Black Skin White Masks” Chapter No: 2 &3

Topic:- “Black Skin White Masks” Chapter No: 2 &3

Name:- Upadhyay Devangana S.

Subject:- The Post colonial Literature 

Roll No:- 05

Submitted to:- MKB University

·      Introduction

               “Black Skin White Masks” by Frantz Fanon is a sociological study of the application of historical interpretation and the concomitant underlying social indicted and the psychiatrist. Frantz Fanon formulated ‘Black Skin White Masks’ to combat the oppression of black people; and thus applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that Black people experience in a white world. That the culture of the Mother Country produces an inferiority complex in the mind of the Black subject who then will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer. Such behavior is more readily evident in upwardly mobile and educated black people who can afford to acquire status symbols within the world of the colonial acumen, such as a language of the colonizer, the white masks.

                  Based upon, and derived from the concepts of the collective unconscious and collective catharsis. After its initial publication in the mid-twentieth century, ‘Black Skin White Mask’ remained an obscure book bout the servile psychology imposed upon the colonized man, woman and child a post-colonial cultural legacy of the Mother Country to her former imperial subjects. Since the 1980s ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ has become an important anti-colonial and anti-racist work in Angloghone countries; yet, in Francophone the book is a relatively minor Franz Fanon work despite the subject’s explicit cultural connection with the societies of the black-skinned and other non-white peoples who were the French colonial Empire.

·        The Woman of color and The White Man

                   Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I Love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value making superstructure on my whole vision of the world. 

                       In reaching an understanding of phenomena of this sort, the analyst and the phenomenologist are given a difficult task. And if a Sartre has ‘Being and Nothingness’ amounting only to an analysis of dishonesty and in authenticity, the fact remains that true, authentic love-wishing for others what one postulates for oneself when that postulation united the permanent values of human reality entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts.

                  Left far, far behind the last squealed of a titanic struggle carried on against the other have been dissipated.

                    Today we believe in the possibility of love; that is why we endeavor to trace its imperfections, its pervasions.

                 In this chapter devoted to the relations between the woman of color and the European it is our problem to ascertain to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority or that Adlerian exaltation, that overcompensation, which seen to be the indices of the black Weltanschauung.

              For after all we have a right to be perturbed when we read, in Je Suis Martiniquaise;

“I should have liked to be married but to

A white man. But a woman of color is never altogether

Respectable in a white man’s eyes.

Even when he loves her. I know that.”

This passage which serves in a way as the conclusion of a vast delusion prods one’s brain. One day a woman named. Mayotte capecia obeying a motivation whose elements are difficult to detect, in which the most ridiculous ideas proliferated at random. The enthusiastic reception that greeted this book in certain circles foces us to analyze it. For me all circumlocution is impossible: Je Suis Martiniquaise is cut-rate merchandise a sermon in praise of corruption.

                  Mayotte loves a white man to whom she submits in everything. He is her lord. She asks nothing demands anything except a bit of whiteness in her life. When she tries to determine in her own mind, whether the man is handsome or ugly. She writes;

“All I know is that he had blue eyes,

Blond hair and a light skin, and that I loved him.”

It is not difficult to see that a rearrangement of these elements in their proper hierarchy would produce something of this order:

“All I know is that he had blue eyes,

Blond hair and a light skin, and that I loved him.”

We who come from the Antilles know one thing only too well: Blue eyes, the people say, frighten the Negro.

                   

                            There were evenings, unhappily when he had to leave me alone in order to fulfill his social obligations. He would go to Didier, the fashionable part of Fort-de-France inhabited by the “Martinique whit eye,” who are perhaps not too pure racially but who are often very rich and the “France whit eye”, most of them government people and military officers.

                  Among Andre’s colleagues, who like him had been marooned in the Antilles by the war some had managed to have their wives join them. I understood that Andre’ could not always hold himself aloof from them.

·        The Man of Color And The White Woman

                               In analyzing Je Suis Martiniquaise and Nini, we have seen how the Negress behaves with the white man. Through a novel by Rene Maran- which seems to be autobiographical let us try to understand what happens when the man is black and the woman white.

                      The problem is admirably laid out for the character of Veneuse will make it possible for us to go much more deeply into the attitude of the black man. What are the terms of this problem? Jea Veneuse is a Negro. Born in the Antilles, he has lived in Bordeaux for years; So he is a European. But he is black; So he is a Negro. There is the conflict. He does the whites do not understand him. And he observes,

“The Europeans in general and the French

In particular not satisfied with simply ignoring

The Negro of the colonies, repudiate the one who

they have shaped into their own image.”

