Victorian Age

1837-1901

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The Victorian Age → 1837 when Victoria came to the throne at the age of 18; She ruled for almost
64 years.

She gave the name to an age of economic and scientific progress and social reforms;

→1840, She married Prince Albert, they had 9 children and their family provided o model of
respectability.

REFORMS: beginning 1830s

→1832, First Reform Act, called The Great Reform Act; people wanted to transfer voting priliveges
from small boroughs (quartieri) controlled by nobility, to large industrial towns like Birmingham
and Manchester.

→1833, The Factory Act, prevented children aged from 9 to 13 from being employed more than 48
hours a week and no person from 13 to 18 was allowed to work more than 72 hours a week.

→1834, The Poor Law Amendment Act, created WORKHOUSES where the poor received board and
lodging in return for work.
• WORKHOUSE: In
Britain, a workhouse was
a total institution where
those unable to support
themselves financially
were offered
accommodation and
employment. (In Scotland,
they were usually known
as poorhouses.) The
earliest known use of the
term workhouse is from
1631.
• Workhouses had strict rules,
the poor had to wear uniforms
and their families were slipt;
• Puritan Values → hard work,
frugality and duty;

• The idea behind it was that

the awareness of such a
dreadful life would have
inspired the poor to try to
improve their own conditions;

• Workhouses were mostly

ruled by the Church.
Chartism:
• 1838, a group of working-class radicals drew
up a people’s charter demanding equal
electoral rights, universal male suffrage,
secret ballot (voto).

• No one in power was ready for such

democracy so the chartist movement failed.

• the influence is felt in the 1867 → Second

Reform Act
→ 1872, Ballot Act (secret ballot);
Technological Progress:
• Mid-years of 19°
century, England
experienced a second
wave of Industrialization
→ brought economic,
cultural, architectual
change.

• England avoided
revolutionary wave.

• 1851 → a Great
Exhibition is organized by
Prince Albert, showing
the world Britain’s
Industrial and economic
power.
• The exhibition took place
at Crystal Palace in Hyde
Park, London.

• Money was invested in

setting up several museum,
including Natural History
Museum, Science Museum
and the now called Victoria
& Albert Museum (all
entrance free)

• → 1860, the building of

the London Underground
started to transform the
landscape and people’s lives.
The Victorian Compromise:
A Complex Age → age of change and great contradictions → that’s what we call VICTORIAN COMPROMISE

At the same time, coexisted progress, reforms and political stability with poverty and injustice.

Religion played an important role → Anglicalism encouraged public and political action to create a lot of charities; this
led to the creation of societies which addressed every kind of poverty.

Victorians believed in God but also in progress and science.

→ Emphasis on education, hygiene was encouraged to improve health care.

Respectability
- Social status Mixture of morality and hypocrisy, since the unpleasent aspects
- Keeping up appearances of society like dissolution, poverty were hidden.
- Looking after family
→ Duty of men to respect and protect women seen as physically weaker but morally superior.
→ Women controlled the family BUT single women with a child were marginalized as Fallen Women.

In breve
Il Compromesso Vittoriano mette in mostra la dualità dell’epoca: le città crescono e si avvicinano sempre di più al
modello moderno che conosciamo oggi, con grandi palazzi e metropolitane. Le donne erano politicamente e
socialmente impegnate, contro la prostituzione e praticavano molte attività di volontariato, ad esempio si
proponevano come insegnanti per i più poveri.

Di conseguenza, i ricchi continuano ad accrescere le loro ricchezze (e per loro questo è un periodo di grande
prosperità) ma c’è anche il rovescio della medaglia: l’aumento di richieste si lega all’aumento di manodopera, il che
significa più posti di lavoro ma anche orari più massacranti. Sempre più bambini vengono messi a lavorare nelle
fabbriche tra cui lo stesso scrittore Charles Dickens.

Le condizioni dei più poveri peggiorano: condizioni igienico sanitarie precarie, molte famiglie erano costrette a
vivere nella stessa casa.
The Victorian Novel
There was a communion of interests and opinions between writers and their readers.
The middle classes grew and they were avid consumers of literature: they borrowed books from circulating
libraries and read the abundant variety of periodicals.

