British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

rhythms and stresses and verse forms, disliking and avoiding any facile flow.

But his poetry was also influenced by folklore, popular ballads and tales to such an extent that some of his poems are frank imitations of ballads and songs; they are traditional in structure and metre, like his poem The Division (1893), a simple love lyric written in the ballad stanza:

Rain on the windows, creaking doors,

With blasts that besom the green,

And I am here, and you are there,

And a hundred miles between.

In A Broken Appointment the language is literary abstract, the rhythm is quite different, the syntax – complicated:

You did not come,

And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. –

Yet less for loss of your dear presence there

Than that I thus found lacking in your make

That high compassion which can overbear

Reluctance for pure kindness’ sake

Grieved I when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,

You didn’t come.

Speaking about Victorian poetry, it is necessary to mention one of its most prominent representatives, Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), whose art and outlook were deeply influenced by English Romantic poets, especially by Wordsworth and Keats. The prosaic and mercenary spirit of contemporary life drove him to romantic idealization of the past and to the utterance of rather vague and inconsistent estheticism. The first collection of his poems to achieve great success was the volume of Poems (1842), which included such well-known composition as The May Queen, The Lady of Shalott, Ulysses and many others. In 1855 Tennyson published one of his best poems, Maud, a monodrama in sections of different metres, in which the narrator, a man of morbid temperament, describes the progress of his emotions: his growing love for Maud, his triumph at winning Maud, his own flight abroad and ensuing madness, and his final re-awakening to hope in the service of his country.

The poem Maud grew out of a short poem, published in 1837, and is chiefly celebrated for its lyrical passages. The longing and passion that characterize the whole of the poem are fully expressed in the final stanza:

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She is coming, my own, my sweet;

Where it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat,

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

Music, word-painting and partiality for minute detail are the chief characteristics of Tennyson’s poetry.

Tasks

1.Enlarge on the title of the novel Vanity Fair by Thackeray.

2.How does Dickens make us laugh? Speak on the peculiarities of his humour and satire.

3.Comment on Dickens’ descriptions of places and people’s physical characteristics in David Copperfield and Great Expectations. What is their role in the novels?

Great Expectations originally had two endings. In the ending we know Pip and little Pip go to the ruins of Satis House where Pip meets Estella in the winter evening mist. They agree to remain friends apart, but as the moon rises, the mist disperse, Pip can see “the shadow of no parting with her”. In the first, discarded ending, the two meet briefly in a busy London street and go their separate ways. Which ending suits best the purpose and the mood of the novel and why?

4.Here are examples of several critical approaches to Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. Do you agree with all of them? What do you think about each of them?

THE STRUCTURALIST APPROACH

Structuralism takes many forms, but the emphasis is on the material from which the novel is made, rather than its content. For example, such an approach might concentrate on the plots in which Pip finds himself and the narrative strategies that Dickens uses. Rather than concentrate on Pip as a coherent “character”, the emphasis would be on how he, and others, are constructed for specific purposes from traditional literary roles. Dickens does not create from scratch; he has to use the available literary material at hand. Anny Sadrin has an interesting chapter in her book on Great Expectations which analyses the hybrid nature of Dickens's narrative

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showing how it overlays a realistic plot with a romantic one to great ironic effect.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH

Great Expectations has always been a favourite text for psychological analysis. Pip needs a father and mother, and is the victim of several surrogate parents. Not for nothing does Hamlet, however comically, feature in this novel. The substance of the novel may be seen as Pip's search for an identity through a lost father figure, and eventual acceptance of his lowly, unhappy origins. Peter Brooks's essay “Repetition, Repression and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot” examines the way in which the structure of the novel is symptomatic of Pip's repression. He shows that Pip must be “cured” of plots.

