ENGLISH LITERATURTE AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH CENTURY: HENRY JAMES, JOSEPH CONRAD
The period of transition
The last decade of the 19th century until World War I may be called a period of transition.
In the early 20th Century English fiction challenged the moral and psychological assumptions on which the traditional Victorian novel had rested.
Loss of faith
The most pervasive feature of modern English fiction is that both many writers and readers lost faith in the traditional ways of seeing the world.
Alienation, deracination, quest for selfhood and personal freedom are its recurrent themes.
Historical background
The British Empire, which had expanded under Queen Victoria throughout most of the 19th century, began to disintegrate in the early 20th Century.
The aristocracy and the upper classes exerted less influence.
Institutions became more democratic.
In 1928 women obtained universal suffrage.
At the turn of the century fiction was still dominated by novelists who had already achieved distinction during the Victorian Age Thomas Hardy and Henry James.
Henry James
Henry James (1843-1916) was an American who spent much of his life in Britain and eventually he became a British subject.
He was a precursor of the modern novel.
James prepared the foundations for a new theory of fiction in his famous essay The Art of Fiction (1884).
He believed that the novel is the best form of art for expressing the truth of life.
He attacked Victorian sentimentality and naive didacticism.
His prose is difficult to read as it consists of long-complex sentences. James modified narrative technique.
The key elements in his novels are the invisible narrator and different points of view.
James's narrator reveals the characters' subjective consciousness.
James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of works of literary criticism.
James's literary output is usually divided into three phases:
(1) early realism,
(2) psychological realism and
(3) the `major phase', which was characterised by experiments in narrative techniques.
Among James' masterpieces are:
Daisy Miller (1879), where the young and innocent American, Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication;
The Portrait of A Lady (1881), where again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels in Europe;
The Bostonians (1886) was set in the era of the rising feminist movement;
The Wings Of The Dove (1902) a heritage destroys the love of a young couple.
James was interested in psychology.
In his fiction he described complex inner lives of his characters.
He also described the impact of the European civilisation on the American mind.
He saw a contrast between naive and innocent Americans and sophisticated but false and deceptive European culture.
James' American characters are usually victims of their European counterparts.
However, they achieve freedom through perception and understanding of their situation.
The first period of James's fiction, usually considered to have culminated in The Portrait of a Lady, concentrated on the contrast between Europe and America. The style of these novels is generally straightforward and, though personally characteristic, well within the norms of 19th century fiction.
The Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer, an American heiress and free thinker travels to Europe to find herself. She tactfully rebuffs the advances of Caspar Goodwood, another American who has followed her to England. Her cousin, Ralph Touchett, wise but sickly becomes a soulmate of sorts for her.
She makes an unfortunate alliance with the creepy Madame Merle who leads her to make an even more unfortunate alliance with Gilbert Osmond, a smooth but cold collector of Objets' de art who seduces her with an intense but unattainable sexuality.
Isabel marries Osmond only to realize she's just another piece of art for his collection and that Madame Merle and Osmond are lovers who had hatched a diabolical scheme to take Isabel's fortune.
Isabel's only comfort is the innocent daughter of Osmond, Pansy, but even that friendship is spoiled when Merle reveals the child's true parentage.
Isabel finally breaks free of Osmond and returns to Ralph's bedside, where, while breathing his last, they both realize how truly connected they are, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller travels to Europe with her rather simple mother. She is innocent and naive. Her behaviour is sometimes shocking to Europeans, but she has dignity and honesty.
Daisy dies of malaria in Rome after spending an evening with Giovanelli at the Colloseum;
Winterbourne, Giovanelli represent two different points of view
The Wings of the Dove
Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two engaged Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn't reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud's. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.
With Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she's afraid that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn't quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.
With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice palazzo (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called "Palazzo Leporelli" in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, Densher will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate's idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he'll go along with her plan.
Which Kate does, memorably. Aunt Maud and Kate return to London while Densher remains with Milly. Unfortunately, the dying girl learns from a former suitor of Kate's about the plot to get her money. She "turns her face to the wall" and grows very ill. Densher sees her one last time before he leaves for London, where he eventually receives news of Milly's death.
Milly does leave him a large amount of money despite everything. But Densher won't touch the money, and he won't marry Kate unless she also refuses the bequest. Conversely, if Kate chooses the money instead of him, Densher offers to make the bequest over to her in full. The lovers part on the novel's final page with a cryptic exclamation from Kate: "We shall never be again as we were!"
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad or Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (1857-1924) is regarded by some as one of the greatest novelists writing in the English language although it was not his native tongue.
He was also the first English writer who gave an artistic expression of anxieties which pervaded the new century: crisis of values and questioning of traditional moral axioms.
Conrad's works represent the transition from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century.
