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VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Introduction:

Victorian literature is the body of writing produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) and corresponds to the Victorian era. The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English and formed a transition between writers of the romantic period, such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott  had perfected both closely-observed social satire and adventure stories, and the very different literature of the 20th century.

Economic expansion (which was an era) vs. Moral and Human Decay.

During this era, there were no social classes, after, 2 social classes were existed:

1.      There who had their own land.

2.      The workers: they were called salaries.

 After the Nobility, we have Aristocracy which refers to wealthy people, education was restricted only to Aristocratic people. In the Industrial revolution?s period, women did not work, because they had not the obligation to do, but during the 19^thC, i.e. during the period after the Industrial Revolution, women had the rights to work as well as children, then after children, there were the labours unions who were a group of people, so as a result, all the members were obliged to work. They worked for a very low salary and they lived in slams: these slams were built with wood and metal. In the wealthy class, there were a middle class and then the workers , they were the poor.

Note: women in the 18thC had no right to ask for any hidden, but in the 19thC, it is different (there were a Victorian women, with their husbands? properties). Women could have the choice to share the property of their husbands.

The conservaThe conservative era was an era preceding the 17thC. Thomas Hardy was born during the Victorian era.

During the era before 1837 and exactly in 1789, it was the romantic period. There was a change from ruler life to industrial one, this industrial change effected all domains as: science, architecture, … etc. it was influenced by the French republic, they wanted to change their monarch span style="font-family:Wingdings; mso-ascii-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-hansi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-char-type:symbol;mso-symbol-font-family:Wingdings"> à they brought republic.

Industrialism: dehumanization, result of whole age.

Religion: they rejected the question, for them religion is hypocritical, they accused religion to be trial.

Industry was important to some classes like Aristocracy class. Workers were obvious by industry è the regularity of the wage or salary.

It was a radical change, the romantic era was nearly to Queen Victoria from 1789 till 4 years ago. The French at that time ask for equality and fraternity.

From the reign of Queen Victoria and more exactly in 1832, there were 3 reform acts; the French Evolution gave aim and a hope for a better life. ?the Evolution was about the Critical mind?.

The acceptance of reform acts:The acceptance of reform acts:

There were many Novelists and writers, Edward Morgan Forster in 18^thC was a Critic.

The 4 issues (for the paper) characterised the Victorian era. class="MsoBodyText"> ü  The 1^st was about the Evolution of science, ideas, philosophy and uncritical mind.

ü  The second was about the Industrialism which is a concept: spirit: refers to religion and flesh refers to money.

ü  The third issue was the woman The third issue was the woman Question: Who writes novels are not especially wealthy, poor, .. they named them blue blood (all who writes novels).

üThe last issue Great Britain started to enlarge her territory because of this desire that causes the emergence of sub literature (post colonial literature), after being colonized there were the emergence of literature.

The Style Of The Victorian Novel:

Influenced as they were by theInfluenced as they were by the large sprawling novels of sensibility of the preceding age, the Victorian novels tended to be idealised portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrong-doers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart, informing the reader how to be a good Victorian. This formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction but as the century progressed the plot thickened. More exactly, by the death of Charles Dickens in 1870, happy endings became less common. His fondness for writing about the poor and his description of their sentimentalised portraits started slowly to change. That change become clearer by the end of the century novels of the 1880s and 90s more realistic and often grimmer; e.g.: Thomas Hardy’s novels.

An except is a passage or a part in the literary word. 

Charles Dickens:

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) : an English writer, and a novelist. He wrote many novels, his famous one was walled David Copperfield. He started by being a journalist in the parliament. Dickens depiction was on the poor people. The techniques that Charles Dickens had used in his writing are called the techniques of the “renaissance” to remember his childhood. For his biography, he enjoyed life but he hated the social system. He devoted many writing to the children as result of self experience. Criticism of David Copperfield fiction, autobiography functional element.

