Chapter 4 The Victorian Period

一． 学习目的和要求
　　通过本章的学习，对19世纪维多利亚时代英国的政治，经济，历史，文化背景，对维多利亚时代的诗歌，散文，小说在创作思想上的进步和创作技巧上的改革，以及对该时代主要作家的生平，观点，创作旨意，艺术品特点及其代表作的主题，结构，语言，人物刻画等都有一个全面的了解。 并通过作品选读加深体会感受，增强对作品的理解和鉴赏能力。

二． 考核要求
　（一） 维多利亚时期概述
　　 1． 识记:（1）维多利亚时期的界定
　　　　　　　（2）社会政治，经济，文化背景。
　　 2． 领会:（1）维多利亚时期的文学特点
　　　　　　　（2）批判现实主义小说对后世文学的影响。
　　 3． 应用：宪章运动，功利主义，批判现实主义，戏剧独自等名词的解释

　（二） 该时期的重要作家
　　 1． 一般识记：重要作家的生平与创作生涯
　 　2． 识记: 重要作品及主要内容
　 　3． 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题思想，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。
　 　4． 应用:（1）狄更斯和萨克雷作品的批判现实主义思想及各自的创作手法，艺术特色。
　　　　　　　（2）小说《简·爱》，《呼啸山庄》的主题思想与人物塑造。
　　　　　　　（3）"我逝去的公爵夫?quot;中的戏剧独白。
　　　　　　　（4）乔泊·艾略特和哈代小说中环境，氛围描述与人物内世界的展示。

A. Introduction to the Victorian Period
　1. 识记　(1) Definition: the Victorian Period
　　Chronologically the Victorian period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.
　(2) Political, Economical & Cultural Background
　　The early years of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economic development as well as serious social problems. After the Reform Bill of 1832 passed the political power from the decaying aristocrats into the hands of the middle-class industrial capitalists, the Industrial Revolution soon geared up. Towards the mid-century, England had reached its highest point of development as a world power. And yet beneath the great prosperity & richness, there existed widespread poverty & wretchedness among the working class. The worsening living & working conditions, the mass unemployment & the new Poor Law of 1834 with its workhouse system finally gave rise to the Chartist Movement (1836-1848).
During the next twenty years, England settled down to a time of prosperity & relative stability. The middle-class life of the time was characterized by prosperity, respectability & material progress.
But the last three decades of the century witnessed the decline of the British Empire & the decay of the Victorian values.
　　Ideologically, the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of science & technology, new inventions & discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology & anthropology drastically shook people's religious convictions. Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) & The Descent of Man (1871) shook the theoretical basis of the traditional faith. On the other hand, Utilitarianism was widely accepted & practiced. Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness.

　2. 领会
　(1) Features of the Victorian Literature
　　Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude & diversity. It was many-sided & complex, & reflected both romantically & realistically the great changes that were going on in people's life & thought. Great writers & great works abounded.
　(2) Features of Victorian novels
　　In this period, the novel became the most widely read & the most vital & challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th-century realist novel, novelists in this period carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society & the defense of the mass. Although writing from different points of view & with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry at the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship & Utilitarianism & the widespread misery, poverty & injustice. Their truthful depiction of people's life & bitter & strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems & in the actual improvement of the society.
　　Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represents the reality & spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor & unbounded imagination are all unprecedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values & experiments are to witness their bumper harvest.

　3. 应用 Definitions of several terms
　1) The Chartist Movement (1836-1848)
　　The English workers got themselves organized in big cities & brought forth the People's charter, in which they demanded basic rights & better living & working conditions. They, for three times, made appeals to the government, with hundreds of thousands of people's signatures. The movement swept over most of the cities in the country. Although the movement declined to an end in 1848, it did bring some improvement to the welfare of the working class. This was the first mass movement of the English working class & the early sign of the awakening of the poor, oppressed people.
　2) Utilitarianism
　　Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. This theory held a special appeal to the middle-class industrialists, whose greed drove them to exploiting workers to the utmost & brought greater suffering & poverty to the working mass.
　3) Critical Realism
　　The Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth, literature has come very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress.
　4) Dramatic Monologue
　　By dramatic monologue, it is meant that a poet chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis, in which his characters are made to talk about their lives, & about their minds & hearts. In " listening" to those one-sided talks, readers can form their own opinions & judgments about the speaker's personality & about what has really happened. Robert Browning brought this poetic form to its maturity & perfection & his "My Last Duchess" is one of the best-known dramatic monologues.

