DISSERTATION ON

MODERNISM OF LITERATURE
VICTORIAN AGE AND MODERN AGE

BY –
NITISHA YADAV
B.A (HONS.) ENGLISH

APRIL 10, 2018

AMITY UNIVERSITY
GURUGRAM
INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this dissertation is to provide critical and historical ideas about the change or

transition from Victorian period to Modernism in Literature. This idea will include information

about the historical and cultural contexts of both the ages in literature as well as presenting the

theoretical approaches in the subject mentioned above. In providing the background to this

dissertation I noticed critical view of Victorian era in context of its History, Politics and culture,

further dealing with the beginning of its themes, issues with application to literature towards its

transition to the changing of the themes, ideas and concept in the literature of Modern era or

Modernism. Taking references from various poets, dramatists and novelists of both the eras, I

will try to give the complete overview, the reason behind such change along with the positives

and negatives in the last section that is conclusion. The whole dissertation is arranged in

chronological order.

Victorian age

Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to her death on 1901, and her name has become synonymous

with the age. The term ‘Victorian’ suggests a quite historical juncture, tending to connote a

peculiarly rigid set of ideas, circumstances, values and attitudes. These revolve around a number

of concepts and themes, not to say clichés, which are frequently attributed to the Victorians, and

they can be misleading. The Victorians are typically described as having lived rather drab lives

that were little more than combination of puritan ethics and repressions: several moral probity ,

restraint, reserve, family values, a certain dourness or lack of humor, uncomfortable attitudes

towards sex, stony faces in photographs, and black clothes. They are equally notorious for their

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intolerance towards social ‘deviants’ of all types. Criminals, lunatics, homosexuals and stray

woman, were all treated severely or punished, and masturbation was discouraged by cold baths.

In a society in which middle class norms and attitude rose to dominance, the working classes

were also approached with caution and contempt, and foreignness in any shape or form was

treated with suspicion and hostility.

As a part of their complex middle-class ethos, the Victorians are just as famous for their

liberalism and sense of industry. Concepts such as hard work, bustle, determination, energy,

purpose and progress are all frequently attached to the Victorians, as are practical philosophies

such as ’self-help’ and ‘philanthropy’. As these last two concepts suggests, however, the clichés

surrounding the Victorian age, being clichés turn out to be somewhat contradictory upon closer

inspection: ‘self-help’ describes an ethos of self sufficient individualism, while ‘philanthropy’

denotes an idea of charity or goodwill to others. As mutually defining oppositions, they are

concepts which unsettle the clichés ascribed to the Victorians by operating as simultaneous

attributes of the middle-class ethos. Similar contradictions appear when we consider the issue of

sexual modesty. The general view is that the Victorians were prudish about the human body:

everyone has an opinion, for example about their reluctance to enjoy sex or reveal bits of their

bodies. But this was an age when prostitution and pornography were rampant, homosexual were

jailed, transvestites roamed the nation’s park, population figure swelled, particularly in the

crowded cities, and sex was discussed everywhere.

The contradiction and complexities of the Victorian period also have to be seen in the context of

technological, and consequently social, change in the aftermath of the industrial revolution,

nineteenth century Britain changed rapidly from a largely rural to a predominantly urban society

and the Victorians were unparalleled as innovators in the sciences and technology. Important

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engineering feats came to symbolize this change, especially the development of the railways

from the 1830s onwards, one of the most singular and striking achievements being Isamberd

kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway linking London and Bristol, which was opened in

1835. A London to Birmingham railway was also in operation by 1838 and by the early 1840s

the popular holiday destination of Brighton was served by a London to brighten railway which

costs around eight shillings (40 p) for a cheap day return. By 1850, in fact there were around six

thousand miles of railway lines across Britain. For many Victorians, a better and faster railway

system marked a better and faster Britain. The trains gave rise to greater efficiency in transport

and communication, and enable the swifter movement of vital resources and materials between

the nation’s core industrial centers.

British time was consequently forced to become synchronized and standardized, and this

regulation determined a new sense of hourly structure and routine in daily life throughout the

country. From that point onwards, Victorians would have to keep time with both the new trains

themselves and the relentless chug of the modern world they inaugurated. Victorian engineers

also under took the construction of a series of massive bridge, tunnel and via duct projects,

primarily to facilitate better routes for the trains and the developments in communication

technology enabled them to lay down longer and longer telegraph lines. After 1955, large scale

changes were also a foot in areas of health and sanitation.

To underline the influence of one of these intellectuals’ achievements here, and its implications

for modern literary criticism and theory, we can focus on Marxism. The construction of huge

factories and mass industries throughout Britain in the Victorian period helps cultivate an

increasingly class-conscious nations and it is out of the context that Marx and Engle’s ideas

about the fundamentally exploitative nature of industrial capitalism became important for

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understanding the modern world. Their theories also, inevitable, informed the critical discussion

of what is happening in, and how we interpret, Victorian literature although this has proved to be

a far from simple story. It the early “hungry forties”, Engels witnessed at firsthand what he

described as the poverty and oppression endured by thy British working classes Manchester, then

the center of Britain’s massive textiles industries. He subsequently condemned the industrial-

capitalist system in his polemical condition of the working classes in England (1844). This text

helped shape his collaboration with Marx and the manner in which class relationships- which

marks an Engles saw as the driving force behind the history of the western world-would be

thought about the interpreted in the future. But Marx also developed the theories about the way

literature and culture participated in the spread and consolidation of “Ruling class ideas”. One of

the aims of this book, in both “Ruling-class ideas” in Victorian literature and the tenants of basic

Marxism. The premise of basic or “vulgar” Marxism is that the history of human relationship is

governed entirely by the economic infrastructure of society. For some modern critics, especially

post modern critics, such an argument is reductive because it offers a far too sweeping “grand

narrative” of life and everything. Such reductionism, they maintain, fails to take account of the

complex and ambiguous others movements of history, those which are made up, for example of

the numerous sexual, genders, or racial dimensions which cannot be simplified into a rigid,

economic opposition.

Around the same time that Marx and Engles were establishing their social critique, Victorian

writers also took up the cause of ordinary working people. In the “condition of England” or

“social problem” novels of the 1830s- 50s, especially, the miseries and deprivation suffered by

the British working classes came under increasingly heavy criticism. Two of the most famous

and popular novels of these sub-genre were Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) and Charles

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dickens’s Hard Times (1854). Gaskell’s work is subtitled a tale of Manchester life, and dickens’s

novel, although set in the fictional “coke towns” is also a rendering of Manchester. Both novels

deal with hardship, hunger, injustice and despair, and it is indicative of the changing role of

fiction in the period, and the peculiarly Victorian confidence shared by Gaskell and dickens, that

they intended their works to be agents of social and economic reform.

In hard times, the waiver Stephen Blackpool is mistreated by the aptly named industrialist Josiah

Bounderby, and just about everyone else in the novel. He is wrongly accused of theft, exiled by

his union, made redundant, falls down mine shaft, and dies. And yet as brutal and as unjust as

conditions were and how ever accurate Gaskell and dickens were in reflecting these problems. In

realty the new industrial systems proved to be usually successful in terms of their overall

contribution to the Victorian economy and the way that they sealed Britain’s reputation around

the world. Victoria’s factories mass-produced a vast range of goods made from diverse natural

and metallurgical resources – textiles, steel, coal, hardware, household goods, pharmaceuticals,

luxury goods- for a growing world market, and they insured that the queen would preside over

the most powerful nation in history. With the Victorian industrialist and middle classes profiting

from such growth, at the expense off workers such as Stephen Blackpool, pertain quickly became

renowned as the “workshop of the world”.

Most commentators describe the Victorian era as part of a broader historical period known as the

“long 19th century”. This period, approximately 1815-1914, includes all of the events and affairs

which distinguish British history throughout these years from the end of one great European

conflict, the Napoleonic wars, to the outbreak of another, the First World War. Neither did

Victorian writers begin being Victorian in 1837and start being modernist in 190 put another way,

the Victorian age its culture, ideas, problems, and anxieties, the key concept of its literature and

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their implications, are simply not as neat as the years 1837-1901 would suggest. When,

otherwise, does the immediately preceding age of romanticism end?

The contest deals with the numerous historical, political and cultural concepts which shaped the

literature, and its scope is as broad as these categories suggests. Following the entry “age of

Victoria”, we will find quiet a specific issues ranging from architecture to war. The important

historical and cultural facts required in order to contextualize a concept such as war in the 19th

century. The significant ideas surrounding the impact of war on Victorian consciousness, and

lastly by means of series of close, theoretically informed readings the ways wish to apply these

fats and ideas to Victorian literature.

The fact that Victorian literature is haunted by images of slavery has become increasingly

important to modern critical approaches to the period. That such images appear so soon after the

British government in 1833 dismantle the formal institutions that made slavery possible, begging

to make more sense when Britain’s status as one of the major slaving nations in modern history

is explained. Post colonial critics and theorists are then better positioned to ask what this

suggests about the Victorian imagination and is colonial consciousness, or about the peculiarly

oppressive nature of the power struggles between men and women that forms such a prominent

feature of the Victorian literature, and which some effeminist and Marxist critics have suggested

are akin to those relationships which underpin slavery. Researchers will also be in a better

position to understand how Victorians understood and approached another important concept

which finds an entry in context , race, atopic which is also, inevitably touched on in entries in

slavery, empire, nation, other, and so on.

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Post colonial theory attempts to understand the ways in which Victorian literature can be read

and interpreted in the light of 19th century. Britain’s status as a colonial world power, of which

slavery was pivotal. Post colonial theorist and critics are also interested in the complex manner in

which Victorian texts repress foreigners and foreign lands, especially, but not exclusively, those

nations and territory colonized and enslaved by the British. The fact, at the same time, that the

literature of the period is also bound up it what many critics describe as the Victorian invention

of the British identity is also integral to the problem indeed; the chief aim of this dissertation is to

think across a number of contextual and critical categories. The researcher into a key concept

such as slavery will then be poised to ask what the implication of all these problems are for the

construction of British identity and the British Empire in Victorian literature and how it might all

be most intelligently and persuasively understood.

The Modern Age

The study of English literature in the early twenty-first century is host to an exhilarating range of

critical approaches, theories and historical perspective. “English” ranges from traditional modes

of study such as Shakespeare and romanticism to popular interest in national and area literatures

such as the United States, Ireland and the Caribbean. The subject literature also spans a diverse

array of generous from tragedy to cyber punk; in corporate such hybrid fields of study as Asian

American literature, black British literature, creative writing and literary adaptations, and

remains eclectic in its methodology.

Such diversity is cause for both celebration and consternation. English is varied enough to

promise enrichment and enjoyment for all kinds of readers and to challenge preconceptions

about what the study of literature might involve. To navigate their way through such literary and

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cultural diversity and to make sense of the various literary categories and peroiodisation, such as

modernism and the renaissance , or the proliferating theories of literature, from feminism and

Marxism to queer theory and eco-criticism, guides to literature series reflect the challenges and

pluralities of English today, but at the same time it offers clears and accessible routes through the

contest, generous, historical periods and debated within the subjects.

To clear the drifts of spring

Of our forebear’s excrements

Mina Loy, ‘O Hell’ (1920)

Different dates have been assigned to the beginnings and endings of an English-language.

Literary modernism, “clear”, as Mina Loy puts it, for its “forebear’s excrements”. Its European

origins have been found in the ironic gestures of Charles Baudelaire’s 1850s poems about Paris

prostitutes, in Henrik Ibsen’s plays about liberated women of the 1880s and 1890s, or in the

violent avant-garde leap into the future of F.T.Marinetti’s “Founding and manifesto of futurism”.

Broadly speaking, “Modernism” might be said to have been characterized by a deliberate and

often radical shift away from tradition, and consequently by the use of new and innovative forms

of expression thus many styles in art and literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are

markedly differently from those that preceded them. The term “modernism“ generally covers the

creative outputs of artist and thinkers who saw “traditional” approaches to the arts, architecture,

literature, religion, social organization had become outdated in light of the new economic, social

and political circumstances of a by now fully industrialized society.

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Amid rapid social change and significant developments in science, modernist found themselves

alienated from what might be termed Victorian morality and convention. They duly set about

searching for radical responses to the radical changes occurring around them, affirming

mankind’s power to shape and influence his environment through experimentation, technology

and scientific advancement, while identifying potential obstacles to “progress” in all aspects of

existence in order to replace them with updated new alternatives.

All the enduring certainties of enlightenment thinking, and the hero to sore unquestioned

existence of an all-seeing, all-powerful “creator” figure, were high on the modernist list of

dogmas that were now to be challenged, or subverted, perhaps rejects all together, or , at the very

least, reflected upon from a fresh new “modernist” perspective.

Not that modernism categorically defied religion or eschewed all the beliefs and ideas associated

with the Enlightenment, it would be more accurate to view modernism as a tendency to question,

and strive for alternatives to, the conviction of the preceding age. The past was now to be seen

and treated as different from the modern era, and its axioms and undisputed authorities held up

for revision and enquiry.

The extent to which modernism is open to diverse interpretation, and even rife with apparent

paradoxes and contradictions, is perhaps illustrated by the uneasy juxtaposition of the viewpoints

declared by two of modernist poetry’s most celebrated and emblematic poets, while Ezra Pound

was making his famous call to “make it new”, his contemporary T.S.Eliot was stressing the

indispensable nature of tradition in art, insisting upon the artist’s responsibility to engage with

tradition. Indeed the overtly complex, contradictory character of modernism is summed up by

Peter Childs, who identifies “paradoxical” if not opposed trends towards revoluntary and

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reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and

fanatical enthusiasm creativity and despair.

The early modern period is characterized by the rise of science, the shrinkage of relative

distances through improvements in transportation and communications and increasingly rapid

technological progress, secularized civic, politics and the early authoritarian nation-states.

Furthermore, capitalist economics and institutions began their rise and development, beginning

in northern Italian republics such as Genoa, and the Venetian oligarchy. The early modern period

also saw the rise of the economic theory of mercantilism. As such, the early modern period

represents the decline and eventual disappearances, in much of the European sphere, of Christian

theocracy, feudalism and serfdom. The period includes the Reformation, disastrous Thirty Year

War, which is generally considered one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, in

addition to the Commercial Revolution, the European colonization of the Americas, the Golden

Age of piracy and the peak of the European which-hunt craze.

The expression “early modern” is sometimes used as a substitute for the term “renaissance”.

However, “renaissance” is properly used in relation to a diverse series of cultural developments

that occurred over several hundred years in many different parts of Europe especially central and

northern Italy- and spans the transition from late medieval civilization to the opening of the

“early modern” close period.

Whereas Modern Age also know as Modernism is concerned it and post colonial studies are both

seen in ways that have militated against the consideration of “modernism”. Accounts of literary

modernism that crystallized in the decades after the Second World War did not mention the late

colonial context, while post-colonial studies have often only sketched in its relation to

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modernism. Colonial discourse theory tends to end its analysis in the early 20th century, while

work on contemporary post-colonial issues usually begins with the widespread decolonialization

that followed the Second World War.

