ENG426:Nineteenth Century English Literature (Victorian English Literature)

Nineteenth Century English Literature (Victorian English Literature)

Nineteenth century English literature is generally believed to cover the literary production of the late 1830s to 1901. It is also known as the Victorian English literature, named after Queen Victoria. The early Victorian period witnessed a lot of scientific and technical innovations especially the industrial revolution and colonisation of Africa and the Middle East. The fact that many nations or countries were under the British rule at the time, established Britain as an ―empire‖ and a world power. This status gave Britain the opportunity to expand its territorial powers and increase its economic base. It was the period of Industrial Revolution as industries were established and export business boomed in Britain. These affected the socio- economic and political life of the empire as there were massive movements of people from villages to cities where they believed they could have access to better life. As time went on, there were more people than jobs giving rise to unemployment, poverty, and child labour. Protests and riots became commonplace. Charles Dicken‘s Oliver Twist was set in this historical background.
The novel was the dominant genre of the Victorian period. Among the writers of the period were Robert Browning, Emily Bronte and her sister Charlotte Bronte, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Dickens. Their works featured protagonists who reflected the roles of the individual in the society as they strive for love, social position or success. There was the description of characters‘ surroundings, speeches, actions, depiction of real life issues, plots were linear and coherent; the stories of the heroes and heroines were well finished and ended; and there were unified or well patterned representations of life.
3.2 The First World War and Post-War Disillusionment.
Before the First World War, also called the Great War, though there were bottled-up conflicts and apprehensions, economies were doing well and there was really no great cause for serious distress. In Britain, individuals who amassed wealth following the industrial revolution lived in affluence, and generally, people lived in relative tranquillity and orderliness. The First World War which started in 1914 brought about a chaotic and tumultuous time and ended an era of relative peace and progress in Britain. Until the time of the war, the South African War of 1899 – 1902 was the only experience of major war Britain had. Although many British died fighting in that war (Boer War), the experiences of that war was different from those of the First World War. This was basically because the war was fought in another continent and a different hemisphere. So it was a distant
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experience and the death toll was tiny compared to the death recorded in the First World War. Even while the Boer War was going on in South Africa, the people‘s lives in Britain were not disrupted. But during the First World War, British cities were directly attacked. Also, many people enrolled into the military to fight, leaving their wives and children behind.
Though it was believed that the world war would end quickly, it did not and great financial and material resources were lost. The war ended in 1918, although the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 to officially mark the end of the war. There were records of millions of deaths; young war veterans suffered from psychological disorders and traumas like shell- shock and were unable to function normally after the war; and many women and children lost their husbands and fathers who fought in the war. The relief and happiness of many that the war was over was tainted by these experiences. With the death of many young men and conscription to the military, women became more active and were employed by factories that needed workers. Unlike the situation before the war, this economic power and visibility strengthened women‘s resolve to speak against their subjugation and fight against women oppression.
From the foregoing, it could be deduced that the First World War had a strong impact on the socio-political, economic, psychological as well as emotional state of Britain and its people. The aftermath of the war was incomprehensible and the Post war era was a period of decline in every aspect. Individual companies, homes, places of relaxation, and well-built monuments were destroyed. Women became bread winners in many families. As a result, people lost their faith in all the values, traditions and expectations that they cherished before the war. Authorities were questioned and human relations shifted as so many felt alienated, lost, and helpless. ‗The survival of the fittest‘ was a maxim and the philosophy of existentialism which is characterised by absurdity, alienation, atheism, helplessness, despair and nothingness became a reality. The nothingness and emptiness in life was felt by those who witnessed the destruction wrought by the hands of men and the presence of a Supreme Being who directed the affairs of men but who could not control the world and prevent millions from dying or seriously injured was questioned. Many people became mentally and physically ill, poverty became the order of the day, and gloom was the companion of men. These after effects of the war became the defining factors of modernism as people rejected traditional ways of doing things and began to do things in ways that reflected their experiences and new notions about life.
3.3 The Theory of Evolution
Until the late nineteenth century, people, including scientists agreed that all species were created at the same time. This implied that there was a creator – Supreme Being. To
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explain the fact that some species had gone into extinction, most scientists believed that the biblical story in which God wiped out creatures with flood must have been the reason. Charles Darwin rebuffed these claims in nineteenth century. In The Origin of Species, Darwin explains that human evolved from an earlier kind of animal. He explains that different species had experienced significant changes which eventually led to what he called transmutation. That is evolvement of new forms. By implication, Darwin held that there was no Supreme Being, no creator, no God. This notion became popular among literary writers after the First World War as explained above.
