British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

their own game. The picture of Pickwick himself begins in a hard, satirical, eighteenth-century manner, but Dickens soon endows him with a nineteenth-century heart and (in the sequence in which he is imprisoned after a ludicrous breach-of-promise suit) a nineteenth-century social conscience. But at this stage of his career his vision of the world was mostly sun and sparkle, with very little shade.

As if in reaction against Pickwick's high spirits, his next great success, Oliver Twist (1837–38) is a much darker affair, though the energy of his indignation, the luxuriance of his invention, shows that it is by no means a depressing novel. Dickens's theme is man's inhumanity to child, and his social target is the new workhouses, established on Benthamite principles which laid down that relief of the poor and starving should be made so unpleasant, and should be so meagre, that it would upset as little as possible the natural “balance” of iron economic laws. Oliver is thus not just a representative of childhood, he is a symbol of all suffering humanity. When he escapes, it is to the criminal slums of London, into a “thieves” and “prostitutes” gang led by the Jew Fagin: a terrible world, but one with an energy and warmth about it that makes us wonder if it is not preferable to the workhouse. Periodically Oliver lands up in the bourgeois world, but these episodes suffer from a loss of vigour and sharp observation, and sometimes lapse into gross sentimentality. Dickens does not seem to realize, in making Oliver's goal that of becoming a clean, pious middle-class boy, that it is the middle-classes who save Oliver who have also dictated the social policies that created the workhouses.

Oliver Twist was followed by Nicholas Nickleby, and the two novels gave rise to the didactic trend – literature designed to instruct or persuade. Dickens ordered his imaginative material to illustrate a particular doctrine. He was not the first to discourse about childhood, of course, two monumental works on childhood and education had long been in circulation by that time. One of them was Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education“ (1693), the other was Rousseau's Emile (1762). Both philosophers were concerned with the education of children for political reasons, among other things. Locke's idea was that the child is a “rational creature“ and can be reasoned and disciplined into a virtuous and obedient behavior in its earliest years. Though the concept of a “clean slate“ (tabula rasa) was not new with Locke, he widely drew upon it and stated that each child can be educated and trained by the society and the adults into anything or anybody, because the infant comes into this life as a “clean slate“ upon which one can write whatever he or she wants. This didactic approach was flourishing in the XVIII century England, where the predominant opinion

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of the child's inferiority and the adult's superiority set the tone for education and literature alike.

With Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39) plot grows in importance, and Dickens shows his talent for the melodramatic. Satire is abundant in the Yorkshire school scenes, while much that is best lies in the humour of the theatre of Vincent Crummies and his company. The Old Curiosity Shop (1831) showed pathos transcendent over humour, especially in the death of little Nell: one feels that the only ritual known to Dickens's middleclass audience was the pageantry of funerals. Barnaby Rudge (1841), with its picture of the Gordon Riots, is Dickens's first attempt in the historical novel, and here plot, which had counted for nothing in Pickwick Papers, becomes increasingly important.

Before Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) he made his American journey, and the American scenes in this novel gave offence. Yet all of Dickens is here: Pecksniff and his daughters, Sairey Gamp, Tom Pinch, the gentle, kindly Dickensian figure, Mark Tapley, vigourous and virtuous, a great variety of character and incident all well-managed. Between 1843 and 1848 he wrote his Christmas Books, including The Christmas Carol. The most popular perhaps of all his works, this shows his belief in human kindliness worked almost to mysticism. Dombey and Son (1848) displayed by its increased control of pathos how much his art had developed since The Old Curiosity Shop.

Dickens’ novels are full of the exuberant caricatures that made Dickens so popular, and made his works seem like a sort of moving picture gallery of contemporary types. If in his later works his characters became less lively, this is less because they are “deeper” than because they have to fit into a social vision that is increasingly despairing. In Hard Times, for example, the book is so exclusively centred on Dickens's attack on “Benthamite principles”, as they worked themselves out in an industrial context, that the characters at times seem mechanical reproductions of his earlier creations. We have to realize that because Dickens saw the industrial system as turning men into automates, his characters had in consequence to be robbed of vitality, to become something between men and puppets. It is, significantly, mainly in the novels that spring from a view of childhood that the old energy is maintained. David Copperfield, a heavily fictionalized but emotionally truthful account of his own childhood, contains some of his most engaging caricatures, most notably the gloriously feckless Mr. Micawber (based on Dickens's father) and the repellent Uriah Heep.

