Written Assignment : P-5 : History

 

• NAME : MAHIDA BHUMIKA PRAKASHBHAI

• M A SEM -1 

• ROLL NUMBER : 5

• ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021

• PAPER - 5 (HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE - FROM 1350 TO 1900)

• TOPIC: COMPARISON BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND VVICTORIANIS

⚫ What is Romanticism?

• Definition of romanticism

1. Romanticism : a style of art, literature, etc., during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that emphasized the imagination and emotions.

2. the quality or state of being impractical or unrealistic : romantic feelings or ideas.

⚫what is victorianism in literature?

The Victorian period of literature roughly coincides with the years that Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain and its Empire . During this era, Britain was transformed from a predominantly rural, agricultural society into an urban, industrial one.

⚫Difference Between Romantic and Victorian Poetry:

Romantic period and Victorian period are two notable periods in literature. The romantic period was an artistic and literary movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. Victorian period is the period during the reign of Queen Victoria. The main difference between Romantic and Victorian poetry is that Romantic poets revered and adored nature whereas Victorian poets regarded nature as in a more realistic and less idealistic angel.

• Romantic Poetry

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Romantic poetry refers to the poetry written during the romanticism. Romantic poetry was a reaction against conventions, rules, and traditional laws of poetry. It is considered to be the exact opposite of neoclassical poetry; neoclassical poetry is the poetry of reason and intellect whereas romantic poetry is the poetry of emotion, passion, and sentiments. The romantic poets were against the influence of intellect in their poetry. According to Wordsworth, one of the foremost Romantic poets, ““Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Emotion and imagination are hallmarks of romantic poems. Nature is one of the most used themes in romantic poetry; nature was something to be revered and admired. It was a source of inspiration, happiness, and satisfaction. Pastoral life, medievalism, Hellenism, supernaturalism are also important features of romantic poetry.

William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and John Keats are considered to be the leading figures in romantic poetry.

• Victorian Poetry

Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria. Although romantic poetry played a dominant role in the romantic period, it was the Victorian novel that played an important role in the Victorian period.

The reclaiming of the past was a major element of Victorian literature; Victorian poets displayed an interest in the medieval literature of England. The heroic and chivalry knights were a particular favorite of Victorian poets. Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which blended Arthurian legends with contemporary ideas, is a fine example of this theme. The use of sensory elements was another important characteristic of Victorian poetry. Many Victorian Poets used imagery and the sensory elements to express the struggles between Religion and Science and ideas about Nature and Romance.

Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Tennyson are some notable poets in the Victorian period. 

⚫Difference Between Romantic and Victorian Poetry :

• Period

Romantic Poetry was produced during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Victorian Poetry was produced during the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. 

• Themes

Romantic Poetry predominantly used the theme of nature. In addition, themes of pastoral life, medievalism, Hellenism, supernaturalism can also be observed.

Victorian Poetry used medieval myths and legends as well as realistic issues such as the struggle between science and religion.

• Nature

Romantic Poetry revered and admired nature.

Victorian Poetry treated nature in more realistic and less idealized view.

• Imotion vs intellect

Romantic Poetry gave prominence to emotion, imagination and spontaneity.

Victorian Poetry gave more importance to intellect and realism.

• Poets

Notable Romantic Poets include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

Notable Victorian Poets include Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Lord Tennyson

⚫ Differences between victorianism & Romanticism

Romanticism and Victorianism are distinct European literary and artistic movements that are grounded in specific historical eras. Romanticism is typically considered to have taken place from the 1770s to the 1830s, and is characterized by emotionally laden language and praise of nature. Victorianism, on the other hand, existing during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), makes use of more restrained language and dwells on social concerns such as poverty. Both movements were, to some extent, reactions to cultural changes. 

⚫ Historical background

Romanticism was in part a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. As urbanization and factory production swept across Europe in the 18th century, writers looked to nature as a way to reclaim a way of life that was being threatened. Similarly, increased economic inequality through the 19th century led Victorian writers to want to expose the horrors of poverty. Disenchanted by the decline of religious belief in Europe, poets and novelists saw their role as chronicling the bleakness of the modern world.

