LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

The Anglo-American Literary Paradigm during the First

Half of the Nineteenth Century

Dobra Alexandra
Master, anul I
Limba si Literatura Engleza
The nineteenth century was a period in history marked by the collapse of the
Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese empires. This paved the way for the growing
influence of the British Empire, the German Empire and the United States,
spurring military conflicts but also advances in science and exploration. This
time of economic and political turbulences saw repeated wars in Europe and in
the United States, social and mechanical transformations brought by the
Industrial revolution.
In Great Britain the period known as the Victorian Age spanned the years
of Queen Victoria’s reign, from 1837 to her death in 1901; practically the entire
nineteenth century. The Industrial revolution was felt hardly in Britain. The
middle class gradually took control of the means of production. This fact led to
the Reform Bill, which extended the right to vote to all males owning property.
All these changes brought England slowly to the highest point of development;
as a world power. The highly industrialized economy based mainly on
manufacturing and trading pushed people towards the big cities.
But the Victorian Age meant not only economical and social
transformations; it was the age of moral principles and of religious ideals. It was
the age when rationalism held the center. The royal family was of course the
one setting an example of piety, generosity and respectability. The latter is a key
term for the Victorian age mainly because it represents the main value of the
Victorian ethos. If in the mid-eighteenth century it was used to talk about
persons worthy of respect for moral excellence, during Queen Victoria’s reign it
came to apply for people of fair social standing, honesty, decency, irrespective
of the social class. Respectability included a certain kind of behavior. People
who were called respectable had high moral values such as purity, integrity, but
also high Puritan values. At its highest, the term represented the belief in the
perfectibility of man and the impulse of self-improvement.
Yet all these values were not so easily attainable. Social mobility truly
existed, as Charles Dickens illustrates in his work- the raise of the poor to a
respectable social status- but society was still hierarchically organized after a
model going back to the Middle Ages.
In America things were not different either. The real impetus for America
entering the Industrial Revolution was the passage of the Embargo Act of 1807
and the War of 1812. The passage of the Embargo Act stopped the export of
American goods and effectively ended the import of goods from other nations.
Eventually, America went to war with Great Britain in 1812. The war made it
apparent that America needed a better transportation system and more economic
independence. Therefore, manufacturing began to expand.
Industrialization in America involved three important developments.
First, transportation was expanded. Second, electricity was effectively
harnessed. Third, improvements were made to industrial processes such as
improving the refining process and accelerating production. The government
helped protect American manufacturers by passing a protective tariff. As
industries and factories arose, people moved from farms to cities, as it happened
in England.
Another important event which marked the nineteenth American history
is the Civil War. It was one of the earliest true industrial wars in human history.
The main causes of the secession were slavery, sectionalism, tariffs, and
election of Lincoln. Slavery effectively ended in the U.S. in the spring of 1865
when the Confederate armies surrendered. All slaves in the Confederacy were
freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slaves in the border states and Union-
controlled parts of the South were freed by state action or by the Thirteenth
Amendment.
Regarding the American ethos of the nineteenth century it’s been said
that it’s slightly different from the British one. In the 125 years preceding the
outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in
American public and private life, as it did in British society. Its evolution had a
profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in
American theology during the nineteenth were marked by heightened spiritual
inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the
economic and market realities.
American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States and the
American people hold a special place in the world, by offering opportunity and
hope for humanity, derived from its unique balance of public and private
interests governed by constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and
economic freedom. Since the 19th century, the claim of American
exceptionalism has been widely espoused; from scientific and historical
explanations to polemic or even racialist diatribes. In essence it claims that a
deliberate choice of freedom over tyranny, was properly made, and this was the
central reason for why American society developed successfully. Fundamental
differences exist between exceptionalism as it was originally described in the
19th century, and how it is used today. Shifts in the both general concept and its
common use can be seen in relation to the stages of American development;
from colonial outpost to an established nation with institutional wealth and
power. This concept of exceptionalism, which still characterizes the American
society, was born during the nineteenth century as a result of the great changes
and the great development the United States went over. The term is also tightly
connected to another “the American dream.”
During the nineteenth century the main preoccupation of writers was the
identity construction. They tried to find out what characterized them as
individuals and what made them part of a larger American identity. One reason
for this was the absence of settled community life in America. English novelists
like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and George Eliot lived in a traditional
society shared with their readers’ attitudes that were reflected in their realistic
fiction. This leads us towards the conclusion that the Victorian reader was
satisfied by the rise of the main character from poor to a respectable social
