LITERATURA INGLESA II

CURSO 2020-2021
JUNE EXAM

NAME:

Part I. Provide a brief discussion (300 words max.) on each of the following quotes.
Focus on the key idea(s) each text examines, contextualize them in their specific
historical, ideological, and cultural frame, and support your discussion with textual
evidence (4 points).

TEXT 1
Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
as if alive. Will please you rise? We’ll meet
the company below, then. I repeat,
the Count your master’s know munificence
is ample warrant that no just presence
of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
through his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
at starting, is my object.

The extract presented here is from the 1842 poem by Robert Browning, My Last Duchess, often
cataloged as an example of dramatic monologue. This piece was written in the Victorian Era and
it is interpreted as a critique on the situation of women in this epoque. It is set in Renaissance
Italy and narrates a historical event through the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, who speaks about his
former wife, Lucrezia de’ Medici. The Duke explains how she was to his guests through a
painting of her and in this piece, it is observed how much he hated her being happy because he
thought her good treatment towards him was nothing special, since she was that way with
everyone, then he goes on to how she stopped being her joyous self when he started to become
strict and domineering with her. It is also suggested in the line “then all smiles stopped together’’,
that he may have directly been the cause of Lucrezia’s death since it was rumoured that she had
been poisoned. After this he passes the theme of the conversation to his new bride-to-be and the
arrangements for their wedding.

This behaviour of men was unfortunately very common, if not the norm in the Victorian Era,
since women were seen as simple creatures whose only purpose of living was being beautiful,
agreeable and at the service of the men in their lives.

TEXT 2
“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that,
not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls
are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lighting,
or from fire.” Ere this speech ended I became sensible of Heathcliff’s presence. Having noticed a
slight movement, I turned my head, and saw him rise from the bench, and steal out, noiselessly.

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He had listened till he heard Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and then he staid
to hear no farther.

The text provided is from Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s only novel written in 1847. This work
is contextualized in Victorian England and the author was influenced by Romanticism and
Gothic fiction. It concerns the Earnshaw’s and the Linton’s relationship with Heathcliff, Mr
Earnshaw’s adoptive son. This fragment is set when Catherine confesses her deep love for
Heathcliff to Nelly, but since he is considered not much more than a servant, although they have
been brought up together with the same privileges, she cannot marry him, as this would
“degrade’’ her. Instead she is ought to wed Edgar Linton, a wealthy and well-positioned man, but
one who she is not in love with.

This event was frequent in the period, as women were not able to support themselves since they
were uneducated and were not normally allowed to have a job. Because of this they were to
procure a well-off man to be married to so they would remain protected and sustained financially.

TEXT 3
I learned that the possessions most esteemed by my fellow-creatures were, high and unsullied
descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages; but,
without either, he was considered except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave,
doomed to waste his powers for the profits of the chosen few! And what was I? Of my creation
and creator I was absolutely ignorant; but I knew that I possessed no money, friends, no kind of
property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even
of the same nature as man.

This excerpt belongs to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, written in 1818. It is
a gothic novel and it is set in English Romanticism. It narrates the unorthodox experiment that
the young doctor Victor Frankenstein performs where he gives life to a creature by joining
distinct pieces from different corpses together. This quote is said by the monster when he realizes
that all the faith he has put in the human race is in vain and that he will never be loved or
respected. This may be considered as a critique towards society as at the time men’s value was
determined only by their “riches’’ and not their character or their treatment towards others. The
creature is reflecting on this because he does not have any wealth, property or relations, so this
makes him a nobody in the eopeque’s society.

Part II. Write one comparative analysis of these two texts (2 pages max.). Identify and
contextualize them in their respective works and literary periods, address their
similarities and differences, and provide textual evidence of your ideas (6 points).

TEXT 1

1. Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,

Here earth and water seem to strive again,
Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised,
But as the world, harmoniously confused:
5. Where order in variety we see,

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 And where, though all things differ, all agree.
Here waving groves a chequered scene display,
And part admit and part exclude the day;
As some coy nymph her lover’s warm address
10. Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.
There, interspersed in lawns and opening glades,
Thin trees arise that shun each other’s shades.
Here in full light the russet plains extend:
There wrapped in clouds the blueish hills ascend:
15. Ev’n the wild heath displays her purple dyes,
And ’midst the desert fruitful fields arise,
That crowned with tufted trees and springing corn,
Like verdant isles the sable waste adorn.

TEXT 2

1. O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

5. Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

10. Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

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The first text presented is Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest. First published in 1713 this romantic
and political poem is a celebration of the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, which put an end to
the war of the Spanish Succession. In this extract Pope defends the notion of the tight
relationship of nature to art as they both create harmony from apparent chaos.

The second extract is from Ode to the West Wind, written in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the
poem, the speaker addresses the west wind as a force of decay that welcomes change and rebirth
by destroying old and deteriorating elements.

These two poems not only share their romantic context, but they also approach the recurring
theme in this epoque, nature, in a similar way. They both find the chaotic essence of nature not
only as a necessary element in it but as the origin of all the beauty that characterizes it, as Pope
says ‘‘order in variety we see’’. This anarchy is also crucial for it to renew, evolve and progress
through time. Nature is an element that can only better itself by worsening itself, or as it is named
by Shelley ‘‘Destroyer and Preserver’’.

But even if the authors shared the same ideas towards this theme, in some parts of the piece it
can be said that Windsor Forest was written from a different approach than Ode to the West Wind.
This is notable when focusing on their distinct ideologies. Pope was a conservative and Shelley’s
ideas were more in the direction of society’s evolution towards a more egalitarian one as he was,
for example, in favor of abolishing slavery. The first poem is an exaltation of English patriotism
through nature and members of that day’s royalty are venerated. Alternately, the second has a
more spiritual approach as it talks about the decomposition of elements in nature, comparing
these to the corruption of humanity at his time, such as in the lines ‘‘the leaves dead’’. Shelley
believed that society was only going backwards as it was becoming more and more traditionalist
as the Victorian Era approximated.

During the eighteenth and nineteen centuries nature was one of the most influential aspects in
the works of English writers although the approach towards it drastically changed through the
Romantic period as it neared Victorian England.