Età Vittoriana: Browning, Hardy, Stevenson and Wilde

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Letteratura Inglese
Download:	400
Data:	14.12.2009
Numero di pagine:	6
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

ROBERT BROWNING

Robert Browning is the great exponent to the Victorian poetry and he was deeply interested in the working of the human mind. He is particularly associated with the dramatic monologue. The dramatic monologue has some characteristics: an individual, who is not the poet, ‘speaks’ the poem in a specific situation at a critical moment. He addresses with someone else and the main effect is the unintentional revelation of his true character. He called objective his poems because they are opposed by the objective lyrics of the Romantics. His stories are told by an actor and not by the poet. His style is colloquial and he tends to reproduce the spoken speech.
Robert Browning’s great works are ‘The Ring and the Book’ and ‘Dramatic Romances and Lyrics’. The extract we can read is ‘A heart… too soon made glad’, which belongs to the ‘My Last Duchess’. The setting is the castle of the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II D’Este and he spoke about his forst wife, who he killed after 3 years of marriage (1561). His wife’s name is Lucrezia and the monologue is written in the 1843.
The Duke spoke about a portrait in the wall to an envoy sent to arrange the details of a second marriage with the Count’s daughter. He reveals that he killed his wife because he was jealous and his wife thanked men for their worthless gifts and she didn’t thank him at the same.

THOMAS HARDY

He was born in the Dorset – a country in the south-west of England. In 1862 – for five years- he moved to London to work as an architect. When he returned to Dorset he married and started his career as a novelist; his most important plays are ‘Far from Madding Crowd’, ‘Tess of d’Urbervilles’, Jude the Obscure’. He abandoned the novel and devote himself to poetry. Hardy is considered one of the most important exponent of the regional novel and naturalism. He set his novels in the Wessex (ancian name for the rural countries of Hampshire and Dorset). The theories of Darwin and the evolution influenced Hardy he was forced to accept these theories. His characters are crushed by circumstances.
The novel reflected the influence of DETERMINISM, where the people succumb to the natural laws and natural processes, despite their hopes and ambitions.
The society is cruel but the natural world is coldly indifferent. Hardy stresses the smallness of his characters against the backdrop of the indifferent and hostile world of nature.
In Tess of d’Urbervilles, when she escaped with Angel, the police represent the social forces. Stonehenge and the landscape represented the hostile nature where man doesn’t’ enjoy a privilege position but he must struggle for his own survivor.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

He was born in Edinburgh and he studied law. When he was a child he had suffered from ill health, nevertheless he took up a life of adventure and travelling. His famous story is ‘Treasure Island’, after that he returned to London and started his career as a writer. He dedicated all his life for his works and he deserves recognition for his imaginative powers alone. His technique is formal and sophisticated, the narrative technique is based on letters and diaries.
Stevenson divides good and evil. In ‘Treasure Adventure’ it’s marked because those forces fought each others, but in ‘The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, evil triumphs and, slowly, destroys good.
While Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein combined the pieces of corps and brought biological laws, Jekyll interferes with man’s psychological and moral nature because the evil, in contrast with good, is inside the man. Stevenson combined these Gothic motifs with a new genre of novel (pre- Freudian).
He narrated in third person, the narrator is omniscient, various characters had the point of view, so the knowledge in incomplete and it gives suspense to the story. He used as technique the letters, in fact the end of the story and the truth is revealed by letters.
In this story appears the dualism between good and evil, man’s ego and libido. Stevenson want to think to the reader if the desire to be good is illusory or if men have to give space to the irrational impulses.
Story → It’s the last chapter, where Jekyll’s law and Utterson found two letters (one of Dr. Lanyon and one of Jekyll) and the Mr Hyde’s corp. In Dr Lanyon’s letter he said that he knows Jekyll’s secret, but in his letter, Jekyll explains the real situation about Mr Hyde and him.
Riassunto → Dr Jekyll said about his discovered and he said man has two personalities: one good and one evil, but he supposed that can exist three or four personalities, nobody knows. He tried to separate these personalities, in fact he narrated how he brought the ingredients and some elements, which are able to separate the two natures. When he drunk the potion, he knew that he risked death, but after that he felt some new emotions: he felt younger, lighter, happier in body and with a new heady recklessness. But when he drunk it he had a grinding in the bones and a deadly nausea; but the really change is the wicked: he lost his innocence. When he looked to the mirror, he saw a new man, his evil personality, Mr Hyde.