The Publishing World:

A great deal of Victorian literature was first published in serial form. Essays, verse and even novels made their
first appearance in instalments in the pages of periodicals. This allowed the writer to feel he was in constant
contact with his public.
He was obliged to maintain the interest of his story because one boring instalment would cause the public not
to buy the periodical; also, the writer could alter the story according to the reaction of his audience.

The novel became the most important form of literature and the main source of entrainment. The spread of
scientific knowledge made the novel realistic and analytical.
The novelist’s aim:
In the 1840s novelists felt they had a moral
and social responsibility.
They wanted to reflect the social changes →
Industrial Revolution, the struggle for
democracy and the growth of towns and
cities.
The novelists of the first part of the Victorian
period described society as they saw it and
nothing escaped their scrutiny.
They were aware of the evils of their society,
such as the terrible conditions of manual
workers and the exploitation of children.
The Narrative Technique:
The voice of the omniscient narrator provided
a comment on the plot and erected a rigid
barrier between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviors,
light and darkness.
Setting and characters:
The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists
was the city, which was the main symbol of the
industrial civilization as well as the expression
of anonymous lives and lost identities.
Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic
characters the public could easily identify
with, in terms of comedy – especially Dickens’s
characters – or dramatic passion –
the Brontë sisters’ heroines.
 • The novel of formation. These novels dealt with one
Types of novels: character’s development from early youth to some
sort of maturity.
• The novel of manners. It kept close to the
• Literary nonsense. Lewis Carroll:
original 19th-century models. It
In his famous novel Alice’s Adventures
dealt with economic and social problems
in Wonderland (1865), Carroll created a
and described a particular class or situation.
nonsensical universe where the social rules
and conventions are disintegrated, the
• The humanitarian novel. Charles Dickens’s
cause-effect relationship does not exist,
novels are mostly admired for their tone,
and time and space have lost their function
combining humor with a sentimental
of giving an order to human experience.
request for reform for the less fortunate.

