The Victorian Age (1824? 1832? - 1901) - secondary sources

1. The Poetry

1. Alfred Lord Tennyson

Born in 1809, twenty years after the start of the French Revolution and toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Tennyson first began to achieve critical success with the publication of his Poems in 1842, a work that include "Ulysses," "Tithonus," and other famous short lyrics about mythical and philosophical subjects. At the time of publication, England had seen the death of Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and indeed all of the great Romantic poets except Wordsworth; Tennyson thus filled a lacuna in the English literary scene. In 1845, he began receiving a small government pension for his poetry. In 1850, Wordsworth, who had been Britain's Poet Laureate, died at the age of 80; upon the publication of "In Memoriam," Tennyson was named to succeed him in this honor. His later poetry primarily followed a narrative rather than lyrical style; as the novel began to emerge as the most popular literary form, poets began searching for new ways of telling stories in verse. As Poet Laureate, Tennyson represented the literary voice of the nation and, as such, he made occasional pronouncements on political affairs. In 1892, at the age of 83, he died of heart failure and was buried among his illustrious literary predecessors at Westminster Abbey. Although Tennyson was the most popular poet in England in his own day, he was often the target of mockery by his immediate successors, the Edwardians and Georgians of the early twentieth century.

The Lotos Eaters:

Of the poem

Odysseus tells his mariners to have courage, assuring them that they will soon reach the shore of their home. In the afternoon, they reach a land "in which it seemed always afternoon" because of the languid and peaceful atmosphere. The mariners sight this "land of streams" with its gleaming river flowing to the sea, its three snow-capped mountaintops, and its shadowy pine growing in the vale.

 

The mariners are greeted by the "mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters," whose dark faces appear pale against the rosy sunset. These Lotos-eaters come bearing the flower and fruit of the lotos, which they offer to Odysseus's mariners. Those who eat the lotos feel as if they have fallen into a deep sleep; they sit down upon the yellow sand of the island and can hardly perceive their fellow mariners speaking to them, hearing only the music of their heartbeat in their ears. Although it has been sweet to dream of their homes in Ithaca, the lotos makes them weary of wandering, preferring to linger here. One who has eaten of the lotos fruit proclaims that he will "return no more," and all of the mariners begin to sing about this resolution to remain in the land of the Lotos-eaters.

 

The rest of the poem consists of the eight numbered stanzas of the mariners' choric song, expressing their resolution to stay forever. First, they praise the sweet and soporific music of the land of the Lotos-eaters, comparing this music to petals, dew, granite, and tired eyelids. In the second stanza, they question why man is the only creature in nature who must toil. They argue that everything else in nature is able to rest and stay still, but man is tossed from one sorrow to another. Man's inner spirit tells him that tranquility and calmness offer the only joy, and yet he is fated to toil and wander his whole life.

 

In the third stanza, the mariners declare that everything in nature is allotted a lifespan in which to bloom and fade. As examples of other living things that die, they cite the "folded leaf, which eventually turns yellow and drifts to the earth, as well as the "full-juiced apple," which ultimately falls to the ground, and the flower, which ripens and fades. Next, in the fourth stanza, the mariners question the purpose of a life of labor, since nothing is cumulative and thus all our accomplishments lead nowhere. They question "what...will last," proclaiming that everything in life is fleeting and therefore futile. The mariners also express their desire for "long rest or death," either of which will free them from a life of endless labor.

 

The fifth stanza echoes the first stanza's positive appeal to luxurious self-indulgence; the mariners declare how sweet it is to live a life of continuous dreaming. They paint a picture of what it might be like to do nothing all day except sleep, dream, eat lotos, and watch the waves on the beach. Such an existence would enable them peacefully to remember all those individuals they once knew who are now either buried ("heaped over with a mound of grass") or cremated ("two handfuls of white dust, shut in an urn of brass!").

 

In the sixth stanza, the mariners reason that their families have probably forgotten them anyway, and their homes fallen apart, so they might as well stay in the land of the Lotos-eaters and "let what is broken so remain." Although they have fond memories of their wives and sons, surely by now, after ten years of fighting in Troy, their sons have inherited their property; it will merely cause unnecessary confusion and disturbances for them to return now. Their hearts are worn out from fighting wars and navigating the seas by means of the constellations, and thus they prefer the relaxing death-like existence of the Land of the Lotos to the confusion that a return home would create.

 

In the seventh stanza, as in the first and fifth, the mariners bask in the pleasant sights and sounds of the island. They imagine how sweet it would be to lie on beds of flowers while watching the river flow and listening to the echoes in the caves. Finally, the poem closes with the mariners' vow to spend the rest of their lives relaxing and reclining in the "hollow Lotos land." They compare the life of abandon, which they will enjoy in Lotos land, to the carefree existence of the Gods, who could not care less about the famines, plagues, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that plague human beings on earth. These Gods simply smile upon men, who till the earth and harvest crops until they either suffer in hell or dwell in the "Elysian valleys" of heaven. Since they have concluded that "slumber is more sweet than toil," the mariners resolve to stop wandering the seas and to settle instead in the land of the Lotos-eaters.

Form

The poem is divided into two parts: the first is a descriptive narrative (lines 1-45), and the second is a song of eight numbered stanzas of varying length (lines 46-173). The first part of the poem is written in nine-line Spenserian stanzas, so called because they were employed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene. The rhyme scheme of the Spenserian stanza is a closely interlinked ABABBCBCC, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the final line an Alexandrine (or line of six iambic feet). The choric song follows a far looser structure: both the line-length and the rhyme scheme vary widely among the eight stanzas.

Further Brief Commentary

This poem is loosely based on the story of Odysseus's mariners described in scroll IX of Homer's Odyssey. Homer writes about a storm that blows the great hero's mariners off course as they attempt to journey back from Troy to their homes in Ithaca. They come to a land where people do nothing but eat lotos (the Greek for our English "lotus"), a flower so delicious that some of his men, upon tasting it, lose all desire to return to Ithaca and long only to remain in the Land of the Lotos. Odysseus must drag his men away so that they can resume their journey home. In this poem, Tennyson powerfully evokes the mariners' yearning to settle into a life of peacefulness, rest, and even death.

 

The poem draws not only on Homer's Odyssey, but also on the biblical Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. In the Bible, a "life of toil" is Adam's punishment for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: after succumbing to the temptation of the fruit, Adam is condemned to labor by the sweat of his brow. Yet in this poem, fruit (the lotos) provides a release from the life of labor, suggesting an inversion of the biblical story.

 

Tennyson provides a tempting and seductive vision of a life free from toil. His description of the Lotos Land rivals the images of pleasure in Milton's "L'Allegro" and Marvell's "The Garden." Yet his lush descriptive passages are accompanied by persuasive rhetoric; nearly every stanza of the choric song presents a different argument to justify the mariners' resolution to remain in the Lotos Land. For example, in the second stanza of the song the mariners express the irony of the fact that man, who is the pinnacle and apex of creation, is the only creature made to toil and labor all the days of his life. This stanza may also be read as a pointed inversion and overturning of Coleridge's "Work without Hope," in which the speaker laments that "all nature seems at work" while he alone remains unoccupied.

 

Although the taste of the lotos and the vision of life it offers is seductive, the poem suggests that the mariners may be deceiving themselves in succumbing to the hypnotic power of the flower. Partaking of the lotos involves abandoning external reality and living instead in a world of appearances, where everything "seems" to be but nothing actually is: the Lotos Land emerges as "a land where all things always seemed the same" (line 24). Indeed, the word "seems" recurs throughout the poem, and can be found in all but one of the opening five stanzas, suggesting that the Lotos Land is not so much a "land of streams" as a "land of seems." In addition, in the final stanza of the choric song, the poem describes the Lotos Land as a "hollow" land with "hollow" caves, indicating that the vision of the sailors is somehow empty and insubstantial.

 

The reader, too, is left with ambivalent feelings about the mariners' argument for lassitude. Although the thought of life without toil is certainly tempting, it is also deeply unsettling. The reader's discomfort with this notion arises in part from the knowledge of the broader context of the poem: Odysseus will ultimately drag his men away from the Lotos Land disapprovingly; moreover, his injunction to have "courage" opens--and then overshadows--the whole poem with a sense of moral opprobrium. The sailors' case for lassitude is further undermined morally by their complaint that it is unpleasant "to war with evil" (line 94); are they too lazy to do what is right? By choosing the Lotos Land, the mariners are abandoning the sources of substantive meaning in life and the potential for heroic accomplishment. Thus in this poem Tennyson forces us to consider the ambiguous appeal of a life without toil: although all of us share the longing for a carefree and relaxed existence, few people could truly be happy without any challenges to overcome, without the fire of aspiration and the struggle to make the world a better place.

And Another Take

Lord Alfred Tennyson's "The Lotos Eaters" is a construct of contrasts. Drawing from Homer's Odyssey, Tennyson creates a lyrical poem in which romance and Victorian principles collide. Based on the incident when Odysseus' ship lands on the island of the Lotus Eaters,

On the tenth day we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters, who live on a food that comes from a kind of flowerÉ the Lotus-eaters, who did them no hurt, but gave them to eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return." (Book IX of Homer's Odyssey).

Tennyson's poem focuses on the mariner's desire to remain on this island that offers a life of passive oblivion. Through the persuasive rhetoric of the Lotus-eaters, Tennyson presents an enticing view of a life free from labor while seemingly condemning the implicit evils of such a choice. In doing so, he compares and conflicts the Romantic's attraction to dreams, beauty and death with the Victorian ideals of hard work, social responsibility, and the urge to live fully.

The first part of the text (lines 1-45) immerses the reader into the atmosphere of the Lotos-eater's island paradise. Tennyson's use of rhythmic nine-line Spenserian stanzas is almost hypnotic, putting his readers in their own state of relaxation. The opening line contains a plea from Odysseus to his men to have "Courage" as they approach a land "in which it seemed always afternoon." The natives of the island offer Odysseus' men the fruit of a lotus, but once the exiled mariners taste the exotic fruit, their previous yearnings to return home are overtaken by drug-induced desires for stasis, and they proclaimi they will "return no more".

The remaining part of the poem consists of eight numbered stanzas composed of the drugged men's choric song explaining their resolution to remain forever in the land of the Lotos-eaters. The sailors describe their travels on the sea, their rightful place of work, in terms of "sharp distress", "heaviness," and "sorrow". They question "what will last"? declaring that everything in life is fleeting and therefore futile, and they complain that their arduous journey home is itself a death wish and that they are only driving themselves closer to it by labor (stanza 4). In stanza six the mariners proclaim they have been gone for so long their families have probably already forgotten and replaced them. Pleading to Odysseus for "long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease" (stanza 4) they wish to abandon their duties and responsibility to their families for a seemingly idyllic life of lotus and dreams. The poem's final stanza compares the relaxing death-like existence of the Land of the Lotos to the carefree existence of the Gods, who could seem to care less about the problems which plague the immortals inhabiting the earth. Concluding that "Slumber is more sweet than toil," the mariners resolve to remain on the land of the Lotus-eaters and succumb to a life of abandonment.

