British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

Pictures of parting, farewell, the evanescence of life and love, not unnaturally haunted Keats. Two of the Odes have this as a central theme. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn the permanence of the picture on the Creek frieze, the figures caught in unchangeable attitudes, contrasts with the decay and change of real human activities and natural processes. In the Ode to a Nightingale the apparent permanence of the bird's song, unchanging through the centuries, is contrasted with a world where “Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, / Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.'” The poem depicts poignantly the poet's desire to immerse himself in the bird's song, be at one with its immortality, and shake off the world where “men sit and hear each other groan” (what seems like adolescent exaggeration here was Keats's understandable response to the long illness of his brother). Having considered drugs and wine as means of uniting himself with the bird and partaking of its 'immortality,' Keats chooses “the viewless wings of Poesy” as his means. But even as he imagines himself into the forest glen with the bird, he cannot slough off thoughts of death – the bird can only render the thoughts more acceptable. And as he chronicles the ages past that have heard the self same song, in a passage of unique loveliness (Stanza 7), he climaxes his vision with the song having “Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.” And the double meaning of the last word (long ago, as well as lonely and desolate) brings him back to the real world, as the nightingale's song, like everything else, fades.

To Keats thought and feeling had to exist in unison, the body and mind in equilibrium, and the fruitful tension between the disparate elements in his nature informs the great poems of 1819. He was one of the most sympathetic figures in English literature, and one of the most complete poets.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) published a series of Gothic-horror novelettes when he was in his teens. His first recognized work was Alastor written in 1816. The summer of that year was spent with Byron on Lake Geneva and there Shelley composed two philosophic poems much influenced by Wordsworth. 1819 was the major period of Shelley’s poetic activity. He completed Prometheus Unbound, composed several exquisite, pure lyric pieces, including To a Skylark and The Cloud.

The prominent feature of Shelley’s theory of the destiny of humanity was that Evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled. Prometheus had been a topic of discussion when Shelley met Byron on Lake Geneva, one of Byron’s poems at that moment was Prometheus, but Shelley gives a story a twist of his own, adapt-

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ing a catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views on creation. The theme of Prometheus Unbound is the great one of the moral salvation of man, and the verse has a lyrical quality, unsurpassed in English literature. The images he employs in the poem are always of insubstantial things – winds, dead leaves, sounds, colours, waters. The plot is as follows: the son, greater than his father, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures centuries of torture till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the real events, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the primal power of the world drives him from his usurped throne, and strength, in the person of Hercules, liberates humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of love; it soothes the tortured, and is the hope to the expectant, till the prophecy is fulfilled, and love becomes the law of the world:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing that contemplates;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent:

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Empire, and Victory.

The best qualities of Shelley as a writer are: his intellectual courage and originality; his hatred of oppression and injustice; his excellent sense of humour. His weaknesses lie in his rhetorical abstraction, intellectual arrogance and moments of intensive self-pity.

In the poetry of all Romantics, there is a sense of wonder, of life seen with new sensibilities and fresh vision. This strangeness of the individual experience leads each of the romantics to a spiritual loneliness. They are keenly aware of their social obligations, but the burden of an exceptional vision of life drives them into being almost fugitives from their fellowmen. This sense, present in them all, can be found most strongly in Shelley, who seems even more content amid the dead leaves, the moonlit water, and the ghosts, than in the places where men inhabit. The romantic poets lead the reader to the strange places of human experience, but seldom welcome him in the language of ordinary conversation.

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National poets, like Thomas Moore (1779–1852), an Irishman, contributed much to the development of British Romanticism. Shelley called him the most melodiousness of all lyrics. His love lyric is like a song. Many of his poetic cycles are called melodies (Irish Melodies, Hebrew Melodies). Melody is a lyric reproducing the tune of a folk melody. His political poetry is rather tough and declamatory, it was the reflection of the Irish liberation movement. One of his best poems, Lalla Rukh, is a kind of synthesis: it is written in the spirit of Irish Melodies, but in fact it reflects the Irish struggle. The prototypes were Robert Ammet, the leader of the Irish rebellion of 1803, and his beloved Sarah Carran. Love wins a victory over religious prejudice but doesn’t stop the fighter for independence, and can’t save him from death. The concluding lines are the lament for the dead, though the optimism of the poem is in the justice of the course and the descendants’ gratitude.

