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Author: A. Tennyson Genre: Poem
Summary: Through fields of barley and rye runs the road to Camelot, the home of King Arthur. Parallel to the road is a river. As travelers come and go on the road, they turn their gaze to an island in the middle of the river, the Island of Shalott. There they see a gray, four-towered building that confines a young lady. Horse-drawn barges and small sailboats pass the island. But no one on the road or the river ever sees the lady standing at a window. However, those who harvest the crops hear her singing from time to time, saying, " 'Tis the fairy Lady of Shalott" (line 35).This lady spends her time weaving a colorful magic web. She has heard someone say that she is under a curse. It dictates that she must never look out a window or venture forth from her abode. What will happen to her if she abandons her weaving and gazes upon the world, or joins it, she does not know. To avoid provoking fate, she weaves on. However, a mirror in front of her enables her to see reflections from the outside—an ambling abbot, farmers, red-cloaked market girls, an ambling abbot, a shepherd boy, a page, knights. The Lady of Shalott has no knight to call her own. Her only pleasure is to weave into her web the scenes she sees. At night, she sometimes sees the end of life, a candlelit funeral; and sometimes the beginning of life, newlyweds under a bright moon. "I am half-sick of shadows," she laments (line 71). One day, just an arrow shot away, Sir Lancelot rides by, the sunlight glinting off his greaves. On his resplendent shield, a knight kneels to a lady. Lancelot's armor and his steed's bridle bells ring as he rides, and his helmet and the jewels of his saddle burn bright like the stars of the night or a meteor blazing forth. As he rides on to Camelot, his black curls flowing from beneath his helmet, he sings a song. Immediately, the lady abandons her weaving and stands at the window, looking toward Camelot and the horseman riding toward it. The mirror cracks. The curse takes hold. The lady goes outside, finds a boat, writes her name on it, and lies down in it, allowing the current to take her down toward Camelot. She sings a song—her last—a mournful melody. By and by, her blood freezes and her eyes darken. By the time she reaches Camelot, she is dead. The people come out—knights, burghers, lords and ladies—and read her name on the prow of the boat. The cheerful sounds of Camelot stop, and the knights of the realm make the sign of the cross. Lancelot comments on her beauty and says, "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace / The Lady of Shalott." |
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Author: A. Tennyson Genre: poem
Summary
Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that there is little point in his staying home “by this still hearth” with his old wife, doling out rewards and punishments for the unnamed masses who live in his kingdom.
Still speaking to himself he proclaims that he “cannot rest from travel” but feels compelled to live to the fullest and swallow every last drop of life. He has enjoyed all his experiences as a sailor who travels the seas, and he considers himself a symbol for everyone who wanders and roams the earth. His travels have exposed him to many different types of people and ways of living. They have also exposed him to the “delight of battle” while fighting the Trojan War with his men. Ulysses declares that his travels and encounters have shaped who he is: “I am a part of all that I have met,” he asserts. And it is only when he is traveling that the “margin” of the globe that he has not yet traversed shrink and fade, and cease to goad him.
Ulysses declares that it is boring to stay in one place, and that to remain stationary is to rust rather than to shine; to stay in one place is to pretend that all there is to life is the simple act of breathing, whereas he knows that in fact life contains much novelty, and he longs to encounter this. His spirit yearns constantly for new experiences that will broaden his horizons; he wishes “to follow knowledge like a sinking star” and forever grow in wisdom and in learning.
Ulysses now speaks to an unidentified audience concerning his son Telemachus, who will act as his successor while the great hero resumes his travels: he says, “This is my son, mine own Telemachus, to whom I leave the scepter and the isle.” He speaks highly but also patronizingly of his son’s capabilities as a ruler, praising his prudence, dedication, and devotion to the gods. Telemachus will do his work of governing the island while Ulysses will do his work of traveling the seas: “He works his work, I mine.”
In the final stanza, Ulysses addresses the mariners with whom he has worked, traveled, and weathered life’s storms over many years. He declares that although he and they are old, they still have the potential to do something noble and honorable before “the long day wanes.” He encourages them to make use of their old age because “ ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.” He declares that his goal is to sail onward “beyond the sunset” until his death. Perhaps, he suggests, they may even reach the “Happy Isles,” or the paradise of perpetual summer described in Greek mythology where great heroes like the warrior Achilles were believed to have been taken after their deaths. Although Ulysses and his mariners are not as strong as they were in youth, they are “strong in will” and are sustained by their resolve to push onward relentlessly: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” |
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Author: A. Tennyson Genre: Poem, spiritual autobiography
points:
Prologue:
The poem begins as a tribute to and invocation of the “Strong Son of God.” Since man, never having seen God’s face, has no proof of His existence, he can only reach God through faith. The poet attributes the sun and moon (“these orbs or light and shade”) to God, and acknowledges Him as the creator of life and death in both man and animals. Man cannot understand why he was created, but he must believe that he was not made simply to die.
The Son of God seems both human and divine. Man has control of his own will, but this is only so that he might exert himself to do God’s will. All of man’s constructed systems of religion and philosophy seem solid but are merely temporal, in comparison to the eternal God; and yet while man can have knowledge of these systems, he cannot have knowledge of God. The speaker expresses the hope that “knowledge [will] grow from more to more,” but this should also be accompanied by a reverence for that which we cannot know.
The speaker asks that God help foolish people to see His light. He repeatedly asks for God to forgive his grief for “thy [God’s] creature, whom I found so fair.” The speaker has faith that this departed fair friend lives on in God, and asks God to make his friend wise.
XXVII:
Here the speaker states that he feels no jealousy for the man who is captured and does not know what it means to feel true rage, or for the bird that is born with in a cage and has never spent time outside in the “summer woods.” Likewise, he feels no envy for beasts that have no sense of the passage of time and no conscience to check their behavior. He also does not envy those who have never felt pain (“the heart that never plighted troth”) or those who complacently enjoy a leisure that they do not rightfully deserve. Even when he is in the greatest pain, he still realizes that “ ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.”
LVI:
After having asserted in Section LV that Nature cares only for the survival of species (“so careful of the type”) and not for the survival of individual lives, the speaker now questions whether Nature even cares for the species. He quotes a personified, feminine Nature asserting that she does not attend to the survival of the species, but arbitrarily bestows life or death on all creatures. For Nature, the notion of the “spirit” does not refer to any divine, unearthly element, but rather to the simple act of breathing.
The poet questions whether Man, who prays and trusts in God’s love in spite of the evidence of Nature’s brutality (“Nature, red in tooth and claw”), will eventually be reduced to dust or end up preserved like fossils in rock: “And he, shall he, Man...Be blown about the desert dust, Or sealed within the iron hills?” The thought of this evokes a notion of the human condition as monstrous, and more terrifying to contemplate than the fate of prehistoric “dragons of the prime.” The speaker declares that life is futile and longs for his departed friend’s voice to soothe him and mitigate the effect of Nature’s callousness.
Themes: repeatedly compares himself to a lover, casts himself as both male and female, homoerotic relationship with deceased friend Hallam, questions faith, evolution, questions human faculties and reason, depicts nature as hostile.
passages:
3- "And all the phantom, Nature stands--
wih all the music in her tone
A hallow echo of my own--
a hollow form with empty hands."
And shll I take a thing so blind (note: sorrow)
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood
Upon the threshold of the mind?
5- I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel
For words, like nature, half reveal
And half conceal the soul within
9- My Arthur, whom I shall not see
Till all my widow'd race be run;
Dear as the mother to the son,
More than my brothers are to me
27-'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
55-Are God and Nature then at strife
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems
So careless of the single life
56-She (nature) cries "A thousand types are gone;
I care for nothing, all shall go"
"Though makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death
The spirit does but mean the breath
I know no more" And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law--
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
89- For "ground in yonder social mill
We rub each other's angles down,
"And merge," he said, "in form and gloss
The picturesque of man and man."
We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,
The wine-flask lying couched in moss,
120-I trust I have wasted breath:
I think we are not wholly brain,
Magnetic mockeries; not in vain
Like Paul with beasts, I fought with death;
Not only cunning casts in clay:
Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science unto men,
At least to me? I would not stay. |
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Author: R. Browning Genre: Poem
Summary
This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke’s marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his “gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name.” As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess’s early demise: when her behavior escalated, “[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection. |
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Author: R. Browning Genre: Poem
Summary
“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.
Notes: She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian “prudery” constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality. |
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Author: R. Browning Genre: Poem
Summary
“Fra Lippo Lippi,” another of Browning’s dramatic monologues, appeared in the 1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. “Fra Lippo Lippi” introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night. Because Lippo’s patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to fear from the guards, but he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares with the men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships with women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits. But Lippo’s most important statements concern the basis of art: should art be realistic and true-to-life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo’s paintings of saints look like the Prior’s mistress and the men of the neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which kind of art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all? Lippo’s rambling speech touches on all of these issues.
Commentary
The poem centers thematically around the discussion of art that takes place around line 180. Lippo has painted a group of figures that are the spitting image of people in the community: the Prior’s mistress, neighborhood men, etc. Everyone is amazed at his talent, and his great show of talent gains him his place at the monastery. However, his talent for depicting reality comes into conflict with the stated religious goals of the Church. The Church leadership believes that their parishioners will be distracted by the sight of people they know within the painting: as the Prior and his cohorts say, “ ‘Your business is not to catch men with show, / With homage to the perishable clay.../ Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. / Your business is to paint the souls of men.’ ” In part the Church authorities’ objections stem not from any real religious concern, but from a concern for their own reputation: Lippo has gotten a little too close to the truth with his depictions of actual persons as historical figures—the Prior’s “niece” (actually his mistress) has been portrayed as the seductive Salome. However, the conflict between Lippo and the Church elders also cuts to the very heart of questions about art: is the primary purpose of Lippo’s art—and any art—to instruct, or to delight? If it is to instruct, is it better to give men ordinary scenes to which they can relate, or to offer them celestial visions to which they can aspire? In his own art, Browning himself doesn’t seem to privilege either conclusion; his work demonstrates only a loose didacticism, and it relies more on carefully chosen realistic examples rather than either concrete portraits or abstractions. Both Fra Lippo’s earthly tableaux and the Prior’s preferred fantasias of “ ‘vapor done up like a new-born babe’ ” miss the mark. Lippo has no aspirations beyond simple mimesis, while the Prior has no respect for the importance of the quotidian. Thus the debate is essentially empty, since it does not take into account the power of art to move man in a way that is not intellectual but is rather aesthetic and emotional.
Lippo’s statements about art are joined by his complaints about the monastic lifestyle. Lippo has not adopted this lifestyle by choice; rather, his parents’ early death left him an orphan with no choice but to join the monastery. Lippo is trapped between the ascetic ways of the monastery and the corrupt, fleshly life of his patrons the Medicis. Neither provides a wholly fulfilling existence. Like the kind of art he espouses, the Prior’s lifestyle does not take basic human needs into account. (Indeed, as we know, even the Prior finds his own precepts impossible to follow.) The anything-goes morality of the Medicis rings equally hollow, as it involves only a series of meaningless, hedonistic revels and shallow encounters. This Renaissance debate echoes the schism in Victorian society, where moralists and libertines opposed each other in fierce disagreement. Browning seems to assert that neither side holds the key to a good life. Yet he concludes, as he does in other poems, that both positions, while flawed, can lead to high art: art has no absolute connection to morality.
quotations:
If you get simple beauty and naught else
You get about the best thing God invents:
That's somewhat: and you'll find the should you have missed
...You should not take a fellow eight years old
And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
I'm my own master, paint now as I please
...The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises,--and God made it all!
--For what? Do you feel thankful, ay or no,
For this fair down's face, yonder river's line,...
What's it all about? To be passed over, despised? Or dwelt upon,
Wondered at? Oh this last of course! you say.
But why not do as well as say,--Paint these
Just as they are, careless what comes of it?
God's works--paint anyone, and count it crime
To let truth slip.
...We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
...This world's no blot for us,
Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:
To find its meaning is my meat and drink. |
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Definition
Author: R. Browning Genre: Poem
Summary: "Abt Vogler" illustrates the true nature of artistic inspiration. And in contrast to the musician who labors over the mannered fugues of Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, Abt Vogler is a master of extemporization. Vogler, furthermore, is playing in an empty church solely for his own pleasure when the inspiration descends. His mystic communion with God is thus achieved as a private revelation. And although his improvisations can never be recaptured on earth, he is consoled by the knowledge that they have reached the One to whom they were addressed:
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. [115/116]
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.
But Abt Vogler remains something of an exception in Browning's gallery of artists. Even the seer's field of activity is this world and the life which he shares with other men. God is manifest through his handiwork, and all that mortals can know of his being comes in rightly interpretating the phenomena which condition earthly existence. It is on these phenomena that the imagination must exercise itself, avoiding all willful delusions prompted by the intellect. Any work of the imagination which fails to take cognizance of the facts of human experience is necessarily for Browning either false or imperfect.
Notes: the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual in this life-all that is signified by Abt Vogler's statement: "On earth the broken arcs; in heaven, a perfect round." The ideal, as it exists in God, is unattainable on earth; but this knowledge does not exonerate humanity from attempting the impossible; for in the effort lies the hope of spiritual salvation. Hence Andrea del Sarto's saddened perception: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?" The artist, endowed with special intuitions, is better equipped than other men to apprehend the spirit world. His senses are more keenly responsive to beauty and his mind probes deeper into the laws of cause and effect; but the faculty on which before all others he relies is imaginative insight. |
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Term
| Three defining characteristics of Browning's Dramatic Monoluges |
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Definition
The first distinguishing characteristic of Browning's dramatic monologues is the point of entry, which, I argue, is not through an empathetic relationship with the speaker. The experience Browning offers us is not the same as that offered by the Wordsworthian lyric, although the poets begin the same way. In both cases, the poet's subject is the psychology of the speaker, and in both cases the author explores the speaker's point of view by means of imaginative sympathy — Einfuhlung. With the Wordsworthian lyric, the reader's job is to achieve that sympathy; with the Browningesque monologue the reader may instead take the part of the listener, and this point of view is always available within the form. Indeed, the auditor may appear to be absent (as in "Johannes Agricola"), dead ("Porphyria's Lover"), out of earshot ("Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"), or simply inattentive ("Andrea del Sarto").