Many critics have placed him as a forerunner of modernism.
Conrad's life
Conrad, whose original name was Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, was born near Berdychuv, Poland (now in Ukraine), the son of a Polish noble.
From his father the boy acquired a love of literature, including romantic tales of the sea. He was orphaned at the age of 12, and when he was 16 years old he left Russian-occupied Poland and made his way to Marseille, France.
For the next four years he worked on French ships, … and became involved in a love affair that brought him to the brink of suicide. He then entered the British merchant service, becoming a master mariner and a naturalized British subject in 1886; a few years later he changed his name to sound more English.
For the next decade he travelled widely, mostly in eastern waters.
Conrad's experiences, especially in the Malay Archipelago and on the Congo River in 1890, are reflected in his writing, which was done in English, his fourth language (after Russian, Polish, and French).
Conrad penetrated in his fiction the obscure places of the human heart and showed how man`s life could be wrecked or sustained by his dreams or illusions.
His fiction provides analysis of the moral situation of man.
His characters are alienated people.
The key words of Conrad's moral code included: responsibility, faithfulness, and honour.
Conrad's hero is an alienated individual lost in a morally indifferent world.
Analysis of the moral situation of man;
the first modern writer who expressed the anxieties of the new century;
Crisis of values,
Ideals may be false;
There is no simple division into good an devil;
Conrad's moral code: responsibility, faithfulness, and honour;
One has to fulfil one's duties;
Ideals = illusions;
Conrad's hero: a lonely person lost in a morally indifferent world
Heart of Darkness (1900)
investigates greed and egoism which are hidden behind the idealistic slogans of trading companies in Africa.
Heart of Darkness
Narrator: Marlow
Settings: London barge on the Thames River (the story is narrated by Marlow from a barge on the Thames); the Congo although Conrad does not explicitly state that the novel is set in Africa; Central Station - This is the station where Marlow meets the accountant and observes the way the whites do nothing but exploit the blacks to do pointless labour; Inner Station: This is the station where Kurtz works and where Marlow finds him being worshipped by the savages.
Main characters: Marlow and Kurtz; (Kurtz embodied the highest aspirations of the 19th Century; artist; liberal at first; he wanted to bring enlightenment to dark Africa; dissociation between reality and aspirations;
Genre/Style: a short novel; a parable full or irony and deception; retrospective narration (flashback); foreshadowing and suspense
Themes:
criticism of colonialism;
a psychological study which tells us about people's subconscious life;
an analysis of the deterioration of the white man's morality when it is let loose from European standards;
greed, egoism hidden behind idealistic declarations of trading companies;
analysis of human consciousness; the dark heart of mankind;
Images:
images of modernity are contrasted with images of primitivity; savages - Africans, Europeans (Kurtz has been transformed into a horrifying savage;
breakdown of modernity (boats fall apart, there are rivets to mend them; roads are not built, the decay of the industrial revolution;
images of darkness and blackness - black men in the bush; the black/green jungle; godlessness - dark is evil; images of diseases that plague Europeans;
Marlow is horrified by the inefficiency of colonialism
Significance:
the metaphor of the river (The Thames - “a waterway leading to the uttermost of ends of the earth; and the Congo River - both rivers are interconnected symbolically;
London seen at a distance from the barge - a “monstrous town”); Conrad rejected the religion of progress; the Europeans who try to bring roads (civilisation) to the Congo are defeated; they are plagued with African diseases;
Lord Jim
In Lord Jim (1900), the title hero, who is chief mate on the steamship "Patna„ makes a voyage towards Mecca with a group of pilgrims. At some point the ship begins to sink, the crew abandon the ship without giving assistance to the passengers. Jim also jumps into the sea. However, it turns out that the ship has not sunk and most of the passengers are rescued. Jim is tried at the Court of Inquiry in Aden. He is forbidden to work as a seaman. Jim takes different jobs ashore.
Again he makes a wrong decision and feels responsible for the death of a young boy. Finally he allows himself to be killed by an angry and grieving father. In the novel, Conrad reveals Jim's consciousness and analyses the problem of individual responsibility. Jim is a romantic dreamer who cannot cope with the realities of life.
Setting: “Patna”, Patusan
Characters: Jim - romantic hero; Stein - philosopher, scientist, sentimental German; Jewel, half-Malayan girl, Marlow (“Jim is one of us”); Brown - bandit; Cornelius - Jewel's step father , he hates Jim; Jim spares Brown's life and lets him and his and sail away; Cornelius helps Brown to prepare revenge; massacre of the local people;
Theme: study of the psychic of a romantic youth, who wants to redeem a moment of cowardice; a study of the psychic of a weak young man; when Jim devotes his life, it makes no sense
Genre: a new type of Bildungsroman - development of the protagonist's self knowledge quest for selfhood).