The first person who uses the Byronic hero as a variant of the Romantic hero was Lord Byron (hence the name). In England, some authors focused on Lord Byron and a large number of Gothic novels and dramas contain a protagonist who is a Byronic hero.
As Gothic writers, Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe introduced in their novels the figure of the Gothic villan, which develops into the Byronic hero. As states in the web page http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACTE.htm, the characteristics of the Byronic hero would be:
- A rebel man.
- Possession of dark qualities instead of heroic virtues.
- Isolation from society.
- He is often moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue.
- Emotional and intellectual capacities superior from those of the average man.
- Characterized as arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive, etc.
- Characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed sexual crime.
For all of these characteristics the Byronic hero is considered a figure of repulsion but also fascination.
Examples of this byronic hero would be the ominous hero-villain of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and the brooding, guilt-haunted monk Schedoni of Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian(1797).
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Representation of women in Gulliver´s Travels
Many female critics have considered the book Gulliver´s Travels as a misogynist work. The many references to the female sex and body in Swift´s book are negative and they tend to degrade and disfigure the vision of women. Women are continuously separated from men in Gulliver’s accounts and are described in a superficial manner. The accumulation of these descriptions creates a sense of male superiority. These kind of references can be seen through the whole book.
Women are seldom discussed in the first book, during Gulliver’s first voyage to Lilliput. This shows the minimal role women play in this society. One of the few examples is the event of the Majesty´s apartment on fire. Gulliver says that it was "by the carelessness of a maid of honour, who fell asleep while she was reading a romance”. This illustrates the defects and bad habits of women.
In the second book, in his voyage to Brobdingnag, Gulliver shows his repulsion towards women´s physical appearance. He usually uses women as the objects of refusal to speak about an unpleasant vision of mankind in that country.
In Balnibari, a country included in the third part of the book, women are taxed in a different way than men. While men are taxed on characteristics such as wit, valour, and politeness, women are valued superficially: their most important virtues are fashion and beauty.
I have taken the ideas for this post from:
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Lilliputian Emperor vs. George I
This first book of Gulliver´s Travels by Jonathan Swift is full of political satire. Describing the Lilliputian Emperor, Swift is definitely playing with fire. There are some characteristics related to the Emperor of Lilliput which can be compared with the actual King of England at the time of the publication of the novel:
Gulliver kneeling down in front
of the Emperor of Lilliput
- The Lilliputian Emperor represents George I of England. Swift had no admiration for this king, and uses Lilliputian court practices allegorically to criticize the English monarch.
- George was a Whig king who actively persecuted the Tories, hence the whole high heel/low heel thing described in the novel. The Emperor of Lilliput is described as a partisan of the Low-Heels, just as King George I employed only Whigs in his administration; the Emperor's heir is described as having "one of his heels higher than the other", which describes the encouragement by the Prince of Wales (the future George II) of the political opposition during his father's life.
- The Emperor's vulnerability to manipulation by his ministers, Flimnap (Robert Walpole) and Bolgolam, implies that George I was easily influenced by his favorites.
- The Emperor of Lilliput also wants to enslave the people of Blefuscu, his neighbours. When Gulliver refuses to help him destroy Blefuscu, the Emperor starts to hate Gulliver. This may be a reference to George I's war with France and Austria over Spanish territories in the War of the Spanish Succession.
- The tiny emperor also represents tyranny, cruelty, lust for power, and corruption. This can be seen as a symbol of bad government at the time in England.
Monday, December 19, 2011
As we haven´t spoken a lot about The Beggar´s Opera up to now, I have decided to write this post about my role in this play, which is the vocabulary enricher, since probably I´m not going to have time to speak about it in class and I would like to share what I have found with all of you. I have concentrated my search on the vocabulary related to women, because they are very important through the whole play.
Page 2615: Peachum (about women in general): he calls women "hen partridges" (it means a short-tailed game bird with mainly brown plumage; in Spanish "perdiz") obviously in a pejorative way.
Page 2617: Peachum:
he calls his own daughter "a plague".
he uses the word "wench" (it means woman. It´s an archaic form to say "woman, girl").
