31/10/07 - English Literature - Walter Scott: Waverley

It is difficult to imagine just what a phenomenon Waverley was when it was first published. There is no parallel in contemporary society to the significance and scale of Scott's work. He was the biggest writer since Shakespeare, including in terms of imaginative scope. He signalled the turning point of the history of the novel and imaginative literature in the world. The novel was brought into a historical context. He had worried about genre because his genre was new, a conglomeration of the best bits of many genres, particularly in the first and last chapters. Scott allowed a genuine historicity into his novel - his characters are shaped by their context. He decorates the history of the real world with imaginative dressing.

There are undeniably realistic and historical dimensions to Waverley. But a more imaginative element runs with, and sometimes against the historical aspect. Scott opens up a metacritical reflection of the possibility of the storytelling of history and the consequences of this. Scott's history is sequential, progressive and dialectical. Scott conveys a time of civil war, bringing to life the passions of the time but being careful not to create more. He glorifies the present and so glorifies the past, because it has led up to the present, and holds up the past like a moral essay. He uses narrative progression to imitate history moving from past to present, mapped in novel form. The novel is also mapped geographically: the Highlanders, representing one form of history, conflict with Lowlanders, who represent another. Edward experiences both forms and so is best placed to see the best aspects of both cultures. According to a critic, Alexander Welsh, the hero is a blank, a cipher, which means he can understand both sides. Edward is the sympathetic observer. He is morally weak and impressionable, as detailed in the early chapters.

"My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring."

Edward sees clearly enough to depict the world to us, but his descriptions have a romantic tincture; he is Romantic in an imaginative sense. Edwards lacks balance and proportion of reality. The novel is a Bildunsroman, meaning that Edward grows from naive to mature.

"I have already hinted, that the dainty, squeamish, and fastidious taste acquired by a surfeit of idle reading, had not only rendered our hero unfit for serious and sober study, but had even disgusted him in some degree with that in which he had hitherto indulged. […] From such legends our hero would steal away to indulge the fancies they excited. In the corner of the large and sombre library, with no other light than was afforded by the decaying brands on its ponderous and ample hearth, he would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary events are presented in action, as it were, to the eye of the muser."

Edward's reading space is as deep and gothic as the books he reads. There is a difference between actual events and that way Edward perceives them.

"It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village, or rather Hamlet, of Tully-Veolan, close to which was situated the mansion of the proprietor. The houses seemed miserable in the extreme, especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages. […] Three or four village girls, returning from the well or brook with pitchers and pails upon their heads, formed more pleasing objects; and, with their thin, short gowns and single petticoats, bare arms, legs, and feet, uncovered heads and braided hair, somewhat resembled Italian forms of landscape. Nor could a lover of the picturesque have challenged either the elegance of their costume, or the symmetry of their shape."

Edward focuses on the beauty rather than the poverty of the women. There is an ironic distance between Edward and the narrator. The reader has a different reaction to Edward, because we must make up our own minds about what is really happening. For example, Edward naively does not recognise the treason he has committed by giving his seal to Donald Bean Lean and is not alarmed by Donald's excessive knowledge about him.

Scott criticises the map of history. He finds ways of registering the parts that history left out. The death of Gardiner catalyses Edward's moral development, and romance is left behind after this point.

"Ere Edward could make his way among the Highlanders, who, furious and eager for spoil, now thronged upon each other, he saw his former commander brought from his horse by the blow of a scythe, and beheld him receive, while on the ground, more wounds than would have let out twenty lives. When Waverley came up, however, perception had not entirely fled. The dying warrior seemed to recognise Edward, for he fixed his eye upon him with an upbraiding, yet sorrowful look, and appeared to struggle for utterance. But he felt that death was dealing closely with him, and resigning his purpose, and folding his hands as if in devotion, he gave up his soul to his Creator. The look with which he regarded Waverley in his dying moments did not strike him so deeply at that crisis of hurry and confusion, as when it recurred to his imagination at the distance of some time."

In the heat of battle Edward does not realise the furiousness of the Highlanders. (In history they were known for their great discipline; Scott bends the truth a little.) The Highlanders are evil in this scene so that Gardiner dies like a saint. Scott reminds us that the Highlanders belong to the violent and bloody past.

"'Nay, I cannot tell what to make of you,’ answered the Chief of Mac-Ivor, ‘you are blown about by every wind of doctrine. Here have we gained a victory, unparalleled in history – and your behaviour is praised by every living mortal to the skies – and the Prince is eager to thank you in person – and all our beauties of the White Rose are pulling caps for you, -- and you, the preux chevalier of the day, are stopping on your horse’s neck like a butter-woman riding to market, and looking as black as a funeral.’
‘I am sorry for poor Colonel Gardiner’s death: he was once very kind to me.’
‘Why, then, be sorry for five minutes, and then be glad again; his chance to-day may be ours to-morrow. And what does it signify? – the next best thing to victory is honourable death, but it is a pis-aller, and one would rather a foe had it than one’s self.’"

Here Fergus Mac-Ivor offers the rewards of a chivalric knight to Edward, but these belong to the past and Edward is moving into the present. His reply is simplified and more modern. The world of Fergus is one where honourable death is preferable to dishonourable life. In Scott's footnote on the death of Balmawhapple, he mixes fiction and reality, and uses the striking motif of himself playing on the grave of the soldier. The past is left behind because it is outmoded, yet in the image that Scott paints the past cannot be left behind. It is like the grass. Scott knows he is treating the Highlanders badly by consigning them to the past, so these little hints of the dialectic of Enlightenment, where the past becomes the present, are scattered throughout the novel. Scott uses imagination to allow us to see both the past and present at once. He needs the past, although in the book he leaves it behind.

The closing image of the novel is when the ravaged home of the Baron Bradwardine is restored to its original glory. Scott smooths out the labour of building, making use of his literary power. But one thing changes.

"There was one addition to this fine old apartment, however, which drew tears into the Baron’s eyes. It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. […] the ardent, fiery and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this painting hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war."

The painting contrasts Edward's innocence with Fergus's impetuous nature, which are befriended and framed for the wall. The figures almost step out of the painting. Scott knows his work is fictional, but there is a danger that he may revive the war by his reconstruction of history. The past is forever threatening the present - it is this principal issue that the novel deals with.

30/10/07 - Architectural History - France in the Seventeenth Century

With the seventeenth century came the emergence of a distinctly French classicism. The new style mingled classicism with the proud French tradition. Architecture came to be symbolic of French power.

France finally emerged from the Civil War . Henri IV was intent on redeveloping the economy of France and so building projects commenced with force. The Place des Vosgues (attributed to Louis Metezeau) was built for public spectacle and promenade, and was ringed by bourgeois homes. It was used as a place of industry, for the silk works were built to the side. The Pavilion of the King and Pavilion of the Queen surround the public space. The houses are simple and modest, each with its own roofline. The houses were made of brick with a decorative 'chain' design.

Florent Fournier built the Chateau de Grosbois, c. 1600. It is an example of rural house architecture. It contrasts with the square in grandness, because it was built for a member of the nobility.

Jean du Cerceau's Hotel de Sully (1624-29) has a main block of old-fashioned decor and classical elements. The front is enclosed, but the back is opened out and looks more public.

Salomon de Brosse was born in 1571. His father was an architect, and his mother was the daughter of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder. In 1610 he established himself as an architect in Paris. He died in 1626. One of his major designs was Luxembourg Palace. In design it is an extension of Cerceau's hotel, which also has a traditional chateau design. The wings are lower than is typical. The garden is more clearly enclosed; 'in the round'. There is rustication on the horizontal axis of the building. It has a true attic. It emphasises clean lines. This became a typical French style.

In de Brosse's Chateau de Blerancourt, c. 1619, he emphasises some of the aspects he used in his earlier designs. The wings are gone, leaving freestanding blocks of building. There are standard accurate classical elements on the facade. Once again, simplicity is key to his work. He develops a unique decorative style.

Brosse's Palais de Parlement, 1618, uses restrained classical features and heavy rustication. It has a tall unbroken French roof.

Jacques Lemercier was born in 1580. His father was a master mason. Aged fourteen, he travelled to Rome. In 1618 he was appointed royal architect. His work combined French traditions with Roman classical and baroque developments. He died in 1654.

He planned the Church of the Sorbonne (1635-42) which has a basilica plan that was unusual in France at the time. It expresses Lemercier's mixture of French and Roman tendencies. The side aisles are akin to Roman, but the transepts are French because they do not project much out of the building. The dome acts as a centralising force, with naves of equal length each side to make the building symmetrical.

