Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Novel

Ann Radcliffe is considered to be one of the pioneers of the Gothic Novel. Works such as The Romance of the Forest (1791), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) consolidated her as a leading exponent of an emerging genre. Well-known because of her innovative style, Radcliffe’s novels were characterized not only by the use of the sublime: terror, mystery and suspense, but also by the use of the sentimental novel’s principles, combination that was approved by readers, strongly criticized by experts and parodied by other writers.

According to David Durant’s ideas in his book Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic “Radcliffe was a conservative writer in what now is considered a revolutionary movement”. Her narrative, full of virtuous heroes and heroines, order, emotions and moral lessons, constitutes a proof of her traditional style. Looking for new vehicles to entertain readers, Radcliffe managed to combine these features with gothic elements, creating a new genre that later would find in Radcliffe’s depictions of supernatural landscapes, scary situations and sinister locales the most important alleys to charm the audience.   

That is why experts agree that Radcliffe’s best achievement was the introduction of supernatural elements in the novel. But as a forerunner of the Romantic Movement, her style was incomplete. To many literary critics “Ann Radcliffe’s various novels now seem more like childish fantasies than evocations of primal horror” (Durant, 1), however, these “childish fantasies” were the foundations that made possible the development of the Gothic as a genre.  

Virtue and Virginity: Female’s Tickets to Marriage

 The eighteenth century is marked by the rise of the sentimental novel, a new gender that focusing on the feelings and emotions of the characters and the main issues of its society, is going to originate an enormous passion for reading and  literature in general.  Themes such as: fear, prudence, morality, melancholy, innate goodness and chastity came into vogue, but the most relevant of all was, undoubtedly, virtue. It became the central topic of sentimental novels, especially in Richardson's novel Pamela where it was portrayed, in a peculiar way.

Female virtue, paraphrasing Corrinne Harol’s ideas in the essay Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela's Virtue, was completely related to sexuality and the body. Virtuous equal to virginity constitutes a distinctive aspect that can be seen all through Richardson’s novel, where, according to Harol’s point of view “Pamela’s heroic attempts to preserve her virginity produce evidence about her interiority and thus allow readers to evaluate her virtue … virtue depends upon preservation of her virginity” (Harol, 2)  a fact that Pamela defends till the end, knowing it would be her “free pass” to happiness and a good marriage and consequently to a better future.

As a reflection of the society of her time, Pamela embodies all the women whose unique option to achieve respect, prestige and wealth is through a good marriage, possible only for those who keep their virginity in soul and body. But it is not the first time we see this. In The Rape of the Lock we find Clarissa struggling to preserve her virginity, this time, equal to her physical appearance, in order to get married and maintain her social status in the high-class society.

This is one of the ways in which the literature of this period develops. By portraying the main issues of its society, it will not only achieve a wider public and acceptance but also its maximum splendour, its golden days.     

Bibliography:

- Harol, Corrinne. Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela's Virtue. Eighteenth-Century

              Fiction: Vol. 16: Iss. 2, Article 3. 2004

  

Swift's Satirical Exposure of Human Pride

After being in the land of the Lilliputians, Gulliver’s size moves from a colossus to an insignificant insect that finds himself in the land of Brobdingnag, where, as soon as he arrives, is turned into a domestic pet due to his tininess.

Once again we discover Swift making reference to the issue of “size”, this time from a different point of view. According to K.M. Jan and Shabnam Firdaus in Perspectives on Gulliver’s Travels “Swift concentrates on the superiority of the giants and the insignificance of Gulliver” revealing “human reality as ridiculous and infinitely small”.

Gulliver’s insignificance is perfectly seen all through the book. He is described as a pet, a freak of nature, a baby, even as a doll. Evidently, all these experiences, paraphrasing David Daiches’ ideas in A Critical History of English Literature: the Restoration to 1800, are used by Swift to explore what is considered one of the major themes of this second story: the satirical exposure of human pride and pretention.

 In several occasions we will find Gulliver boasting about England’s history and culture, proud of their achievements even when they are destructive ones as in the case of the gunpowder, but each time also, Gulliver will find the king, shattering his pride with moral comments that show the readers the nature of those giants. About it the authors of Perspectives on Gulliver’s Travels make an interesting observation “The moral superiority and the intellectual clarity of the King of Brobdingnag are far superior to those of Gulliver. Gulliver’s pride is a common failing of man which needs to be humbled”.

Another example can be seen when Gulliver is used as a doll. Even though he has been treated as a slave by his first master, has worked hard entertaining people and also has been threatened by huge animals like rats, a cat, a dog and a monkey, nothing is more disgusting and humiliating to him than being treated as a doll by the maids that also strips him from time to time (Jan, Firdaus 96) hurting deeply his self pride.   

   In this way Swift satirizes the theme of human pride and pretention within his book. By turning Gulliver into a tiny, insignificant creature, he minimizes not only the size but also human existence and its self-admiration and self-exaltation. Swift teaches us we are not as perfect as we think we are and invites us to reconsider our strength and weakness from a humble point of view.  

