Movements and Trends in 19th - & 20th-Century English Literature

-
, ,
Movements and Trends

in 19th- & 20th-Century English Literature

19& 20
Movements and Trends in 19th- and 20th-Century English Literature
19& 20
ISBN 978-960-603-171-7
Copyright , 2015
Creative Commons
3.0.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/gr/
Movements and Trends in 19th- and 20th-Century English Literature
Authors: Yiannis Kanarakis, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Effie Yiannopoulou
Notes on Authors
Yannis Kanarakis is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English Literature and Culture at
Aristotle University, Thessaloniki. He has taught courses on poetry, fiction, aesthetics, literary theory,
Romanticism, the Victorians, and on writing research papers. He has presented several papers at international
conferences and his articles have appeared, among others, in The Pater Newsletter, in The Victorian Network
and in several edited volumes. His chapter on Victorian Philhellenism is included in Anglo-American
Perceptions of Hellenism (2007), published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. His research interests include
literary theory, the relation between aestheticism and commodity culture, prose poetry, historical and
philosophical fiction.
Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou is Associate Professor in English Literature in the School of English, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki. She has been teaching and publishing on Realism, Modernism, and the English
novel, as well as on feminist and body theory. She has contributed to the Reception of British and Irish
Authors in Europe in the volumes on Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. She has also co-
edited two special journal issues, Wrestling Bodies (Gramma 11, 2003) and Experiments in/of Realism
(Synthesis 2, 2011), and three collections of essays: The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh: Cultural and
Theoretical Returns to the Body (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the
Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Bodies, Theories, Cultures in the Post-Millennial Era
(Thessaloniki: University Studio Press, 2009).
Effie Yiannopoulou is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Theory at Aristotle University,
Thessaloniki. Her publications are in the field of twentieth-century womens writings and have appeared in
book collections and international journals. She has co-edited Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), two special journal issues, Intimate Transfers (The European
Journal of English Studies 9.3, Autumn 2005) and Wrestling Bodies (Gramma 11, 2003), and three
collections of essays: The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh: Cultural and Theoretical Returns to the Body (New
York: Peter Lang, 2007), The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the Body (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), and Bodies, Theories, Cultures in the Post-Millennial Era (Thessaloniki: University Studio
Press, 2009).
Preface
This textbook is designed for all English literature students as a main resource for their classes on Victorian,
Gothic, Realistic, Modernist and Postmodernist literature. It discusses movements and trends in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, but it is by no means exhaustive. Each chapter focuses on a major literary movement
or historical period, providing necessary contextual information and examining texts as products of a certain
historical time. The book is supplemented with a large array of illustrations, extensive references to primary
and secondary material, analysis of key texts, textboxes with definitions of terms and links to electronic
sources that aim at enhancing crucial background material.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
The Gothic and Its Revivals Yannis Kanarakis ............................................................................................... 9
1. Introduction: Its alive!!!!!...................................................................................................................... 9
2. Gothic Origins ........................................................................................................................................... 11
3. Towards a Gothic Sensibility .................................................................................................................... 13
3.1 Ballads ................................................................................................................................................. 13
3.2 Elizabethan Drama .............................................................................................................................. 13
3.3 Graveyard Poetry ................................................................................................................................. 14
3.4 The Sublime......................................................................................................................................... 14
4. Walpoles The Castle of Otranto ............................................................................................................... 15
5. The Female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe ........................................................................................................ 19
6. The Terrors of French Revolution ............................................................................................................. 23
7. Romantic Gothic........................................................................................................................................ 25
8. Victorian Gothic ........................................................................................................................................ 29
9. Modernist Gothic ....................................................................................................................................... 38
10. Postmodern Gothic .................................................................................................................................. 41
11. Conclusion: The End (?) .......................................................................................................................... 44
Work Cited .................................................................................................................................................... 45
Selected Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 47
Useful Links on the Gothic............................................................................................................................ 50
Chapter Two
Victorian and Anti-Victorian Voices Yannis Kanarakis ............................................................................... 51
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 51
2. The Historical Context .............................................................................................................................. 52
2. 1 The Early Victorian Period (1830-1858): A Time of Upheavals ....................................................... 52
2. 2 The Mid-Victorian Period (1848-1870): Prosperity and Optimism ................................................... 53
2.3 The Late Victorian Period (1870-1901): Decline and Pessimism ....................................................... 54
3. Industrialism and Individualism ................................................................................................................ 55
3.1 The Condition of England ................................................................................................................... 55
3.2 The Social Problem Novel................................................................................................................... 59
3.3 Victorian Individualism and Collectivism ........................................................................................... 60
3.4 Individualism and Poetry: The Dramatic Monologue ......................................................................... 65
3.5 The Self and the Community in Victorian Fiction .............................................................................. 66
3.6 Escaping Industrialism: The Return to the Past and Medievalism ...................................................... 67
4. Domesticity and the Woman Question ...................................................................................................... 69
4.1 Two Separate Spheres: The Cult of Domesticity ................................................................................ 69
4.2 The Woman Question and the Matrimonial Causes Act ..................................................................... 73
4.3 Womens Representation in Poetry by Men ........................................................................................ 75
4.4 Womens Representation in Literature by Women ............................................................................. 77
4.5 The New Woman and the Decline of Domesticity .............................................................................. 79
5. Religion and Evolutionary Theory ............................................................................................................ 83
5.1 Crisis of Faith ...................................................................................................................................... 83
5.2 Evolutionary Theory and Charles Darwin ........................................................................................... 84
5.3 Science and Art: Realism .................................................................................................................... 90
5.4 Degeneration: From Progression to Regression .................................................................................. 91
6. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire .................................................................................................... 93
6.1 The Rise of the British Empire ............................................................................................................ 93
6.2 Imperial Decline .................................................................................................................................. 94
7. Culture and Aesthetics............................................................................................................................... 95
7.1 Culture and Anarchy............................................................................................................................ 95
7.2 Aestheticism: The Cult of Beauty ....................................................................................................... 97
7.3 Decadence.......................................................................................................................................... 100
8. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the 20th and 21st Century .............................................................. 103
9. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................... 105
Works Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 106
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 108
Chapter Three
Realisms: The British Novel in the Nineteenth-Century Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou ................................... 111
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 111
2. Cinderellas Foot in the Real World ........................................................................................................ 112
3. Le Ralisme: Realism in Art .................................................................................................................... 113
4. Realism and the Novel............................................................................................................................. 117
4.1 Feudalism and Medieval Romances .................................................................................................. 117
4.2 The Rise of the Middle Class ............................................................................................................ 118
4.3 The Characteristics of the New Genre ............................................................................................... 120
5. George Eliots Realist Manifesto ............................................................................................................ 124
6. The Defective Mirror............................................................................................................................... 128
7. Literalism, Photographic Realism, Materialism ...................................................................................... 129
8. Tell All the Truth, but Tell it Slant: The Paradox of Realism.......................................................... 134
9. Translucency vs. Polysemy in Language ................................................................................................ 137
10. The Dialogic Character of the Novel..................................................................................................... 140
10.1 Centripetal vs. Centrifugal Forces ................................................................................................... 140
10.2 The Novel as a Hybrid Genre .......................................................................................................... 141
10.3 Point of View................................................................................................................................... 142
11. Female Realism ..................................................................................................................................... 143
12. Realism: Reactionary or Progressive? ................................................................................................... 144
13. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 148
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 149
Chapter Four
Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction(s) Effie Yiannopoulou ................................................................... 152
1. Introduction: Terms and aims .................................................................................................................. 152
2. Modernity ................................................................................................................................................ 153
2.1 Modernitys Main Features: An Example ......................................................................................... 154
2.2 The Politics of Modernity .................................................................................................................. 156
2.3 Modern Aesthetics: Realism.............................................................................................................. 157
3. Modernism............................................................................................................................................... 158
3.1 The Principal Assumptions................................................................................................................ 158
3.2 Modernist Epistemology: The Turn Inwards..................................................................................... 159
3.3 Language and Representation in Modernism .................................................................................... 163
3.4 The Politics of Modernist Form......................................................................................................... 168
4. The Postmodern ....................................................................................................................................... 172
4.1 Representation ................................................................................................................................... 173
4.2 Difference and the Subject ................................................................................................................ 177
4.3 Banksys Dismaland: A Bemusement Park ....................................................................................... 180
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 184
Chapter One
The Gothic and Its Revivals

Yannis Kanarakis
Image 1.1 Caspar David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetery in the Snow (1817-19).
1. Introduction: Its alive!!!!!

It is very difficult to define the Gothic as a term. There have been, of course, many attempts to do so but none
adequately embraces its full range which includes many seemingly contrasting works. The term has been
associated with Northern European tribes, medieval ecclesiastical architecture, and figures like Dracula,
Cthulhu and Batman; it has been linked with concepts like the sublime, the uncanny or the doppelganger; and
it has been used to characterize novels like Wuthering Heights, The Beloved and American Psycho, music by
artists like Marilyn Manson, Nick Cave or Siouxsie and the Banshees, movies like Psycho, the Silence of the
Lambs and Twilight, or even contemporary series like Vampire Diaries, True Blood or American Horror
Story, to name but a few. All these seemingly incongruent instances are indicative of a term with a long
historical trajectory that has been constantly shifting as a response to various socio-cultural and economic
factors. In this sense, we might argue that the Gothic defies any definitions precisely because it is itself a term
that is vibrant and non static, a term that refuses to die out, and which, despite its long history, is still []
alive and kicking.
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Yannis Kanarakis
A closer look at the historical conditions that gave birth to the Gothic and resulted in its rise will help
us establish some of its basic parameters which account for its adaptability, persistence and appeal as a
cultural form throughout the ages. The Gothic, as we will see, has been constantly transgressing its limitations
by manifesting a great degree of inclusiveness and experimentation. This is due to the fact that it has been
deeply affected by all major literary and artistic traditions it got in touch with, incorporating and appropriating
elements from them in an unprecedented way and transubstantiating these elements into something new. This
is precisely why it is such a mobile concept and also a vague term that has been self reflexively utilized to
discuss things, emotions or ideas that lie in the twilight, are not, i.e., clear or fixed but still unformed.
The Norton Anthology on the Gothic. Access here
This chapter will be an overview of the long historical trajectory of the Gothic, focusing
predominantly on Gothic fiction and the major shifts that this genre has underwent, through an examination of
landmark Gothic texts and key critical receptions of them. Moreover, by tracing the terms long trajectory
from the Middle Ages to today, we will be able to foreground the way certain Gothic motifs, devices and
conventions have developed and interacted with other genres.
Learning Objectives:
Familiarization with the complexity of the

term.
Familiarization with the literary

conventions and thematic preoccupations
of the genre.
Understanding of the relation between
earlier phases of the genre and its
modern variants.
Ability to detect and correlate the various

cultural expressions of the Gothic.
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2. Gothic Origins
Image 1.2 Karl Briullov, The Sacking of Rome 455 (1836).
Let us begin by considering the origin of the term. Initially, the term was not employed in its literary or
cultural sense, but described a group of Germanic tribes, the Goths, who resided in the Northern parts of
Europe, and destroyed the Roman Empire in 4 AD. During the Renaissance, the revived interest in classical
culture by implication entailed that the Goths were looked down on as savage barbarian tribes that had
defeated one of humanitys greatest civilizations, the Roman, thus initiating the Dark Ages. For people in
the Renaissance, the Goths were identified with the medieval spirit and signified a form of outdated
monstrosity that lacked the finesse of classic Roman culture. The fact that the Goths were tribes that produced
no written culture was considered by highbrow Renaissance literati to be indisputable evidence of Gothic
primitiveness and inferiority.
There was, however, a radical shift in the use of the term during the seventeenth-century Civil War in
England. During the Glorious Revolution, William of Orange became the new protestant King of England by
deposing James II on grounds of his absolutist Catholicism. Through the Bill of Rights, William established
parliament as the ruling power of England in order to curtail Catholic claims to the throne. In this way, he
initiated not only a fundamentally modern type of state, but also, by minimizing royal intervention, the rise of
the mercantile class, which later became the basis for the middle class. The supremacy and validity of the
parliament was based on its historical continuity which, according to many thinkers of the time, could be
traced back to a Gothic past. In this sense, while Catholicism was implicitly associated with a form of
despotism, fanaticism (the inquisition) and irrationalism (belief in miracles), the Gothic came to be associated
with liberty and democracy. It was considered to be the cradle of native institutions while historians of the
time even considered the modern British jury system to have originated in the Goths.
This schematic overview of the terms inception reveals some of its basic and most defining
characteristics that will be an integral part of the term for centuries to come. Right from its outset Gothic
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Yannis Kanarakis
was a very inclusive genre and this is precisely why it was employed for a variety of purposes. It was first
utilized to refer loosely to a collectivity of barbaric tribes of no specific historical, cultural or geographic
origin. In other words, from its origin the term was used as a broad, vague and flexible cluster term that could
incorporate within its bay disparate or even conflicting ideas and traits. As David Punter argues in his seminal
study of the genre The Literature of Terror (1980), ambivalence as a form of transgression has been one of the
most defining characteristics of the Gothic. And, it is precisely this indefinite character of the term that
accounts for its persistence, adaptability and mysteriousness.
Another issue that became prominent right from the start was that the term engulfed, as one of its key
features, a relationship with the past. From the vantage point of the Renaissance, the term signaled barbaric
medieval crudeness that had nothing to do with classical order, harmony and refinement; it represented what
the present had to escape from in order to advance. From a different vantage point, the very same term was
utilized to indicate braveness, nobility, democracy, rationality, order and Englishness. In this case,
primitiveness was obviously invested with positive qualities that highlighted racial, national and Protestant
continuity and superiority against superstitious French Catholicism. This was precisely why the British
statesman Edmund Burke persistently associated the Gothic with chivalric ideals throughout his political
pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in his effort to differentiate native Englishness from
the French temperament which he associated with chaos and anarchy. The Gothic, in other words, involved a
form of relation with the past employed to define the present.
Image 1.3 The exterior of Peterborough Cathedral; An example of Gothic architecture.
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The ideological and political implications of the way the Gothic was employed to interpret the past
can be clearly seen in the eighteenth-century reception of Middle Age architecture. Certain eighteenth-century
thinkers, like Edmund Burke or William Stukeley, associated the ancient monuments scattered throughout
Britain with the invasion of Britain by the Goths and, in doing, so managed to establish a connecting line from
Stonehenge to the ruins of medieval abbeys or monasteries and contemporary cathedrals in order to highlight
the common Gothic heritage of England and Scotland. Many writers and poets in their turn were inspired by
these ruins and the patriotic mythology they evoked in order to describe, or even prescribe, what they
considered to be a glorious past.
The Story of the Goths. Access here
3. Towards a Gothic Sensibility

So far we have regarded Gothic as a historical, political, ideological and racial term. Before turning
to the first major eighteenth-century Gothic novels, however, let us briefly consider certain factors that paved
the way towards the formation of a Gothic sensibility and aesthetic upon which these first novels rested.
3.1 Ballads
Ballads were oral narrative songs that focused on tragic or dramatic events, the origin of which could be
traced back to French Medieval songs. These popular folk-songs were not only full of supernatural
conventions and devices such as, fairies, elves, princes, and witches, but also contained scenes of explicit
violence. The emphasis on suffering and death that these songs foregrounded helped develop a sense of
physicality and materiality, which was deeply amoral and subversive in its essence, and which the Gothic
fully embraced.
3.2 Elizabethan Drama
Elizabethan drama decisively contributed to the formation and

development of a Gothic aesthetic. Drawing on the tradition of
Revenge Tragedy, many Elizabethan plays staged violent
Augustan Literature:
crimes, deviant sexualities, madness and ghostly apparitions.
Shakespeares Hamlet (1600-1601) is indicative of this trend. It The term alludes to eighteenth-
establishes, right from the first two lines, a climate of suspicion century English literature. It was
and suspense, where uncertainty and doubt are the existential called Augustan because it imitated
equivalents of a macabre sequence of events and images that the ideals of Classical Rome as they
are associated with incest, madness, graveyards, poisonings, flourished during the reign of
haunting ghosts, countless murders and a dejected prince emperor Augustus through Virgil
holding a skull in his hand, set against a nation in full disorder and Horace. Apart from
and decay. From A Midsummer Nights Dream (1594-1595), to neoclassicism, other ideals that
King Lear (1605-1610), and from Othello to the Tempest were favoured were harmony,
(1611), Shakespeare utilized a wide array of supernatural balance, universality and formal
conventions as stage and plot devices to seize the audiences strictness. The major writers of this
imagination. Even though Shakespeare was not alone in the period were Alexander Pope, John
Dryden, Jonathan Swift and Joseph
employment of these pre-Gothic devices, he popularized them
Addison.
to a great extent, given the position that he has occupied
throughout the centuries in the canon of English literature and
culture.
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Yannis Kanarakis
3.3 Graveyard Poetry
The Gothic is also prefigured in the works of a group of eighteenth-century poets that included, among others,
Thomas Gray, Robert Blair, Edward Young, James Hervey, Thomas Warton, William Collins, Thomas
Parnell, who are also known as graveyard poets. This school of poetry attacked Augustan decorum, restraint
and rationality, by employing a discourse of intense emotions in order to express anxiety about human
limitation and the futility of life. Their memento mori stance was suggested through motifs that involved
darkness, tombs, medieval ruins, ghosts and melancholy.
Image 1.4 Claude Joseph Vemet, A shipwreck in Stormy Sea (1773).
3.4 The Sublime
Edmund Burkes treatise on the sublime in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful (1757) played a very significant role in the development and spread of Romanticism but also
of the Gothic, because it theoretically validated this emerging sensibility. Following Longinus, Burke claimed
that, unlike the concept of the beautiful, which evokes pleasure when being contemplated, the sublime
generates feelings of awe and terror; it involves something attractive, yet of such intensity, extent or
magnitude that the human faculties fail to fully comprehend, and this, in its turn, generates feelings of pain.
The overwhelming mixture of pleasure and pain that one feels while considering the imposing grandeur of
medieval architecture, the vastness of the galaxy, the concept of God, or even the view from Mont Blanc, is
indicative of what Burke had in mind. The sublime, thus, was the aesthetics of infinity, incomprehension and
terror and comprised the darker other of Enlightenment reason and optimism. Burkes discussion,
furthermore, was one of the first attempts to find a language that would represent fear and to consider the role
of absence, the irrational, and transience in the formation of subjectivity.
The above elements were disparate threats that the Gothic brought together giving them new shape
and meaning, as we shall see. As such, it could be argued that the Ballads, Elizabethan drama, Graveyard
poetry and Burkes theory of the Sublime carried, in embryonic form, what would later develop into a distinct,
an easily recognizable literary tradition; they were the pre-cursors of the Gothic.
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Edmund Burke on the Sublime. Access here
What is the Sublime (Tate). Access here
The Sublime: A Brief History. Access here
4. Walpoles The Castle of Otranto
Image 1.5 This is the first page of Walpoles 1764 edition.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Horace Walpole, the son of the Whig Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, played a decisive role in the
development of the Gothic as a genre. This is not only due to the fact that he published in 1764 the founding
Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, which was a best-seller, but also because he was responsible for
initiating the Gothic revival in architecture by redecorating and reconstructing his house in Strawberry Hill
according to the medieval Gothic style. It is no wonder then that most genealogies of the Gothic begin with
Horace Walpole.
When the prince of Otranto, Manfreds son, dies before his wedding when a gigantic helmet falls on
his head, Manfred sends his wife to a convent and decides to marry his sons unwilling bride, Isabella, fearing
that he will lose the castle should he not ensure a new heir as a mysterious prophecy dictates. Isabella attempts
to escape Manfred by entering the subterranean vaults of the castle and is helped by Theodore, who is the son
of Friar Jerome, the count of Falconara, and who turns out to be the rightful heir of Otranto. As it appears,
Manfreds grandfather got possession of the castle by devious means. In the end, Manfred not only remains
heirless, but also mistakenly murders his only daughter and all pieces of the statue of Alfonso the Great in a
nearby church mysteriously come together to symbolically herald the restoration of rightful ownership.
The Castle of Otranto is the first Gothic novel to have brought together disparate earlier elements and
shaped them into an identifiable and groundbreaking form. Moreover, this is a novel in which one can easily
detect in germinal form what will later get to be the stock devices of the genre. Thus, a closer look at the
novels early Gothic machinery will help us better understand this nascent genre.
One of these Gothic devices can de detected from the title page of the first edition of the book (image
1.5), where it is stated that the story has been translated by William Marshal and, as the preface adds, this is a
translation of a manuscript written in 1529 by Onuphrio Muralto, yet, set at the time of the Crusades, between
1095 and 1243. This device of the discovered manuscript, which has ever since been imitated by many Gothic
writers, was actually also employed by Cervantes in Don Quixote (1605), which, according to many scholars,
comprises one of the earliest novelistic forms. It is not accidental that both one of the first novels and also one
of the first Gothic novels rely on this narrative technique. The device of framed narratives marks a break with
earlier artistic forms, since it foregrounds a more complex relation with the past. In the case of Cervantes, it
seeks to transubstantiate the earlier romance into a realistic present, while in the case of Walpole, the linearity
of history is implicitly under question through a framed narrative that brings together past and present.
Furthermore, this device establishes a form of temporal distance that enables the readers to safely enjoy the
narrative since it is supposed to belong to an exotic, barbaric and Catholic past that could not possibly threaten
the readers advanced present. This intricate handling of the past subsequently implies a more sophisticated
and elaborate worldview that highlights the novelty and modernity of both debut forms. This is precisely why
Ian Watt, one of the most influential critics and historians of the novel, calls the Gothic a sort of a
contradiction in terms since it means the old new (158).
In the preface to the second edition, however, Walpole states that his book is an attempt to blend the
traditions of romance and novel writing in order to overcome the shortcomings of both: the nave reliance of
romance on improbable supernaturalism, on the one hand, and the realistic rigidity and pragmatism of the
novel, on the other. In his attempt to legitimize this mixture, Walpole alludes to Shakespeares work where
imagination and reality are perfectly fused. While doing so, Walpole also changes the subtitle of his book
from A Story to A Gothic Story, probably seizing the opportunity that the term Gothic allowed him to
incorporate contradictory terms, as we have already noted. Thus, this blend of the two genres initiated a
rational outlook on the supernatural, which is probably why most supernatural occurrences in the novel appear
too far fetched to induce terror but are rather ludicrous: murder by a large helmet falling from the sky, a statue
that bleeds or a painting that sighs and walks. Such truthfulness and matter-of-factness, indicated from the
first lines of the novel, is also evident in the coherence and pace of the story from which suspense derives.
Moreover, whereas the preface to the first edition locates the novel in the distant past by presenting it
as a medieval romance, the preface to the second edition, arguing for a new form of writing, essentially brings
the novel closer to the present. Walpole achieves this by emphasizing the fact that the improbable incidents of
his novel can be read realistically as well, as covered allegories of psychological states or political situations
that implicitly allude to the present. Many critics claim that Walpole was influenced in this shift by the literary
trend, that was prominent at the time, of interpreting and understanding medieval romances as dealing in
coded form with historical anxieties of the time. This twist, as such, initiates a determining characteristic of
the genre, according to which Gothic narratives appear to be discussing serious problems in disguised form.
Thus, despite the fact that many Gothic stories are set in an exotic faraway past and involve improbable
16
characters and events, they are actually systematically engaged, in veiled form, with realist or present
conditions and plights.
Another characteristic Gothic device we find in Walpoles novel involves the genres typology of
stock characters. Through its protagonist, Manfred, the novel launches a type of villain, the despotic tyrant,
who will dominate subsequent Gothic narratives. Many critics have read Manfreds tyrannical attitude and his
story of succession and usurpation within a political and ideological framework. A medieval castle, after all, is
a setting with strong political connotations and symbolisms. So, the novel could be seen as a story of an
abusive aristocrat finally being overthrown by Theodore, who does not only happen to be the rightful owner
of the castle, but is also sketched as a modernized type of an aristocrat. As such, the story can be read as a
critique of aristocratic abuse and excess, where the old-fashioned feudal aristocracy is presented as a remnant
of the past that haunts and thwarts modern bourgeois aspirations. In a similar vein, as some critics claim,
Manfreds portrayal can be seen as implicitly alluding to James Stuarts despotic and superstitious
Catholicism, which was brought down by the far more liberal and Protestant William of Orange. In this light,
the revelation that the medieval castle rightfully belongs to Theodore seems to be fully in tune with early
eighteenth-century attempts to reclaim the Gothic past and, thus, establish a form of historical continuity that
is meant to reinforce patriotism.
This specific type of villain can also, quite interestingly, be found in one of the earliest novels in
England, Samuel Richardsons Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), which is a detailed account of the
numerous attempts made by a mischievous master to seduce his young and innocent servant. Of course, Mr. B
is not as malevolent as Manfred, since Pamela manages in the end to change him and morally educate him; yet
it is clear that the first Gothic novel relied more or less on the same plotline that one of the first English novels
also did, which is symptomatic of the close affiliation existing between them. Thus, having been born at more
or less the same time as the novel, from its very beginning the Gothic became its dark other. Unlike the novel,
however, which in its inception aggressively defined itself against older traditions, such as the epic and the
romance, the Gothic welcomed them. Unlike the realist novel, moreover, which was preoccupied with the
factual, the particular, the familiar, and the present, the Gothic turned its attention towards the exotic, the
extraordinary, the unfamiliar, and the past.
Image 1.6 Illustration of the Gigantic Helmet from the 1842 edition of The Castle of Otranto.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Horace Walpole, from The Castle of Otranto
The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy
for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence
reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that
shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through
that long labyrinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with new terror; yet more she
dreaded to hear the wrathful voice of Manfred urging his domestics to pursue her. She trod as
softly as impatience would give her leave, yet frequently stopped and listened to hear if she
was followed. In one of those moments she thought she heard a sigh. She shuddered, and
recoiled a few paces. In a moment she thought she heard the step of some person. Her blood
curdled; she concluded it was Manfred. Every suggestion that horror could inspire rushed into
her mind. She condemned her rash flight, which had thus exposed her to his rage in a place
where her cries were not likely to draw any body to her assistanceYet the sound seemed
not to come from behind; if Manfred knew where she was, he must have followed her: she
was still in one of the cloisters, and the steps she had heard were too distinct to proceed from
the way she had come. Cheered with this reflection, and hoping to find a friend in whoever
was not the prince; she was going to advance, when a door that stood ajar, at some distance
to the left, was opened gently; but ere her lamp, which she held up, could discover who
opened it, the person recreated precipitately on seeing the light.
Isabella, whom every incident was sufficient to dismay, hesitated whether she should
proceed. Her dread of Manfred outweighed every other terror. The very circumstance of the
person avoiding her, gave her a sort of courage. It could only be, she thought, some
domestic belonging to the castle. Her gentleness had never raised her an enemy, and conscious
innocence made her hope that, unless sent by the princes order to seek her, his servants would
rather assist than prevent her flight. Fortifying herself with these reflections, and believing,
by what she could observe, that she was near the mouth of the subterraneous cavern, she
approached the door that had been opened; but a sudden gust of wind that met her at the door
extinguished her lamp, and left her in total darkness.
Words cannot paint the horror of the princesss situation. Alone in so dismal a place, her
mind imprinted with all the terrible events of the day, hopeless of escaping, expecting every
moment the arrival of Manfred, and far from tranquil on knowing she was within reach of
some body, she knew not whom, who for some cause seemed concealed thereabouts, all
these thoughts crowded on her distracted mind, and she was ready to sink under her
apprehensions. She addressed herself to every saint in heaven, and inwardly implored their
assistance. For a considerable time she remained in an agony of despair. At last as softly as
was possible, she fell for the door, and, having found it, entered trembling into the vault from
whence she had heard the sigh and steps. It gave her a kind of momentary joy to perceive an
imperfect ray of clouded moonshine gleam from the roof of the vault, which seemed to be
fallen in, and from where hung a fragment of earth or building, she could not distinguish
which, that appeared to have been crushed inwards. She advanced eagerly towards this chasm,
when she discerned a human form standing close against the wall.
She shrieked, believing it the ghost of her betrothed Conrad. The figure advancing, said in
a submissive voice, Be not alarmed lady; I will not injure you. Isabella, a little
encouraged by the words and tone of voice of the stranger, and recollecting that this must be
the person who had opened the door, recovered her spirits enough to reply, Sir, whoever you
are, take pity on a wretched princess standing on the brink of destruction: assist me to escape
from this fatal castle, or in a few moments I may be made miserable for ever. Alas! said the
stranger, what can I do to assist you? I will die in your defence; but I am unacquainted with the
castle, and wantOh! said Isabella, hastily interrupting him, help me but to find a trap-
door that must be hereabout, and it is the greatest service you can do me; for I have not a minute
18
to lose. Saying these words she felt about on the pavement, and directed the stranger to search
likewise for a smooth piece of brass inclosed in one of the stones. That, said she, is the
lock, which opens with a spring, of which I know the secret. If I can find that, I may escape
if not, alas, courteous stranger, I fear I shall have involved you in my misfortunes: Manfred
will suspect you for the accomplice of my flight, and you will fall a victim to his
resentment. I value not my life, said the stranger; and it will be some comfort to lose it in
trying to deliver you from his tyranny. Generous youth, said Isabella, how shall I ever
requiteAs she uttered these words, a ray of moonshine streaming through a cranny of the ruin
above shone directly on the lock they soughtOh, transport! said Isabella, here is the trap-
door! and taking out a key, she touched the spring, which starting aside discovered an iron ring.
Lift up the door, said the princess. The stranger obeyed; and beneath appeared some stone
steps descending into a vault totally dark. We must go down here, said Isabella: follow
me; dark and dismal as it is, we cannot miss our way; it leads directly to the church of Saint
NicholasBut perhaps, added the princess modestly, you have no reason to leave the
castle, nor have I farther occasion for your service; in a few minutes I shall be safe from
Manfreds rage only let me know to whom I am so much obliged. I will never quit
you, said the stranger eagerly, till I have placed you in safety not think me, princess, more
generous than I am: though you are my principal careThe stranger was interrupted by a
sudden noise of voices that seemed approaching, and they soon distinguished these words:
Talk not to me of necromancers; I tell you she must be in the castle; I will find her in spite of
enchantment. Oh, heavens! cried Isabella, it is the voice of Manfred! Make haste, or we
are ruined! and shut the trap-door after you. Saying this, she descended the steps precipitately;
and as the stranger hastened to follow her, he let the door slip out of his hands; it fell and the
spring closed over it.
The Castle of Otranto (Project Gutenberg). Access here
5. The Female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe
Image 1.7 Catherine Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho (1833), artist unknown.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Another influential trendsetter of the Gothic is Ann Radcliffe.

Radcliffe born the year Walpole published The Castle of Otranto, is
one of the most popular first generation Gothic writers. The Mysteries
Sensibility:
of Udolpho (1794), one of her most successful novels, moves, like
The notion of sensibility was
most of her stories, along the paradigm set by Walpole: it involves a
closely connected with story of usurpation with a well hidden family secret taking place in a
eighteenth-century medieval Southern European setting with remote and mysterious
philosophy and literature, castles that suggest Catholic superstition. A villainous aristocrat is
and involved the display of usually after a virtuous innocent girl without success, however, because
emotions and emotionality as in the end virtue always prevails.
an indication of social rank. Where this novel really
This tradition of the excess of stands out in terms of its
feeling was soon ridiculed predecessors is in the unique way
and parodied by its supernatural elements are resolved Picaresque Novel:
opponents. A typical example in the narrative. The mysteries of
of a critique urged against The Picaresque tradition is
Udolpho are always much simpler
this early tradition was Jane considered one of the
and far more innocent than what earliest novelistic forms; it
Austens novel Sense and
Sensibility (1811). Emily St. Aubert, the orphaned involved the adventures
heroine of the novel, initially and journeys of a picaro,
takes them to be. This is why, that is a low-class
from the start of the novel, character. The fact that the
Emilys father warns her about the hero was a marginal
dangers of overindulging into exaggerating sentimentalism. Radcliffes character, made these
infamous use of prolonged suspense and suggestive atmosphere draw the narratives maintain an
reader, along with the heroine, into imaginative speculation, which is ironic distance towards the
eventually undermined. In an anticlimactic way, through the use of frivolities and follies of the
rationalist explanation, things are safely put back to where they initially society of the time. This
were. Indicative of this pattern is the scene in which Emily, while genre developed in 16th-
century Spain and
burning a mysterious manuscript, reads a sentence from it that triggers
Cervantes incorporated
her wildest fears. Speculating the meaning of these words and re- some of its elements in his
interpreting certain past events, she reaches the terrifying conclusion that masterpiece Don Quixote
she is an illegitimate child, which, of course, as the story establishes, is (1605, 1615). This tradition
definitely not the case. The potential threat of a dark secret about her also influenced early
lineage, thus, is turned into a means of re-establishing familial and English novelists: Daniel
domestic order. Defoes Moll Flanders
In doing so, Radcliffe does not only affiliate the Gothic with the (1722) and Henry Fieldings
then dominant rationalist mode, but also aligns it with the cult of Joseph Andrews (1742).
sentimentality, which involves the portrayal of over-sentimental and
over-emotional characters, whose excessive sensibility is a sign of
refinement, innocence and virtue. By bringing these seemingly
contradictory trends together, in a fashion similar to Walpoles blend of the old and the new romance,
Radcliffe manages to have rationalism control excessive passion as a potential disruptive force that can
overthrow enlightened order. By restoring reason and the middle class domestic values of her heroine,
Radcliffe assigns to the Gothic a moral content which it seems to lack. In this respect, her stories resemble
Samuel Richardsons moralism in Pamela (1740) or Clarissa (1748-1749), where innocent and over-
sentimental young girls are eventually rewarded for remaining virtuous. It is precisely because of this
emphasis on chastity that Radcliffe turns the Gothic from a morally questionable into a serious genre and
manages to evade social criticism and become a very popular and successful author.
Unlike, however, Richardsons heroines, Radcliffes are not solely confined into private spaces, but
occupy the public sphere as well in their effort to get away from threatening suitors. Struggling to surmount
the perils that the narrative subjects her into, Emily is exposed to a series of sublime settings that are usually
associated with male heroes coming from the picaresque tradition, and in the end manages to surpass obstacles
by relying on her own self. In other words, Radcliffes heroines both participate in the conventional domestic
morality fit for women, and also suggest an unconventional conception of female subjectivity that is an
indispensable part of open, communal life. In their attempt to escape the imposing castles of patriarchal
20
tyranny, these heroines enter misty, supernatural labyrinths, overcome hardships and reemerge out in the light
not only with a newly defined self but also with a language of their own, able to articulate female experience.
The Gothic was, after all, one of the first genres that attracted female authors who wrote about and for
a predominantly middle class reading public. Ellen Moers, in her seminal study Literary Women (1977), talks
about a female Gothic, to refer to the tradition established by Anna Laetitia Aikin (or Mrs. Barbauld),
Charlotte Smith, Harriet & Sophia Lee, Eliza Parsons, Maria Regina Roche, to name but a few. In the works
of all these women writers, there is a permeating pattern of an innocent heroine, oppressed by a figure of
patriarchal authority, who tries to reclaim her rightful private domain, a room of her own, and her right to self-
definition. Gothic conventions were utilized by these writers in order not only to denote female plight but also
to suggest the mystery, awe and pain that this new uncharted territory of female condition generated. The
mistiness of Gothic tropes reflects the agonies and struggles female authors had to go through, since the only
language available at the time, the language of patriarchy, could not encapsulate the emotions and thoughts of
women who wanted to express their dissatisfaction with it.
It comes as no surprise then that the Gothic captured at the time the female imaginary to the extent
that it did. Through the language of emotion and the decorum of sensibility, women of all ranks could both
identify with these poor Gothic heroines and also be implicitly taught how to control the disruptive forces
inherent in their feelings. This is precisely the theme of Jane Austens parody of the genre in Northanger
Abbey, a novel she began writing in 1798, when the Gothic was at its heyday, but published in 1818.
Catherine Morlands dream of becoming like one of the popular and fashionable heroines of Gothic fiction is
about to come true wneh she is invited to stay in a friendly estate. To the heroines dismay, however,
Northanger Abbey has no hidden manuscripts or secrets to reveal and there is no mystery in its owners death.
Like Don Quixote, whose perception of the world is shaped by the tradition of romance, Catherine is deeply
influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction, revealing the extent to which this form of literature was
popular at the time for middle class women. Just like Radcliffe, Austen seeks to control this emotional excess
through parody as a means of maintaining a rationalist integrity, synonymous with middle class morality. That
is why, in her novel, excessive emotionalism is considered non-English; it is associated with foreign mentality
and a specific historic event that was threatening for England at the time of the French Revolution.
Image 1.8 Illustration from The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1830 edition.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
Volume 2, Chapter 5
In this extract we witness Emilys reactions as evil Montoni approaches his castle.
Towards the close of day, the road wound into a deep valley. Mountains, whose shaggy steeps
appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the
Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each
other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily
had yet seen. The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she was descending, whose long
shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs,
touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that hung upon the opposite steeps, and
streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive
ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illumined objects was
heightened by the contrasted shade, which involved the valley below.
There, said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, is Udolpho.
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montonis;
for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its
mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the
light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as
the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour.
From those too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness
of evening. Silent, lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown
defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became
more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen,
rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to
ascend.
The extent and darkness of these tall woods awakened terrific images in her mind, and she
almost expected to see banditti start up from under the trees. At length, the carriages emerged upon
a heathy rock, and, soon after, reached the castle gates, where the deep tone of the portal bell, which
was struck upon to give notice of their arrival, increased the fearful emotions that had assailed
Emily. While they waited till the servant within should come to open the gates, she anxiously
surveyed the edifice: but the gloom that overspread it allowed her to distinguish little more than a
part of its outline, with the massy walls of the ramparts, and to know that it was vast, ancient and
dreary. From the parts she saw, she judged of the heavy strength and extent of the whole. The
gateway before her, leading into the courts, was of gigantic size, and was defended by two round
towers, crowned by overhanging turrets, embattled, where instead of banners, now waved long
grass and wild plants, that had taken root among the mouldering stones, and which seemed to sigh,
as the breeze rolled past, over the desolation around them. The towers were united by a curtain,
pierced and embattled also, below which appeared the pointed arch of an huge portcullis,
surmounting the gates: from these, the walls of the ramparts extended to other towers, overlooking
the precipice, whose shattered outline, appearing on a gleam that lingered in the west, told of the
ravages of war.Beyond these all was lost in the obscurity of evening.
While Emily gazed with awe upon the scene, footsteps were heard within the gates, and the
undrawing of the bolts; after which an ancient servant of the castle appeared, forcing back the huge
folds of the portal, to admit his lord. As the carriage-wheels rolled heavily under the portcullis,
Emily's heart sunk, and she seemed as if she was going into her prison; the gloomy court into which
she passed served to confirm the idea, and her imagination, ever awake to circumstance, suggested
even more terrors than her reason could justify.
22
Another gate delivered them into the second court, grass-grown, and more wild than the
first, where, as she surveyed through the twilight its desolationits lofty walls, overtopped with
briony, moss and nightshade, and the embattled towers that rose above,long-suffering and murder
came to her thoughts. One of those instantaneous and unaccountable convictions, which sometimes
conquer even strong minds, impressed her with its horror. The sentiment was not diminished when
she entered an extensive Gothic hall, obscured by the gloom of evening, which a light, glimmering
at a distance through a long perspective of arches, only rendered more striking. As a servant
brought the lamp nearer, partial gleams fell upon the pillars and the pointed arches, forming a
strong contrast with their shadows, that stretched along the pavement and the walls.
6. The Terrors of French Revolution

Starting with the Marquis de Sade, there has been a critical tradition of considering the Gothic of the 1790s as
a cultural response to the political and ideological implications of the French Revolution. As the American
eighteenth century scholar Ronald Paulson argues, in Representations of Revolution (1983), the English
expressed their anxieties about the French revolutionary events predominantly through the Gothic. The
English shock about the events that followed the revolution was typically dramatized in Gothic fiction through
the feelings of sublimity that young innocent heroines like Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho felt, while
witnessing the excessive violence, despotic oppression or unlawful acts of usurpation of continental villains
like Montoni. The resolution of these tales, where domestic values were firmly reaffirmed also, became an
implicit way of reminding readers of Protestant and patriotic values. The recurring Gothic setting of remote
and mysterious Catholic castles, on the other hand, became a very fitting locus, which evoked not only the ills
of the ancient aristocratic regime that actually brought about the revolution, but also suggested the violent
deaths of French nobility that followed the outbreak of the revolution and the social upheaval and disorder that
they triggered. The Revolutions emblem was, after all, the Bastille, the castle-prison which was stormed in
1789 by an angry mob, thus initiating the Revolution.
The literary illustration of this scene is nowhere more evident than in Matthew Lewis The Monk,
probably the most scandalous of all early Gothic novels, which was published in 1796, three years after
Udolpho. The Monk has nothing to do with Radcliffes artful suggestiveness. Lewis narrative resembles the
Gothic setting of a labyrinth, where many plotlines, characters, intertextual allusions become the background
against which a series of illicit passions and unspeakable vices are sensationally dramatized; incest, cross-
dressing, diabolism, sacrilege, desecration, rape, mutilation, dismembering, murder, and matricide, are only
some of the disturbances that Lewis book contains. When, towards the end of the novel, the atrocities taking
place at the Priory of St. Clare are revealed, an angry group of people rushes to destroy the convent and tear
its tyrannical abbess to pieces. Lewis diction in this scene, which highlights the threatening frenzy of the
mob, seems to be accurately reflecting the terror of the storming of the Bastille, rendering this scene one of the
most discussed parts of the book. According to the Marquis de Sade, Lewis fiction was the fruit of the
revolution of which all Europe felt the shock (Varma 217), as he admits while discussing Radcliffe and The
Monk.
So, both Radcliffe and Lewis are fruits of the revolution in the sense that they both dramatize
evidently, in different ways, the dangers of uncontrolled passions and emotions. By setting these emotional
excesses in Catholic Europe, they both implicitly foreground a form of rationalism which for them comprises
the predominant characteristic of the English constitution, and which, they seem to believe, distinguishes the
English from the Europeans. The emphasis, however, with which they also underline the necessity to control
passions, by implication, indicates that the eighteenth-century belief in reason is irreversibly undermined.
Thus, in their works we can find Enlightenment reason standing side by side with its opposites, imagination,
sympathy and individual idiosyncrasy, all ideas associated with the outbreak of the French Revolution.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
This extract from the end of the book alludes to the mob violence of the storming of Bastille.
But when [St. Ursula] related the inhuman murder of Agnes, the indignation of the mob was so
audibly testified, that it was scarcely possible to hear the conclusion. The confusion increased with
every moment; at length a multitude of voices exclaimed, that the Prioress should be given up to their
fury. To this Don Ramirez refused to consent positively. Even Lorenzo bade the people remember,
that she had undergone no trial, and advised them to leave her punishment to the Inquisition. All
representations were fruitless; the disturbance grew still more violent, and the populace more
exasperated. In vain did Ramirez attempt to convey his prisoner out of the throng. Wherever he
turned, a band of rioters barred his passage, and demanded her being delivered over to them more
loudly than before. Ramirez ordered his attendants to cut their way through the multitude: oppressed
by numbers, it was impossible for them to draw their swords. He threatened the mob with the
vengeance of the Inquisition: But in this moment of popular phrenzy even this dreadful name had lost
its effect [] They forced a passage through the guards who protected their destined victim, dragged
her from her shelter, and proceeded to take upon her a most summary and cruel vengeance. Wild with
terror, and scarcely knowing what she said, the wretched woman shrieked for a moments mercy: She
protested that she was innocent of the death of Agnes, and could clear herself from the suspicion
beyond the power of doubt. The rioters heeded nothing but the gratification of their barbarous
vengeance. They refused to listen to her: they showed her every sort of insult, loaded her with mud
and filth, and called her by the most opprobrious appellations. They tore her one from another, and
each new tormentor was more savage than the former. They stifled with howls and execrations her
shrill cries for mercy; and dragged her through the streets, spurning her, trampling her, and treating
her with every species of cruelty which hate of vindictive fury could invent.
This extract is typical of the anti-Catholicism that permeates Gothic narratives.
The Nuns were employed in religious duties established in honour of St. Clare, and to
which no prophane was ever admitted. The chapel windows were illuminated. As they stood on the
outside, the auditors heard the full swell of the organ, accompanied by a chorus of female
voices, rise upon the stillness of the night. This died away, and was succeeded by a single
strain of harmony. It was the voice of her who was destined to sustain in the procession the
characters of St. Clare. For the office the most beautiful Virgin of Madrid was always selected,
and she upon whom the choice fell, esteemed it as the highest of honours. While listening to the
music, whose melody distance only seemed to render sweeter, the audience was wrapped up in
profound attention. Universal silence prevailed through the crowd, and every heart was filled
with reverence for religion. Every heart but Lorenzos. Conscious that among those who
chuanted the praises of their God so sweetly, there were some who cloaked with devotion the
foulest sins, their hymns inspired him with detestation at their hypocrisy. He had long
observed with disapprobation and contempt the superstition, which governed Madrids
inhabitants. His good sense had pointed out to him the artifices of the monks, and the gross
absurdity of their miracles, wonders and supposititious reliques. He blushed to see his countrymen
the dupes of deceptions so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free them from their
monkish fetters. That opportunity, so long desired in vain, was at length presented to him. He
resolved not to let it slip, but to set before the people in glaring colours, how enormous were the
abuses but too frequently practiced in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed
indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit. He longed for the moment destined to
unmask the hypocrites, and convince his countrymen, that a sanctified exterior does not always
hide a virtuous heart.
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7. Romantic Gothic
Image 1.9 John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781).
By presenting emotions and passions as uncontrollable, and by surrendering to their sublime energy, The
Monk seems to be indirectly aligning itself with the Romantic distrust of Enlightenment reason, as we have
seen. Romanticism was, after all, an early nineteenth-century movement that also grew as a direct response to
the French Revolution. Romantic and Gothic aesthetics, as such, overlapped to a great extent; and for some
critics, Gothicism is considered to be an integral part of Romanticism. They both embraced the sublime, and
foregrounded the role of imagination and emotion; they both relied on, yet decisively modified, the
conventions of medieval romance as a means of exploring the human psyche and the irrational; they both
promoted, either through their heroes or through their villains, individual uniqueness and rebelliousness; and,
last but not least, they were both preoccupied with the past.
Thus, William Blake, the unconventional early Romantic visionary poet and illustrator, incorporated
revolutionary imagery in his work in ways affiliated with the Gothic. In his poem The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner (1798), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a leading figure of British Romanticism, employed a
form of supernatural machinery that heavily drew on Gothic tradition (the sailor-zombies, the Life-in-Death
figure, the weird shinning of the sailors eyes, etc). Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the most
rebellious Romantic idealists, wrote the Gothic romances Irvyne (1808-9) and Zastrozzi (1810). Lord Byron
(1788-1824), one of the most influential Romantic poets, alluded in his satiric poem Don Juan (1819-24) to
the tradition established by Radcliffe and Lewis. John Keats (1795-1821), a major Romantic poet, in his poem
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1820), is based on a scene from The Monk. Finally, artists like Henry Fuseli and
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Yannis Kanarakis
Caspar David Friedrich heavily drew on Gothic conventions in their work. Fuselis The Nightmare, as a
matter of fact, has become emblematic of nineteenth-century Gothicism.
It was precisely due to this affiliation with Romanticism that the Gothic underwent a major, probably
the most significant shift in the early nineteenth century. This change basically involved the internalization of
Gothic norms, according to which traditional Gothic devices were meant to invoke individual inner states. The
work that paradigmatically encapsulates this change is definitely Mary Shelleys Frankenstein which she
wrote at the early age of 19 and which was initially published in 1818 and then extensively revised in 1831.
Mary was, after all, in direct contact with Romantic sensibility; she was married to Percy Shelley and knew in
person most of the major Romantics, while her parents were two of the most influential intellectuals of the
time, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
At the heart of Shelleys story lies the Romantic preoccupation with nature. But she adds a dark twist
while probing this characteristically Romantic fascination. This is achieved through Frankensteins
Promethean oeuvre to replace God, which of course, echoes the radical secularization of the time, as Gods
throne was violently usurped by science. Thus, Victor is not only a modern god but also a modern demon.
Through this figure, Shelley has created the archetype of the mad scientist that is still even nowadays
replicated in so many Gothic narratives. By playing god, Victor Frankenstein spawned not only a monster but
actually a new species: modern uncertainty thriving on alienation and disillusionment. Being the dark other of
scientific and technological progress, the creature transcends and questions conventions of the natural in the
sense that it is composed of living human matter, which, nevertheless, in its totality remains disturbingly
unnatural. By consistently illustrating the monster as being more humane than the people it gets in touch with,
Shelley manages to blur the romantic distinctions between nature and culture and eventually dramatize
modern anxiety and fear at the dawning of a new world. If human life could be replicated and reproduced so
easily by bringing together different limbs and parts, then humanity could not be that important and unique
after all. Moreover, by having created the creature, Victor does not only usurp Gods place but also
motherhood, blurring in this way gender distinctions and natural roles.
Shelleys story is frightening because it synthesizes, as Romantic imagination does, diverse, opposite
elements: fact and fiction, life and death, subject and object, nature and culture, science and metaphysics or
art, etc. In doing so, she strategically presents the familiar in an unfamiliar light, which is actually a forecast of
Freuds theory of the uncanny that first appeared in 1919. While studying the meaning and the etymology of
the word uncanny (das Unheimliche in German, meaning the un-homely), Freud noticed that the term
incorporated opposing meanings. According to Freud, this linguistic vagueness implicit in the term is
indicative of the fact that the feeling of the uncanny is generated when something lies between the explicable
and the inexplicable, between the known and the unknown. This happens when something that we are certain
we know is actually unknown, or when we realize that something we
believe we do not know is actually something we knew but had
forgotten about. This sense of uncertainty that pervades our
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939):
perception of the world makes all things questionable and terrifying.
That is why the uncanny can be seen as a synonym of uncertainty
Freud was the father of
and of the repressed, or of something forgotten that still haunts the psychoanalysis and a very
present and threatens to disrupt it. influential thinker. He
According to Terry Castle, one of the most influential elaborated complex theories of
American scholars of the eighteenth-century and gender studies, the the unconscious, of sexuality,
feeling of the uncanny originates in the eighteenth-century attempt repression and dreams. By
to rationalize the irrational. Such attempts are evident in Radcliffes emphasizing the role of the
explained supernatural or in Shelleys scientific account of what unconscious in human action,
might initially appear to be supernatural. An extreme form of Freud actually dissolved long
rationalism, Castle implies, might lead to the alienation of the held assumptions about the
faculty of imagination, which ends up being estranged from reason coherence of identity and
and then repressed. As imagination is an integral part of our brain thought, thus deeply influencing
modern thought and art.
and of the way we perceive the world, if we try to do away with it,
this will only lead to malfunction and distortion. Moreover, when
imagination finds an outlet, it will violently rush out and this
violence comes in proportion to its repression. Castles remarks not
26
only present the historical and cultural implications of the uncanny but also help see history itself as the
uncanny, as that which is repressed but always returns and haunts the present, a point we shall return to later
in this chapter.
Image 1.10 Gustave Dores Illustration for Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1876).
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Yannis Kanarakis
Here is an extract from Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1820), which evokes a Gothic atmosphere.
I.
O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has witherd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
II. 5
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!