                                  The personality of the author does not emerge quite as easily as one might wish. An orphan sent compelled o spends his vacations there. His friends and acquaintances scatter all over France on the slightest pretext, where as the little Negro is forced into the habit is his books. At the extreme, I should say there is a certain accusatory character certain resentment an ill-disciplined aggression in the long list-too long-of “travelling companions” that the author offers us: at the extreme, I say but it is exactly to the extreme that we have to go.

                    Unable to e assimilated, to pass unnoticed he consoles himself by associating with the dead or at least the absent. And his associations unlike his life ignore the barriers of centuries and oceans. He talks with Marcus Aurelius, Joinville, Pascal, and Perez Galdo’s RabindranathTagore. If we were compelled to hang a label on Jean Veneuse, we should have to call him an introvert; others might call him a sentimentalist, but sentimentalist who is always careful to contrive a way of winning out on the level of ideas and knowledge. As a matter of fact his friends and schoolmates hold him in high regard:

“What a perpetual dreamer! You know my old pal, Veneuse,

Is really a character. He never takes him nose out of his books

Except to scribble all over his notebooks.”

                          But a sentimentalist who goes nonstop from singing, Spanish songs to translating into English. Shy but uneasy as well:

“As I was leaving them, I degrade say to him”

A good kid that Veneuse- he seems to like being sad

And quiet, but he’s always helpful.

You can trust him. You’ll see.

H’s the kind of Negro that a lot of white gags ought to be like.”

                              Uneasy and anxious indeed. As anxious man who cannot escape his body. We know from other sources that Rene’ Maran cherished an affection for Andre’ Gide. It seems possible to find a resemblance between the ending of Un home pareil aux autres and that of Gide’s strait is the Gate. This departure, this tone of emotional pain of moral impossibility seems an echo of the story of Jerome and Alissa.

            But there remains the fact that Veneuse is black. He is a bear who love solitude. He is a thinker. And when a woman tries to start a flirtation with him he says,

“Are you trying to smoke out and old bear like me?

Be careful, my dear. Courage is a fine thing,

But you’re going to get yourself talked about

If you go on attracting attention this way.

A Negro? That race is just utterly disgracing yourself.”

                  Above all, he wants to prove to the other that he is man, their equal. But let us not be misled: Jean Veneuse is the man who has to be convinced. It is in the roots of his soul, as complicated as that of any European, that the doubt persists. If the expression may be allowed, Jean Veneuse is the lamb to be slaughtered. Let us make the effort.

                         After having quoted Stendhal and mentioned the phenomenon of “Crystallization” his simplicity of the Negro is a myth created by superficial observers.

·        Conclusion

                  When woman of colour go after white men and put down men of their own colour Fanon says the cause is just what many of us suspect: internalized racism.

                  Nor does this woman truly love these white men: they just love their colour. They go with them not out of ups about race.

                  It is because the black woman feels inferior that she aspires to gain admittance to the white world.

                       Fanon, a black psychiatrist from Martinque, starts by saying of himself:

“I want to be recognized not as Black but as white…

Who better than the white woman to bring this about?

By loving me she proves to me that I am worthy

Of a white love. I am loved like a white man.

I am a white man.”

                     Between these white breasts that my wandering hands fondle white civilization and worthiness become mine.

                   Veneuse’s was left alone in the world by mother as a small boy and is hung up on that. So he is afraid to love and be loved. He holds everyone arm’s length, even the woman he wants to marry. Therefore we cannot draw any general conclusions from Veneuse’s case.      

                     

culture, Popular Culture, The Production and Consumption of Culture, power/ Culture

Topic:- Culture, Popular Culture, The Production and Consumption of Culture, Power / culture

Name:- Upadhyay Devangana S.

Sub:- the cultural Studies

Paper:- 08

Std:- M.A. Sem – 2

Roll No:- 06

Submitted to:- M.K. Bhavnagaar University

           Before we know what is Culture study we have to know what is Culture? Answer of this is

Culture...

• influences our expectations of what is appropriate or inappropriate
• is learned
• reflects the values of a society
• frames our experiences
• provides us with patterns of behavior, thinking, feeling, and interacting

                In summery culture means how we live our life, style of life. We cannot defined any particular definition of the culture because every people have their own culture. Every society and place culture’s definition will be change so it is very difficult to say about culture. Most of the people are unaware for their culture. When we come to know about another culture only that time we become aware about our culture and we able to find different between our and other culture.  Cultural misunderstandings and conflicts arise mostly out of culturally-shaped perceptions and interpretations of each other's cultural norms, values, and beliefs (those elements below the waterline). Entering another culture is like two icebergs colliding - the real clash occurs beneath the water where values and thought patterns conflict.