A few texts, in particular Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E.M Foster’s A Passage to

India, have been used, especially in the teaching of Modernism, to establish a peripheral theme

of race and colonialism in the period. Modernism though is the length study that seeks to explore

the pervasive but complex inter relation between British colonialism and the modern movement.

For key figures in establishing what came to be called post- colonial studies- one thinks, for

example, of Chinua Achebe and Edward said – Modernist literature was at once the near-

contemporary established great literature of their early maturity to be the father to be slain and

overcome. Achebe’s 1974 lecture on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, accusing Conrad of racism,

raised a storm. The set of themes of issued for debate that cluster under the heading

“Modernism” that began to form after 1945, excluded empire. Major themes in the study of

literary Modernism throughout the world were Western oriented and centered.

Anglo-American Modernism could be seen in terms of the influences from the 19th century, the

adoption of developments from the continents, the impact of the First World War, Marxist

accounts which stressed the avant-garde attack on centers of power, issues of time and even,

amazingly, the consideration of space and “Briticism” without mentioning colonialism.

Modernism explores the relation between British colonialism and literature. The years after the

First World War so the land occupied by the British Empire reaches it’s maximum.

Dissemination among the various colonizing and colonized population of the discourses that

supported colonialism were also at their most extensive.

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The Second World War, though, available literary-critical positions for all the debate between

them, colluded in excluding references to colonialism. The stress within certain forms of

Modernism itself on an aesthetic world that excluded the contamination by politics contributed to

the wish of New Critics, to avoid political questions. The writing from the period when

colonialism was both at its height and also exhausting it’s forward movement, coming under

question and becoming unattainable, and was inevitably “Mixed” it is this complex utterance.

Modernism can be seen as just part of “Modernity”, which began with the Renaissance and has

only been Critiqued, analyzed, and perhaps surpassed by post Modernity in the late 20 th century

in the major issue in the philosophy of Modernity is the relation of self to other, and the power

relation involved. The critique of modernity has involved examining how the modern subject

was also an inherently “Colonizing” subject. In this account, the Modern-with Modernism at its

end before the inauguration of the post modern critic is saturated to its core with colonialist

attitudes. This analysis, though, is one internal to the West- it also has to be asked how

modernism appeared to those situated at the colonial margins, and how it might have been

appropriated in the effort to establish national and post-colonial literatures.

Alternatively, modernism’s place near the “end of modernity” has led some to locate in

modernism a questioning of attitudes to the “other “and to colonialism. The argument is that

more than an increasing liberal disquiet over colonialism can be seen in modernism rather it is

the true starting point of post-colonial critic. Modernism, and its philosophical under pining, had

problematize the relation to the “other”, and found ways of producing texts that allowed the

multiple voices and a respectful relation to altered and difference. There are many authors and

text from the modern movement that are extreme and violent in their attitudes to race and

empire, rather than respectful and hybrid and whether any author found a place wholly outside

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the dominant discourses of race and empire can be questioned. The politics and writing of a

period do not necessarily share its best thought. In modernist studies, these questions are usually

addressed through continental Marxist theory and debate on hoe avant grade art can unsettle,

disturb and produce change. Issues around modernist aesthetic, Marxist theory of modernism,

and post-colonial studies need more analysis than can be provided in a short introduction. In this

model, writing colonialism is seen as a minor sub theme, a comfortable and comforting view.

With the “literature of empire” goes the writing from the empire. Which is not even mentioned?

Imperialism as registering not only on the content and themes of modernist writing, but on its

very style. The Marxist insight that economic conflict lies behind super structural change leads

Jameson to see the” First World” subject after the congress of Berlin in1884 as feeling her-or

himself to be part of a global economic and social system. However, at this time there was a

silence where the voice of the difference should have been. Modernism at the level of form

reflects a sense of a gap between what it can say and what it feel the need of gesture towards.

Modernism’s relation to imperialism is forced into a single linear narrative of cause and effect.

The good insights- for example, the relation of literally change to the globalizing of historical

and economic conditions, or the relation of colonialism to the very form and language of the

writing are vitiated by the knowing, simplifying framework.

Other forms of relation between the writings of the modern movement and colonialism are not

addressed. Ireland’s relation to modernism is crudely oversimplified in this account, for example,

Joyce’s own consideration of these issues is by no means as straight forward and clear cut as he

suggest.

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Perhaps most extraordinary of all is this confidence is that there is no known-western writing of

note at this time. From within the British Empire, there is—as an initialize-the response to

modernism in Australia, newzealand, South Africa, India, the Caribbean and in writing in

English from Arab writers. Effort to delineate different types of response to modernism could

distinguish between settler culture and that location where there was another language and return

literary tradition that predated colonialism. As a working hypothesis, it could be argued that

black Africa, with the imposition off the English language and the western education a recent

development was an unlikely location for any writing that could be called modernist inform. But

a hypothesis such as this has to be adopted attentively by the metropolitan critic, and if it is an

informed supposition it should be flagged as such, and not maintained easily and dogmatically as

a truth about the “other”. Jameson’s intervention does not take the form of a contribution to

debate; rather, it is fr4amed as the distinguished theorist handing down the law.

Both late colonialism and modernism share many of the same structuring discoursing particularly

concerns over the decline and decay of civilization. Possible responses to collapsing certainties

include working with the changing world or fighting it with a compensate extreme resistance.

Questions of psychology, modernism and late colonialism are of great importance

psychoanalysis, indeed, often equated its early development to exploration, discovery,

colonization. One thinks of Freud calling female sexuality a “dark continent” for psychology. It

is possible to argue that as a world map was colored in by the occupying colonial powers, the last

colonies were found among the new topographic of the psyche. Deleuzd Guattari argues in their

anti-Oedipus that Oedipus is always colonization perused by other means, it is the interior

colony, and even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial

relation. The modernist theme of anxiety and mental torment about the new uncertainty was

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closely bounded up with fear around colonialism. Doubts gathered around the project of empire,

whether it would be sustained or was nearing its end. Was the racial and colonial”other” the

barbarian at the door to be resisted to preserve psychological society and cultural values? Or

were they what offered an exhausted and tired West, its people and its literature a way out?

Modernist writing often answered “yes” to both of these questions- with important implications

for the complexity of its subject matter, narrative form, symbolism and language. After PATRIC

Williams consideration of the theoretical issues raised by the volume, Rod Edmond examines

degeneration theory, perhaps the major discourse that modernism and late colonialism share.

Edmond also re-evaluate the relationship between the metropolitan centre and imperial margins

in his discussion of Conrad’s Almayer Folly, The Secret Agent and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land

.the questions around the politics of modernism that Edmond addresses towards the end of his

chapter are taken up by Helen Carr in her chapter on “Imagism and empire”. Looking at the

inception of high modernism in Britain she reopens debate about “primitivism” and demonstrates

the marked Irish and anti- imperial influences on innovative and radical poetry.

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The Victorian Age in Depth

The name “Victorian” is derived from Queen Victoria who ascended the English throne in 1837.

She ruled for the next 63 years till her death in 1901. According to W.E.H. Lecky, a noted

historian of the period, she was a popular queen who drew support the “sentiment and

enthusiasm” of her people. As a constitutional monarch her powers were limited but she made

the royal throne the embodiment of the moral values and beliefs of her age. No wonder she gave

the age her name.

Every age continues from the previous era. The age that proceeded the Victorian period is

usually marked from 1790 to 1830 and is known as the romantic period. However, to draw a

boundary line between ages in not easy nor is it often desirable. History is not simply a process

of continuous development. A lot of history is reconstructed by looking at the past from the

vantage point of the present. How an age is perceived depends on what is highlighted and what is

ignored. At the same time, thoughts are buried deep in the consciousness of an age that may not

be apparent to those who are living at the time. Our task while studying the Victorian age would

be to fill in these unconscious gaps by looking at the continuities and breaks that mark one age

from another.

Broadly speaking, there are two popular approaches to the Victorian age. The first sees it as an

age of transition from the old, outworn doctrines and traditions of the past. The second compares

the age with the future so that our modern ideas are traced back to the Victorians periods. There

is an interesting distinction between these two approaches. The former sees the Victorian age as

dynamic and free willing, so that changes, which became towards the end of the 18th century, are

seen as gathering momentum from 1850 onwards. The latter, who contrasts the Victorian age

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with the hectic pace of our own times, sees it as a stable world 0f peace and prosperity in which

ideas have their routes in certain unshakable foundations.

In a sense, both these approaches offer a limited perspective. If we take any one point of view we

ignore the other. A more balanced, unified approach would be to look at those aspects of an age

that are invisible and unconscious. They are like ripples on the calm surface of water, they hide

from view the dangerous depth of the water if we were to through the stone on still surface of the

water it will part causing disturbance. The best way to understand an age would be to look at

those cracks and fissures that appear when the calm, smooth exterior of an age is disturbed. Such

a disturbance is caused when we probe that those areas where an age appears confident and self

assured.

With the changes that the Victorians’ celebrated with a great deal of confidence. Almost all the

major thinkers of that period- Arnold, Carlyle, Disraeli, John Stuart mill, Ruskin, Morris,

Bulwark Lytton, Herbert Spencer, J.A Symonds, Tennyson and many others- Hailed Their times

as bringing in a new order to replace old systems of thoughts they were especially proud of the

fact that Victorian England was breaking free from a feudal, agrarian order to be replaced by a

democratic, industrial society. The two major events of the age were the successive Reform Bills

of 1832, 1867 and 1884 that gave democratic rights to the people and the industrial revolution.

The latter was responsible for increasing mechanization and improved communication. The

introduction of railways, steamboats, roads and canals lead to the expansion of commerce. But

what the Victorians truly celebrated was the spread of education and the increase in the

publication of books, periodicals and newspapers so that newer ideas could percolate to a wide

section of people. The age was conscious of the growing power of a new segment of the society,

the traders, bankers, merchants, financiers, professionals and men of letters, the ”Middle ” class

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that occupied the strategic position between the aristocrats and the working class. Most of the

writers mentioned above belonged to this class, and in welcoming the changes that were taking

place in the society were celebrating the increasing social, political and economic power of their

own class.

However, the Victorians were conscious of living in an age of unrest and paradox. Almost all the

writers spoke about the prevailing atmosphere of doubt especially in matter of religion. In doing

so, they were giving expression to a “fear” they experienced collectively. Paradoxically enough,

what they feared was that very change and progress which they otherwise celebrated. A

democratic, industrial society offers ample opportunity for unlimited competition. According to

John Stuart Mill, a noted political and economic analyst of that time a distinguishing feature of

the new age is the fact that “human beings are no longer born to their place in life…but are free

to employ their faculties, and such favorable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may

appear to them most desirable”. With the widening of economic opportunity more and more

people could climb the social scale. At the same time, such a breakdown of class structure

created a peculiar sense of insecurity amongst those very people who had taken advantage of the

social mobility. They now felt the need to protect their status and privileges against the

encroachment of the class they had left behind. This fear translated itself into a powerful desire

for social stability and security.

Though the Victorians acknowledged the “intellectual anarchy” of the time, they always looked

forward to a period of firm conviction and establish beliefs. To them all changes were a

necessary stage in the process of growth. What differentiate the Victorians from our modern

times is this faith in the existence of ultimate truths in both religion and ethics. They also held

onto a faith in man’s capacity to discover this truth.

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This contradictory desire for both change as well as stability on the part of the Victorian middle

class resulted in a number of fascinated intellectual debated of that time. These debated in turn

created a cross current of ideas that influenced the major poets. One way of studying the poetry

of Tennyson, browning and Rossetti would be to analyze the points at which they enter into the

debates.

No wonder the Victorians were outraged!

It is important to understand why scientific discovery was so problematic for the Victorian age.

As already pointed out, it questioned the nature of divine creation, and spoke about a universe

governed by natural laws; it removed man from the center of creation and made him one of the

many species of organic life. It brought in the idea of extinction and made life process continues

and still evolving. It obviously took away man’s sense of security. But there was something even

more alarming about the manner in which the doctrine of “organic development” defused itself

throughout the 19th century thought process, so that no serious thinker could escape its

implications.

Bishops clergymen, academics and layman attacked Darwin. What upset them was that the

notion of evolution divorced science from morality. It implied a process of ruthless struggle in

which only the strongest species survived. Organic development also meant that a species

adapted itself to conditions best suited for its growth. In the process individuals were destroyed

even though species survived. Nature then offered the best example of the very idea of free

competition that industrial society championed. Yet, too much freedom was precisely what the

Victorians feared. They felt that in a society dedicated to individualism, social mobility and the

breakdown of class structure it was very necessary to hold on to the restraints imposed by

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religion. To view development as a counter movement to moral progress was dangerous. So long

as science maintained a healthy link with morality it was beneficial for society. But if science

challenged religion it became a threat to society!

Actually, the theory of ‘development’ was supported by another intellectual tradition that goes

back to the writings of such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke and Newton. It came to be known as the

‘positivist’ tradition and it opened up intellectual debated that proved to be an even greater

challenge to Christianity. The Victorian thinker who carried on with the positivist tradition was

a French philosopher named Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He propagated that society had a

history of its own, which moved through three stages: the theological, metaphysical and positive

or scientific. Therefore Christian religion was only one stage in the history of development and it

was now replaced by a broader religion of humanity.

The positivist tradition studies human history rather than natural history to arrive at a position

where it no longer accepted the Bible or the Church as the source of authority. At the same time

to abandon Christianity did not mean the abandonment of morality. Rather, it allowed for the

cultivation of broad human sympathies with emphasis on the ‘high moral aim’ of life. The

positivist tradition saw itself as a scientific movement mainly because it emphasized on ‘rational’

element in human behavior. The business of living in society, i.e. making the correct choice

between right and wrong or choosing the proper means to an end was a matter of rational

behavior. It was rationality that determined that men preferred pleasure to pain or that goals that

are unattainable are usually avoided.

What the positivist tradition tried to do was narrow the gap between science, social theory, and

religion. It offered a common platform for studying society, whereby it could be determined how

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the health and wealth of the society rested on the pursuit of rational self interest. Yet, social

sciences faced a major disadvantage when compared to natural sciences. The data collected by a

sociologist to study human behavior lacked the objectivity of the data used by Lyell or Darwin.

The only way to tackle the problem was to turn to a branch of knowledge that was both factual as

well as empirical. The Victorian found such a discipline in history. Thus a history of the world

was revised which incorporated the scientific notion of evolution and a history of progress that

did not required supernatural intervention to account for what had happened. The attempt was to

retell the history of man not in terms of the biblical story of genesis or the New Testament, but a

more secular history that suited the spirit of the new industrial age with its emphasis on

democratic rights and economic success.

In a sense, this new, secular history of the world tried to meet science headlong. The attempt was

to combat the chance and blind determinism in evolutionary theory that had distressed the

Victorian so much. Against it was posited a theory that highlighted man’s struggle for progress.

In the world of ruthless competition, effort towards self-help and self- improvement became the

Victorian formula for success. Science was important only insofar as it could be incorporated in

a history of progress. However, such a secular notion of development carried the seeds of

religious crises. Was god banished from the world of struggle, survival and fierce competition?

