Apuntes Lit. Inglesa III

APUNTES DE LA ASIGNATURA:
LITERATURA INGLESA III: PENSAMIENTO Y

GRADO
CREACIÓN LITERARIA EN LA PRIMERA
MITAD DEL SIGLO XX
AUTOR : NACHO COLLINS RAMOS
TRABAJO REALIZADO SOBRE LOS APUNTES MANUSCRITOS AUTORIZADO POR EL AUTOR
HAN COLABORADO:
UNIT 1 Aidy Cruz y Rubén Pareja UNIT 2 Guille y Luis A.Foglia

UNIT 3 Celia Cano y Aida Suárez Unit 4 Cristina Pérez y Mary Caro
UNIT 5 Jean Grey y Leila Shan COMPOSICIÓN Y MONTAJE Aida Suárez
Queda prohibida la copia, publicación o distribución de este trabajo sin la autorización expresa de
su autor - © Nacho Collins Ramos 2014
GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES: LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA
UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA

RESÚMENES LITERATURA INGLESA III
UNIT 1: THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN OR THE NEED TO 'MAKE IT

NEW':LITERATURE IN A EVER-CHANGING WORLD.
● The period studied is between 1880 and WWII.
● In one single word, we could summarise the period, it would be 'change'.
● After industrialisation/mechanization → challenge of Victorian values and morals.
● Around 1880 → crisis in the power and ideals of Victorianism.
The crisis of the Victorian Positivism: Victorianism: (Jeremy
● 1851 → The Great Exhibition took place in London. Bentham) the system of
The following three decades → The Zenith of Victorianism.
thought which states that
● Movement from an economy based on land ownership.
● Women gained the right of vote, and reforms to increase education and to the best action or
improve working conditions and health. decision in a particular
● The most common form of entertainment was reading aloud. situation in the one
● Literature was divided between → High art. which brings more
→ Low art. advantages to the most
● This was also 'The age of the 'Irish Question'. → Lead by a group of people. Retrenchment:
Anglo Irish writers.
Minimal state expense,
↓
Including Yeats, Lady Augusta. and with efficency in
↓ government finances.
They wrote about Irish nationalism, myth and legend, in English.
● Yeats, with Lady Gregory and Edward Martin founded THE IRISH LITERARY
THEATRE IN 1898.
● Sinn Féin (meaning 'ourselves alone') was the most important political movement
emerge from the cultural renaissance, founded in 1905 by Arthiur Griffith.
● 1870 → Land Reform in Ireland.
● 1913 → Series of strikes took place and were suported by many of the Irish literary.
They wanted better working conditions.
● Home rule was to become law in September 1914, but the start of WWI in August,
suspended it.
● 1918 → Sinn Féin won the elections → establishing an independent government in
Dublin.
This lead to an Anglo-Irish conflict know as the War of Independence.
● In August 1919 → The Irish Republican Army was founded.
● In December 1921 → Britain retrained 3 Irish ports, but the rest of the 26 countries were
to be called the Irish Free State.
● Provisional government → Michael Collins → Transfer power to the Irish in January
1922.
● Herva Bergson → French philosopher who discusses the mind's particular understanding
of time.
● Fin de siécle → French term for 'End of a century' mostly applied to the end of 19th
century.
● Make it new → Ezra Pound's word: the modernist age was a reaction against the Victorian
Period.
UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 1

Reasons for 1. Technical innovation in the production of textiles, iron and coal
the industrial 2. Previous agricultural revolution.
revolution 3. Innovations in transport
↓ ↓
This gave birth Philistene: A person who refuses

'the notion of leisure'.
to see the beauty or value of art,
↓
Encouraging the creation literature, music or culture in any
of 'seaside resorts'. form.
● Economic movement form Landownership → to a modern urban economy → Trade

Manufacturing
● Technical developments such as printing presses helped to spread literacy.
● The new aristocracy became one of wealth, not land.
● Wilde followed the art for art's sake doctrine → to pruse beauty
and pleasure as end in themserlves.
They desired to shock and challenge Victorian values, and
figure of the dandy and the effeminate man appeared.
● The philosophy of Art as an End in itself was born in France, with
advocates such as Charles Baudelaire and Gautier.
In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, he argued that a pure
aesthetic experience → contemplation of an obect that provokes
pleasure for its own sake.
● The views of Grench Aesthetics, were introduced by Walter Pater,
and expressed y writers such as Swinburne or Oscar Wilde.
● Aesthetic values lived to the full brought about a different movement → THE
DECADENT MOVEMENT.
Followed a way of life based on the ideas of the Aesthetic movement.
Art Opposed to 'nature'
Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and the play 'Salomé'
are representative literary productions of Decadent literature.
● This sopistication and artiriciality of the Decadents will reappear with
variations in the 1950s with the 'Beats' poets.
* At the turn of the century artist, writers and play writers were highly critical of Victorian
achievemts and beliefs. They mocked and changed middle-class values and the very
notion of art → Oscar Wilde's 'The Importence of Being Earnest'.

• The Interpretation if an Ever-changing world:
* In 1859 → 'The Origin of Species by MEANS of natural Selection' by Charles Darwin.

* Evolution → Served to justify the empire and colonialism.
* Degeneracy → Referred to the phenomenon that the social status quo was under threat from the
free values of the younger generation. * Degeneration → The belief that the end of civilisation
could be foretold by observing licentious contemporary forms of art.
* Issues of human development, degeneration and depravity were presented in the popular
literature produced in the late 1880s and 1890s. Bram Stoker (Dracula) 1897
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Grey)
Robert Luis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde)
↓
Thomas Maltus political They could be read as coutions against the rise
economist whose theories of the promiscuity and also accuse many of the
influenced greatly to Darwin ↓ Victorian society (Victorian hypocrisy)
Natural selection: (Darwin) nature chooses the best Relativity: (Einstein) Theory of
individuals of each generation and they transmit theur physics giving the relationship
favorable characteristics to their descendentans. between space, time and energy
Survaival of the fittest: (Darwin) the individuals especially for 2 objects moving in
perpetuating the species are those more able to adapt to the different ways. Einstein's theory
* In 1870 → The term 'agnostic' was coined → the imposibility for the empirical mind.
* According to D.H. Lawrence, the world was a varied as the individuals abserving it, contrasting
with the principles of Realism.
* Nietzsche → Theoligical search for God had been replaced by an epistemological quest for
self-knowledge, which found expression in the word, in Thus spoke Zarathustra (a book for
everyone and no one), with its 'God is dead' → He was the first philosopherto considerer
extensively human responsibility and freedom in a universe wihout God.
* Writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Yeats incorporate myth and classical models destined
to give meaning to the alienated modern individual for whom christian religion has ceased to be
the answer.
* Nietzsche → Theory of superman referred to a new creative being who would transcend
religion, morality and ordinary society, and would satisfy his own will.
His mother will be 'be what you are'
Theorist of nihilism, 'active nihilism', 'passive nihilism'.
Create a future of new values.
Developed the concept 'eternal recurrence'→The idea tha experienc eternally
repeated.
* Virginia Woolf's (Mrs Dalloway) 1925 and James Joyce's (Ulysses) 1922, start and finish with
the same letter, both contain a circular structure that breaks the linear progression of the
narrative.
In 'eternal recurrence', cyclical time is presented in the idea of repetition or recurrence
* The theory of relativity by Einstein (1879-1955) states that in objets travelling at speed near to
that of light, matter tranforms into energy →Implies the crumble of the principle of permanence
of Newton.