They constitute the bulk of what is generally

called the ‘humanitarian novel’ or the ‘novel
of purpose’,
Charles Dickens:
Life and works
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth,
on the southern coast of England, in 1812.
He had an unhappy childhood. His father
was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12
he was put to work in a factory. When the
family finances improved and his father was
released, he was sent to a school in London.
At 15, he found employment as an office boy
at a lawyer’s and studied shorthand at night.
By 1832 he had become a very successful
shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates
in the House of Commons, and began to work
as a reporter for a newspaper.
In 1833 his first story appeared and in 1836, still a newspaper
reporter, he adopted the pen name
‘Boz’, publishing Sketches by ‘Boz’, a collection
of articles and tales describing London’s people
and scenes, written for the periodical Monthly
Magazine.
It was immediately followed by The
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also
known as The Pickwick Papers), which was
published in instalments and revealed Dickens’s
humoristic and satirical qualities.
Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in April
1836, and during the same year he became
editor of Bentley’s Miscellany and published
the second series of Sketches by ‘Boz’. After the
success of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens started
a full-time career as a novelist, producing work
 of increasing complexity at an incredible rate, • The protagonists of his
although he also continued his journalistic autobiographical novels,
and editorial activities. Oliver Twist (1838), David
Copperfield became the
Oliver Twist was
symbols of an exploited
childhood confronted with the
begun in 1837 and continued in monthly
bitter realities of slums and
instalments until April 1839. Nicholas Nickleby
factories.
was published in 1839. Although he was a
republican, Dickens took strongly against the • Other works include:
United States when he visited the country in Hard Times (1854) and Great
1842. In October of that year his American Notes Expectations (1861), which
appeared, in which he advocated international deal with the conditions of
copyright and the abolition of slavery. the poor and the working
class in general.
By the time of his sudden
death in Kent, in 1870,
Dickens had drawn adoring
crowds to his public
appearances in England,
Scotland and Ireland; he had
Questa foto di Autore sconosciuto è concesso in licenza da CC BY-ND met princes and presidents
and had amassed a fortune.
He was buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Characters
He was the creator of characters and
caricatures who live immortally in the English
Imagination.. His aim was to arouse the reader’s
interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits as
well as the language of the London middle and
lower classes. He was always on the side of
the poor and also the working class.
Children are often the most important
characters in Dickens’s novels. A lot of
instances of good, wise children as opposed to
worthless parents and other grown-up people
illustrate in fiction the reverse of
the natural order of things: children become
the moral teachers .
A didactic aim
Dickens’s task was to make the ruling classes
aware of the social problems without offending his middle-class
readers.
Style and reputation
Dickens employed the most effective language
and accomplished the most graphic and
powerful descriptions of life and character ever
attempted by any novelist. He did so with his
careful choice of adjectives, repetitions of words
and structures, juxtapositions of images and
ideas, hyperbolic and ironic remarks.
He is considered as the greatest novelist
in the English language.
Oliver Twist:
Oliver Twist first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later published as a book.
The novel fictionalizes the economic insecurity and humiliation Dickens
experienced as a child.
The name ‘Twist’, though it is given to the protagonist by
accident, represents the outrageous reversals of fortune that he will experience.
Oliver Twist is a poor boy of unknown parents; he was born in a workhouse in
a small town near London in the early 1800s.
His mother dies almost immediately after his birth and he is brought up in a workhouse in an inhuman way.
The boy commits the unpardonable offence of asking for more food when he is close to starving , so
the parish official offers five pounds to anyone willing to take Oliver on as an apprentice.
In fact, he is later sold to an undertaker , but the cruelty and the
unhappiness he experiences with his new master make him run away to London.
There he falls into the hands of a gang of young pickpockets , trained by Fagin,
who runs a school for would-be thieves. Unfortunately, Oliver is not a successful student:
he is caught on his first attempt at theft. Mr Brownlow, the victim, is
stricked by the ragged and unhealthy appearance of Oliver and rather than
charging him with theft, he takes him home and takes care of him.
Oliver is eventually kidnapped by Fagin’s gang and forced to commit
burglaries ; during the job he is shot and wounded . Oliver is adopted
by Mr Brownlow and at last receives kindness and affection. Investigations are made
about who Oliver is and it is discovered that he has noble origins. In the end the gang of
pickpockets and Oliver’s half-brother , who paid the thieves in order to ruin Oliver
and have their father’s property all for himself, are arrested.
Hard Times :
This novel is set in an imaginary industrial
town named Coketown.
Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes
in facts and statistics, has founded a school
where his theories are taught, and he brings up
his two children, Louisa and Tom, in the same
way, repressing their imagination and feelings.
He marries his daughter to Josiah Bounderby,
a rich banker of the city, 30 years older than she
is. The girl consents since she wishes to help
her brother, who is given a job in Bounderby’s
bank, but the marriage proves to be unhappy.
Tom, who is lazy and selfish, robs his employer.
At first he succeeds in throwing the suspicion
on an honest workman, but he is finally
discovered and obliged to leave the country.
In the end Mr Gradgrind understands the
damage he has caused to his children and
gives up his narrow-minded, materialistic
philosophy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The fictional city of Coketown stands for a
real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century
Victorian England. It is a sort of brick jungle:
the machineries of factories are like mad
elephants, and their smoke looks like serpents.
This place of ‘hard facts’ and ‘hard lives’ seems
to be turned into some kind of magical but
hellish land.
• Hard Times is divided into three sections,
or books, and each book is divided into
separate chapters:

• Book One, ‘Sowing’, shows us the seeds planted

by the Gradgrind/Bounderby education:
Louisa, Tom and Stephen Blackpool.

• Book Two, ‘Reaping’, reveals the harvesting of

these seeds:
Louisa’s unhappy marriage, Tom’s selfishness
and criminal ways, Stephen’s rejection from
Coketown.

• Book Three, ‘Garnering’, is linked

to a dominant symbol – instability – which is
no longer the solid ‘ground’ upon which Mr
Gradgrind’s system once stood.
The philosophy of Utilitarianism: comes forth
largely through the actions of Mr
Gradgrind and his follower Bounderby: as the
former educates the children of his family and
his school through facts.

