SAMUEL RICHARDSON - PAMELA & CLARISSA

PAMELA, OR VIRTUE REWARDED (1740)

The story

Pamela has been the servant girl of Lady B. for many years. When the noblewoman dies, Pamela is very sad: she loved Lady B. because she had always been very good to her and given her an education far beyond her means. Mr B., Lady B.’s son, offers to let her remain in the household and Pamela accepts with gratitude,  but it soon becomes clear that Mr B. intends to seduce her . He then offers to send her home to her parents, but the coachman, who is one of Mr B.’s men, drives her instead to Mr B.s country house, where she is virtually a prisoner. The girl, however, resists all of her master’s advances until Mr B., who is really in love with Pamela, finally asks to marry him. The second part of the book shows Pamela and Mr B.’s married life. Pamela is the model wife and MR B. too is in the end  converted to a sober well-regulated life.

READING DUBLINERS BY JAMES JOYCE (1914)

 TRUTH AS THE SUBJECT OF ART

To defend his work harshly attacked for his bitterness and his inconvenient realism, Joyce asserted that for their “spiritual liberation” the Irish needed to gaze in his “nicely polished looking-glass”, Joyce suggests that by seeing themselves so faithfully represented the Irish would come to a moment of “anagnorisis” or self-recognition, a recognition which would be “the first step” out of “hemiplegia” or unilateral paralysis in which they currently existed.

“What’sthe matter with you is that you’re afraid  to live. You and people like you. This city  is suffering from hemiplegia of the will” Joyce remembered to his brother Stanislaus. According to him, by reading his Dubliners , Dubliners would recognize their paralysis, that recognition would stimulate movement, “ a first step toward freedom, toward civilization.

Joyce’s aim in Dubliners seems that of the satirist whose purpose in writing is to expose vice or folly to the end of correction. The common feature among the 15 stories is that the protagonists do not react to their paralysis or when they try to escape it they fail; they all fail.

THE AGE OF MODERNISM - PART II

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE NEW NOVEL

(notes from an old book of mine, E. Chinol ENGLISH LITERATURE vol.II, Liguori Editore, 1983. I hope you can find them useful)

The main development of the early 20th century novel represents a break with the naturalist school and a movement towards a more subtle and complex vision of man and his world. The break occurred during the second decade of the century (“on or about December 1910” Virginia Woolf said, “ human nature changed”), when a new generation of writers began to question the conventions and the pretended objectivity of the traditional novel. Also with the help of new developments in psychology, especially of Freud’s psychoanalysis, they proposed to go beyond the apparently rational surface of the conscious mind, digging deep into the obscure, irrational world of the unconscious. And with them reality becomes a matter of personal impressions; the focus of attention shifts from external facts to our reactions to them.

THE AGE OF MODERNISM - PART I

MODERNISM AND THE NOVEL

In terms of the novel's development, World War I (1914-18) marks a fundamental break between the old world and the new. Fiction before this period generally followed the styles, forms and themes of the Victorian period, although writers such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad had already begun to develop techniques that would later be more fully exploited by the modern novel.For many people the experience of the war, in which hundreds of thousands had been killed, shattered their faith in society and its institutions. Mechanised industry had prospered on the backs of underpaid labourers. Now those same workers were being sent to their deaths in the trenches in a similarly mechanical manner. With the 1914-18 war, the dehumanising effects of industrial society reached their peak.

The Modernists, horrified by the effect of war and mechanised society in general, were interested in recovering the unique experience of the indiviaduals by exploring and recreating their inner world.

The Modernist novel was to shatter most conventions which had typified Victorian fiction. The co-ordinates of the Victorian moral universe collapsed and was replaced by a climate of moral ambiguity or even by a sense of emptiness which signalled and absence of values. All this was reflected in the themes of most modernist novels.

DEFOE AND SWIFT - A COMPARISON AND OTHER NOTES

 LEMUEL GULLIVER - Although Gulliver is a bold adventurer who visits a multitude of strange lands, it is difficult to regard him as truly heroic. Even well before his slide into misanthropy at the end of the book, he simply does not show the stuff of which grand heroes are made. He is not cowardly—on the contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences of nearly being devoured by a giant rat, taken captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway shores, sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows. Additionally, the isolation from humanity that he endures for sixteen years must be hard to bear, though Gulliver rarely talks about such matters. Yet despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness. This impression could be due to the fact that he rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or experiences great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly open about their emotions. (...)

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VIRGINIA WOOLF IN THE MOVIE "THE HOURS" - CLIPS

Virginia Woolf became a complex, fascinating character in Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS (1999). When the movie was released in 2002, the role of Virginia ,  interpreted by Nicole Kidman,  brought to the Australian actress the Oscar as Best Actress.

Here are two clips from that movie