Second, whether this auditor is present does not matter so long as we find the speaker using the same kind of case-making, argumentative tone that marks "My Last Duchess" and which is the second definitive characteristic of the type. In all these instances the real listener (that is, the target of the argument) is the speaker's "second self"; and it becomes clear that in many monologues the putative auditor within the poem is less important than this Other. The arguments in "Karshish" are not really intended for Abib's eye, but for Karshish's own, as the rationalizing in "Cleon" is not intended to dissuade Protus's interest in Paulus and in Christ, but Cleon's own. The tone of the argument tells us that there is a second point of view present, and it is that point of view which we take. It is this strongly rhetorical language which distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy, for it shows the speaker arguing with a second self. We are coaxed out of our natural sympathy with the first-person speaker by the vehemence of the arguments made; and if Abib or Lucrezia are not impressed by the arguments, we take their places within the monologues and listen as they should.
As its third important distinction, the form requires that we complete the dramatic scene from within, by means of inference and imagination, and thus these texts are rules by which the reader plays an imagined drama. The clues which Browning's speakers provide to their obsessions are observable only if we imagine ourselves within the dramatic situation, with the speaker there before us. (Because Wordsworth intends to put us within the mind of the speaker, his poems remain essentially lyric.) In order to read the poems in this way, we must often sacrifice our certainty about which way to take them: do the Bishop's sons really give him cause for worry that they will substitute travertine for his antique-black and make off with his lapis lazuli, or is he paranoiac? What word did Porphyria's lover expect to hear from God? Was there any truth to the "lie" that Count Gauthier told and Gismond made him swallow? We and the li |
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Definition
Author: M. Arnold Genre: Poem (GRL?)
Time and Place
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote "Dover Beach" during or shortly after a visit he and his wife made to the Dover region of southeastern England, the setting of the poem, in 1851. They had married in June of that year. A draft of the first two stanzas of the poem appears on a sheet of paper he used to write notes for another another work, "Empedocles on Etna," published in 1852. The town of Dover is closer to France than any other port city in England. The body of water separating the coastline of the town from the coast of France is the Strait of Dover, north of the English Channel and south of the North Sea.
Point of View
The poet/persona uses first-, second-, and third-person point of view in the poem. Generally, the poem presents the observations of the author/persona in third-person point of view but shifts to second person when he addresses his beloved, as in Line 6 (Come), Line 9 (Listen! you), and Line 29 (let). Then he shifts to first-person point of view when he includes his beloved and the reader as co-observers, as in Line 18 (we), Line 29 (us), Line 31 (us), and Line 35 (we). He also uses first-person point of view to declare that at least one observation is his alone, and not necessarily that of his co-observers. This instance occurs in Line 24: But now I only hear. This line means But now I alone hear.
Who Is the Listener? (Line 29)
The person addressed in the poem—Lines 6, 9, and 29—is Matthew Arnold's wife, Frances Lucy Wightman. However, since the poem expresses a universal message, one may say that she can be any woman listening to the observations of any man. Arnold and his wife visited Dover Beach twice in 1851, the year they were married and the year Arnold was believed to have written "Dover Beach." At that time Arnold was inspector of schools in England, a position he held until 1886.
Theme
Arnold’s central message is this: Challenges to the validity of long-standing theological and moral precepts have shaken the faith of people in God and religion. In Arnold’s world of the mid-1800's, the pillar of faith supporting society was perceived as crumbling under the weight of scientific postulates, such as the evolutionary theory of English physician Erasmus Darwin and French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Consequently, the existence of God and the whole Christian scheme of things was cast in doubt. Arnold, who was deeply religious, lamented the dying of the light of faith, as symbolized by the light he sees in “Dover Beach” on the coast of France, which gleams one moment and is gone the next. He remained a believer in God and religion, although he was open to—and advocated—an overhaul of traditional religious thinking. In God and the Bible, he wrote: "At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."
Type of Work
“Dover Beach” is a poem with the mournful tone of an elegy and the personal intensity of a dramatic monologue. Because the meter and rhyme vary from line to line, the poem is said to be in free verse--that is, it is unencumbered by the strictures of traditional versification. However, there is cadence in the poem, achieved through the following:Alliteration Examples: to-night, tide; full, fair; gleams, gone; coast, cliff (Stanza 1)
Parallel Structure Example: The tide is full, the moon lies fair (Stanza 1); So various, so beautiful, so new (Stanza 4); Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain (Stanza 4)
Rhyming Words Examples: to-night, light; fair, night-air; stand, land; bay, spray; fling, bring; begin, in (Stanza 1)
Words Suggesting Rhythm Examples: draw back, return; Begin, and cease, then begin again (Stanza 1); turbid ebb and flow (Stanza 2)
Lines:
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal not of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery
...The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore...but now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
...Ah love let us be true
...[the world] hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. |
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Term
| "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" |
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Definition
Author: M. Arnold Genre: poem
Summary/Notes: The speaker in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" has made a virtue of estrangement. It must be remembered that the poet is not here seeking out the Carthusians from any innate sympathy for the ascetic life, but rather because he perceives an equivalence between his own isolation and that of the monks whose type of faith is equally anachronistic in the mid-nineteenth century. In analyzing his own situation, Arnold likens himself to a pagan lingering on after the decline of classical culture.* And for the humanist the monastic ideal does not offer an acceptable alternative to the spiritual void of a materialized society. He describes the monastery like a cold tomb: silent courts, stone carved basins cold, splashing icy fountains, ghostlike cowled forms brush by in gleaming white, and their cell beds "which shall their coffin be, when dead." He blames education for his loss in faith, "For rigorous teachers seized my youth, / And purged its faith, and trimmed its fire, / Showed me the high, white star of Truth, / There bade me gaze, and there aspire. / Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: / What dost though in this living tomb?"
The speaker continues to wander through the monastery he contemplates two worlds and how at once, he identifies with the monks solitude, but no their faith. At best, the anchorite and the latter-day Greek participate in a common exile:
Not as their friend, or child, I speak!
But as, on some far northern strand,
Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek
In pity and mournful awe might stand
Before some fallen Runic stone —
For both were faiths, and both are gone.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride —
I come to shed them at their side. [198/199]
"The Memorial Verses" of 1850 had celebrated the great romantic poets for their lonely but indomitable opposition to the spirit of the, times. In "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" Byron reappears. He is no longer in the company of Wordsworth and Goethe; his companion spirits now are Shelley and Senancour. Together they form a trio of defeated voices crying in the wilderness. If messages such as theirs fall on deaf ears, what recourse has the poet of succeeding times but to remain mute? The culminating image of these Stanzas speaks for a lost generation of artists, likening them to
children rear'd in shade
Beneath some old-world abbey wall,
Forgotten in a forest-glade,
And secret from the eyes of all.
The busy world calls, but the summons is to an alien life:
Fenced early in this cloistral.
round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer,
How should we grow in other ground?
How can we flower in foreign air?
— Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease;
And leave our desert to its peace!
Notes on Religion between Arnold and Hopkins (From Victorian Web):To conclude, both Gerard Manley Hopkins and Matthew Arnold found the condition of God’s ever-quickening retreat from contemporary life intolerable and both continued to fight for a reconnection with God. This was to be achieved through the reconnection of the individual with his fellow man in love and friendship, and also through rekindling an intimacy with the natural world. Poetry was, understandably, key to both poets. Arnold maintained an almost religious-like faith to the spiritual power and significance that poetry possessed whereas Hopkins found the poetic patterns he created were the most developed way to represent the omnipresence of Christ in the patterns of the world. Finally for Hopkins the embracing of Catholicism was essential. Arnold on the other hand, fought against everything that organised religion peddled through their “nonsense beliefs” and base worldly rationalisations. He maintained that the kingdom and wisdom of God was within each individual and it was through acting righteously that one could attain to a spiritual ease. It remains to be seen, however, how successful these attempts to revive God were for the two men. Matthew Arnold, coming under much criticism from his peers, was perhaps condemned to remain in a state of limbo. He wrote in his preface to God and the Bible (1875), “At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, they cannot do with it as it is” (Brett, 77). It would seem that Arnold was, however, unable to find a fitting and effective resolution. He describes himself as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, ll. 85-86). Hopkins on the other hand seems to be a poet and a man who succeeded in transcending quite completely the spiritual condition of his age. Even with the hesitation and the doubt of the so-called ‘Terrible Sonnets’ in his later years, Hopkins’ last words as he lay dying of typhoid fever on June 8, 1889, were, “I am happy, so happy” (Everett). Despite recognising the fallen state of man and nature, Hopkins continued to believe in the salvation of Christ and the ultimate joy of being reunited with God. He succeeds in the end in recovering for himself a world like that of Eden before the Fall, an accomplishment which, despite all his protestations and efforts, Arnold never wholly achieves. |
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Author: Carlyle Genre: ?
Summary: The novel is a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which translates as 'god-born devil-dung'), author of a tome entitled "Clothes: their Origin and Influence", but was actually a poioumenon. Teufelsdröckh's Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a skeptical English editor who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher. The work is, in part, a parody of Hegel, and of German Idealism more generally. However, Teufelsdröckh is also a literary device with which Carlyle can express difficult truths. Sartor Resartus was intended to be a new kind of book: simultaneously factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. It ironically commented on its own formal structure, while forcing the reader to confront the problem of where "truth" is to be found. In this respect it develops techniques used much earlier in Tristram Shandy, to which it refers. The imaginary "Philosophy of Clothes" holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over history, as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures, and faith-systems. The book contains a very Fichtean conception of religious conversion: based not on the acceptance of God but on the absolute freedom of the will to reject evil, and to construct meaning. This has led some writers to see Sartor Resartus as an early existentialist text.
Sartor Resartus had a limited success in the USA, where it was admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, influencing the development of New England Transcendentalism, and by Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick was strongly influenced by Carlyle. |
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Author: E. Bronte Genre: Combining domestic realism and gothic: domestic narrative combined with darkness. Uses violence (gothic conventions) in domestic space (dog attacking Catharine).
Characters: Heathcliff, Catherine, Edgar Linton, Nelly Dean, Lockwood, Young Catherine, Hareton Earnshaw, Linton Heathcliff, Hindley Earnshaw, Isabella Linton, Mr. Earnshaw, Mrs. Earnshaw, Joseph, Frances Earnshaw, Mr and Mrs. Linton, Zillah, Mr. Green.
Summary: I n the late winter months of 1801, a man named Lockwood rents a manor house called Thrushcross Grange in the isolated moor country of England. Here, he meets his dour landlord, Heathcliff, a wealthy man who lives in the ancient manor of Wuthering Heights, four miles away from the Grange. In this wild, stormy countryside, Lockwood asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him the story of Heathcliff and the strange denizens of Wuthering Heights. Nelly consents, and Lockwood writes down his recollections of her tale in his diary; these written recollections form the main part of Wuthering Heights.
Nelly remembers her childhood. As a young girl, she works as a servant at Wuthering Heights for the owner of the manor, Mr. Earnshaw, and his family. One day, Mr. Earnshaw goes to Liverpool and returns home with an orphan boy whom he will raise with his own children. At first, the Earnshaw children—a boy named Hindley and his younger sister Catherine—detest the dark-skinned Heathcliff. But Catherine quickly comes to love him, and the two soon grow inseparable, spending their days playing on the moors. After his wife’s death, Mr. Earnshaw grows to prefer Heathcliff to his own son, and when Hindley continues his cruelty to Heathcliff, Mr. Earnshaw sends Hindley away to college, keeping Heathcliff nearby.
Three years later, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights. He returns with a wife, Frances, and immediately seeks revenge on Heathcliff. Once an orphan, later a pampered and favored son, Heathcliff now finds himself treated as a common laborer, forced to work in the fields. Heathcliff continues his close relationship with Catherine, however. One night they wander to Thrushcross Grange, hoping to tease Edgar and Isabella Linton, the cowardly, snobbish children who live there. Catherine is bitten by a dog and is forced to stay at the Grange to recuperate for five weeks, during which time Mrs. Linton works to make her a proper young lady. By the time Catherine returns, she has become infatuated with Edgar, and her relationship with Heathcliff grows more complicated.
When Frances dies after giving birth to a baby boy named Hareton, Hindley descends into the depths of alcoholism, and behaves even more cruelly and abusively toward Heathcliff. Eventually, Catherine’s desire for social advancement prompts her to become engaged to Edgar Linton, despite her overpowering love for Heathcliff. Heathcliff runs away from Wuthering Heights, staying away for three years, and returning shortly after Catherine and Edgar’s marriage.
When Heathcliff returns, he immediately sets about seeking revenge on all who have wronged him. Having come into a vast and mysterious wealth, he deviously lends money to the drunken Hindley, knowing that Hindley will increase his debts and fall into deeper despondency. When Hindley dies, Heathcliff inherits the manor. He also places himself in line to inherit Thrushcross Grange by marrying Isabella Linton, whom he treats very cruelly. Catherine becomes ill, gives birth to a daughter, and dies. Heathcliff begs her spirit to remain on Earth—she may take whatever form she will, she may haunt him, drive him mad—just as long as she does not leave him alone. Shortly thereafter, Isabella flees to London and gives birth to Heathcliff’s son, named Linton after her family. She keeps the boy with her there.
