The representatives of the victorian age

CHAPTER TWO. THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE 2.1.Victorian respectability and other the features of of the Victorian age
Victorian respectability: The extremely religious bigotry of the Queen Victoria tended to shift the attention on respectability: everyday language had to be adapted to a respectable way of life and some words, which were not considered proper, were replaced by others, for example chicken breast became white meat. All that could seem sinful had to be avoided, even the legs of some tables, very similar to a woman’s leg, were considered provocative and were covered by leg covers. Middle-class women had to conform to the domestic role of the “Angel in the house”. Their rights were restricted: they couldn’t go to university, they couldn’t inherit property if there was a male child in the family, they were mostly taught to be good wives. Their novels couldn’t be published unless they had male pseudonyms. The so-called “fallen women”, that is adulteresses, unmarried mothers, prostitutes were condemned by a hypocritically establishment that instead accepted the middle- and upper- class men who privately had mistresses. The most important institution was the Family. It was dominated by the ‘Master’, that is the father. According to a famous saying, “the husband and wife are one and the husband is that one”.The most powerful class was The Middle Class. It was divided into the upper middle class, which included industrialists, bankers, businessmen, lawyers and members of the professions, and the lower middle class, which included shopkeepers, commercial travellers, post office servants, civil servants and clerks. The upper middle class had the economy in their hands and controlled the policy of the Government.
Literary background
The Age is today looked upon as one the most significant point of reference of British history and culture. The term Victorian is associated with cultural activities: art, furniture, architecture and so on.
The Victorian Age can be compared to the Elizabethan Age: both periods saw women at the head of monarchy and they both were rich in literature.
If the Elizabethan Age was the Age of Drama and the Romantic Age was the Age of poetry, the Victorian Age was The Age of the Novel. A lot of Novels were produced and the whole period was characterized by the constant growth of the number of readers.
Victorian novel: being the period too much long, we have to divide it for convenience into Early Victorian Novel, including the novelists who wrote between the 1850s and the 1870s, and Late Victorian Novel including the novelists who wrote from the 1880s to the turn of the century. To the first group belong Collins, Dickens, the three Brontë sisters, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray and Trollope while the most prominent novelists of the second group were George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.⁶
It was achieved thanks to the publication of novels through the installments and the diffusion of lending libraries. Before 1820, following a tradition started by Walter Scott, novels were published in Three Volumes and were sold at a high cost, a crown and half, and only the wealthy people could buy them. The methods of the monthly installments, that is the publication of single chapters sold together with a magazine at the very low price of a shilling, proved very successful and made it economically convenient for writers to write novels.
The installment modified the structure of the novel because it gave an episodic structure to the plot, obliging the writers to find devices and stratagems to catch and hold the reader’s attention. One of these devices was summoned up in Wilkie Collins formula: ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’. As we can see, it is the same technique used nowadays by modern soap operas on television: at the end of each instalment, when the situation was near a climax, they suspended the narration to increase the readers’ curiosity and make them wait for the following instalment. The magazines, too, increased their readers among the lower classes and that created the popular appeal which will bring to the literary production later defined as Mass Literature.
Early Victorians understood the importance of setting their novels in their contemporary England because they knew that the average Victorian reader expected to read a realistic book with characters he could recognize in and with a story that could provide him an escape from his everyday routine life.
Another limit of the Victorian novel was the moral religious roots of Victorianism which imposed severe limitations to what the early Victorians could write. They had to follow the rules established by Methodism, set by The Wesley Family, which forbade a novelist to deal with many subjects such as sexual immorality, sexual deviance, prostitution and so on. They could not run the risk of loosing their family audience because there was the habit for families to gather together, children included, to read the novel aloud.
Several types of novels were produced: Sensation Novel, dramatic, full of melodrama, mystery, crime and innocent victims (Collins and Dickens); Imaginative Romantic novel, a mixture of romanticism and realism with a touch of sensational and Gothicism exploring extremes of passion and violence(the Brontë sisters Charlotte and Emily); Fantastic novel (Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland); Humanitarian or Social committed Novel denouncing the abuses and evils brought about by industrialism (Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot – Mrs Gaskell, portrayed the “falling women” in sympathetic light expressing the possibility of their moral rehabilitation while George Eliot condemned the superficial idea of “silly novels by lady novelists” and explored the many contemporary social topics: unmarried mothers, marital problems and social marginalisation); Domestic Novel or Novel of Manners that dealt with everyday routine life. They had conventional plot and characters and were richer in psychological analyses than the other novels (Trollope and Thackeray).
LATE VICTORIANS: The period during which Late Victorian Novelists wrote their novel was marked by a gradual anti-Victorian reaction. The early Victorians felt a social and moral responsibility to portray society in a realistic way denouncing its injustices but they also expressed faith in progress. In Late Victorians, instead, faith in progress and society begin to recede and the novels deal with the growing crisis in the moral and religious values. They did not identify themselves with their age as the early Victorians had done, and attacked the optimism of their previous predecessors. In literature all this resulted in a sort of realism which led the writers to reject any sentimental or romantic attitude and to focus above all in the clash between man and his environment, illusion and reality, dreams and their fulfilment. Individuals were alienated from the world and felt powerless to alter their destiny. In their new attitude, some of them were affected by Naturalism which had developed in France following the theories worked out by Charles Darwin which saw man only like a creature conditioned by heredity and environment.