I.                     Charles Dickens

 

　1． 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
　　Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born at Portsmouth. His father, a poor clerk in the Navy Pay office, was put into the Marsalsea Prison for debt when young Charles was only 12 years old. The son had to give up schooling to work in an underground cellar at a shoe-blacking factory - a position he considered most humiliating. We find the bitter experiences of that suffering child reflected in many of Dickens's novels. In 1827, Charles entered a lawyer's office, & two years later he became a Parliamentary reporter for newspapers. From 1833 Dickens began to write occasional sketches of London life, which were later collected & published under the title Sketches by Boz (1836). Soon The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837) appeared in monthly installments. And since then, his life became one of endless hard work. In his later years, he gave himself to public readings of his works, which brought plaudits & comfort but also exhausted him. In 1870, this man of great heart & vitality died of overwork, leaving his last novel unfinished.

　2. 识记His Major Works
　　Upon his death, Dickens left to the world a rich legacy of 15 novels & a number of short stories. They offer a most complete & realistic picture of English society of his age & remain the highest achievement in the 19th-century English novel. In nearly all his novels, behind the gloomy pictures of oppression & poverty, behind the loud humor & buffoonery, is his gentleness, his genial mirth, & his simple faith in mankind.
　　The following is a list of his novels & other collections in three periods:
　(1) Period of youthful optimist
Sketches by Boz (1836); The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837); Oliver Twist (1837-1838); Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841); Barnaby Rudge(1841)
　(2) Period of excitement & irritation
American Notes (1842); Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1845); A Christmas Carol (1843); Dombey & Son (1846-1848); David Copperfield (1849-1850)
　(3) Period of steadily intensifying pessimism
Bleak House (1852-1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865); Edwin Drood (unfinished)(1870)

　3. 领会 Distinct Features of His Novels
　(1) Character Sketches & Exaggeration
　　In his novels are found about 19 hundred figures, some of whom are really such " typical characters under typical circumstances," that they become proverbial or representative of a whole group of similar persons.
　　As a master of characterization, Dickens was skillful in drawing vivid caricatural sketches by exaggerating some peculiarities, & in giving them exactly the actions & words that fit them: that is, right words & right actions for the right person.
　(2) Broad Humor & Penetrating Satire
　　Dickens is well known as a humorist as well as a satirist. He sometimes employs humor to enliven a scene or lighten a character by making it (him or her) eccentric, whimsical, or laughable. Sometimes he uses satire to ridicule human follies or vices, with the purpose of laughing them out of existence or bring about reform.
　(3) Complicated & Fascinating Plot
　　Dickens seems to love complicated novel constructions with minor plots beside the major one, or two parallel major plots within one novel. He is also skillful at creating suspense & mystery to make the story fascinating.
　(4) The Power of Exposure
　　As the greatest representative of English critical realism, Dickens made his novel the instrument of morality & justice. Each of his novels reveals a specific social problem.

　4. 领会 His Literary Creation & Literary Achievements
　　Charles Dickens is one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian Age. It is his serious intention to expose & criticize in his works all the poverty, injustice, hypocrisy & corruptness he saw all around him. In his works, Dickens sets a full map & a large-scale criticism of the 19th-century England, particularly London. A combination of optimism about people & realism about society is obvious in these works. His representative works in the early period include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield & so on.
　　His later works show a highly conscious modern artist. The settings are more complicated; the stories are better structured. Most novels of this period present a sharper criticism of social evils & morals of the Victorian England, for example, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations & so on. The early optimism could no more be found.
　　Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. His language could, in a way, be compared with Shakespeare's. His humor & wit seem inexhaustible. Character-portrayal is the most outstanding feature of his works. His characterizations of child (Oliver Twist, etc.), some grotesque people (Fagin, etc.) & some comical people (Mr. Micawber, etc.) are superb. Dickens also employs exaggeration in his works. Dickens's works are also characterized by a mixture of humor & pathos.