Each stanza of the second half provides a different argument for the mariners decision to stay on the island, while Tennyson provides detailed descriptions of the lush island paradise, enticing the reader to side with the mariners and surrender to a life of ease. But this enchanted paradise is not as perfect as it seems to be. To live in the land of the lotus is to live in a land where everything appears to be, but nothing actually is. It is "a land where all things always seemed the same" (line 24). Tennyson includes the word seems in all but one of the five opening stanzas. The description of the "hollow" land with "hallow caves," adds to Tennyson's underlying scheme, indicating that the sailors' initial impression of the island life as empty and uncertain.

"The Lotos Eaters" illustrates Tennyson's understanding of the human desire for escape from pain and responsibility. Tennyson warns his audience against such self-deceit by proposing there is a time when labor and struggle are necessary.

2. Robert Browning

Born in 1812. He read voraciously as a youth, and began to write poetry while still quite young, influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose radicalism urged a rethinking of modern society. In the 1830's he met the actor William Macready and tried several times to write verse drama for the stage. At about the same time he began to discover that his real talents lay in taking a single character and allowing him to discover himself to us by revealing more of himself in his speeches than he suspects-the characteristics of the dramatic monologue. The late 1860s were the peak of his career. Died in 1889.

Many of his poems approach the problem of faith and the nature of man's religious aspirations, but whenever we think that he has offered us a resolution, a second reading will show that resolution undercut or made suspect. And on one occasion much later in life when he was asked if he considered himself a Christian, Browning is supposed to have answered with "a thunderous 'NO!'" Nevertheless, many nineteenth-century readers thought that they knew where the real Robert Browning stood, and it is easy to find articles with titles like "Browning as a Teacher of Religion." Certainly a love which is very much like Christian love is always approved in his poetry. And Browning knew the Bible so well that he called his first few collections of poems Bells and Pomegranates--a reference (to the decorations on the robes of the Hebrew priests) so obscure that even Elizabeth Barrett, a knowledgeable Bible-reader, had to ask what it meant.

It is difficult, however, to discover a system of belief which he consistently approves. Usually we find believers who have taken their beliefs to extremes shown in an unfavorable light. This pattern of discrediting the extremists may partially explain Browning's fondness for the dramatic monologue: by allowing his speaker to express views with which neither the poet nor the reader would be in sympathy (as for example in "Johannes Agricola"), he is able to undercut positions which he opposes without exposing his own beliefs. One may suspect that this rhetorical technique permits him to leave his own beliefs permanently undecided.

Browning's most important poetic message regards the new conditions of urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British population had become centered in large cities, thanks to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. With so many people living in such close quarters, poverty, violence, and sex became part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions on their behavior, no longer facing the fear of non-acceptance that they had faced in smaller communities; people could act in total anonymity, without any monitoring by acquaintances or small-town busybodies. However, while the absence of family and community ties meant new-found personal independence, it also meant the loss of a social safety net. Thus for many city-dwellers, a sense of freedom mixed with a sense of insecurity. The mid-nineteenth century also saw the rapid growth of newspapers, which functioned not as the current-events journals of today but as scandal sheets, filled with stories of violence and carnality. Hurrying pedestrians, bustling shops, and brand-new goods filled the streets, and individuals had to take in millions of separate perceptions a minute. The resulting overstimulation led, according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness. Many writers now felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with the turmoils and excitements of everyday life, had to shock their audience in ever more novel and sensational ways. Thus violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers, among them Robert Browning. In many of his poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning's more disturbing poems, including "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess," reflect this notion.

 

This apparent moral decay of Victorian society, coupled with an ebbing of interest in religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. So-called Victorian prudery arose as an attempt to rein in something that was seen as out- of-control, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once were. Thus everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of Browning's poems, which often feature painters and other artists, try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning's poetry struggles. The new findings of science, most notably evolution, posed further challenges to traditional religious ideas, suggesting that empiricism--the careful recording of observable details--could serve as a more relevant basis for human endeavor, whether intellectual or artistic.

 

In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams, is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains clearly present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy--a form also used by Browning--in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker. For Browning, the genre provides a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes controversial ideas. He often further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power reached an extreme. Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation. This aspect of the monologue underwent further development in the hands of some of Browning's successors, among them Alfred Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.

 

Browning devotes much attention not only to creating a strong sense of character, but also to developing a high level of historic specificity and general detail. These concerns reflected Victorian society's new emphasis on empiricism, and pointed the way towards the kind of intellectual verse that was to be written by the poets of high Modernism, like Eliot and Ezra Pound. In its scholarly detail and its connection to the past Browning's work also implicitly considers the relationship of modern poets to a greater literary tradition. At least two of Browning's finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare's plays, and other poems consider the matter of one's posterity and potential immortality as an artist. Because society had been changing so rapidly, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging new world. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning's poetry has lasted--perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material.

A. "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister"

An overview:

This disturbingly entertaining poem portrays the grumblings of a jealous monk who finds his pleasures more in the flesh than in the spirit. Presenting himself as the model of righteousness, the speaker condemns a fellow monk, Brother Lawrence, for his immorality; but we soon recognize that the faults he assigns to Lawrence tell more about the speaker. Unlike many of Browning's monologues, this one seems to have no real historical specificity: we have no clues as to when the speaker might have lived, and the Spanish cloister is simply an anonymous monastery.

Form

 The poem comprises nine eight-line stanzas, each rhyming ABABCDCD. The lines fall roughly into tetrameter, although with some irregularities. Browning makes ample use of the conventions of spoken language, including nonverbal sounds ("Gr-r-r-") and colloquial language ("Hell dry you up with its flames!"). Many of the later dramatic monologues dispense with rhyme altogether, but this poem retains it, perhaps to suggest the speaker's self-righteousness and careful adherence to tradition and formal convention.

 

Because the speaker here is talking to himself, the poem is not technically a dramatic monologue as so many of Browning's poems are; rather, it is, as its title suggests, a "soliloquy" (even though it is a freestanding poem, and not a speech from a play). Nevertheless it shares many of the features of the dramatic monologues: an interest in sketching out a character, an attention to aestheticizing detail, and an implied commentary on morality.

Traditional Commentary

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" has been traditionally understood as an attack on moral hypocrisy. On the surface, the poem may seem to be a light historical piece, the utterings of a grumpy but interesting monk--however, it repeatedly approaches a tone similar to that used by the more strident of Victorian essayists and religious figures. Browning portrays this man's interior commentary to show that behind righteousness often lurks self-righteousness and corruption. The speaker levels some rather malevolent curses at Brother Lawrence, accusing his fellow monk of gluttony and lechery, when it is obvious, based on the examples he gives, that it is the speaker himself who is guilty of these sins (for example, when describing the supposed focus of Lawrence's lecherous attentions, the speaker indulges in fairly abundant detail; clearly he has been looking for himself.) Moreover, the speaker's fantasies about trapping Lawrence into damnation suggest that Lawrence is in fact a good man who will receive salvation. Thus Browning implies that the most vehement moralists invent their own opposition in order to elevate themselves.

 

Perhaps most importantly, the speaker describes a bargain he would make with Satan to hurt Lawrence. The speaker claims he could make such a bargain that Satan would believe he was getting the speaker's soul when in fact a loophole would let the speaker escape. The paradox here is that making any sort of bargain with the devil to the disadvantage of another, whether one tricks Satan in the end or not, must necessarily involve the loss of one's soul: the very act of making such a treacherous bargain constitutes a mortal sin. No one could admire this speaker's moral dissolution; yet he represents a merely thinly veiled version of people whose public characters are very much admired--the moralists and preachers of Browning's day. Browning exposes such people's hypocrisy and essential immorality.

And another commentary

This rather amusing, if entirely human, dramatic monologue is very straightforward. Our Speaker, a monk himself, is possessed of a savage, obsessive hatred of Brother Lawrence, another monk at the monastery. We can speculate that part of his hatred may find its genesis in a perhaps unconscious jealousy of the virtues of Brother Lawrence which he fails to consciously note. This particular Speaker shows us through his own words that contrary to what he thinks, Brother Lawrence is far and away the "good" monk, while the Speaker actually possesses the negative qualities he tries to ascribe to Brother Lawrence. It is interesting to note, as well, that the Speaker seems to believe that ritual and formality, the following of rules and restrictions are the measure of a godly man, rather than generosity, humility, kindness, and so on. The Speaker has become so obsessed with his hatred of his colleague that he doesn't even recognize the fundamental danger of his attitude, and that danger is damnation, the loss of his salvation. Rather like Marlowe's Faustus, you can't be forgiven, if you don't ask. And if you don't recognize that you need to ask, you won't ask. In either case, you're damned. Moreover, he is overlooking the admonishment from Christ not to judge others "lest ye be judged." This mandate suggests that if you unfairly and mercilessly pass judgments on your fellow man, that is precisely how you will be judged when the time comes. Although we see these things, the Speaker is oblivious to them or any injustice on his part. He fits the old idea of seeing the mote in his brother's eye and not seeing the beam in his own., and it is quite possible that his hatred for Brother Lawrence has its roots partially in the ability of the monk to enjoy the simple things of life.

Notice the suppressed rage in the "Gr-r-r" of the first and last lines (only) of the poem. This is not the utterance of a human being; this is animal hostility and it is present, though not growled, throughout the entire poem: it frames the poem.

We see in the first stanza Brother Lawrence's love of gardening, of nurturing, helping things grow, bringing some beauty into the world as well as providing little luxuries in the form of fruit, etc. for the monastery: "Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence! / Water your damned flowerpots, do! /If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence, / God's blood, would not mine kill you!" (ll. 1-4). Notice the oath that he takes with murder in his heart. His observations of the monk are poisonous, dripping sarcasm and contempt for the care with which Brother Lawrence works his plants and for his desire to add some beauty to the monastery: "What? Your myrtle bush wants trimming?/Oh, that rose has prior claims--/Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?/Hell dry you up with its flames!" (ll. 5-8).

Everything Brother Lawrence does offends the Speaker. In the second stanza, Brother Lawrence's simple, respectful greeting at their meals (salve tibi!) offends him, the talk of the weather is not interesting or "religious" and is boring to him (he does not realize that a person with Brother Lawrence's interests would naturally be interested in the weather all of the time). He is pompously offended by the idea that the monk should be spouting religious Latin and he places so much emphasis on his gardening that he ought to be using Latin names for his plants.

In stanza 3, the Speaker is outraged because Brother Lawrence possesses eating utensils that are nice, monogrammed, and clean--suggesting that the monk is too worldly and proud. We can see that if Brother Lawrence does enjoy nice things, it does not make him a "bad" monk, worthy of the malicious contempt and hatred we again see in the last line of the stanza when one of Brother Lawrence's flowers breaks: "(He-he! There his lily snaps!)" Envision this: this is near demonic delight in the slightest misfortune experiences by the monk. Surely, if the Speaker was so much better than Brother Lawrence, he would not wish him so much harm.

The 4^th stanza is interesting for the attempt of the Speaker to suggest that Brother Lawrence is also a lecher, full of lust, a voyeur, and so on. Notice, that the Speaker not only knows the names of the questionable ladies, but also the details of their appearances. Notice the details he locks on to. How he knows exactly how a lecher would look and feel that was "interested" in these two ladies:

Saint, forsooth (B. Lawrence)! While brown Dolores

Squats outside the Convent bank

With Sanchicha, telling stories,

Steeping tresses in the tank,

Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horshairs,

--Can't I see his dead-eye glow,

Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?

(That is, if he'd let it show!)