* Saussure in his 'course in General Linguistics' (1916) is the first linguistic to question the
goal of the study of linguistics. He explorer language as a social phenomenon.
Language is made up of signs owing their signification not to the world to the difference to each
other, so the meaning of a sign os not fixed.
According to Wittgeinstein language has limitations, and he considered is not a mere system
of representations of the world, but a social communicative reality.
Language refers to language as a particular structured system.
Parole refers to a specific utterance or speech act.
* In “Time and Freewill”, Henri Bergson discusses the mind’s particular understanding of time. He
opposes linear time what he calls “duration”.
· Willian James (Henry James’s brother) —> coined the term “stream of consciousness”.
* Virginia Woolf’s (Mrs Dalloway) which was going to be called “The hours” is a good example
of what has just been explained in relation to time.
* In The Independence of Dreams (1900). Freud developed his views on the importance of
infantile sexuality for the development of the psyche. Psychoanalysis (1896).
· He argued that dreams are the expression of repressed desires (unconscious) and
discovered its importance.
* Henry James called “psychological realism” —> to explore the hidden drives and desires of the
characters.
· His brother William James.
The New Woman enters the Stage:
* The New Woman placing emphasis on the need to challenge patriarchy and its imposed gender
roles.
* Freud seemed to imply that women are less valuable than men in his paper “same psychological
consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the sexes”.
* The term “New Woman” was born in 1894 attempting to name the 2nd generation of feminist
women. It refers to middle-upper class women who profited from educational and vocational
opportunities by the pioneer feminists in the sixties.
* In Edward Carpenter’s “The Intermediate sex” suggested that the masculinisation of women was
the result of the attitude of these independent women.
OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900): “The Importance of being Earnest” (1895):

* He was disciple of Walter Pater (founder of the Aesthetic movement in England, advocate of “art
for art’s sake).
* He preached the Aestheticism, the “cult of the artificial”, which rejected the social conception of
the natural in a series of lectures in the states in 1882.
* In 1884, he became the editor of the magazine Woman’s World.
* In 1888, he published “The Happy Prince”, a collection of original fairy tales. He also published
provocative essays dealing with the self-explanatory “art for art’s sake”, written in the form of
dialogues between New Plato and his young disciples.
* He published, “Lady Windermer’s Fan” (1892), “A Woman of no Importance” (1893) and “An
ideal husband” (1895) combinating social drama and witty dialogue.
* In 1895, he had two plays: “An ideal husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest”.
* In 1891, he published his novel “The picture of Dorian Gray”, he fell in love with a young
aristocrat named Lord Alfred Douglas.
* Of his time as a prisoner he wrote in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898).
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST:

* Most lasting play. He wrote it for money in 3 weeks. Spectacular success.
* The play consists on a tension between truth and falsehood, given equal value.
* The characters are determined by the Kind of things they say. It is remarkable for its use of
aphorisms (sentences containing a wise or witty comment).
* The play is constructed on a series of secrets. The action arises from disclosure or the fear of
disclosure.
* The play was subtitled “A trivial comedy for serious people”.
* At the time, “society drama” was in vogue. Wilde also parodies such plays in the final act of the
play with Jack’s defence of Miss Prism.
· Lady Bracknell rejects Jack because of his possible lower class origins, this is the major
theme of the play.
· Gender roles are exposed as seriously threatened and consumerist values redefine the
system.
· Wilde’s aim in writing “The Importance of Being Earnest” was anti-morality.
· Among the comic techniques he employs we should highlight his incongruity (the great
distance between what the audience expects to happen and what actually happens), and
timing achieved through the characters’ use of pauses.
· He uses flippant wit, sometimes manifesting it in puns like the double meaning,
manifested in the whole play behind the word Earnest (male name and adjective meaning
seriousness).
* The play has been described as a brilliant satire and praised for its use of parody based on
aphorisms often to do with marriage. These aphorisms also called epigrams.
* Employs absurd. Has many goals. It pokes fun at the aristocracy, the literary world, marriage,
English manners, men, women, love, religion and issues in modern society.
SUMMARY:
* Oscar Wilde —> play —> The Importance of Being Earnest —> Masterpiece of Modern
Comedy —> It was written for money in 1895.
CHARACTERS SUMMARY
Jack Worthing > Ernest * Jack faces many obstacles to his romantic union with
Algernon Moncrieff > Bunbury Gwendolen: His “origins” and Gwendolen’s obsession with
Lady Augusta Bracknell the name “Ernest” (she does not know Jack’s real name).
Gwendolen Fairfax * Algernon discovers that Jack is leading a double life and
Cecily Cardew about Cecily. The revelation of Jack’s origins causes Lady
Miss Leticia Prism Bracknell to forbid his relationship with Gwendolen.
Canon Frederick Chasuble * Algernon visits Jack’s house in the country and falls in love
Lane with Cecily. Gwendolen and Cecily discover that both, Jack
Merriman and Algernon have been lying to them.
* Miss Prism is revealed to be the governess who mistakenly
abandoned Jack as a baby and Jack discovered to be
Algernon’s elder brother.
* THEMES: moral values, marriage, money, hypocrisy, earnestness.

* RETHORICAL DEVICES: incongruity, puns, double meaning behind the word earnest,
aphorism “Divorces are made in heaven”. The absurd “one cannot forget that one is married”.
OSCAR WILDE —> shock and challenge Victorian values :

CONVENTION, RESPECTABILITY and NOTION OF ART.

* Tension between truth and falsehood.
* Plays on language:
·· VERBAL UNIVERSE: characters determined for what they say.
·· Plot: succession of opportunities to say it.
Algernon: “A man who marries without knowing, Bunbury has a very tedious
time afit”.
·· Aphorism (parody) : sentence with wise / witty comments.
“In married life three is company and two none”.
“The General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life”.
·· Restoration comedy (parody) : audience’s familiarity with comedy of manners (social
customs): “Divorces are made in heaven”.
·· Incongruity: distance from what is expected and what happens. “Finally, Jack’s real
name is Earnest”.
·· Pun: game of words. Ernest / earnest.
·· Role playing: adapt fictious identities / alter egos.
·· Absurd: Algernon: “one cannot forget that one is married”.
·· Paradox: Impossibility of actually being either earnest (serious, sincere) or moral while
claiming to be so.
·· Mock: institution of marriage. Pleasant or unpleasant. Tool to get social status.
MAJOR THEME: Preponderance of the social status.

* Society drama: plays of modern life set in the rarefied world of the upper classes.
Witty and frivolous light comedies or ponderous dramatic treaties an difficult social issues.
* Timing: the right moment to insert a comic motif.
* Flippant wit: not serious about a serious subject, in an attempt to be funny or to appear
clever.
* Satire: a subtype of comedy that uses comedy not as an end in itself but as a weapon
to desire.
* Intrigue: a secret plan to do something, especially something that will harm another
person.

RESUMENES LITERATURA INGLESA III
UNIT 2 – “THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN”: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO

IMPERIALISM IN LITERATURE
- Presentation
Relationship between empire and literature
Stanley’s (famous British explorer) account of death and destruction in Africa has
been considered an inspiration to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
British Empire started in the late 15th Century, reaching its peak from the second half
of the 19th C until 1947.
The prevailing attitude in Britain regarding colonialism was that expansion of British
control was good for everyone, and from around the turn of the century, the colonies
evolved into the Commonwealth.
In 1857, the Indian rebellion gave way to a change of attitudes towards colonialism,
reflected for example in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.
- Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
• Heart of Darkness is Conrad’s finest exploration of Evil and Otherness.
• It was serialized between 1898 and 1899 in “Blacwood’s Magazine”.
• This novel has the intention of revealing the reality behind the façade.
The reader should be aware of the ambivalent quality of the language used and the
multiple meaning of words
colonialism, civilization and progress (core elements introduced into the narrative)
• The question of the Empire was by 1890 a public issue.
• In the novel, the debate made explicit when Marlow visits his aunt to say
goodbye.
• By the end of the 19th C, certain disillusionment prevailed as a result of the
discrepancy between humanitarian ideals and the reality of colonial exploitation
The character symbolizing this discrepancy in the novel is Kurtz
At the beginning of the novel, Marlow seems to follow the argument for the need of
superior civilized people to colonize those less developed.
At this point, he seems to define civilization and progress as the taming of
darkness, and the trading company he and Kurtz work for symbolizes progress.
The opposition CIVILIZED/SAVAGE is brought into question and those who

believe themselves to be CIVILIZED/PROGRESSED.
* The wilderness of the Congo is at times sublimated, where the noble and
the true surface and break free from the world of appearances.
* Joseph Conrad’s difference and advantage over his English
contemporaries, so as a foreigner he was in a better position to question
Englishness.
* His experience at sea gave him the perspective lacking in most of his
contemporaries, and after years as a sailor, he became a citizen of the world.