His other poem, The Loves of the Angels, is based on an oriental tale, recounts the love of three fallen angels for mortal women and illustrates the decline of the soul from purity.

The great Scot who is an inherent part of English literature and one of the greatest representatives of the Romantic movement is Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the most popular novelist of his day, both in Britain and in Europe, and a powerful literary influence throughout the nineteenth century. He began his literary career as the translator of popular German poems of that day by Bürger and Goethe. At first he established himself as a writer of romantic historical narrative poetry, the collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which began with The Lay of the Last Minstrel

(1805), continued the interest in medieval ballad and romance, which had been popular in the eighteenth century. This interest was with him a genuine one, and had originated in his antiquarian study of Scottish folklore, customs and traditions. From collection he was led to writing, and a series of poems followed which included Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Scott switched to novel writing when he felt that Byron was stealing his audience. Through Scott's pen, Scotland became the romantic country par excellence for the whole of Europe: the rugged grandeur of its scenery, its sturdy, independent peasantry, the bloody yet poignant nature of much of its history all added to its appeal. For Scott really established the historical novel as a viable and worthwhile fictional form, by setting the personal dilemmas of his characters against a background of historical events, and rooting both in the on-going, densely realized life of the whole community. He is at his best, for this reason, when dealing with his own

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country, most notably in the century and a half before he writes: he not only feels most at home in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he feels ties with the life of that time through his ancestors, through stories of them handed down in his family. And though he was by temperament conservative, by politics Tory, he was able to feel instinctive, understanding sympathy for all points of view, political and religious, in Scotland's troubled and quarrelsome history.

After the success of Waverley in 1814 his main energies were devoted to prose fiction, but he continued writing verse romances to 1817. In substance and range they cannot compare with the novels, but they use all the romantic resources of chivalry, warfare, pathos, sentiment, and the glamour of an imagined past. They have had a certain survival value and they are better than most critics, and even the author himself in his most modest moments, considered them to be.

His narrative style was that of a born story-teller. In The Heart of Midlothian we may get impatient as minor character after minor character is introduced, accounted for, given a history. It seems to have nothing to do with a girl accused of child-murder, the main story of the novel. But in the end we realize that the main characters cannot exist without the minor ones, without communal activities, group and religious animosities, class differences, which Scott has depicted. And the characters exist through their language: “I dinna ken muckle about the law,“ says a chorus-character in the novel, “but I ken, when we had a king, and a chancellor, and par- liament-men о'our ain, we could aye peeble them wi' sranes when they werena gode bairns.“

Some other character, speaking educated English, makes no such an impression. A reader senses Scott's total understanding of the Scots throughout their recent history. He was loved throughout Europe for his romantic and leisurely-told stories, but perhaps readers also responded to the dignity that he gave to his own country and its people. In the age of nationalism, especially for small, oppressed peoples, this was something they could feel on their pulses.

Scott's Romanticism lies in his rejection of the eighteenth-century polite tradition and his attempt to write a literature of and for far broader sections of the people. In contrast to the “Gothic” novelists like Mrs. Radcliffe from whom technically he learned a good deal, Scott does not write exclusively from the point of view of the ruling class. There is a romantic element in all his books (particularly those dealing with the Middle Ages), but in his best novels – Old Mortality, The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian, the novels about eighteenth-century Scotland – he makes a serious

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attempt to capture realistically the strains and tensions of the experiences of the Scottish people. And what ultimately gives these books their strength is Scott's feeling for the plight and problems of the Lowland peasantry.