　5. 应用 Selected Reading
　　An Excerpt from Chapter III of Oliver Twist
　　The novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse & life of the underworld in the 19th-century London. The author's intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order & of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens's first child hero & Fagin the first grotesque figure.
　　This section, Chapter III of the novel, is a detailed account of how he is punished for that " impious & profane offence of asking for more" & how he is to be sold. At three pound ten, to Mr. Gamfield, the notorious chimneysweeper. Though we can afford a smile now & then, we feel more the pitiable state of the orphan boy & the cruelty & hypocrisy of the workhouse board.

II. The Bronte Sisters

　1. 一般识记 Their lives & literary Career
　　Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily Bronte (1818-1848), & their gifted sister Anne Bronte (1820-1849), came from a large family of Irish origin. Their father was a clergyman at Haworth, Yorkshire. When they were young, the Bronte sisters were sent to a school for clergymen's daughters. The oldest two died there due to the poor & unhealthy conditions. This experience inspired the later portrayal of Lowood School in the novel Jane Eyre (1847). After the death of the elder sisters, Charlotte & Emily were brought home to be educated by their father. For some time, they worked in a boarding school & were subsequently governesses in rich families.
Charlotte & her two younger sisters had a great fondness for literature. In 1845 appeared a volume of poetry entitled Poems by Carrer, Ellis & Acton Bell (the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily & Anne), but received little attention. Then the three sisters turned to novel writing. Charlotte's first novel The Professor was rejected by the publisher. But her second one, Jane Eyre, won immediate success when it appeared in 1847. In the same year, Emily's single & unique work Wuthering Heights & Anne's Agnes Grey were also published. Soon they were followed by Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
　　After the death of Emily & Anne, Charlotte continued writing. Her next important novel Shirley, a work about the industrial troubles between the mill-owners & machine-breakers in Yorkshire in 1811-1812 came out in 1849. Another novel Villette appeared in 1853. This is her most autobiographical work, largely based on her experience in Brussels. In 1854, charlotte married her father's curate. She died a few months later in pregnancy. The Professor, her first written work, was published posthumously in 1857.

　2. 识记 Charlotte's Literary Creation
　　Charlotte Bronte's works are all about the struggle of an individual towards self-realization, about some lonely & neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, & understanding & a full, happy life. All her heroines' highest joy comes from some sacrifice of self or some human weakness overcome. Besides, she is a writer of realism combined with romanticism. On the one hand, she presents a vivid realistic picture of the English society by exposing the cruelty, hypocrisy & other evils of the upper classes & by showing the misery & suffering of the poor. Her works are famous for the depiction of the life of the middle-class workingwomen, particularly governesses. On the other hand, her writings are marked throughout by intensity of vision & of passion. By writing from an individual point of view, by creating characters who are possessed of strong feelings, fiery passions & some extraordinary personalities, by using some elements of horror, mystery & prophesy, she is able to recreate life in a very romantic way. The vividness of her subjective narration, the intensely achieved characterization, especially those heroines who are totally contrary to the public expectations & the most truthful presentation of the economical, moral, social life of the time -all this earns her works a never dying popularity.

　3. 应用 Selected Readings
　　Excerpt One: from Chapter XXIII of Jane Eyre by charlotte Bronte
The work is one of the most popular & important novels of the Victorian age. It is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society, e.g. the religious hypocrisy of charity institutions, the social discrimination & the false social convention as concerning love & marriage. At the same time, it is an intense moral fable. Jane, like Mr. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical & moral tests to grow up & achieve her final happiness. The success of the novel is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine. Jane Eyre is a completely new woman image. She represents those middle-class workingwomen who are struggling for recognition of their rights & equality as a human being. The vivid description of her intense feelings & her thought & inner conflicts brings her to the heart of the audience.
Jane Eyre's character:
　　Jane Eyre, an orphan child with a fiery spirit & a longing to love & be loved, a poor, plain, little governess who dares to love her master, a man superior to her in many ways, & even is brave enough to declare to the man her love for him, cuts a completely new woman image. In this novel Charlotte characterizes Jane Eyre as a naive, kind-hearted, noble-minded woman who pursues a genuine kind of love. Jane Eyre represents those middle-class workingwomen who are struggling for recognition of their basic rights & equality as a human being. The vivid description of her intense feelings & her thought & inner conflicts brings her to the heart of the audience.
　　The selected part is taken from Chapter XXIII, not long after Jane is back from her aunt's funeral. Jane finds herself hopelessly in love with Mr. Rochester but she is aware that her love is out of the question. So, when forced to confront Mr. Rochester, she desperately & openly declared her equality with him & her love for him. The passion described here is intense & genuine.
　　Excerpt Two: from Chapter XV of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
　1) Emily's subject matter
　　As far as Emily's literary creation is concerned, she is, first of all, a poet Her 193 poems, mostly devoted to the matter of nature with its mysterious workings & its unaccountable influence upon people's life, are works of strange sublimity & beauty. They are ample proof for the poetic genius of this young, reclusive woman. But, to the common readers, she is better known today as the author of that most fascinating novel, Wuthering Heights.
　2) The theme of the novel
　　The novel is a riddle which means different things to different people. From the social point of view, it is a story about a poor man abused, betrayed & distorted by his social betters because he is a poor nobody. As a love story, this is one of the most moving: the passion between Heathcliff & Catherine proves the most intense, the most beautiful & at the same time the most horrible passion ever to be found possible in human beings.
　3) The structure of the novel
　　The novel has a unique structure: the story is told through independent narrators unidentical with the author, whose personality is therefore completely absent from the book. The story is told mainly by Nelly, Catherine's old nurse, to Mr. Lockwood, a temporary tenant at Grange. The latter too gives an account of what he sees at Wuthering Heights. And part of the story is told through Isabella's letters to Nelly. While the central interest is maintained, the sequence of its development is constantly disordered by flashbacks. This makes the story all the more enticing & genuine.
The excerpt taken here is from ChapterXV, the death scene of Catherine, narrated by Nelly to Mr. Lockwood. When Edgar is away at church, Heathcliff seizes the chance to see the dying Catherine. The intense love between the two is fully shown in this agonizing scene.

 

III. Alfred Tennyson

　1.一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
　　Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) is certainly the most representative Victorian poet. His poetry voices the doubt & the faith, the grief & the joy of the English people in an age of fast social changes.
　　He was born at Somersby, Linconshire, the fourth son of a rather learned clergyman. In 1827, he & his elder brother published Poems by Two Brothers. In this juvenile work the influence of Byron & an attraction to oriental themes were shown. He was educated at the Trinity College, Cambridge & published his first signed work Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) there. In 1832, one year after he left Cambridge, he published Poems, which contained a variety of poems, beautiful in melody & rich in imagery. In 1842, his next issue of Poems came out, collected in the book are the dramatic monologue "Ulysses", the epic narrative " Morte d'Arthur," the exquisite idylls "Dora" & " The Gardener's Daughter," etc. In 1847, The Princess was published. Written in blank verse, it deals with the theme of women's rights & position. In 1850, Tennyson was appointed the Poet Laureate & he published his greatest work In Memoriam. The rest years of Tennyson's life was comfortable & peaceful, but he never stopped writing. In 1855, Tennyson published a monodrama Maud, a collection of short lyrics. Among the other works of his later period, "Rizpah," "Enoch Arden," " Merlin & the Gleam" & " Crossing the Bar" are worthy of note.

　2.识记 His major poetic works & their theme
　1) In Memoriam
　　Presumably it is an elegy on the death of Hallam, yet less than half of its l00 pieces are directly connected with him. The poet here does not merely dwell on the personal bereavement. As a poetic diary, the poem is also an elaborate & powerful expression of the poet's philosophical & religious thoughts - his doubts about the meaning of life, the existence of the soul & the afterlife, & his faith in the power of love & the soul's instinct & immortality. Such doubts & beliefs were shared by most people in an age when the old Christian belief was challenged by new scientific discoveries, though to most readers today, the real attraction of the poem lies more in its profound feeling & artistic beauty than in the philosophical & religious reflections. The familiar trance-like experience, mellifluous rhythm & pictorial descriptions make it one of the best elegies in English literature.
　2) Idylls of the Kin g (1842-1885)
　　It is his most ambitious work which took him over 30 years to complete. It is made up of 12 books of narrative poems, based on the Celtic legends of King Arthur & his Knights of the Round Table. But it is not a mere reproduction of the old legend, though. It is a modern interpretation of the classic myth. For one thing, the moral standards & sentiments reflected in the poem belong to the Victorians rather than to the medieval royal people. For another, the story of the rise & fall of King Arthur is, in fact, meant to represent a cyclic history of western civilization, which , in Tennyson's mind , is going on a spiritual decline & will end in destruction.