So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrels granary is full,
And the harvests done.
III.
I see a lily on thy brow

With anguish moist and fever dew, 10
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV.
I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautifula faerys child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 15
And her eyes were wild.
V.
I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She lookd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan. 20
VI.
I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faerys song.
VII. 25
She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said
I love thee true.
VIII.
She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept, and sighd fill sore, 30
28
And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.
IX.
And there she lulled me asleep,

And there I dreamdAh! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamd 35
On the cold hills side.
X.
I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They criedLa Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall! 40
XI.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hills side.
XII. 45
And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is witherd from the lake,
And no birds sing.
8. Victorian Gothic
Image 1.11 A poster from the 1880s.
29
Yannis Kanarakis
In the second part of the nineteenth century, the Gothic experienced

a sort of revival in the works of writers like R. L. Stevenson, Oscar
Wilde and Bram Stoker, and was also used by many different
authors who belonged to different literary traditions as Sensation Novels:
predominantly a device that more systematically now signified
psychological depth. Thus, the Gothic was diffused into Sensation fiction was a late
nineteenth-century type of novel
sensationalism, social critique, and the ghost story as a means of
writing aimed at creating
addressing the domestic dramas of urbanized and industrialized excitement and shock in the
centers. Even nineteenth-century realists incorporated Gothic readers. The genre was
elements into their writing, in order to dramatize the modern popularized by Wilkie Collins
horrors that individuals experienced in industrialized cities. In its publication of The Woman in
diffusion, expansion and contact with other genres, the Gothic White (1860) which created a
unavoidably changed. Malevolent aristocrats were replaced by mass culture craze. Apart from
criminals, medieval labyrinths by dark alleys, and stories of Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon and
usurpation by stories of corruption, poverty, and social injustice. Ellen Wood published sensation
This incorporation of Gothic machinery as a means of novels.
increasing the dramatic and psychological efficiency and impact of
the narrative is clearly manifested in Charles Dickens, undoubtedly
the most prominent and emblematic writer of Victorian times.
Dickens did not only resort to Gothic conventions and motifs to sketch the ominous signs of his times and the
ill condition of England, but, continuing Radcliffes tradition, attached a moral end to them by utilizing them
as a form of social critique. Such Gothic motifs abound in his works: the urban sceneries of Bleak House
(1853) and Hard Times (1854) are explicitly Gothicized to evoke feelings of alienation and fear; in Oliver
Twist (1838), the distress and agony of medieval monasteries are associated with Victorian industrial reality;
in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Oliver Twist, a young
innocent hero or heroine are being chased by dark forces; the
opening cemetery scene of Great Expectations (1860-1861),
explicitly draws on Gothic conventions to create an atmosphere of Psychological Realism:
mystery that reflects the obscurity surrounding the young heros
The term psychological realism
origin; the Clennams family house in Little Dorrit (1855) is
refers to the accurate
presented as a medieval Gothic castle that hides a dark secret of the representation of the thoughts
familys past, and so on and so forth. and feelings of a character in
Moreover, Dickens, along with other nineteenth-century literature. Its origin can be
writers, like Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, traced towards the end of the
actively participated in the popularization of the ghost story. Apart nineteenth century with the work
from expressing anxiety about the uncanny changes that living in a of Henry James whose work
modern industrial city entailed, this concern with the ghost also focused on the depiction of the
conveyed nostalgia for a non-secularized, non-materialist and non- psychological state of his
rationalized past, as A Christmas Carol (1843) very cleverly characters rather than plot.
illustrated. The modernized Gothic setting was no longer related James work influenced
with the distant medieval past, yet it always retained its interest in Modernist art.
the past, which was either mythologized or glorified, or
domesticated as a haunting specter: a dark guilty family secret,
usually having to do with some sort of low social origin or some
kind of sexual secret that threatened the present. The frightening aspect of ghosts involved the fact that they
intruded domestic privacy, which is the locus of the family and the familiar and, in doing so, they rendered
everything unfamiliar, that is uncanny.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, therefore, the Gothic appeared as the ideal device for
depicting the individuals relation to the past and, by extension, psychological depth. Gothic machinery was,
in other words, paradoxically utilized to represent psychological realism, due to the fact that it had been long
associated with emotional arousal and expression. In Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights (1847), for example,
the psychological portrait and passionate relationship of the two protagonists is predominantly illustrated
through many allusions to Gothic conventions. Cathys anxiety and restlessness is dramatized through her
presentation as a ghost, whereas Heathcliffs alienation and estrangement is achieved through his implicit
association with a villainous vampire figure. In Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre (1847), Bertha Mason, the
30
madwoman in the attic, is Janes double, as she embodies not only

Rochesters dark past but also Janes fears about a possible negative
outcome of her marriage.
Darwins Theory of Evolution:
The character of Bertha brings to the foreground the fact
that the Gothic was also utilized in order to represent, towards the
Darwins theory of evolution by
end of the nineteenth century, anxieties concerning the uncertainty natural selection was formulated
of human identity. The Gothic was, in other words, not only a in his book On the Origin of
means of attributing psychological depth to the narrative, but also a Species published in 1859 and
way of addressing the horrors implicit in this dark internal realm, involved the idea that species
the human mind. We should not forget that the superiority of the change through a gradual
human species was radically questioned by evolutionary theories process that allows them to
that were prominent at the time. These theories relentlessly adapt to the environment as a
undermined theological conceptions about the origin of man, by means of survival. Simply put, the
highlighting a biological account of mans descent from very low organisms that can adapt better
forms of life that firmly foregrounded the animalism of the human have more chances of survival.
species. In this sense, the effect that Darwinian theory had on the
Victorian imaginary was very uncanny indeed. It challenged what
people had been taking for granted for so many years and rendered
reality frighteningly unfamiliar. The evolutionary worldview scientifically proved, in a fashion similar to the
Gothic, that the present could only be conceived in its relation to the past which it carried in fossilized form. A
series of emerging and rising sciences at the time, like anthropology, criminology, psychology, etc., validated
the nervousness that evolutionary theory had instilled about the intricate interrelations between past and
present, culture and nature, civilization and savagery, order and chaos. The source of these tensions no longer
occupied the public sphere but the human mind. Robert Louis Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886) is engaged precisely with the idea of disruption located within the individuals mind rather
than without. Moving along the line paved by Mary Shelley, Stevensons novel expresses anxiety about the
fragmentation caused by modern industrialization, mechanization, alienation, specialization and science.
The uncertainty about origins, identity and the world that
evolutionary theory brought about was reflected in fiction in
unstable or unreliable narratorial voices or framed narratives. Mary
Shelleys Frankenstein, for instance, has three basic narrators: The New Woman:
Captain Walton, who in his letters to his sister encloses Victor
Frankensteins tale, Victor Frankenstein, who narrates the The term New Woman was
used towards the end of the
monsters story to Walton, and the monster, whose diary is
nineteenth century to refer to
enframed in Waltons story. Likewise, in Henry James novella The emancipated women who were
Turn of the Screw (1898), we have a plethora of perspectives and against the restrictions imposed
points of view since an anonymous narrator gave us a story that he on them by society. These women
heard from a friend of his, Douglas, which he read in a letter were largely influenced by the
written to him by Douglas sister about a governess with whom he suffragette movement.
was in love. The coexistence of so many narrative frameworks and
perspectives generates a series of conflicting interpretations on the
plot or certain characters. In James novella the reader is left
wondering about the mental state of the governess or whether she really saw the ghosts. James instills in the
reader the horror that there is no single truth; we can only have multiple possible interpretations of reality.
31
Yannis Kanarakis
The anxiety about the instability of identity also became

prominent through the preoccupation with the notions of
changeability and transformation that we witness towards the end of
Fin de Sicle: the nineteenth century. Bram Stokers Dracula (1897) foregrounds
modern fragmentation by incorporating a variety of different genres
This French phrase means the and perspectives. The
end of a century and can also be emphasis on
used to allude to the end of an
transgression is best
era. It is traditionally employed Aestheticism:
to refer to the last two decades of
illustrated in the novel
the Victorian era which are also through the protagonist.
Dracula defies definition Aestheticism or the art for arts
the threshold to Modernism. This sake movement was a late
was a period marked by a by resisting stable subject
nineteenth century artistic trend
growing sense of pessimism, positions or forms: he
which held that art should be
decay and decline due to the fact brings together past and
autonomous and not evaluated
that society was considered to be present, life and death, in moral but only in aesthetic
in crisis. presence and absence, terms. The trend has its origins in
humanity and animalism, German Idealism and in French
horror and tenderness, literature. In England, it was
fact and fiction, popularized by Algernon
mythology and science. His subversive power becomes obvious Swinburne, Walter Pater and
through the fact that all characters he comes in contact with end up later by Oscar Wilde. This
having deviant gender positions. Women become sexually movement influenced the
insatiable and independent, while men become effeminately Modernists to a large extent.
passive. In this, the Gothic documents fin de sicle anxieties about
emancipated women and
the degeneration of
Victorian morals and norms that deviant sexual positions
Degeneration Theory: supposedly brought about. These Victorian anxieties involved
theories of degeneration that were very much in the air at the time.
This was a theory expressed by As Dracula stands for these repressed sexual energies that allegedly
Max Nordau in his very threaten modern progress, he is destroyed in the end and order is
influential book Degeneration restored.
(1892). Nordau held that
On the other hand, the supposed collapse of male
modernity was a sort of
pathological disease marked by
stereotypes that the book dramatizes can be seen as an expression of
regression rather than progress. the anxiety concerning the imperial decline of Britain that took
Its symptoms, he argued, were place towards the end of the nineteenth century. In this sense,
excessive description of details Dracula implicitly staged the insecurity generated by nationalist
and symbolism, i.e., the inability instabilities, and fears of foreign invasion. Reversely, it could also
to express oneself clearly. be seen as symptomatic of native guilt about the atrocities of the
British Empire which, by the end of the nineteenth century, was
considered by many Britons as nothing else but a vampire that had
been sucking the blood of indigenous people.
32
Image 1.12 Illustration from Stokers Novel Dracula.
Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Sicle. Access here
The Victorian Gothic site. Access here
Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights
In this extract, Lockwood is left alone in Heathcliffs house which has a very Gothic atmosphere.
This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and
the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir-bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the
right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I
rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a
circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. I must stop it, nevertheless! I
muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the
importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!
The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung
to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, Let me inlet me in! Who are you? I asked,
struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. Catherine Linton, it replied, shiveringly (why did I
think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton); Im come home: Id lost my
way on the moor! As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a childs face looking through the
33
Yannis Kanarakis
window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I
pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked
the bedclothes: still it wailed, Let me in! and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening
me with fear. How can I, I said at length. Let me go, if you want me to let you in, the
fingers relaxed. I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid
against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. I seemed to keep them closed
above a quarter of an hour; yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on!
Begone! I shouted. Ill never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years. It is twenty years,
mourned the voice: twenty years. Ive been aw a y for twenty years! Thereat began a feeble
scratching outside, and the pile of books moved as if thrust forward. I tried to jump up, but could
not stir a limb; and so yelled aloud, in a frenzy of fright. To my confusion, I discovered the yell
was not ideal: hasty footsteps approached my chamber door; somebody pushed it open, with a
vigorous hand, and a light glimmered through the squares at the top of the bed. I sat shuddering
yet, and wiping the perspiration from my forehead: the intruder appeared to hesitate, and muttered
to himself. At last, he said in a half-whisper, plainly not expecting an answer Is anyone here? I
considered it best to confess my presence, for I knew Heathcliffs accents, and feared he might
search further if I kept quiet. With this intention, I turned and opened the panels. I shall not soon
forget the effect my action produced.
Heathcliff stood near the entrance, in his shirt and trousers: with a candle dripping over his
fingers, and his face as white as the wall behind him. The first creak of the oak startled him like an
electric shock! The light leaped from his hold to a distance of some feet, and his agitation was so
extreme that he could hardly pick it up.
It is only your guest, sir, I called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his
cowardice further. I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare.
Im sorry I disturbed you.
Oh, God confound you, Mr. Lockwood! I wish you were at the commenced my host,
setting the candle on a chair, because he found it impossible to hold it steady. And who showed
you up to this room? he continued, crushing his nails into the palms, and grinding his teeth to
subdue the maxillary convulsions. Who was it? Ive a good mind to turn them out of the house
this moment!
It was your servant, Zillah, I replied, flinging myself on to the floor, and rapidly
resuming my garments. I should not care if you did, Mr. Heathcliff; she richly deserves it. I
suppose that she wanted to get another proof that the place was haunted, at my expense. Well, it
isswarming with ghosts and goblins! You have reason in shutting it up, I assure you. No one
will thank you for a doze in such a den!
What do you mean? asked Heathcliff, and what are you doing? Lie down and finish out
the night, since you are here; but, for Heavens sake! dont repeat that horrid noise; nothing
could excuse it, unless you were having your throat cut!
From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I886)
This is the scene in which the scientist first encounters his evil double. Horror is combined with
psychological depth.
I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked
death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very Fortress of identity,
might by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least inopportunity in the moment of
exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the
temptation of a discovery so singular and profound, at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I
34
had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a
large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient
required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and
smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of
courage, drank off the potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a
horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these
agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was
something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty,
incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady
recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a
solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew
myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a
slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like
wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was
suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside me as I write, was
brought there later on and for the very purpose of these transformations. The night, however,
was far gone into the morning the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception
of the day-the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I
determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to
my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, i could
have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet
disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my
room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but that which I
suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the
stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed.
Again, in the course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue
and control, it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think,
it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry
Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and
plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of
man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that
ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too,
was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it
seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance, I had been
hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that
when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a
visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are
commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive experiment had yet to be
attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee
before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once
more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to
myself once more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.
That night I had come to the fatal cross roads. Had I approached my discovery in a
more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious
aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come
forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical
nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives
of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth. At that lime my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept
35
Yannis Kanarakis
awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected
was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one
was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of
whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus
wholly toward the worse.
Bram Stoker, Dracula
In this scene in Castle Dracula, Jonathan Harker encounters the seductive women that reside there
and then the Count himself.
I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly
real so real that now, sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least
believe that it was all sleep.
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it; I
could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had
disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young
women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that i must be dreaming when I
saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They
came close to me and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark,
and had high aquiline noses like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be
almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be,
with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know
her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the
moment how or where. All three had brilliant while teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby
of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing
and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they
would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should
meet Minas eyes and cause her pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then
they all three laughedsuch a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound could
never have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling
sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head
coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said:
Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin. The other added. He
is young and strong; there are kisses for us all. I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an
agony of delightful anticipation.
The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath
upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the
nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one
smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The
fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate
voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she
actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on
the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower
went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to
fasten on my throat. Then she paused and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it
licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat
began to tingle as ones flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer
nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat,
36
and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a
languorous ecstasy and waited waited with beating heart.
But at that instant another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was
conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my
eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman
and with giants power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the while teeth
champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did
I imagine such wrath and fury even in the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively
blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. His face
was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires; the thick eyebrows that met
over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal. With a fierce sweep of his
arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were
beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a
voice which, though low and almost a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and then ring round
the room, he exclaimed:
How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had
forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him,
or youll have to deal with me. The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer
him:
You yourself never loved; you never love! On this the other women joined, and such a
mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear;
it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. The Count turned, after looking at my face attentively,
and said in a soft whisper:
Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I
promise you that when I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I
must awaken him, for there is work to be done.
Are we to have nothing tonight? said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to
the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some
living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and
opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-
smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror but as I looked
they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they
could not have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of
the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms
for a moment before they entirely faded away.
Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.
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Yannis Kanarakis
9. Modernist Gothic
Image 1.13 The cover from the 1916 German edition of Kafkas The Metamorphosis.
The diffusion of the Gothic into other genres and cultural modes was carried on in the twentieth
century. Gothic elements can be traced both in modernist fiction and other popular cultural forms, like cinema
and television, and from mid-twentieth century on, the Gothic basically continued to flourish in the domain of
popular culture, as we shall see.
When it comes to twentieth century fiction, traces of the Gothic can be detected in nearly all major
modernist texts. Modernism marked a new register of the Gothic which was now utilized as one literary
convention among others in the service of the modernist agenda. It can be argued that during Modernism the
Gothic in essence turned from a genre into a literary effect which, nevertheless, maintained a strong presence
throughout the literary masterpieces of Modernist tradition. Quite indicatively, the opening poem that W. B.
Yeats selected in order to celebrate and illustrate the new Modernist spirit in The Oxford Book of Modern
Verse 1892-1935 (1936) was actually a celebrated extract from Walter Paters The Renaissance (1873). Here,
Mona Lisa is presented by Pater as an undead vampire, a Gothic primordial femme fatale. In Heart of
Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad illustrates the horrors not only of the western imperialist expedition in the
area of Congo, but also the grotesque darkness of a repressed primeval past that threatens to overthrow
civilization. In The Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), James Joyce, the
priest of high modernism, presents the catholic clergy in a light that seems to be sarcastically drawing on the
Gothic formula of the corrupt monk who is after the innocent youth. T. S. Eliots The Waste Land (1922)
incorporated an army of Gothic conventions into its highly fragmentary form in order to portray modern
alienation, impoverishment and sterility. This existentialist anxiety was further on elaborated through an
explicit Gothic idiom in Franz Kafkas work. His Metamorphosis (1916) involved the story of a man who
38
turned into an insect in order to address the issue of self-loathing implicit in modern alienation, whereas The
Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) invoked the suffocation that contemporary individuals feel when having to
faced with the labyrinth of modern bureaucracy or the impenetrable castle of law. In America, the novelist
William Faulkner employs a series of Gothic devices in order to portray the uncanny feeling that
contemporary lifestyle generates, while Eudora Welty and Flannery O Connor, in their turn, present the
problematics of female identity and sexuality set against a Southern American patriarchal rule through Gothic
diction and imagery.
Image 1.14 The original 1927 poster for Langs Metropolis.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Access here
Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927). English Version. Access here
However, there were also writers who were more systematically occupied with the Gothic in the
beginning of the twentieth century. The masterful ghost stories of the medievalist scholar M. R. James, which
are considered as probably the most influential in the genre, exploited nearly all Gothic conventions, from
haunted houses and castles, to lost manuscripts, apparitions from the past, and the occult. Yet, unlike Dickens
ghosts, James ghosts are always malignant. Stories like Canon Alberics Scrap-Book (1895), The Ash-
Tree (1904), The Tractate Middoth (1911) contain sharply shocking scenes and narratives that, unlike
Radcliffes, leave things unexplained and do not seek to contain the supernatural within a moral end. On the
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Yannis Kanarakis
other hand, the American author H. P. Lovecraft coined a whole new supernatural mythology, the Cthulhu
Mythos, about a world existing in a parallel universe which constantly disrupts conventional reality. In the
middle of the twentieth century, however, the Gothic fell into critical disfavor. Two of the most important
critics of the time, Q. D. Leavis in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) and, later on, her husband F. R.
Leavis, in Revaluation (1956), attacked and condemned the Gothic. They considered it a genre unworthy of
any serious consideration due to the fact that it resorts to unoriginal clichs and conventions.
The Leavises harshly criticized the Gothic due to its affiliation with mainstream and popular cultural
forms. The association established between the Gothic and pop culture became even stronger at the time of
their critique. After having accommodated nearly all narrative forms, the Gothic appropriated the new
mediums that emerged in the twentieth century, namely, the radio, cinema and television, as they afforded so
many new sensationalist possibilities to be explored. During the golden age of the radio, for example, there
were many horror radio series in the States, such as The Witchs Tale (1931-1938), Lights Out (1934-1947)
and Stay Tuned for Terror (1944-1945). It was actually the advent of television that curtailed the popularity of
these shows. TV series like Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965), The Veil
(1958), The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), One Step Beyond (1959-1961), Way Out (1961), The Outer Limits
(1963-1965), Dark Shadows (1966-1971), Night Gallery (1969-1973), fascinated the audience with their
captivating images and filming techniques and they are still watched by many even today.
The Witchs Tale, Devils Name, Halloween 1932 Radio show. Access here
Apart from the radio and television, the Gothic was accommodated by the rising industry of the
cinema as well, which, from its inception, drew on Gothic narratives in order to attract and thrill viewers.
Since then, the Gothic, through the genres of thrillers, horror and fantasy movies remains one of the most
lucrative and successful parts of the industry. All classic Gothic texts, like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which holds the record of the most frequently filmed classic Gothic text, have been re-
interpreted, re-filmed and re-directed countless times. In a similar fashion to their literary corollaries,
cinematic Gothic addressed the anxieties of the time. Thus, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the
extremities of the Great War of 1914-18 are dramatized through the story of a somnambulist created by a mad
scientist to murder innocent women. In Fritz Langs iconic Metropolis (1926), the parvenu class generated by
the accelerated capitalization of the time is criticized through the films class of underground mechanic
laborers who are ruthlessly exploited by a futuristic decadent oligarchy. In the 1930s version of Frankenstein,
the creature, played by Boris Karloff, is dressed in a workmans clothes explicitly alluding to the unemployed
that industrialism had generated and abandoned during the Great Depression. Likewise, the Hammer studios
produced in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s a series of movies characterized by sensuality and violence that
expressed anxieties concerning sexual libertinism and deviations from the gender norms of the time.
Meanwhile, directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski and Michael Powell, through their work,
addressed the horror implicit in everyday life not as a device for cheap sensation, but rather as a subtle means
for psychological exploration. This was also the time when the genre started attracting the attention of
serious writers again.
Lights out radio show, Little Old Lady. Access here
Frankenstein, 1931 version Trailer (Its Alive!!!). Access here
40
10. Postmodern Gothic
Image 1.15 The cover of Ellis first edition of American Psycho.
As we have already seen, the Gothic, since its inception, has been a hybrid form that brings together
conflicting or opposite cultural forms in order to challenge and undermine assumptions concerning social
norms, identity, sexuality or representation. By constantly realigning its devices and by pushing representation
to its limits, a complex set of self-reflexive meta-narratives has developed within the Gothic tradition, which
draw the readers attention on how meaning is constructed within the narrative and thus maintain an ironic
distance and relation to the text itself. It is no wonder, then, that the Gothic, as many critics have noted, is in
full accord with postmodernist art and culture. As a matter of fact, postmodernism, as the French post-
structuralist philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard, has argued, marks a revived interest in the sublime as a
contemporary reminder of the limitations of reason. In light of this peculiar kinship, the dissemination of the
Gothic has been accelerated during postmodernism into an even wider array of narratives and cultural forms
than it did in the twentieth century, becoming, thus, an integral part of the music industry, fashion, comics,
graphic novels, or video games. Maybe this is the reason why, since the 1970s, the Gothic has attracted so
much critical attention and reconsideration. Some such seminal studies on the Gothic are: The Fantastic
(1978) by the French-Bulgarian critic Tzvetan Todorov which provides an intriguing definition of the
fantastic as distinct from fantasy; David Punters The Literature of Terror (1983) which broadens the
term of Gothic as a preoccupation with fear in order to include more works in it; Rosemary Jacksons
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1983) which enriches Todorovs study with psychological insight;
Chris Baldicks In Frankensteins Shadow (1991) which traces the origin of Shelleys myth; and Fred
Bottings Gothic (1996) which provides a very comprehensive approach to the genre.
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Yannis Kanarakis
How to Appreciate Goth Music. Access here
Goth Fashion. Access here
Top Ten Goth Comics. Access here
The Best Goth Videogames. Access here
As far as fiction is concerned, the affiliation established between postmodernism and the Gothic is not
only manifested in writers like Stephen King, James Herbert, John Saul, Dean Koontz, Shaun Hutson and
Clive Barker, who have basically been occupied with Gothic, horror and terror stories, but can be detected in
nearly all genres and modes of writing from magical realism to poetry and from Afro-American fiction to
social satire and critique, as we shall see.
In her collection of short stories The Bloody Chamber (1979), Angela Carter, a feminist novelist and
critic, revisited Charles Perraults seventeenth-century rewriting of a series of oral medieval tales. Through a
complex set of narrative frames, which were formally in full compliance with both Gothic and postmodern
traditions, Carter reviewed these well known tales, by fusing magic realism and the Gothic, in order to
foreground gender, sexuality and identity issues in a manner that transcended polar distinctions and cultural or
theoretical conventions. So, in The Company of Wolves, which was a rewriting of Little Red Riding
Hood, the heroine does not feel threatened by the wolf but rather willingly sleeps with him. Carter here tells
us the story of a typical innocent Gothic heroine who is ultimately saved from her malevolent husband not by
a knight but rather by her mother, in order to discuss female sexuality and identity through a feminist
perspective.
In a similar fashion, Anne Sexton, the American poet and feminist, in her poetic collection called
Transformations (1971), revisits the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. She initially intended the poems of the
collection to be part of an opera for children, yet Sexton foregrounded in such a detailed manner all the
implicit violence that lurks under the narrative of the fairy tales (incest, murder, haunting, cannibalism, rape,
madness) that she eventually had to withdraw them. This violence is presented in an explicit Gothic idiom
because Sexton wants to highlight the fact that these narratives, which typically address children, are full of
stereotypes and scenes that are not as innocent as we take them to be. She manages to establish this ironic
commentary on such traditional forms through the medium of the Gothic. As a form characterized by
hybridity, the Gothic enables Sexton to bring together the past and the present, innocence and darkness, irony
and horror and thus come up with a complex, postmodern narrative.
In Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison, a most influential Afro-American novelist, employed the device of
the ghost with a postmodern twist. Sethes house is haunted by the ghost of Beloved, her daughter, whom
she murdered because she wanted to spare her the life of a slave. When Sethes lover, Paul D, moves into her
house the ghost disappeares and at approximately the same time a girl appears in the neighborhood. As the
girl, Sethes other daughter and Sethe herself become friends, we are led to believe she is Beloved. The girl
soon moves into Sethes house forcing her lover to leave, thus mother and daughter are eventually reunited.
What is interesting is that through the trope of the ghost and the doublings that it generates in the narrative,
Morrison manages to bring together the private narrative of Sethe, and the history of slavery and female
suppression. Personal or collective history is represented here as a haunting ghost that is everywhere and
42
nowhere, that is both intangible and palpable, the uncanny incarnate as the return of the repressed. In this
sense, Carter, Sexton and Morrison all participate in the rewriting of history, each drawing from the Gothic in
her own unique way.
Modern Gothic, however, is not only engaged with issues of historical representation; it also
challenges social conventions and our conception of reality. This trend is evident in The Collector (1963), a
novel by the influential British novelist John Fowles. Fowles novel is based on James The Turn of the Screw,
but also draws explicitly from Shakespeares The Tempest. After winning the football lottery, Frederic Clegg
kidnaps Miranda and keeps her in the basement of his newly acquired house hoping that she will eventually
fall in love with him. Miranda fails to escape, falls ill and dies and Clegg decides to kidnap another girl.
Fowles is based on the Gothic conventions of secluded houses, abducted young girls, framed narratives
(Mirandas journal in the middle of the book is framed by Freds first person narration), lost and found
manuscripts, and employs a very dense intertextual web in order to question good and evil, or reality and
fiction. The reader soon realizes that Cleggs freakishness lies in his conventionality, in the fact that he is the
epitome of middle class propriety, whereas Mirandas highbrow, arrogant and ultimately failed attempt to
educate Clegg raises serious doubts about the role of high culture in the reformation of the philistines.
Although Fowles utilizes here an army of traditional Gothic devices, he minimizes their supernatural qualities.
The frightening, as a result, does not reside in a distant castle, but is part of our everyday world and ourselves.
In American Psycho (1991), a very controversial work, Bret Easton Ellis, a postmodernist American
novelist, presents his critique of capitalist culture in an explicitly Gothic idiom. Ellis novel is set in the
acquisitive world of Wall Street. The horror implicit in corporate materialism and the way the modern banking
system exploits people are addressed through the figure of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, who is a very
successful and fashionable banker, yet, a ruthless serial killer and rapist at the same time. Patrick is unable to
feel any kind of remorse or shame for the pain that he inflicts on his victims, reflecting in his attitude the
coldness, impersonality and indifference of corporate banking. As a matter of fact, Ellis narrative refrains
from any psychological accounts or justifications of the heros behavior presenting us with a cold depthless
surface where everything is meaningless. Patrick is a psycho not so much because of his murderous deeds but
rather because of his detachment, impassiveness, distraction, and inability to focus and by extension feel. He
is a fragmented and neurotic personality loosely kept together only through the social status that his position
holds.
And this is precisely where the horror lies in Ellis novel. The book modernizes, or we might even say
post-modernizes, the Gothic by turning the stock character of the merciless powerful aristocratic into a 90s
golden boy who belongs to the modern elite caste of Wall Street bankers and is arrogantly above the law
despite the fact that he is accountable for many crimes. The device of the Gothic castle is, in its turn,
transmuted into the labyrinth of corporate capitalism, while the cultural corollaries, hollowness,
commercialization, emotional and moral vacancy, are imprinted on a post-modern claustrophobic waste land.
Ellis story is, in order words, a modern version of the narrative of Frankenstein; only now, the mad scientist
is late capitalism, an economic and political system that has grown out of proportion and replaced nearly all
existing value systems, and the creature is no longer made of disparate body parts, but rather of dissimilar
identity pieces that loosely form a psychotic (w)hole.
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Here is a typical example of the association established in the novel between superficiality and evil.
[T]here is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an
entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel
flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply
am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I
am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes
deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at
Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the
43
Yannis Kanarakis
uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter
indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one
is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to
have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and
sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on
others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting thisand I have countless times, in just
about every act Ive committedand coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I
gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling.
There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.
Anne Sexton reciting Snow White and the seven Dwarfs. Access here
The Company of Wolves by Neil Jordan Trailer. Access here
The Collector by William Wyler Trailer. Access here
Beloved by Jonathan Demme Trailer. Access here
American Psycho by Mary Harron Trailer. Access here
11. Conclusion: The End (?)

It is has become clear through this overview why the Gothic as a genre has both persisted for such a long
period of time and vigorously fascinated people despite its countless mutations. Formally and technically, the
Gothic involves artistic devices and mechanisms that directly appeal to the senses creating suspense, horror,
laughter, sympathy, fright, angst, etc., and keeping the reader, viewer, spectator or listener excited and
attentive. Furthermore, the Gothic also provides a sort of emotional depth that everyday humdrum life most
usually lacks. How do Gothic narratives still manage to fascinate, however, since these devices are usually
clichd and easily recognizable, and Gothic plotlines are conventional and predictable? It seems that they
function very much like dreams do. According to Freud, repressed wishes and desires achieve in dreams a sort
of fantasized fulfillment by being distorted so that they will not disturb and wake us; they acquire, in other
words, a manifest dream form that disguises their latent nightmarish content. Likewise, the Gothic is
implicitly addressing, through its fictions, anxieties that are too extreme to be consciously considered or
confronted. It employs a familiar, worn-out and distinguishable form of nightmare in an attempt to give outlet
to, parody, sublimate, or impose order upon a nightmarish disorder that resides in the realm of the
inexpressible. As such, the Gothic can also be seen as a mechanism of organizing the constantly shifting
44
material of life. And, since it still retains its eighteenth-century double aim to instruct and entertain, it is still
persistently popular. Therefore, in all likelihood, the Gothic will continue to excite and thrive not only due to
its dual character and psychological utility but also due to the fact that it is a constantly shifting and adaptable
cultural form, and, as such, can appropriate in a very uncanny way the vital force of life itself.
Re-Cap:
The Gothic emerged in the eighteenth

century as part of Romanticism and was
a reaction against the Enlightenment.
Since then, the Gothic has retained its

popularity due to the fact that it is not
only highly amusing but also a medium
through which anxieties and fears are
imaginatively addressed or resolved.
Its most defining characteristic is its

adaptability, mutability and
inclusiveness.
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Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Garrett, Peter. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in nineteenth Century Fiction. Cornell UP, 2003. Print.
48
Glover, David. Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction. Duke
UP, 1996. Print.
Hughes, William. Beyond Dracula: Bram Stokers Fiction and its Cultural Context. Macmillan, 2000. Print.
Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping Historys Nightmares. Oxford UP,
1999. Print.
Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York UP, 1969.
Print.
Prickett, Steven. Victorian Fantasy. Harvester Press, 1987. Print.
Robbins, Ruth and Julian Wolfreys (eds). Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the
nineteenth Century. Palgrave, 2000. Print.
Scmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: nineteenth Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Print.
Senf, Carol. The Vampire in nineteenth Century English Literature. Bowling Green State University Popular
Press, 1988. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle. Viking, 1990. Print.
Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Sicle. Manchester
UP, 2004. Print.
Smith, Elton and Robert Haas (eds). The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature. Scarecrow,
1989. Print.
Wolfreys, Julian. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Macmillan, 2002.
Print.
Wolstenhome, Susan. Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers. State University of New York Press,
1993. Print.
Modernist & Postmodernist Gothic

Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Culture. Bowling
State University Popular Press, 1999. Print.
Bloom, Harold (ed). Stephen King: Modern Critical Views. Chelsea, 1998. Print.
Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. University Press
of Virginia, 1998. Print.
Cornwell, Neil. The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. Harvester, 1990. Print.
Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Sicle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914.
Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.
Gordon, Joan and Veronica Hollinger. Bllod Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture.
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Print.
Grunenberg, Christoph (ed). Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art. MIT Press,
1997. Print.
Magistrale, Tony and Morrison Michael (eds). A Dark Nights Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror
Fiction. University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Print.
Riquelme, John Paul (ed). Gothic and Modernism. Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies 46, 585-799. Print.
Sage, Victor and allan Lloyd (eds). Modern Gothic: A Reader. Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Smith, Andrew and Wallace Jeff (eds). Gothic Modernisms. Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books, 2006. Print.
Tropp, Martin. Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture, 1818-1918. McFarland,
1990. Print.
Wilt, Judith. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence. Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Female Gothic
Andriano, Joseph. Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction. Penn State
University Press, 1993. Print.
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Harvard UP, 1982. Print.
Becker, Susanne. Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions. Manchester UP, 1999. Print.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester University
Press, 1992. Print.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny.
Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy Kolmar (eds). Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost
Stories by American Women. University of Tennessee Press, 1994. Print.
Clery, E. J. Womens Gothic: From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley. Northcote House, 2000. Print.
Creed, Barbra. The Monstruous-Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993. Print.
DeLamotte, Eugenia. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of nineteenthCentury Gothic. Oxford UP, 1990.
Print.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology.
University of Illinois Press, 1989. Print.
Fleenor, Juliann (ed). The Female Gothic. Eden, 1983. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer in the nineteenth Century
Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979. Print.
Feiland, Donna. Gothic Novels: A Feminist Introduction. Blackwell, 2000. Print.
Hoeveler, Diane. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes.
Liverpool UP, 1998. Print.
Kelly, Gary (ed). Varieties of Female Gothic, 6 Vols. Chatto, 2001. Print.
Meyers, Helene. Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience. SUNY, 2001. Print.
Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. Macmillan, 1992. Print.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Womens Press, 1978. Print.
Palmer, Paulina. Lesbian Gothic: Transgressive Fictions. Cassell, 1999. Print.
Gothic Gender
Clover, Carol. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. BFI, 1992. Print.
Grant, Barry (ed). The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. University of Texas Press, 1996.
Print.
Heiland, Donna. Gothic and Gender: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Print.
Hendershot, Cyndy. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Print.
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Sicle. Cambridge
UP, 1996. Print.
Schoene-Harwood, Berthold. Writing Men: Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man.
Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print.
Sedwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985.
Print.
____. Epistemology of the Closet. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Print.
Useful Links on the Gothic

- Hathi Trust Digital Library: http://www.hathitrust.org/
- Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/texts
- Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
- Literary Gothic Resources: http://www.litGothic.com/index_fl.html
- International Gothic Association: http://www.iga.stir.ac.uk/index.php
- Project Bartleby
- The Cyclopaedia of Ghost Story Writers.
- Horror Master Classics
- Annotated Bibliography from the University of Virginia
- Horrofind.com
- CryptCrawl.com
- City of Shadows: A Gothic Tour of Victorian London
- Victorian Popular Fiction, or The Feasts of Blood: Victorian Sensation fiction
- The Dark Side of the Net: Gothic e-texts
50
Chapter Two
Victorian and Anti-Victorian Voices

Yannis Kanarakis
1. Introduction
In this chapter we will explore the radical changes that took place during Queen Victorias reign by focusing
on certain key ideas or larger clusters of thoughts and the reactions that they generated. As we shall see, the
Victorian era was a period marked by unprecedented changes, and Victorian thinkers and writers had a mixed
reaction towards these shifts. Some of them welcomed change as a sign of progress, while others considered it
an indication of decline and nostalgically contemplated past glories. Here are the major key concepts which
this chapter investigates as they are organized in units:
A. Industrialism and Individualism

B. Domesticity and the Woman Question
C. Religion and Evolutionary Theory
D. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
E. Culture and Aesthetics
F. Victorian Futures
This BBC sponsored site introduces you to all major changes that took place during
the Victorian Age. Access here
Each unit delves into a major Victorian idea or theme by exploring not only the way it developed
throughout Victorias reign, but also the oppositional voices that were directed against it.
Learning objectives:
Familiarization with the historical,

socio-political, and cultural context
of Victorian literary practice.
Ability to recognize the aesthetic and

historical principles underlying each
phase of the Victorian period.
Exposure to key Victorian texts,

authors, ideas and dominant
conflicting voices of the Victorian
period.
51
Yannis Kanarakis
Overview of the Victorian Age and Culture (Norton Anthology). Access here
Image 2.1 Photograph of Queen Victoria.
2. The Historical Context