⚫Idealism vs. Realism

One of the chief markers of Romanticism is a deep belief in the power of nature. Poets such as Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge are famous for looking to the natural world for inspiration in a corrupted world. This idealism led them to write sonnets (short 14-line lyrical poems) that contemplate the beauty of nature. By contrast, Victorian writers had little faith in nature to overcome the problems of the world. Poets and novelists such as Hardy, Tennyson and Browning depicted the world as dark and disturbed. Charles Dickens' novels, meanwhile, showed the misery of the working poor.

⚫Emotion vs. Restraint

Romanticism is also known for its emotional outbursts, what poet William Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Romantic poetry is notable for its sudden expressions of joy, sadness and excitement. Victorian literature, on the other hand, takes literature as a deliberate craft. Making use of careful structure, Browning's "My Last Duchess," for instance, is a poem that uses irony to play with the reader's expectations. Similarly, Victorian novels are known for their long and complicated plots.

⚫Use of Language

The differences between Romanticism and Victorianism are apparent in the contrasting ways in which they use language. Because Romantic literature is emotionally expressive, it often uses phrases such as "Oh!" to give the impression of a sudden onrush of feeling. This over-the-top use of language gave way to a more restrained use of language in Victorianism. Because Victorian literature sought to document the world as it really was, it tends to use modern expressions and language, and makes less use of flowery metaphors and images.

⚫Difference Between Romanticism And The Victorian Era

Romantic writers were optimists, they believed in the possibility of progress, social and human reform. They saw mankind as generally good, but were corrupted by society. Romantic writers broke with the eighteenth century belief in the power of reason, instead they believed in imagination and emotion . The preromantics were a group of poets who represented a bridge between classicism and romanticism. They signaled the awareness of social problems and the love of nature that became typical of English romanticism. William Blake was the leading preromantic poet. Romantic poets believed that nature was the principle source of inspiration, spiritual truth, and enlightenment. “Poets of the Romantic Age focused on the ordinary person and common life in order to affirm the worth and dignity of all human beings, and to repudiate to evils of a class system that artificially designated a few select people as more important than others because of wealth, position, or name,” said Pfordresher. From 1786 to 1830 a few major poets emerged who permanently affects the nature of English language and literature. Robert Burns was a Scottish writer who wrote about characters, sometimes with a Scottish dialect another writer of the Romantic Age was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and idealist and social reformer. 

During the Romantic Age, towns became cities and more and more villagers, forced by economic necessity to seek work in the growing factories, huddled together in filthy slums. Men, women and children worked from sunrise to sunset. For children of the poor, religious training, medical care, and education were practically nonexistent. Through the efforts of reformers, the church and government assumed responsibilities. Sunday schools were organized; hospitals were built; movements were begun to reform the prisons and regulate the conditions of child labor. Gradually English society began to awake to its obligations to the helpless. In the Victorian Period the Industrial Revolution had started in the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine and machines for spinning and weaving. In northern England the “newly mechanized” textile industry expanded Almeida 5 rapidly. Industrialization destroyed old jobs as it provided new ones. During the population shifting there was bad water, no sanitation and little food. Men, women and children worked up to 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, in factories without safety regulations. Industry became a major influence on English life.

⚫Compare And Contrast Romantic And Victorian Era

The Romantic and Victorian Era’s, although similar in creating a massive impact within the literature community, are full of numerous differences. Each era dealt with their unique set of social impacts that were translated into various forms of media such as art, literature, and music so it would be fitting for the two to have different takes on their forms of expression especially when it came to poetry.

When one thinks of a novel associated with the term “romance”, the usual concept to appear in their mind is that of the works of Sarah Dessen or any other modern author whose books consists of a women meeting a man who then fall hopelessly in love with each other. The common idea of romance in literature is that there has to be the existence of a love story.

The proposed starting dates range from 1776 to 1789; each of the different starting dates being linked to an event of great social and political impact within this time period. The Romantic Period was unique not only because of its literature, but of the social and political aspects of this time period that affected such literature. Unlike other eras such as the Victorian Age where it began with Queen Victoria’s rule and ended upon her death, the Romantic Period’s timeline was not restricted to the reign of the monarch who ruled during that time, which in turn, made this period one of the shortest periods of British literary history (Greenblatt). Other social aspects such as slave trading, the French Revolution, and the Americans declaring their independence affected the workings of literature as well with writers of this time period creating literature that often expressed their views on the society around them. 