Page 2618: Mrs. Peachum: she disagress with her husband regarding her daughter and the matter of marriage and she sings a song about women. She compares them to:
"(golden) ore" (here I´m not sure if it means: a naturally ocurring solid material from which a metal or valuable mineral can be extracted profitably; in Spanish, "mineral"; or if it is a monetary unit of Sweden, equal to one hundredth of a krona).
"guinea" (it is a former British gold coin with a value of 21 shillings).
Page 2619: Polly (about women in general): she says:
"a woman knows how to be `mercenary´" (it means primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; in Spanish "materialista, interesado").
"common" (it means common land, common law, but also a name for a prostitute).
Page 2620: Mrs. Peachum (about her daughter):
"slut" (it means prostitute).
"hussy" (it means an impudent or immoral girl or woman).
Page 2622: Peachum (within the song): "whore" (another way to say "prostitute").
Page 2628: Matt: he uses the word "bawd" (it means a woman who is in charge of a brothel; in Spanish "patrona de burdel").
Page 2630: in this page a scene where there are a lot of words related to women starts, but some of these words have been used and explained previously. Some new words that Macheath uses are:
"quality" (it means women of high social position).
"coquette" (it means a flirtatious woman).
Page 2632: Jenny (within the song): "gypsies" (it means a member of a travelling people speaking a language related to Hindi, and traditionally living by itinerant trade; in Spanish "gitana").
Macheath (when he is captured): "beast, jades, jilts, harpies, furies, whores" (all of them are disqualifying words for women).
Page 2643: Lockit (to his daughter): "strumpet" (it means "prostitute").
That´s all I have found related to women. I hope it is useful in order to understand better the play.
Page 2615: Peachum (about women in general): he calls women "hen partridges" (it means a short-tailed game bird with mainly brown plumage; in Spanish "perdiz") obviously in a pejorative way.
Page 2617: Peachum:
he calls his own daughter "a plague".
he uses the word "wench" (it means woman. It´s an archaic form to say "woman, girl").
Page 2618: Mrs. Peachum: she disagress with her husband regarding her daughter and the matter of marriage and she sings a song about women. She compares them to:
"(golden) ore" (here I´m not sure if it means: a naturally ocurring solid material from which a metal or valuable mineral can be extracted profitably; in Spanish, "mineral"; or if it is a monetary unit of Sweden, equal to one hundredth of a krona).
"guinea" (it is a former British gold coin with a value of 21 shillings).
Page 2619: Polly (about women in general): she says:
"a woman knows how to be `mercenary´" (it means primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; in Spanish "materialista, interesado").
"common" (it means common land, common law, but also a name for a prostitute).
Page 2620: Mrs. Peachum (about her daughter):
"slut" (it means prostitute).
"hussy" (it means an impudent or immoral girl or woman).
Page 2622: Peachum (within the song): "whore" (another way to say "prostitute").
Page 2628: Matt: he uses the word "bawd" (it means a woman who is in charge of a brothel; in Spanish "patrona de burdel").
Page 2630: in this page a scene where there are a lot of words related to women starts, but some of these words have been used and explained previously. Some new words that Macheath uses are:
"quality" (it means women of high social position).
"coquette" (it means a flirtatious woman).
Page 2632: Jenny (within the song): "gypsies" (it means a member of a travelling people speaking a language related to Hindi, and traditionally living by itinerant trade; in Spanish "gitana").
Macheath (when he is captured): "beast, jades, jilts, harpies, furies, whores" (all of them are disqualifying words for women).
Page 2643: Lockit (to his daughter): "strumpet" (it means "prostitute").
That´s all I have found related to women. I hope it is useful in order to understand better the play.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
The Queen of Amazons
As my role in the comment of the Rape of the Lock was characters collector, I was interested in writing about one of them, Thalestris.
In the poem Thalestris is Belinda´s friend and she is representing the historical Gertrude Morley, a friend of Pope and the wife of Sir George Browne.
I decided to write about her because she is the only one who encourages Belinda to think about the Baron´s misdeed as an affront to her honour and fight for the restore of her honour and her stolen lock.
All of us are supposed to know it, but we are not supposed to know who Thalestris was. According to the Greek mythology, she was the Queen of the Amazons, a race of warrior women who excluded men from their society. Thalestris brought 300 women to Alexander the Great, hoping to breed a race of children as strong and intelligent as he.