W. Scott grasped, as no other English novelist has done, the organic relationships between man and man, man and place, man and society, and man and his past, the impersonal past of history. At his greatest, he was writing epic, and when one considers certain specific passages, those great scenes of action such as the account of the ambush in Rob Roy, the pitched battles of Old Mortality, or the storming of the Tolbooth in The Heart of Midlothian, one sees immediately, what many novelists owed to him.

But Scott fails whenever he attempts to deal with romantic or sexual love. We see him, rightly enough, as a great romantic writer, indeed, with Byron, the central figure in the European Romantic movement. He was not romantic in Byron's way; passion was alien to him; he writes as a common-sense professional man, whose values are those of a settled society traditionally ordained. Like Fielding and Jane Austen, he accepts the world. He faces life squarely and without illusions; he is bounded, willingly, by the restrictions and limitations society imposes upon the individual. Two things made this possible: his conservatism and the fact that he was a Scot.

Whatever had existed in the past he approached with a sense of what can only be called piety. The past was hallowed because it was the past, and in the presence of what the past had sanctioned his own beliefs were irrelevant. Take, for instance, his description of Louis XI’s adoration of the images in his hat, in Quentin Durward: Scott describes it soberly and factually, he calls it superstition, but he does not sneer, does not laugh, he is content with detailed statement. This is his habitual attitude towards the ritual and ceremony of the Catholic Church, and the very sobriety of his acceptance of a form of religion, which he himself did not share, came in the end to have a revolutionary force. What had formerly seemed to the mass of his British readers profoundly alien, even monstrous, modes of worship were made to appear natural by his acceptance of them and his unheated accounts of them. The religious fanaticism of Calvinism and its resultant distortion and intensification of character he accepted in the same way.

Scott used the supernatural at the folklore level. It is here that the fact that he was a Scott is so important. He was able to use nationally cherished superstition, still actual and operative, and he exposed what he found in its own terms. In many respects The Bride of Latnmermoor is a

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combination of traditionally Gothic and romantic properties. Consider, for instance, the three “witches“ in the churchyard. ~ In a sense, the three sinister old women are conventional figures; they derive pretty clearly from Macbeth. But the derivation is quite transcended by Scott's use of the vernacular: we are in the presence of what we may call the racial; which means that the supernatural has been given a reality it never possesses in the Gothic novel. Scott has taken into his fiction a genuine part of living national experience. He never quite explains his bizarre non-rational, sometimes lunatic figures that haunt his novels and are so important to the working out of his plots, and they are the more powerful for that.

Byron liked Walter Scott’s historical novels so much that he claimed in 1821 to have read each one fifty times, and in 1812 he told Scott that even the Prince Regent “preferred you to every bard past and present”.

A very important role in literary development of the XIX century belongs to women writers. One of them is Jane Austin (1775–1817) who started writing in the Age of Sensibility, lived through the Romantic Period, died before the Victorian Period, but she is closer to realistic literature than any other of her contemporaries. Jane Austen habitually mocked of and was suspicious of Romantic excesses. Her first works were mostly parodies. In Love and Friendship (1790), for example, she makes fun of exalted passions and conventions of sentimental fiction. Not surprisingly she had in her day only a small, select circle of admirers, which included Scott, and throughout the nineteenth century she aroused devotion in a coterie rather than wide-spread enthusiasm. Only now has she become a popular classic, admired for her wit, her commonsense, her insight into character and social relationships. We cannot say that she was a Sentimentalist or Romanticist; her view of life was a realistic one. The main idea of her novels is: men must make the best of their unsatisfactory fates; having made foolish decisions they must endure what can’t be cured. Maybe the only romantic trait in her novels is her loyalty to the idea of romantic love where individual values could achieve high definition, usually in conflict with the social code.