Now we move on what is Culture study, how it work, where it began?

                         Cultural studies is an academic field of critical theory and literary criticism initially introduced by British academics in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics throughout the world. Characteristically interdisciplinary, cultural studies is an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. Cultural Studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. Distinct from the breadth, objective and methodology of cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, cultural studies is focused upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture and its historical foundations, conflicts and defining traits. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, rather than providing an encyclopedic identification, categorization or definition of a particular culture or area of the world.^[1]

                            Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. The influential theories of cultural hegemony and agency have emerged from the cultural studies movement as well as the most recent communications theory, which attempts to explain the cultural forces behind globalization. Unique academic approaches to cultural studies have also emerged in the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Italy.

                          During the 1980s rise of neo-liberalism in Britain and the new conservatism in America, cultural studies was beset with criticism from both outside political and inside academic forces, due to the close alliance between many cultural studies scholars and Marxist theory, left-wing politics and perceived "triumphalism" by other established scholars. Opposition to cultural studies was most dramatically demonstrated with the 2002 closing of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, UK. CCCS was considered the founding academic program for cultural studies in the world, and was closed due to the result of the Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led UK Government of 1986, that determined research funding for university programs. While many of its opponents continue to describe the discipline as "irrelevant," the field has a world-wide presence consisting of numerous annual international conferences, academic programs, publications, students and practitioners, from Taiwan to Amsterdam and from Bangalore to Santa Cruz.

                  Culture studies initially developed in Britain as a reaction against specific disciplinary and political positions. The most important of these were liberal humanism. Specifically the ‘culture and civilization’ tradition in literary studies; orthodox Marxism culture studies developed as part of an engagement with the New left in the 1950 and 1960 and the mass society thesis and the related tradition of media effects research in mass communications studies. Here culture studies took issue with an impoverished view of culture and agency and a ‘Scientific’ – that is to sat, positivist – empiricist research method.

                 In the previous lesson we saw how complex the concept of culture could be. In this lesson we will look at the history of Cultural Studies.

                    Most accounts of the history of Cultural Studies point to the origins of the discipline in the West, and also draw attention to the difference between the British and American variants of Cultural Studies. When we talk of Cultural Studies in India, we need to note that British Cultural Studies has certainly been an important influence. However, the emergence of the area in the Indian context has also been determined by developments in the disciplines of history, art history and the study of cinema. Moreover, much of what we may today view as early work in Cultural Studies was in fact not called Cultural Studies.

                    A working definition of Cultural Studies would be that it is the study of culture in order to understand a society and its politics. While attempting to trace the history of Cultural Studies we need to look at approaches and areas that are clearly related to what we identify as the concerns of Cultural Studies.

·         Popular Culture

              

                      Popular culture is the entirety of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images, and other phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.

             The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier. Traditionally, the term has denoted the education and general "culturedness" of the lower classes, as opposed to the "official culture" and higher or the education emanated by the dominant classes.

             The stress in the distinction from "official culture" became more pronounced towards the end of the 19th century a usage that became established by the interbellum period.

                  From the end of World War II, following major cultural and social changes brought by mass media innovations, the meaning of popular culture began to overlap with those of mass culture, media culture, image culture, consumer culture, and culture for mass consumption. Social and cultural changes in the United States were a pioneer in this with respect to other western countries.

            The abbreviated form "pop" for popular, as in pop music, dates from the late 1950s.Although terms "pop" and "popular" are in some cases used interchangeably, and their meaning partially overlap, the term "pop" is narrower. Pop is specific of something containing qualities of mass appeal, while "popular" refers to what has gained popularity, regardless of its style.

                           According to John Storey, there are six definitions of popular culture. The quantitative definition of culture has the problem that much "high culture" (e.g., television dramatizations of Jane Austen) is also "popular". "Pop culture" is also defined as the culture that is "left over" when we have decided what high culture is. However, many works straddle the boundaries, e.g., Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

Definition: Popular culture is the accumulated store of cultural products such as music, art, literature, fashion, dance, film, television, and radio that are consumed primarily by non-elite groups such as the working, lower, and middle class. There are two opposing sociological arguments in relation to popular culture. One argument is that popular culture is used by the elites (who tend to control the mass media and popular culture outlets) to control those below them because it dulls people’s minds, making them passive and easy to control. A second argument is just the opposite, that popular culture is a vehicle for rebellion against the culture of dominant groups.