Could the Victorian do away with their beliefs in divine intervention in human affairs?

In the final analysis, the Victorians tried to re work at their religious faith by posting a religion

that was more personal than doctrinaire. The Evangelical faith was nonconformist and it tried to

tell the story of the man of fall through a historical- theological recounting for his needs for

redemption and Christ’s sacrifice. It preached a life of simple piety and stressed on the personal

and intense nature of religious experience. It created a human-divine Christ who was constructed

21
as a historical rather than theological figure from the critical study of the bible. The one way that

religion could be assimilated in Victorian social theory was by projecting Christ as a teacher of

morality rather than a figure of divinity. No doubt, the quarrel between science and religion was

incessant and difficult to reconcile. But the Victorians made a sincere effort to resolve the crisis

not by banishing god from society but by making religion a matter of personal faith.

Evangelicalism tugged at the rather heart than the mind. If science raised speculative problems

religion remained a question of feeling. Thus Victorian society attempted to resolve the

‘differences’ between science, social theory and religion by bringing together ideas of evolution,

development and ethical progress under the broad category of ‘personal morality’.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

If there was a single social phenomenon that fascinated the Victorians it was the industrial

revolution. As a social movement it was essentially economic. It drew men away from the land

by opening out new and exciting career option. With the emergence of democracy political

power was transferred from aristocracy to the people. Once the middle class attained political as

well as financial eminence, their social influence increased rapidly. It is largely their thoughts

and fillings that make up what a critic describe a “Victorian temper”. A characteristic feature of

the age was speed. The rail road and steam engine increased the locomotion of goods and people.

If today we live in a world of much greater speed, our sense of speed has declined compared to

the Victorians. Not only did the railways create mobility, it led to the concentration of population

and development in urban areas. The newly urbanized people consisted of thousands of men,

women and children who toiled in mills, breweries, shops and offices. Their lives- styles moved

away from the simpler agrarian settings, for industrial society provided new forms of work and

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social discipline. The factory bell with its implementation of fixed working hours suggested a

new kind of regimentation. Industrial society provided different social and cultural relationships.

Raymond Williams in his book culture and society 1785-1950 provides five key words that were

commonly used in the 19th century and can therefore help us to analyze the nature of the age.

These words were industry, democracy, class, art and culture. The term industry that usually

denoted the human attribute of “skill and diligence” acquired a collective meaning to stand for

certain kinds of manufacturing institutions. The new word was industrial and given the rapid

growth of these institutions, a new social system was created which came to be known as

industrialism. This system was marked by technological changes that intern transform methods

of production. As William’s points out, the phrase industrial revolutions became prevalent after

the 1830s and came to refer to the effect of these changes on society as a whole.

The four other key words were offshoots of industrial revolution. Democracy which means

“government by the people” enters the political vocabulary after the American and French

revolution. In England, it marked the struggle for democratic representation by the middle class.

It led to the growing significance of the word “class” to denote social divisions. Not only was

there a change in the character of these divisions but also a change in the attitude towards them.

The two others words “art “and “culture” acquired immense significance. Culture carried with it

an idea of a “state or habit of mind”, at the same time, it became the yard stick for the intellectual

development of society as a whole. The word art came to stand for a different quality of

imaginative truth, while the term “artist” meant a unique kind of person with special talents. A

new world, “ethics” grouped together different arts like literature, music, painting and sculpture

in order to suggest and” exalted ability or skill”.

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THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST IN AN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY

If Arnold’s “intellectual aristocracy” included the artist as an important component, then it

becomes necessary for us to define the role of the artist in Victorian society. As a matter of fact,

such a definition would form a necessary background to the study of Victorian poetry. In 1840

Carlyle delivered sex lectures on heroes, hero-worship, and the heroic in history among the

different kinds of heroes that Carlyle identified in history, he included the hero as poet and the

hero as ‘man of letters’. According to Carlyle the poet is the prophet or seer ‘whose eyes have

been gifted to discern the godlike mystery of god’s universe’. What makes him heroic in his

moral commitment to convey the prophetic vision to his age? In other words, the artist was seen

as molding the character and influencing the opinion of the age.

THEMES AND TRADITIONS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Distinction between “Victorian” and “neo-classic”

Literature in the Victorian age, does not become neo-classic. All Englishmen do not subscribe to

the new social, religious and ethical principle. Much of English literature continues to be

romantic. But the literature which follows the “Victorian” principles becomes more somber and

factual, more realistic and classical. Much of its reflects the new scientific advancements, the

concerns over social conditions and the doubts and denials that the governing principles are

right. Victorian literature, in spite of attempts to label it as “false, narrow, materialistic

complacent, etc”, is varied and complex. In it, all sides of the various issues are discussed. No

one set off governing principle dictates the entire tone of English writings during this period. The

modern student of literature can find within this period any attitude he wished to find, but he will

find that the majority of the writings of the age will depart “high” romanticism somewhat, in the

24
direction of reality, of convectional practice and of interferers in the real problems of a scientific,

industrial, and orthodox society. It is more a democratic literature of reality than it is one of

fancy and imagination. But it is a healthy literature, in that all elements are present, that in

agreement as well as those in disagreement with the principles that governed the richer and more

politically powerful classes. The impassioned struggle for individualism in literature of the

romantic school and its predecessors bore rich fruit in the sage; literature in English had become

democratic in that a wide range of themes and styles are freely represented.

Popular demand and Victorian literature

In the Victorian age, the intermingling of romanticism and classicism in literature and the

presence of the strong tendency towards didacticism are only a part of the evidence in a new

literary age. In previous periods whether the renaissance, the restoration, neoclassicism, or the

romantic period, literature was largely aristocratic and was aimed at a comparatively small sector

of the population. In this age, educational advancement and the enlarged literate the wealthier

middle class brought a demand upon authors from a distinctly new direction-the people. Most of

Victorian literature was written for consumption by the people. The author, for the most part was

not writing purely for his own individual satisfaction, he was not aiming his product towards a

small select group of individuals with his same taste, he was writing or a mass demand. This

pressure upon him by a mass made for a new standard for much of the writings of this period-

the standard of popular demand.

This new popular demand was for the novel, a novel of realism, a novel that analyze the

problems of people and suited the social and moral standard of the average middle-class

Englishman. There was also a demand to be entertains with an escapist world, but a “down-to-

25
earth” romantic world, which largely took the direction which Scott had indicated- return to the

past ages for fanciful, idealized and heroic themes.

Great drama in all society tends to be critical and satirical when it approached realism. In the

Victorian age an age of homely family gathering rather than a theatre- going society, an age of

self-satisfaction and pride by the family fireside, realistic drama was not appreciated. Victorians,

who attended the theatre, demanded light comedy, farce, and melodrama.

The essay fits into the pattern for the novel. Social and industrial problems are favorite subjects.

Scientific studies became popular reading in this age. There is very little of the familiar style of

lamb and Hazlitt in this age. The writers concern themselves with objective observations of an

external world. The essayist of the period tended to be intellectual rather than emotional, in their

approach to their exposition of themes, many wrote a brilliant prose, in which themes took a

form which was carefully calculated to stir men’s minds rather than hearts.

Industrial progress

In the early years of the 19th century the British industries were languishing but after the gradual

introduction of free trade, progress became rapid. Wealth grew more rapidly and national

revenue increased in proportions. Prices fell as goods could be made more easily by machines

and raw materials could be bought in cheaper markets. Artisans and professional men earned

better. In spite of the repeal of Corn Laws, farmers and landlords continued to be rich and

prosperous. Steamboats and steam railways changed the face of human civilization. England

became a great manufacturing nation, but the evils of the factory system continued. Child labor

was rampant in mines and factories. Wages were so low that even skilled workers found life a

hard struggle. Robert Owen protested against this state of affairs. He gave the first impulse to

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factory legislation and was the founder of English co-operation. The factory acts of 1833 to 1878

limited the hours of women’s and children’s labor and provided that workshops should be

properly ventilated, fenced and inspected the mines act of 1832 prohibited the employment of

women and children underground. The acts of 1867 and 1873 were concerned with the

employment of women and children in rough agricultural labor, the acts of 1834 and 1864

concerned with the boy chimney sweepers, and in 1871, five public health acts were passed.

Along with factory legislation went the development of self help among the workers. Trade

unions grew up. They were often headed by ignorant and unreasonable men and strikes became

more numerous. But bit by bit things became better and trade unions protected the legitimate

interest of the workers.

Social conditions

The rapidly increasing population which was concentrated in London, Liverpool and Glasgow

and other towns live in circumstances of physical and moral wretchedness. The rookeries of

London and Westminster were dense of wretchedness and a large fraction of the population lived

in clouded cellars. The lack of sanitation was scandalous, water supply was costly and

inadequate and often contaminated, there were no proper means for the disposal of sewage and

refuse, and there were graveyard near the houses of workers. The pictured of the London slums

in Oliver twist and of the cemetery in bleak house are not the romantic exaggerations of a gothic

imagination, but transcripts of reality. The efforts of social workers to improve sanitation were

obstructed by undertakers, private water companied and dustmen’s. The result was the spread of

cholera in 1831, 1848 and 1853-4. Social reformers took up a cause. Edwin Chadwick did good

work in this field of social reform. Fabian essays by Sidney web and other advanced thinkers

opened the social question. Statistical research exposed condition in the slums of London and

27
other great cities. Towards the end of the century great strides were made in municipal reform,

and volunteer settlements such as Toynbee hall sprang up in various localities. Newspapers like

daily mail exerted a powerful influence in arousing public opinion against these conditions.

Middle class and Democracy

While workers movements made slow progress, the dominant force in the countries was the

middle class with its policy of social and economic laissez faire after the reform act both Whigs

and Tories accepted the middle class branches as the basis of parliamentary democracy and the

country settled down to enjoy bourgeois domination. The Tories became conservatives, and the

wings became liberals. Liberalism is the most characteristic product of bourgeois thought.

Its main purpose was to free the individual from undue government interference. After the repeal

of the Corn Laws in 1846, free trade became the national policy. Bentham and James Mill who

dominated liberal thought were the apostles of freedom, political, religious, and economic. This

thought was behind many “reform”, such as the emancipations of the Catholics, the abolition of

university test, the establishment of free trade and the granting of Jews the right to sit in the

parliament. But there was an ugly side of Victorian liberalism also. It extended the doctrine of

known-interference to matters of social distress and industrial conditions. All measures for a

betterment of the workers were opposed by liberals and believers in individualism and laissez

faire. Any interference with the rights of private property, with the liberty of the employer to use

his wealth and his employs as he choose, with the natural working of the laws of profit making,

was fiercely resisted. In practice freedom for working classes was only freedom to work under

the conditions imposed by the employers, and if no work was required, freedom to starve. After

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the system of industrial capitalism had been established, the middle class agreed it give small

concessions to the workers, but that was not enough.

It was a time of stress and strain, with the social stress was reflected in Victorian literature.

Intellectual development

The literary product was inevitably affected by the new ideas in science, religion and politics. On

the origin of species (1859) of Darwin shook to its foundation scientific thoughts. We can

perceive the influence of such a work in Tennyson’s in memoriam in Mathew Arnold’s

meditative poetry, and in the works of Carlyle. In religious and ethical thought the “oxford

movement”, as it was called, was the most noteworthy advance. The movement has its source

among the young and eager thinkers of the old university, and was headed by the great Newman,

who ultimately (1845) joined the Church of Rome. As a religious portent it marked the

widespread discontent with the existing beliefs of the Church of England; as a literary influence

it affected many writers of note.

The achievement of the age

With all its immense production, the age produced no supreme writers. It revealed no

Shakespeare, no Shelly nor a Byron or a Scott. The general literary level was, however, very

high; and it was an age, moreover, of spacious intellectual horizons, noble endeavors, and bright

aspirations.

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MAJOR WRITERS OF THIS AGE AND THEIR WORKS

THE AGE OF CHARLES DICKENS

Charles dickens (1812-1870), the most popular of all English novelist, was born in poverty.

Before he was 10, he was earning his living in murky London warehouse, while his father was

held in a debtor’s prison. He later worked for a solicitor and finally found his vocation that was

to make him famous as a news reporter. It was when he was about 25 that his news paper

sketches and satirical tales began to attract a large number of people. His sketches by Boz and the

supporting characters of his Pickwick papers made young dickens a famous caricaturist of

English manners. When in 1837, he wrote his first social novel Oliver Twist, his future course

and fame as a novelist were assured by readers for a long time to come.

The Victorian age was an age of peace, prosperity, and progress. A magnificent Queen was

reigning who could easily inspire the people with love, adoration and patriotism. British Empire

reached the zenith of its prosperity during her regime. Darwin’s origin of species opened the new

vistas of philosophy as the people were confident of endless progress. But the bright side of this

age entails many evils.

The Victorian age was an age of rapid flux and baffling complexity. This age is characterized by

two factors. First, there were very rapid and sweeping changes which the age witnessed.

Secondly, the age encountered the complexity of social forces. As A.C. Ward remarks; “It was

an age of Faith and an age of Doubt; as age of Morality and of Hypocrisy, of Prosperity and

Splendor and Squalor. It was a solemn age, yet it produced more humorous writers than in any

other period- it was advanced in intellect yet immature in emotion”.

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Dickens was a novelist with a purpose. His purpose was to focus attention on the various evils of

his time. His novel mirrors his age in all its manifold contradiction. Thus, it is essential to

understand the Victorian age thoroughly.

Dickens was living in an age of industrial revolution which ushered in an era of unprecedented

difficulties for the common people. On the one hand, there was the voice of the great capitalist

class which was a new force in national life. It was an age of expansion and progress. On the

other hand, the rural population was uprooted. There was a rush to cities in search of wages and

better conditions for living. The poor were encountering untold sufferings. Hence, there were

frequent strikes by the factory workers who were suppressed by force. From the two novels of

dickens, David Copperfield and Oliver twist we may get a vivid picture of the evils of the

workhouses and the consequent sufferings of the poor. Dickens was a realist and a satirist. He

was pre-occupied with the gallows. There is the story of a women in dickens novel Sketches by

boz, in this novel, a women gets back the body of her son after execution hoping to revive him.

In Great Expectation we get a glimpse of the murderous New-Gate. The prisoners were brutally

treated like animals. The prison laws were severe and cruel.

Dickens novels reflect a vivid picture of the life of the poor in London of his day. Many of his

characters are typical Londoners who have the faults as well as the virtues of a particular class of

London. David Copperfield is treated as the masterpiece of dickens because of the social

chronicle of the novel. Dickens is a popular novelist because he is the social chronicler of lower

class of London life. All his novels reflect social condition prevalent in the contemporary

society. He did not admire the prevalent system of poor relief. He was very curate painter of the

social conditions around him although his character has been criticized as mere caricatures and

not individuals.

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The Victorian age has been considered a time of ugliness, “ugly religion, ugly law, ugly relation

between the rich and the poor, ugly cloths and ugly furniture”.

Nature was also ugly because of unhygienic and unhealthy environments. Dickens was deeply

influenced by the prevailing conditions of London lives. He tries to sublimate all this ugliness

into a source of joy. He noted marvelous possibilities in everyday homely life. He wished to seek

wonders in the dreary life of common streets.