3.4 Psychoanalysis and Twentieth Century English Literature
In 1910, Sigmund Freud promoted a ―strange‖ and sensational theory he had propounded a few years before. It is known as Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis emphasises the relationship between what goes on in the sub-conscious aspect of a human mind and the actions and behaviour of that person. To Freud, certain feelings of people are repressed in their sub-consciousness and manifest sometimes as resistance or in dreams. Though Freud applied this theory in the clinic, it affected the literature of the post war period when writers focused on the sub-conscious of a character and explored the deep feelings and experiences stored in the sub-conscious. The reader is given access to this through the stream of consciousness technique and is made to believe that the things that matter are not seen or touched but are buried in the innermost mind of the person. As you will discover in subsequent units, Twentieth Century English literature writers found this technique useful in their depiction of the chaos and disillusionment of their time. Though Freud‘s concept was based on clinical case studies, psychoanalysis has since been applied to disciplines such as Literature, Psychology, Philosophy, Cultural Studies and Feminist Studies among others.
3.5 Traditional English Literature and its Features
Traditional English Literature: What is known as the English Literature began from the Anglo-Saxon period but became well developed and recognised in the eighteenth century, also known as the renaissance period. Prior to the renaissance period, literature from Europe drew heavily in form and style from the Roman and Greek literary traditions. Events depicted in the literature at the time were derived from mythology, history, religion, and legend. With these sources, literary expressions often conveyed communal senses and ideologies. The Roman and Greek literary traditions had two main genres - drama and poetry.
The renaissance period witnessed the rebirth of literature in Britain. A new form of expression emerged - the novel. As the genres of drama and poetry moved from one country (in Europe) to the other, it adopted new techniques and adapted existing ones. Gradually, Britain developed her own literary tradition (known as English Literature) which is distinguishable from, for instance, French or Russian literature. Apart from the fact that it is written in English, it portrays the socio-cultural, economic, and political experiences of Britain and her people.
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Features of English Literature: Traditional English literature broadly refers to writings of the English people that were over the years common and acceptable as the ―norm‖. The thematic concerns, plot, settings viewpoint, and characterisation styles followed a predictable pattern. For example, it is believed that traditional English literature, especially the novel, drew inspiration from actual life experiences of people in the author‘s immediate environment which in turn produced linear and coherent plot. Traditional literary works represent morality. For example, Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe narrates the life experiences of an individual. The event in the novel was drawn from neither myth nor legend; it has to do with actual life experiences of the British society of the time it was written. The novel shows morality by representing the consequences of inordinate ambition through the life of Crusoe.
3.6 English Literature in the Twentieth Century
Between the renaissance of English literature and the Twentieth Century Literature, there was the Victorian literature which has been discussed in the previous unit. The Victorian writers retained the traditions of the renaissance literature, only that the industrial revolution and the resultant economic and scientific advancement widened the scope of people‘s life experiences and living became a bit more complex. There were still linear and coherent plots. Individual experiences were still being represented. Morals were still serious considerations among the writers, and representations of life, heroes and heroines were done in unified pattern. In the Victorian literature, what basically changed from the earliest tradition was the kind of real life experiences being represented. The complexities of modern life outdid the kind of experiences Crusoe has in Robinson Crusoe. For example, the home Crusoe grows up and the kind of experience he has at the Island of despair are different from the kind of home and experience someone in an industrial British setting would have. Victorian writers represented this kind of new experiences, but do not bother about the inner feelings of the character.
In Twentieth Century Literature, there were moves and breakaway from the traditions that the Victorian had retained. There was also a breakaway from the kind of real life experiences being represented. More complex experiences were occurring making writers rethink deep the present and future of humanity. The Twentieth Century English Literature began in the post-Victorian period and got to its peak with the Modernist movement.
3.7 The Post-Victorian Literature
The Victorian literature ended sometime around 1901 and the modernist movement began after the First World War which ended in 1918 and officially in 1919. This means that there was a literary period between the Victorian and the modernist movement. This literary period is the post-Victorian literature and it marked the beginning of the Twentieth Century Literature. Between 1901 and 1914, Edward VII and George V reigned in Britain. The literary works produced in these periods are most times referred to
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as the Edwardian literature. In the Post-Victorian literature (the Edwardian literature), writers were already forming new ideas that were different from the literary traditions of the Victorian period.
Technological development had advanced more than it did in the years before and experiences became more complex and the British were beginning to observe the adverse effects of industrialisation. The Post-Victorian writers depicted how the beautiful landscape of Britain was being disfigured by the establishment of industries and how industrialisation diminished the lives of the people who struggled to survive in mining towns, for example. This is because with the emergence of industries, machines took over some of the jobs that were usually done by human beings and the lush Greenland gave way to industrial buildings. Instead of linear and coherent plot of the Victorian literature, the Post-Victorian literature employs disjointedness. Disjointedness is not only a style to the writers. It is a way of showing that the life people live in this world is not an ordered sequence. In poetry, the writers used unrhymed verse. Morals were no longer considered. Unlike the morality in Robinson Crusoe, there is no moral in E.M. Forster‘s Howards Ends (1910). The representation of the real experiences of life in unified pattern stopped.