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Great Expectations is a later and sadder book, in which its protagonist Pip, in crossing the barriers from lower to middle class, loses the spontaneity and instinctive fellow-feeling of his own class, and can only slough off the corrupting influence of snobbery and class isolation when he discovers that the source of his new wealth, his “expectations,” is a convicttramp he befriended in his childhood, before his loss of social innocence. The novel is connected with David Copperfield in attempting to write a fictional autobiography in the first person, but David is more secure because of his origin. The author uses Pip as a persona – a mask used to project the writer’s personality through another character. Through him the writer can explore his own sense of guilt for past misdeeds and hopes to become a better man. Dickens’ own home, Gad’s Hill, a large mansion on the outskirts of Rochester was the original for Satis House, where the main action takes place.

The novel Great Expectations is one of the best and most complicated books by Dickens. All characters are round – changing and developing in the course of the novel. Usually the writer was criticized for his flat (unchanging) characters. The author raises such important themes as industry and idleness, gentlemen and gentle men, crime and respectability, revenge, parents and children. He sees the links between crime and social oppression and bonds the outcast Magwitch and the exploited child Pip. The theme of Christianity is very important in this novel: Pip betrays Joe, but it is Joe who nurses Pip back to health and pays his creditors. Their reconciliation is that of Christian compassion and forgiveness. Magwitch’s name is Abel, his enemy Compeyson bears the mark of Cain.

Dickens uses symbolism to create the necessary atmosphere. Bleak marshes symbolize crime, guilt and punishment. The great wedding cake is the symbol of Miss Havisham’s sick mind. The ending is also symbolic: after eleven years Pip returns home and finds “Little Pip”, Joe’s son, sitting in the fireplace corner where he once sat. Life continues, and “Little Pip” will have a less troubled life. Dickens also captures the voices of a wide cross-section of society: Pip’s language is polished and urban, Joe’s – common, Miss Havisham’s – self-dramatizing.

Great Expectations is a perfect example of a didactic or education novel because its main focus is an orphan who has to grow up and find a place in a hostile world; it explores the complications and corruptions of the society and contains an autobiographical element. Great Expectations is also a kind of a picaresque novel because it narrates the protagonist’s adventures through all levels of society.

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All these books that contain the kernel of his social vision, are a series of long, panoramic novels written in the 1850s and 60s, in which he analyses the state of England, outwardly so self-confident and successful, in fact so unjust, inefficient and divided. They form the pinnacle of Dickens's achievement. Perhaps the greatest of these is Bleak Ноше (18521853) in which the starting point is a critique of the law – its procrastinations, its inhumanity, the graspingness of its practitioners - and which broadens out into social criticism and social prophecy. Bleak House is the most conscious and deeply planned novel in Dickens' whole work, and shows clearly that his art has moved far from the spontaneous gaiety of

Pickwick Papers.

The basis of Dickens's art, as an observer, as a vivid poet of nine- teenth-century urban life, was his eye for the extreme, the grotesque, the abnormal. The modern embarrassment that averts its eyes from physical or mental peculiarities, that tries unconsciously to iron out the differences between men, could not be further from the distinctive Dickens vision. He seized unerringly on the essential spirit of people, places, atmospheres; he heightened them and he forced the reader to acknowledge the infinite variety and richness of what he saw. It is this ability which sometimes attracts to Dickens the sneer that he can only create flat characters, or caricatures; yet there is often more psychological penetration in a wooden leg or a wall eye in Dickens than in five pages of painstaking characteranalysis in Trollope. Married to this is an unerring ear for speech, for the sub-text behind what we actually say, that makes conversation in Dickens more devastatingly revealing. His characterization by names is superb: the name of Sir Leicester Deadlock (Bleak House) symbolizes social relationship in Britain, Mr Cheerable (Nickolas Nicklby) is a cheerful man. Another device, widely used by the writer, is characterization by means of a detail or by visual display: Miss Jelliby is going to enlighten the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands with the help of the Godspel, but her hair is untidy, her dress is unfastened, so details start symbolizing the typical and become very impressive.

Charles Dickens was the complete artist: the poet and craftsman, the miniature painter and the social prophet, the showman and the statesman. He created no school, essentially had no successors: it is no more possible to be Dickensian than it is to be Shakespearian. Perhaps his contemporaries sensed this when they attached to his name the adjective “inimitable.”