Francois Mansart was born in 1598. His father was a master carpenter and he died when Francois was young. Francois trained with his brother-in-law Garmain Gaultier, who was assistant to de Brosse at Rennes. Francois died in 1666.

Mansart uses a specifically French style of classicism. He was a precautious architect and a difficult person, leading to the loss of many major commissions. The Chateau de Balleroy, of the late 1620s, has courtyard pavilions that are unconnected to the main building. It emphasis separateness with the use of defined separate roofs. But despite the roofline, the building has a unified composition, because it has a hierarchical structure like a pyramid.

Mansart designed the Gaston d'Orleans wing at Blois which was to house a member of the royal family. Mansart is a good example of the reason why French architects were renowned for being able to build well in restricted and pre-existing sites which tend to be difficult to negotiate. The back of the building was not equal in length to the front and the level of the garden was slightly lower than the level of the courtyard. Mansart dealt with this using a staircase and garden, solving both problems of centring and ground level at once. It also gave the building a new unity. Loose classical features such as pilasters and a single roof were used, but these are still distinctly French. The pilasters were used on the corners where the tradition was not to, and the roof is typically high-pitched.

Mansart's Chateau de Maisons Lafitte (1642-46) is a freestanding building, yet still complex in design. It is not decorative by French standards, simply appropriate to the level of the family's importance. It consists of a dome with a hidden light source, which became common in French architecture.

Ste Marie de la Visitation, built by Mansart between 1632-34, is monumental yet restrained. its plan is centralised with a dome, with side chapels which the Italian architects were experimenting with at the same time. The building deliberately draws on existing French traditions such as the chapel at Anet.

From the middle of the century, Louis le Vau became one of the principal French architects. He was born in 1612. His father was a mason, and Louis trained in the same trade. He was a brilliant architect of aristocratic hotels until 1655 when he became the architect of Louvre. Many other royal or courtly projects were given to him, including Vaux-le-Vicomte, College de Quatre Nations in Paris, Church of St Sulpice in Paris and Chateau de Versailles. He died in 1670.

Vax-le-Vicomte was designed for a finance minister (1657-61). It began the establishment of the chateau as a freestanding object. A single order unites both floors, and it has a central domed space. Its gardens and design later became the basis for Versailles.

Bernini was invited to design the Louvre in 1664. The finished proposal was rejected by the French because it was too grand, too Italian for them. He had surprisingly little lasting impact of French architecture. Louis le Vau was given the job of designing the east front of the Louvre. He made a real post-and-lintel construction, i.e. load-bearing columns. Despite having commissions in Paris, Louis did not move to Paris but to Versailles.

An original building on the site of Cour de Marbre had been built years ago for royal hunting parties. But the Cour de Marbre was a completely new building with twenty-five bays. It was le Vau's last building. The architecture was simple and restrained. He used a balustrade on the roofline and brought forward porticoes. But King Louis wanted it to be bigger. Le Vau died at the beginning of the new project and was replaced by Jules Hardouin Mansart. The building expanded the original facade to six hundred metres. It was meant to overlook a vast landscape. Its architectural quality was never questioned, but its monumentality was.

Place Vendome, Paris, built 1698, was designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart. The space was not meant to be economical or important, only the statue, for it was built to celebrate royal power (right before the deposition of the monarchy).

29/10/07 - Architectural History - French Renaissance 1500-1600

Between 1494-1525 the French went on a campaign to invade Italy. The Gothic style reached its height in the fifteenth century, while Italy was ahead of this in terms of perfection, particularly with Bramante's Tempietto of 1508. King Francois I decided to emulate and surpass the achievements of Italian culture, but despite his keenness, the process was gradual, and spread over five hundred years.

The key architects and masons of the French Renaissance were: Domenico da Cortona, Gilles le Breton, Sebastiano Serlio, Pierre Lescot, Philibert de l'Orme, Primaticcio, Jean Bullant and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder.

The major chateaux of the time were situated on the Loire Valley and in the area around Paris.

It may seem unlikely, but the Chateau at Gaillon, 1508, emulates the Tempietto. It has classical pilasters placed atop each other to give a classical appearance. This was the humble beginning of the French Renaissance movement.

Chenonceau, begun in 1515, exemplified the beginning of an orderly and structured French Renaissance style. Italian straight staircases did not suit the French very well, as they tended to build Gothic spiral staircases. The building as a whole is square and simple.

The chateau at Bury is more sophisticated. The buildings are arranged around a central courtyard, with a main facade called a corps-de-logis.

Classical elements were used by the French for their visual effects rather than for accuracy. Azay-le-Rideau (1518-27) has an ordered facade with classical elements integrated into more grand aspects such as windows.

Francois I's chateau at Blois shows a clear horizontal design, with classical pilasters interspersed between windows. It demonstrates a more integrated use of the classical language. The courtyard staircase, for instance, is three-dimensional, sculptural and expressive. It is much more decorative and idiosyncratic than any Italian Renaissance building. The north-west facade has a certain depth and monumentality yet it uses classical detail more accurately than the staircase. Its finesse, structural skill and decoration was praised, but an Italian writer criticised the chateau for poor use of Classical language.

The chateau at Chambord (begun 1519)is a political statement of French authority. It was built at Francois' hunting lodge. It was designed from scratch on a virgin site, so it is more regular in design than any previous French architecture - or perhaps it owes its regularity by its Italian architect, Domenico da Cortona. It is partitioned into four sections, which later became the standard design of French architecture. It is however still very French: the roofline is triangular and prickly and busy, which is an architectural feature singular to France. One of the chimneys could almost pass for an antique salvage. The chateau has a double-helix staircase, or rather, two staircases which intertwine around each other. It is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Gilles le Breton, in Fontainebleau has a west gate (La Porte Doree) that takes remnants from the chateau at Gaillon, such as pedimented windows and the use of pilasters.

Cour du Cheval Blanc at Fontainebleau (1528-40) signified a new type of French chateau. It has a jutting pavilion, bi-axial symmetry and overruling order. The application of exterior classical motifs continues inside.

The chateau at Villandry (1532) is another example of a coherent ensemble. Its roofline is straight and more Italian although still not entirely free of the old French roofline.

By the 1540s France rejected Italian architecture, mainly because of Sebastiano Serlio's treatise of architecture. Serlio was the designer of the chateau at Ancy-le-France. It is in a sense very Italian, because it is completely regular and proportioned with the correct use of Classical language. But the high-pitched French roof and other French details were included that had been unforeseen by Serlio. He designed the Doric Order to be used for the courtyard, but someone else saw fit to put Ionian columns there instead.

Pierre Lescot was the architect of the Louvre's square court. The design is distinctly Classical. There is much sculpture to create a lively and delicate surface, something that the French were good at. Here the fusion of French and Italian architectural features works well.

The French architect Philibert de l'Orme was the first to study Italian architecture at length. He travelled to Rome and published a treatise of nine bodies, called simply Architecture, in 1567. In it he proposed a new set of French orders. They are superficially similar to the Italian orders, but they have added decoration that makes them look closer to Mannerism than High Renaissance.

The chateau at St Maur was de l'Orme's and France's first attempt to decorate a building completely in one order. It consists of a single storey of rooms around a central courtyard.

The chateau of Anet (before 1550) by de l'Orme has a three-storey pavilion entranceway with the correct use of Roman orders. He was more learned by this stage and applied the classical principles accurately. The dome of the chapel was based on a basilica. He used the idea of the circle as perfection and therefore made the chateau the ideal place to worship God. Inside, the dome is spectacularly decorated with the emphasis on play of light. As a result of all his efforts, de l'Orme was hailed as the greatest French architect.

The architect Primaticcio brought the most mature form of classicism to France. He was more Italian than any other French architect had managed. De l'Orme's tomb of Francois I is proper and traditional while Primaticcio's tomb of Henry II is more powerful, muscular and manneristic.

Jean Bullant was one of the confident French architects of new design. He designed the chateau at Ecouen. He is indebted to de l'Orme, but developed a style more sophisticated than ever. He leans towards mannerist style. His Petit Chateau at Chantilly (c.1560) is more adventurous. The arch pushed into the pediment. He shows an equal degree of flair and fancy. He had the idea of adding new buildings like wings, to create a trapezoidal shape.

Cerceau the Elder designed Charleval, a chateau with windows pushing through the entablature, a building with a frieze and rusticated details. After designing the chateau c. 1570, exuberance gave way to soberness and maturity in the Place des Vosgues, begun in 1605, and Solomon de Brosse of 1616.

29/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Historicism

Historicism usually means some account of human society that believes it is changing fundamentally in some way over time. History proceeds in such a way that each period will have its own history, historical circumstances and events. Historicism also refers to types of practice that see the location of a text in a particular historical moment as fundamental to its meaning.