• England was the country where he could exercise his freedom of speech, and
because of that he chose to live there.
• Conrad’s characters are in general heroic people struggling out of extreme
situations. The universality of the characters, and their foreign status brought
about by constant displacement distinguishes the men and women of his world.
His characters are lonely figures facing moral problems. A good example
of this is when Marlow states “we live, as we dream – alone”.
• Conrad’s main concern in this respect is with a man in isolation fighting against
what is outside him, and the need for a personal code of behavior and a capacity
for moral discrimination as opposed to PUBLIC MORAL CODES.
• Conrad’s characters are not cut out of or detaches from society. For this
reason, Conrad, writing between Victorian and post-war values. He’s not purely
a psychological writer, but also a moralist still concerned about the effect of the
individual’s moral dilemma upon society.
In Heard of Darkness he uses a romantic realism, close to the mystery of

Gothic, creating and unsetting, mysterious and disturbing atmosphere.
He was a realist given that his creative genius sought certainty as the
starting point of his story, based on autobiographical data and other people’s
accounts.
He hardly ever invented plots, the raw material for his narratives in general
and Heart of Darkness is found in his research, and his own life experience.
This makes the line between FICTION and REALITY BLURRY, and
enables the exploration of the truth to be found beyond the world of
appearances.
• His frequently used method of indirect narration causes discomfort to many
readers who find his writing tiresome, because of his lack of progress in the
story.
• His “story-within-a story” and dislocation of time impedes the “normal
progression” delaying the deliverance of the story.
Conrad tries to provide a clear revelation of the truth, and the story is just a means
of exploration, not an end in itself.
• The narratorial voice detaches the reader from the story. This questioning of
the narratorial voice, the fact that the narrator may not be trustworthy, brings
about a more discomforting discovery—that reality must not be as reliable as it
seems to be and therefore may be questioned too.
• Conrad’s main topics of interest presented in “Heart of Darkness” are:
1. Evil
2. Man’s moral reality
3. Fidelity
4. Individual responsibility. With particular reference to the Empire.
• In Heart of Darkness he takes the narrative to its extreme. Man against
himself in a natural environment.
• The other themes seem to be additional to this main preoccupation
(subconscious, honor, guilt, moral alienation, expiation, brotherhood and
fidelity)

• In Heart of Darkness he is not interested in his character’s progress in life, but in

the moral responsibility of the individual.
• Reality for Conrad is an entity completely different from appearance, and he is
looking for the means to express those unknown realities that are beyond our
perceptive capacity.
The end is a never-ending story comprised of an unlimited number of possible

conclusions. A very good example is Marlow’s body posture as a Budha (meaning
he is not in possession of knowledge but looking for it), when he starts his story and
when he has apparently finished talking, so he could be starting at the moment hi
finished.
• Heart of Darkness, a proto-modern work, produced at the end of the 19thC, is
one of the most important shocking and predictive novels of the 20thC.
• The title bears the same ambiguity as the rest of the text, since “heart” implies
life, and “darkness” seems to imply death.
• Heart of Darkness also suggests the sense of trying to gain access to the core of
something very deep, unknowing, mysterious, and dangerous, and these are the
Gothic elements of the novel. The structure of the whole narrative is sustained
by polarities like:
life=death Africa=Europe
Colonizer=Colonized Inland=Offshore
• Conrad is suspicious of language because language is no longer a reliable tool.

In Heart of Darkness, language is poetical and condensed, with ambiguity,
symbolism, and diffuseness. Conrad is determined to draw attention to the total
imprecision of language.
• The Structure of the novel is made of multiple narratorial voices. Each person
who informs Marlow and talks to him also becomes a narrator, adding to the
story, since the different narrators are first-person narrators, provides the
narration with vagueness and mystery by never getting to the heart of the matter.
The multiple narratorial voices make the reader a participant in the story. All
of the narratorial voices, Marlow’s is the most important since he is also the
protagonist, ever being inadequate as a traditional narrator
The physical journey in Heart of Darkness is parallel to the emotional development

of his character. The novel is divided into two different parts:
First Part it’s about preparing for the journey
Second Part it has Marlow painfully going deeper into the darkness
and towards Kurtz
• The voyage towards the outside world of Africa becomes a voyage of self-
discovery that unavoidable brings some inner knowledge or vital truth to the
traveller. Perhaps the most surprising element of the novel is the nature of this
vital truth.
• The final words of Kurtz “the horror! The horror!” can be understood as
physical and political in relation to the European attitudes in Africa, but also non
material.

• The circularity of the narrative is symbolized in Marlow’s body position,

indicating however that Marlow is not a provider of knowledge, but a searcher.
• As an emissary of science and progress, Kurtz travelled to Africa to campaign
for the ideal. Once confronted with the wilderness he is liberated from Europe’s
set of values and is free to exercise his own will.
• Kurtz can be a source of enlightenment despite his capacity for dreadful deeds.
The novel as a whole proposes a reconsideration of the traditional notion of reality.

It calls for reconsideration both of fiction and real life.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): “Heart of Darkness” (1899)

It’s a novella (1899)
Setting: inspired in the author’s trip to Congo in 1890
• Characters:
Marlow, Chief accountant, Fresleven,
Kurtz, Pilgrims, Russian Trader,
General Manager, Cannibals, Helmsman,

Brickmaker, Kurt’z mistress, Kurtz’s fiancée,
Marlow’s aunt
.
St
1 Person: Indirect Narration: Narratorial Voice based on multiple
postponents detaches the reader from the story preventing the reader from
identifying too closely with any character.
Marlow and Kurtz: there’s CONFLICT. The image of themselves as
“civilized” Europeans and the temptation to abandon morality. The rumors he
hears that Kurtz is a remarkable and humane man contrast with the cruelty he
witnesses.
Examples of Europeans breaking down mentally or physically in the
environment of Africa.
Marlow discovers that Kurtz has completely abandoned European morals
and norms of behavior
Finally, Marlow’s acceptance of responsibility for Kurtz’s legacy, Marlow’s
encounters with company officials and Kurtz’s family and friends, Marlow’s
visit to Kurtz’s intended.
• Themes: Isolation, evil, hypocrisy of imperialism, subconscious, guilt.

• Language: poetical and condensed, ambiguity, symbolism
• Narrative Strategy: cyclical structure (Nietzsche Eternal Recurrence)
EuropeCongoJungleBack to Europe
The cycle starts with Marlow sitting like a Buddha, in cyclical position.

Joseph Conrad Attitude towards Colonialism: racial superiority,

right to do what they liked,
concept of gentleman
Autobiographical story: shows Congo’s situation
• It Explores Evil and Otherness: “it was unearthly, and the men, no, they were not
unhuman”.
• COLONIALISM CIVILIZATION PROGRESSelements constantly.
Colonialism: it is challenged and questioned: discrepancy humanitarian, reality of
colonial exploitation. Darwin
• Language:
Marlow: “the company runs for profit” e.g. Kurtz (self-tortured idealist)
Language Paradox: opposition between civilized and savage.
Marlow “when the Romans first came to England, it was a great savage
wilderness to them”.
Feel, hear, see indirect narration. Poetical and condemned language with
ambiguity symbolism and diffuseness.
Marlow is not eager to tell the story but tries to extract some meaning.
Disparity language reality Imprecision of language Saussure.
Repetition of words: darkness, inscrutable, mysterious…
Title = heart ↔ darkness: Contradiction, ambiguity.
Gothic elements: something very profound.
Structure: sustained by polarities. Life/death, colonizer/colonized, African/
European.
Setting: wilderness of the Dark continent Heart of Darkness.
Narrator: Each person talking to Marlow becomes a narrator Mystery and

vagueness.
Not traditional: unable to distinguish and comprehend reality beyond appearances.
Prepare journey Metaphor emotional development.
Novel: 2 parts
Marlow towards Kurtz.
Ending: Far from being beautiful. Kurtz: “The horror! The horror!”
Isolation of a person in nature: (modernist literature) Marlow’s position as Buddha (beginning

Seen as PROTO-MODERNIST /Ending) shows he is not in possession of
Marlow: “We live as we dream, alone”. knowledge but looking for it.
MAJOR THEME: Imperialism and imperialist attitudes.
E.M. Forster’s – A Passage to India

• His first major success was Howard’s End (1910) and he also published A Room with
a View(1908). Those early novels are concerned with the cultural barrier between
English and Italians in the same way that the main preoccupation in A Passage to India
is the impossibility of understanding between Indians and British Europeans.