Thirteen years pass, during which Nelly Dean serves as Catherine’s daughter’s nursemaid at Thrushcross Grange. Young Catherine is beautiful and headstrong like her mother, but her temperament is modified by her father’s gentler influence. Young Catherine grows up at the Grange with no knowledge of Wuthering Heights; one day, however, wandering through the moors, she discovers the manor, meets Hareton, and plays together with him. Soon afterwards, Isabella dies, and Linton comes to live with Heathcliff. Heathcliff treats his sickly, whining son even more cruelly than he treated the boy’s mother.
Three years later, Catherine meets Heathcliff on the moors, and makes a visit to Wuthering Heights to meet Linton. She and Linton begin a secret romance conducted entirely through letters. When Nelly destroys Catherine’s collection of letters, the girl begins sneaking out at night to spend time with her frail young lover, who asks her to come back and nurse him back to health. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Linton is pursuing Catherine only because Heathcliff is forcing him to; Heathcliff hopes that if Catherine marries Linton, his legal claim upon Thrushcross Grange—and his revenge upon Edgar Linton—will be complete. One day, as Edgar Linton grows ill and nears death, Heathcliff lures Nelly and Catherine back to Wuthering Heights, and holds them prisoner until Catherine marries Linton. Soon after the marriage, Edgar dies, and his death is quickly followed by the death of the sickly Linton. Heathcliff now controls both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. He forces Catherine to live at Wuthering Heights and act as a common servant, while he rents Thrushcross Grange to Lockwood.
Nelly’s story ends as she reaches the present. Lockwood, appalled, ends his tenancy at Thrushcross Grange and returns to London. However, six months later, he pays a visit to Nelly, and learns of further developments in the story. Although Catherine originally mocked Hareton’s ignorance and illiteracy (in an act of retribution, Heathcliff ended Hareton’s education after Hindley died), Catherine grows to love Hareton as they live together at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff becomes more and more obsessed with the memory of the elder Catherine, to the extent that he begins speaking to her ghost. Everything he sees reminds him of her. Shortly after a night spent walking on the moors, Heathcliff dies. Hareton and young Catherine inherit Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and they plan to be married on the next New Year’s Day. After hearing the end of the story, Lockwood goes to visit the graves of Catherine and Heathcliff.
Notes: Postmodern liken: lack of resolution at end, multiple frame narratives, unsure of truth, experimental in form and characters, distorted timeline, no sense of absolute reality, questionable religion, unsure afterlife.
--Setting:
Wuthering: blustery weather,
The moors: barren wildness, cannot cultivate land, untamable, parlous, dangerous. Heathcliff and Cathy connected to the moors in the landscape, urge to explore.
The grange: refined, house bigger, socialized, (Lintons)
Nelly: social frame, not emotional, invested in class system, moral, makes novel more palatable to victorian audience, told to upper class character,
Young Catharine & Ending: spirit of mother but level-headedness of Linton’s family (combines two characteristics of families) more quiet and deep love. Cathy becomes all four Linton, Healthcliff, Ernshaw. Triumph of domestic novel over the gothic? Go back to threshcross grange at end (leave WH to the ghosts). |
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Author: G. Eliot Genre: novel,
Characters: Mr. Bambridge, Dorthea Brooke, Arthur Brooke, Celia Brooke, Nicholas Bulstrode, Harriet Bulstrode, Elinor Cadwallader, Humphrey Cadwallader, Edward Casaubon, Sir James Chettam, Mr. Dagley, Camden Farebrother, Mrs. Farebrother, Winifred Farebrother, Peter Featherstone, Caleb Garth, Susan Garth, Mary Garth, Will Ladislaw, Tertius Lydgate, Captain Lydgate, Naumann, Miss Noble, Selina Plymdale, Ned Plymdale, John Raffles, Jashua Rigg Featherstone, Brothrop Trumbell, Walter Tyke, Rosamond Vincy, Fred Vincy, Walter Vincy, Lucy Vicny, Mr. Wrech.
Summary:Middlemarch is a highly unusual novel. Although it is primarily a Victorian novel, it has many characteristics typical to modern novels. Critical reaction to Eliot's masterpiece work was mixed. A common accusation leveled against it was its morbid, depressing tone. Many critics did not like Eliot's habit of scattering obscure literary and scientific allusions throughout the book. In their opinion a woman writer should not be so intellectual. Eliot hated the "silly, women novelists." In the Victorian era, women writers were generally confined to writing the stereotypical fantasies of the conventional romance fiction. Not only did Eliot dislike the constraints imposed on women's writing, she disliked the stories they were expected to produce. Her disdain for the tropes of conventional romance is apparent in her treatment of marriage between Rosamond and Lydgate. Both and Rosamond and Lydgate think of courtship and romance in terms of ideals taken directly from conventional romance. Another problem with such fiction is that marriage marks the end of the novel. Eliot goes through great effort to depict the realities of marriage.
Moreover, Eliot's many critics found Middlemarch to be too depressing for a woman writer. Eliot refused to bow to the conventions of a happy ending. An ill-advised marriage between two people who are inherently incompatible never becomes completely harmonious. In fact, it becomes a yoke. Such is the case in the marriages of Lydgate and Dorothea. Dorothea was saved from living with her mistake for her whole life because her elderly husband dies of a heart attack. Lydgate and Rosamond, on the other hand, married young.
Two major life choices govern the narrative of Middlemarch. One is marriage and the other is vocation. Eliot takes both choices very seriously. Short, romantic courtships lead to trouble, because both parties entertain unrealistic ideals of each other. They marry without getting to know one another. Marriages based on compatibility work better. Moreover, marriages in which women have a greater say also work better, such as the marriage between Fred and Mary. She tells him she will not marry if he becomes a clergyman. Her condition saves Fred from an unhappy entrapment in an occupation he doesn't like. Dorothea and Casaubon struggle continually because Casaubon attempts to make her submit to his control. The same applies in the marriage between Lydgate and Rosamond.
The choice of an occupation by which one earns a living is also an important element in the book. Eliot illustrates the consequences of making the wrong choice. She also details at great length the consequences of confining women to the domestic sphere alone. Dorothea's passionate ambition for social reform is never realized. She ends with a happy marriage, but there is some sense that her end as merely a wife and mother is a waste. Rosamond's shrewd capabilities degenerate into vanity and manipulation. She is restless within the domestic sphere, and her stifled ambitions only result in unhappiness for herself and her husband.
Eliot's refusal to conform to happy endings demonstrates the fact that Middlemarch is not meant to be entertainment. She wants to deal with real-life issues, not the fantasy world to which women writers were often confined. Her ambition was to create a portrait of the complexity of ordinary human life: quiet tragedies, petty character failings, small triumphs, and quiet moments of dignity. The complexity of her portrait of provincial society is reflected in the complexity of individual characters. The contradictions in the character of the individual person are evident in the shifting sympathies of the reader. One moment, we pity Casaubon, the next we judge him critically.
Middlemarch stubbornly refuses to behave like a typical novel. The novel is a collection of relationships between several major players in the drama, but no single one person occupies the center of the action. No one person can represent provincial life. It is necessary to include multiple people. Eliot's book is fairly experimental for its time in form and content, particularly because she was a woman writer.
Themes
The Imperfection of Marriage
Most characters in Middlemarch marry for love rather than obligation, yet marriage still appears negative and unromantic. Marriage and the pursuit of it are central concerns in Middlemarch, but unlike in many novels of the time, marriage is not considered the ultimate source of happiness. Two examples are the failed marriages of Dorothea and Lydgate. Dorothea’s marriage fails because of her youth and of her disillusions about marrying a much older man, while Lydgate’s marriage fails because of irreconcilable personalities. Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode also face a marital crisis due to his inability to tell her about the past, and Fred Vincy and Mary Garth also face a great deal of hardship in making their union. As none of the marriages reach a perfect fairytale ending, Middlemarch offers a clear critique of the usual portrayal of marriage as romantic and unproblematic.
The Harshness of Social Expectations
The ways in which people conduct themselves and how the community judges them are closely linked in Middlemarch. When the expectations of the social community are not met, individuals often receive harsh public criticism. For example, the community judges Ladislaw harshly because of his mixed pedigree. Fred Vincy is almost disowned because he chooses to go against his family’s wishes and not join the clergy. It is only when Vincy goes against the wishes of the community by foregoing his education that he finds true love and happiness. Finally, Rosamond’s need for gentility and the desire to live up to social standards becomes her downfall. In contrast, Dorothea’s decision to act against the rules of society allows her to emerge as the most respectable character in the end.
Self-Determination vs. Chance
In Middlemarch, self-determination and chance are not opposing forces but, rather, a complicated balancing act. When characters strictly adhere to a belief in either chance or self-determination, bad things happen. When Rosamond goes against the wishes of her husband and writes a letter asking for money from his relative, her act of self-determination puts Lydgate in an unsavory and tense situation coupled with a refusal to help. On the flip side, when Fred Vincy gambles away his money, relying solely on chance, he falls into debt and drags with him the people who trust him. Only when he steps away from gambling and decides not to go into the clergy do good things begin to happen for him. In particular, the character of Farebrother demonstrates the balance between fate and self-determination. This balance is exemplified in his educated gamble in the game of whist. Through a combination of skill and chance, he is able to win more often than not. His character strikes a balance between chance and his role in determining that fate. The complexity of the tension between self-determination and chance is exemplary of the way in which the novel as a whole tends to look at events from many vantage points with no clear right or wrong, no clear enemy or hero.
Motifs
Epigraphs
Each chapter begins with a small quotation or a few lines of verse known as an epigraph.
These epigraphs work as a way of summarizing the following chapter and moving the plot forward. They also work to place Middlemarch into a larger canon of literary works, as Eliot chooses quotes a variety of writers such as Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, and William Blake. Eliot was charged with being too intellectual for a woman author in part because of the learned nature of her chosen quotations.
Gossip and Speaking for Others
Often characters, especially characters of opposite genders, do not communicate to each other directly, instead using other characters to speak on their behalf. Carrying messages, sending “diplomats,” and not speaking for themselves draws attention to the weblike community of Middlemarch. Part of this web functions to maintain an intricate social web, but it also works to avoid direct communication. Gossip, another form of speaking for another person, plays an important part in the novel as it is often how information is conveyed. Characters frequently use the fact that the information will eventually come around to avoid direct conversation.
Debt and Borrowing Money
Debt appears throughout Middlemarch, and money often indicates elements of a character’s personality. The plot is driven by characters worrying about money or asking others for money. Fred Vincy must ask several people for loans, Lydgate incurs serious debt due to his failure to manage money and his wife Rosamond’s cultured tastes, and Raffles’s constant begging and blackmailing for money indicates his threatening role. On the other hand, Mary Garth’s refusal to take money from the dying Featherstone proves her good, honest nature. The exchange of money and the passing of debts ties the characters together in an economic subtext.
Symbols
The Portrait of Ladislaw’s Grandmother
A miniature portrait of Ladislaw’s grandmother appears several times in the text and is symbolic of Dorothea’s future choice of giving up wealth for love. Ladislaw’s grandmother also gave up wealth to be with the man she loved. The portrait hangs in Dorothea’s bedroom at Casaubon’s house, and Dorothea often recalls the portrait when she thinks of Ladislaw. When Ladislaw comes to say goodbye to Dorothea in a tense conversation filled with romantic subtext, Dorothea offers him the portrait as a parting gift. When Ladislaw refuses it saying he has no need for the past, he indicates that the chance they will end up together remains.
Raffles
The character of Raffles symbolizes the ominous return of the past. Most often he appears as a lone black figure walking down the country roads and is described as a man of ill-repute and questionable background, associating the danger of the past with the unsavory lower class. His repeated appearance disrupts the sanctity of Middlemarch, for he ties together the dark pasts of Bulstrode and Ladislaw. His death fuels neighborhood gossip that almost forces Ladislaw from town, causes Bulstrode’s downfall, and brings about the climax of the novel. |
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| "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," Culture and Anarchy (chp 1-4) |
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Definition
Author: M. Arnold Genre: Literary Criticism, Non-Fiction
The Function of Criticism at the Present Time Key Points and Terms:
Critical/Creative Power: Two Key components “Power of the man and the power of the moment”
Great poets have “sufficient materials” (also called “data”) or ideas that are created by critical observations of the world and life in which they live and the ability “to see the object as in itself it really is.” However, the gift of “creative literary genius” is not in discovering new ideas, but synthesizing and being “happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas.” Thus, the poet must be aware of the moment and the world to “make an intellectual situation” that feeds the creative power. (589)
Seeing things as they really are + awareness/knowledge of the moment x intellectual ideas = creative literary genius
Epoch of concentration: Current of Culture
Arnold uses “current” as in belonging to the present time (588), but also as a forceful flow that depicts society and culture as changing and alive. Great poets live in this “current of ideas” (589) and begin to direct the cultural undercurrents of society and maintain a sense of control over their world: “The way in which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of things, and become in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, should depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it” (591). Example: Burke lives by ideas (591-2). Also identifies this trait as “un-English;” contrasts with England as the Epoch of Expansion (592).
The Anti-Critic:
Polemics: Critics are too concerned with winning the debate: “A polemical practical criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice” (593).
Practical considerations: “practical view of things” the practical man described on 595: only look at one side of something, narrow-minded, swept away by every day life.
Philistine: “An uneducated or unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace or material; a person who is not a connoisseur” (OED)
Critic should “keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things” (595).
The Ideal Critic:
“Free play of the mind” or curiosity: instinctual inclination to “know the best that is known and thought in the world” (592), to seek out the value of knowledge without other considerations.
Disinterestedness: keeping aloof from the practical concerns of the world (592), also be able to distinguish between personal taste and judgment.
“Change of mind is not inconsistency:” Critics should be allowed to change their mind, have flexibility.
Propagate Fresh Knowledge: English critic should read foreign books and expand their frame of reference (598).
Critic should try and posses one great literature distinct from his own and have a “joyful sense of creative activity” (599).