Neoclassical culture refuted the first definition of historicism, for it saw that history was just a repeat of itself, that all civilisations are basically versions of Roman civilisation. In moving beyond medieval social organisation, a neoclassical ‘Renaissance’ imagines itself as returning to what had come before: to classical culture and values.

Enlightenment thinking about society was more radically historicist. According to the 'stadial' history of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson, societies are shaped by their mode of existence. These are hunting, herding, agriculture and commerce progressively. These modes of existence refer to particular stages in history, with commerce being the most advanced and hunting the most primitive. These modes, determined by their stage in history, in turn determine social, political and especially legal institutions.

In moving beyond the medieval, characterised in terms of superstition and feudal oppression, the ‘Enlightenment’ imagines itself mediating the emergence of quite a new type of society, based on commercial and scientific reason. The object of property came to mean money, rather than land. The Enlightenment was linked to a limited monarchy system of government. This materialistic concept of history is not about ideas but impersonal advancement. This theory discounts religion and other concepts. Instead, the necessary conclusion of the theory is that human nature, i.e. feeling, imagination and consciousness, remains the same throughout history.

In Waverley, Walter Scott describes Tully-Veolan in agricultural terms; in terms of a pre-capitalist culture. In the novel, Edward travels through history as he travels geographically, moving from agricultural to pastoral systems of government. As retrospective readers, we know that the pastoral system is doomed because society must necessarily develop and move away from this system. The Jacobites must decline. Nevertheless, there is something human-like persisting through this progression. There is the idea that human nature is consistent and able to be preserved, for example in Ossian, despite social changes.

According to Hugh Blair, it is possible to access the poetry and art of 'primitive' cultures, yet these cultures are able to express the aspects of human nature better than the 'modern' society. This informs the ideal of 'aesthetic' as being apart from politics, religion and other mundane things. Poetry is higher than systems of society because it has not been shaped by processes of modernity. It represents uncorrupted and unchanged human emotion. The role of the past in novels conveys the same idea. For example, in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Catherine's idea of an abbey is the instance of modern subjectivity of someone brought up in a modern society fantasising about the past in a particularly aesthetic way. Ruined abbeys are associated with superstition, Roman power and monarchical power, yet it has been made available to Catherine in a positive aesthetic term of sublime. Access to the past gives her a certain fear. The ruined abbey transcends political and economic change to be made available for aesthetic perception and experience.

In the eighteenth century the French revolution looked like an imaginative reaction, the reversal of cyclable history. However, absolute change occurred rather than a repetition of the old pattern. It was without precedent. It cannot be explained by materialistic or economic reasons. Hegel argued that history works in the exact opposite way to the theories proposed by the Scottish Enlightenment. For Hegel, history is the way in which human consciousness develops in itself and its relation to the world, driving the economic, political and social realm. He named this geist, which refers to a continually changing perception of the world which drives yet more changes. It is idealist, because it is ideas that change history rather than material things.

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" presents two problems: firstly, place, and secondly, time. The poem is not about Tintern Abbey at all, for there is no description of the ruins themselves. It is about consciousness rather than a particular place. The location of the poet as he writes the poem does not matter. The natural scenery described in the poem is not simple fact, but the media through which the poet experiences the supernatural.

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore I am still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
[Wordsworth, "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," 1798, lines 88-111]

The absence of a particularised scene does not matter because the poem is about supernatural spirit. So why did Wordsworth name the poem "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"? Wordsworth is proposing a recovery of spirituality that has been threatened by the modern conceptions that led to demolishing the abbey. The abbey is a spiritual place, stripped of Christian meaning and given aesthetic meaning instead: a post-Enlightenment spirituality. Human emotion cannot be disguised in the same way as economic change. History is transcended; the mind is not trapped into its historical and social context. The poet's mind is free to range over any history. The poem is therefore outside of history. It is a similar view of history to Hegel's, but for Wordsworth the changes take place in his mind, rather than in fact. So why did Wordsworth tell us the date (July 13 1798) is the poem transcends history? July 14 was the fourth anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the anniversary of King Louis' loss of control over the kingdom of France. The consideration of Britain's role in the world is placed in the poem.

"Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone."
[14-22]

By the word "uncertain" the poet claims he does not know where the smoke comes from. But in fact, he does. It comes from charcoal-burning for the nearby ironworks. The valleys around Tintern Abbey ar laden with poor people in the middle of an economic crisis, looking for work. What Wordsworth sees is the historical problem he is trying to deal with by looking for a transcendent ideal elsewhere in history. While Wordsworth tries to dehistoricise his poem to make it transcend the fickleness of time, he paradoxically historicises it.

New Historicism takes one poem and juxtaposes it with another poem, attempting to shed light on both of them. Alternatively, Marxist approaches involve an intellectual context. Marx targeted Hegel by taking his version of historical progression and turning it upside down: Marx says that material change affects consciousness, consciousness does not change the material. For Marx even human nature is not constant; it must change. It cannot escape its historical context. He cannot quite see that consciousness must be able to detach itself in order to make his own kind of writing possible, to allow him to step outside his world and describe and contrast different types of history.

Raymond Williams pointed out the problems with the terminology of history, which originated in the meaning of "literature" and "culture", as the conception of these ideas also changed over time. Their meaning is different now when we use them to refer to things in the past, when their meaning was something else.

26/10/07 - English Literature - Wordsworth: The Prelude

Wordsworth's Prelude was the great unread of the time. It was a great early document of English Romanticism. Wordsworth lived a long time and wrote and wrote and revised the Prelude, unlike Keats, Shelley and other Romantic poets.

The Prelude is a recuperative piece of poetry, fascinated with childhood (which many Romantics were) as they opened windows of light on perception. When Wordsworth says: "That time is past ... and all its aching joys are now no more", and "Bliss was it in that door to be alive," he refers to the democratic revolution. His work is laden with significant retrospect. He attempts to reconstruct childhood event and experience, sometimes successful in terms of reconstructing child development, but we are too aware that the adult speaker is aware of the reconstructed nature of his work. Wordsworth discovered a creative way to write the historical subject: historical subjectivity. The Prelude could be considered iconic or as an example of the movement and/or progression from childhood into maturity.

In the Prelude is a radical subjectivity discovering how perception is shaped. Also in "Tintern Abbey", "all the mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half crate and half perceive." Memory becomes the ground for cognition; perception is a historical construction. The existential present is always affected by historical experiences. Wordsworth had to find a way to realise his theory, hence his obsessive revison of his work. He based the Prelude on Milton's Paradise Lost, because all the other epics seemed to have been done already. So he chose Milton, an epic of individualism, a single subjective "I". This was a story that no one else had told, until Freud came along with his theories of the unconscious. The first lines of the Prelude echo those of Paradise Lost:

"Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome Messenger! O welcome Friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon City's walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchis'd and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? In what Vale
Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmur lull me to my rest?
The earth is all before me: with a heart
Joyous, nor scar'd at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again;
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
As by miraculous gift 'tis shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturb'd delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn
By road or pathway or through open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river, point me out my course?"
[1-32]

Wordsworth articulates that there is a shaping entity out there, constructing a "house of bondage"; echo of Milton. The word "enfranchis'd" had unmistakable political overtones for its association with the right to vote - a right denied to most British people at the time. The last lines of Milton are "The earth is all before me." There is in these lines hope of redemption. Incipient religiosity and spirituality are in us all and we are in it, allowing Wordsworth to detail the development of the "I". He takes the strategy of revival. Keats' "egoistical sublime", like Wordsworth's poetry, is self-questioning and interrogative, and as a result transcended his own experience. There is the sense that we all reach out beyond ourselves. The Prelude is a kind of autobiography (although it has no mention of an illegitimate child or of Wordsworth's affair). Wordsworth 'makes', he does not simply record. The act of writing, although true to events, is also a rewriting.

Wordsworth invented the concept of "spots of time", a crucial determinant of development.

"Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favour'd in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,
I was transplanted. Well I call to mind
('Twas at an early age, ere I had seen
Nine summers) when upon the mountain slope
The frost and breath of frosty wind had snapp'd
The last autumnal crocus, 'twas my joy
To wander half the night among the Cliffs
And the smooth Hollows, where the woodcocks ran
Along the open turf. In thought and wish
That time, my shoulder all with springes hung,
I was a fell destroyer. On the heights
Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied
My anxious visitation, hurrying on,
Still hurrying, hurrying onward; moon and stars
Were shining o'er my head; I was alone,
And seem'd to be a trouble to the peace
That was among them. Sometimes it befel
In these night-wanderings, that a strong desire
O'erpower'd my better reason, and the bird
Which was the captive of another's toils
Became my prey; and, when the deed was done
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
Nor less in springtime when on southern banks
The shining sun had from his knot of leaves
Decoy'd the primrose flower, and when the Vales
And woods were warm, was I a plunderer then
In the high places, on the lonesome peaks
Where'er, among the mountains and the winds,
The Mother Bird had built her lodge. Though mean
My object, and inglorious, yet the end
Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustain'd, and almost, as it seem'd,
Suspended by the blast which blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag; Oh! at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears! the sky seem'd not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion mov'd the clouds!"
[305-350]

With the words "natural growth", "soul" and "fostering", which means parents but also encouragement, Wordsworth moves into the realm of symbolic birth and development from the natural. The idea of aesthetics is evoked in the line "beautiful and the sublime." The lovely and attractive is juxtaposed with a terrifying notion of nature. Wordsworth naturalises classical theory of the beautiful. Wordsworth's sublime is taken directly from nature and planted within us. Wordsworth has a guilty conscience after raiding the birds' nest which is manifested in natural sounds and subjectivity. The child's experience of stealing eggs is followed by a different lexis of reflecting upon the significance of the "spot of time" just related.

One of Wordsworth's most famous "spots of time" is the boat stealing episode. A moral sense is henceforward instilled in him after he has stolen the boat. A fantasy adventure turns into a horror adventure, causing the boy's moral horizon to widen.

"One evening (surely I was led by her)
I went alone into a Shepherd's Boat,
A Skiff that to a Willow tree was tied
Within a rocky Cave, its usual home.
'Twas by the shores of Patterdale, a Vale
Wherein I was a Stranger, thither come
A School-boy Traveller, at the Holidays.
Forth rambled from the Village Inn alone
No sooner had I sight of this small Skiff,
Discover'd thus by unexpected chance,
Than I unloos'd her tether and embark'd.
The moon was up, the Lake was shining clear
Among the hoary mountains; from the Shore
I push'd, and struck the oars and struck again
In cadence, and my little Boat mov'd on
Even like a Man who walks with stately step
Though bent on speed. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure; not without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my Boat move on,
Leaving behind her still on either side
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. A rocky Steep uprose
Above the Cavern of the Willow tree
And now, as suited one who proudly row'd
With his best skill, I fix'd a steady view
Upon the top of that same craggy ridge,
The bound of the horizon, for behind
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp'd my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear'd its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur'd motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work'd with a dim and undetermin'd sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams."
[372-489]

Wordsworth gives nature a capital "N", signifying the idea of Mother Nature and fostering, as above. Fantasy themes are explored - elves, moon shining, water droplets. The band of the horizon represents boundaries both physical and moral. Then the language turns to that of terror. As he rows, the boy sees something appearing above the cliff, a trick of perspective where as he rows further away, the things seems to get bigger. He becomes afraid and feels guilty for 'stealing' the boat. The incident itself is rewritten from motion, to "struck and struck" again. The boy does not know what he has learnt, but the adult does and meditates on it. The boy has learned conscience.

In the skating episode, the child Wordsworth is skating on a lake with his friends. It is about the passage of time, which is in itself a difficult concept.

"And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blaz'd,
I heeded not the summons:---happy time
It was, indeed, for all of us; to me
It was a time of rapture: clear and loud
The village clock toll'd six; I wheel'd about,
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse,
That cares not for his home.---All shod with steel,
We hiss'd along the polish'd ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chace
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The Pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam'd upon the ice: and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp'd short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep."
[452-489]

Wordsworth uses animal imagery in all the episodes of the Prelude, e.g. "untired horse", "swan." The line "alien sound of melancholy" reflects the reality that echoes die. Wordsworth uses open vowels to catch the dying cadence of the last words in each line, like an echo. The boy does not know he is learning about time and transience, but the adult does. "All was tranquil as a dreamless sleep" refers to the dying of day, and other images also signal this: the church clock, the sun setting, images of circles like the boy spinning in circles on his skates, to signify the harmonious movement of the universe.

In terms of the poem Wordsworth enacts nature as a formative shaper of conscience.

Book 6 is about the turmoil in France. Wordsworth is in church and England declares war on France. The greater infanticism (England) declares war on an insipient republic (France). Wordsworth holds onto his republicanism, but his personal opinions make him a traitor in the light of the war.

"Such was my then belief, that there was one,
And only one solicitude for all;
And now the strength of Britain was put forth
In league with the confederated Host,
Not in my single self alone I found,
But in the minds of all ingenuous Youth,
Change and subversion from this hour. No shock
Given to my moral nature had I known
Down to that very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of sentiment that might be nam'd
A revolution, save at this one time,
All else was progress on the self-same path
On which with a diversity of pace
I had been travelling; this a stride at once
Into another region. True it is,
'Twas not conceal'd with what ungracious eyes
Our native Rulers from the very first
Had look'd upon regenerated France
Nor had I doubted that this day would come.
But in such contemplation I had thought
Of general interests only, beyond this
Had [never] once foretasted the event.
Now had I other business for I felt
The ravage of this most unnatural strife
In my own heart; there lay it like a weight
At enmity with all the tenderest springs
Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze
Had play'd, a green leaf on the blessed tree
Of my beloved country; nor had wish'd
For happier fortune than to wither there,
Now from my pleasant station was cut off,
And toss'd about in whirlwinds. I rejoiced,
Yea, afterwards, truth most painful to record!
Exulted in the triumph of my soul
When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
Left without glory on the Field, or driven,
Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief,
Grief call it not, 'twas anything but that,
A conflict of sensations without name,
Of which he only who may love the sight
Of a Village Steeple as I do can judge
When in the Congregation, bending all
To their great Father, prayers were offer'd up,
Or praises for our Country's Victories,
And 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance,
I only, like an uninvited Guest
Whom no one own'd sate silent, shall I add,
Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come?"
[228-275]

Wordsworth looks back on his younger radical self and calls it "ingenuous". He uses Miltonian language such as "uninvited guest" - signifying Satan in Paradise - to express his republicanism. He is true to his earlier memories.

25/10/07 - Architectural History - Sir Christopher Wren and the English Baroque

In France, the Baroque was associated with the great absolutist kings, while in Italy it reflected the beliefs of Christianity. In France it was empowering (for example, at the palace of Versailles), but in England it was more restrained.

In the 1640s Civil War broke out between the Monarchy and Parliament. In 1660 the Monarchy was restored. And in 1688 the 'Glorious Revolution' occurred, in which the Stuarts were deposed. The Baroque in England coincides with the latter period.

In 1660 England did not have a strong Classical background, except for Inigo Jones. Wren replaced Jones' design of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

St Paul's Cathedral
The theoretical basis of Wren's architecture is based on the philosophy of empiricism. This had a long English tradition stretching back to Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century: "Nothing exists which is not accessible to the senses." This was very different from the ideals of the Italian Renaissance or Inigo Jones, in which there was no absolute criteria; everything was relative; and there were no absolute rules of architectural beauty.

"...The Corinthian order became the most delicate of all others, and though the column was slenderer, yet bore a greater weight of entablature than the more ancient orders."
[Christopher Wren, Tracts on Architecture, Tract 2]

"Beauty is a Harmony of Objects, begetting Pleasure by the Eye. There are two Causes of Beauty, natural and customary. Natural is from Geometry, consisting in Uniformity (that is equality) and Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the use of our Sense to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as 'familiarity' or particular inclination breeds a Love of Things not in themselves lovely. Here lies the great Occasion of Errors; here is tried the architect's judgement: but always the true test is natural or geometrical beauty."
[Christopher Wren, Tracts on Architecture, Tract 1]

The Old St Paul's Cathedral was a typical Gothic building, as seen in books of the time. Wren went to Rome in 1655. There he met Bernini and studied the French architects. He came back to England full of ideas for the new St Paul's. His first design included a huge dome, and he sketched a plan of this before the Great Fire of 1666. Within a few weeks of the fire, Wren drew his proposal for rebuilding London. The plan embodies his notions of what a church should be made of: a portico, the main body, and a dome. Wren's first design for St Paul's is lost, but the second was based on the Greek cross form with a central dome reflecting Michelangelo's plan for St Peter's Cathedral. The second is almost a Latin cruciform and it is vast in scale. This design, called the Great Model, was approved by the king, but criticised by the clergy because it was too much like St Peter's, and so was thought to be too Catholic. So Wren went away and designed something that would please everybody. The Warrant Design, made in 1675, is more familiar. It is an old-fashioned classicised gothic building. The design included a spire on top of the dome; an attempt to reconcile the gothic with the classical. It takes a basilica form, with a nave and second storey aisles. But he made another design, known as the Definitive, the same year. This one was a compromise between his second and third proposals. It had two balanced naves on either side of the dome. The dome itself was closely related to St Peter's, and it was gigantic in scale. It takes influence from the Tempietto. The dome would have flattened its supports; it was so heavy.