Charles Dickens:

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) : an English writer, and a novelist. He wrote many novels, his famous one was walled David Copperfield. He started by being a journalist in the parliament. Dickens depiction was on the poor people. The techniques that Charles Dickens had used in his writing are called the techniques of the “renaissance” to remember his childhood. For his biography, he enjoyed life but he hated the social system. He devoted many writing to the children as result of self experience. Criticism of David Copperfield fiction, autobiography functional element

Some note about Charles Dickens:

His fully name is Charles John Huffam Dickens, he was born in Portsmouth in 1812, he passed his childhood in London and Kent. In 1824 he went to school at age of 9 years, but he gave up

his studies when his father was imprisoned because of debt. His mother was obliged to push him to work when he became 12 years old. This period lasted for 3 months: in his book David Copperfield, he wrote about his misery that he saw in his childhood. Therefore, he curried on his studies and he enjoyed reading “les milles et une nuits”, and also some other novels of the 18^thC as Henry fielding and Tobias Smolett which had an influence to his work. In 1827, Dickens became the clerk of the court, then a journalist in the parliament. At that period, he made acquaintance with Maria Beadnell and he fall in love with her, but she was so rich rather than him, whereas he is so poor. As a result the marriage between them was impossible. In 1932, he wrote articles in news paper of his uncle “the Mirror of Parliament” and also another daily called “The Morning Chronicle”. In the “Monthly” news paper he changed his name to “Boz”.

He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836. Due to his writings, he became very rich and so famous.

In 1840, he travelled to USA in order to explain the republic’s contains books. He made discourses and he talked about slavery. He was also a director of the theatre which played in front of Queen Victoria in 1851. Although these famousness and richness, he wasn’t able to forget his misery. He met with a woman that he escaped from his family, leaved his wife and 10 children.

Dickens’ writings were criticized on social system in Victorian era; he spoke about hypocrisy and dehumanisation, but not about hard-hearts. The 19^thC era, it was called the hard-hearts generation.

The Victorian Age (DICKENS)

Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse was at the waterside. It was down in Blackfriars. Modern improvements have altered the place; but it was the last house at the bottom of a narrow street, curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat. It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place; are things, not of many years ago, in my mind, but of the present instant. They are all before me, just as they were in the evil hour when I went among them for the first time, with my trembling hand in Mr. Quinion's.

Murdstone and Grinby's trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.

There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor's Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the - to me - extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy's father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy's - I think his little sister - did Imps in the Pantomimes.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those of my happier childhood - not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom. The deep remembrance of the sense I had, of being utterly without hope now; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, would pass away from me, little by little, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. As often as Mick Walker went away in the course of that forenoon, I mingled my tears with the water in which I was washing the bottles; and sobbed as if there were a flaw in my own breast, and it were in danger of bursting.

The counting-house clock was at half past twelve, and there was general preparation for going to dinner, when Mr. Quinion tapped at the counting-house window, and beckoned to me to go in. I went in, and found there a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout and black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head (which was a large one, and very shining) than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face, which he turned full upon me. His clothes were shabby, but he had an imposing shirt-collar on. He carried a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and a quizzing-glass hung outside his coat, - for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it, and couldn't see anything when he did.

'This,' said Mr. Quinion, in allusion to myself, 'is he.'

'This,' said the stranger, with a certain condescending roll in his voice, and a certain indescribable air of doing something genteel, which impressed me very much, 'is Master Copperfield. I hope I see you well, sir?'

I said I was very well, and hoped he was. I was sufficiently ill at ease, Heaven knows; but it was not in my nature to complain much at that time of my life, so I said I was very well, and hoped he was.

'I am,' said the stranger, 'thank Heaven, quite well. I have received a letter from Mr. Murdstone, in which he mentions that he would desire me to receive into an apartment in the rear of my house, which is at present unoccupied - and is, in short, to be let as a - in short,' said the stranger, with a smile and in a burst of confidence, 'as a bedroom - the young beginner whom I have now the pleasure to -' and the stranger waved his hand, and settled his chin in his shirt-collar.

