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no shaping force on their material. It would be more accurate to speak not of realism but of realisms, since each novelist presents a specific vision of reality whose representational force he or she seeks to persuade us to acknowledge through a variety of techniques and conventions. The worlds of Dickens, of Trollope, of Eliot, of the Brontes hardly seem continuous with each other, but their authors share the attempt to convince us that the characters and events they imagine resemble those we experience in actual life.
The experience that Victorian novelists most frequently depict is the set of social relationships in the middle- class society developing around them. It is a society where the material conditions of life indicate social position, where money defines opportunity, where social class enforces a powerful sense of stratification, yet where chances for class mobility exist. Pip can aspire to the great expectations that provide the title for Dickens's novel; Jane Eyre can marry her employer, a landed gentleman. Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his or her place in society is the main concern of the plot. The novel thus constructs a tension between surrounding social conditions and the aspiration of the hero or heroine, whether it be for love, social position, or a life adequate to his or her imagination. This tension makes the novel the natural form to use in portraying woman's struggle for self-realization in the context of the constraints imposed upon her. For both men and women writers, the heroine is often, therefore, the representative protagonist whose search for fulfillment emblematizes the human condition. The great heroines of Victorian fiction?Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, even Becky Sharp?all seem in some way to illustrate George Eliot's judgment, voiced in the Prelude to Middlemarch (1871?72), of 'a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with meanness of opportunity.'
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the novel was more than a fertile medium for the portrayal of women; women writers were, for the first time, not figures on the margins but major authors. Jane Austen, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot?all helped define the genre. When Charlotte Bronte screwed up her courage to write to the poet laureate, Bobert Southey, to ask his advice about a career as a writer, he warned her, 'Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be.' Charlotte Bronte put this letter, with one other from Southey, in an envelope, with the inscription 'Southey's advice to be kept forever. My twenty-first birthday.' Bronte's ability ultimately to depart from Southey's advice derived in part from how amenable the novel was to women writers. It concerned the domestic life that women knew well?courtship, family relationships, marriage. It was a popular form whose market women could enter easily. It did not carry the burden of an august tradition as poetry did, nor did it build on the learning of a university education. In his essay 'The Lady Novelists' (1852) George Henry Lewes declared, 'The advent of female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience.' His common-law wife, George Eliot, together with many of her sister novelists, fulfilled his prophecy.
Whether written by women or men, the Victorian novel was extraordinarily various. It encompassed a wealth of styles and genres from the extravagant comedy of Dickens to the Gothic romances of the Bronte sisters, from the satire of Thackeray to the probing psychological fiction of Eliot, from the social and political realism of Trollope to the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins. Later in the century a number of popular genres developed?crime, mystery,
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and horror novels, as well as science fiction and detective stories. For the Victorians the novel was both a principal form of entertainment and a spur to social sympathy. There was not a social topic that the novel did not address. Dickens, Gaskell, and many lesser novelists tried to stimulate efforts for social reform through their depiction of social problems. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad defined the novel in a way that could speak for the Victorians: 'What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow- men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?'
POETRY
Victorian poetry developed in the context of the novel. As the novel emerged as the dominant form of literature, poets sought new ways of telling stories in verse; examples include Tennyson's Maud, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868?69), and Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage (1857?58). Poets and critics debated what the appropriate subjects of such long narrative poems should be. Some, like Matthew Arnold, held that poets should use the heroic materials of the past; others, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, felt that poets should represent 'their age, not Charlemagne's.' Poets also experimented with character and perspective. Amours de Voyage is a long epistolary poem that tells the story of a failed romance through letters written by its various characters; The Ring and the Book presents its plot?an old Italian murder story?through ten different perspectives.
Victorian poetry also developed in the shadow of Romanticism. By 1837, when Victoria ascended the throne, all the major Romantic poets, save William Wordsworth, were dead, but they had died young, and many readers consequently still regarded them as their contemporaries. Not even twenty years separated the birth dates of Tennyson and Browning from that of John Keats, but they lived more than three times as long as he did. All the Victorian poets show the strong influence of the Romantics, but they cannot sustain the confidence that the Romantics felt in the power of the imagination. The Victorians often rewrite Romantic poems with a sense of belatedness and distance. When, in his poem 'Resignation,' Arnold addresses his sister upon revisiting a landscape, much as Wordsworth had addressed his sister in 'Tintern Abbey,' he tells her the rocks and sky 'seem to bear rather than rejoice.' Tennyson frequently represents his muse as an embowered woman, cut off from the world and doomed to death. The speakers of Browning's poems who embrace the visions that their imaginations present are madmen. When Hardy writes 'The Darkling Thrush,' in December 1900, Keats's nightingale has become 'an aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.'
Victorian poets build upon this sense of belated Romanticism in a number of different ways. Some poets writing in the second half of the century, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, embrace an attenuated Romanticism, art pursued for its own sake. Reacting against what he sees as the insufficiency of an allegory of the state of one's own mind as the basis of poetry, Arnold seeks an objective basis for poetic emotion and finally gives up writing poems altogether when he decides that the present age lacks the culture necessary to support great poetry. The more fruitful reaction to
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the subjectivity of Romantic poetry, however, was not Arnold's but Browning's. Turning from the mode of his early poetry, modeled on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Browning began writing dramatic monologues?poems, he said, that are 'Lyric in expression' but 'Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine.' Tennyson simultaneously developed a more lyric form of the dramatic monologue. The idea of creating a lyric poem in the voice of a speaker ironically distinct from the poet is the great achievement of Victorian poetry, one developed extensively in the twentieth century. In Poetry and the Age (1953), the modernist poet and critic Randall Jarrell acknowledges this fact: 'The dramatic monologue, which once had depended for its effect upon being a departure from the norm of poetry, now became in one form or other the norm.'