End Goal: Create a better civilization and change the world
“Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas...Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world all the better for maturing a little...that will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost fails to grasp” (598).
The Study of Poetry Key Points and Terms:
Function of Poetry:
Poetry “interprets life for us, consoles us, [and] sustains us” (599). Without poetry science will be incomplete: poetry supplies us with knowledge about life, and poetry is “thought and art in one” (600). Poetry has a high standard and high destiny. Poetry possesses a criticism of life. Finally, the best poetry has the “power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can” (600).
three ways to interpret poetry:
Historical Estimate: how the poem may count on the grounds of historical background (fallacious).
Personal Estimate: (affective fallacy) what the poem may mean to us personally (also fallacious).
Real Estimate: We should determine how a poet “may count to us really” (600). We will benefit by clearly feeling and deeply enjoying the real excellence of poetry that we “come to know [and] we always return” (601).
the very highest poetical quality:
Great Poets depend on the “reality of a poet’s classic character” (601), their work has the highest character of truth and seriousness and also possess an accent of high beauty, power, and worth, which is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement, marking its style and manner. Openly states that he cannot define or explain these terms for it will only “darken the question [instead of] clearing it” (603). Uses Shakespeare, Milton, and Homer as examples of the very high poetical genius.
“It is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness.” (588) |
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Term
| "The Cry of the Children" |
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Definition
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem entitled "The Cry of the Children" was written at the time "when government investigations had exposed the exploitation of children employed in coal mines and factories." In 1842–43, a parliamentary commission investigated the conditions of the employment of children in mines and factories; the commission's report was written by R. H. Horne, a friend and collaborator of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861). Many of the details of Browning's 1843 poem are taken from the report of the commission. Since writers tend to write about things that they know or firmly believe, it comes to no surprise that Elizabeth would write about the "appalling use of child labor," especially at this crucial time in history. For instance, in line 37 of the poem, Browning writes, "'True,' say the children, "it may happen that we die before our time;" indicates that the children know that what is happening is wrong and will not only put them in danger, but cause their early death. The children toiled away for long periods of time and died from exhaustion, lack of food, illness, breathing the fumes from the coal mines or getting hurt at the factory. Without medical attention, the weak faded from existence. The poem does have negative imagery; however, it does have positive images as well. For example, "With your ear down, little Alice never cries; could we see her face, be sure we should not know her, for the smile has time for growing in her eyes," clearly depicts that although this little girl named Alice is dead, she is happier. She is no longer suffering, she is not laboring away under harsh conditions; this little girl, like so many before her are now free from the mistreatment that they endured. The children also say, "'and merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in the shroud by the kirk-chime. it is good when it happens,' say the children, That we die before our time.'"
The poem starts with a quote from Medea: "Alas, my children, why do you look at me?" Interestingly, these are the words that Medea says to her children before she strangles them, indicating England's complicity in the children's deaths.
Throughout the poem, the children speak as one--their identity has merged, perhaps indicating their lack of true identity in the factory system. Strikingly, the only children directly named, Alice, is dead. It is only in death that she regains some semblance of humanity.
The poem starts with the crisis: "Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?"
She describes all the other young things ("lambs, birds, fawns, flowers) outside playing, where they naturally belong, but the children are not, ironically noting: "They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free."
The poem provides stark imagery of the inequality in the mining systems and factories: They look up with their pale and sunken faces,
And their looks are sad to see,
For the man's hoary anguish draws and presses
Down the cheeks of infancy"
Already, the children are "dreary" and "weak". The machinery of industrailization, with its "cold metallic motion" and "iron wheels" are "grinding life down from its mark". Human warmth is gone. The children, who only the first two words of the "Our Father" repeat it over and over again, beseeching him to take them home:
"But, no!" say the children, weeping faster,
"He is speechless as a stone.
And they tell us, of His image is the master
Who commands us to work on.
The narrator notes that they are slaves, martyrs, " worn, as if with age," and demands that the public "Let them weep!" After all, they have a right to and it is the only comfort left to them. She demands:
"How long," they say, "how long, O cruel nation,
Will you stand, to move the world, on a child's heart, —
Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation,
And tread onward to your throne amid the mart?
Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper,
And your purple shows your path!
But the child's sob in the silence curses deeper
Than the strong man in his wrath."
The poem paved the way for the Factory Acts. |
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Definition
Author: Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Genre: Poem
The poem describes the destructive nature to the artistic process through the allegory of Pan, the half-goat God and his invention of the Pan flute. according to the legend, Syrinx was a lovely water-nymph of Arcadia, daughter of Landon, the river-god. As she was returning from the hunt one day, Pan met her. To escape from his importunities, the fair nymph ran away and didn't stop to hear his compliments. He pursued from Mount Lycaeum until she came to her sisters who immediately changed her into a reed. When the air blew through the reeds, it produced a plaintive melody. The god, still infatuated, took some of the reeds, because he could not identify which reed she became, and cut seven pieces (or according to some versions, nine), joined them side by side in gradually decreasing lengths, and formed the musical instrument bearing the name of his beloved Syrinx. Henceforth Pan was seldom seen without it.
The poem starts in media res, as Pan is causing destruction in the river while picking his reeds:
What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
As he breaks the reed, the poet describes the destruction of "broken lillies", fleeing dragon flies as Pan "hacked and hewed as a great god can". The reed itself arguably functions as a symbol of the poet (though it could stand in for all of humanity):
He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)
Then drew the pith, like the heart of a man,
Steadily from the outside ring,
And notched the poor dry empty thing
In holes, as he sat by the river.
As he plays, Pan laughs, and the speaker repeats the fact as if in disbelief "(Laughed while he sat by the river)". Pan remarks,
""The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river."
Destruction is inherent in creation. But as Pan plays it tune is "sweet"--"piercing sweet" and "blinding sweet"--and the speaker seems to experience something of a combination of Romantic ectasy and agony at the same time from his music. The art itself arrests destruction:
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Still, the speaker is mixed as to the cost of art in the final stanza:
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain—
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.
The final question seems to be, is it worth it?
THe poem can alternately be ultilized as a commentary on the commodification of women by male artists. |
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Term
| "Hiram Powers's 'Greek Slave'" |
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Definition
Author: EBB; Genre: Sonnet
Subject: The Greek Slave is a marble statue in Raby Castle, carved in Florence by American sculptor Hiram Powers in 1844. Copies of the statue were displayed in a number of venues around Great Britain and the United States, and it quickly became one of Powers' most famous and most popular works. The statue depicts a young woman, nude, bound in chains; in one hand she holds a small cross on a chain. The title suggests that she is some sort of captive, and is on display for sale as a sexual object in an unknown market.
Poem: They say Ideal beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien Image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her
(That passionless perfection which he lent her,
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man's crimes in different lands
With man's ideal sense. Pierce to the centre,
Art's fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world. Appeal, fair stone,
From God's pure heights of beauty against man's wrong!
Catch up in thy divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown
The poem can be used to describe the power of poetry to effect change, show the moral away, and as a commentary on the slave trade. |
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Author: Christina Rossetti, associated with the PRB-movement, though she was not an official member. Genre: Poem; published: 1862.
In a letter to her publisher, Rossetti claimed that the poem, which features remarkably sexual imagery, was not meant for children. However, in public Rossetti often stated that the poem was intended for children, and went on to write many children's poems.
Plot: "Goblin Market" is about two close sisters, Laura and Lizzie, as well as the goblin men to whom the title refers, and another girl named Jeanie.
Although the sisters seem to be quite young, they live by themselves in a house, and are accustomed to draw water every evening from a stream. As the poem begins, twilight is falling, and as usual the sisters hear the calls from the goblin merchants, who sell fruits in fantastic abundance, variety and savour. On this evening, Laura lingers at the stream after her sister has left for home. Wanting fruit but having no money, the impulsive Laura offers a lock of her hair and "a tear more rare than pearl."
Laura gorges on the delicious fruit in a sort of bacchic frenzy, then comes to her senses and, after picking up one of the seeds, returns home. Lizzie, waiting at home, and "full of wise upbraidings," reminds Laura about the cautionary tale of Jeanie, another girl who, having likewise partaken of the goblin men's fruits, died just at the beginning of winter, after a long decline.
Night has by then fallen, and the sisters go to sleep in their shared bed.
The next day, as Laura and Lizzie go about their work in the house, Laura dreamily longs for the coming evening's meeting with the goblin men. But at the stream that evening, as she strains to hear the usual goblin chants and cries, Laura discovers to her horror that, although Lizzie still hears the goblins' voices, she no longer can.
Unable to buy more of the forbidden fruit and sickening for the lack of it, Laura falls into a slow physical deterioration and depression. As winter approaches, Laura pines away and no longer does her household work. One day she remembers the saved seed and plants it, but it bears nothing.
Weeks and months pass, and finally Lizzie realizes that Laura is on the verge of death. Lizzie resolves to visit the goblin men to buy some of their fruit, hoping thereby to soothe Laura's pain. Carrying a silver penny, Lizzie goes down to the brook and is greeted in a friendly way by the goblins. But their attitudes turn malicious when they realize Lizzie wants to pay with mere money and to carry the fruits home with her. Enraged, the goblins pummel and assault Lizzie, trying to make her eat the fruits. In the process, they drench the brave girl in fruit juice and pulp.
At last, the goblins give up and Lizzie runs home, hoping that Laura will eat and drink the juice from her body. The weakened sister does so, then undergoes a violent transformation of such intensity that her life seems to hang in the balance.
The next morning, though, Laura has returned to her old self, both physically and mentally. As the last stanza attests, both Laura and Lizzie live to tell their children of the evils of the goblins' fruits—and the awesome powers of sisterly love.
Criticisms: Since the 1970s, critics have tended to view Goblin Market" as an expression of Rossetti's feminist (or proto-feminist) politics. Some critics suggest the poem is about feminine sexuality and its relation to Victorian social mores. In addition to its clear allusions to Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit, and temptation, there is much in the poem that seems overtly sexual, such as when Lizzie, going to buy fruit from the goblins, considers her dead friend Jeanie, "Who should have been a bride; / But who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died", and lines like "Lizzie uttered not a word;/ Would not open lip from lip/ Lest they should cram a mouthful in;/ But laughed in heart to feel the drip/ Of juice that syruped all her face,/ And lodged in dimples of her chin,/ And streaked her neck which quaked like curd."
The poem's attitude toward this temptation seems ambiguous, since the happy ending offers the possibility of redemption for Laura, while typical Victorian portrayals of the "fallen woman" ended in the fallen woman's death. It is worth noting that although the historical record is lacking, Rossetti apparently began working at Highgate Penitentiary for fallen women shortly after composing "Goblin Market" in the spring of 1859.
According to Antony Harrison of North Carolina State University, Jerome McGann reads the poem as a criticism of Victorian marriage markets and conveys "the need for an alternative social order". For Sandra Gilbert, the fruit represents Victorian women's exclusion from the world of art.[1] Other scholars – most notably Herbert Tucker – view the poem as a critique on the rise of advertising in pre-capitalist England, with the goblins utilising clever marketing tactics to seduce. Laura J. Hartman, among others, has pointed out the parallels between Laura's experience and the experience of drug addiction.
Form: The poem uses an irregular rhyme scheme, often using couplets or ABAB rhymes, but also repeating some rhymes many times in succession, or allowing long gaps between a word and its partner. The metre is also irregular, typically (though not always) keeping four or five stresses, in varying feet, per line. The lines below show the varied stress patterns, as well as an interior rhyme (grey/decay) picked up by the end-rhyme with "away". The initial line quoted here, "bright", rhymes with "night" a full seven lines earlier.
Important Lines:
The Goblin's refrain:
"MORNING and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:"
"Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
""O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men."
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
"Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,"
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One called her proud,
Cross-grained, uncivil;
Their tones waxed loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together,
"For there is no friend like a sister,
In calm or stormy weather,
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands." |
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Author: C. Rossetti; Genre: Poem
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel — every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more or less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
In her poem, "In an Artist's studio," Christina Rossetti responds to the tendency of Victorian poets to objectify women in their experiment with aestheticism. Her poem recalls Robert Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" in which a male artist pretends to possess his estranged wife by having her pose as his model. This poem also recalls Pygmalian of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a misogynist sculptor who chisels the perfect female and becomes so enamored with his own creation that he asks the gods to bring her to life. Like the artist of Rossetti's poem, Pygmalian essentially falls in love with himself and his own projections and ideas about women. In Rossetti's poem, the artist conceives of his female subject as a passive, emotionless object which he can mold to fit his own fantasies and projections. The description of the female subject is consistent with the stereotypical Victorian view of female patience, passivity and selflessness. The image of the artist "feeding" upon his subject's face refers to the male desire to possess women as wholly aesthetic objects. |
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Author: Christina Rossetti; Genre: Poem
Lines:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
Perhaps some languid summer day,
WHen drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
Commentary: the poem is playful in tone; the poet has a secret, and she won't tell it; in fact, she won't even confirm that she has a secret. The poet also confesses to wearing masks, though she tells us it is a neccisty to keep warm in winter. She hints that she might reveal more of herself as the weather warms, though she still distrusts Spring as too expansive.
We find the clue to understanding this enigmatic poem in its self-parodic tone. The extraordinary fact here is that the work builds a thoroughly engaging relationship between the speaker and reader out of nothing substantial. No events transpire or are described, and even the "secret" has no extrinsic reference. The reader's curiosity and affection for the speaker are generated entirely by means of a fictive enigma that compels our interest. The poem thus becomes a commentary upon itself, upon the "secret" power of art. It also becomes, on an admittedly small scale, an exemplification of artistic perfection, a self-sufficing artifact. But also, on a final note, she is probably also critiquing her brother's over-zealous love affair with Lizzie Siddal, which she probably deemed hypocritical. |
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| "The Wreck of the Deutschland" |
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The Wreck of the Deutschland is a long poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins with Christian themes, composed in 1875 and 1876, though not published until 1918.[1] The poem depicts the shipwreck of the SS Deutschland. Among those killed in the shipwreck were five Franciscan nuns forced to leave Germany by the Falk Laws; the poem is dedicated to their memory.