The Victorian period lasted roughly from 1830 to 1900. It was named after Queen Victoria who sat on the
throne at the age of eighteen in 1837 and reigned until her death in 1901. Her reign lasted sixty-three years,
longer than that of any other monarch of the British throne, and included many shifts, breakthroughs, and
revolutions. As a matter of fact, we might argue that the most prevailing characteristic of the Victorian Age
were the radical changes that people at the time experienced. These changes are usually grouped into three
historical stages, each of which has its own unique characteristics and prevalent ideas.
2. 1 The Early Victorian Period (1830-1858): A Time of Upheavals
The most defining changes that took place during the early Victorian period were triggered by two major
revolutions: the Industrial Revolution, which had begun around 1780 but reached its peak during Victorias
reign, and the French Revolution (1789-1815), the revolt of French citizens against monarchy, which also
broke out at the end of the eighteenth century and deeply affected the political thought of the time throughout
the western world since it was a forceful manifestation of the power that inheres in the will of the people.
First, nearly all facets of everyday life were shaken by the scientific and technological developments
that the industrial revolution had brought about. Steam engine technology accelerated industrial production
and helped shape a new class of people who were urbane and entrepreneurial, and whose interests demanded
less state intervention in business affairs. Accelerated production also resulted in demographic shifts, since the
driving force of economy was no longer related with farming, but with working and living in industrial
centers. This practically meant that large numbers of people had to leave the countryside and move to an
urban setting whose infrastructure could not support such a sudden and unexpected influx of working hands.
Moreover, in these new industrial centers, new forms of print culture started to develop through the
proliferation of newspapers, magazines, journals, novels, and circulating libraries which, along with the
educational reforms of the period, led to a gradual increase of literacy rates. The growth of the print culture,
furthermore, satisfied the Victorians need to be informed about the radical changes that took place at the
52
time. Such inquisitive spirit was further fueled by technological and scientific advances (science became a
national hobby, as we shall see), and the facilitation of travel and communication as well. The spread of
railway lines in the 1830s changed the map of the country, as it shortened distances and brought nearer
cutaway towns or places which were until then hard to reach. The advances in science and technology also
helped commerce flourish, a fact which rendered Britain a powerful empire that controlled the world markets.
These economic, demographic, technological, and scientific shifts had their political, ideological,
religious, and cultural repercussions as well. Stimulated by the French Revolution, which inspired peoples
throughout Europe to claim their rights against the status quo (or the ancient regime, as it was called),
Victorians reacted against the injustices brought about by industrialization. As a result, the times called for a
new way of thinking which, however, conflicted with the status quo (the old way of thinking) and so
upheavals were generated. A typical example of the way new social givens resulted in new political
formations was the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor that the Industrial Revolution had
brought about. This widening became a source of political and ideological agitation and soon ignited a
persistent call for a sweeping reform of the system of political representation. Consequently, after a series of
demonstrations, strikes and fights with the authorities, the First Reform Bill, through which the newly formed
industrial centers were represented in parliament, was passed in 1832.
The Victorians interpreted these radical changes in conflicting ways: for many, the changes signaled
progress and advance, heralding hope and optimism; yet for others, they were considered to be a type of
disease, a spiritual malaise that had to be immediately treated and cured. The Victorian thinkers who were
systematically engaged with the benefits or the shortcomings of progress were called sages and were actually
responsible for the flowering of prose during this period.
Despite their ideological or stylistic differences, all these sages agreed that this was a time of
historical rupture, and expressed their deep awareness concerning these shifts as well as their unease about
their outcome. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) spoke in 1825 about The Spirit of the Age; Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881) talked in 1829 about the Signs of the Times (and in 1831 attempted to define the eras
Characteristics); John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) also wrote about The Spirit of the Age in 1831; and
Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) published about England and the English (1833). This was an age of
transition, as J. S. Mill put it in The Spirit of the Age, in which mankind have outgrown old institutions
and old doctrines, and have not acquired new ones. Or, as Bulwer-Lytton noted:
We live in an age of transitionan age of disquietude and doubtof the removal of

timeworn landmarks, and the breaking up of the hereditary elements of societyold
opinions, feelingsancestral customs and institutions are crumbling away, and both the
spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened by the shadows of change. The commencement
of one of these epochsperiodical in the history of mankindis hailed by the sanguine as
the coming of a new Millenniuma great iconoclastic reformation, by which all false gods
shall be overthrown. To me such epochs appear
but as the dark passages in the appointed
progress of mankindthe times of greatest
unhappiness to our speciespassages into The Great Exhibition:
which we have no reason to rejoice at our
entrance, save from the hope of being sooner It was one of the first international fairs,
landed on the opposite side. organized by Prince Albert and Henry Cole. It
lasted for five months and was housed in an
enormous structure made of glass and metal
2. 2 The Mid-Victorian Period (1848-1870): located in Hyde Park. One could find on
Prosperity and Optimism display there 13,000 exhibits from Britain
and its colonies: technological devices, raw
This period is also known as the Age of Equipoise, materials, exotic art, and jewelry, among
because the sense of crisis and disruption of the 1830s others. The Great Exhibition attracted many
and 1840s gave its place to optimism and industrial visitors and heralded an era of technological
supremacy. Progress became the byword of the day advance and consumerism. It celebrated the
since the mid-century was a period of unprecedented inauguration of industrial Britain.
general prosperity. This was the time when Britain
discovered many new markets across the seas and
53
Yannis Kanarakis
became an international Empire. Consequently, it was also the time when Victorian confidence and optimism
reached its peak. Such optimism was solidified through the Great Exhibition which opened in Hyde Park,
London, in 1851, and signaled Britains scientific and technological sovereignty in the world. The prosperity
of the times was manifest through the fact that now money and financial problems became prominent topics in
the novels of the period. Most writers, moreover, turned to historical fiction or the recording of the domestic
stability of middle class people. The attention of criticism, in a similar manner, shifted from Thomas Carlyle
and his expression of anxiety about the poor to Matthew Arnolds concern about the culture of the middle
classes.
Furthermore, the fact that many people from different backgrounds and religious practices gathered
together into cities, meant that many dissenting voices demanded that their rights were equally heard and
represented, and this gradually undermined the supremacy of the Anglican Church. The status of the Church
was additionally eroded by evolutionary theory and geology. This practically meant that religious discourses
were gradually replaced by more rational ones, like the narrative of evolution or Utilitarianism, as we shall
see. All these changes eventually brought about a deep uncertainty about morals, institutions or values,
becoming the price, one might argue, Victorians had to pay for progress. Dilemmas, such as tradition or
progress, science or religion, culture or anarchy, proliferated, engendering even more debates, and
intensifying the feeling of uncertainty, despite the overall prosperity.
Crystal Palace Model. Access here
2.3 The Late Victorian Period (1870-1901): Decline and Pessimism
Throughout the last two decades of the century, all major Victorian writers passed away: George Eliot died in
1880, Thomas Carlyle in 1881, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882, Anthony Trollope in 1882, Mathew Arnold in
1888, Wilkie Collins in 1889, Robert Browning in 1889, and Christina Rossetti and Walter Pater in 1894.
This, along with some other radical changes that took place at the time, made people feel that it really was the
fin de sicle, that is, the end of the century, or the end of a golden era and the coming of something new,
which they could not yet define and which aroused fear. Traditional Victorian propriety and earlier optimism
about progress were now openly questioned as outdated, while the ideals of domesticity, family, and
earnestness were challenged. This brought about a feeling of uneasiness and anxiety that was enhanced by the
aftermath of the Darwinian revolution and the radical rationalization it had spread. Darwinism and its
offshoots gave new prominence and prestige to science, which ultimately triumphed over theology. Sexuality,
for example, came to be treated as a medical or scientific subject; the status of imperialism was scientifically
validated; and the arts and cultural movements were aligned with technological or scientific advances. The
feeling that nothing was fixed or could be taken for granted was prevalent.
In the last decades of the century also, technological advances changed profoundly the way literature
was produced, distributed, or read, affecting the relation between the author and the reader. The Education Act
of 1870, and the subsequent educational reforms, drastically expanded the reading public by making
elementary education compulsory. Furthermore, printing and the press became much cheaper and accessible
to an increasingly literate public that wanted to be constantly informed about this surprising new world. These
changes established journalism as one of the most dominant powers in the shaping of public opinion.
Moreover, the expansion of the reading public entailed the incorporation of new reading groups in the market
that sought new forms of expression. Thus, the growth of the reading market led to the emergence and
development of new genres like childrens literature, travel literature, pop science, and the short story.
More than any other genre, the short story was a sign of the times. The traditional and emblematic
three-decker novel (the three-volume novel) declined in popularity in the last two decades of the century, as
people no longer read novels through circulating libraries, but bought them. Books had to be cheap and short
because the pace of life had also changed and leisure time for the middle classes decreased. There were
authors, like Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and Arthur Conan Doyle (1858-1930), who were solidly based on
this new form and made the most of the financial opportunities that the short story afforded them, developing
an awareness of the needs of the market that previous writers did not have. Likewise, Oscar Wilde (1854-
1900) exploited many different forms of writing that addressed different kinds of readers and always linked
54
the implied author of his works with his public image as a celebrity, whereas Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-
1894) addressed the specific needs of the market by publishing his most sensational works during Christmas
in order to increase sales.
In a strange way, old narratives and viewpoints still lingered, despite the fact that their relevance was
lost and they urgently had to be replaced with newer ones. The defining characteristic of the end of the
Victorian era was precisely the paradoxical coexistence of conflicting voices: a growing conservativism was
accompanied by the rise of feminism, socialism, and the surfacing of dissident sexualities; nationalist or
imperialist confidence coexisted along with its questioning; the vision of progress brought fears about
regressing to an uncivilized state; collectivism was juxtaposed to disinterested individualism, tradition to
innovation, commodification to crafted art, popular and mass art to elite and obscure forms of art. Such
coexistence of opposing views and concepts was, of course, highly indicative of a radical dissolution of social
consensus and coherence, and anticipated the diversity and plurality of the Modernist Period.
Here is an online exhibition of Victorian printing technology from the British Library. Access here
3. Industrialism and Individualism
3.1 The Condition of England
Image 2.2 Edward Goodall. Engraving of Manchester,1840.
In Signs of the Times (1829), Thomas Carlyle argues that the defining characteristic of his era is
mechanization, an unprecedented social phenomenon that affected all aspects of life: from industrial
production to philosophy, and from cultural production to human relations:
55
Yannis Kanarakis
Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be
tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all
others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense
of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices
the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand: all is by
rule and calculated contrivance, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness.
The driving force of such mechanization is what Elisabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) years later will call
the plague of gold and the profound alienation that it brought about. As she admits in The Cry of the
Human (1842):
Our thoughts grow blank, our words grow strange,

We cheer the pale gold-diggers,
Each soul is worth so much on Change,
And marked, like sheep, with figures. (41-44)
Both Browning and Carlyle are alluding here to the

sweeping force of the Industrial Revolution which started in the
1780s but gained momentum during the early nineteenth century.
Britain was one of the first countries to be radically transformed by The Glorious Revolution:
this Revolution due to the fact that its economy could support the
The Glorious Revolution, also
large-scale investments that such a transformation called for.
known as the Bloodless
Secondly, after the Glorious Revolution, the anti-absolutist climate Revolution, took place in1688
that was established favored the reduction of State intervention and and led to the deposition of
the expansion of commerce, a fact which led to the birth of a Catholic James II and the
commercial middle class. There were also certain scientific ascension to the throne of his
developments such as James Hargreaves (1720-1778) spinning daughter Mary II and her
jenny (1770) or Samuel Cromptons spinning mule (1779) that husband William of Orange, who
mechanized weaving production, and James Watt (1736-1819) and supported the Protestants.
Matthew Boultons (1728-1809) steam engine (1796), which not
only satisfied the need for increased power supplies, but also
revolutionized modes of production and resulted in increased mass
production. Mills no longer depended on waterwheels for power, and steam engines became the driving force
of coal mines, paving the way for the railroad, which drastically accelerated the speed of production in the
1830s and 1840s.
Image 2.3 Illustration of the Boulton-Watt rotative engine.
Such technological advances deeply affected peoples lives and changed the face of Britain
profoundly. This was an era of transition when places like Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester (which was
56
called the workshop of the world) turned from small towns into grey industrial cities. The residents were
forced to leave behind the rural pace of the farms they used to work on and were subjected to the inhuman
working conditions of gas-lit factories that turned night into day in order to maximize profit. As a result, the
English class structure also changed fundamentally. Workers started to develop class consciousness, while the
middle classes increasingly rose to prominence through the new professions that the industrial revolution
engendered. The captains of industry, as Carlyle calls the new class of industrialists, antagonized aristocracy
since, unlike upper-class men, they were self-made men who did not rely on their familys money or property.
The widening of the gap between the rich and the poor eventually engendered social conflict, and
became one of the biggest problems of the time. A series of legislations or political changes during the
following years aimed at alleviating the condition of the poor:
In the 1830s, official labor unions started to develop, and policies that would improve
prison and working conditions and education began to be practiced.
The air of change that was blowing throughout Europe after the French revolution was
expressed in Britain through the First Reform Act of 1832.
In 1834, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. It organized workhouses within which
the poor and the needy could live and work under a very harsh regime which was meant to
act as disincentive for those who wanted to live there without producing anything. The
conditions in these workhouses were severely criticized by many Victorians. Dickens
Oliver Twist (1837-39) is such a striking example.
In 1833, the Factory Reform Act was passed which dictated that children under thirteen
could only work forty-eight hours a week.
A series of bad harvests in the 1840s, nevertheless, led to yet more poverty and
overpopulation, since starving people from Ireland rushed into industrial centers in order to
find a job, and this inflated food prices. This was probably the most wretched period for the
poor in the history of England, which is also called the Hungry Forties. The overall
climate resulted in the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, that is, the reduction of taxation on
imported grain, which was meant to protect and increase the incomes of landowners and
prevent the import of cheap foreign wheat. This practically meant that the Repeal of the
Corn Laws was one of the first laws that took into serious consideration the poor by
reducing the profits of the rich landlords.
This time of upheavals, social paradoxes and

political instabilities is what the Victorians called the
Condition of England, a term initially coined by
The First Reform Act:
Thomas Carlyle in Chartism (1839). With the phrase the
Condition of England Carlyle did not allude only to the The First Reform Act, or the First Reform,
new reality of the two nations of the rich and the poor, Bill nearly doubled the number of the
but also to the debates about the role of industrialization electorate by including new industrial areas
that were tearing Britain apart, and the anger produced by of the north that did not have the right to
such a profound division of society. What Carlyle also be represented before. It also gave the vote
wanted to highlight was the fact that the heavy and rapid to middle class men owning a household
industrialization of British society did not only herald an worth of 10 pounds and more. This meant
era of prosperity for some, but also signaled a time of that one out of 5 men could vote. Women
deep poverty and social agitation, which threatened to and working class people were, of course,
overthrow traditional institutions and ideals. In his excluded.
analysis of British society on the eve of the Hungry
Forties, Carlyle actually expressed his anxiety about the
fact that if the situation of the poor would not improve,
this would have catastrophic consequences on English society, leading to something that everybody would
regret, i.e., a revolution.
57
Yannis Kanarakis
Thomas Carlyle, from Past and Present
In this extract Carlyle, using his characteristic vivid language, defines the Condition of England.
The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many
thoughts unpublished are going on in every reflective head, is just regarded as one of the most
ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of
multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With
unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; Waving with yellow harvests; Thick-
studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be
the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; These men are here; The work
they have done, the fruit they have realized is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us; And
behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth saying, Touch it not, ye workers, ye
master-workers, ye master-idlers; None of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it;
This is enchanted fruit! On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; But on the rich
the master-workers too it falls; Neither can the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man
escape, but all are like to be brought low with it, and made poor enough in the money sense or a
far fataller one.
Benjamin Disraeli, from Sybil, or, The Two Nations
This extract describes the division of England into two nations, the rich and the poor.
Book II, Chapter 5, The Two Nations
It is a community of purpose that constitutes society, continued the younger stranger; without
that, men may be drawn into contiguity, but they still continue virtually isolated.
And is that their condition in cities?
It is their condition everywhere; But in cities that condition is aggravated. A density of
population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought
into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a
state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; And for all the rest they are
careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor as oneself; Modern society
acknowledges no neighbor.
Well, we live in strange times, said Ergemont, struck by the observation of his companion, and
relieving a perplexed spirit by an ordinary exclamation, which often denotes that the mind is more
stirred than it cares to acknowledge, or at the moment is able to express.
When the infant begins to walk, it also thinks that it lives in strange times, said his companion.
Your inference? asked Ergemont.
That society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way.
This is a new reign, said Ergemont, Perhaps it is a new era.
I think so, said the younger stranger.
I hope so, said the elder one.
Well, society may be in its infancy, said Ergemont, slightly smiling, but, say what you like,
our Queen reigns over the greatest nation ever existed.
Which nation? asked the younger stranger, for she reigns over two.
The stranger paused; Ergemont was silent, but looked inquiringly.
Yes, resumed the younger stranger after a moments interval. Two nations; Between whom
there is no intercourse and no sympathy; Who are as ignorant of each others habits, thoughts, and
58
feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; Who are
formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are
not governed by the same laws.
You speak of _______ said Ergemont, hesitatingly.
THE RICH AND THE POOR.
3.2 The Social Problem Novel
The wretchedness of the poor was documented by many philosophers and writers of the time as a new and
shocking phenomenon. Perhaps one of the most disturbing recordings of working-class life appears in the
study of the German philosopher Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), The Condition of the Working Classes in
England (1845). The effects of industrialism on the masses was a debatable topic which was, furthermore,
explored and portrayed in the Condition of England novel or Industrial novel, or social problem novel, which
came to prominence during that time. In most cases, these novels sought to reconcile or bridge the inequalities
that the industrial revolution brought about. Novels that belong in this tradition are, among others, France
Trollopes The Life and Adventure of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), Benjamin Disraelis
Coningsky (1844) and Sybil, or The Two Nations (1846), Elisabeth Gaskells Mary Barton (1848) and North
and South (1855), Charlotte Bronts Shirley (1849), Charles Kingsleys Alton Locke (1850) and Charles
Dickens Hard Times (1854).
Most of these novels are either based on first-hand experience or official documents and records, such
as parliamentary reports or extracts from the press. For example, Benjamin Disraelis Sybil heavily relies on
the 1842 report of the Childrens Employment Commission and the 1843 report on the payment of wages. Set
during the years of political agitation in the 1830s, Sybil draws on Parliamentary reports in order to illustrate
factory conditions, and draw attention to the gap between the rich and the poor, which were like two different
nations. Dickens Hard Times (1854) is based on the authors personal investigation of the cotton workers
strike in Preston, Lancashire. In Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855), Elisabeth Gaskell presents
the bleak reality of industrial neighborhoods, modeled on real Manchester slums. Mary Barton, set during the
turbulent 1830s, documents Gaskells first-hand experiences from industrial Manchester. There is a strong
ethnographic undercurrent in the novel that tries to capture the local dialect and the workers customs in order
to sketch the plight of the people living there. Both Frances Trollope and Elisabeth Gaskell, in their prefaces
to Michael Armstrong and Mary Barton respectively, express their wish to inform the reading public about the
embarrassing living and working conditions of the working classes. In Trollopes The Life and Adventures of
Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), the charitable heroine Mary Brotherton considers it her moral
obligation to be informed about the poor, while the author exposes the reader to the child-labour conditions of
Manchester and Bradford. In a similar fashion, Charlotte Bront in Shirley (1849) illustrates the complex
socio-political and historical factors that led to the workers plight.
Friedrich Engels, from The Condition of the Working Class in England
In this extract, Engels describes the individualism of the working people in the slums.
The crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another,
and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to
delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much
as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the
more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited
space.
Most of these writers recorded the bleak reality of industrialism as a means of introducing something
new to the middle classes, adopting the role of a reporter, historian or even social scientist. But the political
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perspective from which they regarded this bleak aspect of British society was more than evident: Disraeli was
a conservative, Gaskell a dissenter, and Dickens a distanced southerner. They had nothing to do, in other
words, with the harsh reality that the workers faced. This means that all these writers were not only writing for
the middle classes, but they were writing from a middle class standpoint as well, simultaneously promoting a
middle class morality in their work. This tendency was in tune with the strong moral tone within which the
Condition of England was presented by authors like Marx, Engels, Ruskin, and Carlyle, who all considered it
a moral obligation of the individual to be aware of the circumstances in which large communities of people
spent their lives. This moral perspective was due to the fact that for these writers the plights of the poor were
an offshoot of the nations progress, industrialism and individualism, so the middle class individual, who
reaped the benefits of such progress was implicitly held morally responsible for the fate of the poor. In this
light, all these Victorian writers also addressed the issue of the relation between the individual and the
community, and depicted how individuals are always shaped and defined through their relation with the
community. This preoccupation with the relation between the individual and community will later develop
into what is probably the most defining issue of the Victorian novel.
An introduction to everyday life in the Industrial Era. Access here
Living the Poor Life: Poverty and the Workhouse in the Nineteenth Century. Access here
Industrialism: Progress or Decline? (Norton Anthology). Access here
3.3 Victorian Individualism and Collectivism
The driving force of industrialism was individualistic competitiveness and self-interestedness. Let us not
forget here that although this was the first time more than half of the population was living in industrial cities,
the sense of community was lost when people had to leave the villages and move into factory towns.
Furthermore, the new industrial reality was considered by many as a jungle where people had to struggle hard
for survival. This idea was also promoted through the new class of the industrialists, a novel role model, in the
sense that they signaled a new type of self-made man who managed to make it on his own without having to
rely on his familys money, fortune, or name. Moreover, there were also certain political events that
substantiated the doctrine of individualism. One such case was the Anti-Corn Law League which, based on
laissez-faire (free trade) principles, demanded the import of cheap wheat in order to keep wages low and
increase the export of cotton. The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was actually a triumph of the laissez-faire
ideology of self-interestedness, as well. What is more, after the Municipal Reform Act of 1835,
Nonconformists (i.e., dissenters from the established church of England) could enter local government. These
people manifested a strong individualistic ideology because their creed allowed them to be opposed to
religious authorities. As they followed their conscience, they could easily dissent not only from local
authorities but from state interference as well, and promote a type of ideology that was in full accordance with
laissez-faire economy.
Self-reliance and individualism gradually became one of the most dominant and characteristic middle
class Victorian values. This is why when Samuel Smiles, the Scottish government reformer, published his
book tellingly entitled Self Help with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859), it became a huge
best-seller. It is precisely the prevalent idea of individualism and the ideology of self-help as a means of
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economic success that Charles Dickens ridicules in Hard Times (1854) through the character of Bounderby, a
supposedly self-made industry owner, who is eventually proved to be a scoundrel.
Samuel Smiles, from Self Help with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance
Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects
upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education. Schools,
academies, and colleges, give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more
influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in
workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy
haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated
the education of the human race, consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control,all that
tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of
life,a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary
training.
In fact, what actually lurked behind individualism was nothing else but the laissez-faire politics that
industrialism was solidly based upon. The ideology of laissez-faire was also promoted by Utilitarianism,
Benthamism, or Philosophical Radicalism, the philosophical and economic movement founded by Jeremy
Bentham (1748-1832) which greatly affected the legal, social, political, and economic thought of the time.
Benthams system was based on the idea that the leading principle in peoples lives is the desire to avoid pain
and seek pleasure; consequently, all laws had to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Benthams theory, in other words, was implicitly aligned with the laissez-faire individualism of Adam Smith
(1723-1790), since it basically opposed any type of state interference so that people would be free to pursue
their own interests, and, by doing so, promote general welfare. For Bentham, the role of the state had to be
reduced to national defense and the protection of private property and public order.
Along with the development of individualism there grew a strong reaction to it. The strongest and
most fervent early critic of Victorian individualism and rationalism was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). We
should note here, however, that Carlyle may have attacked the individualism implicit in laissez-faire
economy, yet his version of history revolved around the lives of unique individuals. In this way, Carlyle was
indirectly favoring a different type of individualism related with the charismatic leader who was in favor of
the common good, rather than his [sic] personal interest. In his 1840 series of lectures entitled On Heroes,
Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Carlyle celebrated the power of human agency, arguing that the
concept of individualism was crucial even for those who were partially against it and comprised one of the
cornerstones of Victorian ideology.
One of the most influential forms of collectivity that rose to prominence at the time was the political
movement of Chartism, which came into sharp contrast with what individualism stood for.
Chartism and Its Legacy
Chartism was one of the strongest and most widespread working-class movements that Britain had
ever known, despite the fact that it was a very short-lived phenomenon that lasted from 1838 to
1848. Chartism asked for constitutional reform and the democratization of politics. In his pamphlet
published in 1839, Carlyle describes it as the symptom of an illness that might radically undermine
social stability and order. It was an outgrowth of the political and economic predicaments of the time
and the disillusionment that followed the inequalities of the first Reform Bill of 1832. Through this
movement, workers protested against their low wages, the unacceptable working conditions, and the
widening of the gulf between the rich and the poor. The movement took its name from the Peoples
Charter that William Lovett and Francis Place drew up in 1838, and which included the celebrated
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six points: universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, removal of property qualifications for
MPs, payment for MPs, secret ballots, and annual elections.
Chartists fully utilized the printing technology of the time in order to spread their political
agenda, which was expressed in songs, chants, ballads, and hymns. Thus, there were many chartist
papers or magazines, like The Labourer, The Chartist Circular, or The Northern Star, the official
chartist organ, which published poems by chartist poets like Thomas Cooper, Gerald Massey, Ernest
Jones, or W. J. Linton. After having gathered nearly 1.5 million signatures, in 1839 the chartists
submitted a petition to the Parliament, but it was rejected. The rejection was followed by many
demonstrations and government counter-actions. These events were actually the historical
background against which Disraelis Sybil and Gaskells Mary Barton were set. In 1842, a second
petition was presented, followed in 1848 by a third one, both of which were also rejected, leading to
strikes and riots, which formed the background of Kingsleys novel Alton Locke. The disillusionment
and the riots that followed, the fact that the middle classes turned to trade unionism, along with the
prosperity of the subsequent years, led to the waning of the chartist power.
By 1848, Chartism had lost its impetus, but its presence could be felt throughout the century
as a reaction to the radical changes that industrialization had brought about and the inequalities it had
generated. Most of the six points of the Peoples Charter were in due course incorporated in the
English constitution, while Chartism helped radicalism turn into socialism in the following decades.
It definitely paved the way for the improvement of factory conditions and child-labor. It also
heralded the rise of class-consciousness which is evident in Dickens novels David Copperfield and
Great Expectations.
When, years later, a persistent agricultural depression in the 1870s resulted in economic
depression, unemployment, and poverty in 1884, there followed general public agitation and a
resurfacing of Chartism. This alarmed the authorities and led to the awareness that a new handling of
urban poverty was needed which prompted a series of state interventions, new reforms, and debates
that signaled the birth of social welfare. A new collective awareness was developed then as a form of
dissatisfaction with the dominant trend of individualism. This was also the time when socialism and
collectivism became very popular through the foundation of many organizations such as the Socialist
League (1883) or the Fabian Society (1884).
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Image 2.4 Poster of a Chartist Demonstration, 1848.
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The dilemmas and anxieties concerning the phenomenon of Chartism were recorded in the novels of
the time through characters of working class men and women who rejected the bleak individualism of laissez-
faire by joining collective groups such as trade unions or Chartism. These collectivities were, nevertheless,
threatening the established order, since they brought back memories of the horrors of the French Revolution.
As Carlyle confessed in Chartism, [t]hese Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill are our French Revolution;
God grant that we, with our better methods, may be able to transact it by arguments alone. Such threat was
dramatized in the literature of the time through the persistent positive illustrations of individual workers and
negative depiction of organized evil workers. Despite the fact that all social-problem writers sympathized
initially with the newly risen working class, when this class started claiming its rights and questioning the
established distribution of wealth, sympathy gave way to fear and horror.
In Dickens Hard Times, for instance, the workers of industrial Coketown are presented as a single
anonymous and uniform body, whereas the character of Stephen Blackpool embodies the worker who
maintains his individuality by refusing to join their union. In a similar fashion, Gaskells novels stage
suspicion and fear in the face of organized workers, whereas Hard Times, Shirley, and Sybil harshly condemn
trade unions. In Mary Barton, the poor are presented as monsters, whereas in North and South they are
illustrated in bestial terms. Trade unions and working collectivities are, moreover, regarded as hindrances to
economic progress. In Alton Locke and Mary Barton, chartists are directly and unquestionably held
responsible for outbreaks of political violence and are considered to be its initiators, revealing the social
distrust that chartists and the poor evoked for the middle classes. The portrayal of Chartism is even more
negative in Benjamin Disraelis Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), as becomes evident in the famous scene
where the mob attacks Mowbray Castle, overtly evoking memories of the French Revolution. In Charles
Kingsleys Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850), Chartism is also presented as a negative influence and a
means of losing ones individual traits by becoming part of an uncontrollably violent mob. All these novels
depict how extremist agitators take advantage of the bad working and living conditions of the workers and
their ignorance in order to spread destructive mob anarchy and undermine social order.
It is interesting to note here that most of these writers resorted to novelistic and romance conventions
in order to overcome the ideological shortcomings or impasses of their plots. All these industrial novels have
strong intrusive narrators that directly address the reader in order to consolidate their didactic tone and direct
the readers response to such complicated social phenomena. The emphasis on didacticism can be considered
an early precursor of the attempt to educate and shape the opinion of the middle class, something which
became a central issue in the mid-Victorian period, as we will see.
Apart from the didacticism of the omniscient narrators, writers employed other literary conventions in
order to provide solutions to political problems. The gap between the two nations, the rich and the poor, in
these novels is not resolved by overthrowing the status quo but rather through an unexpected inheritance, the
revelation of blood kinship, or marriage. The fact, moreover, that all these authors yearned for a solution to
the social problem reflects their desire for social stability and the annihilation of anything that might disrupt it.
Thus, what initially sets out to be a social, economic, or ideological problem is soon resolved through an
idiom of harmony and reconciliation that actually serves to maintain the status quo. In Disraelis Sybil, the
answer to the Chartist agitation and the threatening rise of a new class is provided through the marriage
between Charles Egremont, the industrialist, and Sybil, who, together with her father, the Chartist leader, turn
out to be aristocrats. For Disraeli, the gap between the two nations can only be bridged through a new form of
aristocracy, embodied in the marriage between the heroine and Egremont, and not through trade unions or
chartists. Drawing heavily on Carlyles version of heroism, Disraeli promotes in his novel a new form of
aristocratic chivalry that would lead the people and establish a historical continuity with the ancient regime.
Aristocracy, monarchy, the Church, and workers are harmonized in an overtly non-democratic way, since the
new working classes are left totally unrepresented in the final resolution.
In a similar fashion, in Gaskells Mary Barton, the initial careful representation of social inequalities
of the first part of the book is abruptly substituted by a romance plot and sensationalist fiction conventions. It
seems that Gaskells sympathy towards social issues reaches an impasse when it clashes with her middle class
Christian identity. Resorting to the convention of the marriage plot, Gaskell naively suggests that love can
achieve the reconciliation between the two nations or at least soften the tension between them.
A detailed overview of Chartism. Access here
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Robert Browning Overview. Access here
Here you can find Charles Booths Survey into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903).
Access here
Here you can find an overview of Socialism, Marxism and Related Reform Movements in Late-
Victorian Britain. Access here
3.4 Individualism and Poetry: The Dramatic Monologue
The force of individualistic ideology was not only manifest in the industrial novels of the time, but found
expression in other literary forms, such as the dramatic monologue, which was one of the most fashionable
poetic modes during the Victorian period. This poetic tradition was invented, practiced, and popularized by
Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and various other Victorian poets. It based its
effect on theatrical qualities since it involved an imagined speaker and an implied audience. A dramatic
monologue focused on a persons speech which was open to interpretation by the audience without any direct
authorial intervention. In most cases, this speech highlighted a form of discrepancy between what the speaker
or persona said and what s/he meant or how the audience interpreted it. As such, this medium was a perfect
means of illustrating the complexities of human identity through the active participation of the audience or the
listener. This medium was very popular at the time because it addressed the conflicts and discrepancies
between the personal and the social that were very much in the air. In other words, it implicitly illustrated the
shortcomings of individualism by highlighting the active role of the audience in the construction of social
reality or meaning. It achieved this by staging individuals who have no knowledge of their blind-spots and
whose self-centeredness is the reason why they are self-deluded. The fact that the audience is aware of their
delusions, nevertheless, generates dramatic irony. In a similar fashion, Tennysons The Lady of Shalott
(1832) captures the tension between personal inner vision and the realm of social demand, whereas in The
Lotus-Eaters (1832) Tennyson lucidly encapsulates the conflict between desire and duty.
In one of Robert Brownings (1812-1889) most celebrated dramatic monologues, The Bishop Orders
His Tomb at Saint Praxeds Church (1845), for example, the nuances of individualism are implicitly invoked
through a portrait of a fictional Renaissance bishop on his deathbed ordering his tomb. Browning draws on the
theatrical conventions of the dramatic monologue in order to illustrate the clash between the readers or the
audiences expectations for compliance with moral and social norms and the bishops self-centeredness. From
the start, the poems unrhymed iambic pentameter, which resembles the rhythm of natural speech, a very
colloquial and businesslike tone, foregrounds the bishops materialism and sensualism rather than his longing
for salvation, faith, or deliverance. The speakers self-centeredness is highlighted not only through his
indulgences in the poem but also through the fact that he longs to build his luxurious tomb because he wants
to outshine his antagonist, Old Gandolf. In full compliance with the critics of laissez-faire antagonism,
Browning presents individualism as a synonym of materialism, envious competitiveness, and shallowness as
well as the opposite of spirituality, sympathy, or personal fulfillment.
The Dramatic Monologue. Access here
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3.5 The Self and the Community in Victorian Fiction
The idea of overcoming the limitations of the self and becoming one with the community, that is, the idea of
sympathy through which self-interestedness and greed will be overcome is another crucial Victorian concern
and one of the dominant themes in Dickenss work throughout his career. When he visited Manchester in
1843, Dickens was struck by the volunteers who taught the workers children. This very idea of sympathy and
love able to transcend the cash nexus (i.e., materialism) is staged later that year in his very popular story A
Christmas Carol (1843). Throughout his works, Dickens consistently employs the medium of sentiment as a
means of teaching his readers how sympathy and love can overcome the limitations of individualism.
Consider for example Little Nell, the angelic orphan girl in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), whose life is
immersed in misery while her guardian grandfather is addicted to gambling. Her tragic deathbed scene
affected the Victorians much more than any other piece of writing and urged them towards social action.
Many other Victorian writers were also preoccupied with the relation between the individual and
society, turning against the dominant ideology of individualism. One might even argue that the main topic of
the Victorian novel is actually the relation between the self and society. George Eliot addresses this issue
through the phenomenon of egoism that she is constantly preoccupied with throughout her work. She
consistently explores the interdependence of the individual and the community through characters who have
to surpass their individual limitations in order to become helpful to the community. In one of her early works,
Adam Bede (1859), the character of Dinah Morris is the epitome of altruism, and influences everyone around
her. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), the community is upheld over and above the self; Maggie Tulliver
develops from being self-centered to being altruistic and only then can she be united with her brother. In
Romola (1862-63), through the characters of Tito and Romola, Eliot explores the relation between selfishness
and generosity. In Middlemarch (1871-72), finally, the narrator illustrates how individual benevolence can
affect the community.
In Middlemarch, specifically, the power that brings everything together, does not lie with the
positivists, Lydgate and Casaubon, who are satirically presented as trying to unify things through biology and
anthropology, but through an artist, Will Ladislaw, who is the bearer of imagination, or fancy, as Dickens
would have put it. This is precisely why Eliot employs one of the predominant images in the novel, that of the
web, to illustrate the idea of interconnectedness. Eliot is preoccupied with extending the sympathies of her
readers through imagination, the power of identifying with others, and this is why her moralizing narrator
constantly intervenes to make sure the reader is aware of the connections between her narrative and real life,
or the reader and the world. The plight of others is, in this way, consistently utilized as a stepping stone for
action and an urge against egoism.
The Victorian interest in the relationship between the individual and the collective as a corrective of
the extremities of self-interestedness is manifested in the resurgence of the bildungsroman (i.e., the novel of
development or education). Even though the form is solidly based on autobiographical conventions and the
Romantic tradition of individualism, in the bildungsroman, this emphasis on the individual is always mediated
through the social and the communal. Identity is here shaped by external social forces and is, as a
consequence, unstable. In Great Expectations, which is yet another moral fable written by Dickens in the form
of a bildungsroman, the author is engaged with the impact of social mobility upon the self. The novel
indicatively begins with Pips attempt to understand who he is by trying to read the inscriptions on his
familys tombstone. The semi-Gothic atmosphere of the novel is related to the dark quest into the identity of
things (Great Expectations, Vol. 1, Ch. 1) amidst a terrifying world of conflicting and misleading signs. The
novel includes many scenes of the attempt to to read or write as a means of creating ones identity, and
constantly highlights the role of the past in the construction of oneself. The past is the one thing that the
characters in the novel can never escape from. It is actually only when the protagonist accepts and embraces
his dark, criminal stepfather that he is able to go up the social ladder and succeed in the competitive world of
Victorian England. This is how Dickens chose to illustrate the fact that the individual always needs the others
in order to be complete.
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3.6 Escaping Industrialism: The Return to the Past and Medievalism
Image 2.5 Ford Madox Brown. The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry (1845).
The wretched conditions that the poor had to undergo and the bleak side of industrialization made many
Victorian thinkers and writers resort to a glorified type of the past as a means of escaping the ugliness of the
present. George Eliots novels, for example, are all marked by a nostalgia for a pre-industrial past. In Adam
Bebe (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1872) industrialization is
totally absent despite the fact that Middlemarch, for example, is set against the backdrop of the first Reform
Bill of 1832. In the opening pages of Felix Holt (1867), Eliot nostalgically contemplates a pastoral past when
there were no railroads. The need to return to the past is evident in a number Victorian writers and artists;
Tennyson and Ruskin are nostalgic of the Middle Ages; Robert Browning, Walter Pater and the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood celebrate the art of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance; and Matthew
Arnold longs to revisit classical Greece. Such nostalgia was symptomatic of a refusal to directly engage with
the present by escaping or sublimating it.
Another reason why many writers turned to a glorified and idealized version of the Middle Ages was
because they wanted to criticize certain aspects of the present. Medievalism was first expressed in the
eighteenth-century architectural movement of Gothic revival and aimed to highlight a sense of historical
continuity. The restoration of the Parliament in a Gothic style after it was burned down in 1834 was indicative
of the type of the non-classical past it wanted to evoke. But it was actually Carlyles Past and Present (1843),
which popularized medievalism by juxtaposing its communal vision to laissez-faire individualism. In this
book, which is one of the most influential works of Victorian social criticism, Carlyle tries to explore the
reasons why people do not react against the inequalities and injustice of modern life but rather take them for
granted. For Carlyle, social bonds have been replaced by the cash nexus and reduced to the worship of
money and material goods. The aristocracy, Carlyle maintains, has failed to provide people with inspiring role
models that would encourage them to get out of such misery. So, he believes that industrialists, these
successful self-made men, should take the place of aristocracy and become the Captains of Industry, in
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order to provide moral guidance to workers and the middle class. Carlyles solution draws on a type of
medieval chivalry in order to come up with a modern type of hero. His answer to the workers plight is
actually a return to a form of feudalism that actually promotes existing social hierarchies and economic
structures. The promotion of aristocratic political dominance inspired the conservative party, the Tories, and
deeply influenced Benjamin Disraeli, as we have seen.
What is also interesting to note here is that the medieval past was employed to serve diverse
ideological ends and not only conservative ones. For example Ruskins essay The Nature of Gothic, in the
fifth volume of Modern Painters (1860), is solidly based on Carlyles medievalist tradition. However, it
further expands the notion of medievalism to include not only the concept of chivalric pre-industrial, non-
alienated labor, but also the freedom of expression and imagination which industrial mass production
definitely lacked. Such celebration of handicraft will later have a huge impact on William Morris socialism
and the arts and crafts movement. It will also help shape a whole tradition of utopian fiction in which
medievalism will be utilized as a means of illustrating an unattainable utopian kind of communal future. This
is evident in novels such as William Morris News from Nowhere (1891) or George Gissings Workers in the
Dawn (1880), Demos (1886) and The Nether World (1889).
The Medieval Revival. Access here
Medievalism, Aestheticism and Design. Access here
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4. Domesticity and the Woman Question

Domestic propriety became one of the most characteristic values of the Victorian temper and was espoused by
the Queen herself. Women were identified with domestic morality as its guardians and bearers, whereas men
were identified with the public sphere. Gradually, though, a number of women were not satisfied with the
domestic role they were called to play, as it was too constraining and even suffocating. Their attempt to
escape the limitations of the domestic sphere marks the birth of a proto-feminist awareness which comprised a
crucial part of the Victorian agenda of political and social reformation.
4.1 Two Separate Spheres: The Cult of Domesticity
Anne Bront, Domestic Peace, 1850
Why should such gloomy silence reign,

And why is all the house so drear,
When neither danger, sickness, pain,
Nor death, nor want have entered here?
We are as many as we were
That other night, when all were gay
And full of hope, and free from care;
Yet, is there something gone away.
The moon without, as pure and calm,
Is shining, as that night she shone;
But now, to us, she brings no balm,
For something from our hearts is gone.
Something whose absence leaves a void
A cheerless want in every heart;
Each feels the bliss of all destroyed,
And mourns the changebut each apart.
The fire is burning in the grate
As redly as it used to burn;
But still the hearth is desolate,
Till mirth, and love, and peace return.
T was peace that flowed from heart to heart,
With looks and smiles that spoke of heaven,
And gave us language to impart
The blissful thoughts itself had given.
Domestic peace! best joy of earth,
When shall we all thy value learn?
White angelto our sorrowing hearth,
Returnoh, graciously return!
The cult of domesticity functioned at first as a protective shield the Victorians raised against the sweeping
shifts of the times. Amidst the chaos brought about by radical socioeconomic changes, the idea of ordered and
pious domesticity was presented as an antidote to such disorder. Home became the shelter from all these
troubles that seemed to be threatening nearly all aspects of daily life, and women were the guardian angels of
morality. This feminized version of domesticity was also historically enhanced by the ascension of a young
female monarch to the throne in 1837. Queen Victoria was devoted not only to her public role, but her
domestic role too as a loyal wife and mother of nine children, and foregrounded the role of women as the
bearers of the nations morality. In 1839, Sarah Stickney Ellis, the author of multiple books about womens
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roles in society, further popularized the idea of separate spheres for men and women and highlighted
womens supportive role in the family. Through her publications, she insisted that women should be confined
to the domestic sphere in order to be able to care for their husbands who toiled in the turbulent public sphere.
Women were identified with the ideals of home and were considered to be emotional, melancholic, and
sensitive.
Image 2.6 Miss Day, Photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (26 July 1859).
These domestic traits actually enabled the association of women with art and culture. Interestingly,
poetry started to be increasingly associated with femininity. Actually, the first two Victorian poets, long
before Lord Alfred Tennyson appeared on the scene, were Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon. Hemans was
one of the most popular early Victorian poets and a leading figure in the domestication of English poetry.
Most of her work dealt with the idea of home, associated either with family or with England. Landons poems,
on the other hand, are mostly preoccupied with unfulfilled desire and the isolation that female writers
experienced. The image of a domesticated woman who is sullen or melancholic due to her alienation from the
public sphere became a defining characteristic of Tennysons work. It is a theme he returns to in a number of
poems, such as Oenone, (1829), The Palace of Art (1832), and The Lady of Shalott (1832), or
Mariana (1830).
The genre of the novel also contributed decisively to the dissemination of the ideal of domesticity. As
a matter of fact, this was the time when, gradually but steadily, the novel replaced poetry in popularity and
became the dominant literary form in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that, unlike previous dominant
literary forms, that is poetry and drama, the novel was not a collective or public medium, but involved reading
in the privacy of ones home. In this sense, the novel was the cultural form of domesticity par excellence. This
is why most novels involved narratives that had to do with concepts of domesticity such as the family or the
home. In these novels, the protagonists were usually women, unlike the common literary modes of the past,
like the epic, which dealt with the public sphere and focused mostly on men. The prevalence of domestic
ideals in the fiction of the time is also obvious in the work of the most popular Victorian writer, Charles
Dickens. In nearly all of his stories, Dickens counterbalanced the threatening injustice and violence of the
public sphere with the soothing moral warmth of home. The domestic sphere is consistently illustrated in
Dickens as the haven against the difficulties of life.
In the social-problem novels of the time, moreover, it is often the female protagonist who is the bearer
of a redemptive and reconciliatory force precisely because of her association with the domestic sphere. Here,
femininity is identified with the domestic values of love and compassion which are employed in order to
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soften the political and economic forces of the public sphere with a kind of moral, emotional, and spiritual
authority. In Benjamin Disraelis Sybil, for example, the heroine stands for the sacred and the noble, whereas
in Elizabeth Gaskells Mary Barton and North and South the female protagonists redeem male power through
their loving. It is the consciousness of Margaret Hale that gives coherence to the universe of North and South
the way a mother brings a family together. The female as a motherly mediating force brings extremes together
into a happily-ever-after resolution. Thus, through the marriage plot between Margaret Hale and Henry
Thorton, male capitalist individualism is feminized and Christianized in order to give birth to a commercial
middle glass that will replace a declining immoral gentry.
Sarah Stickney Ellis, from The Women of England
In this extract Sarah Stickney Ellis discusses the influence that women in Victorian England have.
It is therefore not only false in reasoning, but wrong in principle, for women to assert, as they not
unfrequently do with a degree of puerile satisfaction, that they have no influence.
An influence fraught either with good or evil, they must have; and though the one may be above
their ambition, and the other beyond their fears, by neglecting to obtain an influence which shall be
beneficial to society, they necessarily assume a bad one: just in the same proportion as their
selfishness, indolence, or vacuity of mind, render them in youth an easy prey to every species of
unamiable temper, in middle age the melancholy victims of mental disease, and, long before the
curtain of death conceals their follies from the world, a burden and a bane to society at large. A
superficial observer might with this class many of those exemplary women, who pass to and fro upon
the earth with noiseless step, whose names are never heard, and who, even in society, if they attempt
to speak, have scarcely the ability to command an attentive audience. Yet amongst this unpretending
class are found striking and noble instances of women, who, apparently feeble and insignificant,
when called into action by pressing and peculiar circumstances, can accomplish great and glorious
purposes, supported and carried forward by that most valuable of all facultiesmoral power.
It is not to be presumed that women possess more power than men; but happily for them, such are
their early impressions, associations, and general position in the world, that their moral feelings are
less liable to be impaired by the pecuniary objects which too often constitute the chief end of man,
and which, even under the limitations of better principle, necessarily engage a large portion of his
thoughts. There are many humble-minded women, not remarkable for any particular intellectual
endowments, who yet possess so clear a sense of the right and wrong of individual actions, as to be
of essential service in aiding the judgments of their husbands, brothers, or sons, in those intricate
affairs in which it is sometimes difficult to dissever worldly wisdom from religious duty.
To men belongs the potent (I had almost said the omnipotent) consideration of worldly
aggrandisement; and it is constantly misleading their steps, closing their ears against the voice of
conscience, and beguiling them with the promise of peace, where peace was never found. Long
before the boy has learned to exult in the dignity of the man, his mind has become familiarized to the
habit of investing with supreme importance, all considerations relating to the acquisition of wealth.
He hears on the sabbath, and on stated occasions, when men meet for that especial purpose, of a God
to be worshipped, a Saviour to be trusted in, and a holy law to be observed; but he sees before him,
every day and every hour, a strife, which is nothing less than deadly to the highest impulses of the
soul, after another godthe mammon of unrighteousnessthe moloch3 of this world; and believing
rather what men do, than what they preach, he learns too soon to mingle with the living mass, and to
unite his labours with theirs. To unite? Alas! there is no union in the great field of action in which he
is engaged; but envy and hatred, and opposition, to the close of the day. . . .
How often has man returned to his home with a mind confused by the many voices, which in the
mart, the exchange, or the public assembly, have addressed themselves to his inborn selfishness, or
his worldly pride; and while his integrity was shaken, and his resolution gave way beneath the
pressure of apparent necessity, or the insidious pretences of expediency, he has stood corrected
before the clear eye of woman, as it looked directly to the naked truth, and detected the lurking evil
of the specious act he was about to commit.
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Nay, so potent may have become this secret influence, that he may have borne it about with him
like a kind of second conscience, for mental reference, and spiritual counsel in moments of trial; and
when the snares of the world were around him, and temptations from within and without have bribed
over the witness in his own bosom, he has thought of the humble monitress who sat alone, guarding
the fireside comforts of his distant home; and the remembrance of her character, clothed in moral
beauty, has scattered the clouds before his mental vision, and sent him back to that beloved home, a
wiser and a better man.
The Cult of Domesticity. Access here
Here you can find Isabella Beechers The Book of Household Management (1861), a
paradigmatic domestic advice book. Access here
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4.2 The Woman Question and the Matrimonial Causes Act
Image 2.7 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found (1865-69).

