...about a young, charming man that is in conflict with the cultural anxieties of living an extravagant, seductive, moralistic, and self-confident life style along with two friends with similar conflicts. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that reveals many aspects of cultural anxieties instilled in three characters. The cultural anxieties complicate the virtues of every character in the novel and lead each of their lives into the vices of their virtues. All the characters have the anxieties for living great lives. However, all their lives turn for the worse including death. Each character wants more or less than their role, place, and identity in society. The anxieties of the Late Victorian Era were “sexual restraints, low tolerance...
Words: 1694 - Pages: 7
...Dickens was born in the year 1817, Victorian Era Mid 19th century till to beginning of 20th century, Hard Times published on 1854, Schools become mandatory in 1889. _____________________________________________________________________ OUR TALK WILL BE DIVIDED INTO 4 PARTS: INTRODUCTION OF VICTORIAN ERA The Victorian era of British history: was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death, on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain, where during that time, the British Empire has existed for centuries and was able to maintain a world order which rarely threatened Britain’s wider strategic interests. By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, The British empire extended over about one-fifth of the earth’s surface and at least a quarter of the world’s population. One of the ways they achieved such a thing is through the Industrial Revolution. What is the Industrial Revolution exactly? Prior to the Industrial Revolution, a working person would be lucky to have 1 or 2 shirts. To make fabric, these people had to spend their whole lives weaving this shirt and as demand for british goods increased, they needed a way to speed up things in a way without affecting it economically. As a result, they came up with the idea of factories where workers would repeat the same thing over and over again. So I want you to think like a business man in the victorian era right now. What would make sense...
Words: 2426 - Pages: 10
...Britain, during the Victorian era, underwent many drastic and at times, rapid changes in the form of industrial revolution. By the later stages of the period Britain was in its last phases of acquiring one of the largest, wealthiest and influential empires in history and asserted itself as the world’s most powerful nation. However, while the country experienced large scale economic progress social complications such as poverty, inequality and exploitation soon followed. Historian Llewellyn Woodward, in The Age of Reform, (1815-1870) stated “England in 1871 was by no means an earthly paradise. The housing and conditions of life of the working class in town and country were still a disgrace to an age of plenty.” There was also a shift in ‘ideals’ as strict social codes were...
Words: 1638 - Pages: 7
...‘fallen woman’ against the backdrop of Victorian society. This portrayal by the authors of their heroines and the contrasting ways in which each character deals with their own situation leads us to empathise with their burdens and gain a deeper insight into their thoughts and emotions. As we witness the deepening punishments and tragedies unfolding for each character, both authors also succeed in eliciting our sympathy for these women as they enable us to experience the unfairness and injustice of the world as it was then. Wilde demonstrates the sheer devastation for a woman, of becoming ‘ruined’ through his character Mrs Arbuthnot as she expresses her demoralising thoughts and deep feelings that she has not spoken of before. We witness the destruction foisted upon her state of mind by the label of ‘fallen woman’ that was bestowed upon Mrs Arbuthnot, through the way that she scrutinises herself and expresses that she is a “tainted thing”. This metaphor implies that she believes her actions are so horrendous that she has been de-humanised and should be regarded as something impure. When describing her emotional burdens she states “I will bear them alone”. This simple declarative suggests that she has command over her own feelings and is deciding upon her own punishment. However she continues to affirm that she “must bear them alone”, where through the addition of the modal verb “must” we are brought back to the sad truth that, in Victorian society, a fallen woman would have had...
