Morris

• Alice Meynell

• Amy Levy

• theorists & critics formulated their theses through essays

• Walter Pater
• Oscar Wilde,
• Arthur Symons
• Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)• “purple prose”

• I can resist everything except temptation.
• Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
• In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
• The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

"One of the first principles of Aestheticism is that all the fine arts are intimately related to one another; hence we see that their poets have been painters, whilst their artists have largely availed themselves of the creations of the poets as topics for their principal pictures and statues."

CYRIL: The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it complete, you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of Art. Are you prepared to do that?

VIVIAN: My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.

CYRIL: Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes here effects from him? (343)

• the diary entries are written about things that haven't even happened yet
• when they then happen in real life, life seems to imitate art (the diary)

Algernon. But was our engagement ever broken off?

Cecily. Of course it was. On the 22nd of last March. You can see the entry if you like. [Shows diary.] ‘To-day I broke off my engagement with Ernest. I feel it is better to do so. The weather still continues charming.’

Algernon. But why on earth did you break it off? What had I done? I had done nothing at all. Cecily, I am very much hurt indeed to hear you broke it off. Particularly when the weather was so charming.

...
Algernon. You’ll never break off our engagement again, Cecily?

Cecily. I don’t think I could break it off now that I have actually met you. (act 2)

Life imitates art: first there was the art, then there was the room built after it

Oscar Wilde as Narcissus

• Oscar Wilde: known for his writings (which were more works of art at times and were also published like that) and also mostly for his persona
• "Books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. If they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation."

• "The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the ‘Æsthetes,’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde."

• "Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works."

• "What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about."

• "Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime."