A Brief History of the British Novel

A Brief History of the British Novel • Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (part 1, 1605; part 2, 1615) most often cited as first novel • F.Y.I. • Tale of Genji (c. 1000 A.D.) by Shikibu Murasaki, Japanese court lady • La Princesse de Cleves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette • Oroonoko (1678) by Aphra Behn, the first English woman to support herself as a writer

17th Century: the old word "romance" gave way to the new word "novel" which denoted short histories

Prior to the British Novel? • Religious writing such as John Bunyan’s prose allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress • Drama such as Restoration Plays • Essays, including Jonathan Swift’s satirical tracts: “Tale of a Tub” (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729) • Poetry, including Alexander Pope’s mock heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock (1712) • Periodicals/journalism • Travelogues • Autobiographies

The Novel Emerges • Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722) • Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747-48) • Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) • Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759) • Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Explosion of the Novel 1750 – 1900 • Tremendous growth in literacy • Related growth in publication of novels • To reach growing audience, novels published in three-volume editions for lending libraries or installments in literary periodicals and popular magazines • Women able to break into the historically male dominated literary profession, many using noms de plums for fear of not having work taken seriously

Romance Initially romance referred to medieval/ chivalric romances written in French and composed in verse about knightly adventures, courtly love, chivalric ideals By 17th century, term applied to any medieval romance, prose or verse, from any country of origin Focus is on chivalry; supernatural characterizes world rather than the gods or their will per epics

Romanticism Literary movement occurring in England from 1798 – 1837 Emphasis on the imagination or emotions Psychological component: landscape is outward manifestation of hero or heroine’s inner state, i.e. emotions and mental stability → despairing character will stumble into a cave; temptation likely to be encountered in deep forest vs. wide, sunny moor Involves a romantic quest for some ideal, forbidden, lost, or otherwise unreachable

Gothic Literature First Gothic novel = Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) Characterized by • Grandiose, gloomy, and bleak settings • General mood of decay • Dramatic and generally violent or otherwise disturbing action • Destructively passionate loves

The marriage between Romantics and the Gothic Novel • Romantics found in the Gothic a freedom of spirit, variety, and mystery that meshed well with their own emphasis on individuality, imagination, and sublimity. • Jane Eyre is sometimes classified as a Gothic novel: • Dark, mysterious castles full of secret passageways and seemingly supernatural phenomena • Heroes & heroines with mysterious, dark histories and secrets of their own • Hero = man known for power and charisma more than for personal goodness • Heroine = challenged to win hero’s love without being destroyed in the process

Victorian Period in English Literature 1837 - 1901 • Divided into two parts: • early Victorian Period ending around 1870 • late Victorian Period commencing thereafter • Influences: rapid technological, political socioeconomic change due to Industrial Revolution; scientific advancement; challenge of longstanding religious ideas and institutions • Reading novels became a popular pastime; novels directly connected to issues and concerns of contemporary society

Major Literary Movements of Victorian Period • Realism: • developed in latter half of 19th century as an attempt to “write reality” in reaction to the excesses of Romanticism • focuses on objective presentation of details and events rather than subjective concentration on personal feelings, perceptions, and imaginings of characters • Rely heavily on local color, attempting to accurately portray customs, speech, dress, and living and working conditions of chosen locale • Characterization is critical element of work

Pre-Raphaelitism: • Inspired by Pre-Raphaelite art • Noted for crisp descriptions and sensuous details • Heavily symbolic, demonstrating power to suggest metaphysical states and indicate philosophical and theological truths • Aestheticism: • Separated art from morality, insisting that art need not be moral to have value: art for art’s sake

Victorian Literature: Not So Prudish • Segments of English society, notably the growing middle class, did espouse attitudes that led to conception of era as prudish, hypocritical, stuffy, narrow-minded, and complacent • Many Victorian writers carefully dance around subjects such as sex (“Lie back and think of England” – Queen Victoria to daughter on wedding night?!) However, . . .

Literature of the period came in many forms and genres including satire (Oscar Wilde), nonsense verse (Lewis Carroll), romance (Brontë sisters), etc.

Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 - 1901 The Victorian Era • Etiquette – Era popularly known as "prudish," "repressed," and "old fashioned." However . . .

Industrial Age – time of great innovation with advances in science and technology • Darwinism – ideas related to survival of the fittest as applied both to biology and sociology; religious questioning and doubt • Social change – rise of middle class; rapid changes led to modern movements in democracy, feminism, unionization of workers, socialism, Marxism

Ever-changing Role of Women in Victorian Society • 1840’s petitions began circulating for women’s suffrage • 1848, women began attending University of London • Married Women’s Property Acts in 1882 secured women’s rights to maintain property ownership after marriage • Industrial Revolution opened doors for lower class women to work in factories

A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women; Together with a Few Observations Thereon . Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith, 1827–1891 • If her father or mother die intestate (without a will) she takes an equal share with her brothers and sisters of the personal property, but her eldest brother, if she have one, and his children, even daughters, will take the real property, as the heir‐at‐law; males and their issue being preferred to females. • The professions of law and medicine,*whether or not closed by law, are closed in fact. They may engage in trade, and may occupy inferior situations . . . *Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., received her diploma in America before she walked St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.

Married women no legal existence. • A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her acts; she lives under his protection or cover, and her condition is called coverture. A husband has a right to the person of his wife. • A woman’s body belongs to her husband; she is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus. Her personal property becomes his. • What was her personal property before marriage, such as money in hand, money at the bank, jewels, household goods, clothes, &c., becomes absolutely her husband’s, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not.

A mother’s rights over children. • The legal custody of children belongs to the father. During the life‐time of a sane father, the mother has no rights over her children, except a limited power over infants, and the father may take them from her and dispose of them as he thinks fit.

The consent of the father or guardians is necessary to the marriage of an infant ( i.e. id est , a person under twenty‐one), unless the marriage takes place by banns. The consent of the mother is not necessary if there be a father or a guardian appointed by him. • A lunatic or idiot cannot lawfully contract a marriage, but insanity after marriage does not make the marriage null and void.

Poor Victorian Children • Lived in much smaller houses or even single rooms; lacked the extravagant toys, clothes or fine foods that wealthy children enjoyed • Families were closer, but not necessarily more loving • Parents had 10 or 12 or even more children, thinking of them as income and sending them to work public jobs to help support their families

Wealthy Victorian Children “overwhelming sense of boredom and the constant prodding to be proper and polite with very little parent to child communication” • a “sad, redundant and affection-less existence” • raised by a nanny; saw parents only during specified period daily

The Victorian Governess • Raised the children of wealthy families; typically a substitute parent • Responsible for instilling manners, education, propriety, how to dress, etc. per parents’ direction • Often middle-aged, single, intolerant, strict, and even mean • Walked precarious line as member of middle class who was paid as a servant

Bonnie G. Smith summarizes the agony of the governess in her Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700: The governess in the nineteenth century personified a life of intense misery. She was also that most unfortunate individual; the single, middle-class woman who had to earn her own living. Although being a governess might be a degradation, employing one was a sign of culture and means . . . The psychological situation of the governess made her position unenviable. Her presence created practical difficulties within the Victorian home because she was neither a servant nor a member of the family. She was from the social level of the family, but the fact that she was paid a salary put her at the economic level of the servants.

Middle Class and Orphan Schools • The Illustrated London News praised Rev. C. Woodstock’s efforts to create a successful school to educate middle class boys and prepare local orphans for a life of service (July, 1861)

St. Andrew’s College and Industrial Schools had 80 orphans in the Industrial School who were responsible for the upkeep of the school for the middle class children: “The difficulty of retaining any adequate number of his poor parishioners at the good schools which he earlier provided, induced the Vicar, the Rev. C. Woodstock, to add industrial teaching to his national school; but, as housework for the girls, who are trained for service, could not easily be found without a large establishment, the greater part of the children are lodged and boarded in the village, and the whole of the cooking, washing, and house-cleaning is done by the pupils, under the superintendence of a matron and housekeeper.”

Victorian Era boarding schools

The “primary function” of education “was to fit people for their place in the social order” (Dr. Bruce Rosen, The Victorian Web)

Jane Eyre • Historical Context • How was England organized politically? • Was there a great difference between social classes, and what made the difference? • What sort of education was open to children?