Words: 1886 - Pages: 8
..."The Victorian elements in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontё" The Victorian Era, in which Brontё composed Wuthering Heights, receives its name from the reign of Queen Victoria of England. The era was a great age of the English novel, which was the ideal form to descibe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Emily, born in 1818, lived in a household in the countryside in Yorkshire, locates her fiction in the worlds she knows personally. In addition, she makes the novel even more personal by reflecting her own life and experiences in both characters and action of Wuthering Heights. In fact, many characters in the novel grow up motherless, reflecting Emily’s own childhood, as her mother died when Emily was three years old. Similarly, the vast majority of the novel takes place in two households, which probably is a reflection of author’s own comfort at home as whenever she was away from home she grew homesick. Emily Brontё’s single novel is a unique masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising artistic sense. However, despite the relative invisibility of Victorian influence in the plot and content, the attitudes of the Victorian Era make some impact on the story, and the novel is considered not only a form of entertainment but also a means of analyzing and offering solutions to social and political problems. Brontё may not highlight the social aspects in the novel, nevertheless the indications of Victorian society’s...
Words: 3665 - Pages: 15
...There is no good if there is no evil. In the early 1900s, a time of change brought many prosperous beginnings, a time for capitalism, a time for opportunities. However, with them came a time of conflict and turmoil for the poor, the immigrants, and the ostracized—women. In society a woman was classified as the maiden, the nurturer, the Madonna, the sex goddess, the witch, or the whore. In the novel Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow portrays these different types of women as Mameh, Mother, Evelyn Nesbit, and Emma Goldman. Doctorow uses fictional characters along with real historical characters to paint a colorful and vivid picture of these times, to portray the social class distinctions, the morality of women, and the many undergoing changes of this era. Like an hour glass figure the social classes were very distinct among women; there were the rich, the poor, and a few in between. The women of higher social status, the wealthy were embedded with the idea that sexual purity was a must in order to get married. It was considered a stain in a family’s reputation for a woman to have premarital sex and worse promiscuous sex. The importance of reputation is clearly illustrated in Ragtime. “Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families” (Doctorow 4). To women of wealth marriage was their goal, and their reputation was the only thing they had. In contrast to the wealthy, the poor were not worried as much about their reputation, but more...
Words: 1550 - Pages: 7
...examines Lucy Snowe’s journey towards maturity and fulfillment through the streets of Britain. The novel portrays Lucy as a complicated character who searches for independence in exchange for social acceptance. Lucy’s search for identity that is independent of society is very difficult to establish and express due to its existence in the sphere of ‘expected female social conduct.’ In the novel one of the characters, Ginevra, curiously inquires “Who are you, Miss Snowe”...”Who am I indeed? Perhaps a personage in disguise.” Since most women during that era were conditioned at an early age about social standing and gender roles, Ginevra has a very difficult time labeling Lucy as a traditional female. Bronte craftily created Lucy as this untraditional female protagonist in order to challenge Victorian ethics through her silence over her narrative. Throughout the novel, Lucy reveals her dissatisfaction with the Victorian values, however at the same time she represses information and keeps her identity concealed. This personality trait gives her great power over the reader, who longs to get more information about this mysterious character. The novel begins with Lucy saying, “When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit.” This line from the first chapter is clearly vague and does not give any incite to why Lucy Snowe is staying at Bretton. Instead, she then jumps right into introducing her God-mother to the readers. “I was staying...
Words: 1453 - Pages: 6
... II Abstract The purpose of my study is to show the conflict between idealism and society in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. In this novel, Hardy portrays the strife of the two individuals Jude and Sue to make their own ways in society by seeking to realise their ideals. He also reveals the difficulties met by the two idealists in front of society’s attempts to thwart their ideals and to force them to surrender to its norms. This study allows the reader to have a deep understanding of the origin of the conflict, the climax of the confrontation between the two opposing sides and the result of the conflict. In this respect, the present study helps the reader to acquire a thorough knowledge of Hardy’s thought and the values of the Victorian society to which he belongs. III Résumé L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer le conflit entre l’idéalisme et la société décrit dans le roman de Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure. Dans ce roman, Hardy dépeint la lutte des...