A Fallen Woman who has attempted to escape her domestic duties and is now caught. Order is restored by a man. The
little calf in the background is indicative of the fate that awaits her.
Apart from evolutionary theory, which launched a relentless questioning of religious and metaphysical
assumptions, there were other historical factors that contributed to a gradual yet steady change in domestic
values, which were so fundamental in the middle class moral code. Gender stereotypes, which were so
ardently supported in Sarah Stickney Ellis The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits
(1839) as the cornerstones of domestic ideology, were systematically attacked in the 1840s and 1850s,
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initiating what has been called the Woman Question. There were many women who found the idea of
marriage as the only alternative in their lives suffocating, and thus fought for equal rights with men. Caroline
Norton, Harriet Martinaeu, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, and Bessie Rayner Parkes, among others, played a
decisive role in the 1850s parliamentary debates which led to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 which
made divorce legal and provided for the protection of divorced, separated, and deserted wives.
What also led to the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act was quite unexpectedly the British defeat at the
Crimean War that took place from 1853 to 1856. The failure, incompetence, and mismanagement on the part
of the authorities outraged the disillusioned public which demanded radical reforms. In sharp contrast,
nevertheless, to the inadequacy and ineffectuality of the male high-class authorities, a modern heroine
emerged out of this war. Florence Nightingale rose to prominence as the organizer and manager of a very
efficient team of nurses that tended the wounded soldiers during the war. The Lady with the Lamp, as
Nightingale came to be known, was not only the founder of modern nursing but actually foregrounded the role
of women as crucial and helpful agents of the public sphere as well. She thus played a crucial role in the
professionalization of nursing for women, setting up the first secular school for nurses which unlocked the
gates of womens domestic seclusion.
Image 2.8 George Frederic Watts, Found Drowned (1867).

An image that depicts the fate that awaits women who leave the domestic warmth and seek adventure in the public
sphere.
Despite its double standards for men and women, as well as its many shortcomings, the 1857 Act gave
relative autonomy to women, paving the way towards the improvement of their status. As a consequence of
the Act, many constitutional efforts were made towards womens equality. During the debates about the
Second Reform Bill, J. S. Mill, a Member of the Parliament then, suggested that women should also vote, and
in 1869 he published his controversial essay The Subjection of Women, in which he argues in favour of
equality between men and women. However, another series of Acts brought to the forefront the inequality
between men and women and infuriated certain liberal thinkers. These were the Contagious Diseases Acts,
successively passed in 1864, 1866, and 1869, which permitted the authorities to perform genital inspection on
women who were suspected of venereal disease and who would subsequently be detained in hospitals. Men
were, of course, neither inspected nor penalized on grounds that this would harm the morale of the army and
put national security at risk. This comprised not only a violation of the rights of women, since it subjected
them to public humiliation, but, most importantly, failed to eradicate or at least deal with the problem. In
1886, these Acts were repealed, and a number of other Acts set the stepping stones for womens
independence. The 1870 Education Act, for instance, helped women get new employment opportunities as
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teachers, and in 1882 The Married Womans Act gave women rights to the property acquired before and after
marriage. All these actions led to the first feminist wave.
The shift in the sociopolitical climate is reflected in a number of Victorian heroines who question the
restrictive roles society forces on them by developing an oppositional discourse against dominant morals. One
of the harshest critiques of the domestic ideal came with William Thackerays novel Vanity Fair (1847-48).
Becky Sharp, the daughter of a penniless artist and the heroine of the novel, climbs up the social and
economic ladder by cynically exploiting anybody who stands in her way. Through the heroines embodiment
of social mobility and the economic principles of the time, the novel illustrates that domestic values are, like
everything else, a product of the cash nexus, and, as such, part of the social facade and the play of
appearances upon which most Victorian morals rested. This facade is also exposed in two novels written in
the same year; Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre (1847) which, in its claustrophobic domestic imagery, dramatizes
the struggle between self-expression and self-repression and exposes the limited rights and sparse educational
and career prospects that women had; and Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights (1847), a story of the conflicts
between the uncontrollable forces of passion and middle class respectability. The latter implicitly cauterizes
the cult of domesticity through its formal structure. The framed narratives create an atmosphere of uncertainty
and subjectivism that casts an uncanny light upon the domestic sphere. Home is no longer presented as a
warm and safe refuge, but rather as the locus of thwarted desire, unfulfilled passions, and secret traumas. This
is why in both novels the authors borrow from the Gothic tradition in order to illustrate the darker side of the
domestic sphere. A few years later, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliots heroine, Maggie Tulliver,
is considered to be a mistake of nature by her family and local community due to her untamable nature and
passion for education and love. Maggies tragic, but wished for, death by drowning at the end of the book can
also be read as a proto-feminist victory, as it signals her refusal to fit into the reproductive model of her time.
4.3 Womens Representation in Poetry by Men
Women knew that in order to improve their position they would have to change the way they were culturally
perceived and socially represented. Thus, they revolted against the stereotypical and patronizing way in which
female figures were represented by male poets. As poetry written at the time was a very popular and
influential genre, male authors had established a tradition of idealizing women as melancholic domestic
figures who functioned as poetic inspiration, as discussed above. Apart from Tennysons numerous female
figures, another striking example is D. G. Rossettis The Blessed Damozel (1850). In this poem, a male
lover gazes up the heaven as his departed beloved lady looks at him longing for their reunion. Through
language that brings together religious and sexual imagery, the damozel is presented as virginal yet
maintaining certain implicit sexual overtones. She is turned, in other words, into an idealized reverie in the
mind of a man and appears as he would have liked her to be: a woman eternally longing for him and
ultimately becoming his inspiration.
A very helpful interactive site on The Blessed Damozel. Access here
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Image 2.9 W. E. F. Britten, Mariana (1901).

Drawing on Tennysons poem, this sketch illustrates the stereotype of a melancholic domestic woman who waits for a
man to come and make her life meaningful.
A second dominant characteristic in the way male poets presented female characters involved their
ventriloquizing and objectification. In Tennysons Marianna (1830), for example, the voice of the female
character is conditioned and mediated by the male speaker who will not let her speak for herself, while in
The Lady of Shallot (1832), we never hear the Ladys voice throughout the entire poem. In Victorian
poetry, women are often treated as the objects of male imagination and not as independent subjects. This
becomes particularly clear in Robert Brownings My Last Duchess (1842), where the Duke/speaker controls
what the readers know about his young wife. He also commodifies her literally by turning her into a painting
in his possession. In the poem, the last image of the statue of Neptune taming sea horses is indicative of the
fate of his poor wife whose female nature had to be disciplined by male authority because it was considered
threatening. In a similar vein, in D. G. Rossettis Jenny (1860), the male speaker takes pity on a prostitute
he has hired, Jenny, and lets her fall asleep on his knee. Jenny becomes an object of contemplation for the
speaker who reads her as if she were a book. She inspires speculation and pity since she is presented as
incapable of realizing the full implications of her social plight.
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Here is a list of some pictorial interpretations of Tennysons The Lady of Shalott. Access here
4.4 Womens Representation in Literature by Women
Drawing on the changes in the social and political climate, women writers started portraying female figures
that turned against patriarchal tradition and deviated from the domestic model. In the 1850s, spinsters
became dominant figures in novels, reflecting the fact that a third of the women at the time were not married.
This was not only a shift towards realistic writing, since it recorded a historical fact, but also an attempt to
bring women out of the male shadow and present them under their own light. Spinster figures in Bronts
Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), or in Gaskells Cranford (1853) and Ruth (1853), signaled womens
distancing from the domestic ideal, as well as their gradual incorporation into the public sphere. Indicative of
this trend that wanted to undermine the tradition of representing women as inactive and domestic is Gaskells
central heroine in North and South (1855), Margaret Hale. Through this dynamic female character, Gaskell
eradicates the division between the two separate spheres, the domestic and the public, by bringing together
social and family themes. Leaving the traditional South behind, Margaret and her family move to the
industrial North, where she is introduced not only to the plights of the industrial workers, but also to a young
self-made industrialist, John Thorton. In a seminal moment in the book, Margaret chooses to mediate between
John Thorton and the angry mob of workers during a strike. This act signals the emergence of women in the
public sphere, and indirectly introduces the issue of womens rights into the social reform agenda of the
industrial novel.
The tradition of female idealization and objectification, along with the cult of separate spheres, are
also harshly criticized in Aurora Leigh (1856), a best-selling poem of the time, composed by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Robert Brownings wife. Written in blank verse, this autobiographical poem traces the
development of a female poet through her struggle to harmonize her aspirations with love, something which,
as the third person narrator ironically admits, is definitely not the case with male authors. Barrett Browning
questions the Victorian stereotype of separate spheres as Aurora can become domestic only when she has
conquered the public. Browning also attacks the constant idealization of women in male poetry. This is why
Aurora refuses to get married and chooses to pursue the difficult career of a poetess. But the poem gives voice
to female victims as well. In many instances in the poem, prostitution is attacked and sympathy is drawn for
the poor fallen women who are sexually exploited. These radical ideas are enhanced through the very
innovative form of this work, as Aurora Leigh is a poetic novel that crosses the boundaries of genres. The
poem ends with the vision of a New Jerusalem, a new world where women would have equal rights and
chances with men.
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Image 2.10 Dante Gabriel Rossettis illustration of The Goblin Market.

The issue of female solidarity that Christina Rossetti wanted to highlight is evident in this illustration.
The second most influential mid-Victorian female poet after Barrett Browning was Christina Rossetti.
As the youngest child in a family of poets, artists and philosophers, she was closely associated with the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood, in which her brother was a founding member. As a woman, she had little place in a
brotherhood, and this was probably why she was
involved throughout her life with the establishment of
sisterhoods. Rossetti was actively involved with feminist
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
groups and even volunteered to offer her services to a
refuge for fallen women. It comes as no surprise then that In 1848 D. G. Rossetti, a poet and painter,
much of Rossettis work was a critique of marriage and along with his brother William Michael
traditional Victorian domestic values. Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt, John
In one of her most well-known poems, Goblin Everett Milliais, Thomas Woolner, James
Market (1859), Rossetti appropriates the Pre-Raphaelite Collinson, and Frederick George Stephens
portraits of women with accentuated femininity in order formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
to deal with the theme of female sexuality. Through the They wanted to go against the neoclassical
fairy tale narrative of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, the style of the Royal Academy of Painting
poem illustrates the dangers that await a woman once she which was dominant at the time. They
leaves the haven of her domestic sphere. The fact that favored fidelity to the natural world by
being inspired by medieval and early
Rossetti frames her story within a fairy tale narrative
Renaissance artists. By the 1860s, their
helps her sublimate the connotations of female sexuality
style was dominant and their work
and the issue of the fallen woman. Rather than judge or influenced many avant-garde movements
condemn Laura, who is seduced by the goblins, the and trends that became prominent in the
narrative promotes understanding and social acceptance, 1890s.
as she is eventually saved by her sister. Rossettis version
of the fallen woman is in sharp contrast with D. G.
Rossettis portrayal of a fallen woman in Jenny (written
in the 1850s but published in the 1870s), where female sexuality necessarily leads to marginalization. In
Goblin Market, the problems of female commodification and objectification are overcome through female
solidarity.
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Image 2.11 John Everett Millais, The Bridesmaid Star (1851).

The emancipation of this female figure is not only evident in the way her hair symbolically flows free, but also in the way
she directly addresses the viewer without any hesitation.
4.5 The New Woman and the Decline of Domesticity
Sydney Grundy, from The New Woman
From Act 1
Sylvester: Yes, I am Mrs. Sylvesters husband. I belong to my wife, but my wife doesnt belong to
me. She is the property of the public. Directly I saw her photograph in a shop-window I realized the
situation. People tell me Ive a wife to be proud of; but theyre wrong. Mrs. Sylvester is not my wife;
I am her husband.
Colonel: [taking up a book] This is what comes of educating women. We have created a
Frankenstein. Man, the BetrayerA Study of the Sexesby Enid Bethune.
Sylvester: Oh, I know her. She comes to our house.
Colonel: And has a man betrayed her?
Sylvester: Never. Not likely to.
Colonel: Thats whats the matter, perhaps?
Sylvester: Her theory is, that boys ought to be girls, and young men should be maids.
[Colonel throws down the book.] Thats how shed equalize the sexes.
Colonel: Pshaw! [Takes up another book.] Ye Foolish Virgins!A Remonstranceby Victoria
Vivash.
Sylvester: Another soul! Shes also for equality. Her theory is, that girls should be boys, and maids
should be young men. Goes in for latchkeys and that sort of thing.
Colonel: [throws down the book] Bah! [Takes up a third.] Naked and UnashamedA Few Plain
Facts and Figuresby Mary Bevan, M.D. Who on earths she?
Sylvester: One of the plain figures. She comes to our house, too.
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Colonel: [reads] The Physiology of the Sexes! Oh, this eternal babble of the sexes! [Throws book
down.] Why cant a woman be content to be a woman? What does she want to make a beastly man
of herself for?
Sylvester: But my wife isnt a woman.
Colonel: None of them are, my boy. A woman, who is a woman, doesnt want to be anything else.
These people are a sex of their own, Sylvester. They have invented a new gender. . . .
[Enter Enid and Victoria, in hot argument. ]
Enid: I cant agree with you! Say what you will, I cant agree with you!
Victoria: That doesnt alter the fact. A woman has just as much right to a latchkey as a man.
Enid: Rudeness is not argument!
Victoria: Why make distinctions?
Enid: I make no distinctions. I admit that a woman has just as much right to come home with the
milk as a man but I say, a man has no right to come home with the milk; and I say moreno woman
who respects herself has any desire to come home with the milk!
Victoria: Bother the milk! It isnt a question of milk. Its a question of making artificial distinctions
between the sexes.
Enid: I say that there ought to be no distinction! Why should a man be allowed to commit sins
Victoria: And woman not be given an opportunity?
Enid: Then do you want to commit sins?
Victoria: I want to be allowed to do as men do.
Enid: Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself; there!
Victoria: I only say, I ought to be allowed.
Enid: And I say that a man, reeking with infamy, ought not to he allowed to marry a pure girl
Victoria: Certainly not! She ought to reek with infamy as well.
Enid: Victoria! [Knock without.]
Victoria: What is the difference between man and woman?
Enid: There is no difference! . . .
Lady Wargrave: Excuse my ignorance, but I have been away from England for so many years. Can
this be the New Woman I have read about?
Colonel: Everythings New nowadays! We have a New Art
Enid: A New Journalism
Victoria: A New Political Economy
Doctor: A New Morality
Colonel: A New Sex!
Lady Wargrave: [smiling] Ah!
Doctor: Do you object to modernity?
Lady Wargrave: Ive only one objection to new things; they are so old.
Victoria: Not the New Woman!
Lady Wargrave: No; she is generally middle-aged. . . .
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Image 2.12 An image of a New Woman suggesting a drastic change of gender roles.
The term New Woman was coined in 1894 to denote a self-reliant, outspoken, educated, and
unconventional type of woman that was very popular in certain narratives of the time. These narratives
signaled a new rising collective consciousness of femininity. Drawing on the earlier tradition of the Fallen
Woman and the campaigns of the proto-feminists, feminist voices gained new momentum in the 1880s and
1890s, as a result of certain historical factors. First, the fact that in the 1870s women were allowed to attend
university education boosted their hopes and aspirations of reaching, like men, higher social ranks and opened
new vistas for women, who started re-envisioning a life based on equality. This is precisely what the extract
from Sydney Grundys play ridicules when claiming that education has created female monsters. Last but
certainly not least, the staging of Ibsens plays created heated debates about the social position of women and
popularized the roles of unconventional women who rebelled against inequality and injustice.
As we have already seen, the figure of the independent and rebellious woman was the focus of many
earlier novels or poems. What changed in the last decades of the century was the perspective from which such
independence was regarded. In other words, these unconventional heroines were no longer considered to be
failures, or social peculiarities that the narratives were anxious to regulate through marriage, but they were
rather presented in a positive light. This implied that the institution of marriage was not socially idealized any
longer, as we can infer from the increasing presence of unmarried women in late Victorian narratives and the
distrust in the marriage plot, the epitome of mid-century domesticity. In Anthony Trollopes novels, for
example, and especially in The Way We Live Now (1875), we witness the dissolution of traditional norms
through the rise of a new kind of self-interest that corrodes domestic ideals. Echoing Carlyles critique,
Trollope presents a world in which all traditional values are replaced by money, and marriage is only
considered as a means of financial success. George Merediths novel The Egoist (1879) records the burdens of
domestic tyranny, while the cornerstone of Victorian domesticity, family life, is harshly questioned in Samuel
Butlers novel The Way of All Flesh (1903). All fundamentals of Victorian morality are presented here as
empty institutions that have nothing to offer anymore.
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Image 2.13 A satiric illustration of a New Woman from the popular British magazine Punch (1895). Womans entrance
into the public sphere is experienced by men as a form of intrusion.
The dissolution of the marriage plot cast an emancipatory light on women characters. Thus, in Grant
Allens The Woman Who Did (1895), the protagonist refuses to marry her beloved and prefers to live with him
outside wedlock. Henry James The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew
(1897), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904) all record
emancipated independent women with vibrant sexualities and illustrate the disruptive force of desire within
family life. Thomas Hardy has also created multiple paradigmatic New Women. In Tess of the DUrbervilles
(1891), Hardy shocked his contemporaries with the sexual boldness of the heroine, whereas in Jude the
Obscure (1895) he offers a critique of matrimony through Sue Brideheads highly unconventional views on
marriage. Both Tess and Sue encapsulate the spirit of the New Woman in a very concise way.
As female sexuality was no longer connected exclusively with the institution of marriage, it acquired
a new essence, and women were able to enjoy new forms of freedom. One of the basic arguments of first-
wave feminists was precisely that female sexuality can be freely expressed only if it is dissociated from
marriage and motherhood. The claim for sexual liberation was the reason why the New Woman cause was
affiliated with the aestheticist and decadent sexual agenda; they both promoted new sexual types and
emancipation from middle class Victorian stereotypes. In their sexual cause, the New Woman novels brought
together and harmonized two earlier trends of the Victorian tradition: the social problem novel that focused on
public discourse and the novel of domestic realism that concentrated on private discourse.
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Women in the Literary Marketplace. Access here
The New Woman Fiction. Access here
The New Woman in Norton Anthology. Access here
5. Religion and Evolutionary Theory
5.1 Crisis of Faith
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earths shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. (21-8)
Religion occupied a central position in Victorian life whether it was ardently supported or passionately
rejected. Traces of religious language or thought can be observed in all dominant cultural, historical, and
political discourses, and nearly all Victorian thinkers and writers dealt with it one way or another. In the
1830s, long before the publication of Darwins work, Victorians experienced a prominent crisis of faith
motivated by a thick web of factors that persistently attacked religious faith. These factors basically involved
the distrust that people felt over the disputes and antagonisms between English churches or sects, as well as
the radical secularization of peoples worldview that the rise of science, technology and consumption brought
about. This intense Victorian preoccupation with the loss of a unifying, coherent and meaningful narrative is
characteristically presented in Matthew Arnolds poem Dover Beach (1867). There used to be once, Arnold
argues, a sea of Faith that provided soothing comfort to people and a sense of meaning to their lives, but
now the world is bare of its metaphysical magic and beauty. The force behind all this was none other than the
then dominant scientific narrative of evolutionary theory which presented the world as comprising only
matter: vast edges drear / And naked shingles.
Here is a very helpful overview of religion in Victorian Britain. Access here
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5.2 Evolutionary Theory and Charles Darwin
Image 2.14 Satiric illustration of Evolutionary Theory from Punch, May 1861.
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Charles Darwin, from On the Origin of the Species
In this extract, Darwin defines the term struggle for existence which became one of the most
influential and misappropriated aspects of his theory.
Hence, also, we can see that when a plant or animal is placed in a new country amongst new
competitors, though the climate may be exactly the same as in its former home, yet the conditions of
its life will generally be changed in an essential manner. If we wished to increase its average
numbers in its new home, we should have to modify it in a different way to what we should have
done in its native country; for we should have to give it some advantage over a different set of
competitors or enemies.
It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form some advantage over another. Probably
in no single instance should we know what to do, so as to succeed. It will convince us of our
ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary, as it seems to be
difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving
to increase at a geometrical ratio; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year,
during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to suffer great destruction. When
we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not
incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and
the happy survive and multiply.
Although Darwins groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in 1859, the concept of evolution had
been widely discussed decades before that. As early as 1833, Charles Lyells The Principles of Geology
recorded geological findings that radically questioned biblical assumptions and the idea that the world was
divine creation. Evolution, though, came to be tightly associated with Darwin, as he provided a very coherent
and convincing theory which could account for the emergence of certain species in a way that could be easily
understood by nearly everybody. This easy-to-follow narrative made also possible the popularization of the
argumentation against religion.
The controversy about the descent of man is well captured in numerous literary texts from all genres.
Robert Brownings poem Caliban Upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island (1864), for instance,
questions and undermines the idea that man was made in gods image. The poem is a monologue that draws
on Shakespeares play The Tempest (1610-11), in which Prospero, a noble magician, is shipwrecked on an
island inhabited by a bestial native, Caliban. While this animal-like creature is unable to grasp the magnitude
of higher metaphysical forces, it is able to perceive instinctively how evolution works. At some point in his
monologue, Caliban alludes to Darwins idea of natural selection, the mechanism that propels evolution and
allows certain species to survive. In Calibans words, only those species which adapt by running, diving,
or fleeing will endure :
There is the sport: discover or die!

All need not die, for of the things o the isle
Some flee afar, some dive, some run up trees;
Those at His mercy,why, they please Him most
When [] when [] well, never try the same way twice!
(218-222)
Through the figure of Caliban, Browning does not only reflect the implications of Darwins
argumentation, but also addresses contemporary questions about mans origin, the existence of god, and mans
ability to understand all this. Throughout the poem, Browning presents many different interpretations and
versions, yet no conclusion is eventually reached. Such open-endedness reflects the anxiety Victorians
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experienced due to the unresolved dilemma between science and religion, or evolutionary theory and
theology, they had to cope with..
The remarkable aspect of Darwinian theory was that it could be appropriated by both progressive and
conservative discourses for different purposes. It could either stand for opposition to religious orthodoxy, as in
the case of Browning, or represent a set of ideas that promoted continuity rather than a radical break from the
status quo. It could, moreover, be viewed in terms of optimism or pessimism. Thus, concepts like natural
selection or the struggle for survival were optimistically considered by many Victorian thinkers to be in
tune with the laissez-faire economy that actively contributed to the nations progress. The association between
biology and economy or sociology was initiated basically by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a prominent
Victorian philosopher, biologist and sociologist, who coined the term survival of the fittest to describe the
competitiveness and ruthless struggle for success that characterize modern societies. Spencers idea that
societies, very much like organisms, evolve from simpler to more complex forms deeply affected the
discipline of anthropology. All these ideas, however, which comprised the backbone of this attempt to make
ethics out of science, called social Darwinism, were definitely a misinterpretation of Darwinian theory, which
clearly argued that there was no governing principle, end or telos in the evolutionary process.
It was precisely on these grounds that evolutionary theory was interpreted by other thinkers at the
time as scientific proof of moving backwards rather than forwards. The randomness with which the universe
operates, they argued, as well as the fact that humans are insignificant creatures in a cruel universe that does
not care about them are not signs of progress. Thomas Hardys (1840-1928) work illustrates this pessimism,
and represents the darker and crueler side of evolutionary theory. When Charles Knight slips, falls, and is
suspended from a cliff in one of Hardys earlier works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), he sees a fossil and
speculates minutes before his end on the fact that evolutionary time makes no sense in the face of death. In
Jude the Obscure (1894), Hardys last novel, the universe is indifferent to the dreams and aspirations of its
characters, and constantly crushes them in a cruel way. Only the characters who are able to adjust to a
changing world, in which there is no divine providence, manage to survive in the end.
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Twilight of the Idols
In this extract, the German philosopher discusses the inability of the English to get rid of Christian
morality.
They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to
Christian morality. This is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic
females la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from
theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the
penance they pay there.
We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to
Christian morality out from under ones feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point
has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole
view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one
breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in ones head.
It is important to note here that either as a form of providence or as lack of it, evolutionary theory was
directly or indirectly associated with a new form of morality. This was because it did not only undermine faith
but also replaced it as an organizing narrative that could provide order amidst the chaos and anxiety that the
loss of faith had left behind. As a consequence, some writers strove to harmonize science and religion on
moral grounds: Charles Kingsley, a clergyman, combined theology and evolutionary theory in his writings;
Philip Henry Gosse brought together zoology with Evangelicalism; finally, Gerald Manley Hopkins poetry
regarded science as a manifestation of Gods design. Although the Victorians appeared eager to do away with
religion as an outdated system that could no longer account for the new spirit of the times, in many cases, they
actually reshaped Christian ideas in a more secular form. This was precisely the argument that Nietzsche
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presented against George Eliot and the Britons in general for failing to fully get rid of the burden of Christian
morality. Nietzsche is probably right, as all basic Victorian values, such as self-sacrifice, honesty, humility,
respectability, earnestness, and virginity, were nothing but secularized, traditional religious values. Even the
device of the omniscient narrator, a defining characteristic of most major Victorian novels, can be seen as a
secularized version of divine providence; in a god-like fashion, omniscient narrators distributed justice by
punishing crime and rewarding virtue.
Image 2.15 A satirical illustration which presents Darwin as a descendant of the ape (1871).
Here you can find all of Darwins work and manuscripts. Access here
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Thomas Hardy, from A Pair of Blue Eyes
This is a characteristic example of Hardys pessimistic view of evolutionary theory.
Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along the line of coast between
Exmoor and Land's End; but this outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all.
Their summits are not safe places for scientific experiment on the principles of air-currents, as
Knight had now found, to his dismay.
He still clutched the face of the escarpmentnot with the frenzied hold of despair, but with a
dogged determination to make the most of his every jot of endurance, and so give the longest
possible scope to Elfrides intentions, whatever they might be.
He reclined hand in hand with the world in its infancy. Not a blade, not an insect, which spoke of
the present, was between him and the past. The inveterate antagonism of these black precipices to all
strugglers for life is in no way more forcibly suggested than by the paucity of tufts of grass, lichens,
or confervae on their outermost ledges.
Knight pondered on the meaning of Elfrides hasty disappearance, but could not avoid an
instinctive conclusion that there existed but a doubtful hope for him. As far as he could judge, his
sole chance of deliverance lay in the possibility of a rope or pole being brought; and this possibility
was remote indeed. The soil upon these high downs was left so untended that they were unenclosed
for miles, except by a casual bank or dry wall, and were rarely visited but for the purpose of
collecting or counting the flock which found a scanty means of subsistence thereon.
At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited him before, Knight could
think of no future, nor of anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at Natures
treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.
From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge cylinder, having the
sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a
semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the
facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature, and to
its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of
man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knights eyes was an imbedded fossil,
standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to
stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated
by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was
the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body
to save, as he himself had now.
The creature represented but a low type of animal existence, for never in their vernal years had
the plains indicated by those numberless slaty layers been traversed by an intelligence worthy of the
name. Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish, were the highest developments of those ancient dates. The
immense lapses of time each formation represented had known nothing of the dignity of man. They
were grand times, but they were mean times too, and mean were their relics. He was to be with the
small in his death.
Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the
thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentary sweep,
the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature's epoch and his own. There is no place
like a cleft landscape for bringing home such imaginings as these.
Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face
with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides
of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock,
like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts
perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there.
Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the
megatherium, and the myledonall, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped
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by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy
were the sinister crocodilian outlinesalligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the
colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still
underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil
confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. These images passed before
Knights inner eye in less than half a minute, and he was again considering the actual present. Was
he to die? The mental picture of Elfride in the world, without himself to cherish her, smote his heart
like a whip. He had hoped for deliverance, but what could a girl do? He dared not move an inch. Was
Death really stretching out his hand? The previous sensation, that it was improbable he would die,
was fainter now.
However, Knight still clung to the cliff.
To those musing weather-beaten West-country folk who pass the greater part of their days and
nights out of doors, Nature seems to have moods in other than a poetical sense: predilections for
certain deeds at certain times, without any apparent law to govern or season to account for them. She
is read as a person with a curious temper; as one who does not scatter kindnesses and cruelties
alternately, impartially, and in order, but heartless severities or overwhelming generosities in lawless
caprice. Man's case is always that of the prodigal's favourite or the misers pensioner. In her
unfriendly moments there seems a feline fun in her tricks, begotten by a foretaste of her pleasure in
swallowing the victim.
Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight, but he began to adopt it now. He was first
spitted on to a rock. New tortures followed. The rain increased, and persecuted him with an
exceptional persistency which he was moved to believe owed its cause to the fact that he was in such
a wretched state already. An entirely new order of things could be observed in this introduction of
rain upon the scene. It rained upwards instead of down. The strong ascending air carried the rain-
drops with it in its race up the escarpment, coming to him with such velocity that they stuck into his
flesh like cold needles. Each drop was virtually a shaft, and it pierced him to his skin. The water-
shafts seemed to lift him on their points: no downward rain ever had such a torturing effect. In a brief
space he was drenched, except in two places. These were on the top of his shoulders and on the
crown of his hat.
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Image 2.16 Punch Almanack: Man is But a Worm (1881).

Another example of how the concept of evolution was misread and ridiculed.
5.3 Science and Art: Realism
Darwinism greatly contributed to the popularity of scientific discourse as reflected in the rise of realism.
Realism drew on the scientific model because it was a means of understanding the world in a way that had
nothing to do with the outdated illusions of the artistic, the metaphysical, or the Romantic worldview. The
new era was after all about truth and facts, as mentioned above. So realism actually involved the
representation of life as the average reader saw and experienced it.
It was basically through George Eliot that realism became very popular in Britain. Eliots brand of
realism was different from the French realism of Balzac or Flaubert, which became prominent in the 1850s.
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Although Eliot was in tune with the French realists in focusing on the everyday, unlike them, she subjected
her realism to a moral end in order to encourage her readers sympathy. Realism, thus, signaled the
representation and explanation of the world through middle-class values in order to give meaning and validity
to these values. In other words, as it became evident in Eliots case, it was an optimistic moral code imposed
upon the world not based on religion but rather on positivism and science.
By the 1870s, however, realism became less optimistic when it was transformed into Naturalism.
Naturalism was a brand of realism that claimed to be closer in detail to reality than realism itself, and it was
affected by Darwinian theory. Naturalism portrayed human beings as a form of organic matter solely
determined by heredity and the environment, and presented the idea of free will as a cosmic joke. Such
determinism is evident in Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure (1895), where it is impossible for the main
characters to escape the limitations that the environment has set on them, or the faults and misery of their
parents and families.
5.4 Degeneration: From Progression to Regression
Image 2.17 Henry Vander Wayde, Mansfield as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1895).
This photograph illustrates the transition from culture to savagery.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a growing awareness that Victorias reign,
which had brought so much glory to the nation, was approaching its decline. As a result, the fin-de-sicle
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became inevitably associated with decay and even degeneration. Many of the rising social phenomena and
artistic trends of the period were interpreted by Max Nordau, the Zionist physician and social critic, as signs
of a degenerating world. In his book, Degeneration, published in 1892 and translated into English in 1895,
Nordau holds that modernity is a sort of pathological disease, the symptoms of which are expressed in
symbolist or pre-Modernist literature. Nordau based his theory on Darwins Theory of Evolution and the idea
that species are not static or fixed. If species can evolve and progress, then they might as well regress into
weaker and less developed forms. This pessimistic biological model was employed by Nordau to account for
social ills as well, such as poverty, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and criminality.
Nordaus theory also established a correlation between individual and racial or cultural progress.
Children were identified with primitive tribes, since they were both perceived as immature, innocent and
naive, whereas adulthood was correlated with stages of advanced civilization. This association highlighted the
proximity of young ages and certain tribes to the animal realm, and consequently undermined the domestic
security and safety that Victorians cherished. If animals gradually turned into more developed living forms,
then under certain circumstances humans could revert to an animal state, too. This meant that a developed
culture could just as easily regress into more primitive stages, as an adult could regress into childlike behavior.
Nordaus theory thus highlighted the fact that the indispensable (and inescapable sometimes) other side of
progress and evolution was regression. The anxiety of degenerating into earlier brutal forms of life is very
clearly dramatized in Stevensons story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which Dr. Jekyll, the intellectual,
prestigious, and cultivated doctor, reverts to Mr. Hyde, his primitive and animalistic other governed by
primitive instincts and desires. The same fear of devolution is addressed in a number of fin-de-sicle texts,
such as Oscar Wildes Dorian Gray, H. Rider Haggards She, H. G. Wells The Time Machine, and Joseph
Conrads Heart of Darkness.
In general, most literature of the fin-de-sicle alludes to dark irrational forces lurking beneath the
surface and threatening to destabilize the established order of things. These disruptive forces may take several
forms: in Hardys work, they are manifested as uncontrollable sexual urges, in Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, as repressed psychological elements, in James The Turn of the Screw (1898) as the nightmares of child
libido. In ways reminiscent of the Gothic, such narratives addressed the darker side of progress and
highlighted the importance of the past. Although progress was a move away from tradition, such Gothic
narratives brought back the past in the form of what Freud a few years later would call the return of the
repressed.
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6. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
6.1 The Rise of the British Empire
Image 2.18 Map of the English Empire (1897).
As already stated, the industrial boom, supported by an overwhelming shipping force, led to an unprecedented
expansion of Britains markets during the mid-nineteenth century. Meanwhile, with the acceleration of British
colonization, English language and culture spread throughout the world. In 1849, the dominion over India,
the chief jewel in the imperial crown, was completed, while the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 led to
large-scale immigration. Throughout the last decades of the century, Britain annexed vast areas in Africa, the
Far East, and the Pacific. The Britons had been familiar with risky expeditions through the Romantic
fascination with adventurous travels and the exotic other. However, the concept of a powerful and leading
worldwide empire became prominent only with the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58, when the revolt of certain
Indian troops in Northern India led to the killings of a number of Britons and Britains subsequent fierce
reaction. This marked a radical shift in the discourse that accompanied Britains imperial expedition, which no
longer proclaimed to be solely a peaceful process of carrying the torch of civilization, but also, if needed, a
forceful struggle that would suppress savagery.
The right to forceful rule was further supported by a proliferation of scientific discourses, some of
which were based on racial and imperialist versions of the survival of the fittest doctrine which provided the
necessary ideological justification for racial or national supremacy. This was the time when the Britons
realized the magnitude of their empire and its raw force, and felt more than ever before an urgent need to
implement new conceptions of Englishness, i.e., what it meant to be English in the modern world. The more
Britain expanded as an empire and was exposed to a wide array of foreign others, the more this concept of
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Englishness was solidified and strengthened against the primitiveness of the peoples it came in contact with.
We should not forget that Britain at the time was the most technologically, scientifically and industrially
advanced nation in the world. Moreover, the constant political reforms and the extension of franchise made
Britons feel that their country was a very modern democracy. The overall climate of success and expansion is
reflected in the literature of the time, where the empire is no longer a peripheral presence, but occupies a
central position.
The imperial prestige of Britain, moreover, helped heal the wounds that the Crimean war had left
behind. This failure had seriously damaged and questioned not only English heroism but manhood as well.
The new hero that emerged out of the war, after all, was a woman. Britains imperial expansion reinforced the
call for a new hero and a modern English man, giving birth to what Charles Kingsley would call muscular
Christianity. This novel form of manhood was infused with the traditional middle class values of
respectability, honor, and earnestness which were then additionally seasoned with the cosmopolitan air of
international success and victory. The new stereotype that brought together imperialism, Christianity, and
Englishness is manifest in Rudyard Kiplings Puck of Pooks Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910).
Both books consist of short stories and a poem that precedes each story. Through fantasy narratives, these
stories present the history of England and its imperial adventures. Puck of Pooks Hill culminates in a patriotic
song that is meant to teach children the superiority of England as well as its values and morals, while Rewards
and Fairies ends with a Christian poem, which is meant to remind readers of the fact that domestic ideology is
a crucial part of Englishness.
The British Empire Overview. Access here
Victorian Imperialism in Norton Anthology. Access here
6.2 Imperial Decline
In 1877, Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India, which signaled the peak of British imperialist
confidence, since Queen Victoria ruled one quarter of the worlds population. The Britons soon became aware
of the nations unprecedented power and prestige. During the last two decades of the century, the empire
became a central preoccupation that affected nearly every facet of peoples lives. As imperialism was gaining
momentum, nevertheless, it also began to be radically questioned by those who doubted that the empire would
be able to sustain its supremacy and impose its order upon the natives, or those who were concerned about the
fate and state of indigenous people under the British reign. This concern is reflected in Wilkie Collinss novel
The Moonstone which projects some sort of national guilt and a feeling that there is a price that has to be paid
for conquered exotic places. Moreover, as the Queens Diamond Jubilee approached in the summer of 1897,
there was widespread concern about the frailty of the monarch and, consequently, the empire. These concerns
were amplified by a growing competition between Britain and the emerging new powers, such as the USA,
Germany, or Prussia. George Eliots Daniel Deronda (1876), for instance, reflects this international
competitive climate, as it is set in various cities throughout the world and acknowledges implicitly different
centers of power. The imperial uneasiness and decline of confidence was officially recorded in the Berlin
Conference in 1884 which divided Africa among European powers. The time had come when imperialist
prestige was beginning to collapse.
The literature of the time both addressed and attempted to resolve all these anxieties. The resurgence,
for example, of romance and its growing popularity in the 1880s could be attributed to such imperialist fears.
Apart from being a reaction to realist crudeness, romance grew in popularity in the 1880s because it was a
narrative that was implicitly aligned with the imperialist agenda. It involved exotic, faraway settings that were
presented through narratives of conquest in tune with the nations imperial expeditions around the world,
increasing thus the nations self-assurance. As such, romance counterbalanced the discourse of decline by
offering an implicit imperialist cause through an escapist discourse. Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Island
(1883) heralded the resurgence of the romance, and so did Rider Haggards King Solomons Mines (1885),
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She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887). In a similar manner, Kiplings stories provided a vision of a
coherent, stable, and invincible national subject which would inspire new imperialist narratives. Thus, the
upheavals and concerns that were so widespread during this time are totally absent from his work. Kipling
invented a new form of military aristocracy able to counter foreign threats and disperse fears of imperial
decline.
On the other hand, there were a number of works that clearly and directly recorded the darker side of
imperialist rule through what we call imperial Gothic. Bram Stokers Dracula (1897) explicitly embodies the
anxiety about foreign threat. Interestingly, the figure of Count Dracula successfully brings together many
potential threats: the foreigner, the Catholic, the aristocrat, the sexual pervert, the dandy, and the fear of
syphilis coming from abroad. All these threats embody the dangers of turning ones back against middle class
domestic morality; they actually highlight the conservative need to turn towards these values as a means of
maintaining order. Joseph Conrads work, conversely, chronicles the decline of empires as liberating through
an early Modernist idiom. Conrads narrative expresses disillusionment with the imperialist discourse, partly
through his steering away from realist devices. Imperialism is exposed as a form of ruthless exploitation,
associated with the savagery and the horror that lies deep down in the white mans psyche. This is why
Kurtz, in Conrads novella Heart of Darkness (1899), regresses into a primitive and chaotic state after having
faced the darkness that lies within him. This dark aspect of the truth is revealed to him only when he acts as an
agent of imperialist barbarism.
Rudyard Kippling Overview. Access here
7. Culture and Aesthetics

The concept of culture became one of the central topics of debate in the mid and late Victorian period, as it
was widely believed that through culture the wild impetus of the middle and working classes would be
mitigated. Gradually, however, culture became a refuge to ideas or attitudes that were threatened by the
supposedly vulgarizing tastes of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, the notion of culture maintained a double role
as either a means of cultivating the middle and working classes (for Matthew Arnold), or as an arrogant means
of marking a distance from them (for Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetes, and the Decadents).
7.1 Culture and Anarchy
The fascination that the middle and working classes had with commercial forms of entertainment was
followed by a growing concern with the degrading impact of mass culture on them. As a result, throughout the
1860s and 1870s, the Victorian sages were preoccupied with the education of the masses. The matter gained
new urgency due to a historical event on the 22nd of June 1866, when a number of marchers were denied
access to Hyde Park and a thousand yards of park railings were destroyed by outraged rioters. This incident
urged Thomas Carlyle to write an essay entitled Shooting Niagara: And After? (1867), in which he
expresses his concern about the swarmocracy, as he called it, of the angry reformers. In turn, Matthew
Arnold responded to this debate in a series of essays entitled Culture and Anarchy (1867-68). Modern
individual liberty, Arnold claims here, lacks any form of restraint or sense of public duty or discipline and
only culture can prevent the reign of anarchy. Arnold upholds the idea of culture against the materialism and
vulgarity of the philistines (those hostile against culture) and believes that acculturation will be achieved
through general perfection, the combination, that is, of intellectual playfulness and moral discipline, beauty
and practicality (or, what he symbolically calls, Hellenism and Hebraism). He defines culture as a force that
will make individuals aware of the fact that their progress is a common, not an individual, pursuit. For Arnold,
Britain suffered from the fact that its three different classes, what he calles the barbarians (the land-owning
aristocracy), the philistines (the middle classes), and the populace (the poor and the unemployed) could not
transcend their conflicting self-interests and embrace mutuality. Arnolds notion of culture, in other words,
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was nothing else but the Victorian preoccupation with the relation between the individual and the common
good, as discussed above.
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):
Matthew Arnold, the son of Dr.

Thomas Arnold, a famous educator
(1795-1842), was a prominent
Victorian poet and critic. His poetry
expresses the anxiety generated by
religious doubt (as evident in Dover
Beach, Morality and The Future),
whereas his criticism introduced the
middle-classes to the benefits of
culture. Both his criticism and his
poetry were oriented towards social
utility and strived to have relevance
to society.
Image 2.19 Cartoon of Matthew Arnold from Punch.
Only a year before the passing of the second Reform Bill (although set during the upheaval of the first
Reform Bill), George Eliots novel Felix Holt, The Radical instructs the working poor through the concept of
culture. Reminiscent of Arnold, culture here is upheld as a means through which anarchy can be prevented
and democracy safeguarded. The protagonist, Felix, realizes that his individuality makes sense only when
considered as an extension of the common good, and that class differences will be surmounted via a type of
social experience that is shared by everybody.
The debates about the role of culture and education gradually affected literary tastes and styles in the
following decades. By 1870, Tennyson stopped being considered the nations favorite poet and was replaced
by Robert Browning. Tennyson, accessible and widely read, was considered a mainstream poet writing for the
masses, while Browning, more obscure and hard to follow, was closely affiliated with a more elitist form of
culture which the privileged classes promoted. Consequently, the notion of culture encompassed a new sense
of elitism, shaping the literature that followed, and steadily paving the way for Modernist elitism.
It is also important to note that what actually lurked beneath the discourse of culture was anxiety
about the extension of franchise that the second Reform Bill would bring about by allowing the vote to all
working men who had a permanent residence. Such extension, the cultured and affluent classes feared, would
endanger their own rights and leave them at the mercy of the uneducated and unrefined majority. Through
education and culture, that is, these classes wanted to make sure that long held traditions, institutions, and
values would not be overthrown by the sweeping force of the rising middle classes.
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7.2 Aestheticism: The Cult of Beauty
Image 2.20 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Rosa Triplex (1874).