Dickens was well-conversant with sorrows and suffering of children of his age, who were made

to work for as many as thirteen hours a day. In David Copperfield he had endeavored to awaken

the conscience of an age which was insensible to the ill-treatment of its poorer children. His

humor and pathos reveal the various social ills of the day. Condition of the school reflects the

general harshness of the age. The schools were mainly managed by private hands. There were

private academies which provide boarding and lodging to the young students. These academies

were running for profit. The students were mercilessly beaten. In David Copperfield there is a

good school like that of Dr. Strong which was rare in England in those days. “Sphere the rod and

spoil the child” seemed to be the motto of the age.

Dickens felt that suffering were due to religious hypocrisy, affectation and snobbishness. He

lashed at hypocrisy of every kind. His novels reflect hypocrisy, ignorance and tyranny of the

poor people.

The aristocracy of the Victorian age was proud of its blue blood. The capitalist looked down on

the poor. In David Copperfield, Mr. Mell was dismissed from school because he quelled with

steer-forth, the member of an aristocratic family. Steer-forth brought unhappiness to David’s

friend at Yarmouth. Hence due to social snobbery, the rich were indifferent to the poor. Rosa,

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another character in David Copperfield, felt that poor are thick-skinned and cannot be easily

wounded. She was immensely happy that the poor suffered and they did not feel it.

Dickens purpose was social reform in David Copperfield. He emphasized on the harsher and

coarser feature of the Victorian age which required to be removed. Although, the age was

making a rapid progress in spheres in science and industry yet the literary artist like dickens

found the far-reaching repercussions of these developments leading to hardships for the poor.

Hence, Charles dickens is treated as a representative novelist who was a centrist, who exposed

the follies of his age.

THEMES IN DICKEN’S NOVELS

Variety and range of Dickens’s novels

Dickens never lost his sympathy for the poor and the mistreated. His best novels are of victims of

the slums, the poor houses, the debtors’ prisons, and of the semi sides of London lives. The

novels of dickens are filled with stark realism and with a kindly humor. He never became bitter

or bitingly satirical, but even when dealing with the most miserable of social conditions, his

stone is one of idealism and his situations are sketched with understanding and sympathetic

feelings. He was a novelist of the people and his creations have had a continuous popularity with

all classes of people to the present day.

Dickens did his best in the novels to call public attentions to slum conditions and the miseries of

the lower strata of the English society. He did not approve the industrial system and

propagandized endlessly for the abolition of the evils in the legal system, the work houses and

the debtor’s prisons and the miserable condition in the factory system. In most of his novels he

33
was a social writer who never lost his faith in the basic goodness of human character. He was a

reformer, humanitarian, and a mild romantic.

Dickens was a good reporter and many of his novels read a though the vents recounted has

happened last night and are now before the eves in the early morning edition. Dickens is known

best for his humor and the many unforgettable characters he created.

Dickens realism

He appeared to know all the different classes accept the higher classes. So far as the external

features of manners, surroundings and the particularities of different classes go, especially in the

humbler walks of life, he was not only omniscient but extremely faithful. His pictures are

crammed with the rich detail gathered by untiring observer. Nothing seems to have escaped his

eye; nothing was beneath his sympathy and affection.

Dickens idealism

His genius was essentially creative, humorous and fantastic. He was an idealist and a poetic

dreamer. What he had observed of human nature served him as raw material. His sleepless

imagination exaggerated the comic side of everything, and developed the suggestions of reality

into humorous idealism far transcending the proportion of ordinary life. David Copperfield is

richer in personal experience than the work of any other novelist.

Dickens’ sentimentalism

Dickens imaginative sympathy gave a rare tenderness and a compassionate insight to his drawing

of his poor human creatures, his idealism tended to dwell on the beauty of human pathos and to

34
evolve sentimental types akin in imaginative scope to his humorous creation. We owe not a little

to dickens for arousing this very sense of fellowship, even with the meanest and commonest.

Dickens humor

The main ingredient of dickens outlook on life is humor and as a humorist he takes rank with

Chaucer, Shakespeare and Lamb and all those master of the typically English humor which

springs from humanity and easily blends with the pathos. Dickens novels abound in all the

varieties of humor, farcical situations, grotesque descriptions, verbal twist and, mannerism of

speech and above all, the sympathetic laughter which bathes a character and illuminates it’s in

most depth of heart and nature. But there is a remarkable flexibility in the distribution of this

sympathetic laughter among the different kinds of character. It is at its tenders in the sketches of

the good and the generous figures. Dickens’s unique position as a humorist lies in his mastery in

pure humor jobs that are funny not for the satirical light they through, but just in themselves.

Dickens and social reforms

In his novels, Charles dickens has tried to satirize the social, political and economic evils of the

time. He has caricatured the working of the law and the courts, educational institutions and the

cruelties of the teachers and other such evil practices. In fact he wanted to make evil a vehicle of

justice and morality. This is why he has succeeded in portraying those characters more

successfully that have virtues in them. On their other hand, characters with vices have not been

portrayed so successfully.

Elements of caricature in dickens novels

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Some critics have charged Charles dickens of making his characters into caricatures. These

critics are of the view that the characters of Charles dickens are more of caricature than living

human beings. These characters do not belong to the world of reality. This impression is not very

correct.

Symbolism in dickens novels

As David Cecil avers: “thus Picksniff is not only Mr. Picksniff, he is the types of all hypocrites;

Mrs. Jellyby is not only Mrs. Jellyby, she is also the type of all professional philanthropist; like

the writers of old moralities, dickens peoples his stage with virtues, and vices, and like them he

does it gaily, presenting them as no frigid abstractions, but as clowns and zanies, thawing his

bladder, exuberant in Motley and Bell”.

Dickens’s portrayal of female characters

Charles dickens has not succeeded in depicting female characters in a successful manner. He had

portrayed these characters in a weak and artificial manner, the characters, as they are depicted;

seem to show lack of understanding of sex life. If he had succeeded in regards of female

character, he has succeeded only in the portrayal of abnormal women characters.

Dickens: A Moralist

It has been proved for more than once that dickens is moralist. His novels are, in fact, means of

preaching lesson. In fact he wanted to establish moral virtues. To quote George Gissing:

“dickens may be disappointing, considered purely as an artist. But he is something more than an

36
artist. He is also a prophet. He is out to expound a gospel, a view of life, a scale of values which

he wishes his fellowmen to accept.”

HARD TIMES- A NOVEL BY CHARLES DICKENS

In 1854 Hard Times appeared. It was published in weekly installments in a periodical magazine

Households Words. Dickens’ himself was the editor of the magazine. As it first appeared, very

soon Dickens’ great contemporary John Ruskin expressed his opinion rather highly praised it

that it was Dickens’ greatest works and it should be studies especially with close and passionate

care by people interested in social problems. G.B. Shaw also has highly appreciated this novel.

F.R Leavis, the modern critic also regards Hard Times as a work of genius. Keeping aside all the

appraisals, though the novel is great yet not a popular novel. Leaves say, “Hard Times is not a

difficult work; its intentions and nature are pretty obvious. If, then it is the masterpiece I take it

for, why has it not had general recognition? To judge by the critical record, it has had none at all.

If there exists anywhere an appreciation, or even an acclaiming reference, I have missed it. In the

books and essays on Dickens’, so far as I know them, it is passed over as a very minor thing; too

slight and insignificant to distract us for more than a sentence or two from the works worth

critical attention. Yet, if I am right, of all Dickens’ works it is the one that, having the distinctive

strength that makes him a major artist, has it in so compact a way, and with a concentrated

significance so immediately clear and penetrating, as, one would have thought, to prelude the

reader’s filing to recognize that he had before him a completely serious, and, in its originality a

triumphantly successful work of art.”

Title of Hard Times

37
Hard Times is a novel with a special purpose. The expression “hard times” commonly means a

period of decline and depression when there was the scarcity of food, when wages were low and

when unemployment was pervasive. But Dickens has not used this phrase in this particular

meaning. Dickens meant by this phrase a general state of affairs in which the lives of people

were repressed or restricted and in which people were ceased to give spontaneous and natural

outlet to their natural emotions and sentiments. The phrase applies the crises and scarcity caused

by mechanization and industrialization. As F.R.Leavis says that in Hard Times Dickens is

“unmistakably possessed by a comprehensive vision, one in which the inhumanities of Victorian

civilizations are seen as fostered and sanctioned by a hard philosophy—aggressive formulation

as an inhumane spirit.”

Themes and Targets of Hard Times

Hard Times is a novel in which Dickens violently attacks on some of the evils afflicting the

contemporary age. He has made a fierce attack upon the educational theory of “facts” and

“statistics”. He has also satirized the motives of self-interest inspired by industrialization and

utilitarism; he has criticized the discord and disharmony between laborers and industrialists; he

attacks on the inhumanity of factory owners and aggressiveness, obstinacy and stubbornness of

trade unions; he has also satirically presented the worthless and feverish routine of members of

Parliament and fruitlessness of Parliament itself.

The novel, overall, seems to be an indictment of nineteenth century industrial society. “Against

the monstrous cruelty of mine and mill and pit and factory and counting, house, against the bleak

utilitarian philosophy with which they were allied, what power could there be except the

flowering of the human imagination and the ennoblement of the heart?” Sleary rightly states”

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You mutht have uth, Thuire. Do the withe (wise) thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht

(best) of uth (us); not the wortht (worst)”.

Dickens’ attack on the utilitarian’s of his time is the leading theme of the novel. The novels open

with a parody of the utilitarian doctrine: “Now what I want is Facts. Facts alone are wanted in

life.” Even Mr. Gradgrind is called a “man of realities. A man of facts and calculations.” When

Gradgrind talks to Louisa on the matter of Bounderby’s marriage proposal, he tells her not to

take into account the disparity between the age of Bounderby and herself and here he quotes

statistics to justify his points.

Hard Times is also called an analysis and a condemnation of the ethos of industrialism. In this

regard Shaw says, “this is a Karl Marx, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, rinsing up against

civilization itself as a disease, and declaring that it is not our criminals but our magnets that are

robbing and murdering us, and that is no merely Tom-all-Alone’s that must be demolished and

abolished, pulled down, routed up, and made forever possible so that nothing shall remain of it

but Histories record of its infancy, but our entire social system”. Shaw further says,” here you

will find no more villains and heroes, but only oppressed and victims oppressing and suffering in

spite of themselves, driven by a huge machinery which grind to pieces the people it should

nourish and ennoble and having for its directors the basest and foolish of us instead of the

noblest and most farsighted”. Dickens “has spread a dependent into a passionate revolt against

the whole industrial order of the modern world.”

It is not industry per se that Dickens is fighting ,rather laissez-faire, which polluted the

atmosphere, allowed open mind-shafts to fester, employed or starved workers according to the

market without any sense of human need or potential. Not industry alone is inquisition, but the

39
philosophy operating behind it. “Your sisters training has been pursued according to the system”

says the broken Gradgrind, and it is true Hard Times then id Dickens attack upon the system “by

which the claims of individual human being are trampled in a general melee. Society itself

cannot survive under such circumstances. The answers of Hard Times may be invalid, the

question it propounds are still with us. It is a most flawed of Dickens classics, possibly but it is

still a classic.”

Hard Times: a battle between head and heart

Hard Time fully manifests the utmost tragic limit to which intellect and emotion may entangle.

Throughout long Christian tradition the miserable conflict, between reason and sentiment had

been existed. The dominance of reason, intellect and wit in 18th century minimized the effective

side in this clash and the utilitarianism of the early 19th century went back even reading even

further into something unreal. The concept of “economic man” is a leading example of this

retreat. Utilitarianism is partly a development of 18th century intellectualism and partly a revolt

against Romanticism that came to prevail upon the first decade of the 19th century and which

emphasized and importance of instincts, emotions and imagination, of all that was spontaneous

and creative of the life of man. James Mill, particularly, had set himself against the feelings,

trusting that the reason in man might sought out all human problems, both Mill and Geremy

Bentham engaged themselves to a narrow, route and deterministic principle of the association of

ideas as the only explanation of human psychology. Dickens, in putting the case for imagination

and emotions in man, is also part taking the general romantic opinion.

Plot and Structure

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Hard Times was highly praised by the radical social thinkers like Ruskin and G B Shaw for

being openly revoluntary in its implications. Few modern critics have admired it for its well

organized structure, there are three separated plot sequences in the novel that help novelist a lot

in developing them the focus of main action is on Thomas Gradgrind, a wholesale hardware

merchant, who has established a school of “Facts” and who has keen desire to be the M.P for

coke town. He is the stead fast believer of the utilitarian philosophy. Louisa, Tom and Sissy are

the main instruments of action. Louisa gets married to an industrialist and a banker Bounderby

without any emotion for him rather her contempt’s him. Her married life is not happy and she

seems ready to elope with her lover, Harthouse. This is the first complication in the main action

and that gives severe blow to Gradgrind’s beliefs in his education policy. Again Tom who has

been employed in the bank of Bounderby robs the bank and calls destruction upon him. He

contrives a plan to make Stephen the victim of his crime and Stephen falls under suspicion of

committing robbery. This is the second complication in the main action.

In the second plot Bounderby is the central figure. Mrs. Sparsit, his housekeeper is of aristocratic

background and Bounderby feel proud to have such a high lady. Mrs. Sparsit inwardly cherishes

the desire to marry Bounderby. But ultimately her wickedness and shrewdness is exposed and

she is dismissed by Bounderby. Bounderby also has a mother whom he had pensioned off under

the condition never to claim him as her son. He always boost off his humble origin and how he

has achieved the present prosperous state. But he is exposed in front of crowd and his mother’s

identity and truth of his past life is revealed to everybody. The third plot is concerned with the

story of Stephen and Rachael. Stephen is an honest and faithful worker in the textile factory of

Bounderby. His wife is a drunken sinister lady whom he wants to divorce and is inclined to

marry his affectionate and intimate friend Rachael. She is an angel and brings all possible

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comforts to Stephen. Tom robs Bounderby’s bank and vary shrewdly makes Stephen to fall

under suspicion. Here Stephen becomes a link between first plot and the third one. Ultimately

Stephen dies in an accident but before that he gives enough hints about who is the culprit. Thus

these three plots are Dickens general plan for building the whole novel. The theme of the novel is

not only the criticism utilitarian economy but also it is an attack on educational policy, class

distinction, and divorce law and caste system. Therefore, in Hard Times different strands are

interwoven. The book is divided into three books entitled Sowing, Reaping, and Garnering. But

in spite of everything the only weakness in dickens handling of the industrial scene are his

caricature of the union leader Slack Bridge and his portraiture of the novel but serious

representative of the working class Stephen Blackpool. Slack Bridge is “not so honest” or “not so

manly, he was not so good humored, he substituted cunning for their simplicity and passion for

their safe solid sense. An ill made, high shoulder man with lowering brows, and his features

crushed into a habitually sour expression he is contrasted most favorably even in his mongrel

dress with the great body of his hearers in their plain working cloths.” This kind of description is

the example of Dickens sheer ignorance because union leaders are not like Slack Bridge and do

not speak like him. Another flaw is the unconvincing parallel between Bounderby matrimonial

problems. The last chapter is to short but deals with such events that might complete the novel.

