VICTORIANISM

Queen Victoria – 1830 - 1901

 Periods
• 1. Early Victorianism (1830 – 1848)
Taking over of the political power by the middle-
classes. The Industrial Revolution. Urbanization.
Materialism.
2. Middle Victorianism (1848 – 1870)
Relative stability, C. Darwin : The origin of Species
(1852) – theory of evolution
3. Late Victorianism (1870 – 1900) – decline of V.
Values. Rejection of pragmatism and materialism.
Comeback of aestheticism – decadentism (the cult
of beauty)
 Victorian concepts
• 1. The Idea of Progress
The mechanical age. Loss of humanitic values, of tradition
2. The Concept of Time
Temporal (concrete time)/ eternal (religion) and public time (objectiv cronological)/
subjective time (the way each individual perceive time)
3. The Passion for the Past
The past was definite and it couldn’t be changed. Future is ambigous. Diaries,
autobiographies.
4. The picture of life
The V. novel presents the picture of life in a given society against a stable background
of social and moral values. Novelists represented society as they saw it.
5. Women’s rights
No rights to vote, to own property and didn’t have access to education. Inequality in
marriage.
6. Age lead by high moral purpose
 Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte (1847)
• AntiVictorian novel with modernist elements
• Romantic
• Gothic
• Victorian readers found the book shocking and
innapropriate on its descpription of
passionate, ungoverned love and cruelty and
the work was virtually ignored.
• The Destructiveness of a Love that never
changes. Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion
for one another. Nelly criticisez both of them
harshly, condemning their norms and
conventional morality.
• Two parallel love stories : the first half of the
noel centering on the love between Catherine
and Heathcliff, while the less dramatic second
half features the developing love between young
Catherine and Hareton. In contrast to the first,
the second ends happily, restoring peace and
order to Wuthering Heights and Thruschross
Grange.
• Young Catherine and Hareton > involves growth
and change. Catherine and Heathcliff > shared
perception that they are identical. Their love
denied difference and is strangely asexual.
• Vision of life as a process of change
• The precariousness of social class
• Modernist, romantic, gothic
• Innapropriate because of the cruel story
• 2 narrators : Mr. Lockwood and Nelly
• Multiple points of view
• Fine attraction for self-knowledge
• Gothic > manifestation of the past (ghosts)
• Love driven by passion / Inner world, not the
exterior
• Heathcliff > romantic character destined to
suffer, to be the victim of misery : make other
victims to take part to his misery.
• The traditional differnce, antithesis between
good and evil crosses every limit with
Heathcliff > full of hatred wild man versus
county gentleman destroyed by his love for
Catherine.
• Modern love struggle – highly individual
poetic vision
 David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens (1849)
• Victorian novel
• Realistic
• Bildungsroman
• autobiographic
• A novel based on his early life experiences.
Like Dickens, David works as a child, posting
labels onto bottles. David also becomes first a
law clerk, then a reporter and finally a
succesfull novelist.
• Dickens acutely observed this phenomena of
the Industrial Revolution and used them as the
canvas on wich he painted David Copperfield.
• The condition of the weak > abused and
helpless. Dickens focused on orphans, women,
and the mentally disabled to show that
exploitation
• Draws on his own experience as a child to
describe the inhumanity of child labor. His
characters suffer punishment even though
they are morally good people.
• Equality in marriage – Dickens criticizes
characters who attempt to invoke a sense of
superiority over their spouses.
• Wealth and Class – In Dicken’s time, many
people believed that poverty was a symptom
of moral degeneracy and that people who
were poor deserved to suffer because of
inherent deficiences. > society’s unfairness
• Not all poor people are absolute noble, and
not all rich people are utterly evil. Dickens
does not paint a black-and-white moral picture
but shows that wealth and class are indicators
of character and morality
• Realist writer. Child labor. Education. Orphans.
Legal system. Industrialization. Autobiographic.
Bildungsroman. Industrialization. Poor class vs.
rich. The quest for identity. DC – “his favourite
child”. Realistic novel > shows the real society
of that period, describe the V. present, the
social class. Criticizes his society. Good and
evil. Women’s rights. Cruelty of the society.
 The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde (1890)
• Antivictorian novel
• Late-victorian
• Gothic fiction
• The center of the novel : dark desires and
forbidden pleasure.
• Late-victorian-gothic-fiction
• Explored the darkest recesses of Victorian society
and the often disturbing private desires that
lurked behind acceptable public faces.
• Relation between art and beauty. Terrible
pleasure of a double life.
• DG, once he becomes aware, his portrait will
bear the scars of his corruption feels free to
ignore the pious morality that pervaded the V.
era
• The ability to have the best of both worlds :
the continued acceptance of his peers and the
ability to fulfil the basest desires
• Lord Henry makes the link between the
criminal and the respectable citizen clear.
• The very definition of decadence
• The painting playing a sinister role in Gothic
fiction
• The supremacy of Youth and Beauty.
• In a society that prizes beauty so highly, youth and
physical attractiveness become valuable
commodities. Beauty and youth remain at utmost
importance at the end of the novel – the portrait
is, after all, returned to its original form – the
novel suggests that the price one must pay for
them is exceedingly high – Dorian gives nothing
less than his soul.
• The superficial nature of society – a society that
prizes beauty above all else is a society founded
on a love on surfaces
• Art as a mirror. First principle of aestheticism > to
show beauty.