In the late 40s new writers came forward who, if in no way resembling Dickens, could be mentioned in the same breath: Thackeray, the Brontes, Mrs.Gaskell. Of these Thackeray (1811–1863) was the novelist whose

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name was most often coupled with Dickens's, and in the last half of the century he was habitually acclaimed by educated readers as the greater master. This view has not worn well. Today there are certainly to be found critics who urge the claims of Thackeray's other novels, but for the public at large he is the author of Vanity Fair, and probably they are right. Vanity Fair is so superlatively '”taking” that it has distracted attention from Thackeray's other novels – notably Pendennis, The Newcomes and Barry Lyndon. Maybe as a piece of craftsmanship The Newcomes is excellent too. But Esmond, with its sequel, The Virginians, though it has been highly esteemed, as a reconstruction of the Queen Anne period may seem somewhat “phoney” and “made-to-order”.

This novel Vanity Fair was written in 1847–1848 and presents a panoramic view of the English society between 1812 and 1830, the central focus of the book being on polite society of one kind or another. We go as high as the sophisticated aristocracy and as low as genteel, bankrupt poverty, but the bulk of the book concerns the landed gentry, the rich city classes, the officer caste in the army, the flashy hangers-on to the world of fashion.

The scene of Vanity Fair is mainly London, during the close of the Napoleonic war and the next decade. The Battle of Waterloo operates as off-stage machinery producing a critical transition in the development. Major (later Colonel) Dobbin is a Waterloo man. Amelia's first husband was killed there.

Dealing as it does with the years of Waterloo and after, the book captures something of the self-confident quality of a nation that has just emerged victorious from years of struggle and privation. Perhaps this is why, though their conduct is frequently odious or disgraceful, the characters have the vitality that prevents the book seeming merely cynical or depressing.

Thackerey describes it on its title page as “a novel without a hero“. But although its leading male character in no respect resembles a Byronic romantic “hero“, the sober, patient, faithful and affectionate William Dobbin is evidently very dear to his creator. And accordingly he is duly rewarded at long last by marriage to his Amelia – though, truth to tell, one is inclined by then to wonder whether this is a reward so much as the punishment due to Dobbin for being so tolerable and sentimental.

It is a stroke of genius in Thackeray to make the denouncement of the Society come about through the act of the quasi-villainess Becky Sharp, since for all Thackeray can do to stop her, Becky insists upon “stealing the picture” from the moment of her first entry.

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Becky is a wonderful creation – so wonderful, that no novelist – neither Dickens, nor Scott, nor Fielding, nor even Jane Austen – ever created a more complete, more rounded, more real or a more convincing character. She has genius, a proneness to a “Bohemian way of living“, expensive tastes and no income upon which to support them. Her upbringing as the alternately fondled and neglected daughter of a “Bohemian“ pair – an artist and a ballet dancer – had given her an experience beyond her years, an amoral altitude, and an all-too-clear recognition of the fact that to survive she must rely wholly upon herself and her wits.

If the larger outlines of Amelia's life are drawn by men, Becky is one to shape her own fate. That behind the wit, energy and charm she is ruthless, predatory and unscrupulous cannot be denied. The reader can only greet with a cynical smile her claim that “I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.”

Around these two are gathered a superb picture-gallery of saints and sinners, fools and sophisticates, born winners and born losers. The advantage of Thackeray's chosen period is that in his characters of the older generation he can look back to the eighteenth century (the gross, illiterate Sir Pitt Crawley, his free-thinking and theoretically democratic sister Miss Crawley), and in his younger generation he can look forward to the Victorian age (the emotionally constipated younger Pitt Crawley, and his evangelical, tract-writing in-laws). If Thackeray's panorama seems to concentrate on the rogues, hypocrites and fools, it is nevertheless worth noting that at moments of crisis many of his characters can behave with a moral or emotional tightness that we might have thought beyond them: Lady Jane Sheepshanks reveals a backbone of moral steel beneath her vapid religiosity; Becky can do her “friend” Amelia a contemptuous good turn at the climax of her emotional history; etc. In fact Thackeray compounds his picture of the Vanity Fair of his day.

Thackeray’s novels are saturated with a most curious ambiguity that takes many forms. It has been often said that Thackeray was in spirit an eighteenth-century novelist, born out in his time and in the wrong period, that the Victorian age crippled him.