What is striking here is both the sensuality of these figures and their androgynous characteristics.
Walter Pater, from The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters I expressive of what in the ways of a
thousand years man had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are
come, and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the
deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for
a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how
would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed? All the
thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there in that which they have of
power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome,
the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the
vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in
deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastrern
merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary;
and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with
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which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a
perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has
conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought
and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the
modern idea.
One of the most influential artistic and cultural movements of the time, that had its roots in the early
and mid-Victorian period, was Aestheticism, also known as the
Art for Arts Sake movement. Aestheticism was a movement
that celebrated the supremacy of beauty and art over morality
and science. For the aesthetes, as its followers were called, Formalism:
morality was considered to be a bourgeois convention and a
distraction from the exploration of formal perfection and A critical and artistic movement that
beauty. Aestheticism was initially a French literary appeared in the early 20th century
phenomenon, introduced in Britain by Algernon Swinburne in and focused basically on the form and
style of a work of art rather than its
1866 through his Poems and Ballads. In these poems,
historical or cultural context. This
Swinburne presents explicit sexual imagery in a sensual idiom approach to literature tends to
and refuses to be limited by any moral constraints. What was disregard biographical information
deeply shocking for his contemporaries was the fact that related to the creator of a text and
Swinburnes collection of poetry celebrated a kind of pleasure concentrate on its inherent features,
that had nothing to do with domestic Victorian ideals and such as grammar, syntax, or literary
norms. devices. There were two main schools
Swinburnes ideas were followed by Walter Pater. In of formalist literary criticism: Russian
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), which was formalism and Anglo-American New
probably the most influential book in the late Victorian and Criticism.
early Modernist period, Pater argues that art should not have a
practical relevance to life or to morality but rather be devoted
to the search for beauty and perfection. He argues, moreover,
that the transitory character of life can be transcended or
preserved through perfect moments of sensory intensity that
one can find solely in art. This is his point exactly in the
extract about Mona Lisa quoted above. Pater is not so much Symbolism:
interested in describing the famous painting or giving his
reader historical details about it, but rather in recording the Symbolism involves the use of symbols
fleeting impressions, thoughts, and feelings that the painting in order for ideas to be expressed; an
generates in him. object i.e., is meant to stand for a
In their attempt to escape censorship, the aesthetes totally different idea. In literature,
favored form over content, that is, beauty over moral teaching. symbolism is achieved through the
In this sense, they promoted the superiority of form. By paying use of figures of speech such as
metaphor, simile, or allegory. As a
more attention to technical detail or aesthetic finesse, the
movement, the term refers to 19th
aesthetes sometimes created very sophisticated, complex, and century French writers such as
hard to follow narratives, in which meaning became Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud,
ambiguous or simply elusive. Such elusiveness of meaning Paul Verlaine, and Stephane
was contrasted with the dominant ideology of the time which Mallarme. These writers developed a
laid emphasis on practicality, materialism, and utilitarianism. technique of implicit suggestiveness
This is precisely why Oscar Wilde argues in the Preface to The through the use of symbols that
Picture of Dorian Gray, a highly concise manifesto of influenced writers in Britain or the
aestheticism, that all art is useless. For Wilde and the aesthetes, United States, such as W. B. Yeats,
art had to be cherished for its beauty only, not its usefulness. Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and
The aestheticist opposition to the dominant ideology of the Wallace Stevens.
time is also evident in its escapism, its tendency, i.e., to deny
any practical or moral relevance, or any engagement with life
or history.
98
By distancing themselves from the realm of action or practicality and by indulging into eccentricity
and pleasure, the aesthetes were accused of being effeminate. Most aesthetic literature and art was, after all,
one of the first homosexual subcultures, as it communicated in a coded way a same-sex form of love.
Consider, for instance, the paintings of Simeon Solomon, one of the most emblematic aesthete painters, and
the homosexual subtext they contain. In this light, the aesthetes argument in favor of artistic autonomy could
also be an encrypted cry for sexual freedom. It is not accidental that the most characteristic figures of
aestheticist art and philosophy are either androgynous or celebrate an asexual kind of beauty that alludes to
same-sex love, and is distanced from bourgeois sexual models and norms. In combining both male and female
characteristics, such human forms are the embodiments of the idea of a united or unified soul. These figures
need not rely on the other sex for their pleasure or propagation and invite the viewer to put aside moral
judgments in order to appreciate their beauty.
Image 2.21 Simeon Solomon, The Sleepers and the One who Watcheth (1870).
Homosexuality is implicitly addressed here by one of the most outstanding painters of the aestheticist tradition.
Walter Pater Overview. Access here
The Algernon Swinburne Project. Access here
Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is arts aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful
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Yannis Kanarakis
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.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials of his art.
From the point of view of Form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of
view of Feeling the actors craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so also at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for
making a useless thing is that one admires it inordinately.
All art is quite useless.
7.3 Decadence
Image 2.22 The first Volume of The Yellow Book (1894).
The movement of Decadence that followed aestheticism is so tightly linked with it that it is sometimes hard to
distinguish between them. The Decadents, just like the aesthetes, believed in the cult of beauty, artistic
autonomy, and the unconventional. Yet, the Decadents took the aestheticist fascination with the ephemeral
100
and turned it into an obsession with the beauty of the fleeting moment. They sought to experience the
aestheticist moments of intensity through drugs, sexual extremities, or abuse. This was why Decadent art was
marked by a celebration of hallucination, immorality, pain, or mental and physical illness. Moreover, the
Decadents pursuit of peculiar sensual stimuli led them to a fascination with artificiality as a means of having
new sensations and pleasures that lay beyond moral or natural conventions. In its turn, this fueled a fascination
with shock as a means of transcending and disrupting daily routine and, of course, scandalizing the
bourgeoisie. In literature, this was achieved by undermining the readers expectations for coherence, linearity,
and meaningfulness through a complex and over-refined style. Consider, for example, Swinburnes
Nephelidia (1880), a poem with almost no content or meaning, resting exclusively on acoustics and a highly
sophisticated and complex form:
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through

a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers
with fear of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a
marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that
thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat?
(ll. 1-8)
What is interesting to note here is that at a first glance the poem appears to be coherent. Taking a
closer look at it, nevertheless, one discovers that this sense of coherence does not rely on meaning at all, since
the poem is very ambiguous, but rather on its musicality, which involves the use of alliteration, complex meter
and rhyming patterns. By showing an alternative organization of words based on their sounds, Swinburne
manages to challenge his readers conception of how meaning is produced.
Decadent art was also shocking due to its risqu (or improper) character which emphasized sexual
dissidence as a means of attacking and undermining middle class normality. This is clearly evident through
The Yellow Book, an iconic Decadent periodical that published the most provocative and controversial work of
the time. The editor of The Yellow Book was Aubrey Beardsley, a very contentious illustrator. His
groundbreaking illustrations foreshadowed formalism and art-nouveau, laying the foundations for modern
graphics and design as well. Apart from the risqu topics and figures that they depicted, Beardsleys
illustrations could often stand as autonomous works, refusing to be subordinated to the narratives they were
meant to accompany and exemplify. Furthermore, his work was influenced by Japanese art in its denial to
depict a three-dimensional reality, revealing thus his fascination with surface and the rejection of depth.
Moreover, by illustrating mythical figures or characters from
traditional and established literature within a sexual context,
Beardsley mingled high and low art in a very postmodern,
we might argue, way. Consider, for example, Beardsleys Art-Nouveau:
illustration of Wildes play Salome (1891, 1894); the heroine
here is presented as a threatening castrating femme fatale Art-Nouveau was an architectural
engaged in an erotic play with Johns head. As Biblical and decorative movement of the
second half of the nineteenth century.
allusions are reduced to a minimum, what predominates is the
Art-Nouveau designers were inspired
decoration of a depthless surface, while the relation between by geometric and organic forms in an
the illustration and the original Biblical story is eliminated. attempt to foreground the
The Aesthetic and Decadent movements were abruptly craftsmanship involved in their works,
terminated with Wildes conviction for sodomy at the close of something which industrial products
the century. Wilde was sued by his boyfriends father for lacked. Art-Nouveau artists wanted to
corrupting his son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Being at the peak of dissolve the distinction between high
his success, Wilde fool-heartedly counter-sued the father for art (painting, sculpture) and low art
libel, but lost the case and was sentenced to two years of hard (furniture, architecture, everyday
labor. This verdict was at the same time an implicit conviction objects).
of sexual anarchy and dissidence, and an attempt to legalize
normality or, what were considered to be, healthier and more
productive sexual models.
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Yannis Kanarakis
Image 2.23 Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax (1893).
Here is a study of Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. and U.K. from 1815-1914. Access here
The Yellow Nineties Online. Access here
British and European Aesthetes, Decadents and Symbolists. Access here
Oscar Wilde Overview. Access here
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8. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the 20th and 21st Century

Since the 1960s there has been a vogue for recreating the
nineteenth century in contemporary fiction. This trend,
which became especially popular in the last 25 years, has
Pastiche:
been termed by critics as Neo-Victorianism or
Victoriana. When it comes to the definition of this trend, One of the most striking characteristics of
it is important to note that the Neo-Victorian novel is not postmodernism is that it incorporates a
just a version of historical fiction, for it is not the historical wide variety of styles, discourses,
setting that makes a novel Neo-Victorian. Critics claim that narratives, or schools not for the sake of
Neo-Victorian fiction rather involves a close engagement parodying them but rather for the sake of
with the nineteenth century through which the relationship celebrating diversity.
between contemporary and Victorian culture is closely [For more on postmodern literature, see
investigated and comparisons between the two ages are Chapter 4.]
invited.
What is it, though, that has instigated the
emergence of Neo-Victorian literature but not Neo-
Romantic, Neo-Renaissance, or Neo-Augustan revivals?
Researchers point out that there has been a fascination with
the Victorian period because of its proximity to our age. Intertextuality:
Although the nineteenth century appears to be distant,
dissimilar, and unfamiliar to us in some respects, it is close, The term, which was given prominence
similar, and familiar in others. Much like the Victorians, by the Bulgarian philosopher and
today we are preoccupied with such topics as gender and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, denotes the
sexuality, imperialism, civil rights and minorities, the complex and thick web of
invasion of technology, and the role of tradition in a interrelationships that exist between
radically shifting world. In the words of the French texts either in a direct manner through
historian and critic Michel Foucault, we are still Victorian, allusion, citation, and pastiche or through
as he claims in the first chapter of The History of Sexuality parody. As such, it signifies the
interdependence and interconnectedness
(3). Our proximity to the Victorians invites comparisons
that exists between literary works, and
which can illuminate both the past and the present, foregrounds the idea that there are no
affording us a view of the future as well. By revisiting the original texts, but only copies of copies.
not so distant past, authors address issues from radically
different points of view or in entirely new settings, creating
thus an amalgamation of Victorian and contemporary
aesthetics. In doing so, they are given the chance to cast
new light on the past and use it as a filter through which the
present can also be reviewed.
The fact that the trend is believed to have Metafiction:
originated in the 1960s is not accidental but rather
indicative of its association with the movement of The term refers to stories which self-
postmodernism. In its attempt to recreate the past, the Neo- reflexively draw attention to themselves
Victorian novel has actually adopted all major or to their elements. Sometimes this gets
characteristics of postmodern literature: the incorporation the form of direct commentary on the act
of a variety of discourses, pastiche, intertextuality, parody, of reading or writing. This way the reader
or sophisticated conceptions of history. For example, is encouraged to think about the process
Margaret Forsters Neo-Victorian novel Ladys Maid of storytelling as an artificial process and
(1990) is a rewriting of the affair between two famous not as reality itself. Even though this is a
Modernist or Postmodernist practice, it
Victorian poets, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett
can be traced back to Cervantes Don
Browning, as perceived through the eyes of Barretts maid. Quixote (1605, 1615) and Laurence
Forster employs the postmodern device of pastiche, a form Sternes Tristram Shandy (1756).
of imitation that mixes different styles, in order to
reimagine not only a famous love affair but also the
nineteenth-century convention of narrating a story from a
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Yannis Kanarakis
maids perspective. By blending fiction with historical facts in a very postmodern way, Forster comes up with
a complex narrative that raises the question of class and its relation to truth. In a similar fashion, in Arthur and
George (2006), the awarded contemporary writer Julian Barnes reconstructs an incident in Conan Doyles
personal life, in which the famous author tries to help a half-Indian solicitor be acquitted of a crime he did not
commit. Employing the figure of the creator of one of the most emblematic pursuers of truth, Sherlock
Holmes, Barnes explores the relation between race and truth through a pastiche of narratives that undermines
the very act of knowing, representing, or even of establishing a coherent identity.
What is also important to consider here is the issue of intertextuality which is quite revealing of the
politics of Neo-Victorian fiction. The Victorian era is not merely employed as a historical setting, but rather as
an intertext meant to be rewritten. Let us consider Will Selfs 2002 novel Dorian, An Imitation. The book
transposes Wildes climate of decadence and degeneration of the fin de sicle into the early 1980s artistic club
London scene, where sex and drugs reign. Dorians corruption is here suggested through the fact that the
protagonist suffers from AIDS and infects his victims rather than kill them or corrupt them as Dorian does in
Wildes text. Instead of Dorians picture, we end up with Cathode Narcissus, a video installation in which
Dorians naked body can be seen aging and bearing all AIDS symptoms, while Dorian enjoys a virus-free
image and life. Wildes implicit allusions to gay culture are here given an explicit twist and acquire a central
role. Selfs rewriting forces the reader to reconsider in retrospect Wildes story and develop a new
understanding not only of the original text but also of the pre-AIDS age as well. The modernization of Wildes
text is achieved through the intricate interconnections that are established between the end of the nineteenth
century and the 1980s and that involve postmodern readings and understandings of history.
In a similar fashion, J. G. Farell seizes the opportunity in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) to exploit
the issue of the empire afresh and reconstruct the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Based on this historical event, which
actually solidified British imperialism, Farell creates an anti-colonial narrative that is harshly critical of the
British rule in India. The story focuses on the way a group of Englishmen react when they are trapped by the
siege. Their entrapment, set against the backdrop of the Great Exhibition, ironically brings to the surface the
delusions, pride, and arrogance upon which British superiority was based and which the Exhibition fueled.
The assumed progress of British culture and science, for instance, is challenged when British doctors are
unable to deal with an epidemic of cholera that breaks out among the besieged. The besieged Englishmen are
gradually forced to question their position in India, while their role as agents of culture and civilization is
ridiculed. Victorian imperialism in Farells Neo-Victorian novel is presented through a contemporary lens. At
the same time, history is exposed as a study in cultural and historical relativism rather than a discipline of
truth. This process of reinterpretation and revision, which necessitates the rediscovery of the past, is in essence
postmodern.
Apart from the novel, Neo-Victorianism involves films, TV series, comics, fashion, and music. In
other words, it is an extensive and inclusive cultural phenomenon that has its own sub-categories and sub-
divisions. A very important such subdivision is steampunk, a fusion of science fiction, cyberpunk, fantasy,
and historical fiction by way of Neo-Victorianism, in which the future is anachronistically set during the
Victorian times when technological inventions are powered only by steam. Most prominent novels in this
tradition include The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (1983), Homunculus by James Blaylock (1986), Internal
Devices by K. W. Jeter (1987), The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990),
Extraordinary Engines by Nick Gevers (2008), and comic book series such as The League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, or animation films such as Steamboy (2004).
Significant texts in the Neo-Victorian tradition include, among others, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean
Rhys (1966), The French Lieutenants Woman by John Fowles (1969), The Seven Percent Solution
by Nicholas Meyer (1974), Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byat (1990), Mary Reilly by Valerie
Martin (1990), The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzerald (1990), Poor Things by Gray Alasdair
(1992), Chatterton by Ackroyd Peter (1996), Jack Maggs by Peter Carey (1997), Tipping the Velvet
by Sarah Waters (1998), Affinity by Sarah Waters (1999) The Dark Clue by Wilson James (2001),
The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern (2001), Dorian an Imitation by Will Self (2002), The
Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (2002), Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters, The
104
Master by Colm Toibin (2004), Arthur and George by Julian Barnes (2005), The Observations by
Jane Harris (2006), The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (2006), Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster
(2006), Florence and Giles by John Harding (2010), The Convictions of John Delahunt by Andrew
Hughes (2013), and The Asylum by John Harwood (2013).
Neo-Victorian Studies. Access here
Neo-Victorianism: An Introduction. Access here
9. Conclusion
The Victorian era was one of the longest periods in British history during which many radical changes took
place in economy, science, technology, politics, culture and religion. The way the Victorians responded to
these changes was not uniform but rather diverse, making variety and conflict two of the most defining
characteristics of the period. This is precisely why it is hard to schematically sum up the period into a few
words. What we can, nevertheless, note is that such diversity and conflict was definitely indicative of the
profound democratization and modernization that the English society underwent at the time, giving birth to
some novels, poems and prose writing that still manage to fascinate the reading public.
Re-cap:
The Victorian era was a period when Britain

underwent radical changes and became an
industrial and colonial superpower.
During the Victorian period, religion and the

Church were overthrown by science, a fact
which led to an unprecedented secularization
and rationalization of everyday life.
During the Victorian Era, the working class

and women gradually gained more rights.
This was also the time when older cultural

forms were replaced by newer ones and the
novel became the dominant genre.
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Yannis Kanarakis
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Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics. Basingstoke: Routledge, 1993. Print. A very
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108
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Chapter Three
Realisms: The British Novel in the Nineteenth-Century

Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou
1. Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to explore the complexity, slipperiness, and elasticity of the term realism.
Although realist fiction is undoubtedly committed to a historical particularity, as a form of mimesis, realism
can never be identical with that which it represents, since its tools, i.e., language/words, can never function as
flawless, objective mirrors. The serious artistic treatment of ordinary people and their experience, linear plots,
omniscient narrators, round characters are, of course, elements associated with a realistic mode of
representation. Yet, the British nineteenth-century realist project is not explicit, and British realist writers
seem to exploit narrative techniques in ways that acknowledge the impossibility of a hundred percent
objective representation and even question the nature of reality.
Learning objectives:
Ability of students to perceive the

complexity and elasticity of the concept of
realism.
Familiarization of students with the term

realism in art and the narrative
conventions of realism in literature.
Exposure of students to the idea of realism

as an oxymoronic or utopic term as well as
to various critical responses to it.
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2. Cinderellas Foot in the Real World
Charles Perrault, Cinderella, from Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book
I wish I could. I wish I could. She was not able to speak the rest, being interrupted by her tears
and sobbing.
This godmother of hers, who was a fairy, said to her, You wish that you could go to the
ball; is it not so?
Yes, cried Cinderella, with a great sigh.
Well, said her godmother, be but a good girl, and I will contrive that you shall go.
Then she took her into her chamber, and said to her, Run into the garden, and bring me a
pumpkin.
Cinderella went immediately to gather the finest she could get, and brought it to her
godmother, not being able to imagine how this pumpkin could help her go to the ball. Her
godmother scooped out all the inside of it, leaving nothing but the rind. Having done this, she
struck the pumpkin with her wand, and it was instantly turned into a fine coach, gilded all over with
gold.
.
[] a few days later, the kings son had it proclaimed, by sound of trumpet, that he would
marry her whose foot this slipper would just fit. They began to try it on the princesses, then the
duchesses and all the court, but in vain; it was brought to the two sisters, who did all they possibly
could to force their foot into the slipper, but they did not succeed.
Cinderella, who saw all this, and knew that it was her slipper, said to them, laughing, Let
me see if it will not fit me.
Her sisters burst out laughing, and began to banter with her. The gentleman who was sent
to try the slipper looked earnestly at Cinderella, and, finding her very handsome, said that it was
only just that she should try as well, and that he had orders to let everyone try.
He had Cinderella sit down, and, putting the slipper to her foot, he found that it went on
very easily, fitting her as if it had been made of wax. Her two sisters were greatly astonished, but
then even more so, when Cinderella pulled out of her pocket the other slipper, and put it on her
other foot. Then in came her godmother and touched her wand to Cinderella's clothes, making them
richer and more magnificent than any of those she had worn before.
Is there any piece of writing that can seriously and convincingly claim to have nothing to do with
realism? Fairy tales, one could readily reply, as they rely on the element of the supernatural and feature
fantasy characters like elves, giants or fairies. In the first excerpt above, for example, Cinderellas fairy
godmother in Charles Perraults familiar story provides the magic solution to her problem by transforming a
pumpkin into a golden carriage and enabling Cinderella to attend the royal ball and meet the prince. So far in
the story, we know for sure that the narrative defies logic and depends on the readers trust in fantasy. Yet the
poor-girl-gets-handsome-prince happy ending of the story is a chilling reminder of a harsh reality associated
with womens subservient role in Chinese history, as the second excerpt quoted above suggests. If
Cinderellas tiny foot (the only foot in the kingdom which fits into the glass slipper) is the only indicator that
allows the prince to recognize her as the most appropriate bride, this unique characteristic originates in the
Chinese practice of foot-binding which first began in the days of the Song dynasty (960-1279) and was not
banned until as late as 1911. Small feet, or lotus feet, were both a symbol of beauty in China, and also a sign
of submission: as their feet were bandaged tightly for years during childhood to prevent growth, women
suffered severe pains and were forced to stay inside the house. Read in this light, Perraults fairy tale actually
encloses another very realistic tale with a tragic ending: the violent custom of literally maiming womens feet
and training them to become obedient wives.
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See here Jo Farrells pictures of the last living Chinese women with bound feet.
In the spectrum of fiction, genres like biography, the historical novel or realism would normally be
diametrically opposed with diaries, science fiction, or fairy tales; it is important to understand, however, that
all kinds of writing incorporate realistic elements and are, therefore, to a larger or smaller extent, affiliated
with realism.
3. Le Ralisme: Realism in Art

Although, as mentioned above, every piece of writing bears some connection to an external reality, realism as
a movement in art and literature was established in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first appearance
of the term is associated with the French novelist Champfleury (1820-1889) who endorsed it during the 1840s.
It was, however, the French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) who actually established the term, when in
1855 he opened a solo exhibition which he called Le
Ralisme. This display of his works, which took place
outside the grounds of the official Universal Exhibition
Neoclassicism: in Paris, was triggered by the fact that the committee of
the Universal Exhibition had rejected two of his major
A movement in art and architecture that paintings. The paintings which Courbet exhibited were a
coincided with the eighteenth-century Age of real shock to the critics and the bourgeois audience of
Enlightenment, and continued into the early the time; they initiated a revolution in art, as they broke
nineteenth century. away from his contemporary anti-modern nostalgia and
the academic high art which, from 1400 to 1800, had
Romanticism:
been dictated by Renaissance theories of idealized
An artistic, literary, and intellectual painting. Courbet steered away from mythological
movement that originated in Europe toward themes and rejected the gravity, rigidity, and austere
the end of the eighteenth century and in most heroism of Neoclassicism or the extreme emotionalism
areas reached its peak in the period from of Romantic painting.
1800 to 1850. The tendency to return to classical antiquity and
view the present through the prism of the past, for
example, is clearly evident in Jacques-Louis Davids
1799 painting The Intervention of the Sabine Women.
The horror of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, a period during which David had been
imprisoned as a supporter of Robespierre, is reflected in a scene from Roman history. The theme of the
painting, which refers to the Sabine women intervening in order to put an end to the battle between the
Romans and Sabines, suggests that the painting can be read as an indirect appeal to the people for putting an
end to the atrocities of the revolution. In his 1830 romantic painting, Liberty Leading the People, Eugne
Delacroix also mythologizes the present by personifying liberty as a bare-breasted woman leading the people
forward over the bodies of the fallen. Although the central figure in the painting shows characteristics of an
actual fighter and woman of the people with a bayonetted musket in her left hand, she is also an allegorical
goddess figure bearing the emblem of a new era in her right hand, the tricolor flag of France.
113
Image 3.1 Jacques-Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799).
Image 3.2 Eugne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830).
It is exactly this idealism represented in the art of classical mythology that Courbet is opposed to
when, in his realist manifesto, he denies the possibility of historic art applied to the past. Each epoch, he
writes in an open letter to his students in 1861, must have its artists who express it and reproduce it for the
future. An age which has not been capable of expressing itself through its own artists has no right to be
represented by subsequent artists. This would be a falsification of history. As an artist of the historical
present, Courbet focuses on everyday and ordinary subjects and presents them in an uncomplicated and direct
114
manner, as painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and
existing things. He wanted to be the pupil of no one but nature and present real people not idealized type
characters. Along with Courbet, a number of nineteenth-century artists, like Jean-Francois Millet, Ivan
Shishkin, Franz von Lenbach, or Thomas Eakins, pushed the limits of what was at the time thought of as
acceptable in art, as they focused on the base and rough aspect of life, the working class, rural or urban life,
busy streets and crowd scenes, and presented human nature and the nude body with unprecedented bluntness.
You can read here Gustave Courbets Realist Manifesto
Consider, for instance, Millets 1857 painting The Gleaners: its central characters are three female
figures caught in a rather awkward pose as they bend to gather grain left by reapers. What is striking here is
not only the emphasis on the beggar women in the foreground, or the very pedantic and raw theme of the
painting that would have brought the nineteenth-century viewers face to face with a harsh reality they
probably wanted to overlook, but also the fact that the painter ascribes a certain elegance and grace to their
back breaking labour. And, in the process of doing so, it is almost as if Millets painting is contributing to the
democratization of art. Courbet himself admitted being influenced by the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon who introduced materialist social thought to France in the 1840s, at the same time Karl Marxs
early writing appeared. Let us humble ourselves, Proudhon urges artists in Du principe de l'art et de sa
destination sociale (The Principle of Art and its Social Destination) beneath the weight of our
unworthiness. It is really not such a trifling thing to be able to show us as we are. In all these respects, I dare
say that, aside from the finish of the execution, [] the painting of Courbet is more serious and higher in its
aim than almost anything that the Dutch school has left (204). Art, he concludes, has the objective of
leading us to the knowledge of ourselves by the revelation of all our thoughts, even the most secret ones, of all
our tendencies, of our virtues, of our vices, of our ridiculousness, and in this way it contributes to the
development of our dignity, to the perfecting of our being. It was not given to us to feed ourselves with myths,
to intoxicate ourselves with illusions, to deceive ourselves and lead ourselves into evil with mirages as the
classicists and romantics would have it, as well as all the sectarians of a vain ideal, but rather, to deliver
ourselves from these harmful illusions by denouncing them [] (225).
Image 3.3 Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners (1857).
115
In his picture Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854), Courbet likewise brings art down to the level of the
everyday and the ordinary. As the title of the painting suggests, it simply involves the painter walking across
country in his working clothes with his painters tools on his back and greeting his friend and patron. There is
nothing elevated here in the poses of the figures, the tramp-like artist they salute, or the flat and uninspired
rustic background. And, although, of course, a twenty-first-century viewer would detect nothing shocking in
this painting, in 1854, Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet was a blow against middle-class pretentiousness and
artistic decorum. Courbets aim was to dissociate art from the superficial propriety and the clichs of
academicians and assert the value of persistent artistic sincerity and boldness. In his pursuit of truth, he
realized that the eye of the painter needed to refocus and invest on the raw, base, and crude working material
that life provided, for life, after all, originates in nothing else but expendable flesh. Courbet makes this explicit
in his uniquely provocative painting, which even today still has the power to stun or alarm, The Origin of the
World (1866). This painting, with its extraordinary angle and the close-up view of the female genitals and part
of the upper torso of a woman lying with legs spread, is sharply contrasted with the refined and idealised
nudes of the past. With exceptional audacity it proclaims that it is exactly in the hitherto vulgar and offensive
aspects of human life and the world where truth can be traced.
You can see here Courbets painting The Origin of the World
Image 3.4 Gustave Courbet, Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854).
116
4. Realism and the Novel
4.1 Feudalism and Medieval Romances
Realism is inextricably bound with the genre of the novel which reached a peak in England in the eighteenth
century and which is, in turn, largely associated with the rise of the middle class. As artistic and literary
production depends on the political, social, economic and cultural context of a certain time and place in
history, it is crucial to examine the conditions that
contributed to the spread and dominance of this new
mode or representation.
Idealism:
The novel was born with the birth of capitalism
in Europe and the new bourgeois class that led to an
The philosophical belief according to which
only ideas that are conceived in the mind increase of literacy and the growth of a large, widely
exist in the world. distributed reading public. This new form of realistic
The material world is rejected, unless it is writing came as a reaction to the medieval romance and
perceived through human consciousness, and its courtly descendants of the sixteenth and seventeenth
reality is basically mentally constructed. centuries, and reflected the changes in the new social
In western thought, idealism originates in system that succeeded medieval feudalism. In feudal
Plato according to whom reality consists of societies, power rested on a warrior nobility (the lords)
ideal immaterial forms existing outside the who owned the land (fiefs) and granted permission to the
mind, whereas the material world is merely a vast majority of the population (vassals or serfs) to
pale reflection of the ideal world. Nineteenth- cultivate the land. In exchange for the land and the
century philosophy was dominated by the protection that the lord offered, the serfs were obliged to
thought of German idealists, such as
serve him in a slavish way. The life of serfs revolved
Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Johann
around paying fees and taxes to the lords in the form of
Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer. manual labour in the fields (ploughing, harvesting,
digging, etc.). Serfs had no personal rights and little
control over their lives, and it was impossible for them to
change their status in a society characterized by social
rigidity and intellectual conservatism. Moreover, the
main concern of the ruling class in feudalism was to maintain the ownership and preserve the status quo;
consequently, the few elect that could read wanted a literary genre that would promote and exalt the values
and principles of the aristocracy.
Chivalric romances, the dominant genre of medieval aristocracy, project an idealized world and offer
a substitute living through an escape into a pseudo-world of courtliness, adventure and gallant knights with
superhuman powers who complete quests successfully and win the favour of the lady they are in love with. By
presenting an improved, almost perfect picture of the world, romances carried the readers away from the
problems of their everyday reality and urged them to ignore their hardships and distress. As romances
borrowed mostly from myths and fairy tales, they also had a strong didactic tone and depended on a very
static moral code. Ethical issues are oversimplified, as the world is divided into evil and good forces that are
in constant battle, characters are either wholly sound or wholly wicked, and the complexity of human
behaviour is overlooked.
117
Image 3.5 Edmund Blair-Leighton, The Accolade (1901)

A beautiful queen knighting a young man, reminiscent of Lancelot and Guinevere.
4.2 The Rise of the Middle Class
Apart from the mighty aristocracy who owned the land during the Middle Ages, as we have seen, another
class, the bourgeoisie, began to appear from the eleventh century, especially in the newly developed urban
areas of the twelfth century (boroughs). The term bourgeoisie originally referred to people who had the
rights of citizenship and political rights in a commercial city. They were merchants, craftsmen, or artisans,
whose interests clashed with those of the feudal landlords who kept insisting on higher rents in an effort to
sustain their power and exploit all classes inferior to them. As this newly rising class of merchants and artists
longed for trade independence and autonomy of thought, they rebelled against the rigidity of feudalism and its
unchanging emphasis on static property relationships and, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
developed into the revolutionary class that deposed feudal order.
118
The bourgeoisies demand for commercial rights, personal

liberty, and the ownership of property ignited the English
Positivism: Civil War (164251), the American War of
Independence (177583), and the French Revolution (1789
The philosophical doctrine that 99). In England, this new progressive class was associated
predominated in the nineteenth with the organizing of the New Model Army, the trial and
century and claimed that the only way execution of King Charles I, the exile of his son, Charles II,
to acquire knowledge was through and the replacement of English monarchy with, at first,
scientific experimentation and the Commonwealth of England (164953) and then the
observation. Some fundamental Protectorate (165359) under Oliver Cromwell's personal
doctrines of positivism can be traced in rule. Consequently, the bourgeoisie rejected older forms of
the theories of Francis Bacon (1561-
literature, like the medieval romance and its idealism that
1626), George Berkeley (1685-1753),
aimed at strengthening the ruling class, and sought more
and David Hume (1711-1776), but this
trend took shape in the 1830s when objective means of representation which corresponded to the
Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the changes in the social order and the needs of the new class. In
French mathematician and the eighteenth century, as the bourgeoisie gained in strength,
philosopher, rejected metaphysics and the novel gained in popularity.
theology and founded the positivist
school. Positivism has also been
associated with empiricism, as it lays
emphasis on empirical evidence, i.e.,
positive facts perceived through the
senses and interpreted through
reasoning processes.
Image 3.6 Charles Landseer, Cromwell Reading a Letter Found in Charless Cabinet, after Naseby (1851).
The Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645 marked the victory of the Parliamentarian New Model Army over
the Royalist Army and was a significant turning point in the English Civil War.
119
4.3 The Characteristics of the New Genre
While the bourgeoisie rejected the romance, a genre committed to promoting the feudal system and obscuring
its limitations by offering readers an ideal substitute for their own lives, they embraced the novel as a new
form of prose writing that promised to tell the truth about their everyday reality. Although, of course, prose
fiction had appeared long before the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, there was at the time a striking
preference for true stories narrated in an unbiased objective mode. This shift from poetry (the genre that
predominated during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) to prose can be justified when one bears in
mind that, despite the fact that prose is considered to be plain and simple, it is actually a more sophisticated
and persuasive form of writing. In prose, the spontaneous intuitive emotion of poetry is replaced by conscious
restraint, as stories strive to represent a consistent portion of external reality.
The realism of the novel, furthermore, is attuned to Enlightenment thought and the conviction that the
truth can be discovered by the individual through a process of rational thinking. This thesis has its roots in the
influential French philosopher Ren Descartes (1596-1650) who laid the foundations for seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century rationalism and the modern belief that truth can be achieved only when one relies on
individual experiences and dissociates oneself from past thought and literary traditionalism. But the most
ardent advocator of direct realism or common sense realism was the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid
(1710-1796) who opposed any form of idealism and insisted on the existence of an external objective world,
independent of the perceiving mind. Raids commonsense school called for realistic approaches in art and
literature since for positivists an external, objective, material reality actually existed. Another key figure in
nineteenth-century thought was the French philosopher Auguste Comte, whose works had a major influence
on Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. Comte was the founder of the epistemological
perspective of positivism and the discipline of sociology, as he highlighted the importance of both the physical
sciences (like mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy), as well as the most complex science of
human society.
In its pursuit of truth, the prose fiction of the eighteenth century displays a marked trust in individual
narratives, base and low characters, everyday themes, and detailed depictions of the material world. That
which distinguishes the eighteenth-century novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, or
Lawrence Sterne, for instance, from previous types of literature is a rejection of traditional historical themes
or plots that relied on myths and legends (as in the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton, for
example, who borrow their plots from writers of ancient Greece and Rome), and the introduction of
individualized characters involved in particular circumstances and in many cases facing ordeals which they
fail to deal with successfully.
The characters of novels are given a realistic name and surname (like Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones,
Clarissa Harlowe, Pamela Andrews, Elisabeth Bennet, David Copperfield, Becky Sharp, etc.) rather than
historical or general type names that carried fixed predetermined qualities (like Galatea, Aphrodite, Mr.
Badman, Mrs. Malaprop, etc.). And even when they are suggestive of the characters overall behaviour (as in
Mr. Allworthy, Robert Lovelace, or Mrs. Sinclair), they still appear as common everyday-life names. These
ordinary people are in most cases coming from the lower strata of society and have nothing epic or heroic
about them; they have more flaws than virtues, are more cowardly than valiant, and more often than not make
human mistakes. William Makepeace Thackerays 184748 novel, Vanity Fair, very tellingly subtitled A
Novel Without a Hero, echoes the novels bias against superhuman heroes and heroines and collective
tradition, as well as its predilection for individualism and novelty. At a time when the word original was
redefined and obtained its modern positive meaning, the novel fractured its ties with the past and opted for
freshness.
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Image 3.7 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair frontispieceProject Gutenberg eText.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Realism and the Novel Form
It is significant that the trend in favour of originality found its first powerful expression in
England, and in the eighteenth century; the very word original took on its modern meaning at
this time, by a semantic reversal which is a parallel to the change in the meaning of realism. We
have seen that, from the medieval belief in the reality of universals, realism had come to denote
a belief in the individual apprehension of reality through the senses: similarly the term original
which in the Middle Ages had meant having existed from the first came to mean underived,
independent, first-hand; and by the time that Edward Young in his epoch-making Conjectures on
Original Composition (1759) ailed Richardson as a genius as well moral as original, the word
could be used as a term of praise meaning novel or fresh in character or style. (14)
Notice, for example, how one of the earliest eighteenth-century novels, Daniel Defoes 1722 Moll
Flanders, proclaims its distance from romances that preceded and claims veracity in the Preface that frames,
what is supposed to be, the true account of the life of the eponymous Moll. The full title of the novel (The
Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, &c. Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of
continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife
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(whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last
grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums) announces that the book is
not fiction, but the memoir of a disreputable woman of low origin. As the story is purported to be a detailed
account of the life of a real person and refer to real-life events, it is considered necessary by Defoe to conceal
the true names of characters; and since the story is narrated by Moll herself, a former convict in Newgate
prison involved in a variety of scandalous illicit adventures (such as deceit, whoredom, thievery, felony,
incest, etc.), its style is slightly altered in order not to shock the reader. Molls memorandum, as Daniel Defoe
explains in the preface, her original account of her eventful life, is presented as it is, with just a minimum
retouching for the sake of decency. The external author in this case has functioned as an editor of a true
real-life and incomplete narrative, for, as Defoe explains, nobody can write their own life to the full end of it,
unless they can write it after they are dead.
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
The Authors Preface
The world is so taken up of late with novels and romances, that it will be hard for a private history
to be taken for genuine, where the names and other circumstances of the person are concealed, and
on this account we must be content to leave the reader to pass his own opinion upon the ensuing
sheet, and take it just as he pleases.
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very beginning of
her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal her true name, after which there is
no occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous
lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester
words that she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand having been written in language
more like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to
be.
The pen employed in finishing her story, and making it what you now see it to be, has had
no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen, and to make it speak language fit to be read.
When a woman debauched from her youth, nay, even being the offspring of debauchery and vice,
comes to give an account of all her vicious practices, and even to descend to the particular
occasions and circumstances by which she ran through in threescore years, an author must be hard
put to it wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his
disadvantage.
..
We cannot say, indeed, that this history is carried on quite to the end of the life of this
famous Moll Flanders, as she calls herself, for nobody can write their own life to the full end of it,
unless they can write it after they are dead. But her husbands life, being written by a third hand,
gives a full account of them both, how long they lived together in that country, and how they both
came to England again, after about eight years, in which time they were grown very rich, and
where she lived, it seems, to be very old, but was not so extraordinary a penitent as she was at first;
it seems only that indeed she always spoke with abhorrence of her former life, and of every part of
it.
As the novel embraced new plots and focused its lens on the portrayal of low life, it became
indispensable to set the action and its agents in a specific spatial and temporal background. It is of crucial
significance in realism that characters operate in a recognizable time period and live in environments that bear
a close resemblance to real-life surroundings. Consider, for instance, the opening of Felix Holt, George Eliots
1866 social novel, set, as the narrator makes clear in the first sentence of the book, thirty five years before its
publication, at the time of the First Reform Act of 1832. The novel focuses on the social change in rural towns
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across England resulting from the political change the Act caused, as it gave the right to vote to all men
owning property worth ten pounds or more in annual rent. In this detailed depiction of the old coach roads and
an imaginary trip across the plain watered by the rivers Avon and Trent, Eliot invites the reader to get a view
of the wider public life through the private perspective of her imaginary traveler. The profusion of images
here is striking: acoustic (horns, bells, the shepherds cry), olfactory (honeysuckle fragrances), gustatory
(bread and bacon), tactile (full-uddered cows milked, hoar-frost), and visual (purple blossomed, ruby-berried
nightshades, scarlet haws, deep-crimson hips, brown leaves). It is though this plethora of sensory details that
Eliot illuminates the central point made in this passage: before 1832, those boroughs the traveler passes by
were unrepresented in Parliament and corn laws (the high tariffs on imported grains that had been
established in order to protect English farm products from having to compete with low-priced products
imported from abroad) were still unrepealed. And although the shepherd is unaware of all this, as his solar
system cannot extend beyond his masters temper and the casualties of lambing-time, it is through this
meticulous depiction of the shepherds life that the reader can identify a specific time and place in history and
relate them to a specific political context.
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical
Introduction
Five-and-thirty years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach roads: the great
roadside inns were still brilliant with well-polished tankards, the smiling glances of pretty
barmaids, and the repartees of jocose hostlers; the mail still announced itself by the merry notes of
the horn; the hedge-cutter or the rick-thatcher might still know the exact hour by the unfailing yet
otherwise meteoric apparition of the pea-green Tally-ho or the yellow Independent; and elderly
gentlemen in pony-chaises, quartering nervously to make way for the rolling, swinging swiftness,
had not ceased to remark that times were finely changed since they used to see the pack-horses and
hear the tinkling of their bells on this very highway.
In those days there were pocket boroughs, a Birmingham unrepresented in Parliament and
compelled to make strong representations out of it, unrepealed corn-laws, three-and-sixpenny
letters, a brawny and many-breeding pauperism, and other departed evils; but there were some
pleasant things, too, which have also departed. Non omnia grandior aetas, quae fugiamus habet,
says the wise goddess: you have not the best of it in all things, O youngsters! the elderly man has
his enviable memories, and not the least of them is the memory of a long journey in mid-spring or
autumn on the outside of a stage coach. Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by
atmospheric pressure, from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes;
but the slow, old fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better
thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as
barren as an exclamatory O! Whereas, the happy outside passenger, seated on the box from the
dawn to the gloaming, gathered enough stories of English life, enough of English labors in town
and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey. Suppose
only that his journey took him through that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at
the other by the Trent. As the morning silvered the meadows with their long lines of bushy willows
marking the water-courses, or burnished the golden corn-ricks clustered near the long roofs of
some midland homestead, he saw the full-uddered cows driven from their pasture to the early
milking. Perhaps it was the shepherd, head-servant of the farm, who drove them, his sheep-dog
following with a heedless, unofficial air, as of a beadle in undress. The shepherd, with a slow and
slouching walk, timed by the walk of grazing beasts, moved aside, as if unwillingly, throwing out a
monosyllabic hint to his cattle; his glance, accustomed to rest on things very near the earth, seemed
to lift itself with difficulty to the coachman. Mail or stage coach for him belonged to the mysterious
distant system of things called Gover'ment, which, whatever it might be, was no business of his,
any more than the most outlying nebula or the coal-sacks of the southern hemisphere: his solar
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system was the parish; the masters temper and the casualties of lambing-time were his region of
storms. He cut his bread and bacon with his pocket-knife, and felt no bitterness except in the matter
of pauper laborers and the bad-luck that sent contrarious seasons and the sheep-rot. He and his
cows were soon left behind, and the homestead, too, with its pond overhung by elder-trees, its
untidy kitchen-garden and cone-shaped yew-tree arbor. But everywhere the bushy hedgerows
wasted the land with their straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures with
catkined hazels, and tossed their long blackberry branches on the corn-fields. Perhaps they were
white with May, or starred with pale pink dog-roses; perhaps the urchins were already nutting
among them, or gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the journey only to see those
hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beautyof the purple blossomed, ruby-berried
nightshade, of the wild convolvulus climbing and spreading in tendriled strength till it made a great
curtain of pale-green hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed honey-suckle which, in its most
delicate fragrance, hid a charm more subtle and penetrating than beauty. Even if it were winter, the
hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, the deep-crimson hips, with lingering brown leaves
to make a resting-place for the jewels of the hoar-frost. Such hedgerows were often as tall as the
laborers cottages dotted along the lanes, or clustered into a small hamlet, their little dingy
windows telling, like thick-filmed eyes, of nothing but the darkness within.
5. George Eliots Realist Manifesto

This physical concreteness and accumulation of material data, as well as the turn to the low and sordid aspect
of life, manifest the closeness of realist fiction to the nineteenth-century realist paintings we have already
examined and also to the Dutch and Flemish painting schools from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
The most ardent supporter of realism in nineteenth-century England, George Eliot, expresses her preference
for the truthfulness of Dutch painting and in general this taste for the humble and the ordinary which has been
one of the trademarks of realism. In Chapter 17 of her first novel, Adam Bede, published in 1859, Eliots
narrator breaks for a moment the illusion of fiction in order to address her reader directly and defend her
refusal to retouch and beautify the life she describes. Although her readers would have preferred her to
improve facts and rectify the portrait of her tasteless and indiscreet characters, like that of Adolphus Irwine,
the Rector of Broxton, the narrator insists on giving a faithful account of men and things and representing
their complexity rather than simply casting them as either wrong or virtuous. Her aim is not to create a
seamless version of the world, but to discover the splendor of coarseness and vulgarity and provide insight
into the infinite potential that people have to surprise us (like Mrs. Green, the neighbor who was really kind
to you in your last illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence).
It is not celestial angels, heroic warriors, or divine Madonnas that fascinate her, but old women with
weather-beaten faces engaged in dull activities like scraping potatoes in a dingy kitchen full of tin pans and
clusters of onions. In this realist manifesto, Eliot links her aesthetics with the aesthetics of Jan van
Eyck, Pieter Brueghel, Jan Steen, Jan Vermeer, and numerous other Dutch and Flemish painters who were
devoted to what she calls in The Mill on the Floss the most prosaic, emmet-like aspect of life (Book Fourth,
Chapter 1). Like those past masters, Eliot discovers the poetry and tragic potential of people irradiated by no
sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self renouncing faith (The Mill on the Floss). There is
grace and magnificence in the worldliness of a kitchen maid pouring milk from a jug (see Jan Vermeers The
Kitchen Maid), or a disorderly assemblage of unattractive peasants absorbed in ungainly dancing (see Pieter
Brueghel IIs Peasant Wedding Dance), as there is in the mundaneness of Eliots characters. Eliots candid
pen scrapes off the veneer of artificiality and convention to disclose the oppressive narrowness (The Mill on
the Floss) which lies in the very heart of life and which she adores.
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Image 3.8 Jan Vermeer, The Kitchen Maid (1660).
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Image 3.9 Pieter Brueghel II, Peasant Wedding Dance (1607).
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Chapter XVII
In Which the Story Pauses a Little
This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan! I hear one of my readers exclaim. How
much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual
advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful thingsquite as good as reading a
sermon.
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they
never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely
after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own
admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my
strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and
things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the
outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to
tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my
experience on oath.
Sixty years agoit is a long time, so no wonder things have changedall clergymen were
not zealous; indeed, there is reason to believe that the number of zealous clergymen was small,
and it is probable that if one among the small minority had owned the livings of Broxton and
Hayslope in the year 1799, you would have liked him no better than you like Mr. Irwine. Ten to
one, you would have thought him a tasteless, indiscreet, methodistical man. It is so very rarely that
facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste! Perhaps
you will say, Do improve the facts a little, then; make them more accordant with those correct
views which it is our privilege to possess. The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a
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tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair. Let all people who
hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably. Let your most faulty characters always be on
the wrong side, and your virtuous ones on the right. Then we shall see at a glance whom we are to
condemn and whom we are to approve. Then we shall be able to admire, without the slightest
disturbance of our prepossessions: we shall hate and despise with that true ruminant relish which
belongs to undoubting confidence.
But, my good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your
husband in the vestry? With your newly appointed vicar, whose style of preaching you find
painfully below that of his regretted predecessor? With the honest servant who worries your soul
with her one failing? With your neighbour, Mrs. Green, who was really kind to you in your last
illness, but has said several ill-natured things about you since your convalescence? Nay, with your
excellent husband himself, who has other irritating habits besides that of not wiping his shoes?
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their
noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these peopleamongst whom
your life is passedthat it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less
ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire
for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. And I would not, even if I
had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which
we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder
eye on the dusty streets and the common green fieldson the real breathing men and women, who
can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped
onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they
were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of ones best efforts, there is reason to
dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in
drawing a griffinthe longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous
facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real
unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no
motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate
feelingsmuch harder than to say something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.
It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings,
which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures
of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-
mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring
actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic
warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the
noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the
rim of her spinning-wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the
precious necessaries of life to heror I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown
walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride,
while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably
with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and goodwill.
Foh! says my idealistic friend, what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these pains
to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low phase of life! What clumsy, ugly
people!
But bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope? I am not at all
sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those lords of their
kind, the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling
exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class
of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying;
yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniaturesflattering,
but still not lovelyare kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron,
who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow
love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I
believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt
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quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found
themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human
feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beautyit flows with
resistless force and brings beauty with it.
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in
men, women, and childrenin our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty
too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy. Paint us an
angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet
oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine
glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those
old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a
dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the
spade and done the rough work of the worldthose homes with their tin pans, their brown
pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these
common coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and
philosophy and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore, let Art always
remind us of them; therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the
faithful representing of commonplace thingsmen who see beauty in these commonplace things,
and delight in showing how kindly the light of heaven falls on them. There are few prophets in the
world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and
reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men,
especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I
touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or
romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread and eats it
vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of
sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted
cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathersmore
needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the
faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is
perhaps rather too corpulent and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds
of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical
graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.
6. The Defective Mirror

