From the Edwardian Age to the
First World War
Edwardian England
In 1901 Queen Victoria died, so her son became king as Edward VII. He reigned
from 1901 to 1910, and this short period was call Edwardian Age.
At that time British town were the wealthiest in Europe and British ships carried 80
per cent of world trade.
But soon, the British power was challenged by the new technical innovation in
France and Germany, and also by the industrial competition in America.
Moreover, other European countries started to have imperial ambitions, in fact,
Germany started to built navy to challenge British’s supremacy at sea.
In this difficult situation, King Edward tried a diplomatic strategy, and so he signed
an agreement with France in 1904, the Entente Cordiale, which established that
Britain could occupy Egypt, while France Morocco.
The seeds of the Welfare State.
The political situation started to change, when in 1906, there was the general
election, and Liberals won the election.
Liberals were divided in two groups: those who supported the traditional liberal
values of laissez-faire, and those who supported New Liberalism, which was in favor
of State intervention in social life.
The Welfare State was introduced by a series of measures, such as the introduction
of old-age-pension, free meals and regular medical inspections in schools.
In 1910, king Edward died, and he was succeeded by his son, who became George V
(1910-1936).
The Suffragettes
In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst founded Woman’s Sociale and Political Union
(WSPU). The term “Suffragettes” was used to indicate woman that wanted the right
to vote. They held large protest marches in London, chained themselves to railings,
broke windows, hit and spat policeman. A lot of Suffragettes were sent to prison and
went on hunger strike.
But this struggle was not in vain, in fact, in 1918 woman over 30 obtained the right
to vote, and in 1928 also woman over 21.
The First World War
World War I officially began in 1914, when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand
was assassinated by a Serbian in Sarajevo.
The war was essential between the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire
on one side and England and France on the other.
Unlike previous wars, World War I involved mobilization of masses of people.
But soon, from lightning war became war of attrition, which each side hoping to
exhaust the other’s supplies of man, arms and ammunition.
In this war almost of million British soldier died.
The war finished on the 11 of November of 1918, and because at the 11 o’clock the
guns fell silent and this day is still celebrated as Armistic Day, or “Remembrance
Day” ora “Poppy Day” because the poppy plants where the only one which tarted to
grow on the battle fields. In 1919 was signed the Treaty of Versailles, which had
the aim of preventing Germany from building his military power again.
During the First World War, there was an important historic event: The Russian
Revolution of October 1917. The new social government promised to redistributed
land and to end the war with Germany.
Consequences of war
The First World War led to a collapse of Eurocentrism, because the European
countries got into debt with the United States, so there was terrible financial
problems. Moreover, the horrors of war led to an Anti-war feeling into people. For
this reason, International socialist movements and workers’ union emerged from the
war enormously strengthened, although these were not revolutionary in the Soviet
sense, but part of the movement towards democratic reform.
In Britain’s colonies, mostly in India, there was a mood of rebellion. A men,
Mahatma Gandhi started a protest movement based on principles of non-violence
and civil disobedience and his aim was the independence of India.
The inter-war years
Another country which wanted independence was Ireland. In 1918 Sinn Fein
declared Irish Republic during a parliamentary sitting. So in 1920, started a civil
war, which ending after yers with the establishment of the Irish Free State.
In 1920, after World War I, was created the League of Nations, an ancessor of the
United Nation. But the severe sanctions imposed on Germany, paid the way for
Hitler’s National Social movement, which gained the power in 1933.
After was, in USA, there was an economic boom that started in 1920, but then the
great stock-market crash of 1929 caused a world-wide depression.
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
The crisis of certainties
Th English soldiers that came back to home after WWI, had different reactions: some
soldiers celebrated their return at home with a frenetic search for pleasures; others
were haunted by a sense of guilty for the horrors of trench war.
Furthermore, the gap between the new and old generation was getting worse
because the young people believed that the older generations were responsible for
the war.