 

Sounds rather like it is the Speaker who spends a lot of time observing these women, letting his imagination (at least) pursue them, developing the dead-eyed glow, and careful not to "let it show" rather than Brother Lawrence.

Continuing with his nit-picking the Speaker objects to Brother Lawrence's lack of forming the cross with his eating utensils as the Speaker does. Worse than that, Brother Lawrence, because he drinks his juice in one gulp instead of sipping it, becomes the same as a heretic to the Speaker.

In the sixth stanza, the Speaker is so intent on criticizing Brother Lawrence for showing favoritism to the boss, that he does not even notice that first of all, Brother Lawrence cared for and grew the fruit, and second of all, he made sure all of his brethren at least got a piece of the melons he grew. The monk's generosity and care for his fellows is completely lost on the Speaker. Apparently, the Speaker would not have done so. The boss probably would have gotten none, or a slice at best, and our Speaker would probably have taken good care of himself. So ok, he seems to say, the melons ripened and were harvested, but what about your flowers? The Speaker is doing what he can to spoil that for the monks. Note his delight at preventing the double from happening because he kept "them close-nipped on the sly!"

The seventh stanza finds him planning to bring about the damnation of Brother Lawrence, by trapping him into one of the 29 "distinct damnations" exactly at the time he is "just a-dying" (l. 53). Why at that particular time? Because he hopes to cause Brother Lawrence to commit a damnable sin when there is no time left for him to ask and be given forgiveness. Ergo, tricking him at the moment of death means sending him to hell. Some monk. This is the same reason that Hamlet does not kill Claudius when the king is at his prayers.

In stanza eight, he hopes to trap the monk through exposing him to the lewdness of his French novel. The key to this that the Speaker again is totally missing, is that it is he, not Brother Lawrence who has clearly an interest in smut and he is aware of the consequences of it. Notice he says in "my scrofulous French novel/On gray paper with blunt type [very cheap, perhaps our "plain brown wrapper" equivalent]!/ Simply glance at it, you grovel/ Hand and foot in Belial's gripe" (ll. 57-60). And in the last stanza, we see the lengths he is willing to go to, even to risking his own salvation making a deal with Satan (if he can only find a loophole to save himself).

By the end of the poem the Speaker is exposed for exactly what he is. The vicious, sacrilegious growling that ends the poem combined with the meaningless words (for him obviously ) Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r, you swine!" lets us see who is the really bad monk here. Simply put, and biblically perhaps, in condemning others he condemns himself, and out of his own mouth is he condemned.

And yet another one

The speaker of Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" reveals himself as a patently evil man, one who in an attempt to discredit the piety of his fellow monk, Brother Lawrence, ironically condemns himself to hell. Unlike his sensitive but liturgically lax counterpart, the speaker is a stickler for details, giving careful attention to the externals of his faith. In fact, he is obsessed with the outward signs and trappings of religious life, being careful to show himself a loyal member of the faithful ("I the Trinity illustrate, / Drinking watered orange-pulp / In three sips the Arian frustrate") lest he be classified a heretic himself. In his disdain for Brother Lawrence, the speaker actually wishes to "trip him just a dying," so that Brother Lawrence will die unabsolved of his sin and the speaker can have the pleasure of casting him "flying off to hell, a Manichee." Critics have debated extensively the significance of the line of the last stanza of the poem, "Hy, Zy, Hine,"[1] which seems to al gn the speaker with Devil worship. A more significant, and less cryptic, connection with Satan is the pact that the speaker intends to make with him for the damnation of Brother Lawrence and, more important, his intention of breaking the pact:

Or, there's Satan!-one might venture Pledge one-, soul to him, yet leave

Such a flaw in the indenture As he'd miss till, past retrieve,

Blasted lay that rose-acacia We're so proud of! ...

A matter that has attracted little critical attention is exactly how the speaker plans to break the pact. It has been suggested by Jane McCusker that the speaker must depend ultimately on the Blessed Virgin Mary for help, but he ruins his chances by breaking off communications with her: "By failing to continue the 'Hail Mary' prayer, omitting the part most relevant to his own position, the monk rejects that which could save his soul" (423). Because he does, as McCusker suggests, reject salvation through Mary, he must be depending on some other route to heaven, one more in keeping with his reliance on the outward signs of faith, namely the sacrament of confession. Mentally arranging a confession in advance, the speaker feels certain that he can gain release from the "indenture," escape hell, and gain entrance into heaven.

Though the speaker has been likened to Faust in his willingness to make deals with the Devil and his foolish attempt to defraud Satan, the most infamous of all frauds, by using the confessional as an escape hatch to heaven, he can perhaps be more appropriately compared to one of Dante's fallen churchmen, Guido da Montefeltro, a counselor of fraud, whom Dante encounters on his journey through the Inferno. Montefeltro (the spokesman of lost souls in the epigraph to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") abused the confessional by accepting papal absolution in advance for a sin he was planning to commit. Having been literally guaranteed admission to heaven by Pope Boniface III (whom Dante suggests is due to die and join the other simoniacs in circle 8), Montefeltro agrees to counsel him in a fraudulent act of military strategy, one that will end in the death of many innocent people. When Montefeltro dies, however, he finds that he has been double-crossed, for the "Black Cherub" appears, clai ing the priest's soul for Satan:

"He must go join my servitors down there

He counselled fraud-that was his contribution

To Hell; since then I've had him by the hair.

Absolved uncontrite means no absolution;

Nor can one will at once sin and contrition,

The contradiction bars the false conclusion."

O what a waking! when with fierce derision

He seized on wretched me, saying "I'll be bound

Thou dids't not think that I was a logician." (27.115-23)

Doubtless a student of religious legalisms, our monk should realize that he has no better chance of defrauding Satan, much less God, than did Guido da Montefeltro. Satan can still spot a bad confession. But the speaker is blinded by his own pride, certain that he can beat the rap. He fails to see that the "flaw in the indenture" is not put there through his own device; but through the suffering of Christ in the holy sacrament of confession.

Perhaps his overwhelming pride is best described as presumption, another of the speaker's vices that he projects onto his adversary, Brother Lawrence. Just as he has accused Brother Lawrence of hiding the licentiousness of a Barbary corsair and of being easy prey to the content of the speaker's "scrofulous French novel," he also projects his own presumptuousness onto the innocent monk. His observation that Brother Lawrence on his deathbed is "sure of heaven as sure can be" actually applies to himself because it is the speaker who is too sure of himself.

The poem is sometimes viewed as an expression of the Protestant suspicion of aesceticism and an indictment of Catholicism. The speaker's clever scheme to use confession as a convenient "loophole," a shortcut to salvation, makes a travesty of the sacrament and seemingly validates Protestant suspicion of its abuse.

Having heaped on sins throughout the poem, the monk's only hope for redemption is to decide not to go through with his "venture." Interestingly, this plan, the third and most risky of his ideas to damn Brother Lawrence, is written in the third person, unlike his two previous ideas, in stanzas seven and eight, which are in the first person. Even those two schemes (to use "the great text Lawrence's soul) are presented in question form, as though the speaker is considering his options. The use of the third person in discussing his final option, and his use of the auxiliary verb might, could suggest that the speaker is at least considering the seriousness of such an act.

NOTE

1. Interpretations vary from the onomatopoeic echoing sound of the vesper bells to the satanic incantations of the speaker invoking the power of the Devil. See Richard Wear, "Further Thoughts on Browning's Spanish Cloister." See also Susan Hardy Aiken, "Medieval Sources for "Hy, Zy, Hine." She explores the notion that such sounds were incorporated in the medieval, mock-demonic "Mass of the ass" and that the speaker is using these sounds to mock the incompetent Latin of Brother Lawrence.

WORKS CITED

Aiken, Susan Hardy. "Medieval Sources for 'Hy Zy Hine.'" Victorian Poetry 17 (1979): 377-83.

Browning, Robert, "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister." Poems of Robert Browning. Ed. Donald Smalley. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1956.

Dante. The Divine Comedy I: Hell. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. Baltmore: Penguin, 1949.

McCusker, Jane A. "A Note on the Last Stanza of 'Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.'" Victorian Poetry 21(1983): 421-24.

Wear, Richard. "Further Thoughts on Browning's Spanish Cloister." Victorian Poetry 12(1974): 67-70.

B. “My Last Duchess”

Overview

This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16^th c.. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke's marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his "gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name." As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess's early demise: when her behavior escalated, "[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together." Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.

Form

"My Last Duchess" comprises rhyming pentameter lines. The lines do not employ end-stops; rather, they use enjambment--that is, sentences and other grammatical units do not necessarily conclude at the end of lines. Consequently, the rhymes do not create a sense of closure when they come, but rather remain a subtle driving force behind the Duke's compulsive revelations. The Duke is quite a performer: he mimics others' voices, creates hypothetical situations, and uses the force of his personality to make horrifying information seem merely colorful. Indeed, the poem provides a classic example of a dramatic monologue: the speaker is clearly distinct from the poet; an audience is suggested but never appears in the poem; and the revelation of the Duke's character is the poem's primary aim.

Commentary

But Browning has more in mind than simply creating a colorful character and placing him in a picturesque historical scene. Rather, the specific historical setting of the poem harbors much significance: the Italian Renaissance held a particular fascination for Browning and his contemporaries, for it represented the flowering of the aesthetic and the human alongside, or in some cases in the place of, the religious and the moral. Thus the temporal setting allows Browning to again explore sex, violence, and aesthetics as all entangled, complicating and confusing each other: the lushness of the language belies the fact that the Duchess was punished for her natural sexuality. The Duke's ravings suggest that most of the supposed transgressions took place only in his mind. Like some of Browning's fellow Victorians, the Duke sees sin lurking in every corner. The reason the speaker here gives for killing the Duchess ostensibly differs from that given by the speaker of "Porphyria's Lover" for murder Porphyria; however, both women are nevertheless victims of a male desire to inscribe and fix female sexuality. The desperate need to do this mirrors the efforts of Victorian society to mold the behavior--sexual and otherwise--of individuals. For people confronted with an increasingly complex and anonymous modern world, this impulse comes naturally: to control would seem to be to conserve and stabilize. The Renaissance was a time when morally dissolute men like the Duke exercised absolute power, and as such it is a fascinating study for the Victorians: works like this imply that, surely, a time that produced magnificent art like the Duchess's portrait couldn't have been entirely evil in its allocation of societal control--even though it put men like the Duke in power.

 

A poem like "My Last Duchess" calculatedly engages its readers on a psychological level. Because we hear only the Duke's musings, we must piece the story together ourselves. Browning forces his reader to become involved in the poem in order to understand it, and this adds to the fun of reading his work. It also forces the reader to question his or her own response to the subject portrayed and the method of its portrayal. We are forced to consider, Which aspect of the poem dominates: the horror of the Duchess's fate, or the beauty of the language and the powerful dramatic development? Thus by posing this question the poem firstly tests the Victorian reader's response to the modern world--it asks, Has everyday life made you numb yet?--and secondly asks a question that must be asked of all art--it queries, Does art have a moral component, or is it merely an aesthetic exercise? In these latter considerations Browning prefigures writers like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde.

What to do with the Duke?