'This is Mr. Micawber,' said Mr. Quinion to me.

'Ahem!' said the stranger, 'that is my name.'

'Mr. Micawber,' said Mr. Quinion, 'is known to Mr. Murdstone. He takes orders for us on commission, when he can get any. He has been written to by Mr. Murdstone, on the subject of your lodgings, and he will receive you as a lodger.'

'My address,' said Mr. Micawber, 'is Windsor Terrace, City Road. I - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, with the same genteel air, and in another burst of confidence - 'I live there.'

I made him a bow.

'Under the impression,' said Mr. Micawber, 'that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road, - in short,' said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confidence, 'that you might lose yourself - I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.'

I thanked him with all my heart, for it was friendly in him to offer to take that trouble.

'At what hour,' said Mr. Micawber, 'shall I -'

'At about eight,' said Mr. Quinion.

'At about eight,' said Mr. Micawber. 'I beg to wish you good day, Mr. Quinion. I will intrude no longer.'

So he put on his hat, and went out with his cane under his arm: very upright, and humming a tune when he was clear of the counting-house.

The Victorian Novel

The Victorian Age is marked roughly by the reign of Queen Victoria of England from 1837-1901.

The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary form of the era. The novel is the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature.

Earlier in the century Sir Walter Scott had created a large novel-reading public and had made the novel respectable. He had also strengthened the tradition of the 3-volume novel.

The publication of novels in monthly instalments enabled even the poor to purchase them

The novelists of the Victorian era:

• accepted middle class values
• treated the problem of the individual's adjustment to his society
• emphasized well-rounded middle-class characters
• portrayed the hero as a rational man of virtue
• believed that human nature is fundamentally good and lapses are errors of judgment corrected by maturation

The Victorian novel appealed to readers because of its:

• realism
• impulse to describe the everyday world the reader could recognize
• introduction of characters who were blends of virtue and vice
• attempts to display the natural growth of personality
• expressions of emotion: love, humour, suspense, melodrama, pathos (deathbed scenes)
• Moral earnestness and wholesomeness, including crusades against social evils and self-censorship to acknowledge the standard morality of the times.

Emily Bronte:

Emily Bronte was a daughter of a religious man; her character was in a very acute way. She was a governess; she suffered a lot from illness. She had no idea about the negative aspect.

Wuthering Heights: is a king of imagination. Emily Bronte falls in love with a man who told her that his wife was died, but in fact not. Gothic: is a style of literature

The Gothic elements were:

• Fear
• Terror
• mystery
• Love (feeling)
•  Depiction children's lives

They were the aspects of the romantic novel with some Gothic elements. The depiction of nature is an aspect in a romantic literature.

The main protagonists were:

• Heathcliff
• Catherine
• Cathy Earnshaw
•  Edgar Linton

The father of Catherine was a drunken man. He was full of his son Hindley (the brother of Catherine).

Heathcliff was poor, he called gypsy.

Gypsies: were known as being without pure origin, they were the result of the illegitimate relations.

Heathcliff was degraded by the brother of Catherine. Heathcliff loved Catherine from their childhood, unfortunately, they did not get married because Catherine refused to marry to a dark skin, who had no origin, and who was brutal.

Edgar Linton was the man who married Catherine, although he was not the man that she loved but she married him because he was rich. He was a servant; he lived in a very nice house surrounded with gardens, with a lot of windows… etc.

In fact, Edgar Linton married also her sister named Isabelle,, and they had a son. Edgar was a civilized man.The necessary and the agreeable:

Linton was the necessary, i.e. the suitable man for Catherine in order to get in high-class. But Heathcliff was the agreeable.

Nelly Dean was the governess of Catherine who told Heathcliff that his beloved Catherine had got to marry with Edgar Linton. She was a narrator and an active character.