• During those years E.M. Forster was part of the Bloomsbury Group (intellectuals
that include Virginia Woolf, John Mayward Keynes and T.S. Elliot among others).
• His 4 pre-war novels did nothing to break free the mode of writing of Victorian and
Edwardian fiction.
Plots were melodramatic and improbable, and with an omniscient narrator. He wrote it
by his experience concerning the current preoccupations on the colonial occupation of
India by the British.
• The omniscient narrator had full control over the characters, interpreting their
motives and actions and introducing moral judgements. Only in A Passage to India
(1924) does he break with narrative convention.
The main tenement of the novel was the exploration of the misunderstanding created by
the different cultural backgrounds of the protagonists.
• The novel deals with the political occupation of India by the British.
In 1858 the British Parliament approved the Government of India Act, transferring
political power from the East India Company to the crown.
• The typical attitude of the British in India was that they were undertaking the “white
man’s burden” as put by Rudyard Kipling, a system of aloof and condescending
sovereignty.
• Indian nationalism began to take shape around 1885, and around 1919 Gandhi
became a distinguished voice in Indian politics, and Foster wrote A Passage to
India.
• In 1947, parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, proclaiming Indian
independence as well as ordering the separation of India and Pakistan.
• The novel is the unkind portrait of the relationship between the Indians and the
Anglo-Indians, the latter completely ignored or mistreated the former, and had a
strong impact on general public opinion who now perceived the Empire and its
colonies.
The novel’s themes of misunderstanding and disharmony between the cultures, the harm
that an imposed relationship did to each of the parties, were used as arguments by anti-
imperialists who wanted to remove Britain from India.
• The novel, as happens with Heart of Darkness, provides no answer. The only way to
resolve the problem seems to be the withdrawal of the British from India, but this is
not a solution for the problem, but its elimination.
• The effectiveness of the novel as a political influence is found in his dramatization o
a great imperial system and its worst.
• Foster, escaping the easy stereotypical portrayal of the characters, presents human
beings carrying with them the good and evil of their cultural and life experiences.
The title of the poem is taken from a Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name
included in Leaves of Grass (1900), making reference to the fact that a passage to India
was make more easily possible by the construction of the Suez Canal, finished in 1869.

• In Foster’s view, India is not so much a mystery as a muddle or labyrinth. It should

be noted that the main “muddle” which forms much of the turning point of the
novel, the Marabar Caves incident, is left unresolved.
• We are confronted with a novel that combines realism and symbolism, since Foster
establishes Chandrapore as a prototypical Indian town, to be taken as symbol of
the rest of India.
• A Passage to India addresses complex questions about human relations. The tragedy
of the novel lies in the breakdown of communications between race and individuals.
The book is divided into 3 main sections entitled “Mosque”, “Caves” and “Temple” which
might correspond to the three seasons of the Indian year, and stands as a symbol of how
individual relationships are weathered by lack of communication and misunderstanding.
• The religious imagery serves to explore different aspects of the human beings. In
“Mosque” Foster uses Aziz to express emotional nature though Islam.
• Godbole represents Hinduism in “Temple”.
• But religion is of little assistance when confronting intellect, so Adela and Fielding,
by expressing their western views, become a textual symbol of the part entitled
“Caves”.
• Mrs. Moore is able to grasp the truth of human existence because she becomes a
conductor for cultures and religions. The physical death of this character is a
metaphor for the ultimate knowledge she has acquired at the Marabar Caves,
indicating that each individual is alone in a rather hostile universe. She has
confronted good and evil at the same time.
• Mrs. Moore becomes a kind of goddess, a Vishnu seen by others as provider of truth
and knowledge. At the time of the trial, the Indians believe Mrs. Moore has been
sent back to England by her son so she cannot testify (and it is true that Ronny fears
his mother might cause trouble if she remains in India).
The main difference between Kurtz and Mrs. Moore is that the reader is able to
witness, although may not understand, Mrs. Moore’s transformation.
• Mrs. Moore comes to India in the company of Miss Quested, who had a similar
experience but is not ready to understand the real significance of the echo.
• The Marabar Caves are introduced right from the beginning of the novel as the only
distinguishable item. In Chandrapore’s landscape imbued with a mysterious aura
foreshadowing future events. Nobody in the novel is able to describe them. They
reflect everything as a mirror, and their most remarkable feature is the echo. They
represent everything in life. They stand for all the possible emotional, intellectual
and mystical views.
After her visit to the caves, she becomes the bearer of their echo, and this might be
the reason why she now repeats words almost every time she speaks.
• Much of the symbolism Forster develops in the novel is taken from Hindu scripture
and philosophy. The caves elude all explanation as does the conception of Hindu
deity.
• In Hindu philosophy, Brahman, also called “soul of the world”, represents all that
exists. All the other gods represent the various parts of Brahman like a tree with its
many branches.
The echo taunts Adela until she withdraws her accusation against Aziz. Until then, the evil
stays with her in the echo. Also, when Mrs. Moore had her vision at the caves, their essential
meaning was revealed to her. Her repetition of words is a symbol representing the calling
presence of Brahman.
• The technique of repeating events with slight variations in different contexts is used
as a way to explore the meaningless but disturbing echo, which is, as the novel
implies, the heart of human existence.
• The echo of the caves provides the novel with a rhythm to be found in the use of
repetition.
• Foster seems to think that affection is the key to matter.
• A Passage to India seems to be a pessimistic book where more connections are
severed than made between people.
• Most of the names of the characters are symbolic of their characters: Mrs. Moore is
the everlasting presence looking for more, Miss Quested comes to India in search
for further knowledge, Fielding is the Promised Land, lacking prejudices, he is the
theoretical enabler of affection between cultures, Aziz is a victim of his inefficiency
to communicate clearly, and Godbole is a synonym for Brahman (the bole is the
trunk of the tree).
• At the end of the novel, the reader is left with the same feeling of uneasiness
provoked by the unsolved crime, because the novel attempts, but necessarily fails, to
grasp the whole meaning of life, raising questions that cannot be answered.
E.M. Forster (1879-1970): “ A Passage to India” (1924):

E.M. Forster
Novel (1924)
Chandrapore and Mau 1910’s – 1920’s.
Characters:
• Dr. Aziz • Mr. Turton

• Cyril Fielding • Mr.s Turton
• Adela Quested • Mr. Mcbryde
• Mrs. Moore • Mahmoud Ali
• Hamidullah
• Ronny Heaslop
• Stella Moore
Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore arrived in India, the women’s befriending of
Aziz, Adela’s reluctant engagement to Ronny Heaslop. Ronny and the other
Englishmen’s disapproval of the women’s interaction with Indians, Aziz’s
organization of an outing to the Marabar Caves for his English friends; Adela’s
and Mrs. Moore harrowing experiences in the caves; Adela´s public insinuation that
Aziz assaulted her in the caves; the inflammation of racial tensions between the
Indians and English in Chandrapore.
Aziz’s trial: Adela’s final admission that she is mistaken in her accusations and that
Aziz is innocent; the courtroom’s eruption; Aziz’s release; the English
community’s rejection of Adela. Fielding conversations with Adela, Fielding and
Aziz’s bickering over Aziz’s desire for reparations for Adela.

Aziz’s assumption that Fielding has betrayed him and will marry Adela; Aziz’s
increasingly anti-British sentiment, Fielding’s visit to Aziz with his new wife,
Stella; Aziz’s befriending of Ralph and forgiveness of Fielding.
Aziz: Misunderstanding, lack of communication, culture clash, friendship,
ambiguity.
• 3rd person impersonal narrative voice.
• Structure: 3 sections: Mosque, Caves and Temple (seasons of the Indian year, Holy
Trinity).
• Symbolism:
Mosque: Protection, refuge, peace, symbol of real India, cool weather, people
meeting. First part of the novel.
Cave: Confusion, menacing, muddle, hot weather, emotions are inflamed.
Temple: rainy season, it washed away what happened, reconciliation, healing.
• Nothing: Important. Nothing is mentioned about what happened in the cause,

however, this gap is key in the story.
A Passage to India: Edward Morgan Forster
E.M. Forster: had visited India twice (historical context).
Broke with narrative convention.
White man burden
Political context occupation of India Unkind relationships
Misunderstandings
He provides NO ANSWERS
Symbolism:
• Religious mystery: Explore aspects of human beings.
• Metaphor Mrs. Moore’s physical death.
caves elude all exploration

• Hindu scripture: -. Mrs. Moore repetition of words.
Echo: human existence.
Mosque: symbol of refuge and peace.
• 3 Parts: Caves: dark, confusion and menacing. 3 seasons of Indian year.
Temple: rainy season, healing.
Themes:
• Culture
• Friendship
• Public / Private life
• Ambiguity
• God and religion.
Irony:
Aziz has organized the trip to the Marabar Caves to entertain the English Guests, but it
ends in disaster for everyone.
Major Teme English – Indian Relationship.