The element of humour and pathos

Dickens is equally great a master in producing humour and pathos. We find humour almost in

every scene where Mrs.Gradgrind appears. Dickens has even made her death-scene amusing.

When Louisa asks about her pain, she replies it must be somewhere in the room, Mrs. Gradgrind

decision of calling Bounderby as ‘J’ her praise “something ological”, all are very amusing and

humorous. Mr.Sleary’s lisping manner of speech produces enough humour and his constant state

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of semi-drunkenness is quiet interesting. There are many more such instances of amusement

further as we go deep in the novel.

Emily Jane Bronte

30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her

only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the

third eldest of the four surviving Bronte siblings, between the youngest Anne and her

brother Barnwell. She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Emily Bronte has been the subject of extensive research documenting her strength of character

and independent nature as a woman and as a nineteenth-century author. Her reclusive nature

captures the interests of independent learners and scholars alike. This paper adds to the current

body of knowledge, investigating evidence of self-reflective learning theory as a guiding

influence in Emily Bronte‘s everyday life, leading to her ultimate writing talent. It chronicles

Emily Bronte‘s life as a means for discovery, looking at how creative success is formed within a

woman writer who has had little to no formal education. Questions considered include: ―How

does someone learn to write well?‖ and ―Is there evidence that lifestyle and personality combine

to produce a successfully creative individual?‖ Emily Bronte‘s early life is here examined

through her few remaining letters, as well as letters of other family members and friends, journal

entries, essays, and poetry to uncover how her lifestyle may have created her successful writing

abilities, or at least encouraged their development, later culminating in the writing of her only

novel, Wuthering Heights.

Many Bronte researchers have tried to put their own interpretations upon the Bronte novels,

characters, settings, poetry, and more. This dissertation does not seek to interpret, but rather to

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discover from Emily Bronte‘s own words any evidence of her mastery of the art of creative

writing. The goal is not to interpret upon whom from her life Heathcliff might have been based,

if anyone, or from what sprang her inspiration for the inter-generational story line of her only

novel. Many others have already attempted this, some to the original author‘s credit and others

not. This research into Emily Bronte‘s life, learning, and writings stems from a sincere desire to

glean a greater insight into how someone so truly talented as a writer honed her skills with such

little formal training. The search is for a discovery of reflection in practice by letting Emily

Bronte‘s words speak for themselves, as much as possible, and to uncover to what extent Emily

may have used self-reflection as a means for self-discovery and self-improvement.

This dissertation also seeks to uncover whether or not Emily Bronte‘s self-reflective practices

contributed to her writing abilities and if so, how and to what extent. As very little of Emily‘s

original personal writings have been preserved, it is a challenge to accurately locate truthful

representations of her self-reflection in practice. These do exist, however, in what remain of her

letters, diary and journal papers, and essays. Even her poetry shows reflection and may perhaps

reveal the most about the creative soul of this near elusive individual. The words of others

concerned with the accurate representation of Emily Bronte can and will be relied upon as well,

especially the words of family members. Bronte‘s use of reflective learning theory in practice

adds a new dimension to this well researched and respected woman writer of the nineteenth

century.

Self Reflection in Emily Bronte’s work

To reflect upon something means to truly think deeply about something, to ponder over it,

perhaps evaluate its worth or potential. ―Reflection includes thinking about one's own actions

and thoughts, taking other people's point of view, and understanding oneself‖ (Zuckerman 2004,

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9). Self-reflection would then mean to truly think about some aspect of self. Self-reflection could

mean searching for value and meaning in something one has done or something one has created.

Self-reflection could also mean creating a project to express self.

Writing in a journal, for example, is an expression of self where the writer might share inner

feelings about what he or she has done or not done, or the writer might share plans for the future.

A second step would follow in this form of self-reflection. The writer would return to the

original journal entry at an agreed-upon future time to analyze how much of what was proposed

to have happened has actually taken place as planned. This activity could offer opportunity for

self-analysis and self-evaluation, to judge good and bad qualities in one‘s self. This self-

reflection would provide opportunity for looking as successes and failures with the goal of

making one‘s future better than one‘s past, or even present, situation.

Expressions of creative self-reflection take many forms. For writers, going beyond journal

writing and diary entries, such self-reflective expressions often include letters or forms of short

informal writings including poetry and short autobiographical pieces. Short stories and novels

even comprise a reflection of self for many. Visual artists express self-reflection in sketches,

drawings, sculptures, paintings, or another creative medium. Self-reflection can bring about a

sense of self-fulfillment for the creative individual, or become the basis for self-examination with

the purpose of self-improvement, as stated in the previous paragraph. Self-reflective creations are

often made in response to some particular event in one‘s life or as a means to express inner

doubts, anxieties, or some otherwise unexpressed emotion.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, and her fame rest upon it. This novel which grips the

mind of any appreciative reader was written by a woman in her late 20s who looked at life

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through the narrow windows of vicarage. Her knowledge of the outside world, beyond the moors

and hills in its neighborhood was negligible. In 1846, Charlotte, Emily and Anne produce a

volume of poems under the pseudonyms “Currer, Ellis and Acton bell”. Although many of the

poems are today well esteemed they were at the wide and utter failure. In 1847, Charlotte

came out with Jane Eyre under the pen name of Currer Bell. In the same year, Emily completed

Wuthering Heights published under the name of Alice Bell.

The Setting

The scene of Wuthering Heights is laid in the bleak moor land country of the West riding of

Yorkshire. In almost every chapter emphasis is laid on the bitter winds and storms, the

impassable roads, the marshes and whether and the wild birds of this region. The geographical

setting plays a major part in providing the atmosphere for the unfolding of the action. Mainly

pasture land for the grazing of sheep and cattle, this part of Yorkshire, even today, is sparsely

populated and the dreariness of the climate is reflected in the dour, unsociable characters that

people the novel.

Period of action

The action in the novel spans a year 1778-1802 an age which covers the early phases of both the

“Industrial Revolution” in England and the French revolution and the Nepolianic wars on the

continent. But these momentous historical events play no part in the development of the plot.

The Story

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It revolves around the hero of Wuthering Heights- Heathcliff a man as stormy and wild as the

Yorkshire moors in which the story is set. Brought as the waif by Mr. Earnshaw to the Heights,

he is reared with Earnshaw two children, Hindley and Catherine, and Heathcliff and Catherine

shared an intense love while Hindley and Heathcliff developed hatred as Heathcliff supplants

Hindley in his father’s affection. On the death of Earnshaw, Hindley returns with a wife, Frances

and tyrannizes the household and particularly ill treats Heathcliff. Francis dies giving birth to

Hareton. Heathcliff’s dire straits is even more pitiable, when Catherine makes the acquaintance

of Edgar and Isabella Linton of Thrush cross Grange. Eventually Catherine marries Edgar though

she still loves Heathcliff and from then on Heathcliff is irredeemable. He leaves the Heights and

returns a few years later as a well bred gentleman. He still bears his passionate love for Catherine

but coupled with it is his intense desire for revenge against the families of both the Earnshaw’s

and the Linton’s. To this end, he marries Isabella, ill treats her and finally when she leaves him

giving birth to a son Linton, he claims his son on her death. Catherine also dies giving birth to a

daughter who is also named Catherine.

Heathcliff’s plan of revenge takes a diabolic turn when he gets his sick son Linton to marry

Catherine so that he can get the property of the Grange. Linton dies very soon and Catherine is

left a young widow in a hostile home. Hareton Earnshaw, who had been ill treated by Heathcliff

in the same way he had been ill treated by Hindley, is attracted to Catherine and eventually their

love ends in marriage. Heathcliff himself dies and is buried by the side of his beloved Catherine.

He is united with her in death. Love triumphs over the desire for revenge in the story. Thus, the

novel ends on a positive note.

The story is told in the first person by two main narrators, the tenant Lockwood who tells of the

present and his housekeeper Nelly Dean who recounts the past. A diary kept by the elder

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Catherine, letter written by Isabella, and information given by Zillah, the new house keeper at the

Heights fill in additional information.

Wuthering Heights: A story of Strange Love and Strange Revenge

This story of strange love and equally strange revenge ends at last happily with the ringing of the

marriage bells. The end is undoubtedly convectional. Still, it is different from the other Victorian

novels. For one thing, there is no attempt made in this novel to portray Victorian life and society.

Secondly the intensity of passion and the element of mysticism mark this novel of from the

others novels of the Victorian age. Through the medium of the love story the Victorian novels

offers to our view a picture of life and society. No such attempts are made in this novel. The

typical triangular love with a hero, a heroin and a villain is not presented in it. Besides, love does

not end with the death of the hero and the heroin but continues even beyond their physical death.

Likewise, revenge does not end with the death of the enemy, by passes on after his death to his

child. It I a story effecting not one but three generations, Wuthering Heights is a novel written by

a mystic, those vision is confined not to this life, but passed beyond it to the life to come, to

eternity. Hers is a vision of life in which the physical turn into spiritual and the finite into the

infinite. She obliterates the distinction between time and timelessness, the one flow into the

others. The story is an embodiment of a mystic’s vision of life. Such a story in spite of a few

convectional features is unconventional, and belongs to a class by itself.

It has been pointed out above that the story develops through three distinct stages. In the first

stage the theme of love and revenge grows and develops during the early youth of the principal

characters-Heathcliff, Hindley, Catherine and Linton. In the second stage this theme grows still

further during the married life of Edgar Linton and Catherine. After Catherine’s death and in the

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third stage off the story Heathcliff revenge descends on his enemies children, whom he tortures

and subjects to humiliation until he himself dies.

The psychology of the characters

This peculiar story of love and revenge is routed in the equally peculiar psychology of its

character. Heathcliff and Catherine both are persons of very strong passions. They love each

other with a passion the like of which is seldom known on earth. Love makes the one and

inseparable part of the other. The depth and intensity of their love turns into a sought of

consuming fury which at last kills Catherine. Love, which is a source of life and strength to her

at last, becomes a cause of her death. Equally strong, violent a tempestuous is hatred developing

into revenge. By nature Heathcliff is unforgiving and intensely revengeful. He is extremely

dangerous as an enemy and extremely loyal as friends. Time has no effect what so ever either on

his love or hatred. Their intensity is not abated with the passage of time. He is not a man so much

as a force equally beneficent and malevolent. Frustration in love turns his great powers

malevolent so that in the novel he appears as a dangerous animal prowling about and harming

innocent and timid person. It is from the psychology of such person that this story of love and

revenge springs the story of destructive love and destructive revenge. Change the psychology of

these strange creatures, and the story would be entirely different. The love story of men like

Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella would be like any other love story, for they are like other

person without anything remarkable about them their revenge also would be weak and short-

lived. Wuthering Heights is the story of violent love and violent revenge, because it is the story

of persons of violent tempestuous passions.

Themes in Wuthering Heights

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The purpose

Emily’s basic purpose is to show how good may conquer the evil in human nature. The novel

deals with the conflict between one, all demanding love, itself contaminated with vindictive

resentment, and several fully-grown hatreds in one man’s soul. The universal theme of the novel

is thus, the co-existence of good and evil. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this novel is concerned

with the problem of men and destiny, and like Milton’s Paradise Lost it recalls the proud

challenge of Satan and the conflict between good and evil which had dominating man’s history.

The main theme

Despite the multiplicity of theme, the main theme may be said to be the personal theme of love

and revenge and the social theme of the contrast between untamed nature and the conventions of

society.

The theme of love

The love of Heathcliff and Catherine dominates the novel it is an uncommon passion, almost

spiritual in its intensity and it triumphs eventually after the death of Catherine and Heathcliff.

Spiritual love

Catherine confides in Nelly the deep love she feels for Heathcliff even as she reveals she is to

marry Edgar Linton. Her words “my great thought is living in himself, if all else perished and he

remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the

universe would turn to a mighty stranger I should not seem a part of it. Nelly, I am Heathcliff

he’s always, always in my mind-not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to

myself but as my own being” reflect an almost Christian view of holly love she sees Heathcliff

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as “one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself and suggests that her

continued being is entirely dependent upon him.”

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THE ‘MODERN’ PERIOD IN DEPTH

The modern period (known also as the ‘modern era’, or also ‘modern times’) is the period of

history that succeeded the Middle Ages (which ended in approximately 1500 AD) As a historical

term, it is applied primarily to European and Western history.

The modern period has been a period of significant development in the fields of science, politics,

warfare, and technology. It has also been an age of discovery and globalization: it is during this

time that the European powers and later their colonies began their political, economic, and

cultural colonization of the rest of the world.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, modernist art, politics, science and culture had come to

dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every civilized area on the

globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the West and globalization. The modern

era is closely associated with the development of individualism, capitalism, urbanization and a

belief in the positive possibilities of technological and political progress.

The brutal wars and other problems of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid

change and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to

many reactions against modern development: optimism and belief in constant progress has been

most recently criticized by ‘postmodernism’, while the dominance of Western Europe and North

America over other continents has been criticized by postcolonial theory.

The concept of the modern world as distinct from an ancient or medieval one rests on a sense

that ‘modernity’ is not just another era in history, but rather the result of a new type of change.

This is usually conceived of as progress driven by deliberate human efforts to better their

situation. Advances in all areas of human activity – politics, industry, society, economics,

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commerce, transport, communication, mechanization, automation, science, medicine,

technology, and culture – appear to have transformed an ‘old world’ into the ‘modern’ or ‘new

world’. In each case, the identification of the old Revolutionary change can be used to demarcate

the old and old-fashioned from the modern.

Much of the modern world has replaced the Biblical-oriented value system, re-evaluated the

monarchical government system, and abolished the feudal economic system, with new

democratic and liberal ideas in the areas of politics, science, psychology, sociology, and

economics.

MODERNISM

The first half of the nineteenth century saw an aesthetic turning away from the realities of

political and social fragmentation, and so facilitated a trend towards Romanticism: emphasis on

individual subjective experience, the sublime, the supremacy of Nature as a subject for art,

revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century,

however, a synthesis of these ideas with stable governing forms had emerged, partly in reaction

to the failed Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. Exemplified by ‘practical’

philosophical ideas such as positivism, and called by various names – in Great Britain it is

designated the ‘Victorian era’ – this stabilizing synthesis was rooted in the idea that reality

dominates over subjective impressions.

Central to this synthesis were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference,

including the religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics

and doctrines that asserted that the depiction of external reality from an objective standpoint was

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not only possible but desirable. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines Realism,

though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist

movements established a primacy of reason and system.

Against this current ran a series of ideas, some of them direct continuations of Romantic schools

of thought. Notable among these were the agrarian and revivalist movements in plastic arts and

poetry (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin). Rationalism also

drew responses from the anti-rationalists in philosophy: in particular, G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic

view of civilization and history drew responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard,

who were major influences on Existentialism. All of these separate reactions together begin to be

seen as offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by civilizations,

history, or pure reason.