　3.领会Artistic Features of His Poetry
　　Tennyson is a real artist. He has the natural power of linking visual pictures with musical expressions, & these two with the feelings. He has perfect control of the sound of English, & a sensitive ear, an excellent choice & taste of words. His poetry is rich in poetic images & melodious language, & noted for its lyrical beauty & metrical charm. His works are not only the products of the creative imagination of a poetic genius but also products of a long & rich English heritage. His wonderful works manifest all the qualities of England's great poets. The dreaminess of Spenser, the majesty of Milton, the natural simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake & Coleridge, the melody of Keats & Shelley, & the narrative vigor of Scott & Byron, --- all these striking qualities are evident on successive pages of Tennyson's poetry.

　4. 应用 Selected Readings
　(1) Break, Break, Break (1)
　　This short lyric is written in memory of Tennyson's best friend, Arthur Hallam, whose death has a lifelong influence on the poet. Here, the poet's own feelings of sadness are contrasted with the carefree, innocent joys of the children & the unfeeling movement of the ship & the sea waves. The beauty of the lyric is to be found in the musical language & in the association of sound & images with feelings & emotions. The poem contains 4 quatrains, with combined iambic & anapaestic feet. Most lines have three feet & some four. The rhyme scheme is a b c b.
　(2) Crossing the Bar (1)
　　This poem was written in the later years of Tennyson's life. Although not the last poem written by Tennyson in his long creative career, this poem appears, at his request, as the final poem in all collections of his works. The scene is sketched with a few strokes: sunset & the evening star, the twilight and the evening bell, & then the dark. The ship is ready to go out of the harbor. It will cross the bar & reach the vast open sea for the long voyage that it is to make. The allegory of the poem is clear. Tennyson is in the evening of life, & the "clear call" of death will come soon. But when he has crossed the border between life & death to go on that voyage beyond the bound of Time & Place, he hopes then to see his "Pilot," God, face to face. From the moving imagery & the pleasant sound of the poem, we can feel his fearlessness towards death, his faith in God & an afterlife.
　(3) Ulysses(1)
　　In Greek mythology, Ulysses is the king of the Ithaca Island. He is the hero in many literary classics. In Homer's Odessey (the Greek name for Ulysses), Ulysses eventually arrives home after the ten-year Trojan war & another ten-year's adventures at sea. However, according to Dante, Ulysses never returns to his home place Ithaca, but urges his men to go on exploring westward. Tennyson combines these two versions. In this poem, Ulysses is now three years back in his homeland, reunited with his wife Penelope & his son Telemachus, & resumes his rule over the land. But he will not endure the peaceful commonplace everyday life. Old as he is, he persuades his old followers to go with him & to sail again to pursue a new world & new knowledge. Written in the form of dramatic monologue, the poem not only expresses, through the mouth of the heroic Ulysses, Tennyson's own determination & courage to brave the struggle of life but also reflects the restlessness & aspiration of the age.

 

IV. Robert Browning

　1.一般识记His life &Literary Career
　　Robert Browning (1812-1889) was born in a well-off family & received his education mainly from his private tutor, & from his father, who gave him the freedom to follow his own interest. In 1833, he published his first poetic work Pauline, which brought great embarrassment upon him. But in his second attempt Sordello (1840), he went too far in self-correction that the poem became so obscure as to be hardly readable. He even tried play writing but failed. All these frustrating experiences forced the poet to develop a literary form that suited him best & actually give full swing to this genius, i.e. the dramatic monologue.
　　In 1846, Browning married Elizabeth Barrett, a famous poetess whose famous book of love poetry was Sonnets from the Portuguese. In 1869 Browing's masterpiece, The Ring & the Book, came out. In 1889, Browning died & was buried in the Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, beside Tennyson.

　2.识记His major works
Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances & Lyrics (1845), Bells & Pomegranates (1846), Men & Women (1855), Dramatic Personae (1864), The Ring & the Book (1868-1869) & Dramatic Idylls (1880)

　3.领会Characteristic of The Ring & the Book: Dramatic M　onologue
　　In this poem, Browning chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis, in which his characters are made to talk about their lives, & about their minds & hearts. In "listening" to those one-sided talks, readers can form their own opinions & judgments about the speaker's personality & about what has really happened.