UNIT 3: LITERATURE AND WAR: DISILLUSION AS NEVER TOLD IN THE

OLD DAYS1
Concentrated in WWI charting the strategies through which poets and writers
developed original techniques and learnt from their predecessors to convey their
experiences of war.
• Production and interpretation of war poetry was conditioned by cultural,
social and political factors.
• The Great War changed the lives of Europeans forever, and what remained
in its aftermath was a bitter insecurity, translated into a total rejection of the
positive humanistic traditional values, and a sense of total alienation.
• The contrast between the life-and-dead problems of war time and the
triviality of civilian life was a recurring them in women’s narrative at the
time.
2.1. “The Poetry is in the Pity:” Georgian Poets Experiencing War

GEORGIAN is a name given to a generation of poets that refers simply to the period of
reign of George V (1910-196).
- DH Lawrence (1885-1930)
Writers included in this group are - Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
- Robert Graves (1895-1985)
- Eduard Thomas (1878-1917)
Inspired by the Romantics and interested in expressing everyday life experiences and
looking at the world with fresh eyes.
• Georgian Poetry consists on a complacement and meditative lyrical vision of

certain aspects of life and nature. Their poetry was paramount in the
construction of “Englishness”: white, rural, and in many ways, romantic.
• Some of the Georgian Poets are better known as the “War Poets”, even though
may of them wrote fine poetry prior to WWI.
RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915): “THE SOLDIER”
He represents the sublimination of the sacrifice the nation had been pushed to make.
His sonnets sequence entitled “1914”, consists on five numbered sonnets preceded by
one unnumbered:
• The Treasure • III The Dead
• I Peace • IV The Dread
• II Safety • V The Soldier
1
Second part of the title has been taken from Ezra Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
(1920)

- “The Soldier” Analysis

The poem follows the English Sonnet form introduced by Wyatt and Sydney: 14 lines
of iambic pentameter divided into an octave (ABAB CDCD) and a sestet (EFG EFG)
Themes: It speaks about the fallen soldier and the immortality of the English Heritage.
- Spiritual liberation from old ideas
- The permanence of the memories of the dead
- The Hero’s immortal legacy
These ideas are related to the idea of the Englishness and a personal loyalty. Related to
Imperialism? “England is wherever her sons are”
If I should die, think only this of me: A

That there’s some corner of a foreign field B
That is for ever England. There shall be A
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; B
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, C
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, D
A body of England’s, breathing English air, C
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. D
And think, this heart, all evil shed away, E

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less F
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; G
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; E
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, F
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. G
WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918): “DULCE ET DECORUM EST”

- His poetry was modern and innovative, in the sense of “make it new”.
- He clearly understood the need to abandon traditional poetic diction and syntax
and use the direct speech.
- He mastered the use of contrastive and powerful images aimed at creating a
strong emotional impact.
- The real essence of Owen’s war poems is to tell the truth about the war. This
objective changed completely his view on poetry.
- In his poem “Dulce et Decorum est” (title taken from Horace’s dictium), his
voice is the feeling of “disillusions as never told in the old days”, rejecting
Horace’s dictium as “the old lie”.
- He first dedicated this poem to Jessie Pope for her poem “The Call”, later
withdrawing his dedication.
- The commitment of Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” is not new. Most Victorian
poets moralized. An in showing his commitment, it became an
antiestablishment poem, kind of “protest poem”.
- “Dulce et decorum est” Analysis

- He wants to tell the truth about the war.
- The poet uses we for including the reader in the text.
- The poem begins with a simile that recalls the image of soldiers heavily loaded
and the ruined state of their uniforms.

- The paradoxical “bent double” brings the image of soldiers bent both for
protection and under the weight of a load.
- Metaphorically speaking they are bent double under the weight of their emotions
and tiredness.
- They are on their way to the “distant rest”, alluding to the camp away from the
front line, and the out of hand of the resting.
From Horace It’s sweet and right to die for your country - Strong sense of duty/Irony
Exhaustion name, blind walking asleep, drunk with fatigue (not only in the front
line)
Direct voice Gas! Gas! Condenses in short sentences made of monosyllables, the
surprise of the attack.
Flund’ ring like a man in fire: used to provide an image of the panic growing.
Paradoxical image of soldiers bent both for protection and under the weight of their
own emotions and tiredness
Dulce Et Decorum Est Simile thar tecals the image of soldiers hevily loaded
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, and the ruined state of their uniforms
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Including the reader in the text
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
A camp away from the front line and the out of hand of
And towards our distant rest began to trudge. the resting,.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots A description of the overworked soldiers
2
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling, Used paradoxically, showing speed and panic
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling Provides the horror of witnessing a man
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— dying without being able to help him –
3 terror and pain
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. Convey the desolation and lack of words, of a
man witnessing another dying.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. Evoking the sound of the dying
man
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace He is now talking to us
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, Owen still has nightmares about
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; the event, so he is tooo a victim or
the gas attack
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Tell us the pain of the man is hidden.
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud The man is dying from the inside out
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend4, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est The dignity of death is in the knowing and
Pro patria mori. telling of the war, not in dying for one's
country.
2
5.9 caliber shells
3
Of the gas mask,s celluloid window
4
He is talking to Jessie Pope

“Let’s We Forget:” Women Writing the War
On the end of the war, the position of women in the British society was largely
unfavourable. War would provide new employment opportunities for women,
not only in the posts formerly occupied by men, but in alternative employments
open to satisfy the demands of war.
Many women found their wartime labour experiences in some ways “liberating”,
if only because they freed them from woefully paid jobs in domestic service.
The First World War also forced unions to deal with the issue of women’s work.
JESSIE POPE (1868-1941): “The Call”

− Wrote for children – Heroic overtone.
− Published in newspapers and used as a propaganda to recruit men ( Young
men: laddie).
− You inclusive language.
− Are you my laddie? is justaposed with the negative would you, my
laddie?
− Feelings reinforced with repetition
Who’s for the trench—

Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s for the khaki suit—

Are you, my laddie?
Who longs to charge and shoot—
Do you, my laddie?
Who’s keen on getting fit,
Who means to show his grit,
And who’d rather wait a bit—
Would you, my laddie?
Who’ll earn the Empire’s thanks—

Who’ll swell the victor’s ranks—
When that procession comes,
Banners and rolling drums—
Who’ll stand and bite his thumbs—

ROSE MACAULI (1881-1958): “The Picnic”
―Frustration, guilt and anguish of staying at home

—Images mud, rats, blood, pain contrast with images of pastoral England:
gentleness, fertility and growth.
—Walls protected women from war cannot longer hold up.
—The word battered in the penultimate line suggets further identification with the
soldiers, since the guns could be heard clearly int Southern England and that women's
hearts and minds were battered.
—The poem ends with the perception that the walls, real and imaginary, that had
protected women fron the hideous knowledge of war, can no longer hold up.
We lay and ate the sweet hurt-berries And far and far are Flanders mud,
In the bracken of Hurt Wood. And the pain of Picardy;
Like a quire of singers singing low And the blood that runs there runs beyond
The dark pines stood. The wide waste sea.
Behind us climbed the Surrey Hills, We are shut about by guarding walls;
Wild, wild in greenery; (We have built them lest we run
At our feet the downs of Sussex broke Mad from dreaming of naked fear
To an unseen sea. And of black things done)
And life was bound in a still ring, We are ringed all round by guarding walls,
Drowsy, and quiet and sweet…. So high, they shut the view.
When heavily up the south-east wind Not all the guns that shatter the world
The great guns beat. Can quite break through.
We did not wince, we did not weep, Oh guns of France, oh guns of France,
We did not curse or pray; Be still, you crash in vain….
We drowsily heard, and someone said, Heavily up the south wind throb
‘They sound clear today’. Dull dreams of pain…..
We did not shake with pity and pain, Be still, be still, south wind, lest your
Or sicken and blanch white. Blowing should bring the rain…...
We said, ’If the wind’s from over there We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,
There’ll be rain tonight’. And sleep once again.
Once pity we knew, and rage we knew, Oh we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,
And pain we knew, too well, While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,
As we stared and peered dizzily Lest, battered too long, our walls and we
Through the gates of hell. Should break…....should break……....
But now hell’s gates are an old tale;

Remote the anguish seems;
The guns are muffled and far away.
Dreams within dreams.

UNIT 4: “LIFE IS A LUMINOUS HALO” : THE NOVEL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Presentation: social consciousness narrated: D.H. Lawrences'new other in context:
• D. H. Lawrence was one of the most impassioned writers in seeking the psychic dangers
besetting his society and the potential sources of strength with which to combat them.
◦ His novels flee from material realism, exploring the reality of poverty and the
enormous power of art.
◦ He also criticizes the Realism of the Russian novelist, since for him the literary ideal to
be pursued is not material realism, but a psychic ideal.
• Notions as the “old stable ego” of character disappear, and so does the traditional unity and
linearity of the plot. Lawrence was calling into question the belief in the ego's stability.
◦ In Women in Love (1920) all the character are disjointed, and the movement is
indecisive and episodic.
• The abrupt transitions in the plot All have an affinity with the modes
• His calculated disjointedness. Are common to much of organisation of T.S. Eliot's love
• The disjointedness of the writing of the period song.
characters. James Joyce's ulysses.
• The organic kind of unity.
→
• Lawrence was very English, even in his French Naturalist and Symbolist heritage. He is the
novelist as moralist.
• The 18th century was the century of the novel of sensibility. (Samuel Richardson, Daniel
Defoe, Henry James, Thomas Hardy)
SAMUEL RICHARDSON → Novels of “sensibility” and towards a psychological

“sensationalism”.
◦ It legitimized the individual as the subject of literature.