⚫ The Romantic age vs Victorian period

The Romantic Age and Victorian Period had many similarities, but they had just as many or more differences. They first differed in rule; the Romantic Age didn't have a king or queen, but they did during the Victorian Period. They were similar and different in writing styles, and beliefs. The Industrial Revolution also had a huge effect on both time periods.  

• Romanticism in romantic period

This is why most authors of this period wrote their stories either real or fiction by using rebellion and revolution as the plot. The Romantic Movement was incomplete after the death of Cowper in the 1800s. However, the movement was supposed to reach its highest peak with the works of greatest writers of the next quarter century. These writers were to create best and unique body of literature like the one produced in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth .

⚫ Refferences

1. Comparison of victorianism and Romanticismhttps://pediaa.com/difference-between-romantic-and-victorian-poetry/ .

2. Differences between Romanticism and Victorianism https://penandthepad.com/differences-between-romanticism-victorianism-8657956.html.

3. Similarities between Romanticism and victorianism https://housecleaningwestpalm.com/essay-similarities-differences-romantic-age-victorian-period/.

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Written Assignment : P-4 : Victorian literature

 

• NAME : MAHIDA BHUMIKA PRAKASHBHAI

• M A SEM -1 

• ROLL NUMBER : 5

• ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021

• PAPER - 4

( LITERATURE OF THE VICTORIANS)

• TOPIC: "JUDE THE OBSCURE" AS A VICTORIAN NOVEL

⚫ THOMAS HARDY ⚫

Thomas Hardy OM  was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth.He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.

While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd , The Mayor of Casterbridge , Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure . During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets  who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.

Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

• NOVELS

• "Far from the madding crowd"

• "Jude the obscure"

• "The mayor of casterbridge"

• "The returns of the native"

• "Under the Greenwood tree"

• "The Woodlanders"

...etc.

⚫ Jude the obscure

• Summary

Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a young woman named Arabella, is tricked into marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their marriage goes sour and Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last. However, he finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm.

Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries not to fall in love with her. He arranges for her to work with Phillotson in order to keep her in Christminster, but is disappointed when he discovers that the two are engaged to be married. Once they marry, Jude is not surprised to find that Sue is not happy with her situation. She can no longer tolerate the relationship and leaves her husband to live with Jude.

Summary Summary

Jude Fawley dreams of studying at the university in Christminster, but his background as an orphan raised by his working-class aunt leads him instead into a career as a stonemason. He is inspired by the ambitions of the town schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, who left for Christminster when Jude was a child. However, Jude falls in love with a young woman named Arabella, is tricked into marrying her, and cannot leave his home village. When their marriage goes sour and Arabella moves to Australia, Jude resolves to go to Christminster at last. However, he finds that his attempts to enroll at the university are met with little enthusiasm.

Jude meets his cousin Sue Bridehead and tries not to fall in love with her. He arranges for her to work with Phillotson in order to keep her in Christminster, but is disappointed when he discovers that the two are engaged to be married. Once they marry, Jude is not surprised to find that Sue is not happy with her situation. She can no longer tolerate the relationship and leaves her husband to live with Jude.

Both Jude and Sue get divorced, but Sue does not want to remarry. Arabella reveals to Jude that they have a son in Australia, and Jude asks to take him in. Sue and Jude serve as parents to the little boy and have two children of their own. Jude falls ill, and when he recovers, he decides to return to Christminster with his family. They have trouble finding lodging because they are not married, and Jude stays in an inn separate from Sue and the children. At night Sue takes Jude's son out to look for a room, and the little boy decides that they would be better off without so many children. In the morning, Sue goes to Jude's room and eats breakfast with him. They return to the lodging house to find that Jude's son has hanged the other two children and himself. Feeling she has been punished by God for her relationship with Jude, Sue goes back to live with Phillotson, and Jude is tricked into living with Arabella again. Jude dies soon after.

• Part I: At Marygreen

Everyone in Marygreen is upset because the schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, is leaving the village for the town of Christminster, about twenty miles away. Phillotson does not know how to move his piano, or where he will store it, so an eleven-year-old boy of suggests keeping it in his aunt's fuel house. The boy, Jude Fawley, has been living with his aunt Drusilla, a baker, since his father died. Drusilla tells him that he should have asked the schoolteacher to take him to Christminster, because Jude loves books just like his cousin Sue.