How do we read "My Last Duchess," one of the most representative dramatic monologues? The old "sympathy/judgment" model does not seem to work very well. Langbaum, the main proponent of this view, finds that the Duke's

immense attractiveness . . . his conviction of match less superiority, his intelligence, and bland amoral ity, his poise, his taste for art, his manners, overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to suspend judgment of the duke, for he raises no demur. The reader is no less overwhelmed. We suspend moral judg ment because we prefer to participate in the duke's power and freedom, in his hard core of character fiercely loyal to itself. (83)

Hazard Adams points out that sympathy does not seem to be the right word for our relationship to the Duke (151-52), and Philip Drew protests that suspending our moral judgment should not require "an anaesthetizing of the moral sense for the duration of the poem" (28). Langbaum is right that the intellectual exercise of inferring the real character of the last Duchess from what the Duke says about her to the envoy and then going on to make a moral judgment about him constitutes a large part of our enjoyment of the poem, but that enjoyment is not dependent upon our entering into sympathy with the Duke.

Rather, we enter into this scene on the side of the envoy, and at that level we feel the pull of the Duke's commanding rhetoric. In order to read the poem, we must create the scene in imagination, which means "losing ourselves" within it, forget ting, for the moment, our real, present surroundings in favor of active involvement in the dramatic situation. Our entry is facilitated by its most striking feature, which is the way the Duke so directly addresses us. His narrative in the center of the poem is carefully framed by the first ten lines and the last ten, in which he addresses someone as "you." Because we do not discover until after he has told his tale that this second person is in fact present in the poem, at the moment of our reading we can only assume that it is us to whom he is speaking. (It is true that we eventually discover that this "you" to whom he is speaking is an envoy from a Count, but this identification is not made until very late in the poem.) We are slightly disoriented, on a first reading, by that direct address, and we recognize that an effort is being made to suggest that we are the silent partner in a conversation; even the omission of quotation marks helps sustain the illusion that we have encountered a character who is speaking directly to us. Trusting that our curiosity about what is going on in the poem will keep us reading despite our lack of information about the character of the auditor, Browning leaves us only one source for that information, the Duke's monologue.

Commentary by Ian Lancashire

We always drop unprepared into a Browning dramatic monologue, into several lives about which we know nothing. Soliloquies or speeches in a play have a context that orients the audience. Browning's readers have only a title and, in "My Last Duchess," a speech prefix, "Ferrara." Yet these are transfixing clues to a drama that we observe, helplessly, unable to speak or to act, as if we turned on a radio and, having selected a frequency, overhear a very private conversation, already in process and, as we may come very gradually to appreciate, about a murder and the maybe-killer's search for the next victim. Readers familiar with Browning's writing and sensitive to nuance perceive the speaker's pride and cold-bloodedness. Many miss the point and are astonished. "You say what? there's nothing in the poem about him killing her! where do you find that?" A century and more ago, when Browning still lived, readers presented him with questions about this poem. He answered them cautiously, almost as if he had not written the poem but was seeing it himself, attentively, after a very long time and was trying to understand what had happened.

Thanks to Louis S. Friedland, a critic who published an article on "My Last Duchess" in 1936, we know something about how young Browning found the story. Fascinated with the Renaissance period, he visited Italy in 1838 and clearly had done considerable reading about its history. He must have come across a biography of Alfonso II (1533-1598), fifth duke of Ferrara, who married Lucrezia, the 14-year-old daughter of the upstart merchant princes, the Medici, in 1558. Three days after the wedding, Alfonso left her -- for two years. She died barely 17 years old, and people talked, and four years later in Innsbruck, Alfonso began negotiating for a new wife with a servant of the then count of Tyrol, one Nikolaus Mardruz. The poem's duke of Ferrara, his last duchess, the "Count" with whose servant (Mardruz) Ferrara is here discussing re-marriage and a dowry, and the new "fair daughter" are historical, but the interpretation of what actually took place among them is Browning's own. He first published the poem in 1842, four years after his visit to Italy. The painter Frà Pandolf and the sculptor Claus of Innsbruck are fictitious, as far as we know, but Browning must have meant his readers to associate the poem with these shadowy historical figures because he changed the title in 1849, from "Italy and France. I. -- Italy." to ... what we see today.

The title evidently refers to a wall painting that Ferrara reveals to someone yet unidentified in the first fourteen words of the poem. "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall," he says. However a reader utters this line, it sounds odd. Stress "That's" and Ferrara reduces a woman, once his spouse, to something he casually points out, a thing on a wall. Emphasize "my" and Ferrara reveals his sense of owning her. Pause over "last" and we might infer that duchesses, to him, come in sequence, like collectibles that, if necessary, having become obsolescent, are to be replaced. If "Duchess" gets the stress, he implies -- or maybe we infer -- that he acquires, not just works of art, but persons; and that Duchesses are no different from paintings. The line suggests self-satisfaction. Finding ourselves being given a tour of a grand home for the first time, by the owner himself, and being told, "That's my last wife painted on the wall," how would we react? We might think, "How odd he didn't say her name. I wonder what happened ...", or at least we might wonder until he finished his sentence with "Looking as if she were alive." This clause, also sounding peculiar, tells us two things. The Duchess looks out at us, the viewers, directly from the painting; and her depiction there is life-like, that is, we might be looking at a living person rather than a work of art. Yet wouldn't Ferrara say "life-like" or "true to life," if that was simply what he meant? His choice of words may suggest that, while she, the Duchess herself (rather than her image in the painting), looks alive, she may be dead; and the phrase "last Duchess" echoes in our working memory. Do we know for sure? Does "she" mean the Duchess or her painting?

Ferrara continues, cheerfully, describing the painting, not the Duchess (so possibly we are being silly): "I call / That piece a wonder, now." The phrase "That piece" must mean "that portrait," surely, though there is something intangibly common, almost vulgar, in his expression. That sense of "piece," as "portrait," is archaic now and may have been so when Browning wrote the poem (OED "piece" sb. 17b). This context, a man speaking of pictures of women, connotes something quite different, what the term has meant for centuries, and still means now, "Applied to a woman or girl. In recent use, mostly depreciatory, of a woman or girl regarded as a sexual object" (OED sb. 9b). Is "That piece" a portrait or a sl-t, a b-tch, a c-nt? Ferrara's next remark keeps us off-balance. "Frà Pandolf's hands / Worked busily a day, and there she stands." Obviously the "piece" is something hand-made, a painting, a wondrous good one, not a person, not someone contemptible -- a relief; and yet Ferrara continues, "there she stands." The painting cannot stand because it is on the wall. Is he speaking about the woman? Ferrara then invites his listener, standing beside him, to sit down "and look at her." As readers, Ferrara also speaks to us, as if we too were there, because Browning, who as a lyric poet would address us directly, has disappeared behind this character. We may want to sit down. Mid-way through line 5, Ferrara has not yet done with us. We have to look at the Duchess, through his words, being just as silent as the "you" to whom Ferrara refers. We have to "read" (6) her face.

As "Strangers" (7), knowing nothing about this place and its people, we must be told (and Ferrara will explain) why he named, "by design," the painter, giving him the honorific, "Frà" ('brother'), due a member of religious orders and a celibate man. The Duchess's look -- her "pictured countenance,/ The depth and passion of its earnest glance", and that "glance" (again) -- causes ignorant observers, if they dare (11), to look as if they would ask Ferrara, and only Ferrara, because (as he tells us pointedly) the portrait is curtained off, and only he can pull back the curtain to reveal it, just what elicited that "passion" in her. His listener does not ask this question, though he may look as if he would like to ask. He just sits where he is told to sit and hears what others, of his type, would sometimes want to ask (but in fact seldom do ask) and, more, hears what Ferrara would say in answer to that rare question. Was she looking at a lover, at sometime who desired her? That is one question her look suggests, but of course that is impossible, for Frà Pandolf, a celibate religious, could never bring forth that "passion." No, her look did not rise, Ferrara implies, from sexual passion, but from a more general emotion. "Sir, 't was not / Her husband's presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess' cheek." If "presence" meant just "the state of being in the same place", it would be redundant here. Ferrara uses the term to allude to the importance of his decision to be with her, the stateliness and majesty that a duke confers, as a gift, on anyone by just turning up; and add to that, possibly, the way he, as her sexual partner, ought to arouse her, nature being what it is, to colour in this way.

Yet any "courtesy," Ferrara asserts, any court compliment owing to the Duchess merely by virtue of her position, aroused that look, that "spot of joy," that "blush" (31). Frà Pandolf, for example, might have observed that the Duchess should shift her mantle up her arm somewhat to show more of her wrist, its skin being attractive; or he might have complained that his art was not up to capturing the "faint / Half-flush that dies along" her throat. If it died in the throat, where did it live? Frà Pandolf alludes here to the "spot of joy," spreading downwards from her cheeks (15) as he was painting her. Her embarrassed, but not at all displeased, awareness that someone likes her reveals itself in a blush, a colouring in a small patch ("a spot") as blood flows to the face. That, Ferrara says, reveals a "joy" felt by the Duchess in herself, at being herself, at being looked at approvingly, no matter who -- whether a celibate painter, or her husband the duke -- did the looking.

Now, standing before her portrait, where she stands, by the side of a listener made to sit, Ferrara obsessively reviews the reasons why that joy was "a spot," a contaminant that should not have been on his last Duchess' cheek. The more he talks, the more his contempt and self-justifying anger show, and the more he endears the Duchess to us. Unable to recognize "courtesy" as insincere, she was made happy by it, in fact, took joy in "whate'er /She looked on, and her looks went everywhere." A sprig of flowers from the duke for her bosom (25) and his ancestral name itself (33) meant joy to her, no less than a sunset, a courtier's gift of some cherries from the tree, and the white mule whom she rode "round the terrace" (29). She smiled on him, whenever he "passed" her (44), though sharing the same smile with anyone else. Her humility and general good nature, however, disgusted (38) Ferrara for the way they seemed to trifle (35) with, or understate the value of his own gift, a place in a noble family 900 years old. Lacking the cunning to discriminate publicly, to flatter Ferrara, she also could not detect his outrage; and he said nothing to her about what he felt. She wore her feelings openly, in her face, but to the standing Duke any outward expression of his concern would have meant "stooping" (34, 43), that is, lowering himself to her level. He attributes this silence to his lack of "skill / In speech", an excuse that the poem itself disproves. When he describes her as missing or exceeding the "mark" (38-39), Ferrara develops his metaphor from archery, as if she was one of his soldiers, competing in a competition for prizes (his name), rather than a Duchess who was herself the prize.

"This grew; I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands / As if alive." This elliptical chain of four curt, bleak sentences brings Ferrara back to where he started. If the Duchess smiled everywhere, could her smiles be stopped by anything short of death by execution? What Ferrara's commands were, he does not say, but "As if alive", the second time he uses the phrase, has a much more ominous sound. At the beginning, Ferrara could indeed be speaking mainly about the "life-like" portrait, but as his anger grew, he shifted to the Duchess herself. She cannot be "life-like." Even had he just divorced her and put her in a convent, as Browning thought possible late in his life -- as if the poem somehow lived independent from him -- Ferrara killed the joy that defined the "depth and passion" of her being. He finally controlled before whom she could "blush." He alone draws back the curtain on the portrait.

Then Ferrara invites his listener and us to rise from being seated and "meet / The company below" (47-48). When negotiating with the listener's master the Count for a dowry, Ferrara "stoops." He not only lowers himself to the level of a mere count but generously offers to "go / Together down" with the listener, a servant, side by side, instead of following him and so maintaining symbolically a duke's superior level and rank. For all his obsession with his noble lineage, Ferrara bargains with it openly.