Catherine died because she was unhappy with Linton. Three years after her death, Heathcliff came and started his process.

The three generations of Characters: we have two houses:

• Wuthering Heights è Heathcliff's house.
• Thrushcross Grange è Linton's house

WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

Romanticism, the literary movement traditionally dated 1798 to 1832 in England, affected all the arts through the 19^th century. The Brontes were familiar with the writings of the major romantic poets and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The romantic elements in the Brontes' writings are obvious. For instance, the characteristic spirit of romanticism appears in the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, and that of Heathcliff -tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin that he may really lie beside her in death- figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit.

Romantic elements in WUTHERING HEIGHTS

• The imagination is unlimited to explore extreme states of being and experience.
• The love of nature is not represented just in its tranquil aspect but also appears in its wild, stormy moods.
• Nature is a living, vitalising force and offers a refuge from the constraints, of civilisation.
• The passion driving Catherine and Heathcliff and their obsessive love for each other are the centre of their being and transcend death.

• A great focus is placed on the individual that society is pushed to the periphery of the action.

• The concern with identity and the creation of the self are a primary concern.
• Childhood and the adult's developing from childhood experiences are presented realistically.
• Heathcliff is the Byronic hero; both are rebellious, passionate, misanthropic, isolated, and wilful, have mysterious origins, lack of family ties, reject external restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with love object.
• Hareton is the noble savage and so is Heathcliff.
• The taste for local colour shows in the portrayal of Yorkshire, its landscape, its folklore, and its people.

The Romantic/Gothic elements in WUTHERING HEIGHTS

• The dynamic antagonism in the novel tends to subvert, if not to reject literary convention; often a novel verges on turning into something else, like poetry or drama. In Wuthering Heights, realism in presenting Yorkshire landscape and life and the historical precision of season, dates, and hours co-exist with the dreamlike and the unhistorical, Bronte refuse to be confined by conventional classifications.
• The protagonists' wanderings are motivated by flight from previously- chosen goals, so that often there is a pattern of escape and pursuit. Consider Catherine's marriage for social stability, position, and wealth, her efforts to evade the consequences of her marriage, the demands of Heathcliff and Edgar, and her final mental wandering.
• The protagonists are driven by irresistible passion, curiosity, ambition, intellectual pride, and envy. The emphasis is on their desire for transcendence, to overcome the limitations of the body, of society, of time rather than their moral transgressions. They yearn to escape the limitations inherent to life and may find that only escape is death. The longings of a Heathcliff cannot be fulfilled in life.
• Death is not only a literal happening or plot device, but also and primarily a psychological concern. For the protagonists death originates in the imagination, becomes a "tendency of mind", and may develop into an obsession.
• As in Gothic fiction, buildings are central to the meaning, the supernatural, wild nature, dream and madness, and physical violence are set off against social conventions and institutions. Initially, this may create the impression that the novel us two books in one, but finally Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights fuse.
• Endings are disquieting and unsatisfactory because the writer resists a definitive conclusion, one which accounts for all loose ends and explains away any ambiguities or uncertainties. The preference for open-endedness is ultimately, an effort to resist the limits of time and place. That effort helps explain the importance of dreams and memories of other times and location, like Catherine's delirious memories of childhood at Wuthering Heights and rambles on the moors.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (Emily Bronte - 1848)

Analysis: Chapters VI-IX

In this section, Nelly brings to conclusion the story of Heathcliff and Catherine's childhood, with Heathcliff leaving Wuthering Heights the night Catherine decides to marry Edgar Linton. In the climatic scene in which Catherine discusses with Nelly her decision to marry Edgar, Catherine describes the conflict between her love for Heathcliff and her love for Edgar. She says that she loves Edgar because he is handsome, rich, and graceful, and because he would make her the greatest lady in the region. However, she also states that she loves Heathcliff as through they shared the same soul, and that she knows in her heart that she has no business marrying Edgar? Nevertheless, her desire for a genteel and socially prominent lifestyle guides her decision-making: she would marry Heathcliff, if Hindley had not cast him down so low.

