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U n i t
The literary scene
A general realistic trend.
The late Victorian novel featured a tendency
towards realism much more decided than that of the early Victorian
novel. Following
Darwin’s theories
(
➤
p. 14
) of the influence of the
natural environment on animals,
Realism
, as an intellectual and literary
movement, carefully studied the influence of the
social environment
on man and tended to concentrate on a direct presentation of its object,
giving as precise and detailed a picture of it as possible, and avoiding any
judgement or comment. Realism intended to photograph reality. With its
predilection for poor and degraded social settings and failed characters, it
was in itself a
reaction against the triumphant Victorian ideology
and
the official image of England as an imperial power and the world’s leader
in commerce and industry. As the century went on, Realism came to be
identified also with a faithful description of the complex workings of the
mind and the conscience.
The divided self.
Robert Louis Stevenson
(
➤
p. 78
) is by far the best
writer in the horror and crime tradition, and one of the greatest English
novelists. His masterpiece,
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886), on a first level reads like a
horror story
which owes something
to the Gothic tradition and even more to Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of
terror: it is about the transformation of the respected Dr Jekyll into the
monstrous and brutal Mr Hyde. On a second and deeper level, however,
the book casts serious doubts on human nature and progress: man is in
part inherently bad and science cannot hope to separate the good from
the bad artificially, and so solve all the problems of mankind.
The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
thus
strikes at the core of the Victorian
compromise
, and the fundamental duplicity of the age’s
moral standards.
Novels of philosophical pessimism.
An extremely
original reaction to accepted Victorian standards came
from
Thomas Hardy
(
➤
p. 85
). His stories are mostly
set in
rural Wessex,
a fictional region in south-west
England. This is the world of Hardy’s major novels –
such as
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891) – which all have
as their central theme love. Hardy called these works
“
Novels of Character and Environment
”, to stress the
two elements that he thought shaped man’s destiny. In
contrast with a too easy Victorian optimism based on
progress, he adopted from the German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer the notion of an “Immanent
Will”, a universal power indifferent to the fate of man.
The late Victorian novel
A portrait of
R.L. Stevenson, by
John Singer Sargent
(1885), detail.
A traditional
country festival in
Roman Polanski’s
Tess
(France/UK,
1979).
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