                        Owing to the pervasive and increasingly interconnected nature of popular culture, especially its intermingling of complementary distribution sources, some cultural anthropologists, literary, and cultural critics have identified a large amount of intertextuality in popular culture's portrayals of itself. One commentator has suggested this self-referentiality reflects the advancing encroachment of popular culture into every realm of collective experience. "Instead of referring to the real world, much media output devotes itself to referring to other images, other narratives; self-referentiality is all-embracing, although it is rarely taken account of." Furthermore, the commentary on the intertextuality and its self-referential nature has itself become the subject of self-referential and recursive commentary.

                             Many cultural critics have dismissed this as merely a symptom or side-effect of mass consumerism; however, alternate explanations and critique have also been offered. One critic asserts that it reflects a fundamental paradox: the increase in technological and cultural sophistication, combined with an increase in superficiality and dehumanization.

                               Long-running television series The Simpsons routinely alludes to mainstream media properties, as well as the commercial content of the show itself. In the episode "Bartvs. Thanks giving", Bart complains about the crass commercialism of the Macy's Thanks giving Day Parade while watching television. When he turns his head away from the television, the screen shows an oversized inflatable balloon of Bart Simpson floating past.

                     According to television studies scholars specializing in quality television, such as Kristin Thompson, self-referentiality in mainstream American television (especially comedy) reflects and exemplifies the type of progression characterized previously. Thompson argues shows such as The Simpsons use a "...flurry of cultural references, intentionally inconsistent characterization, and considerable self-reflexivity about television conventions and the status of the programme as a television show." Extreme examples approach a kind of thematic infinite regress wherein distinctions between art and life, commerce and critique, ridicule and homage become intractably blurred.

See also.

·         The production and Consumption of Culture

                       Max Weber's theory of cultural rationalization and differentiation is well known. For Weber the development of modernity not only involved a long process of differentiation of the capitalist economy and the modern state but also entailed a cultural rationalization with the emergence of separate scientific, aesthetic, and moral value spheres. Weber's (1948) discussion of the differentiation of the cultural sphere from a more rudimentary, holistic, religious cultural core is conducted at a high level of abstraction. Although Weber provides brief glimpses of the way in which each aspect of the cultural sphere is relentlessly driven by its own logic, the way in which values relate to life-style and conduct, and the tensions experienced by intellectuals, the "cultivated man" and the cultural specialist, his prime purpose was to sketch out a typology (Weber 1948:323–24). While we do find fuller discussions of the cultural sphere in the writings of Bell (1976) and Habermas (1981), we need to build on these sources if we seek to understand the particular conjunction of culture in contemporary Western societies. In effect we need to investigate the conditions for the development of the cultural sphere by focusing on particular historical sequences and locations. First, we need to understand the emergence of relatively autonomous culture (knowledge and other symbolic media) in relation to the growth in the autonomy and power potential of specialists in symbolic production.

                                    We therefore need to focus on the carriers of culture and the contradictory pressures that are generated by changing interdependencies and power struggles of the growing fraction within the middle class toward dual processes of (a) the monopolization and separation of a cultural enclave and (b) the demonopolization and diffusion of culture to wider publics. Second, we need to focus on the development of separate institutions and life-styles for cultural specialists and examine the relation between value complexes and conduct in the various life orders, not only in terms of a cultural sphere conceived as the arts and the academy ("high culture") but also in terms of the generation of oppositional countercultures (bohemias, artistic avant-gardes). Third, we need to comprehend the relational dynamic of a parallel development to that of the cultural sphere: the general expansion of cultural production via "culture industries" and the generation of a wider market for cultural and other symbolic goods to produce what has been termed a mass culture or consumers culture . Both tendencies have contributed to the increasing prominence of culture within modern societies—tendencies that threaten to erode and domesticate everyday culture, the taken-for-granted stock of memories, traditions, and myths.

                              Like the pieces of a mosaic, popular culture practices embody a series of different yet, overlapping elements through which unique traditions emerge. For most Americans, popular culture is the way of life in which, and by which, the dominant society lives. As Ray Brown defines it, "popular culture is the everyday culture of a group, large or small, of people." He contends that, in a democracy like the United States, "popular culture is the voice of the people- their practices, likes and dislikes- the lifeblood of their daily existence" (Brown 23). When looking at American popular cultural studies, however, it is important to consider that there are unlimited demonstrations of cultural behavior dictated by history, race, ethnicity, custom, gender, age, locality and group-size conditions. While most would confine the 'popular' aspects of cultural practices to the dominant, it is also important to consider the alternative cultural narratives that have emerged as hybrids from within the margins of American society.                                          Although these cultural elements make up a much smaller component than those of the dominant society, they are uniquely relevant in explaining and emphasizing the fragmentary nature of American popular culture and the extent to which the 'popular' has conditioned and contested the formation of social spaces.

