Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 1436/1437 University of Umm el Qura: Female sector Amel Oueslati English Department
Fiction in 19th C: 2914376-50
Defining the genre
A novel is a long, fictional narrative which describes intimate human experiences. The novel in the modern era usually makes use of a literary prose style, and the development of the prose novel at this time was encouraged by innovations in printing, and the introduction of cheap paper, in the 15th century.
Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. Throughout the early modern period authors of historical narratives would often include inventions rooted in traditional beliefs in order to embellish a passage of text or add credibility to an opinion. Historians would also invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political and personal realities of a place and period with clarity and detail not found in works of history.
However, up until the 1750s historians were the main critics of the novel and they emphasised its lack of veracity and therefore serious worth, and criticised it for being merely entertainment. Then in the second half of the 18th-century criticism evolved and with Romanticism came the idea that works of fiction could be art.
Literary prose
While prose rather than verse became the standard of the modern novel, the ancestors of the modern European novel include verse epics in the Romance language of southern France.
Even in the 19th century, fictional narratives in verse, such as Lord Byron's Don Juan (1824), Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeniy Onegin (1833), and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), competed with prose novels.
However, in the 15th century, following the invention of printing, prose began to dominate European fiction. This immediately led to the development of a special elevated prose style modelled on Greek and Roman histories, and the traditions of verse narrative. The
development of a distinct fictional language was crucial for the genre that aimed at creating works that readers would actually identify, and appreciate, as fiction rather than history.
At the beginning of the 16th century, printing had created a special demand for books that were neither simply published for the non–academic audience nor explicitly scientific literature, but belles-lettres. This included modern history and science in the vernacular, personal memoirs, contemporary political scandal, fiction and poetry. However, prose fiction was soon far more popular than verse, rhetoric and science.
Fictional prose, though aiming for stylistic elegance, was closer to everyday language, to personal letters, to the art of "gallant" conversation, and to the personal memoir and travelogue. Pierre Daniel Huet summarised the stylistic ambition of fictional prose accordingly in 1670: "It must be compos'd with Art and Elegance, lest it should appear to be a rude undigested Mass, without Order or Beauty."
By the 18th century, however, English authors began to criticize the French ideals of belles lettres elegance, and a less aristocratic prose style became the ideal for them in the 1740s.
When, in the 1760s, it became the norm for the author to open his or her novel with a statement of the work's fictionality, the prose became even more informal.
The Victorian Era: 1837/1901
During the 19th century, romances continued to be written in Britain, and major writers such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy were influenced by the tradition. Publishing first at the very end of the 19th century, Joseph Conrad has been called, "a supreme 'romancer'. In America, it was said, "the romance has proved to be a serious, flexible, and successful medium for the exploration of philosophical ideas and attitudes" into the 20th century, and notable examples are Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville's Moby- Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Robert Penn Warren's World Enough and Time.
European figures that were influenced by romanticism include Victor Hugo, with novels like The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862), and Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, whose novel A Hero of Our Time (1840) is notable for introducing Superfluous man into the world of literature.
Most 19th-century authors hardly went beyond illustrating and supporting widespread historical views] The more interesting titles won fame by doing what no historian or journalist could do: make the reader experience another life. Émile Zola's novels depicted the world of
the working classes, which Marx and Engels wrote about in a non-fictional mode. Slavery in the United States, abolitionism and racismbecame topics of far broader public debate thanks to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which dramatises topics that had previously been discussed mainly in the abstract.
Charles Dickens novels led his readers into contemporary workhouses, and provided first hand accounts of child labour. The treatment of the subject of war changed with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1868/69), where he questions the facts provided by historians.
Similarly the treatment of crime is very different in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), where the point of view is that of a criminal. Women authors had dominated the production of fiction from the 1640s into the early 18th century, but few before George Eliot so openly questioned the role, education, and status of women in society.
As the novel became the most interesting platform of modern debate, national literatures were developed, that link the present with the past in the form of the historical novel. Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1827) did this for Italy, while novelists in Russia and the surrounding Slavonic countries, as well as the Scandinavian countries, did likewise.
With the new appreciation of history, the future also became a topic for fiction. This had been done earlier in works like Samuel Madden'sMemoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), a work whose plot culminated in the catastrophic last days of a mankind extinguished by the plague. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) were marked by the idea of long term technological and biological developments.