The descent of realism to themes, characters and settings that had been considered by other movements in art
and literature prosaic and uninspiring is interrelated with the mode of representation favoured in realism. It is
not just the subject matter of realistic stories that is faithfully drawn from a real-life reservoir; the voice that
narrates is also directed towards objectivity and aims at achieving the detached approach of the scientist who
observes the world rather than that of a partial commentator who guides the reader towards certain
conclusions. The writer in realism strives to abstain from partialities or personal prejudices that would make
him or her steer away from facts. In tune with eighteenth-century philosophies of Enlightenment and
nineteenth-century positivism that acknowledged experimental investigation and observation as the only
sources of knowledge, the realist writer, like a methodical and impersonal scientist, is supposed to observe the
world and document facts, holding up a mirror to reality and offering to the reader a slice of truth. The mirror
became a key metaphor in nineteenth-century realism, as it best defined the role of realist literature and art.
The French critic Fernand Desnoyers very characteristically writes in his 1855 declaration On Realism: I
demand for painting and for literature the same rights as mirrors have (quoted in Becker 82).
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Yet, the mirror image, even for nineteenth-century writers, was a crude simplification. Evidently, the
medium of literature could never function as the flat surface of a looking glass that simply generates copies of
the world. George Henry Lewes, another fervent proponent of realism, philosopher, and critic of literature,
was well aware of this, when in 1858, he argued that, since every mode of representation presupposes a
medium, representation is always bound to and limited by the
nature of its medium (493). Lewes life-long partner, George
Eliot, honestly declares the limitations of her medium when, in
Mimesis: her realist manifesto, she speaks of a defective mirror. Like a
witness in the courtroom, who is bound by oath to tell the truth,
The word originally denoted the Eliot on the one hand vows to give a faithful account of men
human behaviour of miming or and things as they have mirrored themselves in [her] mind,
mimicking something. Since Plato
while on the other hand she confesses that, in the mirror of her
and Aristotle, it has been associated
mind, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection
with artistic representation, as, like
people who imitate each other, art faint or confused.
imitates the world. The question of The defective mirror image has been crucial in the
how accurately a work of art can theory of realism, as it reveals the paradoxical nature of the
imitate life has been central to term: its potential to convey a faithful picture of reality but also
Western thought and verisimilitude its failure in performing this task successfully. No matter how
has in various contexts been hard a writer may strive for objectivity, if the world is always
regarded as the correct way of filtered through his or her mind, it will always be coloured by
painting or writing. In the twentieth his or her personal perspective. Even the writer who makes the
century, many influential theorists most compelling and sincere effort to monitor and document
have considered mimesis a primary, reality with the impartiality of a scientist is always involved in
rather than secondary, activity processes like selecting his or her data, deciding about the order
directly associated with issues of
in which they will be presented, transmitting them to the reader
identity, language and desire.
According to them, we shape our
through the voice of one (or more) narrator(s), and employing
identities, gender behaviour or racial language in order to do so. Eliots defective mirror, in an
differences, for example, through interesting way, anticipates twentieth-century criticism of
unconscious identification with realism, as we will see later on in this chapter, and is also proof
certain models that prevail in certain that the approach of nineteenth-century realists is not nave or
times and places. ignorant of the complications that the I am a camera metaphor
had. Even in photography, which developed at around the same
time, in mid-nineteenth century, and promised unprecedented
correctness and precision, the personal shortcomings of the
person behind the camera could not be eliminated. In her study Fiction in the Age of Photography, for
example, Nancy Armstrong has shown how certain poses for portraits of women, criminals, or native people
in nineteenth-century photography were utilized to suggest their inferiority and promoted discriminatory
sexist or racial views. Eliots recognition of the subjective fallibilities of the author manifests that her
insistence on realism is anything but artless or unstudied.
7. Literalism, Photographic Realism, Materialism

Unlike romances that present an idealized version of the world, as we have seen already, realist fiction is
committed to truth. It is exactly this devotion to truth, a much contested term among philosophers, that renders
realism such a complex and hard to define concept. In his 1970 book, Realism, Damian Grant distinguishes
between scientific and poetic truth and the two contrasting and complementary approaches to it: the empirical
and epistemological method of scientists, which he technically refers to as the correspondence theory, and
intuitive perception, which is associated with the coherence theory. In the former case, it is taken for
granted that there is a factual reality which exists a priori and can be captured through careful observation and
meticulous reproduction of a simulacrum that corresponds to an external original reality. The artist here is
conscientiously loyal to an external world already there; his or her conscience, in other words, protests when
external reality is neglected. In contrast, in the latter case, the task of the artist is not to seize, but to discover
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Image 3.10 Anonymous Engraving of Plinys Tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasius (ca 1610).
and release the truth, by consciously trusting his or her instinct and imaginative abilities. Truth here is created
and need not correspond to any preexisting world, but cohere and make sense as the artist is self-aware of
realism and its ontological status (physical existence).
A number of critics have conflated realism with the conscientious manner of mimicking appearances,
so it has often been alleged that realisms strength rests on a works power of illusion. Since Platos Republic,
a work which initiates the idea of mimesis in Western culture in 380 BCE, art has been characterized as an
imitation of the real world. In book seven of the Republic, Plato presents his well-known allegory of the
cave, according to which truth resides only in ideas. Human beings are like prisoners chained in a cave
sitting with their back to its opening and watching the reflections of the real world on its walls. Although they
can observe only shadows of the things that happen outside the cave, they believe that what they see is the real
world, as this is what they have known since birth. When, in very rare cases, a prisoner breaks his [sic] chain,
Plato claims through the voice of Socrates, he [sic] can look at the sun directly and catch a glimpse of the real
world. This is the true philosopher, for the real world is the world of ideas, not material things, and it is only
philosophers that can approach it. In contrast to philosophers, who reach truth, artists in Book Ten of the
Republic can only produce phantoms, shadows of the things they imitate, or, more precisely, shadows of
shadows, as, like all mortals, artists too are captives in this cave and perceive only reflections. All they are
able to do is mechanically reproduce replicas of people, animals, plants and everything in heaven and earth, in
the manner of a mirror that automatically sends out duplicates of shadows. Artistic representation, twice
distanced from truth and a threat to knowledge, is in this sense a superfluous, histrionic, inferior and harmful
activity and artists should be banned from Platos ideal city, in order for artistic contamination to be
eliminated.
Platos theory of art as mimesis has left an indelible mark on Western aesthetics and accounts for the
Western attachment to realism throughout the centuries. It also explains the reduction of realistic
representation in certain cases to literalism or photographic realism, a mode directly related with the
correspondence theory of realism discussed above. This obsession with imitative exactness is best reflected in
the classical tale of the two ancient painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius, recorded in Plinys Natural History, who
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are competing with each other over who can produce the most lifelike and convincing painting. Zeuxis is
overconfident that he has won the match, as the bunch of grapes he has painted has fooled even the birds that
flew down to nibble them. Parrhasius takes him by surprise, however, when Zeuxis attempts to draw the
curtain he thinks is covering Parrhasius painting and discovers that it is nothing but a painted veil. This
trompe-loeil, as it is called in French, technique of depicting objects or people in three dimensions in order to
deceive the eye, is resonant of Platos mimetic function of art and has been much in vogue throughout the
history of painting, murals, sculpture or architecture.
Image 3.11 Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism (1874).
The technique of trompe-loeil is evident also in 3D Street Art which is gaining much
popularity in our days. It presents startling views that delude the viewer into believing that
there is a third dimension in a two-dimensional drawing, as in the artwork posted here.
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In literature, the medium of representation is language and, therefore, correspondence to the material
world is less evident than in the visual arts. As Edgar Allan Poe observed while commenting on the
Daguerreotype process which was the origin of modern photography:
All language must fall short of conveying any just idea of the truth, and this will not appear
so wonderful when we reflect that the source of vision itself has been, in this instance, the
designer. Perhaps, if we imagine the distinctness with which an object is reflected in a
positively perfect mirror, we come as near the reality as by any other means. For, in truth, the
Daguerreotyped plate is infinitely (we use the term advisedly) is infinitely more accurate in
its representation than any painting by human hands.
When conscientious realism contests with photography in presenting a simulacrum of reality, it very
often degenerates into literalism, photographic realism, or, what Virginia Woolf has called, materialism. In
her 1925 essay Modern Fiction, Woolf attacks the slavish insistence on accuracy which smothers life and
which is epitomized in the novels of the Edwardian writers of the late nineteenth century. Writers like Arnold
Bennett (1867-1931), John Galsworthy (1867-1933), or H. G. Wells (1866-1946) focus exclusively on the
external material world, but real life escapes them, she argues:
So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is
not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting
out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by
some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide
comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable
that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the
last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to
a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt,
a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must
novels be like this?
Their characters may live in perfectly constructed houses, but they are really dead, choked by the
conglomeration of innumerable trivial details, while their true spirit has eluded the writer. This is justified in
the extensive quotation inserted in Woolfs essay from Arnold Bennets novel Hilda Lessways. The
exhausting description of the view from the main characters window and all the tedious information about
houses, rents, Victorian economics, terraces, etc. are mere digressions from the truth.
Virginia Woolf, from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
But then he [Arnold Bennet] begins to describe, not Hilda Lessways, but the view from her
bedroom window, the excuse being that Mr. Skellorn, the man who collects rents, is coming along
that way. Mr. Bennett proceeds:
The bailiwick of Turnhill lay behind her; and all the murky district of the Five Towns, of
which Turnhill is the northern outpost, lay to the south. At the foot of Chatterley Wood the canal
wound in large curves on its way towards the undefiled plains of Cheshire and the sea. On the
canal-side, exactly opposite to Hildas window, was a flour-mill, that sometimes made nearly as
much smoke as the kilns and the chimneys closing the prospect on either hand. From the flourmill a
bricked path, which separated a considerable row of new cottages from their appurtenant gardens,
led straight into Lessways Street, in front of Mrs. Lessways house. By this path Mr. Skellorn
should have arrived, for he inhabited the farthest of the cottages. One line of insight would have
done more than all those lines of description; but let them pass as the necessary drudgery of the
novelist. And nowwhere is Hilda? Alas. Hilda is still looking out of the window. Passionate and
dissatisfied as she was, she was a girl with an eye for houses. She often compared this old Mr.
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Skellorn with the villas she saw from her bedroom window. Therefore the villas must be described.
Mr. Bennett proceeds: The row was called Freehold Villas: a consciously proud name in a district
where much of the land was copyhold and could only change owners subject to the payment of 4
fines,' and to the feudal consent of a court presided over by the agent of a lord of the manor. Most
of the dwellings were owned by their occupiers, who, each an absolute monarch of the soil, niggled
in his sooty garden of an evening amid the flutter of drying shirts and towels. Freehold Villas
symbolised the final triumph of Victorian economics, the apotheosis of the prudent and industrious
artisan. It corresponded with a Building Society Secretarys dream of paradise. And indeed it was a
very real achievement. Nevertheless, Hildas irrational contempt would not admit this. Heaven be
praised, we cry! At last we are coming to Hilda herself. But not so fast. Hilda may have been this,
that, and the other; but Hilda not only looked at houses, and thought of houses; Hilda lived in a
house. And what sort of a house did Hilda live in? Mr. Bennett proceeds: It was one of the two
middle houses of a detached terrace of four houses built by her grandfather Lessways, the teapot
manufacturer; it was the chief of the four, obviously the habitation of the proprietor of the terrace.
One of the corner houses comprised a grocers shop, and this house had been robbed of its just
proportion of garden so that the seigneurial garden-plot might be triflingly larger than the other.
The terrace was not a terrace of cottages, but of houses rated at from twenty-six to thirty-six pounds
a year; beyond the means of artisans and petty insurance agents and rent-collectors. And further, it
was well built, generously built; and its architecture, though debased, showed some faint traces of
Georgian amenity. It was admittedly the best row of houses in that newly settled quarter of the
town. In coming to it out of Freehold Villas Mr. Skellorn obviously came to something superior,
wider, more liberal. Suddenly Hilda heard her mothers voice [] But we cannot hear her
mothers voice, or Hildas voice; we can only hear Mr. Bennetts voice telling us facts about rents
and freeholds and copyholds and fines.
Woolf best exemplifies the modernist critique of realism, which began with the fin-de-sicle writers,
and gained vigor in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the late Victorian period, for example, Oscar
Wildes aesthetic philosophy rejected realism as philistine materialism. The purpose of art, Wilde provokingly
declares, is not to echo life, but to lie about life, not to show us its morbid revolting face, but to retouch it
according to the ideal of beauty. In his dialogue, The Decay of Lying (1889), Wilde seems to take sides
with Platos views on the artificiality of art; unlike Plato, though, he claims that artistic lies are the apex of
beauty, delight and pleasure. For Wilde, it is not art that should be committed to life, but life that should
imitate art. In the early twentieth century, along with Woolf, a whole range of modernist writers, like Joseph
Conrad, E. M. Foster, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, or D. H. Lawrence (to name but a few), questioned
the doctrine of realism. As they wrote at a time when science underlined its limitations and uncertainties,
when both material and psychological reality was elusive, and absolute truths were pronounced dead,
modernists derided both the realists exertion to attain truth and their means of achieving this goal.
Virginia Woolf, from Modern Fiction
Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the
task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?
We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of
fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
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8. Tell All the Truth, but Tell it Slant: The Paradox of Realism
Even seen from the perspective of twentieth-century modernists, however, the excerpt from Arnold Bennetts
novel which Woolf quotes from is not representative of a variety of nineteenth-century novels whose attitude
towards reality is anything but unsophisticated. Let us consider, for example, the rawest case of
representational realism that finds its expression in nineteenth-century fiction. This is Mr. Gradgrinds
reiterating decree in Charles Dickenss Hard Times: Now, what I want, is Facts. Teach these boys and girls
nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. The students in Mr. Gradgrinds factual school, trained to
perceive the world through a pair of scales and the multiplication table always, are mere vessels filled to the
brim with imperial gallons of facts. Deprived since birth of anything that would nurture their imaginative
flair and brought up without nursery rhymes or fairy tales, his students learn that everything is to be calculated
in numbers and explained through statistics. Hence the model definition of a horse which consists only of dull
factual information and numbers. Here it is, forced on them by the model student in Mr. Gradgrinds class in
the second chapter of Hard Times:
Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and
twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard,
but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.
In his classroom aesthetics also, students are instructed that any trace of fancy needs to be expelled.
According to Mr. Gradgrinds factual philosophy, animate or inanimate things must be locked in their
denotative meanings and any effort to misplace them must be crushed from the roots. We cannot paper our
walls with horse images or decorate our carpets with flowers or our china with butterflies, Mr. Gradgrind
reasons nonsensically, as quadrupeds can never trot the sides of rooms in reality, insects never perch on
tableware and flowers would wither if people put tables and chairs on them.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Chapter II
Very well, said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. Thats a horse. Now,
let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of horses?
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, Yes, sir! Upon which the other half,
seeing in the gentlemans face that Yes was wrong, cried out in chorus, No, sir!as the custom
is, in these examinations.
Of course, No. Why wouldnt you?
A pause. One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing, ventured the answer,
Because he wouldnt paper a room at all, but would paint it.
You must paper it, said the gentleman, rather warmly.
You must paper it, said Thomas Gradgrind, whether you like it or not. Dont tell us you
wouldnt paper it. What do you mean, boy?
Ill explain to you, then, said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, why you
wouldnt paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and
down the sides of rooms in realityin fact? Do you?
Yes, sir! from one half. No, sir! from the other.
Of course no, said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. Why, then, you
are not to see anywhere, what you dont see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you dont
have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact. Thomas Gradgrind nodded his
approbation.
This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery, said the gentleman. Now, Ill try you
again. Suppose you were going to carpet a room. Would you use a carpet having a representation
of flowers upon it?
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There being a general conviction by this time that No, sir! was always the right answer to
this gentleman, the chorus of No was very strong. Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among
them Sissy Jupe.
Girl number twenty, said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.
Sissy blushed, and stood up.
So you would carpet your roomor your husbands room, if you were a grown woman, and
had a husbandwith representations of flowers, would you? said the gentleman. Why would
you?
If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers, returned the girl.
And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over
them with heavy boots?
It wouldnt hurt them, sir. They wouldnt crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be
the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy
Ay, ay, ay! But you mustnt fancy, cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to
his point. Thats it! You are never to fancy.
You are not, Cecilia Jupe, Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, to do anything of that
kind.
Fact, fact, fact! said the gentleman. And Fact, fact, fact! repeated Thomas Gradgrind.
You are to be in all things regulated and governed, said the gentleman, by fact. We hope to
have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to
be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have
nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a
contradiction in fact. You dont walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon
flowers in carpets. You dont find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your
crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You
never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented
upon walls. You must use, said the gentleman, for all these purposes, combinations and
modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and
demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.
The girl curtseyed, and sat down. She was very young, and she looked as if she were
frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.
Now, if Mr. MChoakumchild, said the gentleman, will proceed to give his first lesson here,
Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode of procedure.
Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged. Mr. MChoakumchild, we only wait for you.
So, Mr. MChoakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other
schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles,
like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had
answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody,
biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion,
algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends
of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majestys most Honourable Privy
Councils Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and
physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all
the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the
rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all
their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone,
MChoakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught
much more!
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking
into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good
MChoakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost
thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking withinor sometimes only
maim him and distort him!
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It is, however, exactly this uninspired bland attitude that Dickenss novel cauterizes. Although Hard Times is
realistic to the bone in the sense that it refers to a very particular time period in England and deals with some
hot debates of the mid-Victorian period (like the Condition of England Question, the educational system
and utilitarianism), the mode of representation selected by Dickens deviates from realism and borrows from a
variety of other genres.
On the one hand, Hard Times focuses on some very characteristic aspects of mid-Victorian England.
The classroom scenes in the beginning of the novel, for instance, are distinct echoes of the teaching system in
schools: in huge classrooms, about one thousand students were arranged in a military way and controlled by
monitors and a monitor-general; students had numbers and were taught to memorize blocks of factual
knowledge in a mechanical way. The setting of the novel also, Coketown, is an exact copy of the monotonous,
hellish industrial cities which were mushrooming at the time and dehumanized their inhabitants. Moreover,
the part of the plot referring to the mill workers and their combining in unions faithfully demonstrates the
conditions of the working class people: as an aftermath of the laissez faire or Free Trade economic system of
the time (that was based on the assumption that the government should not interfere at all with the running of
factories), the poor were prey to exploitation by capital owners. Dickenss effort to be precise about the world
he described is evident in the unprecedented emphasis he gave to observation as recorded in his letters. We
know for example that he had visited Preston, a textile-manufacturing town in the North of England in order
to collect data and form an opinion about trade unions and the weavers strike that broke out there in 1853, a
year before the publication of his novel.
On the other hand, this dry, oppressive, deadly statistical life in the novel is very robustly resisted by
both the voice that narrates and the style of narration. The narrator is avowedly not recording the real-life
situations the novel refers to in an objective way as, throughout the novel, he attacks the system of political
economy, utilitarianism and self-interest, and invites the reader to form an opinion and take sides. His
language is loaded with metaphors and compressed and becomes most of the times invasive and rhetorical,
making polemical and didactic proclamations, as in the excerpt below:
Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-

up infidels, gabblers of many little dogs-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with
you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and
affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph,
when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to
face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.
In a paroxysm of rage here, the narrator imagines all preachers of facts being devoured and demolished by
their own creed which has taken the monstrous shape of a wolf. This grotesque image points towards the very
characteristic reliance of the narration on genres diametrically opposed to realism, such as the gothic, fairy
tales or melodrama. The novel abounds in exaggerated characters who bear a close resemblance to ogres,
witches, fairies, dragons, old women on broomsticks, etc., and have names indicative of their qualities in a
restoration-comedy fashion (Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. MChoakumchild grind and choke the imagination of
innocent children, Mr. Bounderby is a bounder, i.e., a wicked person). To a considerable extent, it also
borrows from the popular theater, pantomime and circus slapstick in order to reveal the truth to the reader. It is
through the mouth of the clownish circus owner, the always half-drunk and cross-eyed Mr. Sleary, that the
ultimate truth is revealed to us in a ludicrous, hardly recognizable, lisp: People muth be amuthed. [] You
muth have uth, Thuquire. The gist of the novel, people must be amused as they cant live without the
circus, is pronounced in a hilariously amusing way. In its effort to attack factual reality, Dickenss novel
sacrifices realism to impossible plot coincidences, incoherent characters, theatricality, artificiality, and
melodramatic tableaux, and has for this reason been accused by various critics of failing to represent the
condition of the working people. George Bernard Shaw has characterized Dickenss depiction of the workers
union leader, for example, a mere figment of middle-class imagination. No such man would be listened to by
a meeting of English factory hands (338).
You can read here Henry James short story The Real Thing
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Yet, despite these departures from the real, Hard Times, is an invaluable portrait of industrialized
England, the devastating effects of political economy and the predominance of utilitarianism. It is an excellent
case of how truth does not necessarily lie in the real, a theme that intrigued Henry James, another key figure in
nineteenth-century literary realism. In his short story The Real Thing, published in 1892, James puts
forward exactly this question of simulation/imitation versus creation of truth in art. The first-person narrator
and painter in the story finds it impossible to be inspired by the declining but genuinely aristocratic Monarchs,
or to use them as models for his painting of upper class life. The Monarchs are the real thing, the real
gentleman and the real lady, and, as such, are always trapped in the same thing and can only stand for the
class of people they belong to. However, meager little Miss Churm with her freckled cockney and
whimsical sensibility has infinite potential of being metamorphosed into anything the artist wants her. The
fact that the drawings the painter makes of the Monarchs will always look exactly like them is precisely their
defect. Miss Churms portraits, conversely, can signify everything: from a fine lady to a shepherdess. In a
metafictional flash of frankness, the narrator/painter confesses his perverse, as he calls it, innate preference
for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of
representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate
and almost always a profitless
question. Emily Dickinson
James story provides proof that
the realists pursuit of truth, even their Tell all the truth but tell it slant
trust in the external world, does not Success in Circuit lies
necessarily mean that their writing is Too bright for our infirm Delight
reduced to a scrupulous mechanical The Truth's superb surprise
mirroring of material actuality. Like As Lightning to the Children eased
modernist writers, realists too are aware With explanation kind
of the elusiveness of life, the power of The Truth must dazzle gradually
the imagination and the importance of Or every man be blind
overcoming the subservient attachment
to trivialities. Most nineteenth-century
realists acknowledge the shortcomings
of their means and, as a result, depend
on their imagination. This fact highlights the continuities rather than the breaches between realism and
modernism. If realists still believed there was a truth to be told, they knew well that the only way to do that
was, in Emily Dickinsons words, to tell it slant.
9. Translucency vs. Polysemy in Language

What makes circuitous journeys in literature inescapable and perplexes realistic representation even more is
the fact that the tool of a writer is language. Although it is generally defined as a complex system of signs that
enables communication, language is often an inadequate method of interaction or even a cause of
misconceptions. Conceptions of language have changed throughout the centuries, and since the role language
plays in literature is decisive, it is important to trace the key moments in its trajectory. The English
philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) formulated his theory of language in his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), which prevailed throughout the eighteenth century and set up the basis for consequent
empirical theories of language. According to Locke, men came to use spoken words as the signs of their
ideas (Book III, Chapter 2, section 1); although these words are selected by people arbitrarily (at that time,
the word arbitrarily meant dependent on human choice, not randomly), in Lockes theory, there is a
great dependence of words on ideas and words are perceived as flat surfaces, transparent glass through which
we get a sight of the actual world.
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Image 3.12 Ferdinard de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics ( 66-67).
This view of language was dominant in the nineteenth century as well, but it was by and large
contested by twentieth-century structuralist and poststructuralist linguists. The seminal Swiss linguist and
semiotician Ferdinard de Saussure (1857-1913) challenged the referential function of language and its ability
to allow entrance to the real world. For Saussure, the sign is the basic unit of meaning and comprises the
signifier/the word image and the signified/the mental concept. The signified and the signifier are inseparable
and form a unity. Like Locke, Saussure also believes that the relation between the signifier and the signified is
arbitrary, i.e. random, but for him, words acquire meaning through their relationship to other words, not
because they represent things in the actual world. Language, in other words, is a closed system of signs in
which meaning is produced from the interrelationship between the signs it contains. This is clearly evident in
contrasting concepts; beauty, for example, cannot be perceived irrespectively of its binary opposite, ugliness,
in the same way that presence is dependent on our understanding of absence, farness is dependent on
closeness, right is dependent on wrong, originality on banality, democracy on absolutism, and so on and so
forth.
Saussures structuralist definition of language as a system of interdependent entities would seem to
conflict with realist writing which professes to represent an accurate picture of the outside world. And, of
course, the poststructuralist approaches that followed in the second half of the twentieth century complicated
things even more. The idea of the unity of the sign, for instance, is rejected by the French controversial
psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), who spoke of the open-endedness of signs. For
Lacan, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is never a one-to-one relationship, as words can
never be perceived outside a certain context. Furthermore, we should bear in mind that words are always
perceived by human beings, and since perception inevitably involves memory, the same signifiers are
perceived differently by different people. The denotative meaning of a word, even in cases where a word has
multiple, varied, and/or conflicting definitions, can be traced in a good dictionary. Its connotations, however,
are countless and depend both on the linguistic context in which the word appears and on the myriad
associations the word may have for each individual who reads, hears or speaks it.
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To have this point further illustrated, let us consider

the following excerpt from Jane Austens Mansfield Park.
As this passage relies chiefly on the technique of showing
Structuralism: (i.e. presenting to the reader the characters direct words in
dialogue) and scanty telling, (i.e. narratorial commentary),
A theory that appeared first in the early
except in the last paragraph, it would be reasonable to
1900s. It stemmed from the structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, but conclude that this part of the story is presented objectively
eventually spread over to a large range of to us through the voice of a non-interfering narrator. A
disciplines, like sociology, psychology, company of three, Edmund Bertram, his cousin Fanny
anthropology, literary criticism, Price, and their friend, Miss Mary Crawford, have been
architecture, and economics. According to walking around the wood park of a large mansion they are
structuralism, human life phenomena visiting and come to rest for a while on a shaded bench.
make sense only through their Edmund and Mary talk about how exhausted Fanny must
interrelations which constitute a large be, while Mary decides that she must explore further.
structure. The aim of a structuralist is to Edmund argues with her about the dimensions of the wood,
examine these substantial underlying and the two set off to calculate the distance by walking
structures that motivate human activity. about it. Meanwhile, Fanny is persuaded that she should
The term appeared in the works of the
stay behind and wait for them. There appears to be nothing
French anthropologist Claude Lvi-
Strauss, writers such as Louis Althusser
vulgar or provocative either in the conversation between
and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In the characters here or in the narrators comments at the end,
the 1960s, most of the principles of and Jane Austen is perhaps the last nineteenth-century
structuralism were brushed aside by a writer one would consider capable of offensive language. It
number of French theorists called is, however, passages like these in Austen that have
poststructuralists, like the historian generated a whole school of criticism delving into her
Michel Foucault, the philosopher and bawdy humour and subversive potential, like Eve Kosofsky
social commentator Jacques Derrida, the Sedgwicks Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl
Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the (1991) or Jillian Heydt-Stevensons Austens Unbecoming
literary critic Roland Barthes, and the Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History
feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Luce (2005).
Irigaray. Indeed, if we contemplate the connotative
meanings of words, like ha-ha, for example, and relate
Poststructuralism:
them to the context of the story and the characters of the
This movement criticized basically the novel, it becomes clear that in this scene the filter through
idea that there is a clear-cut overarching which events are transmitted to us is not really transparent.
structure lying beneath texts. The real According to the dictionary definition, ha-has are walls or
structure or the truth for other boundary markers set in a ditch so as not to interrupt
poststructuralists is not embedded in the landscape. It is exactly these rigid borders, i.e., her very
texts, but produced through confined role as a nineteenth-century woman, that unruly
interpretation and therefore is always in Mary wants to cross over, and it is only via very suggestive
the process of being disputed. Texts, in references to the geography of the place that this is
other words, do not have single or inferred. Theres no direct mention here of Marys
monolithic meanings, but are open to subverting gender stereotypes, claiming the pleasure of a
multifaceted and often conflicting female sexual gaze, or experiencing sexual satisfaction; but
readings which are in direct correlation
all these lurk around her desire to engross Fannys horse,
with the background of each reader.
look through iron gates, and reach to the bottom of the
wood right by the side of the ha-ha. In this apparently
objective recounting of three characters resting on a bench
and engaged in well-bred conversation, Jane Austen
actually sabotages all nineteenth-century propriety rules as her heroine wittily and stealthily takes the
initiative to be in places which immobilized Fanny is prevented from entering.
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Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Chapter IX
A few steps farther brought them out at the bottom of the very walk they had been talking of;
and standing back, well shaded and sheltered, and looking over a ha-ha into the park, was a
comfortable-sized bench, on which they all sat down.
I am afraid you are very tired, Fanny, said Edmund, observing her; why would not you
speak sooner? This will be a bad day's amusement for you if you are to be knocked up. Every sort
of exercise fatigues her so soon, Miss Crawford, except riding.
How abominable in you, then, to let me engross her horse as I did all last week! I am
ashamed of you and of myself, but it shall never happen again.
Your attentiveness and consideration makes me more sensible of my own neglect. Fanny's
interest seems in safer hands with you than with me.
That she should be tired now, however, gives me no surprise; for there is nothing in the
course of one's duties so fatiguing as what we have been doing this morning: seeing a great house,
dawdling from one room to another, straining ones eyes and one's attention, hearing what one does
not understand, admiring what one does not care for. It is generally allowed to be the greatest bore
in the world, and Miss Price has found it so, though she did not know it.
I shall soon be rested, said Fanny; to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure,
is the most perfect refreshment.
After sitting a little while Miss Crawford was up again. I must move, said she; resting
fatigues me. I have looked across the ha-ha till I am weary. I must go and look through that iron
gate at the same view, without being able to see it so well.
Edmund left the seat likewise. Now, Miss Crawford, if you will look up the walk, you will
convince yourself that it cannot be half a mile long, or half half a mile.
It is an immense distance, said she; I see that with a glance.
He still reasoned with her, but in vain. She would not calculate, she would not compare. She
would only smile and assert. The greatest degree of rational consistency could not have been more
engaging, and they talked with mutual satisfaction. At last it was agreed that they should endeavour
to determine the dimensions of the wood by walking a little more about it. They would go to one
end of it, in the line they were then infor there was a straight green walk along the bottom by the
side of the ha-haand perhaps turn a little way in some other direction, if it seemed likely to assist
them, and be back in a few minutes. Fanny said she was rested, and would have moved too, but this
was not suffered. Edmund urged her remaining where she was with an earnestness which she could
not resist, and she was left on the bench to think with pleasure of her cousin's care, but with great
regret that she was not stronger. She watched them till they had turned the corner, and listened till
all sound of them had ceased.
10. The Dialogic Character of the Novel
10.1 Centripetal vs. Centrifugal Forces
Twentieth-century theories of language, as we have already seen, have enabled fresh readings of nineteenth
century texts which, under the scope of the early twentieth-century modernist experimentation, had been
devalued as static and monolithic. The most influential theory, however, which put forward a new
understanding of the novel and instigated groundbreaking reconceptualizations of the genre was formulated by
the Russian formalist theorist and critic of literature Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975).
According to Bakhtin, the principal characteristic of language is heteroglossia, the fact that language
at all times consists of multiple layers which correspond not only to linguistic dialects, but also to socio-
ideological languages related with factors like age, social groups, professions, gender, class, etc. All words,
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Bakhtin writes, have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency, party, a particular work, a particular
person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour, and no word can escape its contextual overtones which
can be generic, tendentious, individualistic (293). Words can never simply reflect objects, but are always
engaged in an interactive and antagonistic dialogue with them. In languages that are alive and developing,
words travel towards objects. In doing so, they come upon other alien words that are already there in the
objects and with which they intersect in order to create new meanings (Bakhtin 279). As a result, each
word/voice speaks of its own way of seeing the world and from its own value system.
This is what makes Bakhtin reject definitions of language as a common unitary system of linguistic
norms that lay emphasis on what he calls the centripetal forces of language. These forces aim at conquering
variety in language and promoting a concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which
develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization (Bakhtin 271).
Along with these centripetal forces, though, operate centrifugal forces that counteract unification and
centralization striving for disunification and decentralization (Bakhtin 272). Consequently, every utterance is
inherently heteroglot (many-voiced), since it embodies contradictory voices, and dialogic, as these voices are
involved in an incessant conflict. Meaning, for Bakhtin, can be produced only by the words interaction with
other words in certain contexts.
Michael Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under the influence of the
unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life, the noveland those artistic-
prose genres that gravitate toward itwas being historically shaped by the current of
decentralizing, centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural,
national and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-
ideological levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and the buffoon spectacle, the
heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all languages and dialects; there developed
the literature of the fabliaux and Schwnke of street songs, anecdotes, where there was no
language-center at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the languages of poets,
scholars, monks, knights and others, where all languages were masks and where no language
could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face. (272-73)
What is crucial in our discussion here is Bakhtins perception of the novel as a dialogic genre par
excellence. Novels are distinct from other literary genres, he argues; unlike epics, which endeavor to abolish
diversity, novels embrace diversity. They are by nature polyphonic, artistic orchestrations of multiple voices,
as prose writers can distance themselves from the language of their own work and celebrate multivocality.
Unlike the epic poet, the novelist has no fear of the unfamiliar meanings and tones of words and therefore
feels no urge to eliminate them. Novelists, Bakhtin writes, do not speak in a given language, they speak
through language, like a ventriloquist that can juggle diverse voices and trick you about their source. This
polyphonic quality of novels can function at a number of levels. In a more elemental way, it may refer to the
different voices of the characters in the novel, their different dialects, sociolects or idiolects. In a more
complex way, it may have to do with the variety of genres from which a novel is borrowing or the variety of
points of view filtered through the voice of the narrator(s).
10.2 The Novel as a Hybrid Genre
Let us consider first the polyphonic aspect of the novel as far as genre is concerned. Bakhtin perceives the
novel as an all-enveloping and ever-developing genre, unique in its capacity to ingest and devour other genres
while still maintaining its status as a novel. Its idiosyncratic structure can embrace, parody, and reformulate or
novelize other genres (like drama, see for ex. Ibsen or naturalist drama), epic poetry (for ex. Byrons Don
Juan), or lyric poetry (Heines lyrical verse). The novel questions the fixed characteristics of well established
genres, he argues, blends them with innovative elements, and achieves a wider and deeper perspective of ever-
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changing, ever-unfolding reality. Heroes from medieval romances, for example, as has already been
mentioned above, are metamorphosed into anti-heroic parodies in the novel. They are no longer one-sided but
acquire new dimensions as their positive qualities are depicted along with the ridiculous, base and flawed
aspects of their character. They make mistakes and learn from them, or refuse to learn, but in either case
reveal to the reader a broader and more complexly rich view of life. It is in the nature of the novel to rely on
other forms and at the same time expose their conventionality, reappropriate them, and in doing so enable
fresh understandings of the world.
Bakhtins theory can prove to be very enlightening when exploring the British nineteenth-century
novel, as its attachment to realism is mostly characterized by haziness and uncertainty especially when
compared with the French nineteenth-century novel. Although both French and English novels of the time
share the tendency to position characters and events in a real historical moment and direct their gaze towards
the low and up-to-that-time neglected part of life, English realism is far more indirect and complicated, as the
influential literary critic George Levine has shown. This is largely due to the fact that most major novelists of
that century are still under the insistent influence of romanticism. Enlightenment thought with its trust in
rational scientific knowledge has left an indelible mark on the eighteenth-century novel, but in the nineteenth
century such models of perception are always pervaded by a Romantic critique of utilitarian thinking. This has
been made clear in the previous reference to Dickenss Hard Times, an industrial novel which assembles
elements from melodrama, fairy tales or the gothic and presents the distilled truth through the voice of a
clown. But the strong link to romanticism is evident in a whole range of authors affiliated with realism, like
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Bronts, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Jane Austens Pride and
Prejudice is a realistic depiction of early-nineteenth-century society with residues of the archaic romance;
Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre combines the domestic-realist governess fiction with elements from the Gothic
and the romance; Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights relies heavily on the uncanny and Gothic romance;
George Eliots Middlemarch anticipates the modern psychological novel; Thomas Hardys Tess of the
dUrbervilles blends realism with symbolism. The list is endless.
10.3 Point of View
It is not only genre that British nineteenth-century realism transforms, but narrative techniques as well.
Although realism is dedicated, as we said, to representing social realities in an objective way, it is not ignorant
of the fact that these realities are intricate and constructed. Consequently, the voice that narrates is in many
cases split or unstable, and omniscience is recognized as an impossible task. Even the highly anti-romantic
William Thackeray, a chief representative of the realist school, distrusts omniscient narrators and
acknowledges their deficiencies. In his not so very well-known novel The Newcomes, which is an education in
the Victorian era with its hundreds of references to Victorian poets, painters, politicians and events of the
time, the narrator openly declares his inability to comprehend the minds of his characters and reach the depths
of their hearts. There are, of course, other, more subtle, narrators who rather than reveal their intentions to the
readers delight in carrying them off track. This is usually the case with Jane Austens ventriloquist narrators
whose voice often mixes with the voice of the characters. We are often tricked into believing that the views
which the narrator expresses are the views of an external non-involved observer, but Austens narrators
recurrently adopt the perspective of certain characters in the novel without warning us. This kind of stylistic
contagion (i.e., a case in which the way the narrator thinks is infected by the way a character thinks), or literal
endosmosis (i.e., the two voices are like two liquids separated by a thin membrane which eventually breaks
and allows them to merge), as it has also been called, is a precursor of the phenomenon of Free Indirect
Speech encountered in modernist fiction par excellence.
Such a renowned lie, or case of Free Indirect Speech, can be traced in the opening sentence of Pride
and Prejudice, which is presented to us as a universal truth supposedly announced by the narrator: It is a
truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
The lack of inverted commas here, which would mark the beginning and end of someone elses quoted words,
makes us infer that this statement is expressed and supported by the narrator. nly when the readers get to the
second paragraph, do they realize that what has been advertised as a world-widely accepted truth is actually
the very limited perspective of certain people who live in a certain neighbourhood:
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However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a
neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is
considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Furthermore, the narrator very subtly draws together the word truth and the idea of fixity, a fact
which would make any cautious reader suspect that this truth is nothing but an obsession. As a result, this
initially universal truth is eventually reduced to an absurd fixation, especially when it is explained as the
conviction that newcomers are deemed the rightful
property of the unmarried female population. Its
universality shrinks to an astonishing degree when in the
Free Indirect Speech/Discourse/Style: rest of Chapter One, through the dialogue between Mr. and
Mrs. Bennet, we are led to conclude that this preposterous
This literary term refers to what Bakhtin thought is stuck in Mrs. Bennets mind, the mother of five
calls double-voiced discourse, i.e. the girls, who is in desperate need of finding husbands for
confusion of two voices, usually that of the them. This chapter ends with the narrators very caustic
narrator and that of a character. In such remarks about Mrs. Bennet: She was a woman of mean
narrative passages, the third-person understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.
narration is overrun by the style of a [] The business of her life was to get her daughters
characters language (this can be evident
married; its solace was visiting and news. Such sarcasm
in the tone of voice, vocabulary, thoughts,
values or perspectives of the character)
reasonably makes one wonder why the narrator would
without the external indication of inverted adopt her prejudiced perspective in the very first sentence
commas. Although this style of writing of the book.
was first used consistently by Jane Austen, The answer lies in the fact that for Austen, as for
it is extensively adopted by modernist most British realist writers, truth is more complex than it
writers. appears to be. Her narrators voice is in a sense undecided,
as while it is rooted in the world it describes (the landed
gentry of early nineteenth-century England), it
simultaneously undermines it through refined criticism and
irony. It is not accidental that Free Indirect Speech, a narrative device which was adopted systematically by
modernist writers in the early twentieth century, was first used consistently by Jane Austen in the early
nineteenth century. Both Austen and modernist writers, in different ways and degrees of course, distrusted
universal truths and perceived reality as flux rather than rigidity and permanence. Hence, their preference for
polyphony and the joining together of incompatible points of view.
11. Female Realism

Austens revisiting of universal truths is largely due to the fact that these truths nailed women down to very
limited roles. Her contribution to the novel is unique not only because it exploits the potential of narrative
voice and anticipates modernism, but, more importantly perhaps, because it establishes a female form of
realism. In the same way, antiheroes and the lower strata of society permeated fiction in the eighteenth
century, as we have seen, women gained momentum in nineteenth-century novels. This is not to suggest that
female characters were not there before, but for the first time women are represented by women and given a
voice of their own. Let us not forget that women were the major consumers and producers of fiction in the
nineteenth century. Inspired by her predecessor, Frances Burney (1752-1840), a writer who concentrated on
representing womens social lives and struggles in a patriarchal world, Austen launches a tradition of novels
by women about women which was carried on throughout the century by writers like the Bronts, Elizabeth
Gaskell, and George Eliot.
For all these female writers, reality had up to that point been defined by male voices and was therefore
partial and prejudiced. Women had been misrepresented as weak, feeble and inconstant creatures locked in
feminine domestic sensibility. Men have had the advantage of us in telling their own story, Anne Elliot
protests gently in Austens last novel, Persuasion. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the
pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything, Anne concludes. In the novels of these
nineteenth-century female writers, women are able to reason, express their views and take an active stance,
while their domestic concerns and affairs are recognized as an essential part of everyday reality. With these
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women writers, the novel acquires a new dimension, as it acknowledges domesticity as a central part of
reality. Their witty, competent, passionate, persistent, independent, strong-minded, or educated female
protagonists enable fresh insights into the world, life and history. While public or major historical events are
either only indirectly alluded to or presented through the prism of female protagonists, concerns originally
considered private (like marriage, love, parenting, housekeeping) come to the forefront and obtain political
importance.
If we return for a moment to the example from Pride and Prejudice mentioned in the previous section,
we can see how cautiously, almost imperceptibly, Austen engrafts on the novel the point of view of women,
even silly and frivolous women like Mrs. Bennet. According to common sense and plot evidence, it is
gentlemen or ladies in need (not in possession) of a fortune that are in want of a wife or a husband. It is indeed
Mr. Wickham, Charlotte Lucas, and all the potentially impoverished Bennet girls who must desperately hit
upon a good match in order to escape disgrace or misery. Yet there is truth in this introductory sentence when
set within the early nineteenth-century context and seen through the prism of the social hierarchies of the time.
A well-off gentleman belonging to the landed gentry, like Mr. Darcy, was indeed in need of a wife, if he were
to set a proper example to the large parish he was in charge of and rule as a proper proprietor. It is his future
wife, Elizabeth Bennet, who provides Mr. Darcy with the opportunity to be aware of his pride and reform his
behaviour. Although the initial remark in Chapter One of the book conflates with the perspective of
unintelligent and unwise Mrs. Bennet, it is not entirely discarded in Pride and Prejudice. Truth with Austen
seems to broaden its spectrum in order to accommodate points of view that had up to that time been
considered trifling and superfluous. So, a propertied gentleman like Mr. Darcy, the novel concludes, can
accomplish his public mission successfully only if his private life is illuminated and enriched by a proper
heroine like Elizabeth. Although she is silly Mrs. Bennets daughter, Elizabeth is well aware that her mothers
frivolous perspective alludes to the actual dangers that women of her class would have to face if not married
to an eligible gentleman, and encapsulates traces of a universal truth, according to which women are a
crucial and indispensible part of society.
12. Realism: Reactionary or Progressive?