                Because of their exclusion from political power, cultural recognition, mass communication and popular culture, ethnic minorities and immigrants have played an important role in shaping the American post-modem aesthetic for decades. These exclusions, while often generating marginal states of consciousness among minorities, have contributed to the development of 'historical blocs' of oppositional groups. These 'historical blocs'- united by common ideas, dreams, intentions and alienating experiences- signify the fragmentary nature of the post modem sensibility and display the importance of the many overlapping and inter working popular cultures of American society. (Lipsitz 152).

              While popular culture studies have embraced a wide definition of culture, and have resisted any particular set of theories and methodologies, ghettos, barrios and border zones have been the setting for most texts that examine the popular culture of minority groups in United States (Cawelti 5). When immigrants and ethnic minorities assemble in these urban communities, they often settle as ethnic groups and are surrounded by other marginal clusters. Because such communities share with each other similar experiences of alienation on the margins of society, they have produced similarly apparent, yet alternative narratives, influenced by their conflicting desires to challenge ideological hegemony and/or conform to the mainstream of mass popular culture. "Neither assimilationist nor separatist, these groups drew upon 'families of resemblance'

similarities to the experiences and cultures of other groups- to fashion a unity of disunity"

·         Power\ culture

                             Culture can and should play a role in bringing people together, even those with very different world views. Culture can undoubtedly change individual lives. Beyond that though, it can help to solve intractable social and economic problems; to raise understanding between people and nations; and to encourage solutions to some of the major international challenges we all face.

                   With the pressing economic, social and environmental issues which face the international community, the Edinburgh International Culture Summit will create a much needed and rare opportunity to look at the role of culture in government and governments in culture. It creates a significant new platform to think about key issues such as how Ministries of Culture, and their equivalents, can encourage the right environment for helping culture in all its forms to develop and grow.

             The summit also provides an opportunity for Ministers, and other key figures in the international world of culture, to think about, and discuss together, how cultural policy in countries across the world can be enriched by the sharing of international best practice and co-operation.

                 The process of globalisation is transforming all societies and making them increasingly diverse and interconnected. This opens vast new opportunities for exchange and mutual enrichment between persons of different and plural cultures. It is also raising new questions about inclusion, human rights, and sustainability, calling for new competencies.

               Culture is a key resource to address both the economic and social dimensions of poverty and to provide innovative and cross-cutting solutions to complex issues such as health and the environment, gender equality and promoting quality education for all. Cultural and creative industries are some of the most rapidly growing sectors in the world, representing an estimated global value of US$ 1.3 trillion.

                At the same time, culture is a source of wealth in ways that do not have price tags. Culture can help promote social cohesion and youth engagement, and it is a wellspring for social resilience. Culture is a source of identity and cohesion for societies at a time of bewildering change. No development can be sustainable without it.

At this moment of change, when we are rethinking strategies for development and seeking to identify new sources of dynamism, let’s put culture on the agenda as a force for sustainability in development.

         The Power of Culture is a website about culture and development. Culture is not a peripheral matter. The ideas, ideals and creativity of people are the driving force behind development towards more political, economic and social freedom. The Power of Culture reviews art and cultural expressions in conjunction with human rights, education, the environment, emancipation and democratisation. The site offers a list of projects, initiatives and objectives of Dutch organisations active in this area.
                The site also reports on the part played by cultural organisations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and South-east Europe. News and background information illustrate how culture is inextricably entwined with ethics and policy. The Power of Culture also points the way to other internet sources, media and organisations. No development without culture. If culture is defined as the entire system of beliefs, practices and customs that exist in a society, it is the foundation that supports every development. Economic development without cultural roots will never be sustainable. But culture is not merely a vehicle for material progress: it is a goal in itself. It is part of the daily reality and is therefore essential to the development of all people.
All our efforts to achieve the millennium goals will be in vain if we fail to notice the themes that occupy people every day and bypass their creativity.

The Features of Victorian Age

Topic: - features of Victorian Age

Name: - Upadhyay Devangana S.