Industrialization, Darwin's theory of evolution and Marx's theory of class divisions shaped these works and turned historical processes into a subject matter of wide debate:
Bellamy's Looking Backward became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after Harriet Beecher-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such works inspired a whole genre of popular science fiction as the 20th century approached.
Literary realism
Literary realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is. In the spirit of general "realism," realist authors
opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
George Eliot's novel Middlemarch stands as a great milestone in the realist tradition. It is a primary example of nineteenth-century realism's role in the naturalization of the burgeoning capitalist marketplace William Dean Howells was the first American author to bring a realist aesthetic to the literature of the United States. His most popular novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, depicts a man who, ironically, falls from materialistic fortune by his own mistakes.
The modern individual
The individual, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(la) had placed the story itself at the centre: it was driven by plot, by incident and accident, rather than being the story of a single larger-than-life figure.
And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.
Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would fight against knight after knight, change (as an Assyrian princess) into men's clothes, survive alone on an island – while it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author of the most personal French contemporary memoir. As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of proper writing skills.
The late-18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies. The rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her, with his or her class or the entire nation. Any such rift had the power to criticize the collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to create.
The novel's individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became the field of mid-19th-century explorations. The artist's life had been an interesting topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views.
The exploration of the individual's perception eventually revolutionized the very modes of writing fiction. The search for one's personal style stood in the centre of the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become publicly celebrated minds.
The destabilization of the author-text connection, which 20th-century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what had been the individual's voice so far – speaking through the author or portrayed by him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually were with the beginning of the 20th century.
Great Expectations: Background
Great Expectations's single most obvious literary predecessor is Dickens's earlier first-person narrator-protagonist David Copperfield. The two novels trace the psychological and moral development of a young boy to maturity, his transition from a rural environment to the London metropolis, the vicissitudes of his emotional development, and the exhibition of his hopes and youthful dreams and their metamorphosis, through a rich and complex first person narrative.[54] Dickens was conscious of this similarity and, before undertaking his new manuscript, reread David Copperfield to avoid repetition.[19]
The two books both detail homecoming. Although David Copperfield is based on much of Dickens personal experiences, Great Expectations provides, according to Paul Schlicke, "the more spiritual and intimate autobiography."[55] Even though several elements hint at the setting — Miss Havisham, partly inspired by a Parisian duchess, whose residence was always closed and in darkness, surrounded by "a dead green vegetable sea," recalling Satis House, and the countryside bordering Chatham and Rochester — no place name is mentioned, nor a specific time period, which is indicated by, among other elements, older coaches, the title "His Majesty" in reference to George III, and the old London Bridge prior to the 1824–1831 reconstruction.
The theme of homecoming reflects events in Dickens's life, several years prior to the publication of Great Expectations. In 1856, he bought Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent, which he had dreamed of living in as a child, and moved there from faraway London two years later. In 1858, in a painful divorce, he separated from Catherine Dickens, his wife of twenty-three years. The divorce alienated him from some of his closest friends, such as Mark Lemon. He quarrelled with Bradbury and Evans, who had published his novels for fifteen years. In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens burned almost all of his correspondence, sparing only letters on business matters. He stopped publishing the weekly Household Words at the summit of its popularity and replaced it with All the Year Round.
The Uncommercial Traveller, short stories, and other texts Dickens began publishing in his new weekly in 1859 reflect his nostalgia, as seen in "Dullborough Town" and "Nurses' Stories." According to Paul Schlicke, "it is hardly surprising that the novel Dickens wrote at this time was a return to roots, set in the part of England in which he grew up, and in which he had recently resettled."
Margaret Cardwell draws attention to Chops the Dwarf from Dickens's 1858 Christmas story
"Going into Society," who, as the future Pip does, entertains the illusion of inheriting a fortune and becomes disappointed upon achieving his social ambitions. In another vein, Harry Stone thinks that Gothic and magical aspects of Great Expectations were partly inspired by Charles Mathews's At Home, which was presented in detail in Household Words and its monthly supplement Household Narrative. Stone also asserts that The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written in collaboration with Wilkie Collins after their walking tour of Cumberland during September 1857 and published in Household Words from 3 to 31 October of the same year, presents certain strange locations and a passionate love, foreshadowing Great Expectations.