The building was criticised because it was dishonest and gothic. Nowhere does the building reveal its internal structure; in fact the exterior is very misleading. The first storey wall has been rusticated to make it appear antique. There is a frieze running between the second storey capitals, expressing Wren's originality. Inside, there is a clear division of space, indicated by the arches. The arches of St Paul's crossing are in fact fake. They merely give the impression that the dome is resting on the arches, but it actually rests on a lower arch. The dome is not the same on the outside as inside. There is another interior dome with an oculus which allows light from the outer dome to filter into the central space. On the facade the lower portico is wider than the upper one, which echoes the proportions of aisle and nave on the interior. The dome stands out well against the skyline. It is particularly distinct from the smaller church steeples around it which merely pierce the air rather than dominate it.

The City Churches
Eighty-seven churches were destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Fifty-one were rebuilt. Wren headed a board of commissioners which was appointed to oversee the rebuilding of the churches. It was the first post-reformation church building programme in England. Wren and his associates had no obvious precedents to draw on. There was no elaborate ceremonial. The Protestant church was thought of as a 'preaching box' and this affected the final designs. Wren changed many of the small churches into centralised plans. Larger churches tended to be based on basilicas with surprisingly little emphasis on the altar.

St Bride on Fleet Street was rebuilt between 1671 and 1678. The new version had a gothic clerestory. Wren drew on his own ideals for new churches when constructing St Bride and his other commissions.

"A moderate voice may be heard 50 feet distance before the preacher, 30 feet on each side and 20 feet before the pulpit ... By what I have said, it may be thought reasonable that the ... Church should be at least 60 feet broad and 90 wide."

St James in Piccadilly (1676-84) has slim columns supporting the aisles. Wren said this of Catholic worship:

"... It is enough they hear the murmur of the mass, and see the elevation of the host, but ours are to be fitted for auditories."

St Lawrence Jewry, 1671-7, had an east end with clear emphasis on the altar which was unusual for Wren. Another unusual characteristic in this church is that Wren used abstracted language on the exterior. He gave the exterior a flat and thin veneer.

At Antholin on Watling Street (1678-82) Wren put a beautiful feature inside and emphasised it.

St Stephen, in Walbrook (1672-87) is a large church and Wren used it to explore the dome cross church juxtaposed with a basilica design. We get the sense of transepts, but this is deceptive. Again, the corner arches are deceptive and look awkward like those in St Paul's Cathedral. Wren did not make much emphasis on the exterior.

Classical language was adapted to gothic needs in some of Wren's churches, including St Mary-le-Bow (1670-7), St Bride's and St Stephen.

Nicholas Hawksmoor
Nicholas was born in 1661. Aged eighteen he entered Christopher Wren's service. In 1682 he designed the Chelsea Hospital. Throughout the 1680s he supervised the rebuilding of the city churches under Wren. In 1689 he designed Hampton Court Palace. In 1691 he became Wren's Amanuensis at St Paul's. In 1699 he began a collaboration with Vanbrugh. In 1707 be began to take commissions on his own account. He died in 1736.

By 1711 London still need more churches. Nicholas Hawksmoor stepped in to design Christ Church in Spitalfields. The church has a triumphal arch entrance design, topped by a medieval rope spire. His interests in architecture were more sculptural and three-dimensional than Wren's, even though he was influenced by Wren when they worked together. He uses Wren's typical deceit, for example, with barrel vaulting continuing through the building although they are not real, only trans-barrel vaults. He used light well, for example, in the gallery of the church. He reconciled the Classical language of the exterior by adding a very medieval spire. Outwardly, the church looks like it follows the basilica plan. The composition of elements on the west front include an open portico, flat classical facade and the medieval broach spire. An arched, vaulted central bay of portico ties in with the window on the east front. This gives the impression of a barrel-vaulted interior which is not the reality, although short sections of the vaulting make up the aisles of the church.

Hawksmoor's use of the Gothic connects but contrasts with Wren. The latter used an empirical approach which led to a certain cross-cultural approach to architecture and therefore Wren was not attracted only to the classical past as a source of information for modern architects. He had an interest in the Gothic, which he linked to Islamic (Saracenic) architecture. Hawksmoor also stressed the roots of Gothic architecture in the east but his focus was on Byzantine, early Christian roots and it was its christianity that was the essential characteristic. This allowed him to disengage Gothic architecture from Roman Catholicism (because its early Christian roots were pre-Roman Catholic) and to connect Gothic and Roman - stressing native English Norman, i.e. Romanesque. This avoidance of Roman Catholicism allowed him to argue that his churches were Christian, English and Protestant. Structurally and stylistically, the roots of this architecture he saw in the Byzantine round arch, not the pointed Gothic arch. In his Gothic work, he noticeably avoids ever using the pointed arch. He managed to combine all religions, past and present, in the spire of St John Horsleydown, built 1727-33.

James Gibbs 1682-1754
Gibbs was born and educated in Aberdeen, a Catholic. In the late 1690s he studied in Holland. In 1703 he entered Scots College in Rome to study for priesthood. He gave this up and entered the studio of Baroque architect Carlo Fontana. He returned to Britain in 1710. He gained patronage from the Earl of Mar, Secretary of State for Scotland. It resulted in his inclusion as one of the architects of the fifty new churches proposed under the 1711 Act. He was suspected of Jacobite sympathies after the 1715 uprising which was led by Mar. He produced the definitive and most influential of all English protestant churches, St Martin in the Fields.

Gibbs had a different approach to both Wren and Hawksmoor. Neither the tasteful classical veneer of Wren, not the more dramatic modelling of Hawksmoor. He was more interested in complex rhythmical patterns on his facades, seen in the side elevation of St Mary-le-Strand (1714-17). He developed this to a high degree in building like the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

Thomas Archer c. 1668-1743
Archer was said to be "...the least English and the most Baroque" by Marcus Whiffen. He was a gentleman amateur, who had gone on the Grand Tour twice, in the 1680s and 1690s. There he gained a first hand experience of Roman Baroque architecture. He designed St Philip's Church, Birmingham (1709-15) which is now a cathedral. He was appointed for the 1711 commission and designed two churches, St Paul's Deptford (1730) and St John's Smith Square (1714-28). He took for his designs direct influence from Roman Baroque.

24/10/07 - English Literature - William Wordsworth

This lecture will discuss Wordsworth particularly in relation to his politics and uneasy relationship with democracy.

Chronology
1770 Born April 7 to John and Anne (Cookson) Wordsworth, second of five.
1778 Mother dies; William goes to Hawkshead Grammar School.
1783 Father dies.
1787 Goes up to St. John's College, Cambridge.
1789 An Evening Walk.
1790 Walking tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany.
1791 Graduates; goes to France; meets and has an affair with Annette Vallon.
1792 (Illegitimate) daughter Caroline born.
1793 Returns to England to earn money; Anglo-French War prevents his return to France until 1802. Descriptive Sketches.
1794 Reunited with Dorothy.
1795 Inherits legacy of £900. Meets Coleridge.
1797 William and his sister Dorothy move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge.
1798 Lyrical Ballads.
1798-99 The Wordsworths travel to Germany with Coleridge.
1799 William and Dorothy settle in the Lake district, at Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
1800 Lyrical Ballads revised, Preface added.
1802 Visits the Vallons at Calais. After receiving a much-delayed inheritance, marries Mary Hutchinson. Sonnets Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.
1803 Son John born. (Four more children by 1810.)
1805 The Prelude finished. Brother John lost at sea.
1807 Poems in Two Volumes.
1809 The Convention of Cintra.
1810 Quarrel with Coleridge.
1812 Children Thomas and Caroline die.
1813 Moves to Rydal Mount, between Grasmere and Rydal Water; appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (£400/year).
1814 The Excursion.
1815 Preface to Lyrical Ballads revised.
1819 Peter Bell and The Waggoner.
1820 We Are Seven and The River Duddon (sonnets).
1825 Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems.
1828 Tours the Rhineland with Coleridge.
1839 Oxford confers honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree.
1842 Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years. 1843 named Poet Laureate.
1847 Daughter Dora dies.
1850 Dies (April 23). The Prelude.

The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was financed largely by Wordsworth himself, and published by a relatively unknown company. The edition contained an opening advertisement, forty-two poems by Wordsworth, four by Coleridge, begins with "The Ancient Mariner" and ends with "Tintern Abbey." The term "Lyrical ballads" suggests subjectivity, formality politeness, artificiality and the scribal, juxtaposed with the communal, informal, vernacular, spontaneous and oral. Ballads were an older form of poetry while lyrics were more modern. So the title itself suggests the irresolvable nature of the poems it contains.

