3/24/09 intro to Victorian poetry; R. Browning, "Andrea Del Sarto"

<http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/a/andrea/sarto/index.html>

Qs on P2 (due 3/31) or poems assign (due 4/14)?

We are moving ahead once again, this time to the Victorian era, 1830-1901.

In some ways, this was the most difficult period to find a "representative" poem for, for a number of reasons:

• the distinction between Victorian and Romantic is not as sharp as the distinction between neoclassical and Romantic. True, the Victorians often wrote in opposition or contrast to the Romantics, but their work developed out of the Romantics' as often as not ;their work is as much continuous with Romantic poetry as it is opposed to it.
• it's a long era, especially in comparison with the romantic period. One result of this is that there was a LOT of poetry written during the age, and it varied quite a bit.
• To say that a poem is "representative" is to imply that there is some unified entity which can be represented, and the character of the Victorian era was precisely such as to call "unity" into question. In fact, one way to describe the Victorian era is as an era which struggled to define itself in the face of change and disunity. Consider the background:
  • era of exposure to other ways of thinking:
    • The Victorian era was the era of the building of the railroads--and thus the first era of something like mass transit. The more a society travels, the more exposed it is to different points of view--and the more difficult it is for a particular point of view to seem natural and right.
    • The Victorian era was the age of Empire--the era in which British colonial power reached its height. British contacts with other cultures were by no means on equal terms, but they WERE contacts--which again increased the number of points of view that were in the air. Even those who never travelled to the colonies were affected by them. The first photographs were taken in 1834; by the end of the era, photography allowed even those who remained at home to see something of how others lived.
  • era of rapid change:
    • The Victorian era was an era of massive industrialization; England was the first industrial society, and a good deal of that transformation took place in the Victorian era. The way people lived changed dramatically over the course of their lifetimes--calling into question the possibility of a single "right" point of view.
    • it is an era of political change: the Reform Bill of 1832 gave the right to vote to a much larger segment of the middle class; the Second Reform Bill of 1867 extended that right to the working class.
    • Similarly, women were moving towards gaining some political and economic rights. Although women didn't get the vote in England until 1918, and they didn't get the right to own property until 1870, relatively late in the Victorian era, the ISSUE of women's rights was in the air throughout most of era, with increasing volume.
    • One of the implications of these reforms was that it was an era in which more voices were heard. That's good from a pro-equality standpoint, but it also had the effect of making Victorian culture more fragmented.
    • The Victorian era is one in which religious doubt becomes rife. For us, Darwin is the best known of the Victorian scientists whose views called religious belief into question. But this trend began much earlier, with Lyell's Geology, which pointed out that there was a fossil record of creatures who 1) no longer existed and 2) hadn't existed for millions of years. So much for the Great Chain of Being, a view in which the order of creation was essentially fixed, with all creatures in their proper places. So much, too, for the conventional view that the world was 4000 years old. That's not to say that suddenly Britain was predominantly atheistic--far from it. But it did mean that poets who would ultimately affirm belief in God, such as Tennyson, would have to confront his own doubts, and for the first time you have major figures like Arnold who are avowed agnostics and are deliberately calling for something to replace religion as a cultural unifier. (He thought it should be poetry.)
    • despite all this, it was also an era of Progress; England was a mess, but it was the most successful mess on the planet, possibly in all history up to that point. Which is to say that the time was not yet ripe for modernism, in which doubt would win the day; the conventional sense of "Victorian"--stuffy, bourgeois, prosperous, rigid--is not entirely untrue.

What kind of poem could represent such a mess? Either one which confronts directly the fragmentation and doubt of the era, or one in which partiality and perspective become major themes. For the first, we could look to a poem like "Dover Beach," where the closing image of the world is of a "darkling plain/ Where ignorant armies clash by night"; for the second, we should look at the dramatic monologue--the most important formal innovation of the era where poetry is concerned. We'll define this precisely in a moment; for now, let's just say that a dramatic monologue is a poem in which a fictional character speaks within a fictional context.

What this form allows is precisely exploration of perspective and point of view; it allows the poet to take on a new voice and a new worldview. That's not to say that it necessarily endorses what the new voice says. Dramatic monologues very often center on the revelation of some character flaw in the speaker; thus, because the reader is given some distance from the worldview expressed by the speaker, the "normal" way of looking at things is affirmed. Yet we are also called upon to try to imagine the speaker's point of view; in this way, our "normal" view, whatever it is, is called into question just a little bit. Our own views aren't necessarily challenged directly, but we are made aware that other views exist and must be taken into account.

Andrea Del Sarto:

• like many of Browning's characters, Del Sarto is a Renaissance figure, in this case from Florence--in part what Browning does is represent a Italian Renaissance worldview which is to some degree different from the British Victorian worldview. This poem is an exploration of a perspective, in other words, as I've said.
• defn:
  • speaker is someone other than the poet,
  • speaking in a more or less clearly defined dramatic situation,
  • often to an auditor--that is, a fictional character who is someone other than the reader,
  • in such a way that, often, the character of the speaker is gradually revealed.
• basic situation: who is the speaker, who is the auditor, under what circumstances are they speaking?
• Often what makes Browning's characters so interesting is their flaws, often moral flaws. What's Del Sarto's flaw?
  • relationship with with Lucrezia:
    • loves her more than she loves him: 29-32, 242-3
    • she manipulates him: 1-9, 219-226
    • but he in turn blames her: 12-18, 116-119, 122-32, 166-72, 266
  • similarly, blames God, circumstances: 46-52, 133,
  • ultimately, lacks ambition, soul:
    • 35-6, 79-86, 97-99,
    • comp with Raphael 107-114 194-197,
    • France 145-174, 213-219, 244-251
  • and conscience (therefore?): 247-255, 140-143
• what does this poem say about art?
• can we read through Del Sarto's perspective to find a moral truth, as we can, more or less, with Swift?