Words: 16996 - Pages: 68
...4. “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now species.” Explain what Foucault means by this remark with reference to the nineteenth century process he calls “the medicalisation of the sexually peculiar”. At the heart of the statement and references contained in the title are illustrations of how power is expressed through normative discourse in Western capitalist society. The process of how an act once termed ‘sodomy’ became transformed into the term ‘homosexual’ is fundamental to the nature of power in general and to the mechanism of discourse specifically. Foucault draws our attention to domains of discourse that are characterised by establishing quantifiable knowledge as truth, which society affords positions of authority, such as the medical profession. This authoritative mechanism was an instrument that was applied to an existing system of sexual relation governance resulting in a control-dynamic between power, knowledge and sex. The medicalisation of sexuality through discourse spawned a categorisation of the individual as determined by their sexual identity in a process of transforming experience into knowledge, knowledge into truth, and truth into reality. Foucault’s reference to the ‘sexually peculiar’ draws our attention to the delineation between the procreative model of relationships and all other pleasure-centred sexual acts. The child-bearing relationship’s sexual activities were regulated and protected at the exclusion...
Words: 2171 - Pages: 9
...needs and infusing vitality into these classics. The incredible Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are not special cases joining the trend. A convention of the relationship between the detective and the sidekick has supported Doyle’s stories for over one century, in which Dr. Watson has been an iconic character complementary for the eccentric and intelligent Holmes. The brilliant creation of Dr. Watson, according to T.J. Binyon in “Murder Will Out,” provides readers with the authentic and plausible adventures by his narratives “through his prosaic, stolid personality”(10). Dr. Watson as the narrator not only helps Doyle develop the stories by hiding vital aspects of mysteries from readers but also represents the majority of Victorian middle-class men, as Panek supported in “Beginning” (80). “His very averageness makes him the representative of societal norm,” added by April Toadvine in “Watson Effect”(52). Hence, observing and analyzing the alterations of Dr. Watson within current Holmesian adaptations provide an insight into how modern-texts continue to use Watson to represent and cater to its twenty-one-century audiences. In BBC’s TV series Sherlock, directed by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, John Watson is portrayed as a former military doctor back from Afghanistan. Throughout Sherlock, John Watson is still characterized as a loyal, professional, moral and ordinary partner of Sherlock Holmes but with distinct age epitomes, where he reflects unique circumstances among...
Words: 1900 - Pages: 8
...Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, which was then part of the Austrian Empire and is now in the Czech Republic. He spent most of his life in Vienna, from where he fled, in 1937, when the Nazis invaded. Neither Freud (being Jewish) or his theories were very popular with the Nazis and he escaped to London where he died in 1939. He had wanted to be a research scientist but anti-Semitism forced him to choose a medical career instead and he worked in Vienna as a doctor, specialising in neurological disorders (disorders of the nervous system). He constantly revised and modified his theories right up until his death but much of his psychoanalytic theory was produced between 1900 and 1930. Freud originally attempted to explain the workings of the mind in terms of physiology and neurology ...(but)... quite early on in his treatment of patients with neurological disorders, Freud realised that symptoms which had no organic or bodily basis could imitate the real thing and that they were as real for the patient as if they had been neurologically caused. So he began to search for psychological explanations of these symptoms and ways of treating them. In 1885 he spent a year in Paris learning hypnosis from the neurologist Charcot; he then started using hypnosis with his patients in Vienna. However, he found its effects to be only temporary at best and it did not usually get to the root of the problem; nor was everybody capable of being hypnotised. Meanwhile Breuer, another...
Words: 2239 - Pages: 9
...1 THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian Compromise The Victorian Age takes its name from Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837 to 1901; it was a complex era characterised by stability, progress and social reforms, and, in the mean time, by great problems such as poverty, injustice and social unrest; that’s why the Victorians felt obliged to promote and invent a rigid code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, based on: * duty and hard work; * respectability: a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards (possessions of good manners, ownership of a comfortable house, regular attendance at church and charitable activity); it distiguished the middle from the lower classes; * charity and philanthropy: an activity that involved many people, expecially women. The family was strictly patriarchal: the husband represented the authority and respectability, cosequently a single woman with a child was emarginated because of a wide-spread sense of female chastity. Sexuality was generaly repressed and that led to extreme manifestations of prudery. Colonialism was an important phenomenon and it led to a patriotism deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority: British people thought that they were obeying to God by the imposition of their superior way of life. The concept of “the white man’s burden” was exalted in the works of colonial writers (such as Rudyard Kipling). This code of values, known as “Victorian Compromise”...