 Middlemarch
by George Eliot (1871)
• Victorian
• Realist
• Modernist
• Representing the world adequately means
representing its very ordinariness, and the
novel project of realism is – in resistance to
conventional art – to dramatize the value of
the ordinary. The strategy of what has been
called George Eliot’s “moral realism” is
deliberately Wordsworthian, to evoke the
romantic side of familiar things, but the
project is moral as well as aesthetic.
• Characters neighter good nor evil
• In Middlemarch education and money “greatly
determine” the characters’ lives and
opportunities, and Eliot take as her central topic
the unfit preparation of women for life.
• Portrayal of Dorothea is somewhat contradictory.
Dorothea represents the modern movement in
feminism. She wants to break out of the
traditional role of subervience and is interested in
intellectual gain above all things. While the
obvious feminist novel would focus on the
advancement of Dorothea, Eliot instead pairs
Dorothea with a man that doesn’t appreciate her
feminism.
• Mm represents the lives of ordinary people,
the spirit of nineteenth-century England
through the unknown, historically
unremarkable common people.
• Rapid industrialization – social mobility is
growing rapidly with the rise of the merchant
middle class for life. Complex social world.
• Each individual occupies a point in this web,
affecting and affected by the other points
• Representation in great detail
• No single point in the web and no single
world-view reigns triumphant
• Moreover, Eliot's many critics
found Middlemarch to be too depressing for a
woman writer. Eliot refused to bow to the
conventions of a happy ending. An ill-advised
marriage between two people who are
inherently incompatible never becomes
completely harmonious. In fact, it becomes a
yoke. Such is the case in the marriages of
Lydgate and Dorothea. Dorothea was saved
from living with her mistake for her whole life
because her elderly husband dies of a heart
attack. Lydgate and Rosamond, on the other
hand, married young.
• Two major life choices govern the narrative
of Middlemarch. One is marriage and the other is
vocation. Eliot takes both choices very seriously.
Short, romantic courtships lead to trouble,
because both parties entertain unrealistic ideals
of each other. They marry without getting to
know one another. Marriages based on
compatibility work better.
• Eliot illustrates the consequences of making the
wrong choice.
• Dorothea > She is restless within the domestic
sphere, and her stifled ambitions only result in
unhappiness for herself and her husband.
• Eliot's refusal to conform to happy endings
demonstrates the fact that Middlemarch is
not meant to be entertainment. She wants to
deal with real-life issues, not the fantasy
world to which women writers were often
confined. Her ambition was to create a
portrait of the complexity of ordinary human
life: quiet tragedies, petty character failings,
small triumphs, and quiet moments of dignity.
The complexity of her portrait of provincial
society is reflected in the complexity of
individual characters.
 Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy (1895)
• Antivictorian novel
• Tragic
• Is a tragedy that describe Victorian society’s
opression of the human spirit / Jude Fawley’s life
• Jude resigns himself to death and in turns loses
his family, he loses everything, eventually he dies
alone.
• Hardy unequivocally shows that Jude’s
Romantism is destructive because it distors his
vision of reality; ensuring that he acts neither
rationally nor practically. But Jude gains Hardy’s
symphaty for his resistance in the face of
continual disappoiment and far his entuziasm to
keep trying to recapture his ideas.
• From the opening pages of the novel, Hardy shows
us that not only does Jude have a strong
imagination, but that there is a disparity between
his imaginative world and the real world. The
strenght of Jude is imagination, is romantic but what
is unromantic about his imagination it is unfounded
in reality.
• Novel attacked the institutions > higher education,
social class and marriage – a new openness in
marriage laws
• Critical reception of the novel so negative
• It introduces one of the first feminist characters in
English fiction> the intellectual, free-spirited Sue
Bridehead – Hardy is famous for his tragic heroes
and heroines and the grave, socially critical tone of
his narratives
• Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university
in Christminster, but his background as an orphan
raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead
into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by
the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard
Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude
was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a
young woman named Arabella, is tricked into
marrying her, and cannot leave his home village.
When their marriage goes sour and Arabella
moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to
Christminster at last. However, he finds that his
attempts to enroll at the university are met with
little enthusiasm.
• Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries
not to fall in love with her. He arranges for her
to work with Phillotson in order to keep her in
Christminster, but is disappointed when he
discovers that the two are engaged to be
married. Once they marry, Jude is not
surprised to find that Sue is not happy with
her situation. She can no longer tolerate the
relationship and leaves her husband to live
with Jude.
• Both Jude and Sue get divorced, but Sue does not want
to remarry. Arabella reveals to Jude that they have a son
in Australia, and Jude asks to take him in. Sue and Jude
serve as parents to the little boy and have two children
of their own. Jude falls ill, and when he recovers, he
decides to return to Christminster with his family. They
have trouble finding lodging because they are not
married, and Jude stays in an inn separate from Sue and
the children. At night Sue takes Jude's son out to look for
a room, and the little boy decides that they would be
better off without so many children. In the morning, Sue
goes to Jude's room and eats breakfast with him. They
return to the lodging house to find that Jude's son has
hanged the other two children and himself. Feeling she
has been punished by God for her relationship with Jude,
Sue goes back to live with Phillotson, and Jude is tricked
into living with Arabella again. Jude dies soon after.