◦ Jane Austen's first novel Northonger Abbey was a good example at the terminus at
which Gothic novel arrived.
▪ Conventions of Gothic novel: -A native heroine prone to romantic fantasies.
-A castle.
-A mistery.
• Lawrence was preoccupied by the industrial and urban modern world, and how it was
transforming the human condition. In his novel The Rainbow (1915) the main characters
move out from a life bounded by the rhythms of the traditional former's year into more
modern worlds.
• In Lawrence's fiction, the main character almost always originates from a partial or
mechanical existence and arrives at an organic wholeness, so for him, a novel appears as a
religious art form in which he can speak of and to the whole man.
• Lawrence was much besides a moralist : he is a novelist, a poet and a short story writer. He
believed that industrialised Western culture was dehumanising because it emphasised
intellectual attributtes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts.

• His three great novels : Sons and lovers (1913),

The Rainbow (1915),
Women in love (1921).
Concern the consequences of trying to deny humanity's union with nature and instead
emphasize the power of sexuality.
• Reality is in the word: The Poetics of Narrative:

We can divide Lawrence's fiction in three different moments or phases:
1. Personal phase: from the year he started writing (1909) until 1912. The White Peacock
inaugurates the modern novel of creative and in it Lawrence first presents the theme that will
dominate in his later works: the mechanisms at work in the relationship between men and women.
2. Frustration: A super-civilized man and an inarticulate down-to earth man. Lawrence de-
plored the dualism of the modern person. In Sons and lovers shows, another topic is a de-
termined antagonism towards the figure of the father and against any imposed authority.
Degradation of the man who abhors his own potentialities: his aim
3. Mystic prophet:
was to return to the primal energy of Eden before human consciousness became stained by
the sense of sir.
• Sons and lovers is, with Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)” the
most notable autobiographical fiction and one of the most famous English novels of the
Sons and lovers can be classified in the literary genre of the Bildungsroman, a German word
meaning “development word”. Traces the development and growth of the main character.
Bildungsroman heroes are often overly sensitive and melancholic, with a sincere liking for
living.
20th century.
• Frustation is the keynote of this personal phase for D.H. Lawrence. In the next literary
period he will seek a solution to his disappointment.
⇒ Emotional adjustment in the modern era covers roughly the years between 1913 –
1920.
• D.H. Lawrence was the first novelist in Western Culture to attempt to explore sexuality
seriously and frankly. Sexuality is the theme dominating this second phase of his writing.
The Rainbow : is the first novel to trace the influence of social revolution.
• Regarding human relationships, Lawrence ignores the set of rules of late 19th century
England, and offers a series of novels where basic sexual relationships are examined. At
the time explicit allusion to sex was considered obscene, and literary works were
scrutinised by censors.
“Women in love” become the icon of the sexual liberation movement of the 60’s
• “Mystic prophet” novels such as Kangaroo, Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Plumet
Serpent.

• Lawrence's writing was revolutionary in that is stressed the importance of feelings. The
plot was important for the light it threw on the inner events in a character. His travels were
an attempt to find in more primitive men the wholeness and balance lost by civilization.
• Lawrence's narrative style is often highly poetic. His intensity, his preoccupation for
portraying his passion for life, “natural” life, led most of his novels to being banned for a
time.
• Some feminists claim a part of Lawrence's work deeply misogynistic, since he may be
suggesting women will only reach true fulfilment by submitting themselves to men.
• Life for Lawrence was essentially a mystery and it could be only experienced by direct
intuition.
• The characteristics of his fiction can be summarized as this: The formal attributes of his
novels are not unsual, except for their lyricism and symbolism.
He wanted to express emotion and feelings.
He wasn't interested in the social man, but in that part of the man, which is
unconcious.
Discovering Newness and Otherness: D.H. Lawrence’s sons and lovers.
• Sons and Lovers best exemplifies the Lawrentian idea of the modern situation of man and
woman.
o The loneliness of the individual.
o The lack of communication.
o The split between one’s self and the self of others.
• Sons and Lovers presents a combination of realistic description and poetic images. The
realism is stronger in the first half of the novel.
o Lawrence’s poetry is more visible in his descriptions of nature.

o Sons and Lovers constantly contrasts the natural environment with the cold
industrial town and city life.
• Walter Morel speaks in a local dialect, while Gertrude speaks refined English.The
relation between them reveals the gulf between the lower and the middle classes.
One of the most important aspects in Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s treatment of class.
His depiction of working- class conditions is accurate.
The physical situation of the novel is extremely important since it represents a moral
situation too.
The duality city/nature, factory/country represents the natural man versus the social man.
• Nature involves peace and relaxation, whereas industrialization means slavery and restraint.
• For Lawrence, the mind is the prison of the body, not the other way around. This
confrontation is epitomised by the tensions between the Morels: she represents: the
ideas he represents the senses. No balance and no communication between them.
• The end of the story is ambiguous. Paul has been searching for light, and as his mother

dies he turns to darkness. Now that he is alone, he must rely on his own possibilities, and
acts with resolution for the first time in his life, and is prepared to begin a new (one) with his
hands closed into fists like a newborn baby.
• The relationship between Paul and women are similarly incomplete and unsatisfactory. The
mind, the spirit and the body are represented by three separate women.
• Sons and Lovers moves rhythmically in the treatment of different character’s relationships:
1. Walter and Gertrude Morel: their relationship is a confrontation between her mind and
his instincts.
2. Paul and his mother: his comfort, his peace, the warmth of childhood.
3. Paul and Miriam: she is honest with him (spirit).
4. Paul and Clara: related with body.
(Miriam and Clara are connected to flowers and gardening)
D.H. Lawrence: (1885-1930), “Sons and lovers” (1913)

• Novel
• Mrs Morel is not satisfied with his alcoholic husband. She devotes his life to her four sons.
Her favourite is William. She is upset since her son is moving away; she is very possessive.
• When William dies Mrs. Morel is crushed. Now her favourite one is Paul, they both live
for each other. He falls in love with Miriam, but her mother doesn’t approve that relation-
ship.
• The lack of passion and probably her mother contribute to the break up.
• Later, he meets Clara, suffragette and married. (Passionate relationship)
• Paul comes back with Miriam, but decides that he loves his mother more. He’s still Clara’s
lover but she doesn’t want to divorce. His mother finally dies, he is broken, and he ends up
alone.
• Industrial, modern world and how humans are affected negatively.
• Concern: the consequences of trying to deny humanity’s union with nature instead empha-
size the power of sexuality.

• Bildungsroman novel: It traces the development and growth of the main character, Paul
(psychological and social development) overly sensitive and melancholic, like a Bildungs-
roman hero, but also expresses liking for living.
• Freud’s Oedipus complex (powerful emotional connection between Mrs Morel and Paul.
Characters:
- Gertrude Morel - William Morel (first son) - Miriam Leivers

- Paul Morel - Annie Morel - Clara Dawes
- Walter Morel - Arthur Morel - Baxter Dawes
SONS AND LOVERS
David Herbert Lawrence
LAWRENCE: diagnose physical dangers of society. Preoccupied by the industrial and urban model
(dehumanising).
Sons and lovers: autobiographical (mother’s side).
• Setting: British Midlands end 19th century. Highly industrialized region.

Contrasts: - natural environment (industry) Lack of harmony
- city (nature) between man and
- factory (country) society.
Separation between lower and middle classes:

lower → Walter Morel (use of dialect), middle → Gertrude Morel (use of refined English).

“Recklessness is alinast a maris leverge on his woman”
Paul → Develops through the novel → Bildungsroman
Paul + Mother (mind) “He felt that she

Women’s relationship: Paul + Miriam (spirit) wanted that sort out of
Paul+ Clara (body). his body and not him”
STRUCTURE: It moves rhythmically in the treatment of character’s relationships.
PAUL + MOTHER: OEDIPAL SITUATION (pidgeon, honey, little…..)

↑
Get he helps nor die!