Bibliography:
 Daiches, David. "A Critical History of English Literature: the Restoration to 1800, Volume 3". Allied Publishers, 1979.
 Jan, K.M;  Firdaus, Shabnam. "Perspectives on Gulliver’s Travels". Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 01/01/2004.  

   

Exploration on Human Nature

The first book of Gulliver's Travels, “A Voyage to Lilliput” constitutes an exploration on human nature.   Pharaphrasing the Teacher's Guide to the Core Classic Edition of Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels we can say that through the creation of a new society “the Lilliputians”  (very similar to that of Gulliver’s home) Swift presents a profound analysis of the human behavior. Lilliputians are described as tiny even insignificant people in comparison to Gulliver; nevertheless they are evil and astute minds capable of keeping him under their control since the very beginning.

 The violent reaction Lilliputians show soon after they discover Gulliver, gives us an idea of the Machiavellian nature of this culture, who think they are the only “great empire" in the universe, and "even the presence of the gigantic Gulliver can't convince them of their relative insignificance" (Teacher's Guide)

 The fact of checking all his personal belongings with a high level of ignorance shows their lack of knowledge of the outside’s world mainly because of the excessive pride in its own culture that does not let them consider someone else better. According to Teacher's Guide to the Core Classic Edition of Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels "there are just two items that ironically escape the view of the Lilliputians: Gulliver’s spectacles and telescope. These devices are used by Swift with symbolic significance; they will enable Gulliver to see more clearly up close and underscore Swift's message that judgment depends on perspective" (page 29)

It is evident that Gulliver, amused by their sizes and customs, underestimates these people at the beginning. In the Teacher's Guide we have a reflection about the fact of Gulliver asking for his liberty. It says "Gulliver could have crushed most of the army as they paraded between his legs. Why does he have to ask for freedom?Why does Gulliver allow himself to be the prisoner of these tiny creatures?" (page 32-33) And here comes the interesting answer they offer to it "Gulliver has stopped seeing objectively" so we can conclude that the mental power Lilliputians craftily exercise towards him became stronger.

Through this satire, Swift also explores interpersonal relationships as well as the behavior of the English society. Lilliputians, as a symbolic representation of the English society, exemplify misplaced human pride, while Gulliver’s innocence represents the inability of some people to diagnose it correctly.

Bibliography:      Marshal, Lisa "Teacher's Guide to the Core Classic Edition of Jonathan Swift's 

                         Gullivers Travels", Core Knowledge Foundation, 2003  

                          http://www.coreknowledge.org/mimik/mimik_uploads/documents/55/CCGT.pdf

The Beggar’s Opera

             To understand in detail “The Beggar’s Opera” it is necessary to analyze first the society and the epoch where it was composed. We are talking about a period in the history of the English literature which was marked by a bawdiness and wit, as well as sentimentality. A period where English theaters, after having enjoyed a revival during the Restoration, had subsided into an opaque phase and the stages had become part of the political battleground.

At the same time there were two emerging and fashionable forms of entertainment that arose: the Italian opera, a formative and stylized type, and a culture of satire in literature that was growing, with Swift and Pope, good friends of Gay, among its most prominent exponents.

It was then when John Gay’s great masterpiece appeared. Written in 1728, The Beggar’s Opera is considered a funny satire on marriage, money and morals, as relevant today as it was when first written and played. The piece sought to transform the formal patterns of Italian opera to a bawdy satire, set in the underworld’s London of the time, where beggars and thieves created a world of love, violence, sexual passion and fraud. The targets of Gay’s satire were really obvious, the Italian opera itself; those responsible for administering the law, the corruption of the time particularly the politicians as the Prime Minister Robert Walpole, who restricted activities of the theatre and finally the writer satirized the practices of society. So we all agree that Gay's work was a mock heroic opera, which picturing the London criminal underworld, suggested the idea that the morals of the people in Newgate prison did not differ so much from the rest of society.

Due to its innovative character and social connotations, The Beggar's Opera had a huge success at that time. It was arguably the first musical in the modern sense; a play animated by songs, but with plenty of unsung dialogues, unlike the Italian opera of the times. In this way we can say that the success achieved remained all through the years and turned the opera into an excellent masterpiece of the English Literature.   

Mock-Epic style within Pope’s prose

           Since I consider extremely interesting the way in which Pope developed his masterwork “The Rape of the Lock”, I have decided, this time, to talk about the mock-epic style in Pope’s prose.

 Mock-epic style, also called mock-heroic or heroi-comic, constitutes a form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary societies and ways of behavior. Pope was one of those moderns. The Rape of the Lock is perhaps, the most prominent example in the English language of the mock-epic gender. In this case, Pope’s intention was not to mock the style, but to mock his society, exposing its pettiness and emphasizing the ridiculousness of a society in which values had lost all proportion, and the trivial was at the same level as the gravity and solemnity, that ought to be understood as important issues.

Consciously, Pope imitated the epic opening in his lines, which may be called the invocation in the approved epic manners. His tone did gather declamatory epic ring as he commands the goddess: “Say what strange motive…?” ….. At a certain moment we began to notice that Pope is not mocking the epic form, on the contrary, he was laughing at his subject. Once we realized that we are reading a mock-epic story, it acquired a different light on the apparent solemnity and dignity of Pope’s propositions and invocation.