Jude tires of hearing himself talked about and goes to the bakehouse to eat his breakfast. After eating he walks up to a cornfield and uses a clacker to scare crows away. However, he decides that the birds deserve to eat and stops sounding the clacker. He feels someone watching him and sees Mr. Troutham, the farmer who hired him to scare the crows away. The farmer fires him and Jude walks home to tell his aunt. She mentions Christminster again, and he asks what it is and whether he will ever be able to visit Phillotson there. She tells him that they have nothing to do with the people of Christminster. Jude goes into town and asks a man where Christminster is, and the man points to the northeast.

Jude decides to make himself more useful to his aunt and helps her with the bakery, delivering bread in a horse-drawn cart. While he drives the cart he studies Latin. At the age of sixteen, he decides to devote himself to Biblical texts and also to apprentice himself to a stonecutter for extra money. He still dreams of going to Christminster, and saves his money for this possibility. He keeps lodgings in the town of Alfredston, but returns to Marygreen each weekend. One day, when he is nineteen, he is walking to Marygreen and planning his education and his future as a bishop or archdeacon when he is struck in the ear by a piece of pig's flesh. He sees three young women washing chitterlings. He asks one of the girls to come get the piece of meat, and she introduces herself as Arabella Donn. He asks if he can see her the next day and she says yes. He thinks of studying Greek the next afternoon, but decides it would be rude not to call on Arabella as promised and takes her for a walk. He meets her family afterward and is struck by how serious they perceive his intentions to be. The next morning he goes back to where they walked together and overhears Arabella telling her friends that she wants to marry Jude. Jude finds his thoughts turning more and more to her.

• Part II: At Christminster

Three years after his marriage, Jude decides to go to Christminster at last. He is motivated partly by a portrait of his cousin Sue Bridehead, who lives there. He finds lodging in a suburb called Beersheba and walks into town. He observes the colleges and quadrangles and finds himself conversing aloud with the great dead philosophers memorialized around him. The next morning he remembers that he has come to find his old schoolmaster and his cousin. His aunt sent the picture of Sue with the stipulation that Jude should not try to find her, and he decides that he must wait until he is settled to find Phillotson. He tries to find work in the colleges. He finally receives a letter from a stonemason's yard and promptly accepts employment there. He thinks of going to see Sue, despite his aunt's continuing entreaties not to see her. He walks to the shop his aunt described and sees Sue illuminating the word "Alleluja" on a scroll. He decides that he should not fall in love with her because marriage between cousins is never good, and his family in particular is cursed with tragic sadness in marriage.

Jude finds that the Christminster colleges are not welcoming toward self-educated men, and he accepts that he may not be able to study at the university after all. His propensity for drinking emerges. The episode in the pub, in which he recites Latin to a group of workmen and undergraduates, shows the juxtaposition of Jude's intellect with his outer appearance. Christminster will not accept him because he belongs to the working class, yet he is intelligent and well-read through independent study. The realization that his learning will help him only to perform in pubs sits heavily with Jude, and he is comforted only by the possibility of becoming a clergyman through apprenticeship.

• Part III: At Melchester

Jude decides to follow the path recommended by the clergyman and become a low-ranking clergyman. He receives a letter from Sue saying that she is entering the Training College at Melchester, where there is also a Theological College. He decides to wait until the days are longer to travel to Melchester himself because he will have to find work there. Sue writes that she is desperately lonely and begs him to come at once, so he agrees. Jude arrives and takes Sue to dinner. She mentions that Phillotson might find her a teaching post after she graduates, and Jude expresses his anxiety about the schoolmaster's romantic interest in her. Sue at first dismisses his fears, saying Phillotson is too old, but then she confesses that she has agreed to marry Phillotson in two years, and then they plan to teach jointly at a school in a larger town.

In the meantime, Jude goes to Christminster for work. He goes to a pub and sees a familiar face: Arabella's. She tells him that she returned from Australia three months before. Jude misses his train to Alfredston and instead goes to Aldbrickham with Arabella. They spend the night together at an inn. In the morning, she says that she married a hotel manager in Sydney. Jude leaves her and unexpectedly encounters Sue. The two go to see Jude's aunt together, and Sue tells Jude that she made a mistake in marrying Phillotson. Jude takes Sue to the train and asks if he can come visit, but she says no. He devotes himself to his studies and develops an interest in music, and on the way back from a trip to see a church composer, he finds an apology and an invitation to dinner from Sue.