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Alexander met Thalestris, and they hunted lions together and had thirteen nights of lovemaking (thirteen is a sacred fertility number for moon worshippers, due to the number of moons in a year).She had hoped to have a mighty daughter from Alexander, but she died soon afterward without issue.
Pope used the name of Thalestris to represent that character probably due to the name suggests a fierce, combative woman. Thalestris´ attempts to rouse Belinda’s anger serve as a reminder of the behaviour Belinda should be demonstrating as the epic hero. In Belinda’s place, Thalestris is outraged. Her presence reinforces Pope’s manipulation of the epic genre, borrowing the Amazon from Greek mythology.
Pope is not the only one who used the name of Thalestris in one of his works. Thalestris is also the name of a character in Mary Renault´s historical novel The King Must Die and there is also a brief reference to the courtship between Alexander and Thalestris in Beaumarchais´" Le Mariage De Figaro".
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Slavery in English literature
Everybody can say that slavery is a huge theme to be treated, actually it is. During the eighteenth century several litarary works focused on that theme.
In the early 1660s, when the events described in Behn´s Oroonoko are supposed to have taken place, England was not yet a major power in the slave trade. The first European slave traders were from Portugal. Soon, people from other countries found out about the slave trade. Spain was one of the biggest slave trading nations. England was one of the latest countries to start slave trade, during the reign of Charles II. Soon England became one of the biggest slave trading nations. This had a quite big repercussion on the mentality of some English writers: some of them started to write about their discontent regarding this subject.
Oroonoko has been seen by many writers as the pioneering antislavery work. After Oroonoko, comments on slavery in the works of many major British writers of the eighteenth century, including Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, denounced slavery. These writers were generally driven by their humanitarian and philosophical concern.
Also it has to be said that not all white British authors opposed slavery, and many travel narratives by participants in the trade and writings of racist thinkers such as Edward Long were used to reinforce public support for the slave trade. However, the intellectual and social climate created by British antislavery writers in the 1700s did a great deal to make possible the abolition of slavery in Britain in the early nineteenth century.
In the early 1660s, when the events described in Behn´s Oroonoko are supposed to have taken place, England was not yet a major power in the slave trade. The first European slave traders were from Portugal. Soon, people from other countries found out about the slave trade. Spain was one of the biggest slave trading nations. England was one of the latest countries to start slave trade, during the reign of Charles II. Soon England became one of the biggest slave trading nations. This had a quite big repercussion on the mentality of some English writers: some of them started to write about their discontent regarding this subject.
Oroonoko has been seen by many writers as the pioneering antislavery work. After Oroonoko, comments on slavery in the works of many major British writers of the eighteenth century, including Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, denounced slavery. These writers were generally driven by their humanitarian and philosophical concern.
Also it has to be said that not all white British authors opposed slavery, and many travel narratives by participants in the trade and writings of racist thinkers such as Edward Long were used to reinforce public support for the slave trade. However, the intellectual and social climate created by British antislavery writers in the 1700s did a great deal to make possible the abolition of slavery in Britain in the early nineteenth century.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Presentation Post
Hi everybody!
This is my first post on my first blog. Perhaps all of you are wondering why that weird name, don´t you?Ok, I´m going to share with you my thoughts. We had to give our blogs a name related to the period of the Restoration, and as you know, APHRA BEHN was one of the most successful writers in that period (actually, her most remarkable work, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, was published during those years). But, probably, few people know that another name used for Aphra is "Affera", and that etimologically, Aphra means "dust". With this, my intention was to create a kind of wordplay, since although you do the dusting everyday, dust always stays everywhere, and this is what happens to Aphra Behn: she was and still is very influential for many writers, that is, "she always stays everywhere".
This is my first post on my first blog. Perhaps all of you are wondering why that weird name, don´t you?Ok, I´m going to share with you my thoughts. We had to give our blogs a name related to the period of the Restoration, and as you know, APHRA BEHN was one of the most successful writers in that period (actually, her most remarkable work, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, was published during those years). But, probably, few people know that another name used for Aphra is "Affera", and that etimologically, Aphra means "dust". With this, my intention was to create a kind of wordplay, since although you do the dusting everyday, dust always stays everywhere, and this is what happens to Aphra Behn: she was and still is very influential for many writers, that is, "she always stays everywhere".
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