Moreover, the dissolution of Commonwealth increased a feeling of frustration and
led to a transformation of imperial nations and white supremacy.
So, writers like Edward Forster became averse to politic and started to think in
terms of personal relationships based on equity and feeling. The committed writers
of the 1930 and 1940, as Auden and Orwell, warned their readers against
totalitarianism.
In this period nothing seem to be right or certain, because scientist and
philosophers destroyed the old theories which had characterized the Victorian age.
Fred’s influence
The first revolutionary idea was introduced by Sigmund Freud, in his essay “The
Interpretation of Dreams”. Freud’s view recognize the power of the unconscious to
affect the behavior; so it demonstrated that the men’s action could be motivated by
irrational forces. Moreover his theory also placed enormous importance on ‘libido’, in
particular in Oedipus phase, in which child sees the father as a rival for his mother’s
affect. In this way the concept of the relationship between parents and children were
altered.
Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the
analysis of dream and the concept of ‘free association’ (in fact his patients were
invited to talk about everything entered their mind at the moment), and this
influenced the writers of the modern age
The theory of relativity
The crisis of certainties was also due to the introduction of ‘relativity’ in science,
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity changed the concepts of time and space, which
he saw as subjective dimensions.
As a consequence, the world’s view lost is solidity.
A new concept of time
The idea of time was completely revolutionized by William James and Henry
Bergson.
James said that our mind records every single experience as a continue flow of “the
already” into “the not yet”.
While, Bergson made a distinction between historical and psychologic time.
Historical time is linear and measured in terms of spatial distance travelled by a
pendulum or hands of a clock. Psychologic time is subjective and measured by the
relative emotional intensity of a moment.
MODERNISM
The advent of modernism
The term ‘Modernism’ indicates a international movement, which involved literature,
music, cinema in the first part of the 20th century.
Modernism as literal movement is associated with the period after World War I. The
horror of war had shaken the certainties of the pre-war society and the new theories
encouraged a search for new modes of expression.
The Modernists expressed the desire to break with the past and find new fields of
investigation, such as urbanization, technology war, speed and mass communication.
Main features of Modernism
All form of modernism share some common features:
- The distortion of Shape in cubist painting of Picasso and Braque
- The breaking down of limitation in space and time
- The emphasis on the subject, in fact in literature, an omniscient third-person
narrator was abandoned in favor of new techniques like the stream of
consciousness
- The use of allusive language
- The importance of unconscious
THE MODERN NOVEL
The origins of the English novel
The origins of English novel were essentially bourgeois. The novelist was a mediator
between the character and the readers. He told significant events and incidents in
chronological order in a more or less objective way.
The new role of the novelist
The passage from Victorian to modern novel was caused by the transformation of
British society, which in few year passed from the comfortable life of the Victorian
age, to the inter-war years.
The new role of the novelist was the mediation between the values of the past and
the confused present.
This new ‘realism’ influenced by French and Russian writers, as Proust, Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy, tended to shift from society to the individual.
The new type of write was introduced by two other factor: the new concept of time
and the new theory of unconscious introduced by Freud
Experimenting with new techniques
In the modern novel there isn’t the omniscient narration, because it couldn’t
represent adequately the reality of world, so modern novelist experimented new
methods to portray the individual consciousness.
A different use of time
Also the treatment of time is different, influenced by Bergson. Time was subjective
and internal. There wasn’t point in building a well-structured plot, with
chronological sequence of event. The story often took place in a single day, as James
Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
The stream-of-consciousness technique
The stream of consciousness was the mainly technique that modern novelists used
in their novel. It’s the continuous flow of thoughts and sensation. So they employed
the interior monologue that is the verbal expression of the psychic phenomenon.
JAMES JOYCE
Dublin 1882-1904
James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He was educated at gesuite school, and
then he attended at University College in Dublin.
He was interested in European culture, and this led him to think about himself as
European rather than an Irishman. This was in contrast with his literary
contemporary Yeats, who was trying to rediscover the Irish Celtic identity. In fact,
Joyce had a European cosmopolitan view.