• Part IV: At Shaston

Jude travels to Sue's school in Shaston. He finds the schoolroom empty and begins playing a tune on the piano. Sue joins him, and they discuss their friendship. Jude accuses Sue of being a flirt, and she objects. They discuss her marriage, and Sue tells Jude to come to her house the next week. Later he walks to her house and sees her through the window looking at a photograph. The next morning Sue writes saying that he should not come to dinner, and he writes back in agreement. On Easter Monday, he hears that his aunt is dying. When he arrives, she has already passed away. Sue comes to the funeral. She tells Jude she is unhappy in her marriage, but that she still must go back to Shaston on the six o'clock train. Jude convinces her to spend the night at Mrs. Edlin's house instead. He tells her that he is sorry he did not tell her not to marry Phillotson, and she suspects he still has tender feelings for her.

Back in Shaston, Phillotson is threatened with dismissal for letting his wife commit adultery. He defends himself at a meeting but falls ill. A letter reaches Sue, and she returns to him. She tells Phillotson that Jude is seeking a divorce from his wife, and Phillotson decides to attempt the same.

• Part V: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere

Summary Part V: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere

Summary

Some months later, Jude receives word that Sue's divorce has been made official, just one month after his own divorce was similarly ratified. Jude asks Sue if she will consent to marry him after a respectable interval, but she tells him that she worries it would harm their relationship. Jude worries because Sue has still not declared her love for him. One night, Jude returns home to find that a woman has come to see him while he was away. Sue suspects it was Arabella. A knock comes on the door and Sue knows it is Arabella again. Arabella tells Jude she needs help. Sue begs him not to go see her at her lodgings, as she asks. Jude hesitates, and Sue says she will marry him immediately. Jude stays home. In the morning, Sue feels guilty about her treatment of Arabella and decides to check on her at the inn. Arabella treats Sue rudely but asks if Jude will meet her at the station. Sue and Jude postpone their wedding and one day receive a letter from Arabella. It explains that Arabella gave birth to Jude's child in Australia, and their son has been living with her parents in Australia, but they can no longer care for him. Sue says she would like to adopt him so Jude writes to Arabella. The boy arrives sooner than they expected and walks to their house on his own. Sue tells him to call her "mother."

Sue goes home and tells Jude about Arabella. He says that when he recovers he would like to go back to Christminster, though he knows the town despises him; perhaps he will die there.

• Part VI: At Christminster Again

Jude and Sue return to Christminster with Little Father Time, who is now also named Jude, and the other two children they have had together. They encounter a procession and see Jude's old friends Tinker Taylor and Uncle Joe. Jude tells them he is a poor, ill man and an example of how not to live. The family goes to look for lodging, but finds that people are reluctant to take them in. One woman rents them a room for the week provided Jude stays elsewhere, though when she discovers Sue's history and tells her husband, her husband orders her to send them away. Sue puts the younger children to bed and takes little Time out to look for other lodgings, but with no success. The boy remarks that he "ought not to have been born" and grows irate when Sue tells him that she is pregnant again.

In the summer, Jude is sleeping when Arabella goes outside to observe the Remembrance Week festivities. She wants to see the boat races, but goes upstairs to check on Jude first. Finding him dead, she decides that she can afford to watch the boat races before dealing with his body. Standing before his casket two days later, she asks the Widow Edlin if Sue will be coming to the funeral. The widow says that Sue promised never to see Jude again, though she can hardly bear her legal husband. She says that Sue probably found peace, but Arabella argues that Sue will not have peace until she has joined Jude in death.

⚫"Jude the obscure" as a Victorian novel 

Summary:

Published in 1895, Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy's last novel. With the approach of the turn-of-the-century, Victorian England experienced profound changes in its social structure. The writing of novels about oppressed women was popular in the late nineteenth century. As the narrative voice in Jude, Thomas Hardy sought to challenge the current conditions for women and men in society. His novel explores the reality of these conditions, and his characters, namely Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley, show readers what can happen when people are unable to adapt to the laws and conventions set forth by society.