OSCAR WILDE

He was born in Dublin in 1854 and during his studies he excelled in Classics. He was very wit and afeter he moved to London, he made a lecture tour to the United States, where he met Constance and got married with her. Wilde was a very strange man, but also for this reason he was very popular. He published ‘The Happy prince of others tales’. ‘The portrait of W H’ and ‘The decay of Lying’ In the decade of decadence he published his most important novel ‘The picture of Dorian Gray’. His other important novels are ‘Lady Windermere’s fan’, ‘A woman of no importance’, ‘An ideal husband’ and ‘The importance to Being Earnest’. By that time he had a relation with a young homosexual, who accused Wilde, who was imprisoned for two years. In this period he wrote ‘The Ballard of Reading Gaol’ and ‘De profundis’. When he left the prison, he went into exile as ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ and died in Paris in 1900.
He wrote plays and prose narratives and he was a great social critic, in fact he used a frivolous tone. In his plays he criticized the upper classes but these critics are veiled with sparkling wit and surface diplomacy. He talked about taboo and he said that beauty and art are separated from morality. His works fascinated many moderns writers.
Wilde is the most important exponent of aestheticism, which celebrated beauty over standard codes of behaviour. This movement was born in France during the 19th century especially with Theophile Gautier and his ideal of ‘l’art pour art’.
Lord Wotton is the principal character who represents aestheticism. In his behaviour and his speech there is a note of decadence. Gautier, in fact, underlined that decadence was opposed to everything that was considered ‘natural’ both biologically and morally. He claimed that real beauty is unnatural and can only be produced by artifice. Unnaturalness and artifice are present in everything Wotton says or does.
The main characters of Wilde’s novel ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ are Lord Wotton and the young Dorian. Wotton has the sophistication, suavity and persuasiveness traditionally associated with the devil. It seems that Wilde is creating a 19th century reworking of the Faustus myth where Wotton plays the part of the devil or devil’s servant Mephistopheles, and Dorian plays the part of Faust that stays balanced between innocence and the promise of a special knowledge.
Dorian wanted to be young and he done a pact: he won’t be old, but his Basil’s portrait will be old for him. The first imperfections appears in the portrait when he falls in love with Sybil Vane, but she killed herself. Under Lord Wotton, Dorian became a vice but his portrait is getting old. When Dorian met Basil, he killed him and, then, when he saw his portrait he can’t tolerate his old imagine and cut the portrait. So he killed himself.
‘The importance to be Earnest’ is his most famous play with a central and complicated plot, which is ending with an happy end. This play shows the hypocritical face of the society, but repeats, however, the Victorian moral. Wilde uses a oblique because it isn’t declared or direct. He uses, also paradox and no-sense dialogues/ideals.
Wilde uses an absurd logic full of paradox, which attacks the commonplaces and destroys them. In fact in this play Earnest is a name and an adjective: we can translate the title as ‘L’importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto’ or ‘L’importanza di essere Onesto’. Wilde plays with the double meaning of the world. The play ends with the happy end as the Victorian Age wants.
The main character is Jack Worthing, who wants to escape by his dull life in the country. He invents a brother in London and he leaves to visit him. There, in London, he falls in love with Gwendolen, Algeron’s cousin, his friend. But when he proposes to the young lady, her mother forbids the marriage because she believes that Jack is a foundling. Jack has to find a mother and a father who can attest that Jack is their son and his name is really Earnest. In the end of the story Jack discovers that he is Algernon’s brother – because his absent-minded governess left him a hand-bag at Victoria Station – and his name is really Earnest.