Mr Gradgrind believes that human nature

can be measured, quantified and governed
entirely by reason. Indeed, his school tries to
turn children into little machines that behave
according to such rules.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Life and works

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh

in 1850. Because of his poor health he spent
most of his childhood in bed, terrified of the
dark room he was kept in and tutored at home.
He travelled a lot in search of a friendlier climate; he lived
in the South of England, Germany, France and Italy.
He was in conflict with his social environment,
the respectable Victorian world; he grew
his hair long, his manners were eccentric
and he became one of the first examples of
the bohemian in Britain, openly rejecting his
family’s religious principles and their love
for respectability.
He graduated in law and decided to devote himself to
writing.
He married an American woman and since his
health was deteriorating, they moved to Australia
and Tahiti.
The Strange
Case of Dr.
Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Plot
Mr. Utterson is a respectable London lawyer
and friend to the brilliant scientist Dr Henry
Jekyll.
After relating a disturbing tale of a
sinister man assaulting a small girl,
Utterson begins to question the odd
Behaviour of his friend. As he
investigates further into the life of
Dr Jekyll, he discovers a story so
horrific, so terrifying, that he can
hardly believe it.
In fact, his friend has created a potion able
to release his evil side, Mr Hyde.
On the one hand, the man may choose a life of crime and
depravity or, on the other hand, Jekyll must eliminate
Hyde in the only way left, by killing him. Hence Jekyll’s
suicide is the final and only choice.
London, 1870s.
At that time London had a ‘double’ nature and
reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian society:
the respectable West End was in contrast
with the appalling poverty of the East End
slums.
Symbolism of Jekyll’s house, whose two
façades represent the faces of the two opposed
sides of the same man: the front of this house,
used by the doctor, is fair while the rear
side, used by Hyde, is part of a sinister block of
Buildings.
The most important events are wrapped up
in darkness and fog: when Hyde tramples
over the child, it is three in the morning; the
murder of a respectable Member of Parliament,
Sir Danvers Carew, happens at night, as well as
Jekyll/Hyde’s suicide.
Style: Sources:

There are four narrators: This novel had its origin in a dream: afflicted
Utterson, his distant relative Enfield, Dr Lanyon with tuberculosis and haunted by sleeplessness
and finally Dr Jekyll himself. and melancholy, Stevenson wrote down in
Utterson has the role of a detective since he his diary that he had dreamed of a man in
follows clues and draws hypotheses. a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and
turned into a different being.
The other narrator, Dr Lanyon, a friend
and a colleague of Dr Jekyll’s as well as a
great advocate of reason, is the first person
to see his friend enact his transformation.
Since he witnesses a physically impossible
phenomenon, he prefers to die rather than go
on living in a world that he thinks has been
turned upside down.
The last narrator is Jekyll himself, who speaks
in the first person. His narrative and final
confession takes up the last chapter.
Influence
Stevenson drew inspiration for the
description of Hyde from Darwin’s studies
about man’s kinship to the animal world.
Hyde’s small stature indicates that his body
is not exercised; he is lame, ‘deformed’;
Lanyon calls him ‘abnormal’ but what this
deformity consists of, nobody is able to say.

This novel may also be considered a

reflection on art itself, as a kind of
psychological search, and Jekyll’s discovery
may symbolize the artist’s
journey into the unexplored regions of the
human psyche.
→ When Queen Victoria died in 1901, her son
Edward became king as Edward VII (1901-10).
→ Wealth of British Empire;
→ However, British power was being challenged by
technical innovation in France and Germany, and
growing industrial competition in America.
In this context King Edward signed an agreement
with France in 1904, the Entente Cordiale, which
established that Britain could pursue its interests in
Egypt, and France in Morocco.
The king’s diplomacy helped Britain
to join a new alignment of European countries:
Britain could count on France and Russia in any
conflict against Germany, Austria or Italy.
As regards society, Edwardian England was still
similar to Victorian England.
The Suffragettes
In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst founded the
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU).
The ‘Suffragettes’, as they were called, wanted
women to have the vote and soon won massive
publicity for their cause.
They held large protest marches in London, broke
windows, hit and spat at policemen. Several
militants were sent to prison and went on hunger
strike. Women over 30 would gain the vote in
1918, whereas suffrage would be granted to
women over 21 in 1928.
 The outbreak of
In 1914 a Serbian nationalist assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-
Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie in
the war:
Sarajevo.
This event triggered a series of reactions:
→ Austria began bombing Belgrade, Serbia’s capital;
→ the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, declared war on
Russia and then on France;
→ Germany invaded Belgium in order to attack
France from an unexpected front before Russia
or Britain could intervene.
Britain, which had participated in the creation of
Belgium in 1831.
→ So when Germany violated Belgian neutrality, Britain
declared war and a force of 130,000 soldiers crossed
the Channel to fight.
IL MODERNISMO:
• The term ‘Modernism’ refers to an
international movement which involved
Western literature, music, the visual arts
and the cinema in the first decades of the
20th century.