Words: 9412 - Pages: 38
...Mrs. Sen’s The process of assimilation if very difficult for Mrs. Sen. Unlike the narrator of The Third and Final Continent or even Lilia’s parents, Mrs. Sen finds it impossible to integrate into her new country. Her refusal to learn how to drive is the culmination of her distress. Her frustration is voiced loudly only to Eliot, who is dealing with his own distress. There is a childish, tantrum-like angle to Mrs. Sen’s complaints. She even remarks to Eliot that he is much wise than she was at that age; she never thought for a moment that she would be separated from her family. While the reader sympathizes with her plight, her stubbornness seems greater than it need be. Her husband tries to accommodate her, the policeman does not arrest or fine her for the accident, and the workers at the fishmarket put product on hold for her. In the end, it is Mrs. Sen’s responsibility to make an effort. Unlike Mala in The Third and Final Continent – who was equally distraught about leaving her family – Mrs. Sen does not try to adjust. She is trapped in a cage of her own making. As in Sexy, the main characters have mirror images within the story. Here, Eliot and Mrs. Sen are quite similar. He is trapped in his life as well. The loneliness and distress that Mrs. Sen expresses are familiar emotions. He has front row seats for his mother’s sadness. Unlike Mrs. Sen, Eliot is unable to tell anyone about his plight because, again unlike Mrs. Sen, he is truly powerless. The sympathy one has for Eliot...
Words: 2333 - Pages: 10
...The History and Culture of Body Modification What is body modification and why has it had such a large impact on society? For centuries humans have been using their bodies as a canvas to identify themselves to the rest of society. Body modification lets a person stand out or blend in; it allows people to describe who they are and where they come from without saying a word. There are many forms of body modification such as Tattooing, Scarification, Piercings, Stretching, Plastic Surgery, and Corseting. Each form holds a story, a reason why it is done. “ In the past three decades, Western body art has not only become a practice, and in some quarters a fashion, that has crossed social boundaries of class and gender, "high" culture and "low," but also it has been greatly influenced by "tribal" practices, past and present.” (Enid Schildkrout, Inscribing the Body, Para 10 line 8) Tattooing The history of tattooing stems back thousands of years from all over the world for all different reasons. “In terms of tattoos on actual bodies, the earliest known examples were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of the Iceman from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old. The distribution of the tattooed dots and small crosses on his lower spine and right knee...
Words: 1618 - Pages: 7
...REPORT ON “EUROPE – CULTURE, HISTORY & ECONOMICS” “Based on Seminar delivered by Prof. Dr. De Meuter” Submitted To: Submitted By: PROF. DR. DE MEUTER GROUP 7 NIDHI SHARMA RICHARD SUMAN HIMANSHU SAHNI MAHESH DILIP REDDY European culture & history LESSONS OF HISTORY: * Historical truth & historical books doesn’t always actually say or what it meant in the books. * They books are changed from time to time according to the situations and conditions. Example of Christopher Columbus who discovered America has been discussed in the class, where the actual evil intentions of Columbus were discussed who started his journey in search of India and discovered America. Here the myth is said as a history but the factual reality is left behind. Perennial philosophy: The perennial philosophy says about the whole world’s religious traditions as sharing a single, universal truth on which the foundation of all religious knowledge and doctrine has grown. In the perennial philosophy the several representations of different countries such as kundalini of India where the seven chakras represents seven energies present around the spine, Greece and the Caduceus / Homer and the Odyssey, Egypt and the Uraeus-Cobra & vulture, South America’s the oroburos, Chinese Dragon and the European alchemy which representation has different meaning has been discussed. Europe and Christianity: ...
Words: 10698 - Pages: 43