In 1904, he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle.
Trieste 1905-1915
In 1905 the couple settled in Trieste, where Joyce started to teach English and made
friend with Italo Svevo. But the years in Trieste were very difficult because no one
wanted publish his works, because they had obscene elements in their prose.
Dubliners was completed in 1905, but only published on the eve of WWI.
Zurich: 1915-1920
In 1915 Joyce moved to Zurich.
In 1917 he received the first of several donations which enabled him to continue
writing.
Paris: 1920-1940
In 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where he published the Ulysses in 1922.
Then his daughter Lucia was hitten by a mental illness, and so she was sent to a
mental hospital.
Zurich: 1940-41
In 1940 Joyce and his family returned to Zurich. He never saw the end of the WWII,
because he died at the age of 59 in 1941. He was buried in Zurich
Ordinary Dublin
Joyce set all his work in Ireland, in particular in the city of Dublin. He wanted to
give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary things and
living ordinary life.
The rebellion against the Church
In spite of his Jesuit education, Joyce challenged Catholicism.
His hostility against the Church was the revolt of the artist-heretic against the official
doctrine which had taken possession of Irish minds. But the conflict was even more
painful; it was like a conflict between a son and his parents.
Style
Joyce, influenced by French Symbolists, believed in the impersonality of artist. So
he didn’t have to express the his viewpoint, but he preferred to use different points
of view. So he used the free direct speech and the interior monologue. He used
also a succession of words without punctuation or grammatical connections and
infinite puns.
A subjective perception of time
Joyce was a Modernist writers. The facts of his works are confused and they are
explored from different point of views.
The Joyce’s stories and novel open with the analysis of a particular moment, and the
portrait of a character is based on introspection rather than on description.
The time is not perceived as objective but as subjective, leading to psychological
change. So the reality of Dublin is not strictly derived from external reality, but from
the character’s floating minds.
DUBLINERS
Structure and setting
Dubliners consists of 15 shorts stories, that represent the life of ordinary people.
The opening stories deal with childhood and youth in Dublin, while the others
concern the middle years of characters and their social, political or religious affair.
While Victorian writers had celebrated the developments of civilization in the cities,
Joyce was hostile to city life, finding that it degraded its citizens. In fact, his Dublin
is a place where true feeling and compassion for others do not exist.
The story are divided in 4 groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.
The last story, “The Dead” wad a late addition.
Characters
The oppressive effects of religious, political, cultural end economic forces on the
lives of lower-middle-class Dubliners brought Joyce to represent his characters as
afflicted people. Everyone in Dublin seems to be part of an endless web of despair.
Even when they want to escape, the are unable to because they are spiritually weak.
The young woman in Eveline is the perfect example, because instead of choosing a
new life in Buenos Aires, she decides to stay in Dublin.
Realism and symbolism
The description of each story is extremely realistic. The use of realism is mixed with
symbolism, because the external details generally have a deeper meaning.
For example Joyce uses the color symbolism: brown, gray and yellow are used to
represent the atmosphere of despair and paralysis.
The use of epiphany
The epiphany is the sudden spiritual revelation, caused by a trivial gesture, an
external object or banal situation which reveals the character's inner truths. So these
revelatory moments reveal to the reader the true meaning of the narrative.
Paralysis
The theme of paralysis is present from beginning to end.
The paralysis that Joyce wanted represent is both physical - due to external forces-
and moral linked to religion, politic and culture.
Dubliners of Joyce accept their conditions or because they don’t know their
situation, or because they don’t have the brave to change their condition.
But, the moral centre of Dubliners isn’t only paralysis, but also the revelation to its
victims. And the main theme is the failure to find a way out of paralysis.
The opposite of paralysis is is ‘escape’ and its consequently failure, because no one of
Joyce’s Dubliners succeeds in freeing themselves.