Will Ferrara "repeat" (48) in marriage as he does in his speech? He claims the Count's "fair daughter's self" is his "object." Will she too, an objective achieved, become a thing, found on a wall like his last Duchess? Ferrara hints at his intentions by pointing out a second work of art, this time a sculpture, as he reaches the staircase. Neptune, the sea-god, is "Taming a sea-horse" (55), as Ferrara tamed his last Duchess.

In this poem Browning develops an idiolect for Ferrara. Unlike poets like Gray and Keats, Browning does not write as himself, for example, by echoing the work of other poets, because to do so would be untrue to the Duke's character. Ferrara betrays his obsessions by nervous mannerisms. He repeats words associated with the Duchess: the phrases `as if ... alive" (2, 47), `there she stands' (4, 46), `Will 't please you' (5, 47), and `called/calling ... that spot of joy' (14-15, 21), `look,' variously inflected (2, 5, 24), `glance' (8, 12), `thanked' (31), `gift' (33-34), `stoop' (34, 42-43), `smile' (43, 45-46), and `pass' (44). These tics define his idiolect but also his mind, circling back to the same topic again and again. He takes pride in saying, "I repeat" (48). He also obsesses about his height, relative to others. He stands because the Duchess stands on the wall, and he requires his listener to sit, to rise, and to walk downstairs with him side-by-side. He abhors stooping because he would lose face. Last, Ferrara needs to control the eyes of others. He curtains off the Duchess' portrait to prevent her from looking "everywhere." He tells his listener to look at her and to "Notice Neptune."

3. Gerald Manley Hopkins.

Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the greatest 19th-century poets of religion, of nature, and of inner anguish. In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God. In this book God expresses himself completely, and it is by "reading" the world that humans can approach God and learn about Him. Hopkins therefore sees the environmental crisis of the Victorian period as vitally linked to that era's spiritual crisis, and many of his poems bemoan man's indifference to the destruction of sacred natural and religious order. The poet harbored an acute interest in the scientific and technological advances of his day; he saw new discoveries (such as the new explanations for phenomena in electricity or astronomy) as further evidence of God's deliberate hand, rather than as refutations of God's existence.

One of Hopkins's most famous (and most debated) theories centers on the concept of "inscape." He coined this word to refer to the essential individuality of a thing, but with a focus not on its particularity or uniqueness, but rather on the unifying design that gives a thing its distinctive characteristics and relates it to its context. Hopkins was interested in the exquisite interrelation of the individual thing and the recurring pattern. He saw the world as a kind of network integrated by divine law and design.

Hopkins wrote most frequently in the sonnet form. He generally preferred the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, which consists of an octave followed by a sestet, with a turn in argument or change in tone occurring in the second part. Hopkins typically uses the octave to present some account of personal or sensory experience and then employs the sestet for philosophical reflection. While Hopkins enjoyed the structure the sonnet form imposes, with its fixed length and rhyme scheme, he nevertheless constantly stretched and tested its limitations. One of his major innovations was a new metrical form, called "sprung rhythm." In sprung rhythm, the poet counts the number of accented syllables in the line, but places no limit on the total number of syllables. As opposed to syllabic meters (such as the iambic), which count both stresses and syllables, this form allows for greater freedom in the position and proportion of stresses. Whereas English verse has traditionally alternated stressed and unstressed syllables with occasional variation, Hopkins was free to place multiple stressed syllables one after another (as in the line "All felled, felled, are all felled" from "Binsey Poplars"), or to run a large number of unstressed syllables together (as in "Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy" from Wreck of the Deutschland). This gives Hopkins great control over the speed of his lines and their dramatic effects.

Another unusual poetic resource Hopkins favored is "consonant chiming," a technique he learned from Welsh poetry. The technique involves elaborate use of alliteration and internal rhyme; in Hopkins's hands this creates an unusual thickness and resonance. This close linking of words through sound and rhythm complements Hopkins's themes of finding pattern and design everywhere. Hopkins's form is also characterized by a stretching of the conventions of grammar and sentence structure, so that newcomers to his poetry must often strain to parse his sentences. Deciding which word in a given sentence is the verb, for example, can often involve significant interpretive work. In addition, Hopkins often invents words, and pulls his vocabulary freely from a number of different registers of diction. This leads to a surprising mix of neologisms and archaisms throughout his lines. Yet for all his innovation and disregard of convention, Hopkins' goal was always to bring poetry closer to the character of natural, living speech.

1. The Windhover

Overview

The windhover is a bird with the rare ability to hover in the air, essentially flying in place while it scans the ground in search of prey. The poet describes how he saw (or "caught") one of these birds in the midst of its hovering. The bird strikes the poet as the darling ("minion") of the morning, the crown prince ("dauphin") of the kingdom of daylight, drawn by the dappled colors of dawn. It rides the air as if it were on horseback, moving with steady control like a rider whose hold on the rein is sure and firm. In the poet's imagination, the windhover sits high and proud, tightly reined in, wings quivering and tense. Its motion is controlled and suspended in an ecstatic moment of concentrated energy. Then, in the next moment, the bird is off again, now like an ice skater balancing forces as he makes a turn. The bird, first matching the wind's force in order to stay still, now "rebuff[s] the big wind" with its forward propulsion. At the same moment, the poet feels his own heart stir, or lurch forward out of "hiding," as it were--moved by "the achieve of, the mastery of" the bird's performance.

The opening of the sestet serves as both a further elaboration on the bird's movement and an injunction to the poet's own heart. The "beauty," "valour," and "act" (like "air," "pride," and "plume") "here buckle." "Buckle" is the verb here; it denotes either a fastening (like the buckling of a belt), a coming together of these different parts of a creature's being, or an acquiescent collapse (like the "buckling" of the knees), in which all parts subordinate themselves into some larger purpose or cause. In either case, a unification takes place. At the moment of this integration, a glorious fire issues forth, of the same order as the glory of Christ's life and crucifixion, though not as grand.

Form

The confusing grammatical structures and sentence order in this sonnet contribute to its difficulty, but they also represent a masterful use of language. Hopkins blends and confuses adjectives, verbs, and subjects in order to echo his theme of smooth merging: the bird's perfect immersion in the air, and the fact that his self and his action are inseparable. Note, too, how important the "-ing" ending is to the poem's rhyme scheme; it occurs in verbs, adjectives, and nouns, linking the different parts of the sentences together in an intense unity. A great number of verbs are packed into a short space of lines, as Hopkins tries to nail down with as much descriptive precision as possible the exact character of the bird's motion.

"The Windhover" is written in "sprung rhythm," a meter in which the number of accents in a line are counted but the number of syllables does not matter. This technique allows Hopkins to vary the speed of his lines so as to capture the bird's pausing and racing. Listen to the hovering rhythm of "the rolling level underneath him steady air," and the arched brightness of "and striding high there." The poem slows abruptly at the end, pausing in awe to reflect on Christ.

Commentary

This poem follows the pattern of so many of Hopkins's sonnets, in that a sensuous experience or description leads to a set of moral reflections. Part of the beauty of the poem lies in the way Hopkins integrates his masterful description of a bird's physical feat with an account of his own heart's response at the end of the first stanza. However, the sestet has puzzled many readers because it seems to diverge so widely from the material introduced in the octave. At line nine, the poem shifts into the present tense, away from the recollection of the bird. The horse-and-rider metaphor with which Hopkins depicted the windhover's motion now give way to the phrase "my chevalier"--a traditional Medieval image of Christ as a knight on horseback, to which the poem's subtitle (or dedication) gives the reader a clue. The transition between octave and sestet comes with the statement in lines 9-11 that the natural ("brute") beauty of the bird in flight is but a spark in comparison with the glory of Christ, whose grandeur and spiritual power are "a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous."

The first sentence of the sestet can read as either descriptive or imperative, or both. The idea is that something glorious happens when a being's physical body, will, and action are all brought into accordance with God's will, culminating in the perfect self-expression. Hopkins, realizing that his own heart was "in hiding," or not fully committed to its own purpose, draws inspiration from the bird's perfectly self-contained, self-reflecting action. Just as the hovering is the action most distinctive and self-defining for the windhover, so spiritual striving is man's most essential aspect. At moments when humans arrive at the fullness of their moral nature, they achieve something great. But that greatness necessarily pales in comparison with the ultimate act of self-sacrifice performed by Christ, which nevertheless serves as our model and standard for our own behavior.

The final tercet within the sestet declares that this phenomenon is not a "wonder," but rather an everyday occurrence--part of what it means to be human. This striving, far from exhausting the individual, serves to bring out his or her inner glow--much as the daily use of a metal plow, instead of wearing it down, actually polishes it--causing it to sparkle and shine. The suggestion is that there is a glittering, luminous core to every individual, which a concerted religious life can expose. The subsequent image is of embers breaking open to reveal a smoldering interior. Hopkins words this image so as to relate the concept back to the Crucifixion: The verb "gash" (which doubles for "gush") suggests the wounding of Christ's body and the shedding of his "gold-vermilion" blood.

2. Carrion Comfort.

Overview

The poem opens with a rejection of Despair, that "carrion comfort." To "feast" on despair, Hopkins avers, would be like eating something dead and vile. Nor will the poet unravel his "last strands" of humanity by giving up hope, though he is close to hopelessness and the strands are already "slack." He makes the feeble but determined assertion "I can," and then goes on to explore what that assertion might mean, what basic action or spiritual gesture might serve to counteract despair: doing "something" that expresses hope, even if it is as minimal as wishing for morning or as negative as deciding not to kill himself.

Having skirted the pit of despair, the poet questions God about the suffering that has drawn him so close to hopelessness. He asks why God would, so roughly, with his powerful right foot, "rock" his world and send him writhing. Why would God swipe at him with the dull and indiscriminate blow of a "lionlimb"? Why, then, maliciously look at him lying there with "bruised bones" and further torment him with gales of "tempest," while he cowers, "heaped there," wanting to escape but exhausted and with nowhere to run?

Then the poet attempts an answer. The "tempest" was actually a harvest wind, shucking the "chaff" from the wheat to expose the kernels of goodness concealed within. In patient acceptance of divine vengeance, the poet has "kissed the rod" of God's punishment--or rather, he corrects himself, he has kissed the hand that held that rod. Since then he has suffered "toil" and "coil," yet the act of acceptance has also brought a resurgence of optimism, mounting gradually to a "cheer." But this word prompts another round of questioning ("Cheer whom though?"); now that he knows that God's rough treatment of him was for his own good, should he now applaud God for having treated him so? Or does he congratulate himself for having struggled, for having met God directly? Or both? The speaker, however far he has come from the brink of despair, is perhaps still trying to come to terms with that dark "year" of suffering in which he struggled with God.

Commentary

Hopkins wrote this sonnet at a time when he had just emerged from a long period of depression and inner anguish. The poem is carefully designed to surprise the reader and dramatize the moment of recognition that the speaker experiences in coming to terms with his own spiritual struggle. The interpretation of the poem depends in large measure on how one reads the transitions between the poem's three sections (the first quatrain, the second quatrain, and the sestet). In particular, ascertaining the poem's chronology can be troubling, in part because Hopkins withholds an important piece of chronological information until line 10, when the poem first shifts into the past tense. In the second stanza, there is a disturbing immediacy in the poet's urgent protests against God's unrelenting persecution; only in line 10 does the poet reveal that the trial has already passed. In light of this recognition, the reader must reevaluate the preceding lines. What is the order of cause and effect? Why does Hopkins use the present tense for the past events of the poem?