Heathcliff's emotional turmoil is due in part to his ambiguous class status. He begins life as a lower-class orphan, but is raised to the status of a gentleman's son when Mr. Earnshaw adopts him. He suffers another reversal in status when Hindley forces him to work as a servant in the very small household where he once enjoyed a life of luxury. The other characters, including the Lintons, to an extent, Catherine-all upper-class themselves- prove complicit in this obliteration of Heathcliff's hopes. Inevitably, the unbridgeable gap in Catherine and Heathcliff's social positions render their fervent romance unrealizable on any practical level.

Nevertheless, the passion between the two lovers' remains rooted in their hearts, impervious to external contingencies. The text consistently treats the love between Catherine and Heathcliff as an incontestable fact of nature. Nothing can alter or lessen it, and the lovers know this. Heathcliff and Catherine know that no matter how they hurt each other, they can be sure of never losing their shared passion and ultimate mutual loyalty. Catherine can decide to marry Edgar, certain that this outward act will have no effect on her and Heathcliff's inner feelings for one another. Similarly, it is in the knowledge of their passion's durability that Heathcliff later undertakes his cruel revenge.

Theme Analysis

Race/Class/Education- throughout the novel characters are prejudged by their race, class or education. When Heathcliff is first introduced he is described as a dark skinned boy with dark hair, and because of this people are prejudiced against him. He is called a "gypsy" numerous times, and the Lintons treat him badly and send him away from their house because of his appearance. Heathcliff also quickly dislikes his son because of his light skin and hair.

Class is also an issue. There was a class hierarchy in Bronte's England, and this can be seen in the novel as well. The residents of Wuthering heights seem to be of a lower class than the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange. Even though she loves him, Catherine will not marry Heathcliff after he has been degraded, and instead marries into a rich Linton family, causing all of the major conflict in the novel. The Lintons are of a higher class both because they have more money and don't seem to have to work, and because they are better educated.

Catherine tries to better her situation both by marrying Edgar Linton and by her constant reading. She laughs at Hareton because of his lack of education. Heathcliff admits that Hareton is smarter than Linton. Yet because of low they are raised and what they will inherit, Linton will be the more upgraded while Hareton will remain a servant. It is only when Catherine and Hareton become friends and she begins to educate him that Hareton turns into a gentleman and loses his crude behaviour.

Revenge- Revenge is a major theme of the novel. Early in the novel Heathcliff is described as plotting revenge, and the second half of the novel is dominated by Heathcliff's revenge against Hindley and his descendants for his mistreatment of him and against Edgar and his descendants for Catherine's death. Heathcliff's revenge affects everyone in the novel, and he seems to think that if he can revenge Catherine's death, he can be with her. He has been looking for her since her death, as he has been sensing her near him. However, it is only at the end of the novel, when he has given up his plans for revenge, that he is able to see Catherine and that he is reunited with her.

Supernatural- Supernatural events happen in the very beginning of the novel and continue until the very end? In chapter three Lockwood is grabbed and pleaded to by Catherine's ghost through a window and in the last chapter Ellen talks about people seeing the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine walking on the moors. In between Heathcliff tells Ellen about hearing Catherine sighing in the graveyard and sensing her nearby, and when he gives up his plans of revenge he even seems to see her ghost. Ellen also once sees Heathcliff as a goblin, and wonders if he is a vampire or a ghoul, although she realizes she is being silly. These themes and instances are tied to a spirituality and life-after-death theme in the novel. Edgar and Heathcliff both want to be with Catherine after she has died. Edgar does not want her to haunt him, but he does look forward to a time when they can be together again. Heathcliff does want Catherine to haunt him, and she indeed seems to, and he also looks forward to spending eternity with her after death.

Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

Jude the obscure of Thomas Hardy is unmistakably not Victorian, in that is preoccupation with the late 19^th century worries and questioning made of it more contemporary than it wanted to be. The concentration of the novel on the loss of religious faith in a conventional society, the rise of the working woman and the difficulties of  being merely an independent woman, and te oppression of a professional ambition in a class-based society led it re-examine the priorities of the Victorian individual.

 

Jude the Obscure is an account of the poor existence of a male protagonist, named in the title, from the very first moment he aspires to be a learned and distinguished man to his disastrous ending alone and desperate. In a period of twenty years of self-study and defeats in sex and love of two women, one sensual and pragmatic, Arabella, with whom he would share an unhappy marital life, the other intellectual and seeking, Sue, whom he intensely loved but did not marry, he waged a war between the ideal life he wanted to have and the ill-fated life he was doomed to live.

Sue Bridehead, is the female co-protagonist, she is portrayed as an intelligent, attractive, intellectually emancipated young woman who marries unhappily too. On meeting her cousin, Jude, she confuses him oscillating between behaviour of tender encouragement and temporary withdrawal. Yet, she marries phillotson, realises her unhappiness, and hastens another time to her lover Jude but declines to marry him claiming the falseness and the failure of the failure of the legitimate and scared relationship.

Her fear from marriage which, according to Thomas Hardy, would destroy her spontaneity and deprive her of the right to deny her lawful husband sexual intercourse when she refuses seems to convey a persistent emphasis on formal marriage as a trap in contrast to what may a free union offer. There us an incredible scorn against marriage which is maintained throughout the novel at such a point that Hardy strives to show Jude and Sue happy only when being unmarried.

Right from the beginning, the reader is remained that, " many a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time after fulfilling them in the church adjoining" then the novelist carries on suggesting when the couple decided to get married and went to the Registar's Office met two couples who prevented them from. The first comprises a soldier "sullen and reluctant" and a bride "sad and timid; she was soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye". The second couple is little better; the groom has just been released from jail, and is "an ill-favoured man, closely cropped, with a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquor and the satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire".

At the end of the novel, Thomas Hardy becomes bitter and his aversion about marriage becomes most overt. When Arabella is seen kissing Jude by the landlord the latter doubts that they are married; but when he hears her abuse Jude and fling a shoe at his head, "he recognized the note of ordinary wedlock" and adds that "they must be respectable".

All marriages of the novel are unhappy and disastrous. Depicted in detail, these experiences seem to show that there are unsuitable candidates for marriage and that even if marriage is to bring happiness, the later is very brief and will vanish sooner or later.

Moreover, the text is interlaced by imagery of gins, springes, and snares. A "gin" (engine for entrapment) was a powerful spring-trap fitted with metal teeth. A "springe" was snare with noose and spring. By means of such imagery Hardy seeks to co-ordinate the various kinds of entrapment, sexual, social and even metaphysical, which beset Jude and Sue.

When Jude realises that he has been tricked into marriage to Arabella, we are told: "he was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a life-time? The imager becomes tangibly manifest when, at Shaston, Jude hears the cry of a rabbit tortured in a gin: he kills the creature to release it from its agony; and thus he encounters Sue, who has similarly been awakened by the cry, and who tells him of her entrapment in marriage to Phillotson.

Jude finds himself ensnared by marriage to an unsuitable partner, thus the imagery of snares has metaphysical implications, to the extent that Jude may seem to have been ensnared by a hostile supernatural pow"

Another theme which appears to shake the student's world refers to the recurrent hints to the absence of a God and an allusion to his unfairness. Through Jude's disappointment when being refused to enter the university because poor and belonging to a lower class. Thomas Hardy depicts the existence of a supreme power, a divine providence that deprived Jude of his ambitions and reduced him to yield to his fated unfortunate life while it gave the opportunity to others like Phillotson. Furthermore, the notion of the punitive God that the novelist shows through Sue's relapse after te death of the children, deepens his religious distrust. By the end of the novel, Jude's destiny, Thomas Hardy concludes mockingly, made him died desperate an alone. 