In the 90 years since the poem's publication, it has attracted considerable critical attention,[2] and is often considered Hopkins' masterpiece because of its length, ambition, and use of sprung rhythm and instress. |
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"The Windhover" is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written on May 30, 1877,[1] but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins dedicated the poem "to Christ our Lord".
"Windhover" is another name for the Common Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus). The name refers to the bird's ability to hover in midair while hunting prey.
Complete Text
To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Summary
The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or “caught”) one of these birds in the midst of its hovering. The bird strikes the poet as the darling (“minion”) of the morning, the crown prince (“dauphin”) of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled colors of dawn. It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with steady control like a rider whose hold on the rein is sure and firm. In the poet’s imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly reined in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and suspended in an ecstatic moment of concentrated energy. Then, in the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater balancing forces as he makes a turn. The bird, first matching the wind’s force in order to stay still, now “rebuff[s] the big wind” with its forward propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his own heart stir, or lurch forward out of “hiding,” as it were—moved by “the achieve of, the mastery of” the bird’s performance.
The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird’s movement and an injunction to the poet’s own heart. The “beauty,” “valour,” and “act” (like “air,” “pride,” and “plume”) “here buckle.” “Buckle” is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature’s being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the “buckling” of the knees), in which all parts subordinate themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a unification takes place. At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order as the glory of Christ’s life and crucifixion, though not as grand.
Form
The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging: the bird’s perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are inseparable. Note, too, how important the “-ing” ending is to the poem’s rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives, and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird’s motion.
“The Windhover” is written in “sprung rhythm,” a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird’s pausing and racing. Listen to the hovering rhythm of “the rolling level underneath him steady air,” and the arched brightness of “and striding high there.” The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on Christ.
Commentary
This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins’s sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections. Part of the beauty of the poem lies in the way Hopkins integrates his masterful description of a bird’s physical feat with an account of his own heart’s response at the end of the first stanza. However, the sestet has puzzled many readers because it seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced in the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover’s motion now give way to the phrase “my chevalier”—a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback, to which the poem’s subtitle (or dedication) gives the reader a clue. The transition between octave and sestet comes with the statement in lines 9-11 that the natural (“brute”) beauty of the bird in flight is but a spark in comparison with the glory of Christ, whose grandeur and spiritual power are “a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous.”
The first sentence of the sestet can read as either descriptive or imperative, or both. The idea is that something glorious happens when a being’s physical body, will, and action are all brought into accordance with God’s will, culminating in the perfect self-expression. Hopkins, realizing that his own heart was “in hiding,” or not fully committed to its own purpose, draws inspiration from the bird’s perfectly self-contained, self-reflecting action. Just as the hovering is the action most distinctive and self-defining for the windhover, so spiritual striving is man’s most essential aspect. At moments when humans arrive at the fullness of their moral nature, they achieve something great. But that greatness necessarily pales in comparison with the ultimate act of self-sacrifice performed by Christ, which nevertheless serves as our model and standard for our own behavior.
The final tercet within the sestet declares that this phenomenon is not a “wonder,” but rather an everyday occurrence—part of what it means to be human. This striving, far from exhausting the individual, serves to bring out his or her inner glow—much as the daily use of a metal plow, instead of wearing it down, actually polishes it—causing it to sparkle and shine. The suggestion is that there is a glittering, luminous core to every individual, which a concerted religious life can expose. The subsequent image is of embers breaking open to reveal a smoldering interior. Hopkins words this image so as to relate the concept back to the Crucifixion: The verb “gash” (which doubles for “gush”) suggests the wounding of Christ’s body and the shedding of his “gold-vermilion” blood. |
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| “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire . . . ” |
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Complete Text
Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.
Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
Summary
The poem opens with a rejection of Despair, that “carrion comfort.” To “feast” on despair, Hopkins avers, would be like eating something dead and vile. Nor will the poet unravel his “last strands” of humanity by giving up hope, though he is close to hopelessness and the strands are already “slack.” He makes the feeble but determined assertion “I can,” and then goes on to explore what that assertion might mean, what basic action or spiritual gesture might serve to counteract despair: doing “something” that expresses hope, even if it is as minimal as wishing for morning or as negative as deciding not to kill himself.
Having skirted the pit of despair, the poet questions God about the suffering that has drawn him so close to hopelessness. He asks why God would, so roughly, with his powerful right foot, “rock” his world and send him writhing. Why would God swipe at him with the dull and indiscriminate blow of a “lionlimb”? Why, then, maliciously look at him lying there with “bruised bones” and further torment him with gales of “tempest,” while he cowers, “heaped there,” wanting to escape but exhausted and with nowhere to run?
Then the poet attempts an answer. The “tempest” was actually a harvest wind, shucking the “chaff” from the wheat to expose the kernels of goodness concealed within. In patient acceptance of divine vengeance, the poet has “kissed the rod” of God’s punishment—or rather, he corrects himself, he has kissed the hand that held that rod. Since then he has suffered “toil” and “coil,” yet the act of acceptance has also brought a resurgence of optimism, mounting gradually to a “cheer.” But this word prompts another round of questioning (“Cheer whom though?”); now that he knows that God’s rough treatment of him was for his own good, should he now applaud God for having treated him so? Or does he congratulate himself for having struggled, for having met God directly? Or both? The speaker, however far he has come from the brink of despair, is perhaps still trying to come to terms with that dark “year” of suffering in which he struggled with God.
Commentary
Hopkins wrote this sonnet at a time when he had just emerged from a long period of depression and inner anguish. The poem is carefully designed to surprise the reader and dramatize the moment of recognition that the speaker experiences in coming to terms with his own spiritual struggle. The interpretation of the poem depends in large measure on how one reads the transitions between the poem’s three sections (the first quatrain, the second quatrain, and the sestet). In particular, ascertaining the poem’s chronology can be troubling, in part because Hopkins withholds an important piece of chronological information until line 10, when the poem first shifts into the past tense. In the second stanza, there is a disturbing immediacy in the poet’s urgent protests against God’s unrelenting persecution; only in line 10 does the poet reveal that the trial has already passed. In light of this recognition, the reader must reevaluate the preceding lines. What is the order of cause and effect? Why does Hopkins use the present tense for the past events of the poem?
The order of the events described in the first two quatrains seems to be reversed in the telling. Presumably, the struggle against despair in lines one through four provided a sequel to the violence depicted in lines five through eight. Yet the fact that this second quatrain is written in interrogative form brings it into the present of the poem. It both tells of past events and asks about their meaning from a retrospective vantage (as if from the present). In this interpretation, the poem contains two different narrative lines superimposed on one another. The first deals with a “now done” crisis of suffering and resistance, in which the poet struggled in futility against God. The second “plot” takes place later than the first but is also, one hopes, nearing consummation via the thinking processes that have contributed to the making of the poem itself. This plot is the poet’s attempt to understand the initial crisis—and it is this plot that takes place in the “present” of the poem. In this latter narrative, the content of the second quatrain does temporally follow that of the first; it constitutes the (partly self-pitying) questions that still remain even after the poet has decided not to give up hope. These four lines mark the problem of understanding still at hand for the poet, a problem that will then be resolved in the sestet. There, the poet abandons the tone of impassioned self-protection and seeks theological explanations for suffering and spiritual struggle.
Another chronological ambiguity centers on line 10. One might assume that the “toil” and “coil” Hopkins has experienced since he “kissed the rod” are precisely this struggle for understanding, after the experience of complete abjection before God forced his spirit into submission. It is out of that second struggle, in which he acknowledges both God’s and his own roles in the earlier, more wrenching struggle, that his heart is able to recover. On the other hand, we might read the phrase “since (seems) I kissed the rod” differently. In light of that puzzling parenthetical “seems,” one might decide that all the violence of the second quatrain has taken place after Hopkins thought he had made his peace with God. In that case, the crux of the theological problem would lie with the inscrutability of a God who would inflict such suffering on even Hopkins, a priest who had devoted his life to God’s service.
There is also a way of reading the chronology of the poem more continuously. The punishments in the second quatrain are perhaps inflicted by God in retaliation against the poet’s (insufficient) first resolution against despair. In this reading, the poem would imply that the conclusions in the first stanza are unacceptable to God—the decision to “not choose not to be” might seem willful and self-regarding, as compared to the humility and prostration before God’s will at which the poet afterward arrives. In this reading, the renewal of questioning in the last lines might look like a further lapse, as the struggle for understanding continues in the poet’s own heart even though he ought to stand in total acceptance of God’s will.
From the beginning, the poem works to contrast active and passive behavior, and to weigh the two against each other. Despair is a kind of extreme passivity, and a serious sin in Christian doctrine. Hopkins graphically dramatizes the difference between this despair on the one hand and some hopeful spiritual activity on the other. In the eighth line we see the speaker as a pile of bones lying “heaped there,” dehumanized, cowering, panicked, and struggling desperately for survival. The sestet depicts the slow emergence from out of that heap, like an animal rising into a human being: lapping tentatively at strength as though it were restorative water, then seizing joy surreptitiously and, finally, more willfully—with a “laugh” and a “cheer.” This is the purified heart rising out of the pile of bones, with more agency than in the foregoing image of the wheat being stripped of its chaff by a fortuitous wind. In the self-pitying language of the second quatrain, the speaker was a passive victim. However, in the later assessment, he decides that he too might deserve some credit for having battled it out with God, even if he felt comparatively helpless at the time. The image of kissing the rod, likewise, involves an act of self-subordination that is nevertheless an act, and not perfectly passive. Not only has this act resulted in a personal purification, but it has also given the speaker something else: a certain measure of joy or contentment. |
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Author: Charlotte Bronte; Genre: Novel, Bildungsroman, Gothic Novel
Plot: J ane Eyre is a young orphan being raised by Mrs. Reed, her cruel, wealthy aunt. A servant named Bessie provides Jane with some of the few kindnesses she receives, telling her stories and singing songs to her. One day, as punishment for fighting with her bullying cousin John Reed, Jane’s aunt imprisons Jane in the red-room, the room in which Jane’s Uncle Reed died. While locked in, Jane, believing that she sees her uncle’s ghost, screams and faints. She wakes to find herself in the care of Bessie and the kindly apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who suggests to Mrs. Reed that Jane be sent away to school. To Jane’s delight, Mrs. Reed concurs.
Once at the Lowood School, Jane finds that her life is far from idyllic. The school’s headmaster is Mr. Brocklehurst, a cruel, hypocritical, and abusive man. Brocklehurst preaches a doctrine of poverty and privation to his students while using the school’s funds to provide a wealthy and opulent lifestyle for his own family. At Lowood, Jane befriends a young girl named Helen Burns, whose strong, martyrlike attitude toward the school’s miseries is both helpful and displeasing to Jane. A massive typhus epidemic sweeps Lowood, and Helen dies of consumption. The epidemic also results in the departure of Mr. Brocklehurst by attracting attention to the insalubrious conditions at Lowood. After a group of more sympathetic gentlemen takes Brocklehurst’s place, Jane’s life improves dramatically. She spends eight more years at Lowood, six as a student and two as a teacher.
After teaching for two years, Jane yearns for new experiences. She accepts a governess position at a manor called Thornfield, where she teaches a lively French girl named Adèle. The distinguished housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax presides over the estate. Jane’s employer at Thornfield is a dark, impassioned man named Rochester, with whom Jane finds herself falling secretly in love. She saves Rochester from a fire one night, which he claims was started by a drunken servant named Grace Poole. But because Grace Poole continues to work at Thornfield, Jane concludes that she has not been told the entire story. Jane sinks into despondency when Rochester brings home a beautiful but vicious woman named Blanche Ingram. Jane expects Rochester to propose to Blanche. But Rochester instead proposes to Jane, who accepts almost disbelievingly.
The wedding day arrives, and as Jane and Mr. Rochester prepare to exchange their vows, the voice of Mr. Mason cries out that Rochester already has a wife. Mason introduces himself as the brother of that wife—a woman named Bertha. Mr. Mason testifies that Bertha, whom Rochester married when he was a young man in Jamaica, is still alive. Rochester does not deny Mason’s claims, but he explains that Bertha has gone mad. He takes the wedding party back to Thornfield, where they witness the insane Bertha Mason scurrying around on all fours and growling like an animal. Rochester keeps Bertha hidden on the third story of Thornfield and pays Grace Poole to keep his wife under control. Bertha was the real cause of the mysterious fire earlier in the story. Knowing that it is impossible for her to be with Rochester, Jane flees Thornfield.
Penniless and hungry, Jane is forced to sleep outdoors and beg for food. At last, three siblings who live in a manor alternatively called Marsh End and Moor House take her in. Their names are Mary, Diana, and St. John (pronounced “Sinjin”) Rivers, and Jane quickly becomes friends with them. St. John is a clergyman, and he finds Jane a job teaching at a charity school in Morton. He surprises her one day by declaring that her uncle, John Eyre, has died and left her a large fortune: 20,000 pounds. When Jane asks how he received this news, he shocks her further by declaring that her uncle was also his uncle: Jane and the Riverses are cousins. Jane immediately decides to share her inheritance equally with her three newfound relatives.