It is difficult to discuss Hardy's purpose because he was somewhat 

ambivalent about Jude. During the late 1800s, until the tum-of-the-century, 

Jude represented a historical structure of unfolding. J. Hillis Miller calls 

Hardy's unfolding the "linguistic movement" (273). In Jude, Hardy's desire to 

be heard was grounded in a conflict between Vicorian England's past 

conventions and present changes. As a result, Natural Law, which encompasses 

one's feelings, beliefs, and instincts, collided with Social Law, which is subject 

to the changing time and ideology. In the actual novel, Hardy's characters 

display behaviors that defY those that were socially acceptable during the time 

in which he actually wrote, yet in some situations, these same characters, 

appear to be in sync with their roles. Sue, who I will discuss later, is a perfect 

representation of Hardy's ambivalence, for her actions, like Hardy's, are also 

the result of conflicts between her beliefs and her reality.

On the other hand, for men, the taboo of pre-marital sex meant sexual 

experience could only be obtained through prostitution or working - class 

women. Rose discusses Freud who claims that men who engage in pre-marital 

sex live "'the erotic life,' encouraging a split between objects of desire and 

objects of respect". The female in Jude, then, is evident when he does such things as turn 

away from Sue with a shy instinct when he first sees her. When Sue decides to 

marry Phillotson, Jude agrees to walk her down the aisle even though he 

wants to marry her himself. It is Jude's susceptibility to the chivalric code of 

helpless women and protective, honorable men to which he adheres. It is his 

effort to satisfy his middle-class aspirations, one of which Hardy also longed 

to be a part. To peasant women like Arabella and Sue, Jude's gentleman 

efforts were out of place, awkward, and therefore unmanly. We still see 

Jude's efforts to be a gentleman at the end of the novel. When Sue decides to 

return to Phillotson, Jude tells her that he "owes her that in penance for how 

he ever over-ruled it the first time" and reflects on how selfish he was to have 

spoiled one of the "highest and purest loves between man and woman".

⚫ Refferences

1. "Jude the obscure" as a Victorian novel http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/diniejko13.html 

2. Novelists introduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy 

3. Victorian literature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_literature 

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Written Assignment P-3 : Romantic literature

 

• NAME : MAHIDA BHUMIKA PRAKASHBHAI

• M A SEM -1 

• ROLL NUMBER : 5

• ENROLLMENT NUMBER :3069206420200021

• PAPER 3 ( LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTICS)

• TOPIC : MARY SHELLY'S FRANKENSTEIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION 

⚫ AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Mary Shelley’s best-known book is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel; it is also often considered an early example of science fiction. It narrates the dreadful consequences that arise after a scientist has artificially created a human being. She wrote several other novels, including Valperga , The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck , Lodore , and Falkner ; The Last Man , an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work. Her travel book History of a Six Weeks’ Tour  recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.

⚫ FRANKENSTEIN ⚫

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821. 

Shelley travelled through Europe in 1815 along the river Rhine in Germany, stopping in Gernsheim, 17 kilometres away from Frankenstein Castle, where two centuries before, an alchemist engaged in experiments. She then journeyed to the region of Geneva, Switzerland, where much of the story takes place. Galvanism and occult ideas were topics of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband Percy B. Shelley. In 1816, Mary, Percy and Lord Byron had a competition to see who could write the best horror story.After thinking for days, Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after imagining a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made.

Though Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, Brian Aldiss has argued that it should be considered the first true science fiction story. In contrast to previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later science fiction, Aldiss states that the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results. The novel has had a considerable influence on literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays.

Since the publication of the novel, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used to refer to the monster, rather than his creator.

⚫ Summary ⚫

• Captain Walton's introductory narrative

Frankenstein is a frame story written in epistolary form. It documents a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. The story takes place at an unspecified time in the 18th century . Walton is a failed writer who sets out to explore the North Pole in hopes of expanding scientific knowledge. During the voyage, the crew spots a dog sled driven by a gigantic figure. A few hours later, the crew rescues a nearly frozen and emaciated man named Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion; he sees in Walton the same obsession that has destroyed him and recounts a story of his life's miseries to Walton as a warning. The recounted story serves as the frame for Frankenstein's narrative.

• Victor Frankenstein's narrative

Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born in Naples, Italy, into a wealthy Genevan family, Victor and his younger brothers, Ernest and William, are sons of Alphonse Frankenstein and the former Caroline Beaufort. From a young age, Victor has a strong desire to understand the world. He is obsessed with studying theories of alchemists, though when he is older he realizes that such theories are considerably outdated. When Victor is five years old, his parents adopt Elizabeth Lavenza, the orphaned daughter of an expropriated Italian nobleman, whom Victor later marries. Victor's parents later take in another child, Justine Moritz, who becomes William's nanny.

