The Victorian Age
Time: 1837-1901, the mid and late 19th century
Background:
Rapid growth in industry, commerce, science, culture and education. Society crisis of faith in the mid 19th century Reason:
The popularity of utilitarianism
Discoveries in biology, geology and astronomy other combined to shake the belief in the creation myth given by Bible, which caused controversy between science and religion.
Examples: Darwin’s theory of evolution work: On the Origin of Species Freud’s study of sexuality
Representatives:
Poets:
Alfred Tennyson(1809-1892)
Works: The Lotus-Eaters (1833) Ulysses (1842) Tithonus (1860) Robert Browning(1812-1889)
Works: My Last Duchess Andrea del Sarto The Bishop Orders his Tomb Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) Works: Dover Beach(1867)
Dramatic monologue（My Last Duchess）
A literary form in which a character, addressing a silent auditor at a critical moment, reveals himself or herself and the dramatic situation.
Novelists:
Charles Dickens(1812-1870)
Works: Great Expectations(1860–61) Our Mutual Friend(1864–65) A Tale of Two Cities(1854)
William Makepeace Thackeray(1811-1863)
Works: Vanity Fair(1847) Henry Esmond(1852) The Virginians(1859) Thomas Hardy(1840–1928) A Victorian realist
Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891) Jude the Obscure (1895) Far from the Madding Crowd(1874)
Examples:
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land, Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
The poem begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in which auditory imagery plays a significant role (\Arnold looks at two aspects of this scene, its soundscape (in the first and second stanzas) and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza). He hears the sound of the sea as \eternal note of sadness\Sophocles, a 5th-century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on fate and the will of the gods, also heard this sound as he stood upon the shore of the Aegean Sea.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending metaphor. Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two lines; one calls
them a \while another sees in them \ The metaphor with which the poem ends is most likely an allusion to a passage in Thucydides's account of the Peloponnesian War. He describes an ancient battle that occurred on a similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The battle took place at night; the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of their soldiers inadvertently killed each other.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
\poem's discourse\Honan tells us, \literally and symbolically from the present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That lovers may be 'true / To one another' is a precarious notion: love in the modern city momentarily gives peace, but nothing else in a post-medieval society reflects or confirms the faithfulness of lovers. Devoid of love and light the world is a maze of confusion left by 'retreating' faith.
A short lyric poem
The sea is a metaphor of faith
The irregular rhyme and run-on-line shows the disorder and chaos of faith My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
An example of the dramatic monologue
In the Poem My Last Duchess by Robert Browning the heartless and haughty speaker explains a painting of his last wife while inadvertently revealing a darker side to his last marriage than one might view from they outside.
The poem depicts a dense stream of conscious feel to it by using language and sentence structure common to conversation earlier to the time period it was written. The use of \and the English spelling of \the poem occurred in a time period in which husbands held power over their wives with such things as \and money. Browning's great usage of dated speaking style creates a historical medium from which the event which slowly unfold. The poem is masked in a conversation with one person speaking in a dramatic monologue about his
beloved portrait of the last duchess he married. The rhetorical questions \sort of trifling\and end rhymes in the couplets throughout the poem \and \the poem much like the anger and arrogance that the Duke exerted towards his deceased wife to control her. The diction of this poem mirrors the force with which the Duke ruled his house as well as the social male norms at the time.
The poem My Last Duchess is told from first point of view by a selfish man admiring his late wife's smiling portrait. As the Duke entertains his guest, \he tells of \favour\after contemplating \shall I say?\that his wife flirted with all she encountered. The biased first person account of the death of the duchess leads the reader into the center of the man's thoughts and allows for a more in depth understanding of his desire for control toward his wife even in death. His dramatic monologue gives perhaps more information concerning the specifics of his involvement in wife's death than he realizes. The quotations incorporated within the poem such as \disgusts me\address \high regards for the thoughts which he believes others are thinking. The Duke boasts that he now holds the power to let others see the smile of the portrait that was meant only for him. He gets so enthralled with his own story of his wife he reveals that his \ended the duchess's smiles and possibly her life. The first person point of view for this poem explains further the thirst for power and self-love which the Duke honors himself with by controlling the women and people in his life of which he feels superior.
Browning illustrates the complexity of the controlling Duke by showing his carelessness and arrogance by the words he uses to impress his guest. The \painted on the wall\has a \that only can be seen by the \of the Duke. When the Duke believes the Duchess finds interest in other people beside her husband, The Duke, \to everyone. When the Duke could not obtain complete power over and tame his young wife, she died in a manner which is not fully explained. The \with the \old name is meeting with a man that is offering the Duke his \by the Duke no doubt is eager to attempt to tame yet another \the Duke this marriage is a trial of the subservience of women to their wealthy and powerful husbands. The details given in this poem bring forth the conclusion that the Duke got rid of his last Duchess and is now ready for a new one.
The title of the poem My Last Duchess suggests that the Duke had had more than one Duchess. Had the poem illustrated the Dukes first wife it could have been titled My First Duchess. The startling \
that this man has the power to make a woman be remembered by nothing more than a portrait controlled by the master of the house. This poem has themes commonly found in the local color movement and associated with feminism. Browning gives the audience a picture of the dark and distorted beginning of a new couple and marriage.
The Victorian Age维多利亚时期英国文学