　4.领会Robert Browning's artistic characteristics
　　(1) The name of Browning is often associated with the term "dramatic monologue." Although it is not his invention, it is in his hands that this poetic form reaches its maturity& perfection.
　　(2) Browning's poetry is not easy to read. His rhythms are often too fast, too rough & unmusical
　　(3) The syntax is usually clipped & highly compressed. The similes & illustrations appear too profusely. The allusions & implications are sometimes odd & far-fetched. All this makes up his obscurity.
On the whole, Browning's style is very different from that of any other Victorian poets. He is like a weather-beaten pioneer, bravely & vigorously trying to beat a track through the jungle. His poetic style belongs to the 20th-century rather than to the Victorian age.

　5. 应用 Selected Readings:
　　1) My Last Duchess (1)
　　"My Last Duchess" is Browning's best-known dramatic monologue. The poem takes its sources from the life of Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara of the 16th-century Italy, whose young wife died suspiciously after three years of marriage. Not long after her death, the duke managed to arrange a marriage with the niece of another noble man. This dramatic monologue is the duke's speech addressed to the agent who comes to negotiate the marriage. In his talk about his "last duchess," the duke reveals himself as a self-conceited, cruel & tyrannical man. The poem is written in heroic couplets, but with no regular metrical system. In reading, it sounds like blank verse.
　　2) Meeting at Night (1)
　　Meeting at Night, together with Parting at Morning, appeared originally under the single title Night & Morning. Browning made them separate poems in a late edition of his work. The speaker in both is a man. In this poem, the man, a lover, describes the whereabouts of their meeting place. The journey to love is dominated by moon, shadows, softness, & sexual imagery.
　　3) Parting at Morning (1)
　　Here in the description of sunrise, the poet unconsciously expresses his helplessness in having to face up his duty as a man. The journey back is from the nighttime woman's world of love to the daytime world of reality.

 

V. George Eliot

　1. 一般识记 Her life & Literary Career
　　George Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was born on Nov. 22, 1819 into an estate agent's family in Warwickshire, England. Though brought up under strict religious influences, she early abandoned religious beliefs, adopted agnostic opinions about Christian doctrine, & showed a great interest in social & philosophical problems.
　　At the age of 39, she started he literary career. Being a woman of intelligence & versatility, she quickly found herself ranking high among the great writers. In 1857, she wrote her first three stories which were later published in book form under the title of Scenes of Clerical Life. Then there came successively her three most popular novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) & Silas Marner (1861), all drawn from her lifelong knowledge of English country life & notable for their realistic details, pungent characterization & high moral tone. In 1863, she published Romola, a full elaborately documented story of Florence in the time of Savornarola. Then followed Felix Holt, the Radical, her only novel on English politics. In 1872, Middlemarch, a panoramic book considered today by many to be George Eliot's greatest achievement, come out. In 1876, she published her last novel, Daniel Deronda. These novels, together with a number of poems & a collection of satirical essays, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, constitute a formidable body of work from a woman frail in health & working constantly under the apprehension of failure or worthlessness.

　2. 识记Her Literary Achievements
　　Writing at the latter half of the 19th century & closely following the critical realist writers, George Eliot was working at something new. By joining the worlds of inward propensity & outward circumstances & showing them in the lives of her characters, she starts a new type of realism & sets into motion a variety of developments, leading in the direction of both the naturalistic & psychological novel. In her works, she seeks to present the inner struggle of a person & to reveal the motives, impulses & hereditary influences which govern human action. She is interested in the development of a soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power of the character. Eliot holds the belief that a certain act in daily life will produce a definite moral effect on the individual. Most of her novels are characterized by two features: moral teaching & psychological realism.

　3. 领会 The theme of her works
　　As a woman of exceptional intelligence & life experience, George Eliot shows a particular concern for the destiny of women, especially those with great intelligence, potential & social aspirations. In her mind, the pathetic tragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education & limited social life determine that they must depend on men for sustenance & realization of their goals, & they have only to fulfill the domestic duties expected of them by the society. Their opportunities of success are not even increased by wealth.