status, while the American reader was rather looking for characters that towards
the end of the book manage to create and to acknowledge an identity.
All of these issues, and the controversies attending them influenced
Victorian and American literature of the nineteenth century. In part because of
the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press, debate about political and
social issues played an important role in the experience of the reading public.
The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life,
represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters. Moreover,
debates about political representation involved in expansion both of the
franchise and of the rights of women affected literary representation, as writers
gave voice to those who had been voiceless. In Britain the readers had a great
influence upon what was to be written, especially because the novels were
published in newspaper series.
In the United States the major theme in the nineteenth century was as
well social: the expansion. When the war ended in 1865, the United States was
bigger, more powerful and richer than ever before, and it continued to grow.
American literature following the Civil War began to reflect Americans' new
sense of nationalism and diversity. Realism dominated the literary scene, as the
arts began to portray ordinary people in their everyday lives. This is what the
readers looked for: to read about their own world, about realistic events that
could happen to them as well.
The nineteenth century was par excellence the great age of the English
Novel. 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.
 Dividing the nineteenth century in two great parts, for literary reasons,
Walter Allan places Charles Dickens in the first half. Along with other writers
he’s perfectly integrated in his time and he shares the convictions of his
contemporaries. Dickens is arguably England's most beloved, read, and
critically acclaimed novelist. Noted scholar Harold Bloom, in his study of
Dickens, praises the author's “astonishing universality, in which he nearly rivals
Shakespeare and the Bible.” He has written several novels describing the social
life of nineteenth century Britain. David Copperfield published in 1850 was the
author’s favorite and has remained a favorite for generations of readers. The
author had several reasons for liking it so much, the most important being that it
was a semi-autobiography. The second reason is that he tried to write in a
different way: more organized, more cohesive and more realistic.
The novel presents the harsh life of a young boy, David Copperfield.
After his mother remarries their life becomes miserable. Her new husband is a
very cruel person who drives the woman to grave. Young Copperfield is sent to
school where he is badly treated by the headmaster. His life as an adult is
difficult as well; his wife Dora dies a few years after their marriage. The only
accomplishment of his life, I would say, is becoming a respectable writer.
Dickens develops the story on two levels: the private and the social one.
On the private level we face different sentimentalities, while on the social one,
realism and comedy are devastating. The main theme of the novel is the
difference between the strata of society each having its own ideals of gentility.
Characters in the novel represent different classes and illustrate the wide
gap between the classes in Victorian England. The most damaging effect from
an awareness of the separation between the lower and middle classes occurs
when Em'ly runs off with Steerforth. Em'ly is quite aware of the difference
between her class and David's when he first meets her. When David notes that
both of them are orphans, she calls his attention to one important difference by
telling him “your father was a gentleman and your mother is a lady; and my
father was a fisherman and my mother was a fisherman's daughter.” By this
statement, Em'ly means that her parents worked hard to maintain a minimal
standard of living, while David's parents had some measure of inherited wealth.
Even at this age, Em'ly understands how money can radically affect one's life.
David is also aware of class divisions and is worried when he faces the
possibility that he will never regain entry into the middle class. When he goes to
work in the warehouse with his new associates he claims “my hopes of growing
up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my bosom.” As we can see
from his statement Copperfield is not happy with the “respectable man” status.
He would like to go back to the middle- class values. But it seems that this is the
price he has to pay for becoming a respectable individual.
The novel attacks social institutions that Dickens viewed as cruel. One of
them is the boarding school system that permitted sadistic men, like Creakle, to
be in charge. No one checks his power or tries to stop his cruelty and as a result,
the children under his care are tormented physically and emotionally. Dickens
also highlights the abusive situation that can result in the home where the man
holds all power and no law can be exerted on behalf of a wife or child. Even
after David's mother dies, Murdstone has complete control over the boy until
Aunt Betsey intervenes. There are also no child labor laws to make illegal the
employment of a ten-year-old boy for long hours of work in a warehouse.
Dickens exposes injustice but offers no solutions. The domestic scene at
the end of the novel is not disturbed by the memory of what David has suffered
from social injustices. Yet Dickens’s realistic portrayal of them calls readers’
attention to the damage they caused in Victorian England.
In the United States realism was as well at its highest poin of
development. American realism was a turn of the century idea in art, music and
literature that showed through these different types of work, reflections of the
time period. Whether it was a cultural portrayal, or a scenic view of a city, these
images and works of literature depicted a contemporary view of what was
happening; an attempt at defining what was real.
Early nineteenth century American writers tended to be too flowery,
sentimental, or ostentatious, because they were still trying to prove that they
could write as elegantly as the English. Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa,