St. John decides to travel to India as a missionary, and he urges Jane to accompany him—as his wife. Jane agrees to go to India but refuses to marry her cousin because she does not love him. St. John pressures her to reconsider, and she nearly gives in. However, she realizes that she cannot abandon forever the man she truly loves when one night she hears Rochester’s voice calling her name over the moors. Jane immediately hurries back to Thornfield and finds that it has been burned to the ground by Bertha Mason, who lost her life in the fire. Rochester saved the servants but lost his eyesight and one of his hands. Jane travels on to Rochester’s new residence, Ferndean, where he lives with two servants named John and Mary. At Ferndean, Rochester and Jane rebuild their relationship and soon marry. At the end of her story, Jane writes that she has been married for ten blissful years and that she and Rochester enjoy perfect equality in their life together. She says that after two years of blindness, Rochester regained sight in one eye and was able to behold their first son at his birth.
Characters: Jane Eyre (lthough she meets with a series of individuals who threaten her autonomy, Jane repeatedly succeeds at asserting herself and maintains her principles of justice, human dignity, and morality. She also values intellectual and emotional fulfillment. Her strong belief in gender and social equality challenges the Victorian prejudices against women and the poor.); Edward Rochester (ochester is unconventional, ready to set aside polite manners, propriety, and consideration of social class in order to interact with Jane frankly and directly. He is rash and impetuous and has spent much of his adult life roaming about Europe in an attempt to avoid the consequences of his youthful indiscretions. His problems are partly the result of his own recklessness, but he is a sympathetic figure because he has suffered for so long as a result of his early marriage to Bertha.); St. John (The minister at Morton, St. John is cold, reserved, and often controlling in his interactions with others. Because he is entirely alienated from his feelings and devoted solely to an austere ambition, St. John serves as a foil to Edward Rochester.); Mrs. Reed; Georgiana Reed (the vain cousin); Eliza Reed (the self-righteous cousin); John Reed (the drunk, violent cousin); Helen Burns (the childhood martyr to Lowood); Alice Fairfax the housekeeper; Bertha Mason (the creole); Adele; Richard Mason; Blanche Ingram
Themes
Love Versus Autonomy
Jane Eyre is very much the story of a quest to be loved. Jane searches, not just for romantic love, but also for a sense of being valued, of belonging. Thus Jane says to Helen Burns: “to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest” (Chapter 8). Yet, over the course of the book, Jane must learn how to gain love without sacrificing and harming herself in the process.
Her fear of losing her autonomy motivates her refusal of Rochester’s marriage proposal. Jane believes that “marrying” Rochester while he remains legally tied to Bertha would mean rendering herself a mistress and sacrificing her own integrity for the sake of emotional gratification. On the other hand, her life at Moor House tests her in the opposite manner. There, she enjoys economic independence and engages in worthwhile and useful work, teaching the poor; yet she lacks emotional sustenance. Although St. John proposes marriage, offering her a partnership built around a common purpose, Jane knows their marriage would remain loveless.
Nonetheless, the events of Jane’s stay at Moor House are necessary tests of Jane’s autonomy. Only after proving her self-sufficiency to herself can she marry Rochester and not be asymmetrically dependent upon him as her “master.” The marriage can be one between equals. As Jane says: “I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. . . . To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. . . . We are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result” (Chapter 38).
Religion
Throughout the novel, Jane struggles to find the right balance between moral duty and earthly pleasure, between obligation to her spirit and attention to her body. She encounters three main religious figures: Mr. Brocklehurst, Helen Burns, and St. John Rivers. Each represents a model of religion that Jane ultimately rejects as she forms her own ideas about faith and principle, and their practical consequences.
Mr. Brocklehurst illustrates the dangers and hypocrisies that Charlotte Brontë perceived in the nineteenth-century Evangelical movement. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the rhetoric of Evangelicalism when he claims to be purging his students of pride, but his method of subjecting them to various privations and humiliations, like when he orders that the naturally curly hair of one of Jane’s classmates be cut so as to lie straight, is entirely un-Christian. Of course, Brocklehurst’s proscriptions are difficult to follow, and his hypocritical support of his own luxuriously wealthy family at the expense of the Lowood students shows Brontë’s wariness of the Evangelical movement. Helen Burns’s meek and forbearing mode of Christianity, on the other hand, is too passive for Jane to adopt as her own, although she loves and admires Helen for it.
Many chapters later, St. John Rivers provides another model of Christian behavior. His is a Christianity of ambition, glory, and extreme self-importance. St. John urges Jane to sacrifice her emotional deeds for the fulfillment of her moral duty, offering her a way of life that would require her to be disloyal to her own self.
Although Jane ends up rejecting all three models of religion, she does not abandon morality, spiritualism, or a belief in a Christian God. When her wedding is interrupted, she prays to God for solace (Chapter 26). As she wanders the heath, poor and starving, she puts her survival in the hands of God (Chapter 28). She strongly objects to Rochester’s lustful immorality, and she refuses to consider living with him while church and state still deem him married to another woman. Even so, Jane can barely bring herself to leave the only love she has ever known. She credits God with helping her to escape what she knows would have been an immoral life (Chapter 27).
Jane ultimately finds a comfortable middle ground. Her spiritual understanding is not hateful and oppressive like Brocklehurst’s, nor does it require retreat from the everyday world as Helen’s and St. John’s religions do. For Jane, religion helps curb immoderate passions, and it spurs one on to worldly efforts and achievements. These achievements include full self-knowledge and complete faith in God.
Social Class
Jane Eyre is critical of Victorian England’s strict social hierarchy. Brontë’s exploration of the complicated social position of governesses is perhaps the novel’s most important treatment of this theme. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane is a figure of ambiguous class standing and, consequently, a source of extreme tension for the characters around her. Jane’s manners, sophistication, and education are those of an aristocrat, because Victorian governesses, who tutored children in etiquette as well as academics, were expected to possess the “culture” of the aristocracy. Yet, as paid employees, they were more or less treated as servants; thus, Jane remains penniless and powerless while at Thornfield. Jane’s understanding of the double standard crystallizes when she becomes aware of her feelings for Rochester; she is his intellectual, but not his social, equal. Even before the crisis surrounding Bertha Mason, Jane is hesitant to marry Rochester because she senses that she would feel indebted to him for “condescending” to marry her. Jane’s distress, which appears most strongly in Chapter 17, seems to be Brontë’s critique of Victorian class attitudes.
Jane herself speaks out against class prejudice at certain moments in the book. For example, in Chapter 23 she chastises Rochester: “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.” However, it is also important to note that nowhere in Jane Eyre are society’s boundaries bent. Ultimately, Jane is only able to marry Rochester as his equal because she has almost magically come into her own inheritance from her uncle.
Gender Relations
Jane struggles continually to achieve equality and to overcome oppression. In addition to class hierarchy, she must fight against patriarchal domination—against those who believe women to be inferior to men and try to treat them as such. Three central male figures threaten her desire for equality and dignity: Mr. Brocklehurst, Edward Rochester, and St. John Rivers. All three are misogynistic on some level. Each tries to keep Jane in a submissive position, where she is unable to express her own thoughts and feelings. In her quest for independence and self-knowledge, Jane must escape Brocklehurst, reject St. John, and come to Rochester only after ensuring that they may marry as equals. This last condition is met once Jane proves herself able to function, through the time she spends at Moor House, in a community and in a family. She will not depend solely on Rochester for love and she can be financially independent. Furthermore, Rochester is blind at the novel’s end and thus dependent upon Jane to be his “prop and guide.” In Chapter 12, Jane articulates what was for her time a radically feminist philosophy:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
Motifs:
Fire and Ice
Fire and ice appear throughout Jane Eyre. The former represents Jane’s passions, anger, and spirit, while the latter symbolizes the oppressive forces trying to extinguish Jane’s vitality. Fire is also a metaphor for Jane, as the narrative repeatedly associates her with images of fire, brightness, and warmth. In Chapter 4, she likens her mind to “a ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring.” We can recognize Jane’s kindred spirits by their similar links to fire; thus we read of Rochester’s “flaming and flashing” eyes (Chapter 26). After he has been blinded, his face is compared to “a lamp quenched, waiting to be relit” (Chapter 37).
Images of ice and cold, often appearing in association with barren landscapes or seascapes, symbolize emotional desolation, loneliness, or even death. The “death-white realms” of the arctic that Bewick describes in his History of British Birds parallel Jane’s physical and spiritual isolation at Gateshead (Chapter 1). Lowood’s freezing temperatures—for example, the frozen pitchers of water that greet the girls each morning—mirror Jane’s sense of psychological exile. After the interrupted wedding to Rochester, Jane describes her state of mind: “A Christmas frost had come at mid-summer: a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hay-field and corn-field lay a frozen shroud . . . and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and fragrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead. . . .” (Chapter 26). Finally, at Moor House, St. John’s frigidity and stiffness are established through comparisons with ice and cold rock. Jane writes: “By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind. . . . I fell under a freezing spell” (Chapter 34). When St. John proposes marriage to Jane, she concludes that “[a]s his curate, his comrade, all would be right. . . . But as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable” (Chapter 34).
Substitute Mothers
Poet and critic Adrienne Rich has noted that Jane encounters a series of nurturing and strong women on whom she can model herself, or to whom she can look for comfort and guidance: these women serve as mother-figures to the orphaned Jane.
The first such figure that Jane encounters is the servant Bessie, who soothes Jane after her trauma in the red-room and teaches her to find comfort in stories and songs. At Lowood, Jane meets Miss Temple, who has no power in the world at large, but possesses great spiritual strength and charm. Not only does she shelter Jane from pain, she also encourages her intellectual development. Of Miss Temple, Jane writes: “she had stood by me in the stead of mother, governess, and latterly, companion” (Chapter 10). Jane also finds a comforting model in Helen Burns, whose lessons in stamina teach Jane about self-worth and the power of faith.
After Jane and Rochester’s wedding is cancelled, Jane finds comfort in the moon, which appears to her in a dream as a symbol of the matriarchal spirit. Jane sees the moon as “a white human form” shining in the sky, “inclining a glorious brow earthward.” She tells us: “It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart—“My daughter, flee temptation.” Jane answers, “Mother, I will” (Chapter 27). Waking from the dream, Jane leaves Thornfield.
Jane finds two additional mother-figures in the characters of Diana and Mary Rivers. Rich points out that the sisters bear the names of the pagan and Christian versions of “the Great Goddess”: Diana, the Virgin huntress, and Mary, the Virgin Mother. Unmarried and independent, the Rivers sisters love learning and reciting poetry and live as intellectual equals with their brother St. John.
Symbols
Bertha Mason
Bertha Mason is a complex presence in Jane Eyre. She impedes Jane’s happiness, but she also catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. The mystery surrounding Bertha establishes suspense and terror to the plot and the atmosphere. Further, Bertha serves as a remnant and reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism.
Yet Bertha can also be interpreted as a symbol. Some critics have read her as a statement about the way Britain feared and psychologically “locked away” the other cultures it encountered at the height of its imperialism. Others have seen her as a symbolic representation of the “trapped” Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her frustration and anxiety. Within the story, then, Bertha’s insanity could serve as a warning to Jane of what complete surrender to Rochester could bring about.
One could also see Bertha as a manifestation of Jane’s subconscious feelings—specifically, of her rage against oppressive social and gender norms. Jane declares her love for Rochester, but she also secretly fears marriage to him and feels the need to rage against the imprisonment it could become for her. Jane never manifests this fear or anger, but Bertha does. Thus Bertha tears up the bridal veil, and it is Bertha’s existence that indeed stops the wedding from going forth. And, when Thornfield comes to represent a state of servitude and submission for Jane, Bertha burns it to the ground. Throughout the novel, Jane describes her inner spirit as fiery, her inner landscape as a “ridge of lighted heath” (Chapter 4). Bertha seems to be the outward manifestation of Jane’s interior fire. Bertha expresses the feelings that Jane must keep in check.
The Red-Room
The red-room can be viewed as a symbol of what Jane must overcome in her struggles to find freedom, happiness, and a sense of belonging. In the red-room, Jane’s position of exile and imprisonment first becomes clear. Although Jane is eventually freed from the room, she continues to be socially ostracized, financially trapped, and excluded from love; her sense of independence and her freedom of self-expression are constantly threatened.
The red-room’s importance as a symbol continues throughout the novel. It reappears as a memory whenever Jane makes a connection between her current situation and that first feeling of being ridiculed. Thus she recalls the room when she is humiliated at Lowood. She also thinks of the room on the night that she decides to leave Thornfield after Rochester has tried to convince her to become an undignified mistress. Her destitute condition upon her departure from Thornfield also threatens emotional and intellectual imprisonment, as does St. John’s marriage proposal. Only after Jane has asserted herself, gained financial independence, and found a spiritual family—which turns out to be her real family—can she wed Rochester and find freedom in and through marriage.
Quotes: Feeling . . . clamoured wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “. . . soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?” Still indomitable was the reply: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation. . . . They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.”
- Jane tries to decide what to do after it is revealed that Rochester is already married. Jane’s allusions to her “madness” and “insanity” bring out an interesting parallel between Jane and Bertha Mason. It is possible to see Bertha as a double for Jane, who embodies what Jane feels within—especially since the externalization of interior sentiment is a trait common to the Gothic novel.
“Shall I?” I said briefly; and I looked at his features, beautiful in their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity; at his brow, commanding, but not open; at his eyes, bright and deep and searching, but never soft; at his tall imposing figure; and fancied myself in idea his wife. Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in that capacity; toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that office; admire and emulate his courage and devotion and vigour: accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition. . . . I should suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be under a rather stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free. I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be only mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there, fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable."
Jane ponders if she should marry St. John. t is an opportunity to perform good works and to be more than a governess, schoolteacher, or housewife—the roles traditionally open to women. Jane’s teaching jobs at Lowood, Thornfield, and Morton have all made her feel trapped, and she would not mind enduring hardships for a cause in which she truly believes. Yet, St. John’s principles—“ambition,” “austerity,” and arrogance—are not those that Jane upholds. Jane must escape such control in order to remain true to herself, for she realizes that her conventional manner of dealing with oppression—by retreating into herself, into the recesses of her imagination, into conversation with herself—cannot constitute a way of life. In her rejection of Rochester, Jane privileged principle over feeling; she is now aware of the negative effects such emotional repression can have. Feeling, too, must play a role in one’s life: a balance must be struck.