Beyond its biographical and literary aspects, Great Expectations appears, according to Robin Gilmour, as "a representative fable of the age." Dickens was aware that the novel "speaks" to a generation applying, at most, the principle of "self help" and believed to have increased the order of daily life. That the hero Pip aspires to improve, not through snobbery, but through the Victorian conviction of education, social refinement, and materialism, was seen as a noble and worthy goal. However, by tracing the origins of Pip's "great expectations" to crime, deceit, and even banishment to the colonies, Dickens unfavourably compares the new generation to the previous one of Joe Gargery, which Dickens portrays as less sophisticated but especially rooted in sound values, presenting an oblique criticism of his time.[
Pip
As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations presents the growth and development of a single character, Philip Pirrip, better known to himself and to the world as Pip. As the focus of the bildungsroman, Pip is by far the most important character in Great Expectations: he is both the protagonist, whose actions make up the main plot of the novel, and the narrator, whose thoughts and attitudes shape the reader’s perception of the story. As a result, developing an understanding of Pip’s character is perhaps the most important step in understanding Great Expectations.
Because Pip is narrating his story many years after the events of the novel take place, there are really two Pips inGreat Expectations: Pip the narrator and Pip the character—the voice telling the story and the person acting it out. Dickens takes great care to distinguish the two Pips, imbuing the voice of Pip the narrator with perspective and maturity while also imparting how Pip the character feels about what is happening to him as it actually happens. This
skillfully executed distinction is perhaps best observed early in the book, when Pip the character is a child; here, Pip the narrator gently pokes fun at his younger self, but also enables us to see and feel the story through his eyes.
As a character, Pip’s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. His longing to marry Estella and join the upper classes stems from the same idealistic desire as his longing to learn to read and his fear of being punished for bad behavior: once he understands ideas like poverty, ignorance, and immorality, Pip does not want to be poor, ignorant, or immoral. Pip the narrator judges his own past actions extremely harshly, rarely giving himself credit for good deeds but angrily castigating himself for bad ones. As a character, however, Pip’s idealism often leads him to perceive the world rather narrowly, and his tendency to oversimplify situations based on superficial values leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. When Pip becomes a gentleman, for example, he immediately begins to act as he thinks a gentleman is supposed to act, which leads him to treat Joe and Biddy snobbishly and coldly.
On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man, a fact that can be witnessed in his numerous acts of kindness throughout the book (helping Magwitch, secretly buying Herbert’s way into business, etc.) and his essential love for all those who love him. Pip’s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism.
Not long after meeting Miss Havisham and Estella, Pip’s desire for advancement largely overshadows his basic goodness. After receiving his mysterious fortune, his idealistic wishes seem to have been justified, and he gives himself over to a gentlemanly life of idleness. But the discovery that the wretched Magwitch, not the wealthy Miss Havisham, is his secret benefactor shatters Pip’s oversimplified sense of his world’s hierarchy. The fact that he comes to admire Magwitch while losing Estella to the brutish nobleman Drummle ultimately forces him to realize that one’s social position is not the most important quality one possesses, and that his behavior as a gentleman has caused him to hurt the people who care about him most.
Once he has learned these lessons, Pip matures into the man who narrates the novel, completing the bildungsroman.
Estella
Often cited as Dickens’s first convincing female character, Estella is a supremely ironic creation, one who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and “break their hearts,” Estella wins Pip’s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Unlike the warm, winsome, kind heroine of a traditional love story, Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip’s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip; as Pip learns near the end of the novel, she is the daughter of Magwitch, the coarse convict, and thus springs from the very lowest level of society.
Ironically, life among the upper classes does not represent salvation for Estella. Instead, she is victimized twice by her adopted class. Rather than being raised by Magwitch, a man of great inner nobility, she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world. And rather than marrying the kindhearted commoner Pip, Estella marries the cruel nobleman Drummle, who treats her harshly and makes her life miserable for many years. In this way, Dickens uses Estella’s life to reinforce the idea that one’s happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one’s social position: had Estella been poor, she might have been substantially better off.