UNIT 5. TALES OF THE CITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF´S MODERNIST

GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIND
Presentation: Women and Modernism
• In the period between 1910 and 1940, the attitude towards art and literature
changes radically.
• After the war, a group of writers (among them Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot)
advocated an art that would avoid the personal, the emotional and the mundane.
• T.S. Eliot was a key figure in this process through his theories on impersonality.
• Both women and men writers experimented with form and content:
Male writers: approached literary modernism in the belief that art should
convey a “transcendent” reality.
Feminist critics (Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) suggest that literary
modernism arose as a reaction to the increasing numbers of women
entering the literary market.
Katherine Mansfield and other women writers of the period, align
themselves both with high art and mass culture. In her story “The
Tiredness of Rosabel” (1908) we are placed at a critical distance from
popular romance. The text points in two directions:
She is pulled towards high art But still speaks powerfully to

critical both of romance and of female needs and pleasures in
femininity, towards a masculine the way of the popular romance.
writing.
• The women that would start writing after the end of the WWI stressed not
just the need for constitutional reform, but also that for a much greater
personal and sexual emancipation for women.
• The great turning point was marked by Freud´s theories on the unconscious.
• There are five main characteristics in the modernists woman writer:
1º= Subjectivity and gender identity women tended towards the split,
fragmented dispersed and alienated subject.
2º= Myth and the dissolution of time in their fiction past, present and
future in intermingle.
3º= Emphasis on the city they write about urban places, because the
city is perceived as offering new possibilities.
4º= New visions on sexuality.
5º= Alliance to stream of consciousness the novel central on the
mental process, on the thoughts, responses and interior emotional
UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página: 26

experiences of a single central character. There were interior monologues

contrasting with the silence outside.
Introduction to Virginia Woolf
• Virginia Woolf is major figure in the Modernist movement, a complex and a

paradoxical woman.
• In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) the city plays an important part in the development of
the novel. Despite of his alluring life, her father was a domestic tyrant as
recalled in Virginia Woolf´s memories “A Sketch of the Past”.
• In 1908, Virginia Woolf started writing her first novel “The Voyage Out” but it
was not published for seven years. Her second novel, even more conventional,
was “Night and Day”, published in 1919. She and her husband had bought a
small printing press as a hobby and therapy for her, while living in Richmond in
the south west of London in 1917, and named it the “Hogarth Press” after the
house.
• In 1925, “Mrs. Dalloway” was published, followed in 1927 by “To the he
Lighthouse” and “The waves” (1931).These three novels are generally
considered her greatest contribution to Modernism.
• Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West led
to “Orlando: A Biography” (1928) and in 1929 to “A Room of One´s Own”: a
discussion of women´s writing and its historical, economic and social
underpinning.
• In 1927 she published “The Years”, perhaps her most overtly political fictional
work. A best seller in America, it was a painful exercise in writing, an essay
dealing with the relationship between war, masculinity and women´s education
and employment.
• In 1940 she wrote a biography for her friend Roger Fry. On 28th March 1941
she killed herself while she was in the last revision of her final novel “Between
the Acts”, posthumously published by her husband Leonard Woolf.
The Bloomsbury Group and Bloomsbury Aesthetics
• As well as Woolf´s siblings (Thoby, Virginia, Adrian and Vanessa) many other
writer formed part of the Bloomsbury Group: Katherine Mansfield, G. E. Moore,
T. S. Eliot, David Garnett, James Strachey, and latter Vita Sackville-West, and
her husband Harold Nicolson.
• What joined the group together was a refusal to compromise with their Victorian
upbringing and bawdiness; a variety of sexualities prevailed.
• Virginia Woolf describes the method of analysis of their group meetings as
“pilling stone upon stone” the arguments. I many of her essays certainly in “A
Room of One´s Own” this is the principle used.

• Moore´s radical philosophy appealed to Bloomsbury for its rationalism and its
elevation of aesthetic life. They became interested in psychoanalysis, but only at
a theoretical level.
• Freud´s theories: particularly in relation to the unconscious and the development
of the human psyche, played an important role in her narrative and in many
arguments used in her essays.
“A Room of One´s Own” and other essays
• Written for money.

• According to Bloomsbury aesthetics, they could hardly be seen as artistic
endeavors.
• Woolf discusses the nature of the essay not in relation to its informative or
persuasive nature, but in terms of aesthetics which are precisely “the features
expected to go with literature”.
• Her writings about literary history show that she preferred certain periods, such
as classical Greece, the Elizabethan period, the Romantics or the 19th century
Russian period.
• She also favored some authors: Daniel Defoe, James Boswell, Jane Austen,
George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad among others, and had
inclination towards certain themes that recur in her essays: essay writing,
painting, women’s lives biography, letters and memoirs.
• She feels that fiction must reflect reality by “observing and ordinary mind on
an ordinary day”, and writers e freed of the obligation of providing a coherent
plot structured in correlative chapters.
• She propounds that the modern writer should be interested not so much in the
outside world but in those emotions and feelings that also form part of the
reality.
• Every feeling and every thought is as much part of reality as is the outside
world.
• In “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” she started the famous quote “ in or about
December, 1910, human character changed”.
• The language and structure of “A Room´s of One´s own” participate in those
exploratory forms ascribed by Woolf to modern fiction.
One of the most interesting aspects of the essay is perhaps its suggestive
quality.
It´s an exploration of the material and psychological conditions, as well as the

historical constraints encountered by women writers, and also in relation to
men.
In “ The Modern Essay”, she argued that “ almost all essays begin with a
capital I "

In “A Room of One`s Own” this “I” is totally abandoned and the very notion of
identity is displaced.
She perceives the “I” as an impediment for communication and artistic
production.
• By diminishing the importance of the name of the narrator “I”, she is
minimizing the importance of an authoritarian voice in the text.
• It is not by chance that the name of that “I” is Mary and it is immediately
associated with the Virgin, and marks the point of departure for Woolf´s
examination of women´s literature. The text constantly asks for the
participation of the reader.
• “A Room of One´s Own” was the final version of two lectures delivered
by the writer at the female Oxford colleges in October 1928. In it she
analyses topics such as the contrast between female and male writing,
university colleges and the banning of women from public spaces; the
effect of poverty on the writing of fiction and the obvious but previously
unstudied women´s exclusion from history.
• She introduces a fictional character who serves as an example: Judith

Shakespeare. She thinks the genius needs material conditions and social
recognition, and a tradition from which to learn the craft. She becomes annoyed
when she analyses the work of other women writers. For instance: she thinks
Charlotte Bronte had more genius than Jane Austen, but her rage made her writing
“deformed and twisted”.
• Most of the women writer from the 16th to the 19th century mentioned were
eccentrics. The arrival of the professional woman writer (Aphra Ben was the
first) marked a turning point in women´s literary history.
• Women need a tradition of their own to twin to when approaching the task of
writing. “A Room of One´s Own” is the first attempt in English literature to
establish this tradition.
Woolf believes that women’s writing is essentially different from men´s.
• One of the most shocking ideas in “A Room of One´s Own” is that the ideal state
of mind in which to produce art is an androgynous one. This does not come from
the desire to be a man but a claim for further knowledge. The androgynous
mind has its more revolutionary declaration in the avowal of a form of writing
that will be unconsciously feminine.
• Both the structure and the distinctive uses of the language “A Room of One´s
Own” displays suppose a breakthrough. Her use of languages enhances the
subversive quality of the essay.

• Through her experimentation with language, Woolf is searching for a form of

writing capable of encompassing the “real” world when it is perceived from
different angles.
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882- 1941): “A Room of One´s Own” (1929)
• Themes :
- The importance of money, questioning the truth interruptions, inequality
(Judith Shakespeare).
- Women need an own space to develop their creativity.
-Women were looking –glasses for men (they seem bigger when they belittle
women).
-We help the need to think back through our mothers (women lack of tradition
of women writers).
-Literature and gender; women should learn to write as women not as men.
-She sits at Oxbridge, a fictional university; library access denied…intellectual

restriction to women. Richness and poorness of women resources. A cat without
a tail how women feel. Poverty affects the mind.
-British Museum all books are written by men.
-Money makes you independent. Her aunt gave her money so she did not depend
on men.
-Mary Carmichael (fictional writer): women should write as women but not
necessarily about women.
-Chloe liked Olivia (1st you break the sentence and then you break the
sequence). No men in the story. She succeeds in not letting men to interfere in
her story.
-One should have an androgynous mind in order to write without fear or anxiety.
“A ROOM OF ONE´S OWN”
Virginia Woolf essay dealing with literature and feminist issues.

Exploration of material and psychological conditions historical contexts
and relation to men.
“I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion
about the room and the money”.