The order of the events described in the first two quatrains seems to be reversed in the telling. Presumably, the struggle against despair in lines one through four provided a sequel to the violence depicted in lines five through eight. Yet the fact that this second quatrain is written in interrogative form brings it into the present of the poem. It both tells of past events and asks about their meaning from a retrospective vantage (as if from the present). In this interpretation, the poem contains two different narrative lines superimposed on one another. The first deals with a "now done" crisis of suffering and resistance, in which the poet struggled in futility against God. The second "plot" takes place later than the first but is also, one hopes, nearing consummation via the thinking processes that have contributed to the making of the poem itself. This plot is the poet's attempt to understand the initial crisis--and it is this plot that takes place in the "present" of the poem. In this latter narrative, the content of the second quatrain does temporally follow that of the first; it constitutes the (partly self-pitying) questions that still remain even after the poet has decided not to give up hope. These four lines mark the problem of understanding still at hand for the poet, a problem that will then be resolved in the sestet. There, the poet abandons the tone of impassioned self-protection and seeks theological explanations for suffering and spiritual struggle.

Another chronological ambiguity centers on line 10. One might assume that the "toil" and "coil" Hopkins has experienced since he "kissed the rod" are precisely this struggle for understanding, after the experience of complete abjection before God forced his spirit into submission. It is out of that second struggle, in which he acknowledges both God's and his own roles in the earlier, more wrenching struggle, that his heart is able to recover. On the other hand, we might read the phrase "since (seems) I kissed the rod" differently. In light of that puzzling parenthetical "seems," one might decide that all the violence of the second quatrain has taken place after Hopkins thought he had made his peace with God. In that case, the crux of the theological problem would lie with the inscrutability of a God who would inflict such suffering on even Hopkins, a priest who had devoted his life to God's service.

There is also a way of reading the chronology of the poem more continuously. The punishments in the second quatrain are perhaps inflicted by God in retaliation against the poet's (insufficient) first resolution against despair. In this reading, the poem would imply that the conclusions in the first stanza are unacceptable to God--the decision to "not choose not to be" might seem willful and self-regarding, as compared to the humility and prostration before God's will at which the poet afterward arrives. In this reading, the renewal of questioning in the last lines might look like a further lapse, as the struggle for understanding continues in the poet's own heart even though he ought to stand in total acceptance of God's will.

From the beginning, the poem works to contrast active and passive behavior, and to weigh the two against each other. Despair is a kind of extreme passivity, and a serious sin in Christian doctrine. Hopkins graphically dramatizes the difference between this despair on the one hand and some hopeful spiritual activity on the other. In the eighth line we see the speaker as a pile of bones lying "heaped there," dehumanized, cowering, panicked, and struggling desperately for survival. The sestet depicts the slow emergence from out of that heap, like an animal rising into a human being: lapping tentatively at strength as though it were restorative water, then seizing joy surreptitiously and, finally, more willfully--with a "laugh" and a "cheer." This is the purified heart rising out of the pile of bones, with more agency than in the foregoing image of the wheat being stripped of its chaff by a fortuitous wind. In the self-pitying language of the second quatrain, the speaker was a passive victim. However, in the later assessment, he decides that he too might deserve some credit for having battled it out with God, even if he felt comparatively helpless at the time. The image of kissing the rod, likewise, involves an act of self-subordination that is nevertheless an act, and not perfectly passive. Not only has this act resulted in a personal purification, but it has also given the speaker something else: a certain measure of joy or contentment.

2. The Novel

1. General Overview of the Romantic Prose

The romantic era was rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground-breaking books on human, and women's, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary criticism.

Jane Austen's (1775-1817) novels seem to defy all classification - or at least to subvert any all too easy understanding of Romanticism. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life, juxtaposed the Romantic, the sentimental, the Gothic and the Augustan. Many of her novels are comedies of manners that depict the self-contained world of provincial ladies and gentlemen. Most of her works revolve around the delicate business of providing husbands for marriageable daughters. She is particularly noted for her vivid delineations and lively interplay of character, her superb sense of comic irony, and her moral firmness. She ridicules the silly, the affected, and the stupid, ranging in her satire from light portraiture in her early works to more scornful exposures in her later novels. Her writing was subjected to the most careful polishing. She was quite aware of her special excellences and limitations, comparing herself to a miniaturist.

Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. His first novel, Waverley (1814), was an immediate success. There followed the “Waverley novels”—romances of Scottish life that reveal Scott's great storytelling gift and his talent for vivid characterization. Ivanhoe (1820), Scott's first prose reconstruction of a time long past, is a complicated romance set in 12^th c. England. With St. Ronan's Well (1824), Scott abandoned the historical style and attempted a novel of manners, but in Redgauntlet (1824) he reverted to the background and treatment of his early novels.

Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), the latter noted for his eccentric novels that satirize the romantics as much as they continue their impulse. Peacock's fiction, interspersed with his poems, comic and delightfully satirical, parodies the intellectual modes and pretenses of his age. Nightmare Abbey (1818), his best-known work, satirizes the English romantic movement and contains characters based on Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley.

2. General Overview of the Victorian Novel

The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed.

Emily Brontë's single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is a unique masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising artistic sense. The fine novels of Emily's sister Charlotte Brontë, especially Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), are more rooted in convention, but daring in their own ways. The novels of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) appeared during the 1860s and 70s. A woman of great erudition and moral fervor, Eliot was concerned with ethical conflicts and social problems. George Meredith produced comic novels noted for their psychological perception. Another novelist of the late 19th cent. was the prolific Anthony Trollope, famous for sequences of related novels that explore social, ecclesiastical, and political life in England.

Thomas Hardy's profoundly pessimistic novels are all set in the harsh, punishing midland county he called Wessex. Samuel Butler produced novels satirizing the Victorian ethos, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a master of his craft, wrote arresting adventure fiction and children's verse. The mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, produced the complex and sophisticated children's (?) classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).

3. Charles Dickens's The Great Expectations.

Plot Overview

Pip, a young orphan living with his sister and her husband in the marshes of Kent, sits in a cemetery one evening looking at his parents' tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped convict springs up from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring him food and a file for his leg irons. Pip obeys, but the fearsome convict is soon captured anyway. The convict protects Pip by claiming to have stolen the items himself.

 

One day Pip is taken by his Uncle Pumblechook to play at Satis House, the home of the wealthy dowager Miss Havisham, who is extremely eccentric: she wears an old wedding dress everywhere she goes and keeps all the clocks in her house stopped at the same time. During his visit, he meets a beautiful young girl named Estella, who treats him coldly and contemptuously. Nevertheless, he falls in love with her and dreams of becoming a wealthy gentleman so that he might be worthy of her. He even hopes that Miss Havisham intends to make him a gentleman and marry him to Estella, but his hopes are dashed when, after months of regular visits to Satis House, Miss Havisham tells him that she will help him fill out the papers necessary for him to become a common laborer in his family's business.

 

With Miss Havisham's guidance, Pip is apprenticed to his brother-in-law, Joe, who is the village blacksmith. Pip works in the forge unhappily, struggling to better his education with the help of the plain, kind Biddy and encountering Joe's malicious day laborer, Orlick. One night, after an altercation with Orlick, Pip's sister, known as Mrs. Joe, is viciously attacked and becomes a mute invalid. From her signals, Pip suspects that Orlick was responsible for the attack.

 

One day a lawyer named Jaggers appears with strange news: a secret benefactor has given Pip a large fortune, and Pip must come to London immediately to begin his education as a gentleman. Pip happily assumes that his previous hopes have come true—that Miss Havisham is his secret benefactor and that the old woman intends for him to marry Estella.

 

In London, Pip befriends a young gentleman named Herbert Pocket and Jaggers's law clerk, Wemmick. He expresses disdain for his former friends and loved ones, especially Joe, but he continues to pine after Estella. He furthers his education by studying with the tutor Matthew Pocket, Herbert's father. Herbert himself helps Pip learn how to act like a gentleman. When Pip turns twenty-one and begins to receive an income from his fortune, he will secretly help Herbert buy his way into the business he has chosen for himself. But for now, Herbert and Pip lead a fairly undisciplined life in London, enjoying themselves and running up debts. Orlick reappears in Pip's life, employed as Miss Havisham's porter, but is promptly fired by Jaggers after Pip reveals Orlick's unsavory past. Mrs. Joe dies, and Pip goes home for the funeral, feeling tremendous grief and remorse. Several years go by, until one night a familiar figure barges into Pip's room—the convict, Magwitch, who stuns Pip by announcing that he, not Miss Havisham, is the source of Pip's fortune. He tells Pip that he was so moved by Pip's boyhood kindness that he dedicated his life to making Pip a gentleman, and he made a fortune in Australia for that very purpose.

 

Pip is appalled, but he feels morally bound to help Magwitch escape London, as the convict is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, his former partner in crime. A complicated mystery begins to fall into place when Pip discovers that Compeyson was the man who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar and that Estella is Magwitch's daughter. Miss Havisham has raised her to break men's hearts, as revenge for the pain her own broken heart caused her. Pip was merely a boy for the young Estella to practice on; Miss Havisham delighted in Estella's ability to toy with his affections.

 

As the weeks pass, Pip sees the good in Magwitch and begins to care for him deeply. Before Magwitch's escape attempt, Estella marries an upper-class lout named Bentley Drummle. Pip makes a visit to Satis House, where Miss Havisham begs his forgiveness for the way she has treated him in the past, and he forgives her. Later that day, when she bends over the fireplace, her clothing catches fire and she goes up in flames. She survives but becomes an invalid. In her final days, she will continue to repent for her misdeeds and to plead for Pip's forgiveness.

 

The time comes for Pip and his friends to spirit Magwitch away from London. Just before the escape attempt, Pip is called to a shadowy meeting in the marshes, where he encounters the vengeful, evil Orlick. Orlick is on the verge of killing Pip when Herbert arrives with a group of friends and saves Pip's life. Pip and Herbert hurry back to effect Magwitch's escape. They try to sneak Magwitch down the river on a rowboat, but they are discovered by the police, who Compeyson tipped off. Magwitch and Compeyson fight in the river, and Compeyson is drowned. Magwitch is sentenced to death, and Pip loses his fortune. Magwitch feels that his sentence is God's forgiveness and dies at peace. Pip falls ill; Joe comes to London to care for him, and they are reconciled. Joe gives him the news from home: Orlick, after robbing Pumblechook, is now in jail; Miss Havisham has died and left most of her fortune to the Pockets; Biddy has taught Joe how to read and write. After Joe leaves, Pip decides to rush home after him and marry Biddy, but when he arrives there he discovers that she and Joe have already married.

 

Pip decides to go abroad with Herbert to work in the mercantile trade. Returning many years later, he encounters Estella in the ruined garden at Satis House. Drummle, her husband, treated her badly, but he is now dead. Pip finds that Estella's coldness and cruelty have been replaced by a sad kindness, and the two leave the garden hand in hand, Pip believing that they will never part again. (Note: Dickens's original ending to Great Expectations differed from the one described in this summary. The final Summary and Analysis section of this SparkNote provides a description of the first ending and explains why Dickens rewrote it.)