4. 应用 Selected Reading:
　　An Excerpt from Chapter XXVIII of Middlemarch
　　Middlemarch, a study of provincial life, has been known as one of the most mature works in English literary history. The book provides a panoramic view of life in a small English town, Middlemarch, &its surrounding countryside in the mid-nineteenth century. It is mainly centered on the lives of Dorotea Brooke & Tertius Lydgate, both of whom are shown have great potentials & ambitions, but both fail in achieving their goals owing to the social environment as well as their own vulnerabilities.
The excerpt below begins from Drothea & Casoubon's return from their honeymoon in Rome, where Mr. Casaubon buries himself in the library, ignoring the bride & leaving her very much alone. This is but the first taste of bitterness & disappointment for the youthful & hopeful Dorothea. Now back at home, she finds herself shut up in the cold, lifeless Lowick Manor & begins to see the impossibility of hope.

 

VI. Thomas Hardy

　1. 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
　　Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born near Dorchester, the area that later became the famous "Wessex" in many of his novels. He first worked for a famous architect. Then in 1871, his first novel Desperate Remedies was published & well received. However, the real success came with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). In 1874, he published Far from the Madding Crowd. In the following twenty-three years he produced over ten local colored novels until 1896 when he was tired if all those hostile criticisms against his last two novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) & Jude the Obscure (1896). From then on, he began to write poetry again. Of the eight volumes by Hardy-918 poems in all-the most famous is The Dynasts, a long epic-drama about the Napoleonic Wars. He died on January 11. 1928 & was buried in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

　2. 识记Features of His Writings
　1) Past & Modern
　　Living at the turn of the century, Hardy is often regarded as a transitional writer. In him we see the influence from both the past &the modern. As some people put it, he is intellectually advanced& emotionally traditional. In his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple & beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining & disappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with these traditional characters he is always sympathetic. On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries & modern philosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious, too.
　2) Determinism
　　In his works, man is shown inevitably bound by his own inherent nature & hereditary traits which prompt him to go & search for some specific happiness or success & set him in conflict with the environment. The outside nature-the natural environment or Nature herself-is shown as some mysterious supernatural force, very powerful but half-blind, impulsive & uncaring to the individual's will, hope, passion or suffering. It likes to play practical jokes upon human beings by producing a series of mistimed actions & unfortunate coincidences. Man proves impotent before Fate, however he tries, & he seldom-escapes his ordained destiny.
　3) Critical realism
　　Though Naturalism seems to have an important part in Hardy's works, there is also bitter & sharp criticism & even open challenge of the irrational, hypocritical unfair Victorian institutions, conventions & morals which strangle the individual will & destroy natural human emotions & relationships. The conflicts between the traditional & the modern, between the old rural value of respectability & honesty & the new utilitarian commercialism, between the old, false social moral & the natural human passion, etc. are all closely set in a realistic background true to the very time & the very place.

　3. 领会His Major Works
　　Hardy himself divided his novels into three groups:
　1) Romances & Fantasies
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873); The Trumpet Major (1880)etc.
　2) Novels of Ingenuity
Desperate Remedies (1871); The Hand of Ethelberta(1876)etc
　3) Novels of Character & Environment
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872); Far Form the Madding Crowd (1874); The Return of the Native (1878); The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); Jude the Obscure (1895)

　4. 应用Selected Reading:
　　　An Excerpt from Chapter XIX of Tess of the D'Urbervilles
　　This novel is one of the best & most popular work by Hardy. It is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society & the capitalist invasion into the country & destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century. Tess, as a pure woman brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, is abused & destroyed by both Alec & Angel, agents of the destructive force of the society. And the misery, the poverty & the heartfelt pain she suffers & her final tragedy give rise to a most bitter cry of protest & denunciation of the society. Of course, naturalistic tendency is also strong in the novel. In a way, Tess seems to be led to her final destruction step by step by Fate. Coincidence adds on "wrong" to another until she is caught up in a dead-end. As Hardy says at the end of the novel: "Justice was done, & the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess."
　　The excerpt here is taken from Chapter XIX, phase 3, The Rally. Now some time after she leaves her home to work as a dairymaid at Talbothays Dairy, Tess gradually rides off her recent misfortune & unconsciously gives herself up to attraction of Angel Clare.

 

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