We have argued so far that realism began as a genre that was affiliated with the rising middle class and
focused on characters and aspects of life that had long been unrepresented or of minor significance in art and
literature. The antiheroic voices of pedantic characters, or the uncouth lower classes, or even the
unsophisticated female population that invaded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature gave to it an air
of democratization. Seen through the prism of modernism, however, in the first decades of the twentieth
century, realism became synonymous with conservatism. At a time when almost all religious, philosophical
and scientific dogmas were put into question, the lens of realism was too narrow and restrictive. For modernist
writers and thinkers, realism, with its attachment to positivist thinking, was considered incapable of
transferring the depth, complexity and confusion of modern experience.
During the interwar period especially, a group of German theorists, who were later labeled The
Frankfurt School, began to consider Enlightenment and positivism as a form of dictatorship. For the
sociologist/philosophers Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) or Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) for instance,
bourgeois Enlightenment imposed a very limited and biased perspective that aimed at naturalizing and
reinforcing the prevalent state of things. Consequently, realisms trust in Enlightenment and rational thinking
rendered it a conformist and reactionary mode. In a similar way, a number of critics in the second half of the
twentieth-century accused realism of representing a simplified one-dimensional view of the world. According
to the French literary theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), the world we encounter in realist fiction is purged
of the uncertainty of existence, and the realist mode is too absorbed in documenting reality and too lost in
concrete details (Writing Degree Zero 27). In Critical Practice (1980), a very influential and innovative book
on the theory and practice of criticism, the British literary critic Catherine Belsey (1940-) also speaks of
realism as a transparent medium that endorses the dominant status quo. In classic realism, Belsey contends,
The reader is invited to perceive and judge the truth of the text, the coherent, non-contradictory
interpretation of the world (69).
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Roland Barthes, from The Reality Effect
Resistance of the real (in its written form of course) to structure is very limited in the fictive
account, constructed by definition on a model which, for its main outlines, has no other constraints
than those of intelligibility; but this same reality becomes the essential reference in historical
narrative, which is supposed to report what really happened: what does the non-functionality of a
detail matter then, once it denotes what took place; concrete reality becomes the sufficient
justification for speaking. History (historical discourse: historia rerum gestarum) is in fact the
model of those narratives which consent to fill in the interstices of their functions by structurally
superfluous notations, and it is logical that literary realism should have beengive or take a few
decadescontemporary with the regnum of objective history, to which must be added the
contemporary development of techniques, of works, and institutions based on the incessant need to
authenticate the real: the photograph (immediate witness of what was there), reportage,
exhibitions of ancient objects (the success of the Tutankhamen show makes this quite clear), the
tourism of monuments and historical sites.
All this shows that the real is supposed to be self-sufficient, that is strong enough to belie any
notion of function []. (146-47)
Realism has also been attacked by postcolonial critics like Edward Said (1935-2003) or Gayatri
Spivak (1942-) as a genre that promotes the imperialist project and is complicit with the dominant
Eurocentrism of the nineteenth century. For them, the nineteenth-century novel reflects the notion that
Europeans as a superior people undertook the noble task of civilizing what they thought of as inferior nations
or races. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), a seminal work in postcolonial criticism, Said draws examples
from mainstream eighteen-century, Victorian, and twentieth-century writers to argue that in the British novel,
the right to colonial possessions helps directly to establish social order and moral priorities at home (73). In
works by Defoe, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronts, Conrad, Kipling, etc., colonial territories are in the
centre or background of their plots either as sources of wealth or as repository of unwanted characters.
Moreover, the colonial other is always a grotesque threat to social order, a fantastic monstrous impossibility
which realist characters are challenged to confront and expel.
More specifically, Said invites us to consider a number of such cases in which the colonies are
exploited both literally (the English invest on their affluent natural resources) and metaphorically (the English
build their pre-eminence on the alleged inferiority of the natives). Said examines a number of examples drawn
from the huge tank of the nineteenth-century novel. Abel Magwitch, for instance, from Dickenss Great
Expectations, is an ex-convict deported to Australia, who eventually becomes a colonial businessman, but is
denied return to England although he finances Pips dream of developing into a successful English gentleman.
Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochesters deranged West Indian wife in Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, is exiled in an
attic and censored for ever when burned alive, allowing Mr. Rochester to marry Jane, a sound English
educator. The authoritative and powerful Sir Thomas Bertram in Austens Mansfireld Park has made a fortune
as a plantation and slave owner in Antigua, a fact which, Said argues, is conveniently silenced in the novel.
And it is precisely realist representation, the critics of realism maintain, that mutes marginal and oppressed
voices; if the genre of realism has promised the readers to convey the material and objective aspect of a
certain historical time, then realism, they conclude, is committed to promoting the prevailing conventionalized
modes of thinking and establishing a stereotypical image of society as recognizable and predictable.
Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism
As a reference, as a point of definition, as an easily assumed place of travel, wealth, and service,
the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally
visible, presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose
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work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied [], or given density.
To cite another intriguing analogue, imperial possessions are as usefully there, anonymous and
collective, as the outcast populations [] of transient workers, part-time employees, seasonal
artisans; their existence always counts, though their names and identities do not, they are
profitable without being fully there. [] [They are] people on whom the economy and polity
sustained by empire depend, but whose reality has not historically or culturally required attention.
In all of these instances the facts of empire are associated with sustained possession, with far-
flung and sometimes unknown spaces, with eccentric or unacceptable human beings, with fortune-
enhancing or fantasized activities like emigration, money-making, and sexual adventure.
Disgraced younger sons are sent off to the colonies, shabby older relatives go there to try to
recoup lost fortunes [], enterprising young travellers go there to sow wild oats and to collect
exotica. The colonial territories are realms of possibility, and they have always been associated
with the realistic novel. Robinson Crusoe is virtually unthinkable without the colonizing mission
that permits him to create a new world of his own in the distant reaches of the African, Pacific,
and Atlantic wilderness. (75)
This, however, is an evaluation which fails to consider realism in all its dimensions. As we have seen
in our analysis so far, realism does not turn a deaf ear to the weak and feeble (whether this involves categories
like gender, class or race), nor does it favor monolithic readings. Modern insights of theory and criticism have
allowed us to appreciate realist texts in all their complexity and throw light on the inconsistencies, ellipses, or
subversions that are embedded in realist fiction. As Said himself plainly states in Culture and Imperialism, we
must read the great canonical texts, and perhaps also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European
and American culture, with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or
marginally present or ideologically represented (I have in mind Kiplings Indian characters) in such works
(78). In the past few decades, such readings have indeed been attempted and have enabled readers to gain a
clearer picture of realisms experimental and dissident moments. Contemporary criticism in most cases
focuses on examining how conflicting tendencies or centripetal and centrifugal forces in texts are engaged in a
dialectic relationship rather than conflating realism with ideological and aesthetic conservatism. It is without
doubt that the insistence of realism on precision or detail does not function as a means of sedating the readers
and robbing them of their power to think and resist. In most realist fiction, despite the overriding references to
an external materiality, the status quo is often questioned and the texts inspire an active reaction to social
injustice, inequalities and wrongs.
If we return for a moment to the examples from Saids book mentioned above, it becomes evident that
when read in the context of the whole novel in which they appear, they constitute more complicated cases and
not an unambiguous support of Eurocentrism, Englishness, or patriarchy. New South Wales, for instance, is
only a vague background in Dickenss story, but it has given Abel Magwitch the chance to reform himself
and, most importantly, to support Pips great expectations. The half-Creole Bertha Mason is of course a
threatening Other in Bronts novel; it is Bertha, however, who enables Jane to see the true face of Mr.
Rochester and motivates her to assume a dynamic role in their relationship. The Bertrams may be apathetic to
where their riches and status derive from, but the reference to the Antigua plantation is a clear allusion to
slavery and Sir Thomas despotic character is not condoned in the novel. Even if most nineteenth-century
novels offer an orderly ending that complies with the orthodox notions of gender, class or race at that time,
more often than not these texts question them in explicit, implicit, and, quite often, unorthodox ways.
One such striking case of an avant-garde ending can be traced in Eliots The Mill on the Floss. Maggie
Tullivers death by drowning seems to be a just and suitable finale to the story of an unruly woman, a
mistake of nature, as perceived by most of the characters around her. Maggies behaviour defies stereotypical
definitions of women, especially as these were prescribed by the dominant Darwinian pattern of the mid-
nineteenth century: she is more intelligent than her brother, perversely attracted by the frail and sick Phillip
Wakem, and too energetic to tame her passion for life. It is to be expected that Maggie must be discarded as
an irregularity; her tragic death, however, signifies simultaneously her release from the confining pattern of
marriage and reproduction. Water functions as a modernist symbol of cleansing and liberation in the novel and
seems to be the natural element for amphibious creatures like Maggie. In this autobiographical novel, Maggie
reflects her creators dual nature (George Eliot was the pseudonym of Marian Evans, who adopted a male
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identity in order to publish her works), and like Marian Evans she seeks a place/element/space in which
women are given the freedom to be creative and express themselves. The overflowing of the river comes as a
blessing to Maggie who surrenders to its power without any agony at all. The angry river is, after all, an
echo of the angry voice of a woman deprived of freedom. It is only when the threads of ordinary association
are broken, when Maggie loses consciousness and enters this dreamlike unconscious state in which the past
merges with the present that she finds relief. Although Eliot, as we have seen, is the most ardent representative
of realism in Britain, her ending here anticipates the modernist tendency to perceive time as circular rather
than linear, the modernist fascination with the dark unexplored aspects of the human mind, as well as the split
self which invades modernist fiction.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Book Seventh, Chapter V

The Last Conflict
At that moment Maggie felt a startling sensation of sudden cold about her knees and feet; it was
water flowing under her. She started up; the stream was flowing under the door that led into the
passage. She was not bewildered for an instant; she knew it was the flood!

And without a moment's shudder of fear, she plunged through the water, which was rising
fast to her knees, and by the glimmering light of the candle she had left on the stairs, she mounted
on to the window-sill, and crept into the boat, which was left with the prow lodging and protruding
through the window.

In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly
passed away from that life which she had been dreading; it was the transition of death, without its
agony,and she was alone in the darkness with God.
The whole thing had been so rapid, so dreamlike, that the threads of ordinary association
were broken; she sank down on the seat clutching the oar mechanically, and for a long while had no
distinct conception of her position. The first thing that waked her to fuller consciousness was the
cessation of the rain, and a perception that the darkness was divided by the faintest light, which
parted the overhanging gloom from the immeasurable watery level below. She was driven out upon
the flood,that awful visitation of God which her father used to talk of; which had made the
nightmare of her childish dreams. And with that thought there rushed in the vision of the old home,
and Tom, and her mother,they had all listened together.

Oh, how welcome, the widening of that dismal watery level, the gradual uplifting of the
cloudy firmament, the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark! Yes, she must be
out on the fields; those were the tops of hedgerow trees. Which way did the river lie? Looking
behind her, she saw the lines of black trees; looking before her, there were none; then the river lay
before her. She seized an oar and began to paddle the boat forward with the energy of wakening
hope; the dawning seemed to advance more swiftly, now she was in action; and she could soon see
the poor dumb beasts crowding piteously on a mound where they had taken refuge. Onward she
paddled and rowed by turns in the growing twilight; her wet clothes clung round her, and her
streaming hair was dashed about by the wind, but she was hardly conscious of any bodily
sensations,except a sensation of strength, inspired by mighty emotion. Along with the sense of
danger and possible rescue for those long-remembered beings at the old home, there was an
undefined sense of reconcilement with her brother; what quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in
each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life
is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? Vaguely Maggie felt this, in
the strong resurgent love toward her brother that swept away all the later impressions of hard, cruel
147
offence and misunderstanding, and left only the deep, underlying, unshakable memories of early
union.
13. Conclusion
Eliots projection into the future makes us realize that borders and definitions are there to be contested and
broken. Let us remember that, although we traced the origins of realism as a movement in art and literature in
the mid-nineteenth century, we have seen how this mode of representation was born long before that when the
new middle class was beginning to gain power in Europe. Or, that although we identified the main
characteristics of the genre to be linear plots, real-life characters, and the portrayal of low life, it has become
obvious that this is not always the case. And, that although we defined the novel by contrasting it to the
medieval romance, there are major realist texts that either borrow from the romance (or from a variety of other
genres, like the Gothic, the grotesque or melodrama), or anticipate modernist techniques. We are closer to
understanding realism if we perceive it as inherently dialogic and inevitably connected with what preceded or
followed it. Like the novel, with which realism is closely affiliated, this mode of representation is also a
hybrid: both an unattainable utopia and an omnipresent possibility. On the one hand, it is an impossibility, as a
hundred percent objective representation of life is a ridiculous claim, since in art and literature there will
always be a filter through which reality or a slice of it is transferred to the reader. On the other hand, it is a
genre that permeates all writing, as it would be absurd to assert that there are works of art that have no
connection to the real world. Eliots nineteenth-century image of the defective mirror has made it clear that
realism is not a transparent genre that excludes the possibility of a critical stance towards the reality it depicts.
In order to do justice to it, it would be more productive to approach realism as an inconstant and polysemous
form of expression and explore it in all its diversity.
Re-cap:
Realism was inspired by Enlightenment

and positivist thinking.
Nineteenth-century British realism is

revealed to be a more sophisticated and
experimental genre when read through
the prism of modern theory.
Realism is engaged in an incessant

dialogue with modes of writing that
preceded and followed it.
148
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Chapter Four
Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction(s)

Effie Yiannopoulou
1. Introduction: Terms and aims

The large body of critical work centred on modernism and postmodernism, which has seen the light of day in
the twentieth century and the first years of the twentieth first, is simply impressive. What partly accounts for
such extensive and ever proliferating critical responses to the two (cultural and aesthetic) movements may be
connected, on one level at least, to the lack of consensus and the intense debate carried out among
commentators with regard to their meaning and politics. As terms, modernism and postmodernism have
infiltrated the professional idioms of a variety of disciplinary fields, from literature, art and philosophy to
architecture, film and cultural analysis. They are, however, often interpreted multiply in their various contexts,
decoded as they are in ways that address very specific, field-bound issues and problems. What is more, their
definitional limits are further stretched by the ongoing revision to which they have been subjected since at
least the 1970s, as new theoretical concerns come to bear on already established positions. For example, the
recent interest in postcolonial studies and globalization has come to question modernisms cultural politics,
especially its Eurocentric focus, by uncovering forms of non-Western art and literature that compete with
James Joyce in their groundbreaking aesthetic innovations (Said; Moore-Gilbert; Cuddy-Keane). In like
manner, postmodernisms encounter with feminism or the anxieties emanating from the new planetary order
since 9/11 has refueled the debate regarding its politics. Is postmodernism the result and perpetrator of
contemporary capitalist, consumerist, largely Western practices or a critical formation capable of reacting to
their inbuilt injustices? s it even worth posing these questions at this moment in history when, as a word and
idea, postmodernism is considered (by some) pass and out of fashion? What might be fairly safely argued at
this point is that there is no one single answer to these questions. Over the years, modernism and
postmodernism have opened themselves up to multiple, often competing, mutually interrogating
interpretations and evaluations, proving slippery and contentious as organizing categories and prompting
commentators in the field to speak of modernisms and postmodernisms in the plural. This is certainly a
gesture meant to register the diversity of positions that have been brought together under the names of the
modern and the postmodern. At the same time, it also crucially underlines the extent to which non-uniformity,
self-contradiction and lack of self-identity (one single and fixed identity) are central to what modernists and
postmodernists do and the alternative representations of reality and the world that they offer.
In line with this view, in this chapter I will not provide all-encompassing definitions or a full account
of the various modernisms and postmodernisms one is likely to encounter. I will offer, instead, a brief and
selective introduction into their basic assumptions and aesthetic practices and suggest ways in which you can
begin to orient yourselves in these ever-shifting spaces mostly by working my way through specific examples.
My focus will be on literary (primarily fictional), artistic and cultural texts, with the odd theoretical essay
thrown in, and will pay special emphasis on their relationship to notions of the real, the subject and the
political (the texts own ideological positions and engagement with the world we live in). Brief detours into
the historical, cultural and intellectual forces that have framed and shaped literary and artistic production since
the late nineteenth century will be carried out when necessary. Finally, I shall suggest reading paths which you
can follow to reach more extensive analyses of the issues broached in this chapter.
In the discussion that follows, there are at least four cognate terms that rub shoulders and which this
essay will spend time unpacking: modernity, modernism, postmodernity, postmodernism. How do they relate
to each other? Do they share conceptual links, as their common etymological root suggests, or are they
defined by a relationship of confrontation and mutually-launched challenges? Or both? And why do we need
to know? As a starting point, it is worth noting that both modernity and postmodernity are frequently
understood as terms that designate social, cultural and intellectual conditions, while modernism and
postmodernism aesthetic phenomena.
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Effie Yiannopoulou
Learning Objectives:
Focus on modernism, postmodernism,

modernity, postmodernity.
Investigate conceptions of the real, the

subject and the political.
Provide cultural, historical and social

contexts.
Suggest further reading.
2. Modernity
To understand where modernist and postmodernist attempts at disturbing modes of representation emerge
from, what they are reacting against and what aesthetic and ideological complexities they ultimately expose, it
is vital to have some sense of the philosophical, political and cultural discourses that make up modernity.
Modernity is at best a slippery term. It was first used by Charles Baudelaire in his essay The Painter of
Modern Life (1863) to describe the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent quality of modern living (13). It
captures the sense of rapid and continual change that shape human life in the industrialized urban centres of
the nineteenth century where novel technologies accelerate the speed of living and revise our notions of time
and space. In fact, to be modern is to be confronted with the new in all fields of human activity, from science
and philosophy to communication and travel. Modernity is a time of constant transformation that affects the
human beings self perception and relationship to nature and knowledge, leading to a distinctly modern
conceptualization of the individual and the real (how we see the world around us). Locating its beginnings has
proved notoriously difficult. There are critics who consider the eighteenth century and its revolutionary
activity the founding moment of the modern. For many, however, modern times begin with the Renaissance,
at the end of the Middle Ages, and find a culminating point in the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment
(For more on the divisions of modernity see Berman). Would this mean, though, that there never was an age
of transformation before the advent of the modern? Not quite. What characterizes modernity is not simply
more change but a different stance towards the very idea of change which is now reappraised and taken to
act, in the context of a highly valued rationalism, as the measure of what is human and civilised. Michel
Foucault, the French historian and philosopher, rightly suggests that we think of modernity as an attitude, a
way of thinking and feeling, and also a way of acting and behaving, rather than a historical period (39).
Re-conceptualizing the modern as an attitude, rather than only an poque, opens the way for recognizing its
153
continuing impact on the present, and accepting that it lives on alongside and within postmodernity rather than
lie buried safely in a past that no longer concerns us. In this line of thinking, the modern continues to shape
how we relate to contemporary reality and how we think about both individual and collective identities
(subjects and communities). It also explains the reason why modernist and postmodernist authors and artists
have engaged with the beliefs and conflicts of the modern with such force and persistenceeither to produce
radical critiques of its foundational premises or to suggest counter-modernities as postcolonial critics Homi
Bhabha and Paul Gilroy have both done.
2.1 Modernitys Main Features: An Example
I will now turn to Roland Barthess essay The Eiffel Tower to unpack further the meanings implicit in
modernitys prioritization of reason, science and progress, especially as regards the different ontological
(concerned with the nature of being) and epistemological (concerned with knowledge and truth) models that it
puts forth and their involvement in aesthetic movements. For Barthes, the Eiffel Tower is not only the
universal symbol of Paris but tellingly the symbol of modernity, of communication, of science (4).
Image 4.1 The Eiffel Tower. 15 May 1888: Start of construction of second stage
Built in 1889 by Gustave Eiffel for the Centennial Exposition in Paris, the tower is a monument to human
ingenuity and innovative engineering, its thousands of steel plates, bolts, beams and screws constructing an
empty structure whose main aim is to reach for the sky and allow Parisians to view the metropolitan landscape
from a height of over 300 meters for the first time ever. In becoming the tallest building of the world in its
time (324 m), the tower materializes and metaphorically captures the spirit of modernity in its desire to dream
ahead, to move on, to fly high, or else to progress. Following Walter Benjamins Angel of History, it turns
its back on a landlocked past and the detritus of history to face the future with the newly acquired confidence
of a world that has invested in the almost unlimited possibilities promised by new machines and technologies.
This only works to prove what commentators have consistently remarked about modernity. It is a
period deeply marked by the emergence of new types of knowledge, sciences and inventions, from Galileo
and Copernicuss scientific revolutions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to steam trains and
telephones in the nineteenth and satellites in the twentieth. What needs to be grasped at this point is that
embedded in modernitys scientific advances is a new way of relating to the world and a new position granted
to the human being. Nature is no longer to be contemplated. It is to be investigated and explored. Isaac
Newton is famously said to have needed to inquire into the causes that made an apple fall to the ground
instead of flying skywards in order to formulate the law of gravity. Nature turns into an object of inquiry and
experimentation, a book that must be analysed and explained. In this light, the Eiffel Tower may be said to
embody modernitys fullest expression. By allowing its visitors to enjoy a birds eye view, it gives birth to a
new sensibility of vision and signals the advent of a new perception. Visitors are encouraged to read and
decipher the world at their feet and to see things in their structure (9). In Barthess own words,
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Effie Yiannopoulou
every visitor to the Tower makes structuralism without knowing it [] in Paris spread out
beneath him, he spontaneously distinguishes separatebecause knownpointsand yet
does not stop linking them, perceiving them within a great functional space; in short he
separates and groups; [] What is, in fact, a panorama? An image we attempt to decipher, in
which we try to recognize known sites, to identify landmarks.(9-10)
Image 4.2 Panoramic view from the Eiffel Tower.
Visitors to the tower, in other words, do not just see Paris. With the help of their intelligence, they
interpret and make sense of it by means of identifying known landmarks (the Bois de Boulogne or the Arc
de Triomphe) and the routes that connect them (roads, rivers), grouping, classifying and organizing the
spectacle of Paris to satisfy the demand for immediate comprehensibility. Just as the job of modern scientists
is to interrogate the world around them, to order it into categories based on data gleaned from experimentation
and observation, to unearth and formulate rules and systems that underpin the laws of nature, visitors to the
tower adopt the same modern gaze to render the cityscape, its life and history intelligible. As pointed out by
Barthes, the panoramic vision that they are confronted with, and the experience of successfully orienting
themselves in the city space before them, confers pleasure and euphoria. He suggests that this happens
primarily for three reasons. First, the view from the top of the tower allows visitors to form a continuous
image of Paris (10) which is the result of a process of decipherment (explanation) (10) that is complete,
without any gaps. Visitors are in no doubt as to where they are in relation to Paris. Second, for this very
reason, it offers the viewers a position of superiority, literally because they stand on a platform higher than
anyone else but also intellectually because they have been proved to possess the mental and perceptual agility
that puts them in charge of the spectacle. Paris has been confronted and possessed (14) by visitors that are
installed in the position of subjects who know and can control their knowledge of themselves and the world
around them. Finally, the towers panoramic vision causes euphoria because it places the observer outside
the spectacle under observation and underscores his position of power over a world that is impacted upon and
hence discursively framed and contained without being able to return the gaze. As Barthes writes in the
essays closing line, at the top of the Eiffel Tower one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the
owner of a world (my emphasis, 17).
This last example, and Barthess essay as a whole, clearly suggests that the questioning, scientific
attitude towards the world fostered in modernity is underpinned by a re-conceptualization of the human as
all powerful centre of the universe (in his new position at the top of the Tower), confirmed in his knowledge
of himself and his surroundings, a self-present agent that acts upon and (mentally) owns the spectacle of the
real. It is fair to claim that the modern subject comes across as a true individual, a self that has an
undivided experience of itself in relation to others. This means that there are no doubts, gaps or ruptures in
his knowledge of who or where he is and he can be said, therefore, to inhabit the space of a unified and
coherent identity. What fuels this empowering articulation of subjectivity, often referred to as modern
individualism, is the belief in the power of human intelligence to control the self and the world with the help
of reason. Modernity is regularly associated with the rise of rationalism that finds its finest expression in the
works of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant. When French philosopher
Ren Descartes writes in Discourse of Method I existed without doubt, by the fact that I was persuaded, or
indeed by the mere fact that I thought at all [] I am, I exist, is necessarily true, every time I express it or
conceive of it in my mind (103), he gives voice to the modern conviction that to be human is to be able to
exercise reason. Rather than being conceived as the product of external, usually divine, forces and plans
155
which was the dominant view of the human until the Renaissancethe modern subject is staged as the
measure of all things, in charge of his destiny and a key agent in the development of knowledge. In
Enlightenment humanist discourses, human-ness becomes intimately bound to the exercise of the subjects
rational faculty and, through it, to structures of knowledge, so much so that the Self is taken to be a function
not so much of what the human being knows as of the way in which he knows things (Gandhi 29). This close
connection that exists between structures of modern epistemology (how we know the world) and subjectivity
(who we are) has had serious implications, over the last few centuries, not only for political, social and
cultural life in Europe and North America but also for aesthetic production.
Re-Cap:
Modernity:
Values reason.
Is marked by advances in technology

and the birth of sciences.
Valorizes progress.
2.2 The Politics of Modernity
As regards the impact of modern discourses on social and political life, suffice it to point out that the modern
re-casting of humanity as the source of meaning and action in the world fueled and sustained a widely shared
representation of the individual (subject) as inherently valuable. This led to the emergence of emancipatory
discourses that worked to protect and improve human existence. Science changed not only the way humans
viewed the world or, as we have just seen, the notion of the human itself but also transformed the way
societies worked, their political systems and social possibilities. The scientific discontent with the self-evident
in nature was translated into political and social dissent and anti-authoritarian struggle. Ideas about progress,
universal justice, individual freedom and emancipation, as expressed by philosophers and political thinkers
from Kant to Karl Marx, were enlisted to challenge social, political and religious injustice, initiating
revolutions that saw the end of absolute monarchy, the rise of parliamentarianism, the curtailing of the
churchs power, increased civil rights for larger classes of people, the gradual democratization of a world that
became gradually transformed beyond recognition in the name of human progress.
Modernitys emancipatory project has had its defenders and critics. Key among its recent supporters is
the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas who explains the current problems attendant on the fragmentation
and the commodification of life brought about by contemporary global capitalism by arguing that modernitys
aims have not yet been fully realized. In his view, universal emancipation is still a vital part of political
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critique and modernity an unfinished project (Habermas; Malpas, Lyotard 37, The Postmodern 51-55). At the
other end, postmodern thinker Jean-Franois Lyotard challenged the premises of modern discourses, their
classificatory gaze and desire to create all-explaining systems of thoughtwhat he called grand
narrativeswhich, in his view, inevitably led to the exclusion of marginal perspectives (Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition). Lyotard is not alone in his critical reading of modernity. His critique is in line with
(though not identical to) early-twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde denunciation of modern
rationalism but also with a number of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century feminist and especially
postcolonial thinkers who have identified the central role race has played in modernization and the ways in
which modern (and contemporary) racial hierarchies and the idea of white supremacy are rooted in the
Enlightenments valorization of rationality (for more on modernitys racial ideas see West and Nadell). We
must not forget that parallel to their struggle for progress and emancipation, Europeans engaged in the
infamous slave trade for three hundred years (it ended in 1807) and spent the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries building colonial Empires on the strength not only of military prowess but, crucially, a set of
ideological assumptions that promoted the scientifically proven and objectively verified superiority of the
white race over other races, some of which were codified as non-human. The idea of white supremacy, as the
African-American philosopher and activist Cornel West remarks, is endemic to the very structure of modern
discourse (47). His claim explains the longevity and enormous impact of (scientific) racism on life and
thought in the West over the last few centuries and at once uncovers a major paradox in the conceptual make
up of the modern.
2.3 Modern Aesthetics: Realism
In the field of aesthetic production, modernity has found its most expressive manifestation in the ideologies of
realism which have dominated literary and artistic creation since the eighteenth century. Realisms
complexity, multifaceted character and radical potential have already been presented in an earlier chapter in
this book. For the moment, what merits consideration, as it stands to shed light on why modernists and
postmodernists critiqued it so rigorously, is the extent to which realism embodies the gaze of modernity in
its writing conventions and textual workings. What also needs to be grasped is that the term, when employed
especially by its postmodernist critics, alludes to a mode of representation (of the real) that exceeds the
historical and generic bounds of the nineteenth-century realist novel. It extends into contemporary popular
culture to encompass present-day soap operas, TV games or news programmes which continue to enact
realisms fundamental principles by offering narratives about the world that insist on comprehensibility,
closure, structural order and empowerment for readers. Life likeness is perhaps realisms most commented
upon attribute. The standard academic view of realism, also voiced by many of its practitioners, draws
attention to its mimetic and reflectionist impulse, its desire, as it were, to provide an unmediated access to the
real in ways that sustain verisimilitude. It is worth remembering that the classic metaphor regularly used to
describe realisms effects is that of the open window. The world of objects depicted realistically on a canvas
or coming alive through the words on a page is likened to the world outside ones open window. Standing by
the window frame, the subject-spectator-reader observes that world uninterrupted, undetected and, as a true
voyeur, unacknowledged by the life outside that continues its course indifferent to his presence (Jay 184).
What underlies this popular understanding of the text-world relationship in realism is the assumption that the
realist text offers readers immediate access to its textual universe. Nothing impedes their vision, allowing
them to become absorbed into the workings of the plot.
Poststructuralist and postmodernist readers of realism have been quick to identify the fallacy implicit
in this position, calling it an illusion and a fantasy (Lyotard, Answering the Question 74). In their view,
realism does not so much give us reality as make the world appear real (Malpas, Jean-Franois 44). This is
achieved in two ways. First, realism effaces its own textuality; it offers itself as transparent (Belsey 51) by
not calling attention to its own textual processes and language tools. Second, it creates a sense of recognizable
reality by recycling familiar knowledge about the world. Realism assembles its juxtapositions and
complexities out of what we already know, and it is for this reason that we experience it as realistic (Belsey
51). Even when readers are confronted with surprises in action, twists, contradictions or changes of codes (the
life-like turned fantastic), the experience of reading a realist text is ultimately reassuring, according to Jean-
Franois Lyotard, as one of its key aims is to preserve various consciousnesses from doubt. Its objective is
to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable
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meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and
sequences quickly, and so arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity (The Postmodern 74).
Lyotard draws attention here to realisms desire to create positions of intelligibility for its readers that promote
comprehensibility both of the world and the self by presenting what is already known either in terms of shared
knowledge about real-life situations (for example, spatial, temporal or human relations) or generic rules (in
writing these would include a linear narrative structure, decipherable characters, largely reliable narrators and
a final resolution). The reader is ultimately reassured about his knowledge of the world and his own identity
and, in this sense, is shown to adopt the gaze of modernity, figuratively placed at the top of the Eiffel
Tower. He is encouraged, by the conventions of realism, to organize the text before him into a connected
space (Barthes 10) in a way that confers a sense of
euphoria on him for having proved his decoding
skills and knowledge of the (social or narrative)
system correct. As we shall see next, the Eiffel Modernist Art:
Tower seat, and by extension realisms inscription
of modern epistemology in its textual workings, is Modernist art is, in most critical usage,
one that most modernists did not care to occupy. reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg
calls the tradition of the new. It is experimental,
They set out, in fact, to blow it up with the force
formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of
accorded them by their violent, provocatively decreation as well as creation, and tends to
disjointed and complex creative styles. associate notions of the artists freedom from
realism, materialism, traditional genre and form,
with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster
3. Modernism [] [T]here are several modernisms: an
intensifying sequence of movements from
Symbolism on (Post-impressionism,
3.1 The Principal Assumptions Expressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism,
Dadaism, Surrealism) often radically at odds, and
Modernism is regarded as an aesthetic and cultural sharp differences of cultural interpretation
reaction to modernity and modernization which is coming from writers apparently stylistically
international and interdisciplinary in character. It is analogous (e.g. T. S. Eliot and William Carlos
part of the modern, sharing in its unabated Williams). Modernism means the ruffling of the
enthusiasm for the new, for change and realistic surface of literature by underlying
experimentation, and directing its energies towards forces; the disturbance may arise, though, from
the future. It is also, however, at once often critical logics solely aesthetic or highly social. Hence,
modernism still remains a loose label. We can
of modernitys certainties and ambivalent about its
dispute about when it starts (French symbolism;
investment in rationalism and all its byproducts:
decadence; the break-up of naturalism) and
technological advancement, industrialization, when it ends (Kermode distinguishes paleo-
urbanization, new forms of mass communication modernism and neo-modernism and hence a
and entertainment, speed and travel, the very notion degree of continuity through to postwar art). We
of progress itself (in time, space, society and even can regard it as a timebound concept (say 1890-
the text). It is a historically specific movement 1930) or a timeless one (including Sterne,
which made its appearance roughly between the end Donne,Villon, Ronsard). The best focus remains a
of the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth body of major writers (James, Conrad, Proust,
century in a number of international centres, from Mann, Gide, Kafka, Svevo, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner
Berlin and Vienna to Paris, New York and London in fiction; Strindberg, Pirandello, Wedekind,
(more on modernisms internationalism in Bradbury Brecht in drama; Mallarm, Yeats, Eliot, Pound,
and McFarlane). Rilke, Apollinaire, Stevens in poetry) whose works
are aesthetically radical, contain striking
As a term, it became widely used in the
technical innovation, emphasize spatial or
1960s to designate retrospectively work produced in
fugal as opposed to chronological form, tend
a variety of fieldsincluding literature, art, music towards ironic modes, and involve a certain
and architectureby groups of writers and artists dehumanization of art.
who shared a commitment to formal (Fowler, A Dictionary of
experimentation and radical stylistic innovation but Modern Critical Terms 145)
who were frequently at odds with each other in their
professed intellectual objectives and ideological
responses to key historical events and forces of the
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Effie Yiannopoulou
period (as in the cases of World War I and Fascism) or forms of social transformation (for example, the
development of mass culture or the womens suffrage). Notable, in this light, is the case of the avant-garde
movements, which many critics believe modernism to encompass, whose views on art and life were at times
underpinned by conflictual ideological orientations. While Filippo Marinettis Futurists, for example, idolized
technology and speed, Andr Breton and the Surrealists lamented the hold of reason on human imagination, a
difference in their attitude to modern rationalism
that calls attention to the discrepant languages that
the modernists often spoke (more on Modernisms
Futurism:
in Armstrong and Nicholls and Kolokotroni for the
manifestos). The most important Italian avant-garde art
What this example points to, on one level, movement of the 20th century, Futurism
is the arbitrariness involved in any act of literary celebrated advanced technology and urban
and canonical periodisation while also illustrating, modernity. Committed to the new, its members
in parallel, the heterogeneous and plural character wished to destroy older forms of culture and to
of the movement. At the same time, however, it demonstrate the beauty of modern life the
allows us a glimpse into the aesthetic and beauty of the machine, speed, violence and change.
ideological struggles that took place in the process Futurism was first announced on February 20,
of producing an identifiable modernist sensibility 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro
that relies for its identity on the very ideas of published a manifesto by the Italian poet and
dissent and contestation. For, if one would wish to editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti
coined the word Futurism to reflect his goal of
identify a recurring feature within modernism, in its
discarding the art of the past and celebrating
various guises, that would be its attempt to break change, originality, and innovation in culture and
with dominant aesthetic and social rules and its society. Marinettis manifesto glorified the new
desire to develop alternative representational codes. technology of the automobile and the beauty of its
Confronted with the catastrophic effects of a the speed, power, and movement. Exalting violence
First World War (WWI), the emergence of and conflict, he called for the sweeping repudiation
feminism, the spread of European colonial empires of traditional values and the destruction of
and intensified labour struggles in the early years of cultural institutions such as museums and
the twentieth century, modernists lived through and libraries. The futurists enthusiasm for modernity
responded to a crisis in values that led to the and the machine ultimately led them to celebrate
erosion of Victorian certainties, especially as the arrival of World War I. By its end, the groups
inscribed in realist works. They felt that influence as an important avant-garde was
significantly reduced, though it continued through
conventional representational patterns could no
the 1920s, and, during that time several of its
longer be trusted to get to the truth of their rapidly
members went on to embrace Fascism, making
transforming age. Over against the comforting Futurism the only twentieth century avant-garde
familiarity afforded by Realism, they pitted their to have embraced far right politics.
discordant, dissonant, alienating visions. Central to
their radically anti-representationalist aesthetic Encyclopedia Britannica & The Art Story
outlook is their desire for formal innovation and
technical experimentation with language, time,
space, character construction and perspective. It is
through texts that are almost routinely branded complex, obscure and disorienting that modernists conduct a
sustained inquiry into the certainty of reality and the role of art in meaning-making processes. At the same
time, they register their deep skepticism towards the idea of the unified, self-present human subject through
their efforts to represent individual consciousness and in their concern with introspection and psychology.
3.2 Modernist Epistemology: The Turn Inwards
To explore how some of these key modernist assumptions become articulated in the field of literature, I would
now like to turn to a fictional narration that is thought to constitute one of the earliest examples of modernist
writing in English. Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899) tells the story of Charlie Marlow who travels to
the African state of Congo, a Belgian colony at the end of the nineteenth century, to take a steamboat up the
river Congo in search of ivory and the elusive ivory trader Mr. Kurtz. The account of Marlows encounter
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with cultural difference at the heart of darkness calls

attention to the novels preoccupation with the ethics of
nineteenth-century European imperialism and the
Stream of Consciousness:
ultimately ambivalent and suspect politics underpinning the
construction of traditionally opposed categories such as is a narrative technique which seeks to
civilization and savagery, interiority and exteriority, self record the random and apparently
and other. Interestingly enough, for our purposes, the illogical flow of impressions passing
narrative allies its cultural critique with the challenge it through a characters mind. The term was
extends to the ability of either language or human coined by William James in 1890 in The
perception to record the real with absolute certainty. The Principles of Psychology and the best
Africans harsh living conditions under colonialism and known English exponents are Dorothy
Europes exploitative relationship to the natives land are Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James
presented to the reader through recourse to Marlows Joyce.
primitivist fantasies about the, at once, repellent and
alluring dark continent, his thoughts and emotional
responses as he endeavours to map out the African
darkness and his own self. That the novel ultimately waters down its critique by revealing itself to be shot
through with dominant racialist discourses of the nineteenth century should not detract from the fact that it
conducts an exciting epistemological shift in the representation of the real. It transfers attention from the
object (outer) word to the inner space of the mind and undermines in this move the fantasy of clear vision (of
the world) structuring both Realism and modern epistemology. I shall quote here and briefly comment upon a
short passage from the novel in which the question of knowledge is a vital concern.
Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness
I would not have gone so far as to fight for Kurtz, but I went for him near enough to a lie.
You know I hate, detest, and cant bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but
simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lieswhich is
exactly what I hate and detest in the worldwhat I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick,
like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose. Well, I went near enough to it by
letting the young fool there believe anything he liked to imagine as to my influence in Europe. I
became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims. This simply because
I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not seeyou
understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do
you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a
dreammaking a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that
commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of
being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.
He was silent for a while.
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of
one's existencethat which makes its truth, its meaningits subtle and penetrating essence. It is
impossible. We live, as we dreamalone
He paused again as if reflecting, then added:
Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know
It had become so pitch dark that we listeners could hardly see one another. For a long time
already he, sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody.
The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the
sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative
that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river. (1778-79)
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Effie Yiannopoulou
This is a passage that disputes the priority accorded to visuality in modernity and the structures of absolute
knowledge that it lends support to. It presents Marlow as an uncertain narrator who doubts his ability to see
the events and characters of his story with clarity. Through his repetitive, almost obsessive questioning, of
visual intelligibility (Do you see?), Marlow voices his anxiety about the possibility of ever attaining full
knowledge of his world, his past and his own self. Unlike the modern subjects visual control over the
spectacle of the real, Marlows interpretive faculties appear numbed. He is unsure as to how much he can
remember or understand about his journey, about Kurtz, who remains inscrutable to the end, or the rest of the
Pilgrims. His narrative conveys a dream-sensation, flowing backwards and forwards in time, rather than
construct itself as a logically-connected, coherent representational space. To tell a dream, Conrad deploys,
here as elsewhere in the novel, key modernist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, tunneling and
interior monologue. These are writing tools widely used across modernist fiction and employed here to
represent the workings of Marlows mind at the moment of contact with the real, to register, as it were, his
attempts at sense-making which often take the form of blurred, unconnected impressions and memories. The
novels entire structure is, in fact, designed to enact this dream sensation. It consists of a series of relayed
narratives that begin their journey from the mouths of characters whose testimony relies on moments when
they fancied they could see things (1774), such as the Russian sailor, pass through to Marlows uncertain
narration to finally reach an unnamed narrators pen. This is an invaginated narrative structure that exposes
the complexity surrounding the notions of truth and falsehood, almost always enmeshed in attempts to delimit
the borders of the factual, and makes truth detection into a process that guides readers slowly into the inner
recesses of the perceiving subjects consciousness, in search of a reality that recedes and fades. As Marlow
muses at another point in the text, the realitythe reality, I tell youfades. The inner truth is hidden
luckily, luckily (1784).
As a final comment on the passage above, what merits consideration is the faint uneasiness inspired
by Marlows narrative in his listeners and readers alike. The darkness that slowly descends over the river
Thames and Marlows companions literalises the challenge that his obscure narrative poses to their vision and
understanding, causing the uneasiness resulting from the lack of complete knowledge to replace euphoria
and self-contentment. As a piece of modernist literature, Heart of Darkness invites reading positions that
dispense with readers as subjects who know and confronts them with what exceeds the visible bounds of
immediate comprehension. There is a politics to this readerly uneasiness (caused by the texts gaps and
ruptures) which goes beyond being a self-indulgent game in textual self-consciousness. Conrads novel
initiates new contact points among the text, the subject and the world by engaging with the cultural and
historical discourses of its time in a way that emphasizes the processes and failings of perception and the
inadvisability of prizing apart the real and the psychic. One might argue that part of his novels anti-
imperialist critique derives its energy precisely from the very epistemological uncertainty it produces, which
invites readers to attend to the necessity of rethinking the cultural certainties that are foundational to forms
of white supremacy and modern raciology in late nineteenth century Europe.
As it has been suggested so far, modernisms desire to develop representational alternatives rests on
the belief that reality is not external to the subject but always already internally defined. Many of the stylistic
features encountered in the fiction of modernist authors, from Katherine Mansfield to D. H. Lawrence and
James Joyce, are directly related to their fascination with introspection. Virginia Woolf provides a theoretical
elaboration of this shared belief when, in her seminal essay Modern Fiction, she allies her understanding of
the real as a semi-transparent envelope with the need to formulate a new literary aesthetic. If life, or spirit,
is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged but a luminous halo [] surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end, as she argues, then the job of fiction is to convey this [] unknown
and uncircumscribed spirit and the job of the novelist to invent a fictional idiom, other than realisms,
capable of recording the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall [] disconnected
and incoherent (1924). Clearly acquainted with Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytic theories that are widely
debated across the intellectual circles of modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, Woolf abandons
the poetics of realism to urge fellow authors to initiate a style of writing which, in its fragmentation and
discontinuities, seems strangely enough truer to life.
The stream-of-consciousness style and interior monologues are fictional techniques which are
developed exactly as a response to the demand that fiction represents moments of being and impressions in
the disconnected order in which they are perceived rather than offer a linear, causal narrative made out of
objectively verified facts. They are well-suited, in this sense, to posing a challenge to our modern vision.
Woolf makes extensive use of interior monologues in novels such as Mrs. Dallaway or To the Lighthouse to
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encourage a revision of Victorian gender structures, as does Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage, while James
Joyce journeys into, and through, the mind of his protagonist Stephen Dedalus to make a comment on Irish
culture and its divisive nationalist and religious politics in the early twentieth century.
The modernist interest in the invisible realities of the mind is also vividly registered in the field of
visual art. Avant-garde movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism, in particular, turn their backs on pictorial
realism and employ Freudian symbols to represent the unconscious, to depict dreams and hallucinations.
Salvador Dalis Surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (1931) depicts a seaside landscape that does
not aspire to life-likeness, only remotely resembling his native Catalonia in the depiction of the distant golden
cliffs.
Image 4.3 Salvador Dali. The Persistence of Memory (1931). Oil on canvas. MoMA.
His painting confronts us, rather, with fragmentsants, melting clocks and an unidentifiable, deformed
creature in a state of sleepwhich are drawn from Dalis imagination. It is fair to say that their function is
more symbolic than literal as there are no immediately visible connections between them and their
surroundings and no meaningful narrative that can be construed in relation to them upon first making eye
contact with the painting. They seem more as having come out of a dreamDali having described his
paintings as hand painted dream photographs (https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/1168-2or as
depicting a dream state which is clearly suggested by the slumbering creature. If melting clocks and ants
allude to time and decay as central concerns in this painting, dream time, which is amorphous, unconnected,
bearing the flowing traces of memories and experiences, seems to be invoked here to destabilize, even
collapse, our sense of an orderly, daily temporal and spatial reality.
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Effie Yiannopoulou
The Surrealists were not alone in

exploring the psychic by way of investigating the
intricacies of time. Modernists across the arts
worked persistently with notions of uneven Henri Bergson (1859-1941):
temporality influenced as they were especially by
French philosopher who in Time and Free Will
Henri Bergsons ideas on time. They were (1889) maintained that facts and matter, which
concerned with the claustrophobic hold of are the objects of discursive reason, are only the
consumer, capitalist time on everyday life but also outer surface that has to be penetrated by
eager to develop formal tools to represent the intuition in order to achieve a vision in depth of
existence of overlapping or competing reality. He distinguished between chronological
temporalities particularly as illustrated in the case time, the time of history (hours, minutes and
of the temporally split subjectwhen psychic time seconds), and duration, the varying speed at which
(taken up by memories and thoughts) runs parallel the mind apprehends experiences according to
to, intervenes in, but is not identical with, their intensity and meaning for the individual
external time (for more on modernism and time which is not necessarily identical with
see Armstrong). In the field of literature, Virginia chronological time. His work changed the way
Woolf offers a good example of a writer who, like Modernists represented time in fiction.
(Childs 49)
Dali, foregrounds the complexity of time through
her focus on the subjects psychology. With the
help of interior monologues that allow readers to
hop from one characters consciousness to
anothers, she contrasts public with private time (Childs 171). Thirty pages of private thoughts may be
experienced by a character (and a reader) as being
long-lasting but have actually taken a minute in
the public time of the narrative. It is noteworthy
that, in the second part of her novel To the Surrealism:
Lighthouse (where the effects of the First World
War on the Ramsay family are made known), originated in the late 1910s and early 1920s as a
Woolf reverses the conventional temporal scheme, literary movement that experimented with a new
prioratising emotional responses to the war and mode of expression called automatic writing, or
subjective time at the expense of facts that automatism, which sought to release the unbridled
belong to public life (battles and the deaths of imagination of the subconscious. Officially
family members) which are given almost in consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication
passing in square brackets. By reversing of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and
critic Andr Breton (1896-1966), Surrealism
established priorities in the representation of
became an international intellectual and political
temporality, the novel foregrounds the existence of movement. Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along
parallel realities and suggests the importance of with French poets Louis Aragon (18971982), Paul
psychic life not only in understanding the luard (1895-1952), and Philippe Soupault (1897-
individual subject but also social relations. 1990), were influenced by the psychological
theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx
3.3 Language and Representation in (1818-1883). Using Freudian methods of free
Modernism association, their poetry and prose drew upon the
private world of the mind, traditionally restricted
Language and representation are central to the by reason and societal limitations, to produce
modernist sensibility as already suggested. Formal surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and
experimentation is a vital aspect of modernisms irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry
aesthetics partly because its re-conceptualisation in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition
of the real encouraged the invention of new forms fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.
of expression and partly because new ideas James Voorhies,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
regarding language and the role of art made their
appearance in the first half of the twentieth
century. Whether accused of having lost its ability
to deliver the truth (when World War I propaganda
was revealed) or its transparency, as an immediate result of Ferdinand de Saussures new linguistic theories,
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language became so ineluctably connected to notions of truth and the real that any discussion about the world
made engagement with language a necessity. I shall briefly discuss here the opening pages of James Joyces
novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as example of modernist fiction that calls attention to the
workings of language in a literary text, and its role in constructions of the subject and the world, through its
discontinuous and fragmented form.
James Joyce, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and
this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo [...]
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon
platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms

On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the
queer smell.
His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to
dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was
older than Dante.
Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt
and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he
brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father
and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His
mother said:
O, Stephen will apologize.
Dante said:
O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.
Pull out his eyes,

Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.
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This is admittedly compact modernist prose, ruptured and difficult to get into. Joyces opening offers us a
series of disconnected images by way of an introduction rather than clear contextual information on his Irish
protagonist Stephen Dedalus and his family: a father reading a bedtime story to his baby son; a baby boy
wetting his bed; a mother playing the piano; Dante threatening a young Stephen who finds solace in
translating her threats into a song. Clearly experimenting with the representation of the real, the fragmented
vision of Stephens early life succeeds in highlighting the importance of language and storytelling in
conveying ideas about characters and their world. The text attracts interest to the question of representation in
a number of ways. For one, the chapter opens with a story. Baby Stephen identifies with baby tuckoo, the
main character in the story his father is reading to him, and so is shown to become aware of his existence with
the help of a fictional construction. Almost deliberately, Joyces artistic portrait insists on underlining the
mediating role of storytelling in ones self-understanding and identity formation from its very first lines.
Second, the text mimics the embryonic prattle of baby Stephen as a way of articulating his perspective. It
attempts to dramatise Stephens consciousness through the deployment of infantile language. The use of
simple and babyish vocabulary (moocow), abrupt and arbitrary juxtapositions verbally represent baby
Stephens perception of his surroundings. This is a writing strategy that Joyce will repeat in the course of the
novel to convey information about Stephens thoughts and state of mind while he is growing up, suggesting
thus strongly the existence of a vital connection between subjective perception and representation.
Finally, the very elliptical structure of the passagethe missing ties amongst images and characters
that prevent immediate comprehensionnot only causes confusion in readers but encourages us to think
about reality (Stephens and the texts) as interpretable material, as representation. As readers, we need to read
on to find out more about nationalist politics in early-twentieth century Ireland, religious conflicts and family
relations before we can make sense of this first chapter. The allusion to the nationalist leaders Michael Davitt
and Charles Parnell or the panic caused in Dante by the mere suggestion that Stephen might get married to the
Protestant neighbour Eileen Vance acquire meaning in retrospect and only after we have learned more about
the ugly divisions scarring Stephens family (Mr. Dedalus and Mr. Casey vs. Dante) and Irish society as a
whole (Catholics vs. Protestants; Catholics vs. nationalists and Charles Parnell and so on). In other words,
negotiating the gaps in meaning that mark the first chapter requires that we return to it to supply meaning.
Through this act of repetition, which is at once a form of readerly alienation, Joyces modernist text
foregrounds its standing as decodable material, as a system of signs that require interpretation and are not
naturally endowed with meaning. No longer an automatic act of decoding, the reading response that Joyces
novel invites is self-aware and ready to acknowledge the importance of language in our contact with reality,
its immense possibilities and inbuilt potential for disturbing the old. The opening pages set the tone for what is
to be a rather different portrait of an artist in the making, Stephens character being presented throughout as an
assembly of fragments, conflicting thoughts, writings and feelings that he experiences about himself, his
awakening sexuality, his religious conversion and his love of country.
To produce Stephens disjointed portrait, Joyce seems to borrow from the language of Cubism which
foregrounds the ideas of collage and multiple, often juxtaposed, perspectives.
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Image 4.4 Pablo Picasso. Maya with her Doll (1938).
Pablo Picassos portrait of his daughter Maya with her Doll (1938) illustrates amply the discontinuity resulting
from the simultaneous coexistence of opposed perspectives. The girls face is represented in profile and
forward facing at once, her head unnaturally enlarged, her legs positioned at a bizarre angle in relation to her
body. Rather than produce a recognizable impression of his daughter, Picasso creates a painting that flaunts its
artificiality and speaks throughand almost in a self-absorbed way aboutits lines, shapes and colours. It is
underwritten by the assumption that the world can no longer be regarded from one single perspective or its
meanings contained in a single posture, script or language.
For the modernists, this doubleness of vision is foundational to their understanding of the world as
fundamentally uncertain and is the result of different but interlocking historical and intellectual forces that are
at work around the turn of the twentieth century: World War I, as the most destructive war ever, has eroded
faith in the stability of life and the ability of language to tell the truth; Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has
undermined belief in the divine by proclaiming that God is dead and dismissed the existence of absolute
truth; Freud and psychoanalysis have reinvented the subject as divided, not all knowing, because always
determined by the unconscious which evades his control; Karl Marx (1818-1883), in his turn, has exposed the
historically conditioned, hence transformable, nature of identity through his attention to capitalist modes of
production and their role in the construction of the bourgeois subject; even science has brought about a
paradigm shift in understandings of the physical universe, Albert Einstein overturning Newtonian physics
through his Theory of Relativity and Werner Heisenberg undermining the possibility of ever knowing
anything about the material universe with absolute certainty through his Uncertainty Principle (for more on
the forces around modernism see Childs and Bradshaw & Dettmar).
The challenge posed by all these discourses to the clear vision of a calculable world is immense. It is
little surprise then that language itself, whose job was traditionally to render what surrounds us visible, is seen
by many modernists as being in crisis, unable to turn such a rapidly, and often, violently transformed reality
into meaningful signs. Its transparency gone, language now figures as a land that invites exploration, its limits
and its potential needing to be reconfigured, which is what the modernists do when they play with form,
perspective and means of expression.
What should be made clear at this point is that key amongst the intellectual forces that motivate the
modernist penchant for language games and formal innovation is a set of linguistic and philosophical ideas
about language that come into effect and are widely debated across literary circles in the first half of the
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twentieth century. It has been already suggested in previous chapters that the emergence of symbolism in late
nineteenth century was instrumental in uncovering the plurality inherent in the structures of language (a heart
may have more than one meaning as a symbol) and contributed to the severing of the bond between the word
and the thing it designates. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure cut this bond for good by proposing, in
his Course in General Linguistics (1916), that language is both arbitrary and relational. In other words, there
is no natural link connecting the (concept of an) object in the real world and their lexical sound (it is totally
arbitrary why we call a chair chair); second, signs produce meaning because of their difference from each
other in a network of signs which is the signifying system and not because meaning is divinely conferred
(Belsey 136)red, as a sign, may mean erotically desirable in a romantic story but threateningly violent in a
vampire film.
The reason why Saussures theories of language are important to modernists and postmodernists alike
is because they foreground meaning as not naturally given but as constructed (socially or psychically), plural
and contextual. What also merits a mention in this context is that close to the time when Saussure makes his
linguistic theories public, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein also formulates philosophies of language
which contribute to a reevaluation of the relationship between reality and meaning-making. Wittgenstein
believes that our physical ways of being, over which we have no choice, are distinguished and identified by
our words, our ability to speak, by particular language games. Naming, that is language, is what allows us to
access what he calls forms of life and make it signify (Fleming 566). Given the promising insights implicit
in these formulations and their impact on intellectual life, it is not surprising that, for many writers and artists,
language is now a space where one can intervene in the representation of the real and the social. Specifically
for the modernists, language itself becomes a new form whose limits must be investigated and are regularly
stretched beyond recognition to discover its potential. Note, for example, Giacomo Ballas painting Abstract
Speed: The Car Has Passed (1913).
Image 4.5 Giacomo Balla. Abstract SpeedThe Car has Passed (1913). Oil paint on canvas. Tate Liverpool.
The theme of the painting is the passage of a car along a white road, with green and blue forms, evoking
earth and sky, in the background. The pinkish areas in this painting suggest the exhaust fumes left by the
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passing car (for more on Ballas painting see here). Attention to verisimilitude has been replaced by abstract
lines and colour schemes that speak to the viewer in ways that are not definite but which convey the explosive
energy of the modern, the new. In a sense, form itself figures as the subject of this openly anti-representational
painting, treated as a new language that is designed to communicate a new vision which, in its turn, signifies
on more than one level. In a similar register, Joyces novel too signifies on more than one level, deploying the
plurality inherent in representation to level its critique against the cultural conventions and stifling identities
dominant in early-twentieth century Ireland. His protagonist develops a modernist sensibility as an artist and
transforms the word into a site of experimentation and resistance to the given.
3.4 The Politics of Modernist Form
What I have suggested through this very brief reading of Joyce is what Michael Levenson also subscribes to
when he remarks that attention to form need not be necessarily opposed to content (3). Levenson
challenges here a rather pervasive reading of modernism as a solipsistic, formalist aesthetic movement that
obsessively pursues formal innovation for its sake, concentrates on the individual rather than society and is,
therefore, removed from real life. This line of argumentation can be traced back to the hostility expressed
towards modernism by a group of Marxist critics in the years before World War II, a position famously
represented by the Hungarian critic Georg Lucks (in his quarrel especially with his fellow Marxist, the
German playwright, Bertolt Brecht). Lucks believed that the Modernists interest in the psychic and spiritual
life of the subject is premised on a lack of concern with the material conditions of living and with history. This
renders them, and their fictional creations, asocial, ahistorical and unable to act upon society or be acted upon
by it (477). In his view, only realist aesthetics is well placed to stimulate social change because political action
can only be the work of a coherently conceived subject in an epistemologically determinate universe.
Luckss argument has proved influential and has lived on in contemporary criticisms leveled against
the various strands of modernismand more generally experimental fiction and arteven today. It is,
however, important to remember that the last thirty years have witnessed a sustained reevaluation of
modernist texts and their politics that firmly connects them to their social and cultural contexts. This is a claim
that might be taken to suggest, on one level, the influence social, historical and cultural circumstances had in
the development of modernisms formal attributes. As I have already suggested, epistemological uncertainty
encouraged writers and artists to experiment with perspective on the canvas (as Picasso did), or on the page
through the development of writing techniques, such as the stream of consciousness, which represented life
through a different lens. Levenson argues in a similar vein that the social cataclysms of the early twentieth
century penetrated modernist invention and gave writers and artists forms suggested by industrial machinery,
the chuffing of cars (consider Ballas abstract representation of speed) or, most horribly, the bodies broken
from war (4).
At the same time, however, modernists also used narrative form to transform the worlds in which they
existed. Notable is the case of women modernists who not only employed but actively developed modernist
writing strategies that allowed them to react both against the conventions of realism and the metaphysics of
gender oppression dominant in Victorian Englandwhich many felt were embodied in realisms
formulations. Characteristically, Dorothy Richardson openly identified realisms masculinist bias when she
claimed in her Foreword to Pilgrimage that, while surveying the existing patterns of writing around her
before writing her novel, she was faced with the choice between following one of the regiments and
attempting to produce a feminine equivalent to the current masculine realism (429-430). Writers such as
Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, H. D. Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Virginia Woolf focused on womens
material lives and thought patterns in ways that disrupted traditional narrative and disturbed Western
conceptual modes. Richardson, for example, developed the stream-of-consciousness technique and repudiated
grammatical conventions, such as punctuation, in order to enable Victorian, middle-class women to write
themselves into a script that offered them a destiny other than marriage. Sinclair unveiled madness as an
arbitrary but gendered social construction while Woolf, as we have seen, manipulated juxtaposed interior
monologues to expose and criticize gender conventions (Michael 49-50).
If this interaction between social context and modernist representation seems to have produced
transformative social critique, it must also be noted that not all modernist engagement with the world was
politically progressive. Recent postcolonial readings of key modernist works have uncovered the racialist
biases implicit in avant-garde experimentalism and in canonical modernist texts. To Chinua Achebe and
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Edward Saids critical analyses of Conrads race prejudicewhich exists parallel to his challenge to European
imperialism in a novel such as Heart of Darknessone may add a more generalized concern recently voiced
with modernisms primitivist impulse. We may define primitivism as a reaction against the deification of
rationality and science, the growth of cities, the capitalist obsession with profit and the ideology of progress
that was registered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It led to the search for origins and
absolutes for unspoiled nature and uncontaminated humanity in non-Western art forms where many
modernists found inspiration for their creations (for more on primitivism in art see Jordan and Weedon).
Though it reversed the nineteenth-century racist stereotyping of racial and cultural difference as negative
primitiveness (barbarism) by reevaluating it in positive terms (what was bad before is now good),
primitivism left the power structures and essential categories of Western racisms untouched (Africans or
Polynesians continued to be placed outside history and essentialised). Pablo Picassos painting Les
Demoiselles D Avignon (1907) is perhaps one of the best-known cases of primitivism in avant-garde art.
Image 4.6 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Paris, 1907). NYCMoMA.
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Image 4.7 Possibly Kota (Mahongwe subgroup). Mask, late nineteenth century. Wood, pigment, 14 x 6 x 9 in. (35.6 x
15.2 x 22.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Frank L. Babbott Fund, 52.160. Creative Commons-BY
The primitive mask which he borrows from African tribal art not only contributes to the revolution in artistic
representation that this painting brings about in the West (it privileges flatness and colour; breaks with the
tradition of perspective; represents broken bodies and ugly
female prostitutes), but is also posited as what allows him
to get in touch with his own inner, primordial artistic
power. Picasso finds inspiration in the energy and the spirit Primitive Art:
of savagery, which, though re-contextualised and
semantically updated, continues to bear as a concept the They [primitive artists] were against
imprint of Europes homogenizing racialism. everythingagainst unknown
In light of the above, one might be justified in threatening spirits I, too, am against
arguing that modernist politics is not monolithic and unified everything. I, too, believe that everything
is unknown, that everything is an enemy!
and needs to be interpreted in context. There is much in the
women, children the whole of it! I
disruptive modernist form that enables it to intervene in understood what the Negroes used their
structures of authority that support imperialism, bourgeois sculptures for [] All fetishes [] were
class hegemony or the male-dominated family, according to weapons. To help people avoid coming
Edward Said and through Marianne DeKovens words under the influence of spirits again, to
(676). It is possible, however, that it may be caught help them become independent. Spirits,
colluding at once with discourses and ideologies that are the unconscious [] they are all the same
credited with allowing forms of domination to continue thing. I understand why I was a painter.
their work. Such is the case, for example, with modernitys All alone in that awful museum (the
valorisation of progress and novelty which underwrites the Muse dEthnographie du Trocadro in
modernist desire to experiment with representational means Paris] with the masks [...] Les Demoiselles
but which at once underlies Europes exclusionary attitude D Avignon must have been born that day
towards non-Western cultures that have apparently failed to [...] because it was my first exorcism
painting yes absolutely (Pablo Picasso;
produce signs of such progressive activity (in technology,
qtd in Jordan and Weedon, 336).
the arts or social organization). Postmodernism, as we shall
see next, persistently emphasises the importance of context
in acts of interpretation, an insight that should be a guiding
light in our own interpretive contact with both the aesthetic
trends discussed here.
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Re-Cap:
Modernism:
Epistemological uncertainty.
Reality recedes inwards; focus on perception
and the psyche.
Break with tradition (make it new);
originality valued.
Desire for stylistic innovation and formal
experimentation.
Conceptual and anti-representational;
language itself becomes a new form.
The disrupted subject is still the locus of
truth.
Elitist and difficult.
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4. The Postmodern
There is no simple way of defining the postmodern. It is a multifaceted and controversial cultural,
philosophical and aesthetic formation that has given rise to vexed debates between critics. What may be said
with certainty is that it has been a major critical and artistic force in numerous areas of intellectual activity
in literature, art, culture, history, architecture, music, theatre, dance, photography and filmsince the term
was first used in the 1950s and 1960s. The intense disagreement surrounding its meanings and politics may
be, partly, due to the varied ways in which it has been deployed in all the above fields of thought. It may also,
however, result from the postmoderns own resistance to being pinned down to an accessible, citable
definition. Grasping what escapes the logic and clarity that characterize most definitions (of terms, peoples or
communities) and celebrating what resists and disrupts them is after all one of its most identifiable features
(Malpas, The Postmodern 4).
It is the case that the postmodern is often employed in critical writings to refer to either
postmodernism or postmodernity, which begs the question of their relationship. Are they identical or
opposed notions? As suggested in the introduction, postmodernity is often understood to designate a set of
intellectual and social conditions, even a historical period, while postmodernism is concerned with aesthetic
practices, questions of style and representation (in literature and art). In practice, it is difficult to tell them
apart as the slippage in the use of the two terms (using one in the place of the other) reveals the impossibility
of separating real living conditions from representationand this is a recurring idea across postmodernist
discourses more generally. What is clear enough is that both terms seem tied to a series of transformations that
shaped the world in the twentieth century especially in the post-World War II years. The stretch of time
especially since the end of World War II has been often identified as the postmodern era and characterized by
the breaking down of borders, an increase in forms of human mobility and immigration, the globalization of
capitalism, the rise in consumerism and the development of new media and communication networksto list
only some of the major changes affecting social and cultural organization in the last seventy years.
This is a particularly mobile world that we are living in where mixing and matching clothes,
perfumes, cars, types of food, ideas and peoples forms part of our daily routine and, in the eyes of some
critics, has become almost synonymous with the postmodern of the anything goes (it is very postmodern
to eat Chinese food in Athens or wear a Ralph Lauren suit in Moscow, for example). For the French
philosopher Jean-Franois Lyotard, however, the daily experience of the anything goes in contemporary
cultures speaks more of the realism of money and the capitalist pursuit of profitwhich excludes entire
classes of people pushing them in the margins of need and disenfranchisement (homeless, refugees, asylum
seekers)and less of postmodernism as a critical practice. As he observes in The Postmodern Condition, even
knowledge is now a marketable commodity. Its production is funded and supported on condition that it brings
money in. No money, no proof [] no truth, he writes characteristically. The games of scientific language
become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right (The
Postmodern 45). What I wish to suggest is that, as a form of critical inquiry, postmodernism disrupts and
deregulates the certainties of this late capitalist age rather than supports them. But it performs its task from
within the system and, therefore, runs the risk of being confounded with it. As Simon Malpas observes,
postmodernism operates within the realist [mainstream] context of a given culture to shatter its norms and
challenge its assumptions, not with a new set of criteria drawn from outside of that culture, but rather by
showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognise or make unpresentable
(The Postmodern 30, 2).
This view of the postmodern is also useful in helping us think its connection with modernism. Many
critics assume that postmodernism follows on from and replaces modernism since the prefix post, which
means after, suggests a chronological succession of periods and aesthetic movements. It is a tempting, and
certainly popular, reading as postmodernist texts often demonstrate an attention to style and representation
that is shared by modernisms many strands. The problem with this account, according to Lyotard, is that it
presents the postmodern as the latest stage in modernitys development. It makes it seem as though
postmodernism is part of a linear (historical, social or aesthetic) structure and a narrative of progress that
postmodernists clearly find problematic and unsatisfactory. As they point out, the postmodern is suspicious of
continuities and is identified, in Lyotards view, as the very moment when a decline in the ability of progress
to improve life is registered (the first perhaps in two hundred years).
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More than all else, however, the postmodern, as suggested earlier, operates within the system it
critiques. Its job, as a critical practice doing work in literature, art, philosophy and politics, is to investigate the
assumptions implicit in modernity (Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained 79-80). As such, it cannot be
regarded as a new age that replaces the modern but rather as a critical attitude within the modern that
challenges its assumptions (Malpas, The Postmodern 41-45; for more on the characteristics of the postmodern
see Malpas). This critical positioning of the postmodern in relation to the modern is made particularly evident
in the postmoderns challenge to questions of novelty and originality, its use of intertextual recycling (of texts,
fashions, attitudes) as a means of illustrating the textual character of the real and the subject; its ironic re-
creation of the past and history; even in what some recognize as its more democratic character which is
often due to the fact that, in breaking down the dividing lines between high and popular culture, it often
inhabits the popular and is rendered thus more accessible (Waugh 5). In the following sections, I shall expand
briefly on some important postmodern ideas regarding the notions of representation, subjectivity and
difference mainly through discussions of literature, culture and art.
4.1 Representation
You may find here information on Baz Luhrmanns Romeo + Juliet
Australian film director Baz Luhrmann directed William Shakespeares Romeo + Juliet in 1996, with
Leonardo di Caprio and Claire Danes in the lead roles. The film presents Shakespeares play to a modern
audience in ways that appeal to their taste, film knowledge and life experience. Though it remains faithful to
the original storyline, the action is transferred to the present, the setting, characters clothes and soundtrack are
contemporary while the editing is fast, jazzy and exciting, designed to cater to the visual needs of a younger
generation. It is fair to say that the final filmic product is organized around some key postmodernist principles,
evident especially in its desire to accentuate its artificiality and, consequently, the textual character of the real.
I shall focus primarily on the films opening scene, which delivers the plays Prologue, and try to tease out
those of its aspects that contribute to its postmodernist effect. In Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann presents the
Prologue as a news bulletin. A female newsreader appears on a TV screen, acting in the place of
Shakespeares narrator, and delivers the original sixteenth-century lines that tell the tragic story of family feud
and death.
William Shakespeare, from Romeo and Juliet (1597)
ACT I
PROLOGUE
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents strife.
The fearful passage of their death-markd love,
And the continuance of their parents rage,
Which, but their childrens end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
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As soon as the Prologue is completed, a series of rapidly edited camera shots present the citys skyscrapers,
the leading characters (the Montagues and the Capulets) and the outbreak of violence caused by the feud
through a series of newspaper cuttings, headlines and film footage, all relating the families quarrels. While
the media coverage of the civil unrest is unfolding, the first six lines of the Prologue are repeated a second
time through a voice-over (an unseen narrator speaking in a
film). At the end of it, the story of the two star-crossd
lovers, as given in the Prologue, is presented to the viewer
a third time in the form of written text that flashes across Continuity editing:
the screen at an incredible speed. Throughout the opening,
is the predominant style of film editing
the editing is fast and the MTV-type music loud, creating
and video editing in the post-production
tension and leading to a final explosion of colour, light,
process of filmmaking of narrative films
music and writing that creates a visual counterpart to the and television programmes. The purpose
storys emotionally intense ending but in a new medium. of continuity editing is to smooth over the
There are various reasons why Luhrmanns film inherent discontinuity of the editing
might be considered postmodernist. For one, it blurs the process and to establish a logical
boundary between high and popular culture. It takes a coherence between shots. In most films,
theatrical play that constitutes, by general consent, logical coherence is achieved by cutting to
serious literature and translates it into a filmic continuity, which emphasizes smooth
representation that employs cinematic techniques (fast transition of time and space.
editing and exciting music) used by popular entertainment
channels and programmes such as MTV or Miami Vice. In
upsetting the dichotomy between high art and popular
culture, the film interrogates the values traditionally attached to the two terms and urges us to examine the
cultural norms that have led to the construction of the opposition (what makes some forms of entertainment
more legitimate than others, for example). Even as early as the 1950s and the 1960s pop artists Andy Warhol
and Roy Lichtenstein achieved fame by challenging the stability of this very division. Warhol turned
consumer products like the Campbells soup cans or pop celebrities like Marilyn Monroe into art icons while
Lichtenstein took comic-strip and advertising images into the select space of the art gallery (see here).
A second reason why Luhrmanns film might be considered postmodernist is that it self-consciously
advertises its own status as representation in at least two ways. It openly recycles Shakespeares text and, in a
way, its own self as a film. It takes an event (the death of the two lovers) and presents it in three different
ways, with each one emphatically calling attention to its storytelling qualities (the same story is recycled
three times, each time starting the film anew). Given its self-identification as recyclable narrative, the opening
scene is clearly asking a question. How can we tell the story of an event? How can we represent an event? In
other words, how can we get to the real? What is strongly suggested is that we do not get the event but a
representation of the event. The repetition of the Prologue serves to bring to the fore the fact that every
attempt to grasp the real (the event of the lovers death) always leads us to a text (newspaper stories lead to a
TV news programme which leads to Shakespeares play and so on). Another way in which Romeo + Juliet
emphasizes its representational character is through its editing. The films fast editing and the abrupt, rapid
sequence of camera shots with which viewers are bombarded disrupt the comforting effect of continuity
editing which allows viewers to become immersed in the narrative plotline by helping them forget that they
are watching a film.
In drawing attention to itself as a series of camera shots, Luhrmanns film highlights instead its own
constructed character as filmic representation and makes a comment on the nature and the accessibility of the
real. In Western metaphysics the categories of reality, fact and truth have been traditionally set against the
notions of representation, fiction or falsehood. The basis of this opposition lies, as Magali Cornier Michael
reminds us, in the belief that a stable, objective reality exists outside of representation. Realist aesthetics
assumes that this reality can be represented directly, while modernists insist that the real is a question of
perception and perspective. For postmodernists, material reality exists but it is always mediated by
representations (Michael 37). Our perceptions, as it were, are continually mediated by culturally, socially and
historically constructed meanings, emotions, fears and desireswhich is perhaps one way of reading the
controversial statement of the French critic Jacques Derrida that there is nothing outside of the text (il nya
pas de hors texte, 158). To claim this is not to deny the materiality of the world but to admit that we cannot
access it directly or unproblematically. Our daily lives may not be merely textual but they are made
meaningful with the help of knowledges that are always already ideologically inflected, subject to fictions and
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(self-)interests (class, gender or racial interests, to mention

a few). Within this scheme of things, traditional distinctions
between fact and fiction or truth and falsehood become
increasingly difficult to maintain. Metafiction:
Consider, for example, how Lurhmanns opening
Any work of fiction which seems
scene plays with the cinematic convention of credit giving
preoccupied with its own fictionality or
which usually takes place in a section of the film that with the nature of fiction generally. In the
clearly sets itself apart from the films fictional world in same way as a metalanguage reflects on
order to give credit to the crew. Unlike mainstream feature language(s), metafiction is fiction whose
films, Luhrmann chooses to present the storys leading subject is fiction. Metafiction differs from
characters in a series of frozen frames. Each characters realist fiction, which employs all kinds of
name appears next to the actors face in a way that reminds techniqueslinear narrative, cause and
us of the credits section at the start or close of films and effect, detailed description, rich
television series. Only that here the clear-cut division characters and dialogueto encourage
between fact and fiction has collapsed as it is not the readers to feel that what they are reading
actors name that appears next to the actors face but the corresponds with reality. Metafiction, by
characters (compare it, for instance, to the opening credits contrast, obliges its readers to consider
first and foremost its own artifice; it
of the television series The Bold and the Beautiful). To
disrupts the illusion that fiction gives
those inimical towards the postmodern, the loss of the real direct access to the real world. Common
as an objectively verifiable category signifies the loss of techniques include beginnings and
history and the subjects ability to transform his world (for endings which comment on the nature of
this type of critical response to postmodernism see the beginnings and endings; the appearance
work of the American literary theorist Fredric Jameson). To of the author as a character (who may
its defenders, disrupting the opposition between reality and well discuss the process of writing the
fiction can be politically effective for marginalized groups. narrative); and the realization by
It encourages the critical examination of cultural codes that characters that they are merely
have sustained oppressive structures and reveals the characters.
artificial basis of existing relations of power (Michael 37), Blackwell: Reference on Line
their fictionality as it were. To give an example, feminist
attempts to critique patriarchal authority can be much
helped by a critical formation such as that of
postmodernisms which exposes patriarchys norms (regarding, for example, the meanings assigned to
femininity and masculinity in a given context) as culturally
and historically constructed (that is, fictional).
What is more, as Magali Cornier Michael observes,
the assertion that mediated representations are the only
means of access to reality transforms art into a valid and In a film, television program or video
game, the opening credits are shown at
potentially active space for political engagement (37).
the very beginning and list the most
Postmodernist fiction has indeed become a vehicle of important members of the production.
gender and racial critique on both sides of the Atlantic They are now usually shown as text
since the middle of the twentieth century. Angela Carter superimposed on a blank screen or static
and Margaret Atwood, for example, have drawn on pictures, or sometimes on top of action in
postmodernist insights to challenge the power of myth and the show. There may or may not be
of fairy tales to disseminate patriarchal gender norms, accompanying music. When opening
while Jeanette Winterson has employed the notion of credits are built into a separate sequence
intertextual exchange to encourage us to rethink the idea of of their own, the correct term is title
romantic love that is central to constructions of sequence (such as the familiar James Bond
heterosexuality. Moreover, in the context of postcolonial and Pink Panther title sequences).
critique, writers such as Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee Opening credits since the early 1980s, if
present at all, identify the major actors
have located in the postmodern tools that enable them to
and crew, while the closing credits list an
disturb structures of racial inequality in Western
extensive cast and production crew.
conceptualizations of cultural difference. To exemplify the
manner in which postmodernist fiction might be used to
challenge hegemonic norms, I would now like to turn to
Margaret Atwoods short story Womens Novels (1983).
175
Atwoods story is concerned throughout with acts

of reading, storytelling and gender. It focuses on the novels
that women like to read (and write) as well as the novels
Intertextuality:
men prefer to buy (or write) and draws our attention to
dominant gender representations that are frequently is the name often given to the manner in
invoked in mainstream fiction. In that sense, the storys which texts of all sorts (oral, visual,
metafictional characterthat is, the fact that it is fiction literary, virtual) contain references to
that discusses fictionis hard to miss. Very much like other texts that have, in some way,
Luhrmanns film, the short story also self-consciously contributed to their production and
signals its awareness of its own fictionality and standing as signification. The notion was initially
representation (it acknowledges the fact that it is a story) introduced by the French feminist theorist
by attracting attention to its own textual processes and Julia Kristeva. Intertextuality, with its
attempts at shattering the transparency effect that realism endlessly receding network of debts and
strives to achieve. Not many realist conventions are legacies, disturbs a casual belief in the
adhered to here: the narrative voice (though humorous and uniqueness of the text and of the
cheeky) is hard to locate; there is no distinguishable plot or originality of the authorial consciousness.
(Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern Critical
linearity or any type of resolution; the reader is not kept
Terms 121-122)
respectfully outside the action (and in charge of it) but is
drawn right into it, shaken out of his position of
comfortable invisibility by being turned into an object of
analysis. And this is because what Atwoods story does
best is talk about readers. It dissects and calls attention to our reading habits, suggesting that how we read
fictional stories (what we like about them or how we make sense of them) is inextricably connected to how we
read and understand gender. It is interesting to follow how the narrative projects its concern with the reading
of gender. First, it draws attention to the popular gender clichs that are recycled from novel to novel. Second,
by self-consciously underlining the intertextual recycling of these stereotypical representations, it points to the
culturally and discursively constructed character of the gender realities they speak of.
From the start of the story we are warned that if Men favor heroes who are tough and hard: tough
with men, hard with women (29), women are attracted to romantic stories with chivalrous men and happy
endings. As the narrator admits, I like to read novels in which the heroine has a costume rustling discreetly
over her breasts, or discreet breasts rustling under her costume; in any case there must be a costume, some
breasts, some rustling, and, over all, discretion. Discretion over all, like a fog, a miasma through which the
outlines of things appear only vaguely. A glimpse of pink through the gloom, the sound of breathing, satin
slithering to the floor, revealing what? (29). The story invokes here an image of femininity that may be taken
from romantic fiction. Is it a heroine secretly meeting a lover? Or a chance encounter between two future
lovers? The narrators reverie? In any case, sexual desire is powerfully invoked. We can almost hear the sound
of her breathing as her discreet breasts heave with discreet desire under the rustling silk of her dress.
Repeatedly emphasized by the narrative, discretion implies here social rules that must not be broken and the
representation of women in this passage is firmly tied both to discretion and society. It suggests that female
sexuality displayed in public is not socially acceptable (as respectable womanhood must be coy and chaste),
which of course makes it all the more titillating in the eyes of a lover and certainly more intriguing for readers.
Moreover, to continue with another popular representation of femininity visited by Atwoods text, the
association of respectable femininity with virtue has also been a powerful, middle-class gender stereotype in
modernity. It is regularly posited, in stories and films, as the prerequisite for a happy ending in marriage and
everlasting love. Listen to the narrator speaking again: I want happiness, guaranteed, joy all round, covers
with nurses on them or brides, intelligent girls but not too intelligent, with regular teeth and pluck and both
breasts the same size and no excess facial hair, someone you can depend on to know where the bandages are
and to turn the hero, that potential rake and killer, into a well-groomed country gentleman with clean
fingernails and the right vocabulary. Always, he has to say, Forever. I no longer want to read books that dont
end with the word forever. I want to be stroked between the eyes, one way only (31). The narrator puts her
finger here on the fairy-tale motif that turns happy-ending stories into such a good read for so many women.
Happiness is ultimately achieved. But the precondition for happiness, both in the novels and the readers real-
life situations, is that women fulfill their destiny as paragons of virtue. They must safeguard public morality
by transforming wayward men into respectable members of society. This is a gender norm whose
representation can be encountered equally in a Harlequin romantic story and in a classic novel such as Jane
176
Effie Yiannopoulou
Eyre. It repeats itself and is recycled, passing from novel to novel and reader to reader and disseminating in
the process patriarchal ideas of gender.
Atwoods feministand postmodernistgesture consists in drawing attention to this recycling
process quite self-consciously. It reproduces a series of dominant representations of femininity and
masculinity as encountered in (popular romantic) fiction and encourages us to read them critically. Humour
functions as a powerful defamiliarising, critical device in this respect. In the storys final lines, the narrator is
caught trying to decode metaphors used quite frequently in fictional writing to construct a heroine as a
precious and desirable catch, pure and untamed as a wild animal and, therefore, precious to possess.
Margaret Atwood, from Womens Novels
She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would
like to be able to write such sentences, without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them
without embarrassment. If I could only do these two simple things, I feel, I would be able to pass my
allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet.
She had the startled eyes of a wild bird. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a
cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot
read a body like a gazelles without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos, and smells.
She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book,
thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. Hes about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot,
devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I cant
concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me.
Porcupines, weasels, warthogs, and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy
and sly. Agony, to see the romantic frisson quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck
to an overripe peach, and not be able to swallow, or wallow. Which one? I murmur to the
unresponding air. Which one? (32-33)
The narrators almost comical attempt at guessing which wild animal the heroine could be likened to
is not an effect that the steamy love story which she is reading at this point ever intended to produce. Rather, it
breaks the spell and her identification with the characters, and stops her from becoming emotionally
involved with, and absorbed into, the love scene as expected. In that sense, her unplanned, unconventional,
quite humorous, response to the love story unsettles the storys anticipated effect and the readers
identification with the romantic heroine and all that she represents in terms of gender. It works, for one, to
remind us that the love scene in question is a fictional convention, a narrative and gender clich that moves
across texts and ends up being a copy of a copy which does not necessarily convey the truth about men and
women. The metaphor of the wild bird is foregrounded precisely as a metaphor, language used to construct a
representation of femininity which is seen now as a linguistic and cultural construct. It is fair to argue that the
postmodernist focus on representation in Atwoods text reveals not only the mediated character of reality but
the extent to which this mediation is gender-coded. Its feminist challenge materializes within the system of
patriarchal representational exchange (the mainstream stories women like to read) and encourages us to read it
differently, or to use Linda Hutcheons term, denaturalize it. In Hutcheons words, the postmoderns initial
concern is to denaturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that
we unthinkingly experience as natural (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are
in fact cultural: made by us, not given to us. Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesnt grow on
trees (2).
4.2 Difference and the Subject
Hutcheon identifies here what is politically progressive about the postmodern and allows a glimpse into the
reasons why it has engaged the interest of feminist and postcolonial thinkers. To accept that the world, or
rather our perception of it, is not given or natural but constructed in language, history and culture is a
177
thought that has appealed to marginalized groups who have had restrictive and often denigrating identities
imposed on them. It implies that our understanding of the world, filtered as it is through representations and
the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about it, can be rewritten and reformulated. It can be changed
along with all the dominant discourses that have oppressively circumscribed, for example, womens sexuality
or black inferiority over the ages.
What also contributes to a politically enabling view of the real in postmodernism is the thought that
our understanding of the world is made up not of one but numerous narratives that are in circulation
interacting and competing with each other. This markedly contrasts with modernitys desire to explain a huge
variety of phenomena in life in terms of one overarching and all-inclusive story, what Jean-Franois Lyotard
terms a grand narrative. Patriarchy, Europe, Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis provide examples of
grand narratives since each one of them attempts to present the world as being organized around one central
idea that it considers universally applicablewhether this might be masculine superiority, white supremacy,
the word of God, the laws of capitalism or the unconscious. The postmodern is the moment when we lose faith
in the power of these grand narratives to deliver the truth about our experience in the singular, and accept the
need to consider alternative representations of the real, which might have been so far sidelined and excluded,
as equally legitimate. Attention is now directed to smaller, local narratives whose value and truth is judged
within specific contexts, making the truth value of any given narrative or world view the product of an
ongoing negotiation, hence contingent and changeable. In other words, in the postmodern outlook, no
explanatory narrative is equally valid for all across time and space, a thought that is not alien to students of
literature, who as trained readers of texts, are well aware of the multiplicity of readings a literary text can
receive, all of which are dependent on the historical and cultural contexts within which they are produced and
received (hence a Shakespearean play may receive a different reading in contemporary China than it did in
eighteenth-century England).
Postmodernisms interventions in representational practices in literature and art are underwritten by
this contingent politics of difference, the need to begin to acknowledge the existence of different viewpoints
on the real and their struggle for legitimation. To give a quick example, Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea
offers an alternative representation of Rochesters first, mad Creole wife Bertha Mason, as given in Charlotte
Brontes Jane Eyre, through a fictional text that experiments with style, structure and point of view. Her
account of Antoinettes (as Bertha is known in the novel) life before she meets Rochester, with its emphasis
on the historical and social circumstances that led to the collapse of the plantation system in the West Indies in
the middle of the nineteenth century, not only explains Berthas madness but strongly suggests that it is an
identity fabricated to serve the interests of patriarchy and colonialism that Rochester represents in the text.
The novel provides in this way an alternative account both of Jane Eyres representation of the specific Creole
mad woman in the attic and, more generally, Europes negotiation of racial and cultural difference at this
point in time. It provides, in other words, a story different to that circulating in nineteenth-century Europe
about racially different women which makes a claim to legitimacy and destabilizes the grand narrative of
white supremacy (rendered now as contingent in its truth claims as the marginal narrative that competes
against it).
The changes brought about by the loss of faith in grand narratives and the postmoderns valorization
of (contingently articulated) difference has also affected its thinking on identity. Postmodernism rigorously
challenges ideas about the subject as conceived by Enlightenment humanism. The self-contained, unified and
coherent modern subject (one with the Eiffel Tower visitor) gives way to the decentred and fragmented
subject of postmodernity. It is telling that we now use the term subjectivity to speak about identity. It is a
linguistic choice that reflects a more general understanding of individual identity as being subject to
language, history and culture, as being produced, rather than given, as a result of circumstances and variables
that are at work in specific contexts. Subjectivity speaks of positions, those positions in which we are placed
when we are interpellated (addressed) by ideology and language (for example, men are traditionally placed in
positions of superiority by patriarchal ideologies while women in positions of inferiority).
Following on the psychoanalytic discovery of the unconscious, subjectivity as a term also implies the
self-divided subject, that is, ones self-perception which is not completeas there is always something
about it that escapes our conscious control. What postmodern theories of the subject often throw light on
reworking the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacanis the existence of this other
(unconscious) space within us which, in effect, also works to blur the boundaries between self and other in
society, rendering our relationship to others (individuals or communities) contingent.
178
Effie Yiannopoulou
To detractors of the postmodern this notion of the subject signifies a loss of control which is construed
as debilitating as it is assumed to be taking power away from the subjects individual agency and ability to
control his fate, his will and his world. To defenders of the postmodern, it creates an opening towards the
other that helps build a relationship not of domination of the self over the other but a relationship that relies on
self-interrogation. That has the potential of creating respect for that which is not us and is, therefore,
unknown to us (that in itself can function as the basis of a cultural politics of difference that allows individual
subjects and communities to develop more inclusive modes of interaction). If, then, human identity is, for
postmodernism, a question of positionality, context and perspective, it is at once suggested as plural,
contingent and changeable. It is no wonder, in that sense, that it is popular with many women writers and
artists.
Take, for example, the case of Barbara Krgers photographic collage Untitled (You are not Yourself),
(1981). It is a self-conscious piece of art that makes visual and explicit the feminist and postmodern
conception of woman as a non-essential, social construct. Displaying a woman examining herself in a
shattered mirror, Krger interprets the myth of woman as a social mechanism by which a restrictive identity is
imposed on women (femininity is traditionally seen as being associated with specific attributes such as
motherhood, weakness, emotion, home and so on). She uses bold graphic techniques to jar the woman, as well
as the viewer, in the mirror delivering a wake-up call from the messages delivered by society. The small size
of the word not indicates that society attempts to trick women into believing You Are Yourself, you are,
that is, what dominant discourses dictate that you are (for more see here). The word not, however, also
shatters the mirror society holds up to women, breaks the surface on which identity is constructed and
suggests a multiplicity of selves in existence. The fragmented mirror speaks, for some, of an impossible
demand issued by society that expects women to play a variety of roles simultaneously; to others, it
constitutes an acknowledgement that the self is never unitary and hence the single affirmative identity
conferred on us (You are yourself) is a representation that can be shattered.
179
4.3 Banksys Dismaland: A Bemusement Park
Image 4.8 Dismaland. Photograph: Florent Darrault (24.08.2015). Wikemedia Commons.
As a way of rounding off the discussion on the postmodern, I would like to make a reference to Banksys
Dismaland, an art work, or art performance, which is driven on by the postmodern impulse to challenge
established beliefs about representation and reality. Banksy, a street artist whose identity remains a secret, hit
the British newspapers headlines in August 2015 with the creation of a theme park on the Weston-super-
Mare seafront in the west of England which the artist describes as unsuitable for small children (Brown)
(http://dismaland.co.uk/; for a video see here). This is no understatement when you consider that the Grim
Reaper rides the dodgems and Cinderella lies dead in her crashed princely carriage surrounded by paparazzi.
180
Effie Yiannopoulou
Image 4.9 Banksys Cinderella crash scene. Photograph: David Levene for The Guardian (20.08.2015)
Image 4.10 The Grim Reaper rides the dodgems at Dismaland. Photograph: Yui
Mok/PA; The Guardian (20.08.2015)
And these are only two exhibits on the site. The unconventionality of the theme park is evident from the start
when visitors are forced to go through a security control of the type endured at airports and are faced with
unsmiling, unhelpful, depressed-looking attendants some of whom are selling I am an Imbecile black
helium balloons and are reportedly briefed to respond to every request for information with a sullen shrug or
wanker gesture. What follows may comprise sticking your head through a hole and taking a picture of
yourself as a terrorist, the drive-your-own model boats full of desperate migrants or visiting a pocket money
loans shop offering money to children at an interest rate of 5,000%.
181
Image 4.11 A close up of the migrants in the installation. Toby Melville / Reuters
In front of its counter is a small trampoline so that children can bounce up to read the outrageous small print
drawn up by artist Darren Cullen (Brown).
In fact, Dismaland features the work of 58 handpicked artists, including Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer
and Banksys own, all of which address the culture of happiness which seems to be at the butt end of
contemporary consumerism and entertainment (Dinseyland-type) business. Dismaland is both shocking and
funny and gets visitors to think about what is left out of their world picture so that they can lead their affluent,
happy Western lifestyles. It is amazing to think how much contemporary western cultures have invested in
the concept of happiness which is tied not only to the efficient operation of a well-oiled capitalist system but
to the smoothing over of its contradictions and inconsistencies. Consider, for example, that in November 2010
the British Prime Minister David Cameron assembled a group of journalists in the Treasury for a speech on
national happiness which was the result of a recently discovered insight in his government that bringing
understandings of psychology to policy making will increase citizen contentment and as a result the states tax
revenues (Thring). As it appears, creating happy citizens is both a cultural and a government aim in Britain
these days.
Dismaland is a response to this climate of unruptured self contentment. When asked why the world
needs Dismaland, Banksy replied Dismaland is an experiment in offering something less resolved. Why
should children be immune from the idea that to maintain our standard of life, other children have to die
trapped in the hulls of boats in the bottom of the Mediterranean? (Mills). In Dismaland, children and adults
become acquainted with the debt-creating world which they inhabit or are confronted with their
involvement in world terrorism when taking their pictures as terrorists (no more immunity from accepting
responsibility in world politics).
In closing I would like to point out that Dismaland is beyond doubt art that surprises. It upsets the
visitors expectations and breaks with what theme parks and fairgrounds have come to stand for in our cultural
imaginary (pleasure, excitement, comfort). It disorients our understanding of leisure time and all the values
connected with it and does so by inhabiting the system. Dismaland re-creates what is perhaps a consumers, a
tourists or a familys paradise, a theme park, but with a difference since it has changed the rules that
182
Effie Yiannopoulou
determine how it operates and how we relate to it as viewers-visitors. In raising issues of war, famine, death
and exploitation through its exhibits, it causes visitors to confront their own habits of living, values and
priorities in life in ways that are not always clear (this is a bemusement park after all) but in a productive
fashion (mirth and discomfort are both present). One might say that Banksys artwork materialises what the
postmodern aims to do according to Lyotard: it puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself
(Answering the Question 81). It surprises us out of our certaintiesit surprises, in fact, the system itself out
of its certainties by forcing it to face its contradictionsand creates a space in our thought which is not yet
full of the familiar and is ready to take on the unknownwith varying results and surprisingly not always
dismally.
Re-Cap:
The Postmodern (main features):
Draws attention to the role of representation in

constructions of reality.
Decentres the liberal humanist subject.
Breaks down the distinction between high and

popular culture.
Upsets the system it critiques from within.
Is marked by increased self-consciousness about the

methods it uses.
Relies on recycling and intertextual exchange.
183
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Movements and Trends in 19th - & 20th-Century English Literature

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Movements and Trends

Authors: Yiannis Kanarakis, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Effie Yiannopoulou

The Gothic and Its Revivals

1. Introduction: Its alive!!!!!

The Norton Anthology on the Gothic. Access here

Familiarization with the complexity of the

Familiarization with the literary

Ability to detect and correlate the various

Image 1.2 Karl Briullov, The Sacking of Rome 455 (1836).

Image 1.3 The exterior of Peterborough Cathedral; An example of Gothic architecture.

The Story of the Goths. Access here

3. Towards a Gothic Sensibility

3.2 Elizabethan Drama

Elizabethan drama decisively contributed to the formation and

3.3 Graveyard Poetry

Image 1.4 Claude Joseph Vemet, A shipwreck in Stormy Sea (1773).

3.4 The Sublime

Edmund Burke on the Sublime. Access here

What is the Sublime (Tate). Access here

The Sublime: A Brief History. Access here

4. Walpoles The Castle of Otranto

Image 1.5 This is the first page of Walpoles 1764 edition.

Horace Walpole, from The Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto (Project Gutenberg). Access here

5. The Female Gothic of Ann Radcliffe

Another influential trendsetter of the Gothic is Ann Radcliffe.

Image 1.8 Illustration from The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1830 edition.

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

6. The Terrors of French Revolution

Matthew Lewis, The Monk

This extract is typical of the anti-Catholicism that permeates Gothic narratives.

Image 1.9 John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781).

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!

I see a lily on thy brow

I met a lady in the meads,

I made a garland for her head,

I set her on my pacing steed,

She found me roots of relish sweet,

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

And there she lulled me asleep,

I saw pale kings and princes too,

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

And this is why I sojourn here,

Image 1.11 A poster from the 1880s.

In the second part of the nineteenth century, the Gothic experienced

madwoman in the attic, is Janes double, as she embodies not only

The anxiety about the instability of identity also became

Image 1.12 Illustration from Stokers Novel Dracula.

Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Sicle. Access here

The Victorian Gothic site. Access here

Emily Bront, Wuthering Heights

From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (I886)

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Image 1.14 The original 1927 poster for Langs Metropolis.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Access here

Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927). English Version. Access here

Lights out radio show, Little Old Lady. Access here

Frankenstein, 1931 version Trailer (Its Alive!!!). Access here

10. Postmodern Gothic

Image 1.15 The cover of Ellis first edition of American Psycho.