Characters

i. Pip.

As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations presents the growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important character in Great Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions make up the main plot of the novel, and the narrator, whose thoughts and attitudes shape the reader's perception of the story. As a result, developing an understanding of Pip's character is perhaps the most important step in understanding Great Expectations.

 

Because Pip is narrating his story many years after the events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips in Great Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character—the voice telling the story and the person acting it out. Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This skillfully executed distinction is perhaps best observed early in the book, when Pip the character is a child; here, Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but also enables us to see and feel the story through his eyes.

 

As a character, Pip's two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip's idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.

 

On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert's way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those who love him. Pip's main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.

 

Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip's desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip's oversimplified sense of his world's hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that one's social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most. Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.

ii. Estella

Often cited as Dickens's first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and “break their hearts,” Estella wins Pip's deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip's first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.

 

Ironically, life among the upper classes does not represent salvation for Estella. Instead, she is victimized twice by her adopted class. Rather than being raised by Magwitch, a man of great inner nobility, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world. And rather than marrying the kindhearted commoner Pip, Estella marries the cruel nobleman Drummle, who treats her harshly and makes her life miserable for many years. In this way, Dickens uses Estella's life to reinforce the idea that one's happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one's social position: had Estella been poor, she might have been substantially better off.

 

Despite her cold behavior and the damaging influences in her life, Dickens nevertheless ensures that Estella is still a sympathetic character. By giving the reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and act on her own feelings rather than on the imposed motives of her upbringing, Dickens gives the reader a glimpse of Estella's inner life, which helps to explain what Pip might love about her. Estella does not seem able to stop herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems not to want to hurt him; she repeatedly warns him that she has “no heart” and seems to urge him as strongly as she can to find happiness by leaving her behind. Finally, Estella's long, painful marriage to Drummle causes her to develop along the same lines as Pip—that is, she learns, through experience, to rely on and trust her inner feelings. In the final scene of the novel, she has become her own woman for the first time in the book. As she says to Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching. . . . I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”

 

iii. Miss Havisham 

The mad, vengeful Miss Havisham, a wealthy dowager who lives in a rotting mansion and wears an old wedding dress every day of her life, is not exactly a believable character, but she is certainly one of the most memorable creations in the book. Miss Havisham's life is defined by a single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson on what was to have been their wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the moment when she first learned that Compeyson was gone, and she wears only one shoe, because when she learned of his betrayal, she had not yet put on the other shoe. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge. Miss Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella. She is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip's heart to be broken in the same manner as her own; rather than achieving any kind of personal revenge, she has only caused more pain. Miss Havisham immediately begs Pip for forgiveness, reinforcing the novel's theme that bad behavior can be redeemed by contrition and sympathy.

 

iv. Abel Magwitch (“The Convict”) 

A fearsome criminal, Magwitch escapes from prison at the beginning of Great Expectations and terrorizes Pip in the cemetery. Pip's kindness, however, makes a deep impression on him, and he subsequently devotes himself to making a fortune and using it to elevate Pip into a higher social class. Behind the scenes, he becomes Pip's secret benefactor, funding Pip's education and opulent lifestyle in London through the lawyer Jaggers.

 

 

4. Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

Plot Overview

The poor peddler John Durbeyfield is stunned to learn that he is the descendent of an ancient noble family, the d'Urbervilles. Meanwhile, Tess, his eldest daughter, joins the other village girls in the May Day dance, where Tess briefly exchanges glances with a young man. Mr. Durbeyfield and his wife decide to send Tess to the d'Urberville mansion, where they hope Mrs. d'Urberville will make Tess's fortune. In reality, Mrs. d'Urberville is no relation to Tess at all: her husband, the merchant Simon Stokes, simply changed his name to d'Urberville after he retired. But Tess does not know this fact, and when the lascivious Alec d'Urberville, Mrs. d'Urberville's son, procures Tess a job tending fowls on the d'Urberville estate, Tess has no choice but to accept, since she blames herself for an accident involving the family's horse, its only means of income.

Tess spends several months at this job, resisting Alec's attempts to seduce her. Finally, Alec takes advantage of her in the woods one night after a fair. Tess knows she does not love Alec. She returns home to her family to give birth to Alec's child, whom she christens Sorrow. Sorrow dies soon after he is born, and Tess spends a miserable year at home before deciding to seek work elsewhere. She finally accepts a job as a milkmaid at the Talbothays Dairy.

At Talbothays, Tess enjoys a period of contentment and happiness. She befriends three of her fellow milkmaids—Izz, Retty, and Marian—and meets a man named Angel Clare, who turns out to be the man from the May Day dance at the beginning of the novel. Tess and Angel slowly fall in love. They grow closer throughout Tess's time at Talbothays, and she eventually accepts his proposal of marriage. Still, she is troubled by pangs of conscience and feels she should tell Angel about her past. She writes him a confessional note and slips it under his door, but it slides under the carpet and Angel never sees it.

After their wedding, Angel and Tess both confess indiscretions: Angel tells Tess about an affair he had with an older woman in London, and Tess tells Angel about her history with Alec. Tess forgives Angel, but Angel cannot forgive Tess. He gives her some money and boards a ship bound for Brazil, where he thinks he might establish a farm. He tells Tess he will try to accept her past but warns her not to try to join him until he comes for her.

Tess struggles. She has a difficult time finding work and is forced to take a job at an unpleasant and unprosperous farm. She tries to visit Angel's family but overhears his brothers discussing Angel's poor marriage, so she leaves. She hears a wandering preacher speak and is stunned to discover that he is Alec d'Urberville, who has been converted to Christianity by Angel's father, the Reverend Clare. Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec appallingly begs Tess never to tempt him again. Soon after, however, he again begs Tess to marry him, having turned his back on his -religious ways.

Tess learns from her sister Liza-Lu that her mother is near death, and Tess is forced to return home to take care of her. Her mother recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies soon after. When the family is evicted from their home, Alec offers help. But Tess refuses to accept, knowing he only wants to obligate her to him again.

Angel agrees to help Tess, though he cannot quite believe that she has actually murdered Alec. They hide out in an empty mansion for a few days, then travel farther. When they come to Stonehenge, Tess goes to sleep, but when morning breaks shortly thereafter, a search party discovers them. Tess is arrested and sent to jail. Angel and Liza-Lu watch as a black flag is raised over the prison, signaling Tess's execution.

Analysis of Major Characters

i. Tess Durbeyfield

Intelligent, strikingly attractive, and distinguished by her deep moral sensitivity and passionate intensity, Tess is indisputably the central character of the novel that bears her name. But she is also more than a distinctive individual: Hardy makes her into somewhat of a mythic heroine. Her name, formally Theresa, recalls St. Teresa of Avila, another martyr whose vision of a higher reality cost her her life. Other characters often refer to Tess in mythical terms, as when Angel calls her a “Daughter of Nature” in Chapter XVIII, or refers to her by the Greek mythological names “Artemis” and “Demeter” in Chapter XX. The narrator himself sometimes describes Tess as more than an individual woman, but as something closer to a mythical incarnation of womanhood. In Chapter XIV, he says that her eyes are “neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all these shades together,” like “an almost standard woman.” Tess's story may thus be a “standard” story, representing a deeper and larger experience than that of a single individual.

In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth century. Possessing an education that her unschooled parents lack, since she has passed the Sixth Standard of the National Schools, Tess does not quite fit into the folk culture of her predecessors, but financial constraints keep her from rising to a higher station in life. She belongs in that higher world, however, as we discover on the first page of the novel with the news that the Durbeyfields are the surviving members of the noble and ancient family of the d'Urbervilles. There is aristocracy in Tess's blood, visible in her graceful beauty—yet she is forced to work as a farmhand and milkmaid. When she tries to express her joy by singing lower-class folk ballads at the beginning of the third part of the novel, they do not satisfy her—she seems not quite comfortable with those popular songs. But, on the other hand, her diction, while more polished than her mother's, is not quite up to the level of Alec's or Angel's. She is in between, both socially and culturally. Thus, Tess is a symbol of unclear and unstable notions of class in nineteenth-century Britain, where old family lines retained their earlier glamour, but where cold economic realities made sheer wealth more important than inner nobility.

Beyond her social symbolism, Tess represents fallen humanity in a religious sense, as the frequent biblical allusions in the novel remind us. Just as Tess's clan was once glorious and powerful but is now sadly diminished, so too did the early glory of the first humans, Adam and Eve, fade with their expulsion from Eden, making humans sad shadows of what they once were. Tess thus represents what is known in Christian theology as original sin, the degraded state in which all humans live, even when—like Tess herself after killing Prince or succumbing to Alec—they are not wholly or directly responsible for the sins for which they are punished. This torment represents the most universal side of Tess: she is the myth of the human who suffers for crimes that are not her own and lives a life more degraded than she deserves.

ii. Alec d'Urberville

An insouciant twenty-four-year-old man, heir to a fortune, and bearer of a name that his father purchased, Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tess's life. His first name, Alexander, suggests the conqueror—as in Alexander the Great—who seizes what he wants regardless of moral propriety. Yet he is more slippery than a grand conqueror. His full last name, Stoke-d'Urberville, symbolizes the split character of his family, whose origins are simpler than their pretensions to grandeur. After all, Stokes is a blunt and inelegant name. Indeed, the divided and duplicitous character of Alec is evident to the very end of the novel, when he quickly abandons his newfound Christian faith upon remeeting Tess. It is hard to believe Alec holds his religion, or anything else, sincerely. His supposed conversion may only be a new role he is playing.

This duplicity of character is so intense in Alec, and its consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes diabolical. The first part of his surname conjures associations with fiery energies, as in the stoking of a furnace or the flames of hell. His devilish associations are evident when he wields a pitchfork while addressing Tess early in the novel, and when he seduces her as the serpent in Genesis seduced Eve. Additionally, like the famous depiction of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, Alec does not try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan, he revels in them. In Chapter XII, he bluntly tells Tess, “I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” There is frank acceptance in this admission and no shame. Some readers feel Alec is too wicked to be believable, but, like Tess herself, he represents a larger moral principle rather than a real individual man. Like Satan, Alec symbolizes the base forces of life that drive a person away from moral perfection and greatness.

iii. Angel Clare

A freethinking son born into the family of a provincial parson and determined to set himself up as a farmer instead of going to Cambridge like his conformist brothers, Angel represents a rebellious striving toward a personal vision of goodness. He is a secularist who yearns to work for the “honor and glory of man,” as he tells his father in Chapter XVIII, rather than for the honor and glory of God in a more distant world. A typical young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees human society as a thing to be remolded and improved, and he fervently believes in the nobility of man. He rejects the values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own. His love for Tess, a mere milkmaid and his social inferior, is one expression of his disdain for tradition. This independent spirit contributes to his aura of charisma and general attractiveness that makes him the love object of all the milkmaids with whom he works at Talbothays.