Jane Austen's subject is the country gentry of England: she occasionally went up into the fringes of the aristocracy, almost never lower than the middle-class tradesman. Even servants are seldom individualized in her work. Her novels centre on girls or young women, and always end with their engagement or marriage. Of course her subject matter is limited, Jane Austen took very good care not to move out of areas that she knew perfectly well. It was only thus that her irony could attain due weight. If

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she had applied it to aspects of life she knew less well, it would have seemed flippant and brittle. Pride and Prejudice, which the author herself thought “too light and bright and sparkling,” opens with a typical example of her irony: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife'.

The irony is double-edged, making fun both of enunciators of universal truths and of husband-hunting mothers. The hilarious fun of the first chapter, in which Mrs. Bennet plots to get one of her daughters (it scarcely matters which) married to the newly arrived rich young man, is underpinned by Jane Austen's understanding that Mrs Bennet is dangerously silly, that she is playing irresponsibly with the most important decision her daughters will ever have to make. Elizabeth Bennet is the most loved of Jane Austen's heroines, and the most witty and independent-minded. Being the child of parents both, in their ways, irresponsible, she takes much of the moral burden of the family on her own shoulders. She is fully integrated into the upper-class society of her time, and accepts its values completely, but she often shocks the more shallow characters by her readiness to utter her own opinions: to the more foolish members of polite society strong opinions were themselves ungenteel. The danger for all Austen heroines is that, through immaturity or an undisciplined heart, they will make a wrong decision on the vital matter of a life partner. Elizabeth Bennet is in danger of this when she feels attracted to the handsome and plausible Mr Wickham, with his tale of being romantically wronged, and when she rejects the remote and reserved Mr Darcy. When she comes to accept Darcy's second proposal, the factors that make up her decision are complex: she knows she has totally mistaken his conduct towards Mr Wickham; she has discovered his kindness towards his sister and his dependents; he has aided her family; she is convinced of the soundness of his principles; she has seen his fine estate at Pemberley. In fact later Elizabeth comments to Jane that her love for Darcy began from her first seeing the beautiful grounds at Pemberley, that “at that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” Most of these would be considerations of no weight at all to a Romantic, but then, to Jane Austen the Romantic view of love was a dangerous madness. The factors that make for successful marriages are esteem and affection – added to a dash of self-interest. Jane Austin presents various types of marriages. The Bennets’ marriage is depicted as a bad one, because “respect, esteem and confidence had vanished for ever”. The Gardiners are happy and they bring up a brood of lively children. The union between Lydia and Wickham starts badly – they elope, and Wickham is paid by Darcy to

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marry the girl, so their marriage is a bad one, it lacks love, integrity and money. The other very important theme of the novel is that of pride and prejudice. In depicting this theme Austin shows how the ancient families of land-owning gentry have to come to terms with new middle-class families.

Her other works include Mansfield Park, a strange and moralistic book, Emma and Persuasion.

Jane Austen's view of life is a totally realistic one. She has no sentimentality, no time for emotional excess. She honours the Augustan virtues of moderation, dignity, disciplined emotion and common sense. We can say that she paved the way for women writers of the Victorian Period, though Charlotte Bronte despised Jane Austin for narrowness of vision.

Tasks

1.Why do many critics call Don Juan a novel in verse? Support your opinion.

2.Do you see any common features in the philosophical outlook of Defoe and Byron and its implementation in such works as Robinson Crusoe and Don Juan?

3.Outline the structure of one of Scott’s novels and analyze the novel from the point of view of reader-response criticism.

4.Speak on the development of the eternal literary character in Prometheus Unbound.

5.Here is an extract from the book “York notes to Pride and Prejudice” by Martin Gray and Laura Gray. Do you agree with this point of view? What do you think about feminist criticism?

FEMINIST CRITICISM

Feminist criticism examines the ways in which women (and men) are portrayed in novels, and considers the role of language and literature in relation to a culture and society which, most certainly in the time of Austen, and still nowadays, is dominated and created by men. It discovers groups of women writers, and female ways of writing, which have been ignored by the canon, and aims to re-assess the role of the woman writer in history.