The Cult of the Brontës • The Brontë siblings created and wrote about imaginary world they called Angria, forming their own literary community in father’s parsonage • Charlotte, the center of this literary “cult” later wrote of the “strange life — outwardly empty, inwardly rich — which they led as children: Charlotte herself, looking back on the years at Haworth, wrote of their feeling of being "buried with inferior minds." (David Cody, Assistant Professor of English, Hartwick College)

Charlotte was “possessed of a remarkably complex character: she was indomitably honest, tenacious, stoic, full of integrity and determination and independence of thought, enthusiastic, passionate, and yet emotionally insecure, shy, sensitive, physically frail, secretly obsessed with her own ugliness — she was thin, short, and plain, with a reddish face, missing teeth and an overhanging brow, though friends speak of her lovely eyes and beautiful hair — and prone to psychosomatic illnesses.” David Cody, Assistant Professor of English, Hartwick College

“It is no accident that all of her novels are secretly fairy tales, variations on the Cinderella theme. Her adolescent fantasies set in the imaginary country called, significantly, Angria, were reworked, as she matured, into great novels, all of them concerned with doomed, ardent, sensitive, lonely, passionate heroines who are versions of herself” (David Cody, Assistant Professor of English, Hartwick College)

Victorian literature  female characters trapped and repressed, marrying for the wrong reasons, disillusioned with family life, and relying on their physical beauty as a means to gain attention and advancement. And then, along came the character Jane Eyre considered groundbreaking and bold. “Jane is a heroine battling the same societal limitations as her literary counterparts, but her raw narrative voice never fails to expose her Romantic sensibilities, psychological depth, and her adamant desire to stay true to herself.”

“You are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep. There, sit down, and think over your wickedness” (11).

“You ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs. Reed: she keeps you: if she were to turn you off, you would have to go the poor house” (11).

Universal Themes • Suffering through social class prejudice • Exhibiting loyalty to those we love • Surviving a difficult childhood • Longing for family • Appreciating gender issues

Feminist or Not? • Progressive in her beliefs • Described as one of the first modern women of her time, but unlike emerging 19th century feminists, withdrew from a society that would not entirely accept her, using her writing to express her stifled ideals • Novels “speak volumes for the oppressed woman” who was considered little more than a social adornment and bearer of offspring

Brontë spoke of the evils of the condition of women, deep-rooted within the structure of the social system (Moers, 18). She believed passion a temporary emotion that could easily give way to disgust, or worse, indifference. "God help the woman who is left to love passionately and alone" (Gaskell, Chap IX).

“Charlotte rejected the use of sexuality to attract men in any form, and criticized women who resorted to this female characteristic as lacking self-respect, a fate she deemed worse than death . . . Concealed by anonymity, she created heroines with genuine ideas and erudite views, who, above all, respected themselves, and wern’t afraid to declare it. For Charlotte Brontë, it was the ideal emotional outlet ”. (Melissa Lowes, MFA)

George P. Landow, professor of English and Art History at Brown University, cites R.B. Martin, author of Charlotte Bronte's Novels: The Accents of Persuasion who argues that Bronte’s novel is essentially pre-feminist: “frequently cited as the earliest major feminist novel, although there is not a hint in the book of any desire for political, legal, educational, or even intellectual equality between the sexes. Miss Bronte asks only for the simple — or is it the most complex? — recognition that the same heart and the same spirit animate both men and women, and that love is the pairing of equals in these spheres. . . . The famous plea that women ought not to be confined 'to making pudding and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags' [Chap. 12] is not propaganda for equal employment but for a recognition of woman's emotional nature. The condemnation of women to a place apart results in the creation of empty, capricious women like Blanche Ingram, who tyrannize over men whenever possible, indulge in dreams of Corsair lovers, and can communicate only in the Byronic language of outdated romantic fiction. Only equals like Jane and Rochester dare to speak truth couched in language of unadorned directness.”

And so the big question is . . . Did Jane stay true to herself? Was Charlotte Bronte an early feminist? What does it mean to “write like a girl”?

Opening Reflection • Read, annotate, and then re-read Author’s Preface to the Second Edition • Paraphrase and explain Bronte’s response to her critics, the “timorous or carping few who doubt the tendency of such books as Jane Eyre”: What is the criticism? What distinctions does Bronte outline for these critics? • Respond to Bronte’s preface. What do you think of the points she makes? What predictions do you have about the text now that you have read this preface? How are you feeling about reading Jane Eyre?

A Brief History of the British Novel