said that many Americans “wrote like exiled English colonials from an England
of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making...
They did not use the words that people have always used in speech, the words
that survive in language.” He goes on later to say, in the same essay, that all
American fiction comes from Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial
American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national
voice. For Twain and other American writers of the 19th century, realism was
not merely a literary technique. It was a way of speaking truth and exploding
the conventions. Twain is best known for his works The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer can be, in my opinion compared to
Dickens’ David Copperfield. It depicts the life of an imaginative, troublesome
boy in the American West of the 1840s. The novel is intensely dramatic in its
construction, taking the form of a series of comic vignettes based on Tom's
exploits. I said that it can be compared to the English novel because the novel as
a whole is concerned with Tom’s personal growth and quest for identity. The
narrator of the book is an adult who views the adult world critically and looks
back on the sentiments and pastimes of childhood in a somewhat idealized
manner, with wit and also with nostalgia.
The novel, being written in a realistic manner presents different aspects of
the world in which the action takes place. One major theme of the novel is
moral and social maturation. When the novel opens, Tom is engaged in
childhood pranks and make-believe games. As the novel progresses, these
initially consequence-free childish games take on more and more gravity. Tom
leads himself, Joe Harper, Huck, and, in the cave, Becky Thatcher into
increasingly dangerous situations. As Tom begins to take initiative to help
others instead of himself, he shows his increasing maturity, competence, and
moral integrity. Tom’s adventures to Jackson’s Island and McDougal’s Cave
take him away from society. These symbolic removals help to prepare him to
return to the village with a new, more adult outlook on his relationship to the
community.
Another very important aspect of the nineteenth century reflected in the
novel is trading. The children in the novel maintain an elaborate miniature
economy in which they constantly trade amongst themselves treasures that
would be junk to adults. These exchanges replicate the commercial relationships
in which the children will have to engage when they get older.
A very highly acclaimed author in nineteenth century America was
Herman Melville. He wrote just three more novels after Moby-Dick and then
retired from literary life, working as a customs officer, writing poems, a novella,
and a few short stories; mainly because he was unable to make a living as a
writer. Not until the 1920s were the multi-layered qualities of his epic novel
fully appreciated.
Even though Melville and Moby-Dick are most of the times regarded as
romantic, it evokes a very realistic and sometimes philosophical view of the
world. Apparently the story of a whaling voyage as seen through the eyes of
Ishmael, the book’s narrator, and the account of the pursuit of a white whale are
concerned with many of the issues which dominated nineteenth-century thought
in America. The relationship between the land and the sea echoes, the conflict
between adventure and domesticity, between frontiersman and city-dweller.
Captain Ahab’s tragic monomania, as expressed in his obsessive pursuit of the
whale, is an indirect commentary on the feelings of disillusionment in mid-
nineteenth-century America and on the idea that the single-minded pursuit of an
ideal is both vain and self-destructive.
An aspect which Melville decided to introduce in his book was very
delicate in the nineteenth century; religion and God's role in the natural world. I
said “delicate” because this century represented a shift in theology, from
Puritanism to Protestantism. The critic Harold Bloom has named Ahab “one of
the fictive founders of what should be called the American Religion.” To Ahab
it does not matter if the white whale is “agent” or “principle.” He will fight
against fate, rather than resign himself to a divine providence. Father Mapple,
who gives a sermon near the beginning of the novel, and Starbuck symbolize
the conventional and contemporary religious attitudes of nineteenth-century
Protestantism. Ahab's defiance of these is neither romantic nor atheistic but
founded on a tragic sense of heroic and unavoidable duty.
According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature perceptive
Victorians suffered from a sense of “being displaced persons in a world made
alien by technological changes which had been exploited too quickly for the
adaptive powers of the human psyche.” (p.919)This aspect is very clearly
reflected by the novels written during the Victorian age, as proved above. The
characters were representatives of the Victorian society; they were clearly
surprised by all the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution. As we have
seen in David Copperfield characters are not fully adapted to the new way of
life. The hero goes from lower class to respectability, but along the way he
reviews his values and concludes that a settled middle-class life-style is the best
choice.
American novels of the nineteenth century are also based on the human
psyche. This time it’s all about finding, or creating an identity. In trying to
create an identity for their characters, American novelists face a history of
revolution, geographical expansion and a classless democratic society. Mark
Twain and Melville have tried in their novels to render as clearly as possible
these different aspects of the nineteenth century America. Evenif critically
acclaimed in the twentieth century, the realism of these two authors brought
them worldwide recognition.
 Bibliography

Allan, Walter. The English Novel. 1954.

Ciocoi-Pop, Ana-Blanca. Notes on 19th Century American Literature.

Sibiu: LBUS Press, 2007.

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Norton: Norton Critical Edition,

1990.

Schneider, Ana-Karina. The reception of the Victorian Novel. Sibiu:

LBUS Press, 2008.

“The Victorian Age: 1832-1901”. The Norton Anthology to English

Literature. 5th ed. vol 2. Norton: Norton Critical Edition,
1986.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/
www.victorianweb.org/