• Modernism as a literary movement is

typically associated with the period after
World War I. The horror of the war had
shaken the certainties of the pre-war
society, which were replaced by a sense of
disillusionment and fragmentation.

• The Modernists expressed the desire to

break with the past and find new fields of
investigation, such as urbanisation, technology,
war, speed and mass communication.
• Novelists and poets drew inspiration
from classical as well as new cultures to
create a new subjective mythology.
Artists regarded the past as a source
which they could reshape in a personal,
original way.

• As regards James Joyce’s use of the

stream-of-consciousness technique,
derives from the process of dissolution of
the novel that Laurence Sterne had
started in the 18th century.

• Absorbing the influences of the past

and contemporary ascendancy coming
from abroad, English modern literature
was becoming cosmopolitan, thus moving
away from the upper-middle-class milieu
of Victorian society.
The Modern Novel

The novel was deeply connected to society, with
the gain or loss of social status as its recurring
theme.
The novelist was a mediator between the
characters and the reader, relating significant
events and incidents in chronological order in a
more or less objective way.
The Role of the Novelist:
The shift from the Victorian to the modern
novel was caused by a gradual but substantial
transformation of British society
→ from the comfortable, prosperous world of
the Victorians
to the inter-war years, which were marked by
unrest and ferment.
The urgency for social change , forced novelists
into a position of moral and psychological
uncertainty.
The novelist had a new role, which
consisted in mediating between the solid
and unquestioned values of the past and the
confused present.
Two other factors contributed to
produce the modern novel: the new concept
of time and the new theory of the
unconscious which derived from the Freudian
Influence.
New narrative Time:
techniques: The treatment of time was also different. Time
was subjective and internal: if the distinction
between past and present was almost
The modern novelist experimented
meaningless in psychological terms, then there
with new methods to portray the individual
was no point in building a well-structured
consciousness;
plot, with chronological sequence of events.
the viewpoint shifted from the external world
to the internal world of a character’s mind.
The analysis of a character’s consciousness
was influenced by the theories about the
simultaneous existence of different
The stream-of-consciousness:
William James coined the phrase ‘stream of
levels of consciousness and subconsciousness.
consciousness’ to define the continuous flow
of thoughts and sensation that characterise
the human mind.
TYPES OF NOVELIST:
There are at least three distinct groups of
Novelists:

• The first group consists of the psychological

novelists, who focused on the development
of the character’s mind and on human
relationships.

• The second group includes the novelists

who experimented with subjective narrative
techniques, exploring the mind of one or
more characters and giving voice to their
thoughts.

• The third group was committed to the social

and political problems of the 1930s.
The writers’ attention focused on the society
around them. Many British intellectuals had
Marxist sympathies and tended to become
didactic and take a political stance.
The interior monologue:

• • It is the verbal expression of a psychic phenomenon, the

stream of consciousness.
• • It is characterized by the frequent lack of chronological order.
• • The narrator may be present.
• • Formal logical order may be lost or lacking.
• • The action takes place within the character’s mind.
• • Speech may be immediate, without introductory expressions.

The interior monologue can be compared to the psychoanalyst’s

couch as the mind of the character is allowed to wander freely
among associations of ideas.
 James Joyce
• James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882.
• He was largely educated at Jesuit schools,
before finally enrolling at University College,
Dublin, where he gained a Bachelor of Arts.

• His interest was for a broader European culture ,

and this led him to begin to think of himself as a
European rather than an Irishman. Joyce believed
that the only way to increase Ireland’s awareness
was by offering a realistic portrait of its life from a
European, cosmopolitan viewpoint.

• He spent some time in Paris but his mother’s

fatal illness in 1903 brought him back to Dublin.
It was in this period that he began to seriously
imagine his future career as a writer and published
his first short story, The Sisters, in the Evening
Telegraph. It would eventually serve as the opening
story in his Dubliners collection.
• In June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-
old girl. They had their first date on 16th June,
which was to become the “Bloomsday” of Ulysses.
Trieste: 1905-15
In 1905 the couple settled in Trieste, where
Joyce began teaching English and made friends
with Italo Svevo. Joyce and Nora had two
children, Giorgio and Lucia, and eventually
married in 1931.
→ The years in Trieste were
difficult, filled with disappointment and
financial problems; in fact, Joyce was in
trouble with publishers and printers because
of supposedly obscene elements in his prose.