From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and

that progress was always good came under increasing attack. The likes of the German composer

Richard Wagner (1813-83) and the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) had been

reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilization and for their warnings that

accelerating ‘progress’ would lead to the creation of individuals detached from social values and

isolated from their fellow men. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society

were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move

forward in its present form. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism. The work

of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was labeled ‘pessimistic’ for its

idea of the ‘negation of the will’, an idea that would be both rejected and incorporated by later

thinkers such as Nietzsche (1844-1900).

Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in

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political science, Karl Marx. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the

religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia.

The notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as ‘lower animals’ proved to be

difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Marx argued there were

fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system – and t hat, contrary to the libertarian

ideal, the workers were anything but free. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of

thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism.

Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact.

The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in

studios, but outdoors. Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see

objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions

among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected by the

most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the

Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and

1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon

des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris

Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted

tremendous attraction, and opened commercial doors to the movement.

The second school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its

nature and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sound and texture of the

words create. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé would be of particular importance to what would

occur afterwards.

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At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis

to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Chief among these was steam-powered

industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering in new industrial

materials such as cast iron to produce railroad bridges and glass-and-iron train sheds – or the

Eiffel Tower, which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be – and

at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life.

Modernist literature

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the mid-

1920s. ‘Modernist’ literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-

literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as painting. Gertrude Stein’s abstract

writings, for example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspective

Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso. The general thematic concerns of Modernist literature are

well-summarized by the sociologist Georg Simmel: “The deepest problems of modern life derive

from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in

the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the

technique of life” (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903).

The Modernist emphasis on radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos

issued by various groups within the movement. The concerns expressed by Simmel above are

echoed in Richard Huelsenbeck’s First German Dada Manifesto of 1918: “Art in its execution

and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch.

The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand fold problems of

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the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week. The best and

most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatches the tatters of their bodies out of

the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of

their time.”

The cultural history of humanity creates a unique common history that connects previous

generations with the current generation of humans, and the Modernist re-contextualization of the

individual within the fabric of this received social heritage can be seen in the ‘mythic method’

which T.S. Eliot expounded in his discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “In using the myth, in

manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporary and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a

method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of

giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is

contemporary history” ( Ulysses, Order and Myth, 1923).

Modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger (1890) is

considered to be the first ‘modernist’ novel), Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D.

(Hilda Doolittle), Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce,

Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke,

Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi

Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Yaroslavl Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter

Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, and

others.

Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce

concepts such as disjointed timelines. Modernism was distinguished by an emancipator met

narrative. In the wake of Modernism, and post-enlightenment, met narratives tended to be

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emancipator, whereas beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic. Contemporary met

narratives were becoming less relevant in light of the implications of World War I, the rise of

trade unionism, a general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. The

consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political importance of

culture.

Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic

movement away from Romanticism, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane – a

prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (1915). Modernist

literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in

Victorian literature in favor of portraying alienated or dysfunctional individuals within a

predominantly urban and fragmented society. Many Modernist works, like Eliot’s The Waste

Land (1922), are marked by the absence of any central, heroic figure at all, as narrative and

narrator are collapsed into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.

Modernist literature, moreover, often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a

concern for larger factors such as social or historical change, and this is particularly prominent in

‘streams of consciousness writing. Examples can be seen in the work of, among others, two

exact contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (1882-1941).

THE AGE OF JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce (Augustine Aloysius) 1882-1841; Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet. Joyce

was born in Dublin and was educated at Jesuit schools (Clongowes Wood College, Kildare;

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Belvedere, Dublin) and University College, Dublin, where he studied modern languages. He

graduated in 1902.

The Aesthetic Theory of James Joyce

In a Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses we find a logical discussion on the nature

of art and beauty though it should be always remerged that aesthetic discussion in the novel is

specifically of the fictional hero, Stephen Dedalus and not that of Joyce. There are several

blemishes in Stephen’s theory an it would not be fair to impute them to Joyce himself in spite of

the fact that the views of Stephen have a large bearing on Joyce own concepts of art and beauty.

S.L.Goldberg warns us about studying the aesthetic theory of Joyce’s too theoretically, “to

approach Joyce’s art theoretically, through his aesthetic, is not without its dangers. The

commonest mistake is to take that aesthetic as a sort of criterion, a point of reference by which to

measure Joyce’s artistic success. The fact is, however, that the real value of the aesthetic theory

is of a different kind. For it is always dangerous to judge a writer’s work by his own theories—

we tend only too easily, to be the most relevant questions, and these dangers are particularly

acute when, as in Joyce’s case the theory appears as an integral part of the complex work of art.

But if they cannot supply us with the critical yard stick, or even a useful structure of the author’s

attention, they can help us, I believe, in another way, if we are prepared to follow them patiently

and critically, they lead us directly towards the preoccupations and the forms of his imagination.”

It is interesting to compare Joyce’s own views expressed explicitically with those found in the

novels, “if we examine these various theories in relation to each other it quickly appears that

those in the novels are more highly wrought, more developed, than anything that survives of

Joyce’s personal comments. It is understandable enough that Stephen remarked in the Portrait

should have led to an inflation of their value as a general aesthetic and some not every

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convincing application of them to Joyce’s work. But even on a casual reading, Stephen’s

character in the Portrait ought to provoke a certain caution about his theories. His emancipation

from his society for example, is clearly less assured than he supposes and despite his citation of

Aquinas in support of his aesthetic, the forms in which his imagination actually expresses itself

seems more like those of a late 19th century aesthete than a tough minded, 20th century neo-

Theorist. He is obviously not to be identifying with the artist as an elder man. If we look at

Joyce’s other novels, moreover, we also notice that Stephen is portrait with far less irony in

Stephen hero and with a far more complex irony in Ulysses. The general difference is reflected

in the differences between the theories he propounds in each work, differences important not

only for their theoretical implications but also for their dramatic implications about the novel in

which they appear. In other words,, if we put the theory in the Portrait side by side with those in

the notebooks and Joyce’s other writing and Stephen hero and press certain problems they raise,

we can hardly avoid concluding that the theory Stephen advances in the Portrait is not a

satisfactory theory in itself, that its force in the novel is not so much philosophical as dramatic,

and that it awaits completion and rectification by the view he advances in Ulysses.

Joyce’s concept of Language and his Style

Joyce and his fictitious hero Stephen are excessively concerned with language, particularly with

words and their sounds. It has been suggested that this might have been because of Joyce’s

defective eyesight, which made sounds much more essential to him than sights. It is a reality that

there are more auditory images those visual images in his works. Where as it is not safe to

identify Joyce’s intimately with Stephen as far as the general aesthetic theory of the two are

concerned, it is quiet adequate to consider their concept on the matter of language to be

analogue. The Portrait and Ulysses consists in little most significant experimentation with

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literature language in modern period.

Joseph Prescott observes a study development in Joyce’s view of language. He believes that the

works of Joyce reveal a progression from an early interest in words through a mature use of them

to the excessive likeness for them in old age. In spite of difference from one word to another, the

development is not always study sometimes there is a shift to a previous phase, sometimes an

advance into a future phase. The direction is flawless.

According to Joseph Prescott the major character of Joyce represent their writer in their interest

in an attitude to language. He points out “Joyce writing gives them readily to such analysis,

because Stephen Dedalus, the unnamed narrator of the first three studies in Dubliners’, the chief

character in a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and one of the chief characters in Ulysses, is

James Joyce recollected in tranquility. The danger of indiscriminant identifying a character as

autobiographical is obvious.

Subjects in James Joyce’s novels

Joyce is a serious novelist, whose concern is chiefly with human relationships—man in relation

to himself, to society, and to the whole race. This is true also of his latest works, though his

interest in linguistic experiments makes it difficult to understand his meaning. Acutely aware of

the evils which spring from it, he is unsurpassed in his knowledge of the seemly side of life.

Which he presents with starling frankness. He is a keen and subtle analyst of man’s inner

consciousness, and in common with the psycho-analysts of his day, he is much pre occupied with

sex.

His technique

In the quest of the twentieth century novelists for a new technique by which to present the

contemporary human dilemma, Joyce is a pioneer, and his lead has been followed by many

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major writers. He was a ceaseless experimenter, even anxious to explore the potentialities of a

method once it was evolved, and in his use of the “Stream of consciousness” technique, and in

his handling of the internal monologue, he went further an deeper than any other. His

sensitiveness, and his depth of penetration into the human consciousness, give to his character-

study a subtlety unparalleled in his day, and if, in his attempts to catch delicate and elusive

shades of feelings and fix them in words, he has frequently become incomprehensible, the facts

remains that a character like Leopold Bloom is a unique and fascinating creation.

His style

Joyce’s study develops from the straightforward, simple writing of Dubliners to the complex

allusiveness and the bewildering originality of Finnegan’s Wake. In the latter, a broken narrative,

with abrupt transitions, and logical sentence links omitted, together with a new vocabulary,

produces writing which is often purely ‘private’ in its significance; or words are coined by the

breaking up off one word and the joining of its parts to parts of other words similarly splits and

roots of words from many languages are employed. Joyce’s interest in language and his eager

experimentation and unequal in any period from our literature. He has a sensitive year for verbal

cadencies, and used language in his books as a part of an elaborately coincide artistic pattern in

which much of the unity of his works lies. In the beauty of language for its own sake only he us

usually little concerns, yet his writing is often of great imaginative power and has a musical

quality that enables even his incomprehensible passages to be read aloud with considerable

pleasures. His genesis is for the comic rather than the tragic view of life, and his work is full of

wit, puns and starveling conceits. And the humor carried from broad comedy to intellectual wit,

but is mainly sardonically in tone.

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Joyce’s Contribution to Stream of Consciousness Novel

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man heralds the technique of the ‘Stream of

Consciousness’ novel. According to Melvin Friedman this loosely autobiographical novel is in

continuation of the poetic tendency of The Dead. It is a sort of lyrical biography, with the

structure formed as much by the caprices of the developing sensibility of the artist by the growth

of Stephen from babyhood to manhood. There is little in the earlier work of Joyce’s to prepare

one for the amazing first paragraph, which is not bracketed by quotation marks although it is

excerpted from a story being read to the baby, Stephen: “Once upon a time and a very good time

it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along

the road met a nicens little boy named cuckoo”. One gets immediately acquainted with the

method of Joyce. His intention is to quote from infant’s mind. The style of the remaining portion

of the first chapter equals Stephen’s development from infancy to babyhood. The chapter appears

like an extended interior monologue, by the indirect presentation of the third person. One can

affirm Stephen’s age, at a given moment, by the building of the sentences and by the maturity of

the language.

Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are also manifested with Stream of Consciousness technique but in

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man it is more apparently marked. The opening section of A

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written in a method very much close to the stream of

consciousness novel. Of course there is a parallel in technique between these pages and the

Nausicas episode of Ulysses since both apply the device of interior monologue. Though the

writing is completely in third person, there is an attempt, in each example to reproduce the

character’s mentality. The opening chapter of A Portrait presents Stephen as a young boy is open

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to a strong, new experience, that his consciousness does not yet subject to interrogation, selection

or judgement.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

An autobiographical novel by James Joyce published in one volume in 1916. It was originally

published in serial form in the Egoist , February 1914- September 1915.

Stephen Dedalus, and intelligent but frail child, struggles towards maturity in Ireland at the turn

of the century. The novel traces his intellectual, more, and artistic development from baby hood

to the competition to his desiccation at university college, Dublin. Stephen individuality is stifled

by many levels of convection, dictated by the family, Catholicism and Irish nationalism. As a

child he witnesses a fiery political dispute between supporter of Parnell and anti-panelists, and

suffers unjust punishment at the hands of a stupid and brutal priest, father Dolan. Adolescent

sexuality causes hi8m moral torment, and this is exacerbated at a school “retreat” where he hears

father Arnall’s famous “hellfire” sermon.

Rejecting the call to the priesthood, Stephen begins to assert his own identity. At University

College he embraces the wider and more rewarding world of literature, philosophy and

aesthetics, and by the end of the novel he has freed himself from the claims of family, church and

state. He resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter the “reality of experience” and to forge

“the uncreated conscience” of his race.

The novel was developed from an earlier work Stephen hero, which Joyce had began in 1904.

Part of this earlier work survived and was published in 1944, edited by T. Spencer. Stephen

Dedalus reappears as one of the principal characters Ulysses.

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A Portrait and Stephen Hero

Joyce himself had characterized this “new form” in his description of his original sketch. He

pointed out that the past has no “iron memorial aspect” but implies “a fluid succession of

presents”. What we are to look for it’s not a fixed character but an “individualizing rhythm”. The

change in title points to a charge in perspective. From the fragment of Stephen Hero that survives

we see that the development is centered in the individuality of the protagonist as a man. A

Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man the accent falls on the artist. The material is similarly

slanted. In the early versions the treatment of Stephen in his unhappy relations with family,

church and society is much fuller and more direct, and illustrated with much more narrative

action. In The Portrait, the Dublin is not attacked so much frontally as wrecking the individual; it

is revealed as the deadly enemy that threatens the free development of the artist. The material is

similarly slanted and underdetermines the primary need of the artist to be loyal to his calling.

The Title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a very strange and exotic title of a novel, and at first

glance the articles in the title for a novel, and at first glance the articles in this title appear to be

put rather irrationally, but a closer observation would reveal that the title is a very significant one

and that the articles are indeed accurate. Joyce himself notified conspicuously that the last four

words in the title were significant and should not be neglected. Actually, this was earlier done by

few of the earlier critics. Interpreting the appropriateness of the title, Williams M. Schulte

stresses that the novel presents the portrait of the artist, and not just any artist. Next problem,

however, emerges out of the words ‘the artist’. Does it imply Joyce himself, or is it that Joyce

built the particular artist the subject of this novel? One of Joyce’s remarks to his friend reveals

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his intention of making the novel a self-portrait: “I haven’t let this young man off very lightly,

have I? Many writers have written about themselves. I wonder if any of them has been as candid

as have.”

Most of the previous readers, reviewers and critics of Joyce regarded the novel as a self

portraiture. “Many of its incidents closely parallel incidents in Joyce’s life. What is more,

Joyce’s schoolfellows at Clongowes Wood under their real names; men’s still walking Dublin’s

streets also walked through the portrait bearing their own names; and numerous well known

Dublin figures, including Joyce’s mother and father and some of his university friends, were

immediately recognizable beneath their pseudonyms. Small wonder that the early reviewers saw

the book as a thinly disguised autobiography.”

Plot and structure of the novel

Joyce was very specific about providing a formal structure to his novels; this is the reason why

his major novels have a compact and precise form. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is

divided into five chapters and all of them end with a note of balance or ‘stasis’. It has been said

that each chapter starts with a series of thematic statements; but it does not appear justified to

ratify this view, though it is convincing in the context of chapter one, where the themes of

paternity, religion, apology, punishments and songs are all encompassed in the first two pages.

Joyce defines this novel as “the curve of an emotion”. All the five chapters present five versions

of the same curve, proceeding from various different experiences, through conflicts to a state of

ephemeral peace, when—to use Stephen’s words—“the mind is arrested and raised above desire

and loathing.” As an artist, Joyce feels satisfied in the organization of his sensible and intelligible

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matter for an aesthetic end. And once one understands the patterns of the novel, our admiration

for it is heighted.