Sub: - The Victorian Literature

Paper: - 06

Std: - M.A. Sem – 2

Roll No: - 06

Submitted to: - M.K. Bhavnagaer University

·       Introduction:-

                         Strictly speaking, the Victorian era or the Age of Tennyson covers the period from 1832 to 1887. The reign of Queen Victorian extends from 1837 to 1901 but literary movements rarely coincide with the exact year of a royal accession or death. During the last decade of the nineteenth century the ideals which were upheld by the Victorian or more precisely by their mouthpiece, Lord Alfred Tennyson, were put to the anvil. The last decade of the nineteenth century was characterized by a revolt against Victorianism, a wholesale condemnation of the ideals and values which had been cherished during the earlier decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. Hence it shell be valid to mark the dates of the Victorian era from 1832 to 1887. In this connection W. H. Hudson writes, “ Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, and it was during the decade between 1830 and 1840 that many of the writers who were to add special distinction to her reign their work. But, though her own life extended till 1901. We may conveniently take the year of her jubilee – 1887 – as marking the close of an epoch. By that time a fresh race in literature had arisen, while those of the former generation who still survived had nothing of importance to add to their production and indeed, like Tennyson’s Bedivere, found themselves ‘ among new men, strange faces, other minds’.

                       The Victorian age is one of the most remarkable periods in the history of England. It was an era of material affluence, political consciousness, democratic reforms, industrial and mechanical progress, empire building and religious uncertainty. There were a number by the Victorians, while from a whole class of adverse critics could be heard a scathing criticism of the values held dear by the Victorian. While Macaulay trumpeted the progress that the Victorians had made, Ruskin and Carlyle, Arnold, Lytton Strachey and Trollope raised frowns of disfavor against the soul – killing materialism of the age. Carlyle, himself a hostile critic of the age, admired L. H. Myer’s reference to ‘ the deep – seated spiritual vulgarity that lies at the heart of our civilization’ Symonds detected in the Victorian period, whatever may be its buoyancy and promise, elements of ‘world fatigue,’ which were quite alien to the Elizabethan age, with which the Victorian era is often compared. Whatever may be the defects of the Victorian way of life, it cannot be denied that it was n many ways a glorious epoch in history of English literature and the advancement made in the field of poetry, prose and fiction was really commendable.

                      The Victorian age was essentially a period of peace and prosperity for England. The few colonial wars that broke out during this period exercised little adverse effects on the national life. The Crimean War, of course, caused a stir in England, but its effects were soon forgotten and the people regained the normal tenor of their lives without feeling the aftermaths of war in their round of daily activities. In the earlier years of the age, the effect of the French Revolution was still felt, but by the middle of the century, it had almost completely dwindled and England felt safe from any revolutionary upsurge disturbing the placidity and peaceful existence of its life. On the whole, it was a comparatively peaceful reign when Englishmen secure in their island base, could complete the transformation of all aspects of their interruptions that gave quite a different quality to the history of continental nation. It was an era when the ‘war drum throbb’d no longer’ and the people felt safe and secure in their island home.

                   Peace brought material advancement and industrial progress in the country. The Industrial Revolution during this age transformed the agrarian economy of England into an industrial economy. Mills and factories were established at important centers, and the whole of England hummed with rattle of looms and booms of weaving machines.

                         Industrial advancement created social unrest and economic distress among the masses. The Industrial Revolution while creating the privileged class of capitalists and mill – owners, rolling in wealth and riches, also brought in its wake the semi – starved and ill – clad lass of labourers and factory workers who were thoroughly dissatisfied with their miserable lot. National wealth increased but it was not equitably distributed. A new class of landed aristocracy and mill – owners sprang up. They looked with eyes of disdain and withering contempt on the lot of the ragged and miserable factory hands. Conditions of life held no charm for labourers and workers in the field, for they were required to dwell in slum areas with no amenities of life attending them at any stage of their miserable existence. There were scenes of horrid despair witnessed in the lives of the poor. Whirligig of time, a wave of social unrest, swept over England, and the ulcers of this apparently opulent society were drought to the surface by writers like Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle and Arnold. The deplorable state of the debtor’s prison, the Fleet and the Marshalsea, the dismal abysses of elementary education, the sorry type of nurses available in sickness the oppression of little children the prevalence of religions hypocrisy – these and many other dark corners in the life of England were illuminated b the searchlight of Dickens genius.

                The woeful and deplorable condition of labourers miners, debtors and prisoners soon caught the eyes of social reformers, and a stage was prepared or ameliorating the lot of the downtrodden and the under – dogs of an affluent society. The Victorian ear, therefore witnessed vigorous social reforms and a line of crusading humanitarian reformers who sought to do away with the festering sores and seething maladies of the Victorian age. The Victorian age is, therefore an age of humanitarian considerations and social uplift for the masses.

                      In the course of the Victorian era there developed among the increasingly large number of literary men and woman and philanthropic social reformers a humanist attitude to life which was not a matter of creed and dogmas, but a recognition of the love and loyalty that the works of Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Carlyle and Ruskin, we notice the crusading zeal of the literary artists to bring about salutary reforms in the social, political and economic life of the country.