"The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart. I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of those Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with them would read them with more than common pleasure: and, on the other band, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them they would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed from my expectation in this only, that I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I should please."
[Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802]

Wordsworth makes audacious statements, and has a preoccupation with the vernacular and lower classes.

"What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement."
[Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802]

This is an unmediated form of public discourse.

Wordsworth's definitions of poetry are as bipartite, spontaneous and of a reserved crafting together. He intended for his Lyrical Ballads to show dynamism and fixity. He was not popular in his time: the people he wrote about could not afford to buy his publications, for he is obsessed with the rural poor. He knew he was speaking mainly to a male privileged society sharing the same point of view about the poor that he wrote about.

Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, and he produced it himself. The Songs are about the radical innocence of children and their spiritual purity. He relates back of Rousseau's Emile of 1762. Wordsworth takes the idea of 'radical innocence' for his own poems, such as "We Are Seven". In it he demonstrates the child's innocent vision and so points out that the adult's logical mind is at fault.

In his "Intimations Ode" Wordsworth asks us to turn to greater things, "paulo maiora canamus." He turns to a higher, more formal canon of poetry.

"And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Think not of any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
["Intimations Ode"]

Notice how Wordsworth uses puns which lend themselves to oppositional reading. Is the poem really about loss? We see the ambiguity of his words, making the meaning uncertain and giving a more pessimistic feel than the optimistic surface reading.

Wordsworth's consciousness has moved away from radical thought to experience. His idea of the loss of innocence relates to Plato's allegory of the cave. Wordsworth says we are like Plato's prisoners watching shadows. If we go outside we realise in the light of day that we are living a deluded existence. We can read Wordsworth on a Freudian level. He always refers to nature as a female entity, suggesting infantilism and a desire to return to infancy. He employs textual repression.

Wordsworth was essentially a poet of the Industrial revolution. The image of dark satanic mills underlies his work. He wrote for the middle classes so he is not "man speaking to man," i.e. frank and straightforward, but bourgeois and polite. He set himself up as a radical, then became a part of the establishment. However, was he not a part of the establishment from the beginning? Wordsworth was an uneasy political tourist, and often got things wrong.

22/10/07 - Architectural History - Pre-Columnbian Architecture in the Americas 1500 BC - 1500 AD

The ancient Mesoamerican civilisations were Olmec, Toltec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec. The ancient South American civilisation was Inca. These can be split into broad categories of 'Formative', 'Classic' and 'Postclassic.' These civilisations built monuments similar to the Egyptian pyramids and complex houses. They could not have been influenced at all by events that were going on so far across the sea, and so the very fact of the existence of the monuments serves the implication that all humans have an innate instinct to build monuments. The precinct, cairn, path and hut, in fact, are all fundamental and recurring typologies in monumental architecture.

The calendar of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican civilisations was incredibly accurate and gave rise to their complex calligraphy. They had a lot of realistic art depicting deities and animals. For example, eagles were considered magical. The Aztecs believed in the underworld, and this is where some of their fantastic animals were thought to have lived.

At the Olmec site of La Venta we see a clear axial arrangement pointing south, with a large manmade mound. This arrangement shows a very human desire to arrange architectural forces with a certain order. One of the first pyramid-type structures is found in ancient America, which could be the remains of a more structured pyramid or simply an earth mound used to emulate the shape of a volcano, one of the most powerful forces in nature. Another mound was found to contain the body of an ancient ruler. Sculptural heads were used to 'guard' certain sites of particular importance, suggesting that they served a religious function. They could also be linked to royal power. Other ancient sculptures show creatures emerging from underground, offering a baby up to the gods, which again is of religious importance. The ancient Mesoamerican civilisations had an interest in topography as well as cosmology.

Teotihuacan, an ancient civilisation site, once had a population of 50,000. It had an impact on the ancient world similar to Constantinople in the east and was almost concurrent with the height of Constantinople. At this site there is a clear north-south and east west axis on a grander and more diplomatic scale than La Venta. It is home to the Pyramid of the Moon, a stepped pyramid, and its twin the Pyramid of the Sun, both of which are built along separate lines of symmetry. The latter was built in layers faced with uncut stone which is now in disrepair. It is the tallest monument on North American soil, at least, it was until the twentieth century. It faces seventeen degrees west, and is designed to reflect the rhythm of the universe. There is a subtle arrangement of space within the colony, with views running south. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl has ambiguous space surrounding it, possibly for public ritual, although this is just speculation. The building has a very distinct form; it is very articulate and deliberate. It was built using the method of 'talus and tablero' and was probably brightly painted when it was completed. It is ornamented with sculptures of deities. The plan of one other building, the Zacula compound, is very similar to a typical Roman villa, with clever circulation of air and lighting. It was a domestic building offering privacy and security.

In 700 AD the Olmecs disappeared. They chopped down more and more forests to use the wood for building and rituals of burning. When there were no forests left, the climate changed and a great drought descended and wiped out the Olmec civilisation.

At Monte Alban there is no axial structure. Instead the architecture is meant to mirror the landscape. Again, talus and tablero was the technique used for building.

The Maya civilisation, c. 300-1500 AD is probably the best known. The Maya believed in magical and supernatural forces. They had many cities in America. They used the same type of monuments, mass and axial arrangement as previous Mesoamerican civilisations. Yet their city designs are more complex because they had to deal with a more hilly terrain and dramatic landscape. They developed some principal architectural features; the stela, corbel vaulting and roof combs. The stelae were stone sculptures with carved inscriptions. There are still some stelae in Copan, Honduras. Once situated in the Great Plaza at Copan, the stelae were used as markers in ceremonies commemorating politic-religious events that were thought of as essential for the continuation of Creation. The Maya also built many pointed archways, which were basic in style. Corbelled vaults and flying facades five the impression of spaciousness and grandeur. Differentiation was achieved using height, and a hierarchy established where the higher the building, the more important it was. Buildings were edited over time. Mostly extra rooms were added which made the buildings more complex. The Great Nunnery at Uxmal, dating from the tenth century AD is one such example. It is broken up into several layers and has complex decoration, comparable in technical ability to ancient Greece or Rome. The Maya worked out how to build higher and more elaborate buildings such as multi-layered temples with roof combs, which were used as tombs for kings. One of these is the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, Mexico. Its nine steps reflect the nine levels of the Mayan underworld. Ball courts have been found there. Although the nature of the game is unknown, we do know that they were used both for friendly matches and gladiatorial ones where players fought to save their lives.

The Toltec city of Chichen Itza holds the Caracol, an ancient observatory used for time keeping. It has holes in the ceiling in order to track the planets. The Castillo is a building with a line of light that runs down its side on the autumn equinox and at no other time of year. The line reflects the shape of a snake, which had religious significance for the Toltecs. A wall painting of a ball court shows how the loser of the game was beheaded.

Mexican society was relatively slow to develop. Tenochtitlan is an ancient site that has been built over by modern Mexicans. The Aztec pyramids were meant to mirror the twin volcanoes in the background. When the Aztecs first emerged, they kept the royal bloodline by marrying the princess to an overlord, and when he was invited to Mexico, the overlord caused a war. The Aztecs were conquered by the Spanish in the late sixteenth century.

The Inca lived in the Andes of modern-day Peru. At their height they had an empire stretching over the Andes and beyond. There are narrow corridors between the mountains, which they used with great perseverance. They showed perseverance in everything they did, for they tamed wild llamas and alpacas, grew their own vegetables and created trade routes between mountains. Their mountain colonies look dramatic and spectacular. They would have housed only one thousand people, so perhaps they had a ritual purpose or perhaps it was a military post, for this area of the mountains is only accessible during a few months a year, and for the ret of the year the region is inhospitable for people to live there permanently. But the Inca thrived in a relatively inhospitable environment. They mastered the art of Cyclopean masonry, or rather, the use of stone without water.

Bibliography
Heyden, D. and Gendrop. P., Pre-Columbian Archiecture of Mesoamerica (New York, 1973).
Kubler, G., The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (Harmondsworth, 1962).
Miller, E. M., The Art of Mesoamerica from Olmec to Aztec (London, 1993).

22/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism, Nature and Ecology

The notion of authenticity, which came at the time of the Enlightenment, was questioned under Postmodernism. In the twentieth century cognition has been replaced by speculation. Jameson asked: is it possible to talk about having a 'genuine self' when we are only representations? Some argue that the self is a natural phenomenon - David Hume and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But for the supernaturalists, such as Carlyle, there is more than the natural in ourselves. Still others have a more ambivalent take, such as Wordsworth.

