A two-faced reality

Performer - Culture & Literature

Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
 A two-faced reality

1. The British Empire

During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great
Britain
ruled over a wide and powerful empire.

An area of 4 million people

more than
400 million squares miles.

British Empire throughout the World,

19th century, Private Collection

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 A two-faced reality

1. The British Empire

1887 Golden Jubilee
1897 Diamond Jubilee

Blue countries already

belonged to the UK
Orange new conquered
lands

Hong-Kong Egypt Boer war Australia and New Zeland

1841 1882 1886 1902

1877 1884 1899

Empress of India Sudan Burma

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 A two-faced reality

1. The British Empire

After the 1857 Indian Mutiny

• India came under direct rule

by Britain;
• Queen Victoria was crowned
Empress of India in 1877.

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 A two-faced reality

1. The British Empire

The British also occupied

• Australia and New Zealand;

• parts of China – including Hong Kong in 1841;
• Burma in 1886;
• Egypt in 1882;
• Sudan in 1884;
• South Africa in 1902, after the Boer War.

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 A two-faced reality

1. The British Empire

The Victorians believed that

• the ‘races’ of the world

were divided by physical
and intellectual differences;

• some were destined to be

led by others;

• it was an obligation imposed by God on the British

to impose their superior way of life, their institutions,
law and politics on native peoples.

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 A two-faced reality

2. Rudyard Kipling: The White

Man’s Burden

• A poem written in 1899 to give advice to

the United States on the occasion of the
annexation of the Philippines

• It contains the author’s famous phrase, ‘the white man’s

burden’

• The bard of the English Empire and came to symbolise

the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race.

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 A two-faced reality

2. Rudyard Kipling : The

White Man’s Burden
Speaking to an
‘Take up the White Man's burden American, who
recently colonised
Send forth the best ye breed Philippines

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captive’s need Responsibility
of coloniser:
To wait in heavy harness burden
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.’
Darwin’s theory

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 A two-faced reality

3. Charles Darwin and evolution

1859 Charles Darwin published
On the Origin of Species.
• His theory of natural selection
discarded the version of creation
given by the Bible, it seemed to
show that the strongest survived
and the weakest deserved to be
defeated.
Charles Darwin
• Stress on the godless element of
chance involved in evolutionary
variation.

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 A two-faced reality

3. Charles Darwin and evolution

1871: The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

Theory of evolution
• all living creatures have taken their forms through a slow
process of change and adaptation in a struggle for survival;
• favourable physical conditions determine the survival of a
species;
• unfavourable ones determine its extinction;
• man evolved, like any other animal, from less highly
organised forms, namely from a monkey.

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 A two-faced reality

4. The Victorians and crime

The Victorians believed crime could be beaten
• Prison acts (1865 and 1877).
• Creation of new police forces.

Impact on small theft Street robbery,

on the streets called ‘garrotting’

There were occasional The murders of

panics linked to particular Jack the Ripper
appalling offences (1888)

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 A two-faced reality

4. The Victorians and crime

Domestic violence rarely
came before the courts:
tolerated because
committed in the private
sphere.

publicising of such
behaviour bad reputation to
The case of Jack The the family
Ripper was the most
famous case
of sexual violence.

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 …
A two-faced reality

4. The Victorians and crime

Parliament responded to the problem

with legislation which provided
flogging as well as imprisonment for
offenders.

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 A two-faced reality

4. The Victorians and crime

Violence, especially
violence with a
sexual connotation,
sold newspapers.

The press created

sensations out of minor
incidents.

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 A two-faced reality

4. The Victorians and crime

The criminals

• At the beginning of the century

criminal offenders individuals in the lower
reaches of the working class.

• By the middle of the century

‘criminal classes’ social groups stuck at the
bottom of society.

• Towards the end of the century

the criminal an individual suffering from some
form of behavioural abnormality that had been either
inherited or encouraged by dissolute parents.

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 A two-faced reality

5. Aestheticism
Developed in France with
Théophile Gautier (1811–72)

It reflected:
• the sense of frustration and uncertainty Théophile Gautier

of the artist;
• his reaction against the materialism and
the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie;
• his need to re-define the role of art;
• the French artists withdrew from the political
and social scene;
• ‘escaped’ into aesthetic isolation.

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 A two-faced reality

5. Aestheticism

The bohemian’s protest against the monotony

and vulgarity of bourgeois life led to an unconventional
existence, the pursue of sensations and excesses, and
the cult of art and beauty.

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 A two-faced reality

5. Aestheticism
Walter Pater (1839–94),
the theorist of the Aesthetic
Movement in England,

• rejected religious faith;

• said that art was the only means to stop
time;
• thought life should be lived ‘as a work of
art feeling all kinds of sensations’.
Aubrey Beardsley, front cover For ‘The YeIIow Book’, January 1895. ‘The YelIow
Book’ was a eading Britìsh journal of the 1890s which was associated with
Aestheticism and Decadence. The magazine contaìned a wide range of literary
and artistic genres, poetry, short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and
reproductions ofpaintings.

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 A two-faced reality

5. Aestheticism

Eternal

Art Art for art’s sake

No reference to life, morality

The task of the artist → to feel sensations, to be

attentive to the ‘attractive’, the ‘gracious’.

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 A two-faced reality

5. Aestheticism
A number of features can be distinguished in
the works of Aesthetic artists:

• evocative use of the language of the senses;

• excessive attention to the self;
• hedonistic attitude;
• perversity in subject matter;
• disenchantment with contemporary society;
• absence of any didactic aim.

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 A two-faced reality

6. The dandy

• Belonged to the upper classes

→ opposite to the bohemian.

• Elegance as a reason of life and

‘life as a work of art’.

• Interested in beauty and literary

works → opposite to the didacticism
of the Victorian writers of the first
half of the age.

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