Weeks before he leaves for the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, his mother dies of scarlet fever; Victor buries himself in his experiments to deal with the grief. At the university, he excels at chemistry and other sciences, soon developing a secret technique to impart life to non-living matter. He undertakes the creation of a humanoid, but due to the difficulty in replicating the minute parts of the human body, Victor makes the Creature tall, about 8 feet  in height, and proportionally large. Despite Victor's selecting its features to be beautiful, upon animation the Creature is instead hideous, with watery white eyes and yellow skin that barely conceals the muscles and blood vessels underneath. Repulsed by his work, Victor flees. While wandering the streets the next day, he meets his childhood friend, Henry Clerval, and takes Henry back to his apartment, fearful of Henry's reaction if he sees the monster. However, when Victor returns to his laboratory, the Creature is gone.

Victor falls ill from the experience and is nursed back to health by Henry. After a four-month recovery, he receives a letter from his father notifying him of the murder of his brother William. Upon arriving in Geneva, Victor sees the Creature near the crime scene and becomes convinced that his creation is responsible. Justine Moritz, William's nanny, is convicted of the crime after William's locket, which contained a miniature portrait of Caroline, is found in her pocket. Victor knows that no one will believe him if he tries to clear Justine's name, and she is hanged. Ravaged by grief and guilt, Victor retreats into the mountains. While he hikes through Mont Blanc's Mer de Glace, he is suddenly approached by the Creature, who pleads for Victor to hear his tale.

• Captain Walton's conclusion

At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes telling the story. A few days after the Creature vanishes, the ship becomes trapped in pack ice, and several crewmen die in the cold before the rest of Walton's crew insists on returning south once it is freed. Upon hearing the crew's demands, Victor is angered and, despite his condition, gives a powerful speech to them. He reminds them of why they chose to join the expedition and that it is hardship and danger, not comfort, that defines a glorious undertaking such as theirs. He urges them to be men, not cowards. However, although the speech makes an impression on the crew, it is not enough to change their minds and when the ship is freed, Walton regretfully decides to return South. Victor, even though he is in a very weak condition, states that he will go on by himself. He is adamant that the Creature must die.

Victor dies shortly thereafter, telling Walton, in his last words, to seek "happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition." Walton discovers the Creature on his ship, mourning over Victor's body. The Creature tells Walton that Victor's death has not brought him peace; rather, his crimes have made him even more miserable than Victor ever was. The Creature vows to kill himself so that no one else will ever know of his existence and Walton watches as the Creature drifts away on an ice raft, never to be seen again.

⚫Frankenstein and the Monster

• The Creature

Although the Creature was described in later works as a composite of whole body parts grafted together from cadavers and reanimated by the use of electricity, this description is not consistent with Shelley's work; both the use of electricity and the cobbled-together image of Frankenstein's monster were more the result of James Whale's popular 1931 film adaptation of the story and other early motion-picture works based on the creature. In Shelley's original work, Victor Frankenstein discovers a previously unknown but elemental principle of life, and that insight allows him to develop a method to imbue vitality into inanimate matter, though the exact nature of the process is left largely ambiguous. After a great deal of hesitation in exercising this power, Frankenstein spends two years painstakingly constructing the Creature's body , which he then brings to life using his unspecified process.

In the novel, the creature is compared to Adam, the first man in the Garden of Eden. The monster also compares himself with the "fallen" angel. Speaking to Frankenstein, the monster says "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". That angel would be Lucifer  in Milton's Paradise Lost, which the monster has read. Adam is also referred to in the epigraph of the 1818 edition:

The Creature has often been mistakenly called Frankenstein. In 1908, one author said "It is strange to note how well-nigh universally the term "Frankenstein" is misused, even by intelligent people, as describing some hideous monster."Edith Wharton's The Reef describes an unruly child as an "infant Frankenstein." David Lindsay's "The Bridal Ornament", published in The Rover, 12 June 1844, mentioned "the maker of poor Frankenstein". After the release of Whale's cinematic Frankenstein, the public at large began speaking of the Creature itself as "Frankenstein". This misnomer continued with the successful sequel Bride of Frankenstein , as well as in film titles such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

⚫ FRANKENSTEIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be read from two main levels; as a science fiction and as human nature. The whole novel moves around the invention of a scientist and the result of it. Dangerous aspect of experience in the scientific field is the subject matter of the novel.