On his On the Origin of Species by Natural selection, studying similarities among different animals in different geographic areas,Darwin maintained that species are not immutable but they undergo a process of modification from ancestral species through evolution: the strongest individuals adapt to nature and survive determining a natural selection. This led him to think that man might descend from the animal world through different stages of evolution.
After Darwin’s book, the traditional Christian belief found itself in open conflict with modern science. The truth of parts of the Bible had already been challenged by German scholars who had analyzed the Bible as a text of history rather than a sacred text. D.E.Strauss had claimed that the portrait of Christ in the gospels was based on a myth rather than on historical facts and Feuerbach had argued that Christianity was a myth created by man in order to satisfy a deep need to imagine human perfection. In the same period new discoveries in geology and astronomy cast doubts on the accuracy of the book of Genesis: the world, it seemed, had not been created a few thousand years before but millions of years before and not in six days. However it was Darwin’s book that was the real cause of anxiety. The ideas about Natural Selection and the struggle to survive seemed to confirm man’s worst fears that Nature was really a soulless and pitiless mechanism. Worse still was for some Christians the interpretation of Darwin in his work The Descendant of Man of the Monkey Theory: if God had created man to his own likeness, what was God’s real image.⁷
The most important late Victorian novelist was Thomas Hardy, whose novels show a pessimistic tragic view of the world. Many of his novels caused a scandal and one, Jude the Obscure, was even burned and banned.
In the Victorian Novel we have also to mention the Colonial Novels which are set in Britain’s colonies and consist mainly of popular adventure novel for boys. They showed the colonizers as heroes who helped the natives. The most important representative was Rudyard Kipling.
The pre raphaelite brotherhood: it was an association of painters and writers, founded in 1848, which advocated a return of art to the simplicity of medieval Italian painters before Raffaello. The birth of the movement was seen as an answer to the materialism of the Victorians and its conventions. It was an answer to the importance for the Victorians of success and wealth with very little concern in the arts which appeal to the heart and soul: poetry, painting, good writing and so on. Similar movements had already been founded in the first part of the century in Germany, France and Belgium. In 1850 the Pre-Raphaelites published a literary magazine, The Germ: thoughts towards nature in Poetry and Art. They believed that Art must be faithful to nature and have a moral purpose. Stressing the supremacy of Art over all other intellectual activities, the Pre-Raphaelites paved the way to the Aesthetic Movement.
Aesthetic movement: It was a literary movement developed throughEurope. The leader of the English Aesthetic Movement was Walter Pater, but the most prominent figure was Oscar Wilde. In England it was the most typical aspect of the reaction against Victorian materialism and utilitarianism which thought that happiness could be secured by legislation, mass-production of goods and changes in the machinery and accessories of life.
The Aesthetes broke with the convention of the time. They were connected with a similar French movement, The Parnassians, and adopted Theophile Gautier’s slogan Art foe Art’s sake, that is to say Art had no reference to life and couldn’t have a moral purpose, a commercial value or be useful; it only needed to be beautiful to justify itself. The outstanding example of the aesthetes’ withdrawal from life was Huysman’s A Rebours in which the hero, Des Essaints, tried to create an entirely artificial life revealing the beauty of evil and decay.
The Aesthetes gave free verse to imagination and fantasy, imitating the Romantics. They reversed the idea that Art had to imitate life and stated that it was life that had to imitate Art. They took their theories and attitudes to the extremes and applied them to their lives, living an extravagant exciting disorderly and unconventional bohemian life.
Eventually Aestheticism was tinged with Hedonism, behaviour based on the belief that pleasure was the main aim in life, and degenerated into what was better known as Decadentism.
Decadentism was marked by a sort of extremism. Disregarding the simple genuine values of life and disdaining mediocrity, the Decadents cut themselves off from the masses. They avoided contact with reality and looked for an escape not in nature, but within themselves and with the help of artificial paradises created by drug, where illusions replaced reality. They studied the poems of Charles Baudelaire, above all Les Fleures du Mal, and Huysman’s novel A Rebours which was considered as their Manifesto.
Victorian poetry: Even if Victorian Age is identified with the Novel, it also produced poets of some standing. The most part of them still had, however, an essentially Romantic character as for tastes, tendencies towards fantasy, sensibility and style. As Victorian poets, they express their doubts and conflicts on Victorian society and criticize its emphasis on science, progress and materialism at the expense of spiritual sentiment. Among the Victorian poets the most important were Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Mathew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Tennyson is considered a great poet of his time. In his poems he expressed the pessimistic mood of the time. He considered doubt as the root of his inspiration and was greatly concerned with the moral and social values of Victorian society.
Browning is remembered for having adapted the dramatic technique of the drama to his poems in the form of the dramatic monologue. Through it Browning succeeded in penetrating the depths of man’s unconscious and the working of the mind.⁸
Arnold’s poems express a very deep melancholy and sadness. He did not like the social reality of his time and attacked the middle class materialism and narrow-mindedness. He called the period he lived in “an age wanting in moral grandeur”.
Hopkins was a man of his time and his poetry expresses the anxiety of the Victorian soul and the devotion to the beauties of the natural world. He is nowadays remembered because he was an avant-garde who broke away from the conventional use of the poetic language and was considered an innovator.