Elizabeth Drew says that the “structure of the novel, as critics have pointed out, is in the form of

a series of trials flights. At the end of each chapter, Stephen makes some assertion of his own

identity which frees him for a time from the particular outer and inner pressures of confusion and

despair which constrict him. The diary form at the end of the book, in spite of much of its ”flip”

tone of cynicism, hints of doubts and wavering distrust.”

Chapter on ideals with the childhood of Stephen in Bray and Clongowes. It closes with the proud

victory of Stephen over Father Dolan’s wrong cruel punishment. Chapter two interprets the

events in Blackrock. Dublin, Belvedere College and Cork. It deals with Stephen’s close slow

detachment from his family and his surroundings. His romantic imagination reaches its climax

ironically when he visits a prostitute. The truth that Stephen really feels the need of being ‘held

firmly in her arms’ suggests that he is still a child who need comfort and ease. But the chapter

end with another kind of stasis—the ‘swoon of sin’.

Chapter third open with references to all the seven deadly sins and concentrates on the sermons

depicting the horrible picture of hell. Stephen’s repentance and communion gives another

moment, this time of pious calm as the concluding note of equilibrium.

At the opening of chapter four, Stephen is leading a pure life but he rejects the offer given by the

rector to become a priest. His homely life has become wrenched, but his father makes

arrangements for him to join the university. His quest for beauty finds his objective when he sees

the bird-girl on the sea-shore; and his swoon of pleasure provides another end of the chapter at

stasis.

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In the opening scene of the last chapter, emphasis is laid on the wretchedness of Stephen’s home

as he looks at the louse-marked lid of the box of pawn-tickets. Then follows the diction with

Davin on patriotism. He discusses art or aesthetic theory with the Dean of Studies. Thereafter, he

talks about international politics with Cranly, patriotism with Davin, with Lynch he discusses art

and with Cranly, religion.

Throughout these discussions and conversations Stephen tries to justify his own points; and

ultimately he concludes that in order to do so, he must accept the state of exile. The novel finally

closes with another note of stasis as Stephen gets ready to quit his family and country.

Use of Symbols and Imagery

Symbols and Imagery are most significantly used in the novel. Major symbols are given in the

first chapter of the book. The most remarkable images among them are that of cow, rose, women,

bird and water. We find that at several moments, the images are blended in such a manner that

any attempt to separate them or single out one from another seems impossible. The primary

images are given in the first two pages of the novel and they contribute a lot in the construction

of structure and form: “We are confronted here with a moocow coming down the road, with a

rose, with wetting the bed, with a girl, and with an eagle that plucks out eyes, not to mention a

number of other things such as dancing to another’s tune. Without much content as yet, these

images, acquiring fresh meaning from recurrence and relationship with other carry aspects of

Stephen and his trouble.”

Few images used for women are sinister. For example, women are not only rose but bird and

sometimes bat also.

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Water is a very frequent and significant image in the novel. In A Portrait of an Artist as a Young

Man, at the beginning the water seems as an image of creation that includes the artist’s two

realities. At school Stephen is thrown into a “square dish” but the concluding image of chapter

one embodies his infantile career; “Pick, Pack, Pock, Puck,” go the cricket bats, “like drops of

water in a fountain falling softly in the brimming bowl.” When he goes rolling up “his trousers

like J. Alfred Prufrock, he himself goes wading. From the moment of baptism and rebirth,

inaudible music and the sound of waters attend his creative ecstasies.”

Few characters are also symbolic. The two dwarfish eccentrics that Stephen encounters—one on

the street and other in the library seems caricature of Stephen’s possible future and the soul of

Ireland.

Element of Realism

Several critics considered the novel “a brilliant and nasty variety of pseudo-realism.” There is no

question that realism is there in the novel. It lies in the famous Christmas dinner scene and in the

University College scenes. But the elaborate discussion of episodes from the life of Stephen is

only one of the several methods used by Joyce in hinting the development of his artist. Joyce has

not made his novel on the basis of pre recognized pattern. He is not among any known categories

thus it would be unjust to call him a realist, or symbolist, or impressionist or psychological

novelist or an associations.

Autobiographical elements

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is a subjective novel possessing the theme of Stephen’s

spiritual development. Stephen is a portrait of Joyce himself. The novel deals with the story of

Joyce’s childhood and adolescence and it informs us how Joyce came to be the artist. Though

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any elaborate picture of the development from creature to creator is not given in the novel, yet as

a child, a boy and as a young man, his life is skillfully traced. But to study the novel wholly as an

autobiography would not be justified. Few critics are of the view that Stephen is not the

embodiment of James Joyce but this is an extreme opinion. Undoubtly, Joyce has used the

element of his own life in writing this novel but he has selected, arranged, changed, dramatized

and fictionalized those ingredients to assist the pivotal theme of the novel. Those instances are all

true and genuine to the spirit of the development of Joyce but not essentially true to the facts.

The consequence is an evocation of the developing conscience and recognition of a devoted

writer and of the warping and disharmonious environment that envelops him. The novel is the

story of how gifted, imaginative and brilliant misfit liberates himself from the chains of family,

church and country, and starts as an exile to achieve his vocation.

In spite of several similarities Stephen Dedalus is grave, serious but Joyce was witty and often

cheerful. On the other hand, like Stephen, Joyce appears to be self-centers and an introvert.

In fact Stephen sometimes seems Joyce and sometimes not. It seems that Joyce has shared the

following opinion revealed by Stephen in his conversation on the art-forms : “ The personality of

the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally

refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the

dramatic form is life purified in and re-projected from the human imagination” of the developed

artist who must, in the words of Stephen, “try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to

press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and color

which are the prison gates of our souls, an image of the beauty we have come to understand.”

This is what Joyce attempted to do with the single solid matter he found appropriate for the

purpose.

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Thus Joyce uses his personal life as a framework for this novel but freely revises his biography

for artistic purposes introducing some incidents or happenings which can assist to describe the

growth of an artist as a young man.

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VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in a highly cultured and educated family in London on

January 26, 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a renowned critic, historian, scholar and

author of a large number of critical, biographical and philosophical essays. He was a great friend

of scholars and men of letters. Virginia was born into what has been called by another of its heirs

as the intellectual aristocracy. And Virginia Woolf gathered much of the material for her novels

from this social and cultural milieu in which she had much of her experience of life. This milieu

was composed of small families and most of them were intimately connected. The members of

this group constituted the cream of the middle class with their high intellectual attainments. It

seems that the Stephen family in their house at Hyde Park Gate must have resembled the

Ramsays in To the Lighthouse with their grownups and the younger girls and boys.

Virginia Woolf was one of six sisters and was remarkably beautiful. She had great attachment

and affection for her sister Vanessa and her brother Thoby. And Thoby’s sudden and premature

death at the age of twenty five during a holiday in Greece had a profound effect on her work.

This is revealed in her novels like The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room and in The Waves. She did

not go through a conventional school because of her indifferent health. She was taught at home

mainly by her father.

The Social Background of her Times

The influence of environment, social, political, cultural as well as intellectual are supreme on

man. Naturally no writer can escape such influences, as he is also a product of the age in which

he or she is born and bred. To understand the work of the times in which they lived and worked,

as it is her novel which reflects the tome-spirit to a far greater extent than other art forms.

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The Effect of Rapid Industrialization

In England, by the last decade of the nineteenth century there was a complete breakdown of the

agrarian way of life and economy. The year 1880 was a landmark in the social and literary

history of England. An era of rapid social change was ushered in. the change was to be noticed in

every sphere of life. The increased urbanization and industrialization brought in their wake

various problems. There was a housing shortage, over-crowding, increase in crimes and vice and

a rapidly increasing ugliness. There was also a considerable fall in the standard of sexual

morality. City slums raised their ugly heads in all directions; Taboos and public opinion on sex

were no longer able to keep control sexual promiscuity in a crowded city life. It led to some

healthy reaction. The Victorian ethics of competition and money relationship had to give place to

a new concept of social responsibility and morality. A new concept of the welfare state emerged.

The state or society was considered to be responsible for education, health and well being of its

citizen. Though private morality took a nose-dive, the sphere of social morality expanded.

Rationalism and Traditional Values

A blind faith in traditional values slowly gave way to the scientific spirit and rationalism. This

led to a questioning of accepted social beliefs and conventions. Traditional religious ideas and

notions were shaken by skepticism and agnostics. In the Victorian era also there was much

criticism of traditional beliefs, but the writers of that age, like Dickens or Thackeray, never

challenged the very fundamentals, the very basis of their social and moral order. But by the end

of the 19th century and the beginning of 20th century there came on the literary scene writers like

Shaw, Wells and Galsworthy who started criticizing the very basis of the existing social,

economic and moral system. The common man was perplexed as this marked a wholesale

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criticism of the existing order from different angles and points of view, often opposite and

contradictory. The common man was at a loss to know what to accept and what to reject.

First World War and its Impact

It is impossible to overestimate the effects of the First World War in any attempt to assess the

prevailing tone of the contemporary world picture of the nineteen-twenties. The credit of the old

world was falling. The war suddenly and violently brought the collapse of the whole edifice. It

increases tension, frustration and neurosis. It strained the authoritarian pattern of family

relationship. It could be described as a revolt against authority. Political and religious skepticism,

cynicism and general disillusionment became the order of the day. The interest shifted from the

‘extrovert’ to the ‘introvert’, from outer to the inner. Economic depression, unemployment,

overpopulation, acute shortages have increased the hardships of life. And the enormous storms

and strains of life caused nervous break downs. Philosophy and Metaphysics began to show keen

interest in the study of the nature of man. To Freud man is a biological phenomenon and to the

Marxist he is an outcome of economic and social forces. The Victorian ideas about man and his

essential rationality were thrown overboard.

Socialism and Internationalism

The Victorian notion of the supremacy of the whites also had to be changed. It was replaced by

the ideas and ideal of socialism and internationalism. Nationalism lost it aureole and imperialism

came in for a great deal of criticism. The idea that the relations between the nations should be

based on equality and mutual respect and not on the political subjection and imperial supremacy

began to prevail. Gone were the days of Kipling, and Tennyson, their place was taken by the

great modern writers like T.S. Eliot and Forster to propagate the new thoughts and ideals.

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THE CHIEF CHARACTERSTICS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ART AS A NOVELIST

No Element of Story—Rendering of Inner Reality

As Virginia Woolf broke free from tradition, she had also to discard the current form of the

novel. But then she was driven to invent her own technique which would express her own vision

of life. And Mrs. Woolf had already expressed very strongly that if the novelist could base his

work upon hi own feelings, and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no

tragedy, no love-interest or catastrophe in the accepted style. Hence in most of her novels there is

hardly any element of story. Mrs. Woolf’s formula for the novel was not humanity in action but

in a state of infinite perception. The novel in her hands is not just an entertainment, or

propaganda, or the vehicle of some fixed ideas or theories, or a social document, buy a voyage of

exploration to find out how life is lived, and how it can be rendered as it is actually lived without

distortion. Hence she concentrates her attention on the rendering of inner reality and gives subtle

and penetrating inlets into the consciousness o her character. She cares very little for narrating

dramatic events.

The World of Outer Reality not Ignored

It is to be noted that because her main purpose as a novelist is to depict inner life of human

beings, she has not ignored the world of outer reality, the warm and palpable life of nature. In

fact, in her novels we find that the metaphysical interest is embodies in purely human and

personal terms that the bounding line of art remains unbroken, that the concrete images which

are the very stuff of art are never sacrificed to abstraction, but are indeed more in evidence than

in the works of such writers as Bennett and Wells. The essential subject matter of her novels is

no doubt the consciousness of one or more characters, but the outer life of tree and stream, of

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bird and fish, of meadow and sea shore crowds in upon her and leads her image after image, a

great, sparkling, and many colored world of sight and scent and sound and touch. Herein lays the

magic and miracle of her work.

The Interior Monologue—Stream of Consciousness Technique

To the novelists of the new schools gunman consciousness is a chaotic welter of sensations and

impressions; it is fleeting, trivial and evanescent. And according to Virginia Woolf, the great task

of the novelist should be ‘to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumsc4ribed spirit’. His

main business is just to reveal the sensations and impressions to bring us close to the quick of the

mind. He should be more concerned with inner reality rather than outer. This is what is known as

‘the Stream of Consciousness Technique’. And we are introduced into interior life of the

character by the means of inner monologue. There is very little intervention in the way of

explanation or commentary on the part of the novelist. And this has been done by Virginia Woolf

by a very skillful use of “the interior monologue” or ‘the stream of consciousness’ technique.

She has very successfully revealed the very spring of action, the hidden motives which impel

men and women to act in a particular way. She has been able to take us directly into the minds of

her characters and show the chaotic flow of ideas, sensations and impressions there. And thus

Mrs. Woolf has been able to create a number of memorable, many sided and round figures, such

as Mrs. Ramsay or Mrs. Dalloway, which are among the immortals of literature.

VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MRS. DALLOWAY

Mrs. Dalloway was publishes in 1925. And this is her first great novel or her greatest claim to

immortality. This novel shows that how remarkably the novelist has succeeded in adopting ‘the

stream of consciousness technique’. The action is limited temporarily to the single day in the life

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of its chief character, Mrs. Dalloway, especially to a single place, London, and emotionally to

her relations with a few other people. As the heroin shops or talks, dresses or eats, we are inside

her mind, seeing her as she sees herself, sharing her memories and knowing the people she

knows or has known through her own eyes.

In the novel the major characters are only five and they stand out from the rest with the

distinctive pre-eminence. It is they alone who reveal their thoughts to the reader in prolonged and

repeated interior monologues as well as in conversations. And we find these five major

characters moving around each other in two concentric circles, Clarissa , Peter Walsh, and

Richard Dalloway in the one Septimus and Rezia Wartren Smith in another. And then around

each of these two circles we find a ring of minor characters such as, Sally Seton, Lady Bruton,

Hugh Whitbread, Elizabeth Dalloway and the important foil to Clarissa, Doris Kilman.

The entire action takes place in one day. It moves between Mrs. Dalloway’s preparation for her

party in the morning and her presiding over it in the evening on the same day. Within this narrow

frame we are also to know her life story from girlhood to her present age of fifty. The story is

gradually unfolded by means of the contacts she makes with others.

It is also one of the most popular novels by Woolf. The novel has also been translated to a

number of languages—French, Danish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, etc. David Daiches

has praised it and remarked this novel as the first wholly successful novel by Virginia Woolf

produced; and John Banette has categorized it as “one of her four most satisfying novels”. E.M.

Fosters has said In the Criterion, “it is perhaps her masterpiece, but difficult, and I am not

altogether sure about every detail, except when my fountain pen is in my hand”.

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The Theme and the Double Plot

Miss Neill has well observed in A Short History of the English Novel: in Mrs. Dalloway the

personality to be explored and recreated is that of a woman on the threshold of middle age.

Incidents of a day in her life and the accompanying visual, mental and emotional impressions are

set down from moment to moment in the style of Dorothy Richardson with a touch of Joyce.