Women became more prominent in the Post-Victorian literature than in the Victorian literature. The industrial revolution of the Victorian period had brought empowerment to a lot of women; instead of just remaining at home as housewives and farmhands, women got jobs in garment industries, food processing industries and so on. As a way of representing reality, Post-Victorian English Literature depicted women in terms of the opportunities they had for self-development in modern world. For example, Helen Schlegel in Howards Ends becomes a single mother with no intention of marrying. She is able to take care of herself without a husband. In short, writers in the Post-Victorian period represented the individual and actual experiences that were in Britain, and which resulted from the high level of economic development and the new ways and social struggles of the people living in Britain. Themes were developed around issues such as the importance of landscape and the earth, the mechanised, industrial world and the role of women in a changing world.
One of the aspects of the Victorian literature that was retained was the representation of heroes and heroines. Writers still saw reasons to applaud individual achievements in different endeavours. Also, Post-Victorian writers failed to consider the inner feelings of characters, they focused less on the mind of the individual; they concentrate on describing the immediate environments of the characters. Post-Victorian writers still used the omniscient narrator who knows everything about the character and his environment. These preoccupations of the Post-Victorian literature only continued to assume other shapes to reflect the actual life experiences of the people after the First World War.
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3.8 Modernism and its Literary Propositions
Modern generally means contemporary so that what comes to mind when modernism is mentioned is ‗new ideas‘ or a time in history when new ideas are in vogue. In literature, Modernism is not a chronological designation; rather it consists of literary work possessing certain loosely defined characteristics. It is a movement and it was the horrors of the First World War and its accompanying atrocities and senselessness that became catalyst for the Modernist movement. In relation to this course, modernism is an important literary movement of the twenty-first century English literature and cannot be ignored or glossed over. Though scholars have never agreed on the specific date of the commencement of modernism, it is gained momentum in the early 1900s and continued to the 1930s.
In the wake of the happenings that took place after the world war ended, writers sought for new ways to represent these new realities. The world according to them had gone through a most confounding experience that had fragmented and disrupted the normal and peaceful flow of life and human relations so, what was written would change and the style of writing too must change. According to Christopher Reed, these writers sought for writings ―appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook‖ (129). Prominent among these writers are James Joyce, W.B Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, D.H Lawrence, T.S Eliot, Aldoux Huxley, Stevie Smith and a host of others.
By definition, literary modernism is the radical shift in aesthetics and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature produced after the First World War. It is basically about modern thoughts, modern characters, modern styles or practices that arose after the change that affected the nature of human life and relationships. Although modernists built upon the progress of the post-Victorian literature, modernism in literature came up as a reaction against Victorian literary tradition. Modernism thus marks a distinctive break from Victorian bourgeois morality as it rejects the 19th Century optimism while presenting a profound pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. It seeks for new aesthetics as against the traditional and old ways of writing because modernist writers saw traditional ways of writing as outmoded and inadequate.
Modernist writers argue that modern life is not symmetrical but is characterized by disjointedness, restlessness, absurdity, alienation, gloom, sadness, and the disruption of the traditionally accepted way of living. To the modernist writers, institutions in which they hitherto believed are no longer reliable means to give meaning to life; they believe that people should turn to themselves to discover the answers to life issues. In order words, the world is better viewed from individuals‘ perspectives. This antipathy towards traditional institutions became the basis of the literary propositions of the modernist writers and this belief found its way into their writings and reflects in the contents and forms of their writings. The whole essence of writing, to the modernists, is to present life
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in its decadence and ugliness, and show that man is disillusioned, confused and marooned in a world that is devoid of order and peace.
The modernist literary propositions are vehemently opposed to the coherent, finished and unified representations of life in Victorian writings, especially the novel. They saw weaknesses in traditional English literature and regarded the realistic literary productions of Victorian writers as mere fact records. The truth, for modernists, could not be obtained from the details of external or environmental descriptions but from the progression of the minds of the characters. Modernist writers were more interested in the individual rather than the society. For them, there was no need for ‗guide books‘ as the mind was sufficient to bridge the gap between the outer and inner realities and as a result, they argued for a change in form and content of literature.
In her essay ―Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown‖, Woolf posits that outward reflections are not enough to arrive at the truth as they are mere facts and that those things hidden and stored in the inner recesses of human mind are most likely to convey truth than those outward reflections. Unlike in Victorian literature where there are heroes and heroines, the modernists do not have heroes or heroines in their works because such portraiture falls short of depicting the complexities of human life and experience. Interior monologue and stream of consciousness are the predominant devices of modernist writing. As a matter of fact, modernists proposed to change the aspects of the Victorian literature that the Post-Victorian literature could not change. They went ahead trepresent more complex realities that reflected the calamities of the First World War.