The monster, Victor's reaction itself is a kind of scientific achievement around which the whole plot structure is designed. The protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a scientist and driven by ambition of scientific curiosity. His quest for absolute knowledge and power has ended in his own destruction. So the novel shows that thoughtlessness causes destruction to themselves. Shelley shows the dangerous aspects of modern scientific world. How the scientific investigation goes beyond human control due to the excess focus on it without proper attention has well been presented in the novel.

Thus the whole novel is about scientific ambition of the protagonist. It is said that one of the most important quest of scientific aspect is the quest of a new kind of creation. But most of the scientists are unknown about how their invention will be resulted at last. They are thoughtless about the further coming danger and destructions of science. Victor Frankenstein is one of the representative figures of modern scientists who created monster due to his excess focus in the quest of scientific knowledge but at last he lost the control over his own creation. Rather Victor Frankenstein compelled to lose his own family members and his own creation became the very cause of his own destruction. He was over curious man to learn the hidden law of nature due to his fervent love for science, this event of the novel is very symbolic for the development of modern science. It allows to have the deep thought in the field of science. In this way as the protagonist and all his activities in the holistic plot structure of the novel moves around the scientific subject matter together with its consequences. So the novel can be analyzed as a science fiction.

• Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction

Frankenstein is one of those literary characters whose names have entered common parlance; everyone recognizes the name and everyone uses it. The recognition and the usage are often slightly uncertain most people know it from the film versions, which are significantly different from the book, and some people have to be reminded that the name is that of the scientist, not the monster that the scientist made  but this uncertainty is not entirely inappropriate to a work whose implication and significance are rather problematic.

The popularity of Frankenstein both as a literary classic and as a fuzzy set of ideas bears testimony to the remarkable vividness of Mary Shelley's vision, but it also reflects the protean quality of its central motifs, which can be interpreted in several different ways so as to carry several different messages. The most common  modern view of the story aided and perhaps sustained by Boris Karloff's remarkable performance in the 1931 film version and its sequel is that it is an account of the way in which 'monstrousness' arises, involving diseased brains, inadequate control over one's actions and resentment against the unthinking horror with which most people react to ugliness. The most common view based on the book alone sees it as an allegory in which a scientist is rightly punished for daring to usurp the divine prerogative of creation. A closely-related interpretation regards Victor Frankenstein as an archetypal example of a man destroyed by his own creation; in this view the story becomes a central myth of the kind of technophobia which argues that modern man is indeed doomed to be destroyed by his own artefacts.

The text of Frankenstein begins with a series of letters written by the explorer Robert Walton, who has been trying to navigate his ship through the Arctic ice in the hope of finding a warm continent beyond it, akin to the legendary Hyperborea. Modern readers know full well that this was a fool's errand, but that was not at all certain in 1818. Thus, although Walton's situation is clearly symbolic  one of the Gothic conventions which Frankenstein does adopt is that the weather is symbolic of human emotions, so his entrapment in the ice signifies that Walton's noble ambitions have unfortunately alienated him from the warmth of human companionship  it should not be taken for granted that Mary Shelley saw him as a lunatic who should have known better. Nor should we assume that Walton's encounter with Victor Frankenstein, who is similarly lost in the ice-field and in whom Walton recognizes a kindred spirit, was in her eyes a meeting of damned men.

Thus, Mary did not begin the work of ideative elaboration with the premise of her story, but with its crucial image. The beginning and the end of the story are both extrapolations of that single instant, the one constructed in order to explain how it came about and the other to follow it to its implicit conclusion. Both are consistent, to a degree, with the visionary moment, but they are not really consistent with one another, in the way that they would have been had the author extrapolated an ending from the apparent premises contained in the beginning. Because the fact that the story was to be horrific was accepted as an axiom,  much of what was eventually presented as the logic of the story  the 'explanation' of how the nightmare confrontation came to take place  was formed by way of ideative apology, not as a set of propositions to be examined on their own merits.

⚫Refferences

1. Frankenstein as a science fiction http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/stable.html 

2. Themes of Frankensteinhttps://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/frankenstein-as-a-science-fiction.html#.YCifsVPhVPw 

3. Author's biography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley .

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