→ Dubliners (1914), a collection of short stories all about

Dublin and its life, was completed in 1905 but
only published on the eve of WWI.

→ The book caught the attention of the American

poet Ezra Pound.

Zurich: 1915-20
In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich together
with his family. Although Dubliners and
A Portrait of the Artist had established him
as a writer, they had done little to alleviate his
financial difficulties. In 1917 he received the
first of several anonymous donations which
enabled him to continue writing the novel
Ulysses, which began to appear in serial form
in The Little Review in 1918, but was suspended
in 1920 on charge of obscenity.
Paris: 1920-40
In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where the
American-born bookseller Sylvia Beach agreed
to publish Ulysses in 1922. A limited edition of
1,000 copies was followed by an English edition
of 2,000 copies, also printed in Paris.
This novel drew both praise and sharp
criticism;
This period of success was also characterised
by the worsening of Lucia’s mental illness. Joyce
encouraged his daughter’s love of dancing,
painting and drawing and spared no expense
promoting her interests. Lucia’s condition
deteriorated and she was sent to a mental
hospital on the outskirts of Paris. Although
this final decade of Joyce’s life was darkened
by his daughter’s illness, he continued
to write.
Zurich: 1940-41
In 1940, when France was occupied by the
Germans, Joyce, Nora and Giorgio returned
to Zurich, the city that had first given them
refuge during World War I. Joyce never saw
the conclusion of World War II. He died at the age
of 59 in 1941. He was buried in Zurich.
Ordinary Dublin
Joyce set all his works in Ireland and
mostly in the city of Dublin. His effort was to
give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary
people doing ordinary things and living
ordinary lives.
Style
The artist’s task was to render life objectively in order to give back
to the readers a true image of it.
As his works did not have to express the
author’s viewpoint, Joyce used different points of
view and narrative techniques appropriate to the
characters portrayed.
His style, technique and language developed
from the realism: he used free direct speech, the interior
monologue with two levels of narration (a device used
to give a realistic framework to the characters’
formless thoughts) and the extreme interior
Monologue→ a succession of words without punctuation or
grammatical connections, into infinite puns,
and reality became the place of psychological
projections, of symbolic archetypes and cultural
knowledge.
Dubliners
Structure:

Dubliners consists of 15 short stories; they

disclose human situations and moments of
intensity, and lead to a moral, social or
spiritual revelation.

The opening stories deal with childhood and

youth in Dublin;
the others concern the middle years of
characters and their social, political
or religious affairs.

Joyce, being a Modernist novelist, was

hostile to city life. In fact, his Dublin is a
place where true feeling and compassion for
others do not exist.
The stories are arranged into four groups.
 Symbolism:
The description in each story is realistic
with an abundance of external details.
The use of realism is mixed with symbolism, since
external details generally have a deeper meaning.
The name of certain objects is carefully chosen.
The Epiphany:
Joyce thought that the function of symbolism
was to take the reader beyond the usual
aspects of life through the analysis of the
particular. To this end he employed a peculiar
technique called ‘epiphany’, that is, ‘the sudden
spiritual manifestation’ caused by a trivial
gesture, an external object or a banal situation,
which reveals the character’s inner truths.
Style Interior Monologue:
His style in Dubliners is
The narrator tends to disappear in the interior monologue→
characterized by two distinct elements: the
free direct speech: the protagonist’s pure thoughts are
interior monologue and patterned repetition
introduced without any reporting verbs, which
of images, that is, chiasmus.
implies the disappearance of the narrator
from the text.
In the first three short stories, which make up
This allows the reader to acquire
the childhood section, Joyce employs a first-
direct knowledge of the character’s mind.
person narrator, who remains nameless and
not identified.
The language of Dubliners appears simple, objective and neutral.
It is always adapted to the characters according
For the other 12 stories a third-person
to their age, social class and role.
narrator is employed: he often shares a
particular character’s perspective and tends to
reflect the language and the sensitivity of the
person who is being described.