Romanticism talked of the ecology of the mind as well as of nature, and how these are related. In the early nineteenth century the separation of life from work occurred, resulting in a feeling of alienation. Percy Shelley reacted against the machine and talked of ecology.

In the late twentieth century, Baudrillard signalled a triumph of man over nature. He wrote that representation saturates everything, so it is impossible to tell between the natural or authentic, and the mediated. Representations only refer to themselves, not to other things. These representations he called "simulacra".

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA—it is the map that engenders the territory […]. "
[Baudrillard, ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ (1983) NATC 1732-33]

He talks of the "hyperrealism" of capitalism and heightened media society in which desires are created in order to create markets. The natural human has therefore been extinguished, replaced by representational simulacra. It is impossible to be authentic in a capitalist culture.

The Romantics were already familiar with this idea. They struggled with the emergence of hyperreality.

"[A] multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. […] When I think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured to counteract it […]."
[Wordsworth, ‘Preface,’ Lyrical Ballads (1800) NATC 652]

Wordsworth expresses what has become a familiar complaint in the twentieth century, that is, of the distraction in our culture, rather than cognition. The romantic return to nature can be thought of in this context. Reality has become sickening because of its separation from nature.

Utopianism, such as in Godwin's Political Justice, is a vision of a morally pure society where people did not work for capitalist machines but went back to nature, surviving subsistently. Coleridge and others also thought up egalitarian societies.

Anti-scientism is the subject of Keats' poem.

"Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade."
[Keats, "Lamia," 231-38]

The poem demonstrates the Romantics' reaction against determination and references.

The idea of organicism became defined as a way of coping with alienation, a ways of recovering wholeness and unity and counteracting modernism. People must become organic structures, where each part is subsumed by the whole, and the relationship of each part to the whole is organic, rather than mechanical. Organic structures are those that cannot be taken apart and put together again while mechanical structures can.

Marxism was a theory that forgot history and how people forget their own history. Organicism as a theory could not explain radical social change, but Marxism could. According to philosophy, organicism cannot explain contingency, randomness and why some things just happen.

"[U]nlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states."
[Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) NATC 1605]

Romanticism was not a reaction against the Enlightenment, but a different way of reaching enlightenment. Ecocriticism argues against this. It insists that all criticism is social, as does Marxism; but that all social issues are related to ecological concerns and are inseparable. Humans are biohistorical creatures, while according to Marxism they are historical. So we are defined by relationships, especially our biological environment. Percy Shelley said of a carnivorous diet:

"The whole of human science is composed in one question:—How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation, be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? How can we take the benefits, and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being?—I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors, would in a great measure capacitate us for the solution of this important question."
[Shelley, ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’ (1813)]

Shelley used his vegetarianism as a way of rejecting capitalist culture and accepting nature. He expresses the problems of thinking about the relationship between the self and the natural world in this way: by rejecting the exploitation of nature.

Thoreau's reaction is to merge with nature, and accept his dependence on it.

"The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun, and wind, and rain, of summer and winter,—such health, such cheer, they afford for ever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race, that all Nature would be affected […] if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"
[Thoreau, Walden, 1854]

He employs radical anti-Enlightenment discourse. It astonished theorists who saw humans as supernatural, rather than natural beings. The problem with raising a problem is also that is creates a problem, and Romantics were very caught up in this idea. They synthesised this by using natural supernaturalism, which meant that humans were at one with nature but also superior to it.

"It was a plot
Of garden-ground, now wild, its matted weeds
Marked with the steps of those whom as they pass’d,
The goose-berry trees that shot in long lank slips,
Or currants hanging from their leafless stems
In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap
The broken wall. Within that cheerless spot,
Where two tall hedgerows of thick willow boughs
Joined in a damp cold nook, I found a well
Half-choked with willow flowers and weeds. […]"
[Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ (1797-98) 54-63]

Wordsworth's poem enacts the scene it describes; his poetry is also overgrown with imagery, threatening to choke off the human voice. Ecocritically, he does not attempt to humanise the scene but allows nature to run riot. In the following lines, the human mind is an overgrowth of nature:

"Sympathies there are
More tranquil, yet perhaps of kindred birth,
That steal upon the meditative mind
And grow with thought."
[Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage,’ (1797-98) 79-82]

So humans are biohistorical in the poem, not a challenge to our authenticity but a means for it.

19/10/07 - English Literature - Austen and the Novel

In the twentieth century Austen has been seen as a writer who transcends criticism, who is above it. People rarely admit to not liking her work. Her superstar status relies only on six texts. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published posthumously. Her canvas is very limited, for her stories are always set in a particular setting and are about a particular class.

"The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour."
[Jane Austen, letter to J. Edward Austen, 16 December 1816]

Here she shows a realisation that she has limited scope, and it is because of her background. Charlotte Bronte shows that criticising Austen is a high-risk strategy.

"Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say that you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I had read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you. But I shall run the risk."
[Charlotte Bronte, letter to G.H. Lewes, 12 January 1848]

Austen wasn't immediately recognised. Her literary qualities, such as her finely detailed narration, were praised, but she was not yet raised to her current high status.

"That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me."
[Walter Scott, Journal entry, 14 March 1826]

Walter Scott's period belonged to a time when people were not quite aware of Austen's genius, but when Charlotte Bronte was writing, people were expected to read and enjoy Austen. Austen found her way to the forefront of the literary canon because she leaves her work open to many directions of criticism, such as moral and New Criticism.

Kettle asked what significance Emma has for us today, but his criticism leaves little scope for wider context.

Austen depicts the middle classes almost exclusively. Aristocratic figures remain in the periphery of her work. There are three types of people on whom she focuses in her novels: the small landowners (who run the country at a local level, and whose main concern is the value of land); the rural middle classes (such as Mr Collins) and the rentier class (who live off interest in trade and industry). Walter Scott says of class in Emma:

"We bestow no mean compliment upon the author of “Emma” when we say that keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly above our own. In this class she stands almost alone; for the scenes of Miss Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. But the author of “Emma” confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies; and those which are sketched with most originality and precision, belong to a class rather below that standard."
[Walter Scott, Quarterly Review, October, 1815]

Scott sees Austen is working in a political way, carving recognition for the middle classes, i.e. the class to which she belongs. Britain in 1813 had a rigid social hierarchy. In the 1830s, the hierarchy buckled, particularly after the Great Reform of 1832. Social and political mobility had kept the rigidity in place. The idea of estates is important in Austen's novels because they are tied up with inheritance, acquirement and marriage.

Marriage became more political as middle trading classes could make just as much capital as the aristocracy. Hardwick's Act stated that people under the age of twenty-one had to get parental consent to marry.

"Riches is the blood of the body politic: it must be made to circulate: if you allow it to stagnate, or if too much of it be thrown into any own part, it will destroy the body politic, as the same cause often does the body natural: if this Bill passes, our quality and rich families will daily accumulate riches by marrying only one another; and what sort of breed their offspring will be, we may easily judge: if the gout, the gravel, the pox and madness are always to wed together, what a hopeful generation of quality and rich commoners shall we have amongst us?

"The marriages of their [the French] quality are something like the marriages of sovereign princes: the bride and bridegroom sometimes have never seen one another, till they meet to be married. Can any love or affection be expected between such a married couple?

"…In this country, Sir, we as yet know of no distinctions with regard to marriage: a gentleman’s, a farmer’s daughter is a match for the eldest son of the best lord in the land, and perhaps a better match than his father would chuse for him, because she will bring good and wholesome blood into the family."
[Robert Nugent, MP, Hansard 1813: columns 14-16]

Nugent argues for romantic love rather than dynastic marriage. In terms of Austen's work, this means that he argues for the female's freedom to choose. In Austen's novels, young girls often go against the will of their parents when it comes to marriage. Elizabeth Bennet goes against her father's will when she declines Mr Collins' proposal and her father cannot intercept; it is her own choice. Eventually she marries well and notice that she marries for love.

Edmund Burke celebrates tradition over new economics. Austen maintains a Burkean kind of conservatism. She is seen as being against the Jacobin rebels. But we might find more complex views in her work, for example, the concept of sensibility.

The novel of sentiment was an established canon when Austen was writing, and it was about refined feelings, the ability to feel and understand. In Sense and Sensibility the Dashwood sisters are divided in sentiment:

'“And how does dear, dear Norland look?” cried Marianne.
“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”
“ Oh!” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”
“ It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.”'
[Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 16]

Austen uses a comic juxtaposition of opinions. Butler argues that Austen falls into identifying sensibility with political radicalism, which parallels her with Burkean theory.