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character—perfect concord is the result. |
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Term
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Definition
Author: Charles Dickens; Genre: Novel (realism); bildungsroman.
Characters: Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, Abel Magwitch, Joe and Mrs. Joe, Biddy, Jaggers the lawyer (Jaggers smells strongly of soap: he washes his hands obsessively as a psychological mech-anism to keep the criminal taint from corrupting him), Herbert Pocket, Wemmick and the Aged, Orlick, Compeyson, and Drummle.
Important Quote:
“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she has never once seen your face—if you had done that, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry? . . .”
“Or,” said Estella, “—which is a nearer case—if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her—if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry? . . .”
“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”
themes · Ambition and the desire for self-improvement (social, economic, educational, and moral); guilt, criminality, and innocence; maturation and the growth from childhood to adulthood; the importance of affection, loyalty, and sympathy over social advancement and class superiority; social class; the difficulty of maintaining superficial moral and social categories in a constantly changing world
motifs · Crime and criminality; disappointed expectations; the connection between weather or atmosphere and dramatic events; doubles (two convicts, two secret benefactors, two invalids, etc.)
symbols · The stopped clocks at Satis House symbolize Miss Havisham’s attempt to stop time; the many objects relating to crime and guilt (gallows, prisons, handcuffs, policemen, lawyers, courts, convicts, chains, files) symbolize the theme of guilt and innocence; Satis House represents the upper-class world to which Pip longs to belong; Bentley Drummle represents the grotesque caprice of the upper class; Joe represents conscience, affection, loyalty, and simple good nature; the marsh mists represent danger and ambiguity.
Pip, a young orphan living with his sister and her husband in the marshes of Kent, sits in a cemetery one evening looking at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped convict springs up from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring him food and a file for his leg irons. Pip obeys, but the fearsome convict is soon captured anyway. The convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the items himself.
One day Pip is taken by his Uncle Pumblechook to play at Satis House, the home of the wealthy dowager Miss Havisham, who is extremely eccentric: she wears an old wedding dress everywhere she goes and keeps all the clocks in her house stopped at the same time. During his visit, he meets a beautiful young girl named Estella, who treats him coldly and contemptuously. Nevertheless, he falls in love with her and dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her. He even hopes that Miss Havisham intends to make him a gentleman and marry him to Estella, but his hopes are dashed when, after months of regular visits to Satis House, Miss Havisham decides to help him become a common laborer in his family’s business.
With Miss Havisham’s guidance, Pip is apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Joe, who is the village blacksmith. Pip works in the forge unhappily, struggling to better his education with the help of the plain, kind Biddy and encountering Joe’s malicious day laborer, Orlick. One night, after an altercation with Orlick, Pip’s sister, known as Mrs. Joe, is viciously attacked and becomes a mute invalid. From her signals, Pip suspects that Orlick was responsible for the attack.
One day a lawyer named Jaggers appears with strange news: a secret benefactor has given Pip a large fortune, and Pip must come to London immediately to begin his education as a gentleman. Pip happily assumes that his previous hopes have come true—that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that the old woman intends for him to marry Estella.
In London, Pip befriends a young gentleman named Herbert Pocket and Jaggers’s law clerk, Wemmick. He expresses disdain for his former friends and loved ones, especially Joe, but he continues to pine after Estella. He furthers his education by studying with the tutor Matthew Pocket, Herbert’s father. Herbert himself helps Pip learn how to act like a gentleman. When Pip turns twenty-one and begins to receive an income from his fortune, he will secretly help Herbert buy his way into the business he has chosen for himself. But for now, Herbert and Pip lead a fairly undisciplined life in London, enjoying themselves and running up debts. Orlick reappears in Pip’s life, employed as Miss Havisham’s porter, but is promptly fired by Jaggers after Pip reveals Orlick’s unsavory past. Mrs. Joe dies, and Pip goes home for the funeral, feeling tremendous grief and remorse. Several years go by, until one night a familiar figure barges into Pip’s room—the convict, Magwitch, who stuns Pip by announcing that he, not Miss Havisham, is the source of Pip’s fortune. He tells Pip that he was so moved by Pip’s boyhood kindness that he dedicated his life to making Pip a gentleman, and he made a fortune in Australia for that very purpose.
Pip is appalled, but he feels morally bound to help Magwitch escape London, as the convict is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, his former partner in crime. A complicated mystery begins to fall into place when Pip discovers that Compeyson was the man who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar and that Estella is Magwitch’s daughter. Miss Havisham has raised her to break men’s hearts, as revenge for the pain her own broken heart caused her. Pip was merely a boy for the young Estella to practice on; Miss Havisham delighted in Estella’s ability to toy with his affections.
As the weeks pass, Pip sees the good in Magwitch and begins to care for him deeply. Before Magwitch’s escape attempt, Estella marries an upper-class lout named Bentley Drummle. Pip makes a visit to Satis House, where Miss Havisham begs his forgiveness for the way she has treated him in the past, and he forgives her. Later that day, when she bends over the fireplace, her clothing catches fire and she goes up in flames. She survives but becomes an invalid. In her final days, she will continue to repent for her misdeeds and to plead for Pip’s forgiveness.
The time comes for Pip and his friends to spirit Magwitch away from London. Just before the escape attempt, Pip is called to a shadowy meeting in the marshes, where he encounters the vengeful, evil Orlick. Orlick is on the verge of killing Pip when Herbert arrives with a group of friends and saves Pip’s life. Pip and Herbert hurry back to effect Magwitch’s escape. They try to sneak Magwitch down the river on a rowboat, but they are discovered by the police, who Compeyson tipped off. Magwitch and Compeyson fight in the river, and Compeyson is drowned. Magwitch is sentenced to death, and Pip loses his fortune. Magwitch feels that his sentence is God’s forgiveness and dies at peace. Pip falls ill; Joe comes to London to care for him, and they are reconciled. Joe gives him the news from home: Orlick, after robbing Pumblechook, is now in jail; Miss Havisham has died and left most of her fortune to the Pockets; Biddy has taught Joe how to read and write. After Joe leaves, Pip decides to rush home after him and marry Biddy, but when he arrives there he discovers that she and Joe have already married.
Pip decides to go abroad with Herbert to work in the mercantile trade. Returning many years later, he encounters Estella in the ruined garden at Satis House. Drummle, her husband, treated her badly, but he is now dead. Pip finds that Estella’s coldness and cruelty have been replaced by a sad kindness, and the two leave the garden hand in hand, Pip believing that they will never part again. (Note: Dickens’s original ending to Great Expectations differed from the one described in this summary. |
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Term
| “Pathetic Fallacy” (Modern Painters) |
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Definition
Modern Painters (1843) is book on art by John Ruskin which argues that recent painters emerging from the tradition of the picturesque are superior in the art of landscape to the old masters. The book was primarily written as a defence of the later work of J.M.W. Turner. Ruskin used the book to argue that art should devote itself to the accurate documentation of nature. In Ruskin's view Turner had developed from early detailed documentation of nature to a later more profound insight into natural forces and atmospheric effects.
Ruskin added later volumes in subsequent years. Volume two (1846) placed emphasis on symbolism in art, expressed through nature. The second volume was influential on the early development of Pre-Raphaelitism. Ruskin also added third and fourth volumes in later years.
"Pathetic Fallacy": The pathetic fallacy or anthropomorphic fallacy is the treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations.[1] The pathetic fallacy is a special case of the fallacy of reification. The word 'pathetic' in this use is related to 'pathos' or 'empathy' (capability of feeling), and is not pejorative.
In the discussion of literature, the pathetic fallacy is similar to personification. Personification is direct and explicit in the ascription of life and sentience to the thing in question, whereas the pathetic fallacy is much broader and more allusive. "Personification" is a more obtrusive and formal use of human traits attributed to natural objects, according to M. H. Abrams. For example, "the sea is angry at us" would be the pathetic fallacy, but when the sea assumes a human form such as a sea god, that is overt personification.
The term was coined by the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) in his 1856 Modern Painters, in which he wrote that the aim of the pathetic fallacy was "to signify any description of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions". In the narrow sense intended by Ruskin, the pathetic fallacy is a scientific failing, since most of his defining paper[2] concerns art, which he maintains ought to be its truthful representation of the world as it appears to our senses, not as it appears in our imaginative and fanciful reflections upon it. However, in the natural sciences, a pathetic fallacy is a serious error in scientific reasoning if taken literally. M. H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms says that Ruskin's use of the term "pathetic fallacy" was derogatory. In addition to the “usual condition of prophetic inspiration”, Ruskin defines three classes:
"The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is, as I said above, that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion; and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it. For it is no credit to a man that he is not morbid or inaccurate in his perceptions, when he has no strength of feeling to warp them; and it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating ; even if he melts, losing none of his weight.
So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it. And, in general, these three classes may be rated in comparative order, as the men who are not poets at all, and the poets of the second order, and the poets of the first; only however great a man may be, there are always some subjects which ought to throw him off his balance; some, by which his poor human capacity of thought should be conquered, and brought into the inaccurate and vague state of perception, so that the language of the highest inspiration becomes broken, obscure, and wild in metaphor, resembling that of the weaker man, overborne by weaker things."
Strong anti-Romantic sympathy. Literary critics after Ruskin have generally not followed him in regarding the pathetic fallacy as an artistic mistake, instead assuming that attribution of sentient, humanising traits to inanimate things is a centrally human way of understanding the world, and that it does have a useful and important role in art and literature. Indeed, to reject the use of the pathetic fallacy would mean dismissing most Romantic poetry and many of Shakespeare's most memorable images. Literary critics find it useful to have a specific term for describing anthropomorphic tendencies in art and literature and so the phrase is currently used in a neutral sense. Josephine Miles in Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of a Changing Relation Between Object and Emotion, influenced by William Wordsworth’s discussion of the practice, argues that “pathetic bestowal” is a neutral and therefore preferable label. However labeled, the practice occurs in any number of accomplished twentieth-century writers, including William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, and John Ashbery. |
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Term
“The Savageness of Gothic Architecture (Stones of
Venice) |
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Definition
Author: John Ruskin; Genre: Art Criticism
Ruskin's strong rejection of Classical tradition in The Stones of Venice typifies the inextricable mix of aesthetics and morality in his thought: "Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age... an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified and all insolence fortified."[192] Rejection of mechanisation and standardisation informed Ruskin's theories of architecture, and his emphasis on the importance of the Medieval Gothic style. He praised the Gothic for what he saw as its reverence for nature and natural forms; the free, unfettered expression of artisans constructing and decorating buildings; and for the organic relationship he perceived between worker and guild, worker and community, worker and natural environment, and between worker and God. Nineteenth-century attempts to reproduce Gothic forms (such as pointed arches), attempts which he had helped to inspire, were not enough to make these buildings expressions of what Ruskin saw as true Gothic feeling, faith, and organicism.
For Ruskin, the Gothic style in architecture embodied the same moral truths he sought to promote in the visual arts. It expressed the 'meaning' of architecture—as a combination of the values of strength, solidity and aspiration—all written, as it were, in stone. For Ruskin, creating true Gothic architecture involved the whole community, and expressed the full range of human emotions, from the sublime effects of soaring spires to the comically ridiculous carved grotesques and gargoyles. Even its crude and "savage" aspects were proof of "the liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure."[193] Classical architecture, in contrast, expressed a morally vacuous and repressive standardisation. Ruskin associated Classical values with modern developments, in particular with the demoralising consequences of the industrial revolution, resulting in buildings such as the Crystal Palace, which he criticised.[194] Although Ruskin wrote about architecture in many works over the course of his career, his much-anthologised essay "The Nature of Gothic" from the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853) is widely considered to be one of his most important and evocative discussions of his central argument.
Ruskin's theories indirectly encouraged a revival of Gothic styles, but Ruskin himself was often dissatisfied with the results. He objected that forms of mass-produced faux Gothic did not exemplify his principles, but showed disregard for the true meaning of the style. Even the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a building designed with Ruskin's collaboration, met with his disapproval. Ruskin's distaste for oppressive standardisation led to later works attacking Laissez-faire capitalism which he considered to be at the root of it. In the piece, he criticizes English industrial production:
"But the modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher ; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults anA shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it ; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. "
He has rules the promote healthy and ennobling labor:
Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.
Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.
Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works.
The second of these principles is the only one which directly rises out of the consideration of our immediate subject ; but I shall briefly explain the meaning and extent of the first also, reserving the enforcement of the third for another place.
Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.
Important quote: The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and sharpening edges, while the old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made, and never moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough when made by clumsy and uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no price is too great for it ; and we never see the same form in it twice. Now you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone." |
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Term
| The Renaissance (Preface, “La Gioconda,” Conclusion) |
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Definition
Overview: Pater represents the rebirth of secular humanism. What matters most is how art is experienced. Religion is too limiting as morality can be and should be experienced individually. Critics should not impose rules onto what is beautiful. He advocated for a life of sensation over a life of thought (influenced by Keats). He also believes that we are shackled by our own perception and language. Full communication about art is not possible, so stop trying. Rather, focus on the experience itself; approach life, always, as something new and novel.
Preface (1st edition)
"Yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove "
Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of æsthetics.
"To see the object as in itself it really is," has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in æsthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one's object as it really is, is to know one's own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. The objects with which æsthetic criticism deals --music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of human life-- are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the æsthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one's self, or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience --metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, unanswerable or not, of no interest to him.
The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar and unique kind.