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. Its hero Jude Fawley is a lower-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar. The two other main characters are his earthy wife, Arabella, and his intellectual cousin, Sue. Themes include class, scholarship, religion, marriage, and the modernisation of thought and society.

Description

 The novel has an elaborately structured plot, in which subtle details and accidents lead to the characters' ruin. It also develops many different themes. These include how human loneliness and sexuality can stop a person from trying to fulfil his dreams; how, when free from the trap of marriage, one's dreams will not be fulfilled if one is of a lower status; how the educated classes are often more like sophists than intellectuals; how living a libertine life full of integrity and passion will be condemned as scandalous in traditional society; and how religion is nothing but a mistaken sense that the tragedies that wear down an individual are the result of having sinned against a higher being.

As in most of Hardy's novels except, perhaps, for Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy manipulates the downfall of his characters like a sadistic god—as if he were a true believer in a deity that was not a redeemer but a cruel monster (a motif frequently called a "rigged doom").

There are strong autobiographical references to Hardy's own life in Jude the Obscure. Hardy, himself a stonemason in earlier years, also did not go to university, and his first wife, Emma Gifford, also became more and more religious as years passed.

Plot summary

The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, a village stonemason in the fictional southwest English region of Wessex who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on Oxford, England. In his sparse spare time, working for his aunt's bakery, he teaches himself Greek and Latin. Before he can try to enter the university, the naïve Jude is manipulated into marrying a rather coarse and superficial local girl, Arabella Donn, who deserts him within two years. By this time, he had abandoned the classics altogether.

After she leaves, he moves to Christminster from his village and supports himself as a mason while studying alone, hoping to be able to enter the university later (he never will). There, he meets and falls in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead. Sue and Jude also meet the latter's former schoolteacher, Mr Phillotson, who marries Sue some time later. Sue is attracted to the normality of her married life but quickly finds the relationship an unhappy one because, besides being in love with Jude, she is physically disgusted by her husband (and, apparently, by sexual relations in general).

Sue eventually leaves Phillotson for Jude. Sue and Jude spend some time living together without any sexual relationship because Sue does not want one. They are also both afraid to get married because their family has a history of tragic marriages, and because they think being legally obliged to love one another might destroy their love. Jude eventually convinces Sue to sleep with him, and several children are born. They are also bestowed with a child "of an intelligent age" from Jude's first marriage, whom Jude did not know about earlier. He is named Jude and nicknamed "Little Father Time".

Jude and Sue are socially ostracized for living together unmarried, especially after the children are born. Jude's employers always dismiss him when they find out, and landlords evict them. The precocious Little Father Time, observing the problems he and his siblings are causing their parents, murders Sue's two children by strangling them with box cord and then commits suicide by hanging himself. He leaves a note reading: Done because we are too menny [sic].

The shock of these events pushes Sue into a crisis of religious guilt. Although horrified at the thought of resuming her physical relationship with Phillotson, she nevertheless returns to him and becomes his wife again. Jude, demoralized, is tricked into remarrying Arabella. After one final, desperate visit to Sue carried out in horrible weather, Jude becomes seriously ill and dies within the year, while Arabella is out courting a doctor.

Reviews

Called "Jude the Obscene" by at least one reviewer[1], Jude the Obscure received so harsh a reception from scandalized critics that Hardy stopped writing novels altogether, producing only poetry and drama for the rest of his life.

Jude was first published under the title The Simpletons; and then Hearts Insurgent in the European and American editions of Harper's New Monthly MaHeart of Darkness is a novella by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.

This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Charles Marlow as he recounts, at dusk and into the evening, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.

The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company, on what readers may assume is the Congo River, in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II; the country is never specifically named. Though his job is transporting ivory downriver, Marlow quickly develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent in the employ of the government. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. 