"[T]he characteristic recourse of the conservative … is to remind us ultimately of the insignificance of individual insights and even individual concerns when measured against the scale of the universe as one vast whole."
[Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 130]

But this kind of reading of Austen is too black-and-white and we should be sceptical of pigeon-holing the subtle Jane Austen. In her novels there is an ongoing struggle between the heart and the head. Elizabeth Bennet is a prime example, seeming to replicate proto-Jacobin traits; she is sceptical as a person and sceptical of Mr Darcy and others. Butler recognises the problem of Austen's theory in the character of Elizabeth Bennet, yet states that her marriage to Mr Darcy conforms to the conservative feeling of the book.

"If this novel ends by affirming the claims of hierarchal society over the perspective, rationality and feeling of the individual, the experience of reading it is nevertheless an immersion in that perspective, that rationality and that feeling."
[Robert P. Irvine, Jane Austen, Routledge, 2005, p. 119]

"Our habit of thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft as a Jacobin, and Jane Austen as a Lady Novelist praised by [the conservative Walter] Scott, makes it difficult for us to see connections between them; attention to the ‘feminist tradition’ of the eighteenth century, in its widest sense, shows that it is by no means bizarre to look for such connection."
[M. Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Harvester, 1983, pp. 40-1]

Austen complicates subjects for us. She disrupts our view of middle class society using certain characters and irony. We see Austen as occupying conservative opinions, yet she addresses controversial topics in a thought-provoking way, making it difficult to place her definitively. She can be all things to everyone.

17/10/07 - English Literature - Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey

Lodge gives this statement about Jane Austen:

"I think I can say in all modesty I was the Jane Austen man. I wrote five books on Jane Austen, every one of which was trying to establish what her novels meant – and, naturally, to prove that no one had properly understood what they meant before … the aim was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle – historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, structural, Freudian, Jungian, Marxist, existentialist, Christian, allegorical, ethical, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it. So that when each commentary was written, there would be nothing further to say about the novel in question."
[David Lodge, Small World, Secker and Warburg, 1984, p. 24]

Lodge explains that Austen was the writer of one of those novels that will always open up to further meanings. Northanger Abbey, particularly, is loaded with irony. It is slippery.

The novel was originally entitled Susan from 1798-99, and so it was at the time an eighteenth-century novel. The Gothic novel and the Novel of Sentiment belong to the eighteenth, as well as the nineteenth century, but became more concerned with revolution. There tends to be an atmosphere of being watched, with the fear of invasion permeating through the pages. Northanger Abbey was not published until 1817, so in the light of this information, it becomes a nineteenth-century novel. It was a posthumous publication that took twenty years to get into print. This is because Austen had sol the copyright of the novel to Crosby for £10, but bizarrely, he never published it, much to Austen's helpless disappointment. Perhaps Crosby did not recognise Austen as the prolific author of the new bestsellers Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, which had been published under the name, "of a lady". Austen did buy her book back again, but she felt that its irony was outdated and irrelevant by that time. She could not overlook this and see that the novel had universal application.

"That any bookseller should think it worth while to purchase what he did not think it worth while to publish seems extraordinary…. The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes."
[Jane Austen, Advertisement, by the Authoress, to Northanger Abbey]

When Austen began writing Northanger Abbey, the Gothic genre had enjoyed a long history already (with Walpole's Castle of Otranto commonly thought to be the first of the genre).

"…archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense."
[David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Longman, 1980, p.1]

In the eighteenth century the Gothic novel developed. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho was one major influence on Austen's novel. In fact, knowing this novel enlightens many of the aspects and events in Northanger Abbey and we see Austen's clever use of irony. Udolpho is about a girl who lives in a domineering old building, owned by a domineering old man. Some of the scenes of Northanger Abbey are a direct re-enactment of the scenes of Udolpho. Take the following, for instance:

"It seemed to conceal a recess of the chamber; she wished, yet dreaded, to lift it, and to discover what it veiled: twice she was withheld by a recollection of the terrible spectacle her daring hand had formerly unveiled in an apartment of the castle, till, suddenly conjecturing, that it concealed the body of her murdered aunt, she seized it, in a fit of desperation, and drew it aside. Beyond, appeared a corpse, stretched on a kind of low couch, which was crimsoned with human blood, as was the floor beneath. The features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible, and more than one livid wound appeared in the face. Emily, bending over the body, gazed, for a moment, with an eager, frenzied eye; but, in the next, the lamp dropped from her hand, and she fell senseless at the foot of the couch."
[Anne Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Chapter 26]

"Her fearful curiosity was every moment growing greater; and seizing, with trembling hands, the hasp of the lock, she resolved at all hazards to satisfy herself at least as to its contents. With difficulty, for something seemed to resist her efforts, she raised the lid a few inches; but at that moment a sudden knocking at the door of the room made her, starting, quit her hold, and the lid closed with alarming violence. This ill–timed intruder was Miss Tilney’s maid, sent by her mistress to be of use to Miss Morland; and though Catherine immediately dismissed her, it recalled her to the sense of what she ought to be doing, and forced her, in spite of her anxious desire to penetrate this mystery, to proceed in her dressing without further delay. Her progress was not quick, for her thoughts and her eyes were still bent on the object so well calculated to interest and alarm; and though she dared not waste a moment upon a second attempt, she could not remain many paces from the chest. At length, however, having slipped one arm into her gown, her toilette seemed so nearly finished that the impatience of her curiosity might safely be indulged. One moment surely might be spared; and, so desperate should be the exertion of her strength, that, unless secured by supernatural means, the lid in one moment should be thrown back. With this spirit she sprang forward, and her confidence did not deceive her. Her resolute effort threw back the lid, and gave to her astonished eyes the view of a white cotton counterpane, properly folded, reposing at one end of the chest in undisputed possession!"
[Northanger Abbey II.vi]

There are similarities in the build of tension and suspense in both passages. But the revelations are of great dissimilarity: in Udolpho, the girl's worst fears are realised; but in Northanger Abbey Catherine finds the most mundane object, a blanket. Austen assumes that her reader is familiar with the Gothic genre, she plays on our expectation the something horrific will be found. But instead she is laughing at our disappointment. Austen wants us to recognise that Catherine is simply impressionable and that her mind has been perverted with unsuitable reading.

However, the irony runs deeper than this. Austen takes her influence also from the novel of sentiment, an established literary genre like the Gothic. It is thought to have originated from Samuel Johnson's Clarissa, but others say that it comes from The Man of Feeling, whose hero is affected by the selfishness of others in Britain and so is considered the epitomy of goodness and virtue. Novels of sentiment have their villains and their heroes, they have bad circumstances and a happy ending.

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard - and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings - and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on - lived to have six children more - to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features - so much for her person; and not less unpropiteous for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief - at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities - her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid."
[I.i]

Austen here offers irony and a critique of sentiment. We must consider that people in Austen's time did not yet think that the novel was an important literary form. Austen therefore defends the novel in her own novel.

"Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding - joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from The Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens - there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader - I seldom look into novels - Do not imagine that I often read novels - It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss - ?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
[I. v]

Notice the post-modernist feel of the passage. It is a playful defence, not to be taken on face value. Austen raises the status of the novel, for her most socially adept characters, the Tilneys, are novel-readers themselves.

'"But you never read novels, I dare say?"
"Why not?"
"Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books."
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days - my hair standing on end the whole time."
"Yes," added Miss Tilney, "and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it."'
[I. xiv]

Austen therefore offers a critique on female education. Catherine has gained her education to some extent from novels, it is simply that she has not learnt to be a discerning reader. To Catherine, life is like a novel, and she is unable to read social situations or people. Irony gives us the method of interpretation for the novel and the world around us. It represents the divided self - multiplicity of perspective, that is, it moves away from a critique of only one character. Irony can help us unlock the truth of the whole, and develop our skills. So Northanger Abbey is a Bildungsroman.

Henry Tilney is a controversial figure in some ways. He assumes paternalistic authority, upsetting Catherine in order to make her conform. He is pedantic with her; he can be irritating. However, he is a character of irony. He offers Catherine the education she has lacked, teaching her to start thinking for herself rather than to take things on trust. He gives her critical powers. In a way, this makes him the hero of the novel.

'"But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?"
"The nicest - by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding."
"Henry," said Miss Tilney, "you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word `nicest,' as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way."
"I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?""Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement - people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word."'
[I. xiv]

Henry employs Socratic dialogue to make Catherine think about how she processes events in her mind. He advises her to make up her own mind. There is a multiplicity of meaning.

At the end of the novel there is a gap between the appearance and the reality of Northanger Abbey. Austen knows that we want a happy ending, and she laughs at us for wanting it. She will not satisfy us; she leaves the end open. Interpretation of the novel rests on individual readers rather than on the author.