                 The growing importance of the masses and the large number of factory hands gave a spurt to the Reform Bills, which heralded the birth of democratic consciousness among the Victorian people. The Victorian age witnessed a conflict between aristocracy and plutocracy on the one hand, and democracy and socialism on the other hand. The advance in the direction of democracy was well marked out, and in spite of the protests of Tennyson and Carlyle, its sweeping tide could not be stemmed. The long struggle of the Anglo – Saxons for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy becomes the established order of the day. The king and peers are both stripped of their power and left as figure – heads of a past civilization. The last vestige of personal government and the divine right of rulers disappear; the House of Commons becomes the ruling power in England and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the suffrage until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the men who shall represent them.

                 England witnessed expansion in the field of education. The passing of the Education Acts was landmark in the history of education in the country. A large reading public was prepared to welcome the outpourings of novelists, poets and social reformers. The press also came into its own and became a potent force in awakening political consciousness among the people of this age.

                     There was a phenomenal growth in population during the Victorian age. The population of Great Britain at the time of the first census in 1801 was about ten and a half millions. By 1901 it had grown to thirty seven millions. More and more of territorial expansion was needed for the habitation of this growing population and England during this age marched on the course of empire building and establishing its hegemony in countries where the light of civilization had not yet advanced.

                    There was an unprecedented intellectual and scientific advancement during the Victorian age. Ti was a period of intellectual ferment and scientific thinking. Science, once a sealed book saves to an elect few was democratized and more and more scientific works like Darwin’s Origin of Species. The man of science was regarded on more an academic recluse, but as a social figure exercising a deep and profound influence on the social and educational life of the age.

                In spite of the advance of science and the various scientific discoveries the general tenor of life was still governed by religious and moral considerations. The Victorians were moralists at heart, and religion was the sheet anchor of their lives. There was a marked conflict between religion and science, between moralists and scientists, each outdoing the other, but the current of religious thought was not chilled. It was an age in which Prime – ministers raised echoes of a submerged religious vocabulary in their speeches and novels. The Oxford Movement represents the revival of the old Roman Catholic religion and the authority of the church at a time when science was challenging the religious thought of the age.

                       In domestic life the Victorian upheld the authority of parents over children. In the Barrets of wimpole Street we have a vivid picture of parental authority and the subjugation of children to the will of the head of the family. Emphasis was laid on authority and reverence for the elders. Women were relegated to a lower place. They were expected to cultivate domestic virtues, rear up children and look after the home and Mrs. Ellis in the Women of England outlined the role of the female sex as being of service to the male members of the family. “The first thing of importance,” she said, “was to be inferior to men, inferior in strength.” Education was a closed book for most of the women, and the idea of establishing women’s colleges was ridiculed by Tennyson, the national poet, in the princess.

                            The Victorian laid emphasis on order, decorum and decency. To talk of duty honour, the obligation of obligation f being a gentleman, the responsibility of matrimony, and the sacredness of religious belief was to be Victorian. “The Victorian we are told, “were a poor, blind, complacent people,” yet they were torn by doubt, spiritually bewildered, lost in a troubled universe. They were cross materialists wholly absorbed in the present quite unconcerned with abstract varieties and eternal values but they were also excessively religious, lamentably idealistic, nostalgic for the past, and ready to forego present delights for a vision of a world beyond despite their slavish “conformity,” their purblind respect for convention, they were, we learn, “rugged individualists,” give to “doing as one like,” needless of culture, shipped the idols of authority. They were, besides, at once sentimental humanitarians and hard – boiled exponents of free enterprise. Politically they were governed by narrow insular prejudice, but swayed by dark imperialistic designs. Intellectually and emotionally they believed in progress, denied original sin, and affirmed the death of the Devil, yet y temperament they were patently Manichaeans to whom living was a desperate struggle between the force of good and the power of darkness. While they professed “manliness” they yielded to feminine standards: if they emancipated woman from age – oil bondage, the also robbed her of a vital place in society. Though they were sexually inhibited and even failed to consider the existence of physical love, they begot incredibly large families and flaunted art constitutes a shameless record of both hypocrisy and ingenuousness, and their literature remains too purposeful, propagandistic, didactic, aesthetic, with too palpable a design upon the reader; yet it is clearly so romantic, aesthetic, ‘escapist’, that it carries to posterity but a tale of little meaning,”. Whatever we may say of Europe between Waterloo and Sedan,” wrote John Morley:-

In our county at least it was an fepoch of hearts lifted

With hope, and brains active with sober and manly

Reason for the common good. Some ages are marked as sentimental,

Others stand conspicuous as rational. The Victorian age

Was happier than most in the flow of both these currents into

A common stream of vigorous and effective talent.