THE FEMINIST APPROACH

Feminists would not see Pip's version of events as neutral or unbiased but a product of a male point of view. They would examine this text in the light of Victorian attitudes to women, and Dickens's in particular. They might see Dickens's treatment of Mrs Joe, Estella and Miss Havisham as evidence of his own troubled relationships with women and repressed hostility towards them. Claire Tomalin has filled in an important missing context to the later fiction in her study of Dickens's relationship with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, which feminists have found useful in their efforts to revise traditional readings of his novels.

(from “York notes to Great Expectations” by Nigel Messenger)

5.Does the prose of Victorian women-writers differ from that of menwriters? Why do you think so?

6.Here is an extract from the poem Maud by Tennyson. Read it and answer the questions:

–What are the feelings conveyed by the stanzas?

–Is there a contrast in the wording of these stanzas?

O let the solid ground

Not fail beneath my feet

Before my life has found

What some have found so sweet;

Then let come what come may,

What matter if I go mad,

I shall have had my day.

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Let the sweet heavens endure,

Not close and darken above me

Before I am quite sure

That there is one to love me;

Then let come what come may

To a life that has been so sad,

I shall have had my day.

Chapter VII

THE VICTORIANS: PART II

The Victorian period was not a homogeneous literary period. Despite its later reputation as an age of solemnity, the Victorian Age produced a remarkable amount of humorous, as well as absurd and eccentric prose and verse. It was a kind of a revolt against Victorian stagnation. A mental unease and a tendency to melancholia characteristic of Tennyson were substituted by nonsense – a kind of fantastical writing which is almost a minor genre in English literature. The first collection of this kind was written by Catherine Sinclair (1800–1864) – Nonsensical Stories about Giants and Fairies. With this fairy tale she, in fact, created a new genre – that of nonsense stories, in which joke was combined with eccentricity. Sinclair’s fairy tale is full of “mad pranks an merry jests”, the heroes are grotesque figures. Grotesque is an artistic device, which interweaves the fantastic with the real and is characterized by fantastic exaggeration.

Edward Lear (1812–1888) is one of the major representatives of this tradition. He was a zoological draughtsman and a landscape painter until he came under the patronage of the earl of Derby, for whose children he wrote A Book of Nonsense (1845) in which he created his own upsidedown world of absurdity, puzzle and fantasy, defying any common sense. The book was followed by the publication of Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871). Edward Lear popularized limerick – a form of comic verse epigram consisting of five lines with the first, second and fifth lines rhyming and the third and fourth lines rhyming. It is said to be derived from a refrain, “Will you come up to Limerick”, chanted during party games involving the invention of nonsense verse. Here are two examples of Lear’s limericks :

Limericks are closely connected with macaronic verse – verse made up of languages muddled together for comic effect. Later nonsense was absorbed in the XX century into modernist movements like dada – poets arranged words into illogical patterns, and surrealism, the adherents of which considered that art should grow out of confrontation with the unconscious mind.

Lear’s poetry has flexible rhythm and is full of witty puns. One of the most famous books of the XIX century – Alice in Wonderland - is rooted in Lear’s Book of Nonsense.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898) is widely known under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll. He was a lecturer of mathematics in Oxford. His most famous book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was first related by word of mouth to distract Alice, a little girl of seven and her sisters, the daughters of one of his friends, during a boat trip from Oxford. Alice grew restless, having nothing to do, and begged for a story “with plenty of nonsense in it”, and so Charles Dodgson, speaking to the children, began with the words which were to become famous all over the world: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do!” His next book Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There followed in 1871. These two books rank among the best in the world literature for children. The author loved children and designed the books for them, not about them. His imagination is intellectually inverted. Philologists and linguists have been writing about this book since its first publication, attracted by its lack of sense, fun, puns, neologisms, parodies on the one hand and mathematical exactness, deep psychological characteristics, truth to life in the descriptions of characters on the other hand. These two books started a new trend in English literary fairy tale – that of a dream-story, which first appeared in Germany (Hoffman’s A Nutscracker) and in Russia (Pogorelsky’s Black Hen). Gilbert Chesterton, who is not only the author of famous detective stories about Father Brown, but also of such fantasies as The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man who was Thursday: a nightmare, wrote about

Alice that when Victorians wanted to organize vacations, those were intellectual vacations, a kind of shelter, in which monsters turned into peaceful home pets. It was nonsense for the sake of nonsense; they were enjoying

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security, as they knew that no wars or revolutions were threatening them; on the other hand it could be an escape from dull reality. Chesterton also wrote that there was something from duality in the book, though without the interference of demonic forces; Dodgson amputated his head and not his heart, and with the help of this operation he found the mystery of aspirations of many stable Victorians to anarchy.