Dickens and Thackeray differ in their attitude towards the world they lived in. Dickens is successful in the description of common people, but he did not know the life of the upper classes, while Thackeray is a brilliant analyst of both middle class and aristocratic society. Taken together, the novels of Dickens and Thackeray give us a remarkably truthful picture of all classes of English society. Thackeray’s realism is different from that of Dickens; it is less connected with fantasy and lyricism, it is more objec-

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tive. While Dickens idealizes his positive heroes, Thakeray describes his heroes more realistically. Dickens is more optimistic than Thackeray, the desire to reform wrongs and champion the oppressed holds the first place in his novels. Thackeray cares more to study and portray society than to reform it, considering that the existing state of things could not be changed. Thackeray’s pessimism marked the beginning of the crisis of bourgeois humanism, which began in the middle of the XIX century and found its full expression in the literature of the second half of the age.

Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) attributed his remarkable output, which included 47 novels, several travel-books, collections of short stories, to a disciplined regularity of composition. In his works he is more concerned with character than with plot. In his Autobiography he writes eloquently on the novelist’s needs to live with his creatures “in the full reality of established intimacy” and the importance of recording change and the effects of time. In 1855–1867 he writes is famous “Barsetshire” series, starting with The Warden and ending with The Last Chronicle of Barset. All the novels are interconnected by their characters and the place of action – the imaginary west county of Barset. By this series Trollope established the novel sequence in English fiction.

The XIX century was rich in women-writers who introduced new themes into their novels. The distinctive note was sounded by the Brontē sisters. It was the success of Charlotte Brontē (1816–1855) with Jane Eyre in 1847 that established the family with the public, and it remained throughout the century the most popular Bronte novel. All Charlotte's novels are technically unconventional, and are frequently subjected to superficial criticism on this account. The most impressive thing about this novel is the way Charlotte blends the most disparate elements from her reading and from her own limited experience to create a novel with a uniquely personal flavour: one can see the influence of Scott, the Gothic novelists, Byron, the French realists; one can see Charlotte's horrifying childhood experiences at Cowan Bridge school, and her desperate need for love. Yet all these are so blended that no page of Jane Eyre could be mistaken for the work of anybody else. To render the central character she uses a variety of devices that in other hands would be melodramatic, crude or merely ridiculous, and by the end we have a picture of Jane – complex, independent, revolutionary – that is as complete a picture as any in literature. Jane is torn between a side of her that demands passion, excitement and fulfillment, and another side, which is attracted by the idea of hard-

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ship and spiritual struggle. The colours red and white, the images of fire and ice, follow her through the novel, right from the miraculous opening, where she sits behind red curtains, reading of the Arctic. The two extremes find human embodiment in the two men in her life, Mr. Rochester and St. John Rivers. In coming to terms with these two sides of her nature, Jane also comes to understand and rebel against the impossible contradictions in what was expected of a woman at that timethe hypocrisies and concealments underlying the Victorian ideal of ”'womanliness.”

Ann Brontē is known for her two major books – Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In both books the author shows decisive but still very feminine women who can manage their own lives.

Emily Brontē is established as the most considerable poet of the three sisters, but she is also known by her masterpiece Wuthering Heights – the novel structured on the inter-relations of two families – the farmers Earnshaws and the country gentry Lintons. The book was a shock to existing morals, because of its brutality, sexual abuse and lack of moral condemnation.

Elizabeth Gaskell was the first woman writer who introduced the working-class theme into her novels. The message of such novels as Mary Barton or Ruth is the need for social reconciliation, for better understanding between the classes. In Ruth the writer poses the problem of “fallen women”, tries to draw attention to them. The heroine Ruth is an unprotected victim of seduction, regains esteem by becoming a heroic nurse during a cholera epidemic, brings her seducer back to life and dies. The book shocked the readers when it was first published.