Despite her cold behavior and the damaging influences in her life, Dickens nevertheless ensures that Estella is still a sympathetic character. By giving the reader a sense of her inner struggle to discover and act on her own feelings rather than on the imposed motives of her upbringing, Dickens gives the reader a glimpse of Estella’s inner life, which helps to explain what Pip might love about her. Estella does not seem able to stop herself from hurting Pip, but she also seems not to want to hurt him; she repeatedly warns him that she has “no heart” and seems to urge him as strongly as she can to find happiness by leaving her behind. Finally, Estella’s long, painful marriage to Drummle causes her to develop along the same lines as Pip
—that is, she learns, through experience, to rely on and trust her inner feelings. In the final scene of the novel, she has become her own woman for the first time in the book. As she says to Pip, “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching. . . . I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”
Ambition and Self-Improvement
The moral theme of Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class. Dickens establishes the theme and shows Pip learning this lesson, largely by exploring ideas of ambition and self-improvement
—ideas that quickly become both the thematic center of the novel and the psychological mechanism that encourages much of Pip’s development. At heart, Pip is an idealist; whenever he can conceive of something that is better than what he already has, he immediately desires to obtain the improvement. When he sees Satis House, he longs to be a wealthy gentleman;
when he thinks of his moral shortcomings, he longs to be good; when he realizes that he cannot read, he longs to learn how. Pip’s desire for self-improvement is the main source of the novel’s title: because he believes in the possibility of advancement in life, he has “great expectations” about his future.
Ambition and self-improvement take three forms in Great Expectations—moral, social, and educational; these motivate Pip’s best and his worst behavior throughout the novel. First, Pip desires moral self-improvement. He is extremely hard on himself when he acts immorally and feels powerful guilt that spurs him to act better in the future. When he leaves for London, for instance, he torments himself about having behaved so wretchedly toward Joe and Biddy.
Second, Pip desires social self-improvement. In love with Estella, he longs to become a member of her social class, and, encouraged by Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, he entertains fantasies of becoming a gentleman. The working out of this fantasy forms the basic plot of the novel; it provides Dickens the opportunity to gently satirize the class system of his era and to make a point about its capricious nature. Significantly, Pip’s life as a gentleman is no more satisfying—and certainly no more moral—than his previous life as a blacksmith’s apprentice.
Third, Pip desires educational improvement. This desire is deeply connected to his social ambition and longing to marry Estella: a full education is a requirement of being a gentleman.
As long as he is an ignorant country boy, he has no hope of social advancement. Pip understands this fact as a child, when he learns to read at Mr. Wopsle’s aunt’s school, and as a young man, when he takes lessons from Matthew Pocket. Ultimately, through the examples of Joe, Biddy, and Magwitch, Pip learns that social and educational improvement are irrelevant to one’s real worth and that conscience and affection are to be valued above erudition and social standing.
Social Class
Throughout Great Expectations, Dickens explores the class system of Victorian England, ranging from the most wretched criminals (Magwitch) to the poor peasants of the marsh country (Joe and Biddy) to the middle class (Pumblechook) to the very rich (Miss Havisham).
The theme of social class is central to the novel’s plot and to the ultimate moral theme of the book—Pip’s realization that wealth and class are less important than affection, loyalty, and inner worth. Pip achieves this realization when he is finally able to understand that, despite the esteem in which he holds Estella, one’s social status is in no way connected to one’s real character. Drummle, for instance, is an upper-class lout, while Magwitch, a persecuted convict, has a deep inner worth.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about the novel’s treatment of social class is that the class system it portrays is based on the post-Industrial Revolution model of Victorian England. Dickens generally ignores the nobility and the hereditary aristocracy in favor of characters whose fortunes have been earned through commerce. Even Miss Havisham’s family fortune was made through the brewery that is still connected to her manor. In this way, by connecting the theme of social class to the idea of work and self-advancement, Dickens subtly reinforces the novel’s overarching theme of ambition and self-improvement.
Crime, Guilt, and Innocence
The theme of crime, guilt, and innocence is explored throughout the novel largely through the characters of the convicts and the criminal lawyer Jaggers. From the handcuffs Joe mends at the smithy to the gallows at the prison in London, the imagery of crime and criminal justice pervades the book, becoming an important symbol of Pip’s inner struggle to reconcile his own inner moral conscience with the institutional justice system.