Drama was represented by comic plays of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911), though they were more than comic, attacking the vices of the time.

William Gilbert found his true genius in comic opera containing much social satire. He met Arthur Sullivan, an English composer, in 1869, and it marked the beginning of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, for which Gilbert wrote librettos. He was a great verbal rhythmist.

If the drama of the early nineteenth century was mainly represented by irregular spectacle, melodrama and farce, the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan marked the return of intelligence to the theatre and prepared the audience for comedy of Oscar Wilde and, later, of George Bernard Shaw.

Oscar Wilde was an excellent playwright. He brought into the theatre an acute and brilliant wit, while his care for style helped to clear the drama of verbiage and to make its dialogue keen-edged and clean-cut. He was an adherent of the Aesthetic Movement of the last decades of the XIX century with its cultivation of “Art for Art’s sake” and its dangerous separation of artistic activity from the life of its time. His artistic credo is expressed in a short piece A Poet from his unpublished collection Poems in Prose Told by Oscar Wilde: “… when people and children gathered round him to hear of all the wonderful things he had seen that day, the poet said to them: “I have nothing to tell you, for today I have seen nothing”, for on that day for the first time in his life, he had seen reality, and to a poet, fancy is reality, and reality is nothing”.

His most famous comedies are Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895) and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The latter play is a brilliant piece of inconsequent extravagance, many quotations from it have become popular phrases, like: “Divorces are made in Heaven” or “The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life”. Wilde is very good at puns and epigrams. He said about it that the play “…has as its philosophy … that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality”. The Importance of Being Earnest continued to run in London even during the deepest disgrace of the

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author (his homosexuality led him to imprisonment) whose name was removed from the playbills for some time. As a contribution to English comedy, this play equals the plays of Sheridan.

Aesthetic views of Wilde are well expressed in his fairy tales. His biographer Ransom said about them that they were written with Flaubert’s pen, and Andersen could have invented them. Their style is influenced by painting and music: for example the description of the dances in The Birthday of the Infanta reminds us of Goya’s drawings, and the background – of Velaskes’ paintings. His method in writing the tales is very interesting: on the one hand it reflects his aesthetic priorities (nature must be submitted to art, so he compares blood to rubies, not vice versa), on the other hand his tales are social: bright colours become dull, disappear when he describes poor life. The intonation of the tales is flexible: lyricism is blended with irony, sentimentality – with sarcasm. The tales reflect his revolt against himself, he always contradicts himself. In The Young King Wilde emphasizes the social aspect of Beauty: the beautiful things created by hard labour overshadow social injustice. In The Happy Prince he shows himself as a humanist: the Prince gives everything to the deprived ones.

Oscar Wilde expressed his own contradictory nature in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a kind of a Gothic melodrama. Wilde didn’t define the genre of it, so it is often called a romance, an allegory, a symbolic novel or a mythological novel. It is based on the motif of dualism and was influenced by such works as The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde by Stevenson, Vivian Grey by Disraeli, Edgar Poe’s William Wilson, Gogol’s Portrait and of course by La Peau de Chagrin by Honoré de Balzac. But the novel is not an imitation of these works, it is an original piece of art. The narration is based on the tradition of romance, which was revived in the end of the XIX century. The protagonists reflect the controversial unity of Wilde as an artist. Lord Henry is Wilde’s interpretation of Mephisto. He says right things, but in fact these things are very dangerous, they assert individualism and voluntarism. Basil says that Henry only pretends to be a cynic, being ashamed of his virtues, but it makes him a threat for the others. Basil is rational and selfish, he tries to keep Dorian for himself, exercises his influence by words and deeds. His portrait of Dorian is not only the implication of abstract beauty, but also of the secrets of Basil’s soul. Dorian experiences the crucial change of his ego, becomes a spectator of the death of his own soul. His limited view of arts and literature gives birth to his primitive instincts.