As his name—in French, close to “Bright Angel”—suggests, Angel is not quite of this world, but floats above it in a transcendent sphere of his own. The narrator says that Angel shines rather than burns and that he is closer to the intellectually aloof poet Shelley than to the fleshly and passionate poet Byron. His love for Tess may be abstract, as we guess when he calls her “Daughter of Nature” or “Demeter.” Tess may be more an archetype or ideal to him than a flesh and blood woman with a complicated life. Angel's ideals of human purity are too elevated to be applied to actual people: Mrs. Durbeyfield's easygoing moral beliefs are much more easily accommodated to real lives such as Tess's. Angel awakens to the actual complexities of real-world morality after his failure in Brazil, and only then he realizes he has been unfair to Tess. His moral system is readjusted as he is brought down to Earth. Ironically, it is not the angel who guides the human in this novel, but the human who instructs the angel, although at the cost of her own life.

iv. Themes

Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Tess does not mean to kill Prince, but she is punished anyway, just as she is unfairly punished for her own rape by Alec. Nor is there justice waiting in heaven. Christianity teaches that there is compensation in the afterlife for unhappiness suffered in this life, but the only devout Christian encountered in the novel may be the reverend, Mr. Clare, who seems more or less content in his life anyway. For others in their misery, Christianity offers little solace of heavenly justice. Mrs. Durbeyfield never mentions otherworldly rewards. The converted Alec preaches heavenly justice for earthly sinners, but his faith seems shallow and insincere. Generally, the moral atmosphere of the novel is not Christian justice at all, but pagan injustice. The forces that rule human life are absolutely unpredictable and not necessarily well-disposed to us. The pre-Christian rituals practiced by the farm workers at the opening of the novel, and Tess's final rest at Stonehenge at the end, remind us of a world where the gods are not just and fair, but whimsical and uncaring. When the narrator concludes the novel with the statement that “âJustice' was done, and the President of the Immortals (in the Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess,” we are reminded that justice must be put in ironic quotation marks, since it is not really just at all. What passes for “Justice” is in fact one of the pagan gods enjoying a bit of “sport,” or a frivolous game.

v. Changing Ideas of Social Class in Victorian England

Tess of the d'Urbervilles presents com plex pictures of both the importance of social class in nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple way. Certainly the Durbeyfields are a powerful emblem of the way in which class is no longer evaluated in Victorian times as it would have been in the Middle Ages—that is, by blood alone, with no attention paid to fortune or worldly success. Indubitably the Durbeyfields have purity of blood, yet for the parson and nearly everyone else in the novel, this fact amounts to nothing more than a piece of genealogical trivia. In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage, which explains how Simon Stokes, Alec's father, was smoothly able to use his large fortune to purchase a lustrous family name and transform his clan into the Stoke-d'Urbervilles. The d'Urbervilles pass for what the Durbeyfields truly are—authentic nobility—simply because definitions of class have changed. The issue of class confusion even affects the Clare clan, whose most promising son, Angel, is intent on becoming a farmer and marrying a milkmaid, thus bypassing the traditional privileges of a Cambridge education and a parsonage. His willingness to work side by side with the farm laborers helps endear him to Tess, and their acquaintance would not have been possible if he were a more traditional and elitist aristocrat. Thus, the three main characters in the Angel-Tess-Alec triangle are all strongly marked by confusion regarding their respective social classes, an issue that is one of the main concerns of the novel.

vi. Men Dominating Women

One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the way in which men can dominate women, exerting a power over them linked primarily to their maleness. Sometimes this command is purposeful, in the man's full knowledge of his exploitation, as when Alec acknowledges how bad he is for seducing Tess for his own momentary pleasure. Alec's act of abuse, the most life-altering event that Tess experiences in the novel, is clearly the most serious instance of male domination over a female. But there are other, less blatant examples of women's passivity toward dominant men. When, after Angel reveals that he prefers Tess, Tess's friend Retty attempts suicide and her friend Marian becomes an alcoholic, which makes their earlier schoolgirl-type crushes on Angel seem disturbing. This devotion is not merely fanciful love, but unhealthy obsession. These girls appear utterly dominated by a desire for a man who, we are told explicitly, does not even realize that they are interested in him. This sort of unconscious male domination of women is perhaps even more unsettling than Alec's outward and self-conscious cruelty.

Even Angel's love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her in an unhealthy way. Angel substitutes an idealized picture of Tess's country purity for the real-life woman that he continually refuses to get to know. When Angel calls Tess names like “Daughter of Nature” and “Artemis,” we feel that he may be denying her true self in favor of a mental image that he prefers. Thus, her identity and experiences are suppressed, albeit unknowingly. This pattern of male domination is finally reversed with Tess's murder of Alec, in which, for the first time in the novel, a woman takes active steps against a man. Of course, this act only leads to even greater suppression of a woman by men, when the crowd of male police officers arrest Tess at Stonehenge. Nevertheless, for just a moment, the accepted pattern of submissive women bowing to dominant men is interrupted, and Tess's act seems heroic.

Images of birds recur throughout the novel, evoking or contradicting their traditional spiritual association with a higher realm of transcendence. Both the Christian dove of peace and the Romantic songbirds of Keats and Shelley, which symbolize sublime heights, lead us to expect that birds will have positive meaning in this novel. Tess occasionally hears birdcalls on her frequent hikes across the countryside; their free expressiveness stands in stark contrast to Tess's silent and constrained existence as a wronged and disgraced girl. When Tess goes to work for Mrs. d'Urberville, she is surprised to find that the old woman's pet finches are frequently released to fly free throughout the room. These birds offer images of hope and liberation. Yet there is irony attached to birds as well, making us doubt whether these images of hope and freedom are illusory. Mrs. d'Urberville's birds leave little white spots on the upholstery, which presumably some servant—perhaps Tess herself—will have to clean. It may be that freedom for one creature entails hardship for another, just as Alec's free enjoyment of Tess's body leads her to a lifetime of suffering. In the end, when Tess encounters the pheasants maimed by hunters and lying in agony, birds no longer seem free, but rather oppressed and submissive. These pheasants are no Romantic songbirds hovering far above the Earth—they are victims of earthly violence, condemned to suffer down below and never fly again.

vii. The Book of Genesis

The Genesis story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is evoked repeatedly throughout Tess of the d'Urbervilles, giving the novel a broader metaphysical and philosophical dimension. The roles of Eve and the serpent in paradise are clearly delineated: Angel is the noble Adam newly born, while Tess is the indecisive and troubled Eve. When Tess gazes upon Angel in Chapter XXVII, “she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.” Alec, with his open avowal that he is bad to the bone, is the conniving Satan. He seduces Tess under a tree, giving her sexual knowledge in return for her lost innocence. The very name of the forest where this seduction occurs, the Chase, suggests how Eve will be chased from Eden for her sins. This guilt, which will never be erased, is known in Christian theology as the original sin that all humans have inherited. Just as John Durbeyfield is told in Chapter I that “you don't live anywhere,” and his family is evicted after his death at the end of the novel, their homelessness evokes the human exile from Eden. Original sin suggests that humans have fallen from their once great status to a lower station in life, just as the d'Urbervilles have devolved into the modern Durbeyfields. This Story of the Fall—or of the “Pure Drop,” to recall the name of a pub in Tess's home village—is much more than a social fall. It is an explanation of how all of us humans—not only Tess—never quite seem to live up to our expectations, and are never able to inhabit the places of grandeur we feel we deserve.

viii. Variant Names

The transformation of the d'Urbervilles into the Durbeyfields is one example of the common phenomenon of renaming, or variant naming, in the novel. Names matter in this novel. Tess knows and accepts that she is a lowly Durbeyfield, but part of her still believes, as her parents also believe, that her aristocratic original name should be restored. John Durbeyfield goes a step further than Tess, and actually renames himself Sir John, as his tombstone epitaph shows. Another character who renames himself is Simon Stokes, Angel's father, who purchased a family tree and made himself Simon Stoke-d'Urberville. The question raised by all these cases of name changing, whether successful or merely imagined, is the extent to which an altered name brings with it an altered identity. Alec acts notoriously ungentlemanly throughout the novel, but by the end, when he appears at the d'Urberville family vault, his lordly and commanding bearing make him seem almost deserving of the name his father has bought, like a spoiled medieval nobleman. Hardy's interest in name changes makes reality itself seem changeable according to whims of human perspective. The village of Blakemore, as we are reminded twice in Chapters I and II, is also known as Blackmoor, and indeed Hardy famously renames the southern English countryside as “Wessex.” He imposes a fictional map on a real place, with names altered correspondingly. Reality may not be as solid as the names people confer upon it.

ix. Prince

When Tess dozes off in the wagon and loses control, the resulting death of the Durbeyfield horse, Prince, spurs Tess to seek aid from the d'Urbervilles, setting the events of the novel in motion. The horse's demise is thus a powerful plot motivator, and its name a potent symbol of Tess's own claims to aristocracy. Like the horse, Tess herself bears a high-class name, but is doomed to a lowly life of physical labor. Interestingly, Prince's death occurs right after Tess dreams of ancient knights, having just heard the news that her family is aristocratic. Moreover, the horse is pierced by the forward-jutting piece of metal on a mail coach, which is reminiscent of a wound one might receive in a medieval joust. In an odd way, Tess's dream of medieval glory comes true, and her horse dies a heroic death. Yet her dream of meeting a prince while she kills her own Prince, and with him her family's only means of financial sustenance, is a tragic foreshadowing of her own story. The death of the horse symbolizes the sacrifice of real-world goods, such as a useful animal or even her own honor, through excessive fantasizing about a better world.

x. The d'Urberville Family Vault

A double-edged symbol of both the majestic grandeur and the lifeless hollowness of the aristocratic family name that the Durbeyfields learn they possess, the d'Urberville family vault represents both the glory of life and the end of life. Since Tess herself moves from passivity to active murder by the end of the novel, attaining a kind of personal grandeur even as she brings death to others and to herself, the double symbolism of the vault makes it a powerful site for the culminating meeting between Alec and Tess. Alec brings Tess both his lofty name and, indirectly, her own death later; it is natural that he meets her in the vault in d'Urberville Aisle, where she reads her own name inscribed in stone and feels the presence of death. Yet the vault that sounds so glamorous when rhapsodized over by John Durbeyfield in Chapter I seems, by the end, strangely hollow and meaningless. When Alec stomps on the floor of the vault, it produces only a hollow echo, as if its basic emptiness is a complement to its visual grandeur. When Tess is executed, her ancestors are said to snooze on in their crypts, as if uncaring even about the fate of a member of their own majestic family. Perhaps the secret of the family crypt is that its grandiosity is ultimately meaningless.

xi. Brazil

Rather surprising for a novel that seems set so solidly in rural England, the narration shifts very briefly to Brazil when Angel takes leave of Tess and heads off to establish a career in farming. Even more exotic for a Victorian English reader than America or Australia, Brazil is the country in which Robinson Crusoe made his fortune and it seems to promise a better life far from the humdrum familiar world. Brazil is thus more than a geographical entity on the map in this novel: it symbolizes a fantasyland, a place where dreams come true. As Angel's name suggests, he is a lofty visionary who lacks some experience with the real world, despite all his mechanical know-how in farm management. He may be able to milk cows, but he does not yet know how to tell the difference between an exotic dream and an everyday reality, so inevitably his experience in the imagined dream world of Brazil is a disaster that he barely survives. His fiasco teaches him that ideals do not exist in life, and this lesson helps him reevaluate his disappointment with Tess's imperfections, her failure to incarnate the ideal he expected her to be. For Angel, Brazil symbolizes the impossibility of ideals, but also forgiveness and acceptance of life in spite of those disappointed ideals.

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