Judgement has not stabilised with regard to Austen. Some feminist readers see her, like Butler (whose study predated the burgeoning of feminist writing), as the purveyor of feeble female acquiescence to the patriarchy. Others regard her as a subversive force for the good, mocking men and

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paying proper attention to the values of the female worlds that she describes.

Julia Prewitt Brown's Jane Austen's Novels (Cambridge, MA, 1979) explores her writing in relation to the cult of the family in the early nineteenth century, and shows how the values of womanhood and domesticity were dignified, strengthened and idealised by this.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1979) surveys women's writing in the light of their exclusion from the male dominated canon of literary greatness. Women writers have to find covert ways of subverting male culture, and Austen illustrates this in representations of female friendship, neurotic older women and weak fathers.

Two other works continue the examination of Austen's novels in relation to her contemporary culture. In Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction (Harvest, Brighton, 1983) Margaret Kirkham examines the contemporary feminist controversies at the end of the eighteenth century. She finds that Austen implicitly espoused feminist views in her beliefs that women share the same moral nature and are as wholly responsible for their moral conduct as men. In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, by Mary Poovey (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984), Austen's ideas of female propriety are compared to those of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Chapter VI

THE VICTORIANS: PART I

Queen Victoria (1819–1901) ruled the country from 1837 and that period in the history of Britain is called the Victorian Age. The moral and religious roots of Victorianism reach well back into the eighteenth century. Part of the vitality which one feels springing from the pages of Victorian novels arises from the newness of their vision of the world. Britain was being rapidly transformed from a rural to an urban civilization. The middle of the XIX century was characterized by rapid development of natural sciences. Darwin’s epoch-making Origin of Species undermined the current beliefs and paved the ground to skepticism and nonconformism. The advanced men of the 1860–70s called themselves freethinkers. The ideologist of this new trend was Herbert Spencer. He endeavoured to create an all-embracing system of sociology, philosophy and

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psychology and to take care that it should rest only on positive knowledge of facts and disregard all abstract calculations. Politically the end of the 1820s was marked by the end of the Industrial Revolution and by Chartist movement – a chiefly working-class political movement between 1837 and 1848 directed against the Parliamentary reform of 1832. This movement had important literary results both in poetry and in prose. A militant spirit of resistance, sarcasm and irony, pathos and rhetorics, strong rhythms and sonorous rhymes go together to give the Chartist poetry a peculiar vigour. The most known names are Thomas Cooper, William James Linton and Ernest Jones in poetry, Thomas Martin Wheeler and Ernest Jones in prose.

“The novel of the XIX century is broader and more complete than that of the XVIII, due to the greater breadth and complexity of the life with which it has to deal – the life of the sea, the army, crime, commerce, labour, politics, the church – and with the special difficulties, dangers and temptations which each career involves”, said J.B. Priestley. The novel becomes the most popular and widely cultivated form of literature, reflecting the authors’ interest in social problems as well as in the problems of man’s personal experience. Literature of that period is often defined as Victorian literature.

In the nineteenth-century novel Charles Dickens is preeminent. In most ways he is the greatest novelist in the age of novelists and the greatest novelist that England has yet produced. After his preliminary Sketches by Boz (1836), he published Pickwick Papers (1836–37), the supreme comic novel in the English language. The comedy is never superimposed for it is an effortless expression of a comic view of life. Dickens seems to see things differently, in an amusing and exaggerated way, and he plunged with much exuberance from one adventure to another, without any thought of plot or design. He was hampered by his age, which demanded sentiment and reticence, but in the space that was allowed to bin – he scamperd as if he knew no restraint. Pickwick Papers, probably the most successful fictional debut ever, looks back in many ways to the past, to a pre-industrial world of stage-coaches, sleepy villages and genteel watering places. Perhaps it was a nostalgia for these aspects of English life, that were even then threatened with extinction, that accounted for some part of Pickwick's fantastic success. In these settings Dickens places a series of comic adventures for Pickwick and his fellow travelers – adventures, which take up all the popular subjects for humour at that time (sport, politics, sexual misadventures, class, and so on) and bear his competitors at

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