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In 1895 Oscar Wilde was imprisoned. His mood of that time, the summary of his life and outlook are expressed in his last two important works: The Ballad of the Reading Gaol and De Profundis. The latter means “out of the depths”, the first two words of the Latin version of Psalm 130. De Profundis is often called the author’s confession. We can define it as a novel: there is a conflict of a genius and the commonplace; the structure is that of a discussion. The author generalizes the ideas, introduces quotations from outstanding books, his own aphorisms and paradoxes. The book has all the traits of an autobiographical novel.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is best known as a writer for children. His most known book Treasure Island started as a game with his stepson. One can say that the author widely used the fabula of The Golden Bug by Edgar Poe. It is partially right. There are not so many plots in world literature, but every writer (if he is not a plagiarist) treats them in his own way. Plagiarism suggests dishonest borrowing. Stevenson did not deny that he borrowed a parrot from Defoe’s The King of Pirates, the scenery – from Washington Irving’s books, and that Captain Kidd and George North were the prototypes for his hero. The writer was a sensitive stylist and a born storyteller. His story was so persuasive that there appeared an article asserting, that Stevenson himself was a smuggler and pirate known under the name of Geoffrey Bonce. The main idea of Treasure Island, as well as of Black Arrow or The Master of Ballantrae is the struggle between good and evil.

In the novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Stevenson raises the problem of dualism – there are two personalities in every man. He exposes evil that often wins. Stevenson is also the author of many poems including A Child’s Garden of Verses.

In poetry of the late Victorian period it is necessary to mention Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), a highly intelligent man, well-educated, up- per-class in background, who became a real shock to bourgeois morality. He was a member of Pre-Raphaelite circle, which proclaimed a return to truthfulness and simplicity of medieval art, the lush sensuousness of his verse was combined with religious feelings. His most famous poems are

Hymn to Proserpine, Dolores, Triumph of Time. In these poems he demonstrated his preoccupation with de Sade, masochism, femmes fatales and repudiation of Christianity. For example, Dolores is a hymn to perverse and cruel sensual delights. In 1866 Swinburne wrote one of his most beautiful poems, A Forsaken Garden:

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In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed

Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead.

The beauty of this poem is in its verbal music, the free flow and richness of words and in symbolic value of the picture drawn. The neglected garden grown all over with weeds and thorns, is a symbol of a wasted life and lost illusions. It reflects the author’s melancholy views: life is fleeting and only the process of destruction eternally repeats itself. Swinburne masterfully plays with the sound of words: “an inland island” presents a delicate interplay of sound, meaning and image. The rhythm creates the impression of mournful monotony. So he concentrates more on form, considering that only form can give aesthetic pleasure.

Tasks

1.What are the main tendencies in the development of Victorian prose and poetry?

2.Give your opinion of nonsensical literature. Why did it develop rapidly during the Victorian period?

3.Analyze Carroll”s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass from the structuralist point of view.

4.Many Russian poets tried to translate the poetry of Robert Lewis Stevenson. Here is the translation of The Land of Counterpane, made by V. Brysov. Do you think the translator managed to preserve the vividness of a child. What can you say about the translation of metaphors, the preservation of the rhythm?

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5.Discuss the theme of dualism in the works of Stevenson and Oscar Wilde. What can you say about the development of this theme in the works of Russian writers of the XIX century?

6.Here is Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. How does it reflect his contradictory nature? Find the proof in his works.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban * seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

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