This extraordinary writer was also mindful of the fact that a mock-epic story should have a moral just as an epic did. Clarissa’s speech in "The Rape of the Lock” opened out the moral of the poem about the fashionable society. The speech could be taken as an attempt to redefine for contemporary women a concept of honor, which applied to male epic heroes. In the world of belles, honor became courage to face decay with humour and duty, to use the power of beauty well. In this way, The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, the pieces are wrought together with an ingenuity and magnificence that makes the poem surprising and delightful. Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and hazardous but with a high level of common sense and moral implications. That is why, it has become one of the most famous English-language poems of all times .

Theory of Four Humours

Chicos aquí les dejo la teoría de los cuatro humores completa para que le den un vistazo!!!!!!!!! 

The Four Humours

From Shakespeare's Life and Times

In Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance thought, the traditional four elements form the basis for a theory of medicine and later psychological typology known as the four humours. They constituted the western equivalent of the Chionese five states of change. Each of the humours was associated with various correspondences and particular physical and mental characteristics, and could, moreover, be combined for more complex personality types: (e.g. choleric-sanguine, etc). The result is a system that provides a quite elaborate classification of types of personality.

The Four Humours and Classical Thought

In classic times, medicine was equated with philosophy and three Greek philosophers: Hippocrates (c.460 – 370 b.c.e.), Plato (427-348 b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) contributed to the vision of health, disease and the functions of the body. Although they had differences in general they saw health as an equilibrium of the body as determined by the four humors. Sap in plants and the blood in animals is the fount of life. Other body fluids- phlegm, bile, faeces, became visible in illness when the balance is disturbed. For instance, epilepsy, the sacred disease was due to phlegm blocking the airways that caused the body to struggle and convulse to free itself. Mania was due to bile boiling in the brain. Black bile was a late addition to disease theory and was associated with melancholy."

[ref. The Roots of Scientific Medicine by Dr. P. Warren, - The Humoral Theory of Diseases.]

Essentially, this theory holds that the human body was filled with four basic substances, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. These deficits could be caused by vapors that were inhaled or absorbed by the body. The four substances were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Greeks and Romans, and the later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a patient was suffering from a surplus or imbalance of one fluid, then his or her personality and physical health would be affected. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: earth, fire, water and air; earth predominantly present in the black bile, fire in the yellow bile, water in the phlegm, and all four elements present in the blood.

The four humors, their corresponding elements, seasons, sites of formation, and resulting temperaments are:

Humour	Body substance	produced by	Element	Qualities	Complexion and Body type	Personality
Sanguine	blood	liver	air	hot and moist	red-cheeked, corpulent	amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, irresponsible
Choleric	yellow bile	spleen	fire	hot and dry	red-haired, thin	violent, vengeful, short-tempered, ambitious
Phlegmatic	phlegm	lungs	water	cold and moist	corpulent	Sluggish, pallid, cowardly
Melancholic	black bile	gall bladder	earth	cold and dry	sallow, thin	Introspective, sentimental, gluttonous

 The "humours" gave off vapors which ascended to the brain; an individual's personal characteristics (physical, mental, moral) were explained by his or her "temperament," or the state of theat person's "humours." The perfect temperament resulted when no one of these humours dominated. By 1600 it was common to use "humour" as a means of classifying characters; knowledge of the humours is not only important to understanding later medieval work, but essential to interpreting Elizabethan drama"

 Taming of the Shrew is an example of the presence of four humours in the Elizabethan works. Here, the character Petruchio pretends to be irritable and angry to show Katherina what it is like being around a disagreeable person. He yells at the servants for serving mutton, a "choleric" food, to two people who are already choleric.

Foods in Elizabethan times were believed all to have an affinity with one of these four humors. A sick person coughing up phlegm was believed to be too phlegmatic, and might have been served wine (a choleric drink and the direct opposite humor to phlegmatic) to balance it out.

The Four Humours in the modern world

Rudolph Steiner, who derived a lot of his ideas from Graeco-Medieval thought, not unsurprisingly incororated the humours into his overall synthesis, here is his lecture on the four temperaments. These are associated with dominance of one or the other of the four levels of self. Choleric with the ego (which Steiner associates with "warmth", hence "fire"), the Sanguine with the astral body, the Phlegmatic with the etheric body, and the Melancholic with the physical body. The sequence is from most subtle (fire, traditionally "spirit") to most dense (earth, hence physical) elements

Steiner's thinking, being occult-theosophical based, has had little impact outside the specialised world of Anthroposophy. Of mucfh greater influence however was the personality classification of Hans Eysenck (1916 - 1997). Eysenck took the two gradations of extrovert-introvert and stable-unstable, to come up with four quadrants which could be associated with the classic four temperaments. Each quadrant is also are further divided by keywords, creating a 360° gradation as follows:

Another 20th century equivalent (although with only three temperaments) are Sheldon's Somatotypes. Additional recent temperament theories are reviewed by Richard Dagan.