It was the time when positivist way of thinking was very popular among the British writers. August Comte, a well-known French philosopher, founded this theory by rejecting metaphysics and revealed religion, substituting a cult of Humanity and altruism, based on the motto “Live for Others.” These ideas left a profound impression on the work of Mary Ann Evans, known under the pseudonym of George Eliot (1819–1880). In one of her novels, Felix Holt, she expressed her literary credo: “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.” Herbert Spencer said about George Eliot: “She had a remarkable capacity for abstract thinking, which so seldom goes along with capacity for concrete observation…, such a union of the two as existed in her has, I think, never been paralleled.” Eliot’s early Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) had an immediate success. With Adam Bede (1859) her reputation was made. Eliot’s

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best known novel is The Mill of the Floss (1860), which is largely autobiographical. It represents a searching analysis of the heroine’s inner life, of the forces that made her an outcast in the philistine, narrow-minded community she belonged to. Silas Miner is a story of a weaver, who, suspected of stealing church property and banished from his native town, settles in an isolated hut and suffers a mental stupor until he adopts a little child whose mother dies on Silas’ doorstep. The advent of the child into his life softens him and brings him back to life. In all her works George Eliot wanted to enlarge the possibilities of the novel as a form of expression, to include new themes and to penetrate more deeply into characters.

It would be interesting to know how much nineteenth-century poetry lost because of the dominance of the novel as a literary form. Two novelists at least, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy began as poets, and continued as poets in the intervals of writing novels. Thomas Hardy is not a philosophical poet as is Meredith, though a settled belief in the cruelty of life, and in the pathos of men and women tormented by it, seems to lurk behind all his work. In his many short lyrics, he shows men and women, caught in the tragic irony of circumstances, inflicting cruelty on one another, or pursued by a malign destiny.

Thomas Hardy saw England as an Englishman born in Dorchester, and living for the greater part of his life in the Wessex he portrayed. In 1871 Hardy published his first novel. Desperate Remedies and from that year until the appearance of Jude the Obscure in 1896 he produced novels regularly, of which the most memorable by common consent are The Return of the Native (1878); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final impression was one of a malign Fate functioning in men's lives, corrupting their possibilities of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy.

The subject of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is stated by Hardy to be the fate of a “pure woman”; in fact it is the destruction of the English peasantry. More than other XIX century novel it has the quality of a social document. Tess Durbeyfield, a daughter of a poor villager, descended from the ancient family of D’Urberville, is seduced by Alec, whose parents, with doubtful right, bear the name of D’Urberville. Later she becomes engaged to Angel Clare, a clergyman’s son. But when he knows the truth from her on the wedding night, he hypocritically abandons her and goes to Brazil. Tess appeals to her husband but her letters are unan-

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swered and for the sake of her family Tess becomes Alec’s mistress again. Angel returns from Brasil, repenting of his harshness, but finds Tess living with Alec. Maddened by the second wrong that has been done to her by Alec, she stabs and kills him to liberate herself. After a brief concealment with Angel Clare, Tess is arrested, tried and hanged.

No theory can in itself make a novelist and Hardy's novels, whether they are great or not, have appealed to successive generations of readers. He possessed varied gifts. First, he had supremely the gift of anecdote, the power of inventing lively incidents through which his story could move. He had patience in displaying through the incident the gradual interplay of his characters. His knowledge of country life made vivid the details in his stories, coloured and attractive in themselves, apart from their importance in the secure structure of his theme. Nor would he allow himself to be confined by the reticence, which had limited the art of so many of his contemporaries. In Tess and in Jude the Obscure he brought the novel in England near to the dignity of high tragedy. Nature, which to Wordsworth and the Romantics had seemed stimulating and benign, appeared to Hardy as cruel and relentless. At the same time his kindliest characters are those who have lived away from the towns in a quiet rural life, refusing to challenge the wrathful spirits, which play such havoc with life.

Hardy published eight volumes of poetry. Though he wrote them in his early youth, and at intervals during his novel-writing period, it was in his last thirty years that he turned his back on prose-fiction and devoted himself to his first love, poetry, to whom in spirit he had always remained true. His admirers are divided into those who rank his novels higher and those who prefer his poetry. He himself is on the side of the latter. To be a poet, to give his life to poetry, that had always been his desire, and if he had been quite free to choose it is likely that he would have written no novels at all. A very competent critic, Lionel Johnson, writing in 1896, felt constrained to compare Hardy, not with another novelist but with a great poet – with Wordsworth, may be because both wrote in a language close to that of speech. In later life Hardy spoke with the utmost impatience of those who insisted on regarding him as a novelist rather than a poet, complaining of American visitors who were ready to interrupt any remark about his poems with; “And now. Mr. Hardy, tell us something about your real work.”

Hardy’s poetic heritage contains over 900 poems of great variety and individuality. Probably the most remarkable are in the group of poems written in recollection of his first wife (“Poems of 1912–1913” in the collection Satires on Circumstance). He experimented constantly with

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