Mrs. Dalloway’s intent on the preparation of her birthday party in the evening, is outwardly

poised and controlled, yet filled with wistful regrets for what has left unachieved. The day of her

life is expreseends in terms of a long interior monologue, the smooth flowing streams of

consciousness interrupted only by the striking hours of the clock that poignantly marks the

drifting hours.”

Apparently, the theme of the novel is the life and personality of Mrs. Dalloway. But Mrs.

Dalloway is not only an individual, she is a representative character. She represents they vivid

and critical picture of the contemporary civilization with all its chatter, noise and incessant

parties, its hypocrisy, its snobbery and materialism. The other theme in the life and personality of

Septimus Warren Smith, a neurotic. He is Clarissa Dalloway’s double’ in the sense that he is the

objectification of the death of her soul as well as the death of contemporary civilization. Mrs.

Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, they project a terrible indictment of the

contemporary materialistic society. Though both are two poles and stand apart yet they constitute

a whole. They are two faces of the same society—a society with all its sophistication, pomp and

power, wealth and affectation, second picture of the society is of a ‘dead’ soul.

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The Universitality of Theme

Thus Mrs. Dalloway has two plots that are closely knit together and quiet coherent. Mrs.

Dalloway has a poetic pattern also that is suggested through the use of rhythm in language,

symbols and imagery. It suggests the universality of life, the conflict between life and death, the

spiritual privacy and independence, the urge of love and social contact. Mrs. Dalloway is sacred

of both love and religion because they are too possessing and dominating. Septimus’ horror of

‘human nature’ is so acute that he commits suicide. Dr. Bradshaw is the ironical picture of an

insolent, aggressive and dominating figure that destroys the soul of others.

The Structure of Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway has a very vigorous structure. Mrs. Woolf’s unparalleled achievement in the

context of this novel lies in the fact that she has become successful in imposing form and order

on something coherent, formless and chaotic. She has achieved it through the narrow framework

of the novel. The entire action is very limited. It is like Joyce’s Ulysses, a single day of June in

the life of Mrs. Dalloway—spatially at London and “spiritually” or rather psychologically Mrs.

Dalloway meets several persons at different places. For filling the campus there are a numbers of

characters in the background of the novel. The method of presentation follows a free movement

completely independent of time – sequence. There is a skillful association of ‘psychological

time’ withy ‘clock time’; whenever the Big Ben strikes we feel that now there will be a shift

from the past to present or from one personality to another. Mrs. Woolf is not altogether present

but appears from time to time in order to guide the readers. This is well indicated by the frequent

use of pronoun ‘one’ in place of ‘I’. Thus we meant no incoherence or confusion in the novel.

R.L. Chambers says, Mrs. Dalloway represents a compromise between the need for formal

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clarity of presentation and the formlessness apparently inherent in the stream of consciousness

technique with its insistence that ‘everything is the proper stuff of fiction’ and, ‘no perception

comes amiss’. It was perhaps the main achievement of Virginia Woolf’s genius to discover that

such a compromise was possible, certainly it requires an artistic sensibility of a very high order

to apply such a compromise in practice.”

Subtle Manipulation of Time

“ the added dimension afforded by allowing the persons of the novel to move back and forth in

time to encompass and entire life in a few seconds of though enriches not only they personality

off the characters but, in great measure, the philosophical depth of the book,” Mrs. Dalloway is a

round character. We get her picture, through her own “stream of consciousness” through other

character’s stream of consciousness and we feel you present with her at the crucial moments of

her life. Of course, the technique of stream of consciousness has freed the novelists from the

chains of the chronological time sequence. The action independently moves backward and

forward in time. We see a confrontation of clock time with psychological time. The historical

time is suggested by the aftermath of war that has just ended.

The Lyrical Style

Mrs. Dalloway represents a musicalization and poetization of the English novel. It is very much

like, “a musical fugue in construction” as remarked by Bernard Blackstone. It has a rhythmical

movement of going backward and forward. The focal point is fixed and it is the stream of

consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway. From this point the movement swings backward and forward in

time. The fixed point regarding both time and space is June morning and bond street. The third

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fixed point is the consciousness of Septimus and Lucretius. There is again a backward and

forward movement from this point. Thus the novel is an artistic whole like a piece of music.

Mrs. Woolf has used the technique of a poet to enhance the expressiveness and richness of her

diction. Her style is poetic; she has used plenty of poetic imagery, metaphor and symbol. As

E.Elbert writes, “she uses words with a keen sense of their rhythmical and musical potentialities,

her style is richly figurative “. Her style has all the qualities of a poetic style- rhyme, refrain, and

metaphor. R.L.Chambers has pointed out that the metaphors of Woolf are not of prose or

romantic prose but of poetry. First, they are not the metaphors from the visible world but they are

often the collection of ideas made by the transportation of laws of association which we get in

poetry. “A candle in the crocus” is not a prose metaphor. It is a poetic image as “A bracelet of

bright here about the bone” etc. thus, the style of Mrs. Dalloway is poetic. Her style is perfectly

made to render complex mental states or to convey that is hard to render.

Symbolism in Mrs. Dalloway

Few critics say that the characters of Mrs. Dalloway are symbolical of different aspects of life

and society. The Dalloway’s represent pomp and show, outward glitter of a civilization that is

suffering from a spiritual barrenness. The Whitbread’s suggests all that is most detestable in

English middle class life. Doris Kilman symbolizes the possessiveness of love and religion. Dr.

Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw represent the scientific evils of modern civilization. Peter

Walsh is symbolic of knowledge, truth, adventurous spirit and those men who are able to protect

themselves from society. Septimus is a stricture in the modern war, and Sally is a revolt against

orthodox. Fresh morning represents youth, rose is symbol of love. Streets are symbolic of

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anonymity and mystery in the human life, rooms represents protection and intimacy, and window

suggests personal angle of viewing the world.

Stream of Consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Virginia Woolf is truthfully called “a tireless experimenter in whose hands the novel tends

to become something different from a more fictional narrative of ‘characters’. She seems to have

felt that a literary form, to be capable of reflecting the current idea of life, must be a new literary

form; and she proceeded to develop such a form to its perfection. In her early novel, Night and

Day, she speaks of writing as “that process of self-examination, that perpetual effort to

understand one’s own feelings, and expresses it beautifully, fitly or energetically in language.”

It is in Mrs. Dalloway that Virginia Woolf achieves perfection in the technique of stream of

consciousness. The action of the novel is confined within a narrow framework of a single day in

the life of the central figure, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, spatially to a single place, London, and

emotionally to the relations of Mrs. Dalloway and few other characters. The action of the novel

is mainly presented through the minds of the other characters. As the mind ranges without

limitations of time and space, the novel basically deals with the past of its characters that with

the present of its single day. Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is the focal point and all the actions revolve

around her. The method of presentation produces alternating movement by going out and back

again.

We began within Clarissa’s stepping out into a London street in order to buy flowers for here

birthday party, but we actually join her when we move in her mind, to her girlhood away from

London to Baurton where we meet Peter Walsh. Then after we share with her the world of the

London morning and her own world for next twelve pages, meet her next door neighbored Scrop

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Purvis and her friend Hugh Whitbread, her husband Richard Dalloway and daughter Elizabeth,

Mrs. Doris Kilman, her girlhood friend Sally Seton and again peter Walsh. Then we meet an

external incident, the backfiring of motor car engine in Bond Street but what happens in the

novel on the face is unimportant. In Mrs. Dalloway a most sophisticated upper class lady gives a

party, and the man Peter Walsh who has been in love with her comes back from India. A man

Septimus, a neurotic is suffering from Hallucinations and mental imbalance, commits suicide.

Mrs. Woolf’s brilliance lies in the knacks of Mrs. Dalloway movement from one mind to

another. The whole interior monologue of chief characters is rendered through the subtle use of

evocative prose poetry. The novel is remarkable for the illustration of symbolist technique in

fiction.

Thus Mrs. Woolf has deliberately used the techniques of stream of consciousness with ever

growing sureness of purpose, keenness, and intelligence but everythi8ng is handles with an

almost scientific precisions. Mrs. Woolf ha limited the novels scope in time and place; there are

few significant characters in the novel and their relations to each other are crystal clear. The time

scheme is patterned with exception attention.

Mr. Albert has said that Mrs. Woolf’s “keen mind and magnificent artistic since makes her able

to weld the parts into a unifies artistic whole of subtle portraiture. Her studies of moods and

impulses are handled with an almost scientific precision and detachment, with great lyrical and

poetic gifts.”

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CONCLUSION

First let’s look at the two periods in detail, starting with the Victorian period. The Victorian

period started in 1837 and lasted until the year 1901 during which Queen Victoria led Great

Britain in the monarchy. The ruling of Queen Victoria was distinct for its belief in tradition.

According to the book “Defining the Victorian Nation”, gender roles are discussed. In the

Victorian period men and women were expected to adhere to certain gender rules. For Example,

men were expected to be the providers. A Victorian man had to be strong and independent

because it reflected the ideals of British society. Women, on the other hand, were expected to be

homemakers and to raise the family. Women for much of the Victorian era fought for suffrage

but had major shortcomings in doing so. (1) These ideals were one of the driving forces behind

the Victorian Era and were the inspiration behind one of the most famous novels written during

this time; Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. When it comes to the Modernist era however,

tradition was not thought of highly. Starting to form in the 1890s, the cornerstone of the

Modernist movement was progression. Unlike the Victorian Era, the Modernist era consisted of

trying new things and individualism was also embraced. (2) The Modernist Era gained steam due

to a change in public opinion on social issues and cultural norms. Many people were tired of the

“Same old same old” mentality that British culture had become. (3) However the biggest

motivator to the Modernist Era was the abrupt cultural changes that occurred, most notably

World War I, also known as “The war to end all wars”. This event led many writers to question

all they know about humanity and life.

The second contradiction between these two eras is nationalism and questioning of authority.

During the Victorian Era, there was a great sense of nationalism. Many in Great Britain were

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proud of its nation due to its status as a world power. During the 19th century, Britain had

influence in India, Africa, present day Canada and parts of South America. Queen Victoria had

conveyed the message that Britain was possessing these territories because Britain was a force

for good and was out to do good in the world and was there to help those in need, which was met

with great approval from the British citizens. Another major influence that created immense

nationalism in Britain was the several defeats the country suffered in war. In 1783, Great Britain

lost a major war to its colony that later became known as the United States. In 1812, Great

Britain lost another war to the United States. Both defeats were demoralizing to Great Britain

however it did bring the nation closer together creating a sense of nationalism. During the

Modernist Era, The feelings of nationalism faded away. Many Modernist literates questioned

government and authority in general. Modernists in Great Britain believed that the government

was imperialist and responsible for wrong doing across the world.

The final comparison between Victorianism and Modernism is the difference between nature and

science. During the Victorian Era, the main focus of writing was the idea of relating people to

nature. A perfect example of this is in the book “Pride and Prejudice” When Elizabeth talks

about Pemberly as a beautiful setting perfect to live in. That was one of the main points of

Victorian literature, relating it to nature. The modernist Era however had no interest in

expressing literature through nature; rather Modernist preferred to express literature through

science and logic. One of the greatest scientists to come out of the Modernist era was Sigmund

Freud. Born in Austria, Freud was a psychologist who developed the theory of psychoanalysis

which represented the progression of discovery that was common in the Modernist Era.

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CHANGES THAT CAME IN NOVELS

In the 20th century, novel became the dominant literary form in English. It is a very popular

literary in the genre in modern age. The film, the radio and the TV are gaining popularity but

novel is the only literary form which can compete with them. The modern novelist can claim its

importance in enthusiastic response. In the restoration period, a new comedy by Congreve and

Dryden was received with applause, in Victorian age the poet laureate Lord Tennyson’s newly

published poems were admired and believed to add great luster to English Literature.

In the 20th century, the novel holds the supreme place in realm of literature while poetry has lost

its position. The change from poetry to novel meets the need of the modern world. To a semi-

educated modern taste prose fiction was more palatable than poetry, which is a more

sophisticated taste while, by its nature, it is more accessible to the masses than drama. In

addition, the novel is admirably suited as a vehicle for the sociological studies which attracted

most of the great artists of the period. Aldous Huxley, D.H. Laurence, and James Joyce were all

poets but they have changed from poetry to fiction, there permanent reputation is likely to rest on

their novels. We may quote examples of other fictional writers like Edith Setwil and Virginia

Woolf who have enriched fiction by bringing to it some of the luminous insights of poetry. They

were poet but diverted their attention to fiction. Virginia’s To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The

Waves are experiments which have a strong influence or poetry and drama and they were treated

as the richer genre of English Literature. Righter from Chaucer to the Victorian age, poetry and

drama have played a dominant role.

The novel in the 20th century has gained an undoubted ascendency over all other literary forms,

an ascendency it has maintained until many recent years. Its growing importance had been

accompanied by serious study of the art of the novelist, and from a technical point of view, the

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progress of novel throughout the century, is unequalled in all its previous history.

Characterization in the modern novel

The 19th century characters do not develop, they are called flat characters. The novelist does not

depict unimportant modifications, that is, they remain as they are from the beginning to the end.

All the important characters of 19th century- Heathcliff Micawber, Yriah Heep, Amelia Sedley,

Fred Bayhem, and Mrs.Proudie- remain unchanged. Mrs. Micawber is a very important character

from a novel of the 19th century. She repeats the same matter from the beginning to the end. In

this sense, 19th century characters are static and not dynamics, thus, the chief concern of the 19th

century novelist was to create memorable characters and to convey a moral but the modern

novelist’s object is to portray the character realistically or as they are. In this process he makes a

psychological research, reveals the character from within, and dissects his mind and soul, and

ion conducting this research they get to know that man is the complex creature, not a simple and

innocent one. Man is made of both virtues and vices. According to psychology man is like a

river, running sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes clear or turbid, he presents a different

form at every moment. Like in the Victorian age women in the modern novel are treated a

virtues or the reverse made of golden clay, present savagery or sunlight. Now it is obvious that

on account of the complexities of human personalities the novelist cannot portray him straight

forwardly as a simple, memorable creature. He cannot let him free to act according to the

predictions. Thus the modern characters, when analyzed from within, do not enjoy the reputation

of being memorable characters.

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Bibliography

Primary Readings

Howard J. Booth. Modernism and Empire. U.S.A: Manchester University Press,2000.Print

Malcolm Bradbury.Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930.London: Penguin

Series,1978.Print

Richard D. Altick. Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of
Victorian Literature.New York,1973.Print
Deirdre David. The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel.London,2001.Print

Secondary Readings

Modernism and Post Modernism:An Overview with Art Examples, Content and Practice in a

Post Modern Era. James Hutches.1997.Web

http://www.terrybarrettosu.com/pdfs/B_PoMo_97.pdf

Modernism/Modernity (http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/modernism_modernity/index.html),

official publication of the Modernist Studies Association

(http://msa.press.jhu.edu/index.html)

Victorian early years:Development and Growth

http://www.education.vic.gov.au/Documents/childhood/providers/edcare/veyldframework.pdf

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