Conclusion: This brief 'Conclusion' was to be Pater's most influential – and controversial – publication. It asserts that our physical lives are made up of scientific processes and elemental forces in perpetual motion, "renewed from moment to moment but parting sooner or later on their ways". In the mind "the whirlpool is still more rapid": a drift of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, reduced to impressions "unstable, flickering, inconstant", "ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality"; and "with the passage and dissolution of impressions ... [there is a] continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves". Since all is in flux, to get the most from life we must learn to discriminate through "sharp and eager observation": for "every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, – for that moment only". Through such discrimination we may "get as many pulsations as possible into the given time": "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Forming habits means failure on our part, for habit connotes the stereotypical. "While all melts under our feet," Pater wrote, "we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, or work of the artist’s hands. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." The resulting "quickened, multiplied consciousness" counters our insecurity in the face of the flux.[8] Moments of vision may come from simple natural effects, as Pater notes elsewhere in the book: "A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment - and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." [9] Or they may come from "intellectual excitement", from philosophy, science and the arts. Here we should "be for ever testing new opinions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy"; and of these, a passion for the arts, "a desire of beauty", has (in the summary of one of Pater's editors [10]) "the greatest potential for staving off the sense of transience, because in the arts the perceptions of highly sensitive minds are already ordered; we are confronted with a reality already refined and we are able to reach the personality behind the work".
The Renaissance, which appeared to some to endorse "hedonism" and amorality, provoked criticism from conservative quarters, including disapproval from Pater's former tutor at Queen's, from the college chaplain at Brasenose and from the Bishop of Oxford.
"La GIoconda": "La Gioconda is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea. Perhaps of all ancient pictures time has chilled it least.* As often happens with works in which invention seems to reach its limits, there is an element in it given to, not invented by, the master. In that inestimable folio of drawings, once in the possession of Vasari, were certain designs by Verrocchio, faces of such impressive beauty that Leonardo in his boyhood copied them many times. It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait. From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady, embodied and beheld at last. What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature of his thought? By means of what strange affinities had the person and the dream grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together? Present from the first incorporeally in Leonardo's thought, dimly traced in the designs of Verrocchio, she is found present at last in Il Giocondo's house. That there is much of mere portraiture in the picture is attested by the legend that by artificial means, the presence of mimes and flute-players, that subtle expression was protracted on the face. Again, was it in four years and by renewed labour never really completed, or in four months and as by stroke of magic, that the image was projected?
The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men 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 Eastern 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 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." |
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Term
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Definition
| One of Hopkins’s most famous (and most debated) theories centers on the concept of “inscape.” It is a portmanteau word: Inner + landscape. He coined this word to refer to the essential individuality of a thing, but with a focus not on its particularity or uniqueness, but rather on the unifying design that gives a thing its distinctive characteristics and relates it to its context. Hopkins was interested in the exquisite interrelation of the individual thing and the recurring pattern. He saw the world as a kind of network integrated by divine law and design. It is the thingingess of the thing; the whole object as it is in all of its particularites and its all of its wholeness. It is the essential particularity of the object,, In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God. In this book God expresses himself completely, and it is by “reading” the world that humans can approach God and learn about Him. God is responsible for inscape. |
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Term
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Definition
| GM Hopkins invented technique of poetry. n sprung rhythm, the poet counts the number of accented syllables in the line, but places no limit on the total number of syllables. As opposed to syllabic meters (such as the iambic), which count both stresses and syllables, this form allows for greater freedom in the position and proportion of stresses. Whereas English verse has traditionally alternated stressed and unstressed syllables with occasional variation, Hopkins was free to place multiple stressed syllables one after another (as in the line “All felled, felled, are all felled” from “Binsey Poplars”), or to run a large number of unstressed syllables together (as in “Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy” from Wreck of the Deutschland). This gives Hopkins great control over the speed of his lines and their dramatic effects. |
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Term
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Definition
| a technique GM Hopkins learned from Welsh poetry. The technique involves elaborate use of alliteration and internal rhyme; in Hopkins’s hands this creates an unusual thickness and resonance. This close linking of words through sound and rhythm complements Hopkins’s themes of finding pattern and design everywhere. Hopkins’s form is also characterized by a stretching of the conventions of grammar and sentence structure, so that newcomers to his poetry must often strain to parse his sentences. Deciding which word in a given sentence is the verb, for example, can often involve significant interpretive work. In addition, Hopkins often invents words, and pulls his vocabulary freely from a number of different registers of diction. This leads to a surprising mix of neologisms and archaisms throughout his lines. Yet for all his innovation and disregard of convention, Hopkins’ goal was always to bring poetry closer to the character of natural, living speech. |
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Term
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Definition
| The popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be "the Angel in the House"; Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a place of peace where man could take refuge from the diffuculties of modern life. She was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure. The phrase "Angel in the House" (1854) comes from the title of an immensely popular poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he holds his angel-wife up as a model for all women. |
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Term
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Definition
| the poetic form is Robert Browning particularly associated with |
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Term
| Married Women’s Property Acts (1870-1908) |
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Definition
| gave married women the right to own and handle their own property. |
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Term
| Married Women’s Property Acts (1870-1908) |
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Definition
| gave married women the right to own and handle their own property. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1839: gave a mother the right to petition for court for access to her minor children and custody of her children under 7. |
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Term
| The Married Women's Property Act |
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Definition
| 1870 and 1882: Property rights given to women, allowing them to own and control their own property. An amendment and separate in 1884 made a woman an independent and separate person from her husband. |
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Term
| The Guardianship of Infants Act |
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Definition
| Women could be made the sole guardians of their children if their husbands died. 1886 |
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Definition
| 1832. To receive gov't help, one must live and work in a workhouse; you must work for your handout, but the conditions were horrible. Dickens directed social criticism at the Poor Law in Oliver Twist. |
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Definition
| 1839 - Granted limited maternal rights for the first time in British law. In a separation, the woman can have custody of children up to 7 years old, and access to their children between the ages of 8-10. Fathers still were given primary custody of all children. |
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Term
| Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children |
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Definition
| 1889 - Government can remove the child from the home when cruelty is suspected. |
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Term
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Definition
| GM Hopkins poetic theory. He believed instress was the onlookers response to the object. |
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Term
| Christina Rossetti: Important contextual biography |
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Definition
She is the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was one of the founding members of the PRB. She was a model for the group and often included in their meetings and discussions, though she was never a full fledged member, even though she was a poet in her own right. She was far more religious than the group and took issue to the way the men, even her brother, aestheticized women for their own poetic purposes.
She suffered long term health problems. She was engaged to a PRB member, but broke off the engagement when he became Catholic. Although she had suitors, she never became engaged again.
In 1848, she published her own poetry and then taught at a day school a few years later. From 1860-70, she worked at Highgate House of Charity for fallen women; her interest in fallen women could be tied into the subject matter of Goblin Market. In the 1870s, she was a part of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. |
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Term
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Definition
With few exceptions, the models became financees, wives and mistresses.
Christina Rossetti
Elizabeth Siddal
Fanny Cornforth
Alexa Wilding
Jane Burden Morris |
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Term
| PRB vs. the Royal Academy School |
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Definition
The PRB was a gesture of defiance and signal of opposition to the Academy's rigorous methods of training. They rejected the tradition of copying Raphael and Michelangelo and wanted to return to a time before the Renaissance masters. They weren't down for copying art only; they wanted to create.
They were the avantgarde movement of their time. |
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Term
| Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin |
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Definition
| (1799-1802) He was the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. In 1687, the Parthenon was being used as a municipal storage facility. in 1801, Elgin obtained a legal writ to remove the art from the Parthenon. From 1801-1812, his agents removed half of the parthenon's surviving sculptures and materials. By 1810, he is defending his actions, and in 1816 the House of Commons buts the art from Elgin for half of what he paid for them. They were displayed at the London Museum and were highly influential. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1808 - allowed the use of local funds to built asylums. |
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Term
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Definition
Formed 1848 and ran strongly until 1851
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (painter/poet)
William Holman Hunt (painter)
John Everett Millais (painter)
William Michael Rossetti (historian)
Thomas Woolner (Sculpture)
James Collinson (painter)
FG Stevens (critic/artist) |
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Term
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Definition
| William Morris, Edward Burn, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti |
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Term
| Shared Characteristics of PRB poetry |
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Definition
ll of whom draw upon the poetic continuum that descends from Spenser through Keats and Tennyson -- upon the poetic line, in other words, that emphasizes lush vowel sounds, sensuous description, subjective psychological states, elaborate personification, and complex poetic forms, such as the sestina, borrowed from Italian and Provençal love poetry.
Early poetry was moralistic and didactic, with Christian Subject matter. |
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Term
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Definition
| Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin, and Christina Rossetti. |
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Term
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Definition
| Modern Painters, John Keats, Sir Walter Scott's medieval novels, Blake/Coleridge, old Ballads, and Tennyson's poetry |
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Term
| Lunacy Act, 2nd County Asylum Act |
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Definition
| 1845 - Established the lunacy comission to inspect asylums and workhouses. Required that all counties provide an asylum. |
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Term
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Definition
1871 - Charles Darwin
explains the theory of Man's evolution. Principal traits are passed on through sexual selection. Embryological structures share a common progenitor. Man has become more intelligent to make up for his lack of physical stength. MOrality is nothing more than social instinct and the belief of God develops through culture. |
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Term
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Definition
1889 - Defends aestheticsim and art for art's sake.
1. Art never expresses anything but itself
2. All bad art comes from returning to life/nature and elevating them into the ideals.
3. Life imitates art more than art imitates life
4. Lying, telling beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1843. Sarah Ellis. The text was really a behavior guide for women. Ellis believed that men and women had sex specific virtues. Men and women are spiritual/moral equals, but men are more noble and more enlightened (as they were made in God's image). But women are ill-prepared for marriage. Women's nature is of a pure, deep affection. Women should be taught to fill an inferior space. Men are alpha-omega (complete). But men and women need each other. She thought that sexual equality was vulgar. Women were meant to be comfort-givers. Meals are better than morals. Women are meant to lift men up without pointing out their weaknesses. She also notes the women love more deeply than men do. |
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Term
| Strictures in the Modern System of Education |
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Definition
| 1799. Published just a couple of years after Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the RIghts of Woman (1792). She basically discounts all of Wollstonecraft's ideas about women. She advocates for sex-specific virtues. Women are the moral lodestones of the home. They provide the moral example to husband and children. This is later carried even further by Sarah Ellis. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1847: Women cannot work more then 10 hours in a textile mill. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1844: Children were working 10-14 hour shifts in factories. After the law, they could only work 6.5 hours a day, but the rules could still be bended. The law also mandated that the factory must be clean, that children must register for school, and that factories must report any child injuries. |
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Term
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Definition
| 1842 - Children under 10 and women cannot work in the mines. |
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Term
| Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act |
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Definition
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Term
| The Matrimonial Causes Act |
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Definition
| 1857: This act gave women limited access to divorce. But while the husband only had to prove that a wife committed adultery to gain a divorce, a woman had to prove adultery, incest, bigamy, cruelty, or desertion. In 1878, the law was modified to allow for cruelty alone. |
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Term
| Date women were allowed to vote in Britain |
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Definition
| 1918; only women 30+ could vote |
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Term
| First Contagious Disease Prevention Act |
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Definition
| 1864-1886; Women suspected of prostitution had to undergone involuntary genital examinations. If the women refused, they were sent to prison. If the women were diagnosed with illness, they would be sent to the hospital. Men were not targeted for examinations. |
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Term
| John Ruskin's three systems of architectural ornamentation |
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Definition
| In servile ornamentation the power of the subordinate workman is entirely subjected to his superior, his work is entirely ordered as in the Greek and Eyptian building. In constituional ornamentation the subordinate workman is given a measure of licensed or controlled freedom, and he has an element of disgression. In revolutionary ornamentation, no 'executive inferiority' is admitted. In the ornamentation of Christian gothic architecture, the value of the individual soul is recongized at the same time as its imprefections are acknowledged. The admission of imperfection into the ornamentation of building is no grudging or reluctiant coming to terms with reality. It is a necessary feature of great work, a distinguishing factor of the greatest because it is a frank affirmation of man's limitations and therefore tends to the glory of God. Ruskin says that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. No architect can do everything for himself, so he must either make slaves of his workmen in the old Greek and present English fasion, and lend his work to a slave's capacity, which is to degrade it; or else he myst take his workmen as he finds them and let them show their weaknesses together with their strengths. |
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Term
| "It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said, that the respective greatness either of the painter or the writer is finally determined" |
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Definition
| John Ruskin, Modern Painters |
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Term
| "Painting, or art generally, as such, with all its technicalities, difficulties and particular ends is nothing but a noble and expressive language, invaluable as a vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing," |
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Definition
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John Stuart Mills; 1869.
Mills believed what is common is not necessarily what is natural, even when it comes to gender. We can never know if sex-specific virtues are natural because women are educated differently. He attacks social and legal inequalities; inequality is a relic of the past and has no place in the modern word. Sexual inequality is a hinderance to the world as a whole (a utilitarian argument) as progressed is stymied if half of the population can't contribute. We simply do not know what women are capable of. Gender is constructed and does not contribute to the greater good. The sexes should connect on an intellectual level as it would make better marriages. Marriage laws are like slavery. He notes that "there are no legal slaves, save the mistresses of every house." |
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1837–1901; the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.[1] It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence. Some scholars date the beginning of the period in terms of sensibilities and political concerns to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.
The era was preceded by the Georgian period and succeeded by the Edwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first portion of the Gilded Age of the United States.
The population of England almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901.[3] Scotland's population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland's population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901.[4] At the same time, around 15 million emigrants left the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Britain becomes an imperial powerhouse at the same time. The age also featured a population boom, rapid industrialization and vast movements to the cities. There is an increase of prostitution in the area, and public and literary explosion of these figures.
In literature, it forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century. The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a reading public. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed.
Other areas of interest:
Children's literature
Poetry and Drama
Science, philosophy, and discovery
Nature writing
Supernatural and fantastic literature |
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