New truths were welcomed in free minds and minds make brave men.”

                           Our study of Victorian background will not be complete without adding a few line about the Victorian compromise The Victorian sought a happy compromise when they were faced with radical problems. They were not willing to be dominated by one extreme viewpoint and in a welter of confusing issues they struck out a pleasing compromise. Victorian compromise was particularly perceptible in three branches of life. In the field of political life there was a compromise between democracy and aristocracy. While accepting the claims of the rising masses to political equality they defended the rights of aristocracy. While reposing their faith in progress in the political sphere they were not ready for revolutionary upsurges disturbing the settled order of life. Progressive ideals were reconciled with conservative leanings for an established order of society. In the field of religion and science, a satisfying compromise was affected. The advances made by science were accepted, but the claims of old religion were not ignored. The Victorian took up compromising position between faith of religion and doubt created by science.

There remains more faith in honest doubt

Believe me than in half the creeds.

                      “ They desired to be assured that all for the best; they desired to discover some compromise which while not outraging their intellect and their reason, would none the less soothe their conscience and restore their faith, if not completely at least sufficiently to allow them to believe in some ultimate purpose and more important still, in the life after death. In voicing these doubts, in phrasing the inevitable compromise Tennyson found and endeavored passionately to fulfill his appointed mission.”

                    In the field of sex, the Victorian made a compromise. The sex problem was the most blatant and persistent. In this field their object was to discover some middle course between the unbridled licentiousness of previous ages and the complete negation of the functions and purposes of nature. The Victorians permitted indulgence in sex but restricted its sphere to conjugal felicity and happy marred life. They disfavored physical passion and illegal gratification of sex impulse. They could not contemplate the possibility of any relation between man and woman other than the conjugal. In Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot we are introduced to ‘two young lovers walking together in the moonlight but we are at once reassured by the statement that these two lovers were ‘lately wed’. The Victorian of the sex urge by illegal and unauthorized methods.

                             The Victorian age was one of the most remarkable periods in the history of English Literature. It witnessed the flowering of poetry in the hands of host of poets, great and small. Ti marked in the growth of the English novel, and laid the foundation of English prose on a surer footing.

                          The note of individuality was the hall mark of Victorian literature. The literary figures of the Victorian age were endowed with marked originality in outlook, character and style. “In Macaulay there was much of the energy and enterprise of the self – mad man. Tennyson loved to sing the praises of sturdy independence. In Dickens books there are, perhaps more originals than in those of any other novelist in the world. The Bronte sisters pursued their lonely path in life with the pride and endurance learnt at the Haworth parsonage. Carlyle and Browning cultivated manner full of eccentricity and even Thackeray though more regular in style than his contemporaries loved to follow a haphazard path in the conduct of his stories indulging in unbounded license of comment and digression.”

                        The Victorian age was essentially the age of prose and novel. “Though the age produced many poets, and two who deserve to rank among the greatest,” says W.J. Long;

“Nevertheless this is emphatically an age of

Prose and novel. The novel in this ge fills a place

Which the dream held in the beys of

Elizabeth; and never before, inany age or language, has the novel

Appeared in such numbers and in such perfection.”

                    

                             Victorian Literature in its varied aspects was marked by a deep moral note. “The second marked characteristic of the age is that literature both in prose and poetry, seems to depart from the purely artistic standard of art’s sake and to be actuated by a definite moral purpose.” Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin were primarily interested in their message to their countrymen. They were teachers of England and were inspired by a conscious moral purpose to uplift and instruct their fellowmen. Behind the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social miniatures of Thackeray, the psychological studies of George Eliot, lay hidden a definite moral purpose to sweep away error and to bring out vividly in unmistakable terms the underlying truth of human life.

·         Conclusion:-

                  In one direction the literature of the Victorian age achieved a salient and momentous advance over the literature of the Romantic Revival. The poets of the Romantic Revival were interested in nature, in the past and in a lesser degree in art but they were not intensively interested in men and woman. To Wordsworth the dalesmen of the lakes were a part of the scenery they moved in. He treated human beings as natural objects and divested them of the complexities and passions of life as it is lived. The Victorian poets and novelist laid emphasis on men and women and imparted to them the same warmth and glow which the Romantic poets had given to nature.

“The Victorian Age extended to the complexities of human life, the imaginative sensibility which its predecessor had brought to bear on nature and history. The Victorian poets and novelists added humanity to nature and art as the subject matter of literature”