Background

In writing the novella, Conrad drew inspiration from his own experience in the Congo: eight and a half years before writing the book, he had served as the captain of a Congo steamer. However he soon became ill and returned to Europe soon after. Some of Conrad's experiences in the Congo, and the story's historic background, including possible models for Kurtz, are recounted in Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost.

The story-within-a-story device that Conrad chose for Heart of Darkness — one in which an unnamed narrator recounts Marlow's recounting of his journey — has many literary precedents. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used a similar device, but the best examples of the framed narrative include Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian Nights and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Motifs and themes

The motif of "darkness" from the title recurs throughout the book. It is used to reflect the unknown, the concept of the "darkness of barbarism" contrasted with the "light of civilization" and the ambiguity of both - the dark motives of civilization and the freedom of barbarism, as well as the "spiritual darkness" of several characters. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity — again, in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Moral issues are not clear-cut; that which ought to be (in various senses) on the side of "light" is in fact mired in darkness, and vice versa.

Africa was known as "The Dark Continent" in the Victorian Era with all the negative attributes of darkness attributed to the Africans by Europeans. The lavishly praised, finest, most civilized and estimable flower of European civilization is represented by the character "Kurtz"; but Kurtz is actually the bloodiest, most evil, violent and monstrous—hence the "darkest"—character in the book. This contradiction is ultimately a criticism of the Victorian perception of Western Culture being the heart of "Civilization". One of the probable models for the Kurtz character was Henry Morton Stanley of "Dr. Livingston; I presume" fame, as he was a principal explorer of "The Dark Heart Of Africa", particularly the Congo. Stanley was infamous in Africa for horrific violence and yet he was honoured by a knighthood.

To emphasize the theme of darkness within all of mankind, Marlow's narration takes place on a yawl in the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, Marlow recounts how London, the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world at the time (where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived), was itself a "dark" place in Roman times. The theme of darkness lurking beneath the surface of even "civilized" persons is further explored through the character of Kurtz and through Marlow's passing sense of understanding with the Africans.

Themes developed in the novella's later scenes include the naïveté of Europeans — particularly women — regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the British traders and Belgian colonialists' abuse of the natives; and man's potential for duplicity. The symbolic levels of the book expand on all of these in terms of a struggle between good and evil, not so much between people as within every major character's soul.

Throughout the novel Conrad dramatises a tension in his narrator Marlow between the restraint of civilization and the savagery of barbarism. The darkness and amorality which is exemplified by Kurtz is argued to be the reality of the human condition, upon which illusory moral structures are imposed by civilization. Marlow's confrontation with Kurtz presents him with a 'choice of nightmares' - to commit himself to the savagery of the human condition, or to the lie and veneer of civilized restraint. Though Marlow 'cannot abide a lie' and subsequently cannot perceive civilization as anything but a veneer hiding the savage reality of the human condition, he is also horrified by the darkness of Kurtz he sees in his own heart. After emerging from this experience, his Buddha like pose aboard the Neille symbolises a suspension between this choice of nightmares.

Controversy

In a post-colonial reading, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe famously criticized the Heart of Darkness in his 1975 lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness.", saying the novel de-humanised Africans, denied them language and culture, and reduced them to a metaphorical extension of the dark and dangerous jungle into which the Europeans venture. Achebe's lecture prompted a lively debate, reactions at the time ranged from dismay and outrage - Achebe recounted a professor emeritus from the University of Massachusetts saying to Achebe after the lecture, "How dare you upset everything we have taught, everything we teach? Heart of Darkness is the most widely taught text in the university in this country. So how dare you say it’s different?"[1] to Cedric Watts' A Bloody Racist: About Achebe's View of Conrad (1983),[2] which sets out to refute Achebe's critique. Other critiques include Hugh Curtler's Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness (1997).

In King Leopold's Ghost (1998), Adam Hochschild argues that literary scholars have made too much of the psychological aspects of Heart of Darkness while scanting the moral horror of Conrad's accurate recounting of the methods and effects of colonialism.