• Topics
Contrasts female- male writing.
University colleges + women in public spaces.
Effect of poverty in writing of fiction.
Unstudied women´s exclusion from history.
Fictional character: genius needs material conditions and social
recognition. (Judith Shakespeare).
• Language and structure:

Begins with doubt and assertiveness, BUT.
Irony “rugget of pure truth”.
“I totally abandoned. It has no real existence.
“Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or any other name
you please, it is not a matter of importance”.
Breakthrough experimentation with language.
• Androgyny: combination of feminine and masculine characteristics.

Mind (both masculine and feminine) further knowledge.
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a
woman”.
MAJOR TOPIC: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to
write fiction .
"Mrs Dalloway" and the woman's sentence (1925)
It broke with the pattern of the novel established at the time, different in themes,
style and method of writing. The whole work can be seen as an attempt to
disrupt the traditional way of writing, an exploration of new techniques,
shifting continually from one character to another, from past to present, from
one subject matter to another.
Irony is also used when criticizing the social system, and feminist issues are
raised in an oblique manner.
- The framework of the novel can be placed in one day in the life of several people in London.
- Another beautiful example of the "invisible thread" also connecting the use of time and
consciousness, remain in the importance attached to events like the appearance of a car, an
airplane writing in the sky, all presented cyclically, through different individual
consciousness.
- Woolf in Mrs Dalloway shows interest in one of the features of Modernism: the
experimentation with temporality.

In Mrs Dalloway we find all the features of Modernism:

The use of stream of consciousness techniques.
Fluid characterization.
Exploration of subjectivity.
The repetition of aspects of modernity as the centrality of the city.
Woolf records the thoughts and remembrances of a number of consciousness:
Septimus, Lucrezia, Clarissa, Miss Keenan, Elizabeth, Peter, Sally, etc.
Repetition and the function of the omniscient narrator are the significant
aspects of this narrative. The omniscient narrator can move from mind to mind
and relate to the reader the thoughts and feelings of any character.
Time is used in a unique manner: the narrator telling the story after the event
happened. This repetition is achieved by relating first the mind of one character
and then the mind of another.
There are common images throughout the narrative (the airplane) and the
repetition of events from the past are brought up in many minds.
- The recording of the workings of the mind may produce a very slow, even
boring, text. This technique receives many names (stream of consciousness or
interior monologue). The narrator conveying thoughts to the reader is the "free
indirect style" or, as she called it, the "tunnelling process" by which she
created "caves" behind the characters.
Political issues are embedded within the narrative: emigration, imperialism,

government party struggles.
Woolf believed that in order to convey reality, she needed to write from her
body and from her mind, so that's the reason for the next question "Am I writing
"The Hours" from deep emotion?".
Many critics describe Septimus as Clarissa's doppelgänger; that is, the
alternate persona, a darker, more internal personality compared with
Clarissa's.
Woolf's use of the doppelgänger, Septimus, portrays a side to Clarissa's
personality that becomes absorbed by fear and broken down by society as well
as a side of society that has failed to survive the war.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): "Mrs Dalloway" (1925)
Novel
Omniscient narrator: The point of view changes constantly, shifting from one
character's stream of consciousness to another's.
Not heroes, just ordinary people.
Setting (time): A day in mid-June (1923). There are many flashbacks to a summer at
Bourton in the early 1980s, when Clarissa was 18.
Clarissa and other characters try to preserve their souls and communicate in an
oppressive and fragmentary post-World War I England.

Rising action: Clarissa spends the day organising a party that will bring people
together while her double/doppelgänger, Septimus Warren Smith, eventually commits
suicide due to the social pressures that oppress his soul.
Climax: At her party, Clarissa goes to a small room to contemplate Septimus'
suicide. She identifies with him and is glad he did it, believing that he preserved his
soul.
Falling action: Clarissa returns to her party and is viewed from the outside. We do
not know whether she will change due to her moment of clarity, but we do know that
she will endure.
Linking characters: Sir William Bradshaw, a friend of Clarissa and Septimus'
doctor (invisible threads join them).
Woolf wants to criticize the social system and she does it through her characters
(when Sally loses her temper). She does not interrupt the narration.
Lineal time coexists with cyclical time.
Septimus and Clarissa never meet but they are connected (doppelgänger).
Themes: insanity, fear of death.
Time: Sounds to indicate that time is passing, it's palpable.
Trees and flowers: They suggest different feelings and emotions.
Foreshadowing: when Clarissa is at the flower shop. She is anticipating Septimus'
death.
Characters: * Clarissa Dalloway

* Septimus Warren Smith
* Peter Walsh
* Sally Seton
* Richard Dalloway
* Hugh Withbread
* Lucrezia Smith
MRS. DALLOWAY
Complex and paradoxical woman. Bloomsbury Group.

Virginia Woolf
Commited suicide
Broke pattern
disrupt traditional way of writing new techniques Shift characters
Past- present shift subject matters
* Setting 1 day in the life of several people in London

other times influenced (experimentation with temporality)
* Irony Criticising social system, feminist issues in an oblique manner.

* Repetition thoughts and feelings

narrator able to access all the characters' minds (omniscient)
* Insanity Septimus Madness. Clarissa "dies" figuratively with him.
Convey world "sane" and "insane" line dividing very fine
Post-war trauma correct past-present
Septimus is Clarissa's doppelgänger
alternate persona, darker, more internal personality
* Political issues emigration, imperialism, war
* Closing scene draws together the main arguments
Clarissa Septimus
Death Party
"she felt somehow very like him, the young man who had killed himself"
MAJOR THEMES:
• Communication vs. privacy
• Disillusionment of British Empire
• The Fear of Death
• The threat of oppession

Apuntes Lit. Inglesa III

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APUNTES DE LA ASIGNATURA:

LITERATURA INGLESA III: PENSAMIENTO Y

TRABAJO REALIZADO SOBRE LOS APUNTES MANUSCRITOS AUTORIZADO POR EL AUTOR

UNIT 1 Aidy Cruz y Rubén Pareja UNIT 2 Guille y Luis A.Foglia

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES: LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN A DISTANCIA

UNIT 1: THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN OR THE NEED TO 'MAKE IT

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 1

This gave birth Philistene: A person who refuses

● Economic movement form Landownership → to a modern urban economy → Trade

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 2

* In 1859 → 'The Origin of Species by MEANS of natural Selection' by Charles Darwin.

In 'eternal recurrence', cyclical time is presented in the idea of repetition or recurrence

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 3

The New Woman enters the Stage:

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900): “The Importance of being Earnest” (1895):

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST:

* THEMES: moral values, marriage, money, hypocrisy, earnestness.

OSCAR WILDE —> shock and challenge Victorian values :

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 5

MAJOR THEME: Preponderance of the social status.

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 6

UNIT 2 – “THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN”: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO

The opposition CIVILIZED/SAVAGE is brought into question and those who

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 7

In Heard of Darkness he uses a romantic realism, close to the mystery of

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 8

• In Heart of Darkness he is not interested in his character’s progress in life, but in

The end is a never-ending story comprised of an unlimited number of possible

• Conrad is suspicious of language because language is no longer a reliable tool.

The physical journey in Heart of Darkness is parallel to the emotional development

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 9

• The circularity of the narrative is symbolized in Marlow’s body position,

The novel as a whole proposes a reconsideration of the traditional notion of reality.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): “Heart of Darkness” (1899)

General Manager, Cannibals, Helmsman,

• Themes: Isolation, evil, hypocrisy of imperialism, subconscious, guilt.

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 10

Joseph Conrad Attitude towards Colonialism: racial superiority,

Narrator: Each person talking to Marlow becomes a narrator Mystery and

Isolation of a person in nature: (modernist literature) Marlow’s position as Buddha (beginning

MAJOR THEME: Imperialism and imperialist attitudes.

E.M. Forster’s – A Passage to India

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 11

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 12

• In Foster’s view, India is not so much a mystery as a muddle or labyrinth. It should

E.M. Forster (1879-1970): “ A Passage to India” (1924):

• Dr. Aziz • Mr. Turton

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 14

• Nothing: Important. Nothing is mentioned about what happened in the cause,

caves elude all exploration

Major Teme English – Indian Relationship.

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 15

UNIT 3: LITERATURE AND WAR: DISILLUSION AS NEVER TOLD IN THE

2.1. “The Poetry is in the Pity:” Georgian Poets Experiencing War

• Georgian Poetry consists on a complacement and meditative lyrical vision of

RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915): “THE SOLDIER”

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 16

- “The Soldier” Analysis

If I should die, think only this of me: A

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, E

WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918): “DULCE ET DECORUM EST”

- “Dulce et decorum est” Analysis

UNED Autor: Nacho Collins Ramos, página 17