- GUM:
- Go to Bedford Online (blog, right-hand column)
- Grammatical Sentences - Section 25 (who/whom)
- Read rules 25a, b, and c
- Do Ex. 25–1 with a neighbor (each copy into Notability)
- Victorian Poets (U7: Vic tab):
- Read Victorian Poets Intro together
- Begin reading each poet together, answering the following nail:
- What are some of the common ideas and tones expressed by Victorian poets . . . and why?
HW:
- (Tues) Journal: TIBE Quotes
- GUM: Begin intro to Victorian Era: take notes on each sections
- One topic sentence in your own words
- Two details for each section
- TIBE: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People - Some things to keep in mind:
- Wilde is using light satire to poke fun at Victorian duplicity (hypocrisy)
- private vs public life - or sinful reality vs moral appearance
- The name "Ernest" sounds like "earnest," which means "serious in intention, purpose, or effort; sincerely zealous; showing depth and sincerity of feeling."
- Begin Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (TIBE)
- As you read each act, identify one quote (or
snippets of dialogue) that you think criticize Victorian values and/or
institutions.
- Context: (Who are the characters?) What
is/are the character(s) saying?
- What do you think the
playwright (Wilde) is possibly saying through the quote?
HW:
- (Wed) Victorian Era notes
- One TS and two facts per section:
- "Peace and Economic Growth"
- "The Idea of Progress"
- "The Hungry Forties"
- "The Movement for Reform"
- "Decorum and Authority"
- "Intellectual Progress"
- "Questions and Doubts"
- "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
- "Revealing Reality"
- Intro to The Victorian Era
- Texts
- See Brit Lit - Historical Eras/Contexts (in Notability) or get it again in Google Classroom if necessary.
- Nails
- What were some of the main people, events, and ideas of the Victorian Period?
- Oscar Wilde
- Texts
- Nails
 |
| He's an English Man! |
- What is a comedy of manners and how does Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest qualify as such?
- What does the word "earnestness" or "earnest" mean and how does Wilde use it as a pun (the name "Ernest") that critiques Victorian virtues?
- How does the subtitle "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" contribute to Wilde's tone and thematic development?
- How does Wilde use epigram, hyperbole, understatement, and irony to satirize (critique) Victorian values and institutions?
- Lit Terms
- Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
- e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
- Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration
- e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
- e.g. "He ate everything in the house."
- Understatement - Says less than is intended
- e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
- e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde)
- Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.
- e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
- e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)
- e.g. "I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talks politics" (Wilde).
- Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical—sometimes satirical—statement designed to surprise the audience
- e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing / Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge)
- e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, / Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge)
- e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde).
- e.g. "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got
the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about
when to die" (Wilde).
- e.g. "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" (Wilde).
- e.g.
"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be
wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy"
(Wilde).
- e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).
- Victorian Poets
- Nails
- What are some of the common ideas and tones expressed by Victorian poets . . . and why?
Victorian Poets
From Trust to Skepticism and Denial
Trust in a transcendental power was characteristic of the early
Victorian writers. They were the immediate heirs of the Romantic idea of
a finite natural world surrounded by and interfused with an infinite,
ideal transcendental reality. The highest purpose of a poet, of any
writer, was to make readers aware of the connection between earth and
heaven, body and soul, material and ideal.
Fundamentally, as Thomas
Carlyle wrote in his essay “The Hero as Poet,” reality is spiritual, a
divine idea. “All Appearances, from the starry sky to the grass of the
field, but especially the Appearance of Man and his work, is but
vesture, the embodiment that renders it [the divine idea]
possible.” The poet penetrates to the divine idea and makes it palpable
in language and story to those of lesser power and vision. “That is
always his message; he is to reveal that to us—that sacred mystery which
he more than others lives ever present with.”
With some exceptions—Gerard Manley Hopkins is one and Christina
Rossetti another—writers younger than Alfred Tennyson and Ruskin found
it increasingly difficult to believe in an infinite power and order that
made sense of material and human existence. Some simply thought it
unnecessary. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Rudyard Kipling, in their
different ways, celebrated a relation between humans and the natural
world that could be joyous and even redemptive. Other writers at mid-century, sometimes reacting to explanations of the world that
excluded the spiritual, were saddened by what seemed to them to be the
withdrawal of the divine from the world. The dominant note of much
mid-Victorian writing was struck by Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover
Beach”: “The Sea of Faith,” Arnold wrote, had ebbed. There was no
certainty; or if there was, what was certain was that existence was not
governed by a benevolent intelligence that cared for its creatures.
By the end of the century, this skepticism and denial had become
pervasive in the works of Hardy, Housman, and others. Early- and
mid-Victorian novelists such as Dickens and George Eliot had dramatized a
human ideal achieved through sympathy and unselfishness. They made sad
or frightening examples of people like the Murdstones in
David Copperfield and Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner—all
hard surface and no soul. Their heroes and heroines learned to find
happiness in nurturing marriages and in small communities of family and
friends. But there were few such marriages and communities in the
fiction and poetry of Hardy and Housman. These late-Victorian writers
told stories of lovers and friends bereft and betrayed by
unfaithfulness, war, and the other troubles that humans add to the
natural troubles of mortal life.
Revealing Reality, Creating Coherence
Victorian writers had purposes as various as the ideas of reality
they believed in. Some writers wanted to scare or shame readers into
effective moral and political actions that they optimistically believed
were possible. Some wanted to show readers what it is like to live in a
pleasurable moment of intense feeling like that caught in a lyric or in
the interesting perspectives of a character in a dramatic monologue or
novel. Victorian literature entertained, informed, warned, and
reassured.
Even the playfulness of Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde shows the two
most important and consistent purposes or effects of Victorian
literature. The first was to make readers hope, or wonder if, reality
was really like that—really as whole and satisfying as in Tennyson’s In
Memoriam, as briskly coherent as in a poem by Browning or an essay
by Macaulay. The second principal purpose or effect was to demonstrate
that, however bleak and chaotic reality seemed to be, the writer and
reader could make a pleasing order in it. Even when a story or poem said
that the world was ugly or made no sense, the story or the poem could
seem beautiful and make sense to its audience. In every successful act
of writing and reading literature, one more satisfyingly coherent thing
in the world is created or discovered.
Finally, it is important to remember that these purposes and effects
happened first to readers who were living Victorian lives. Victorian
literature did not exist above or outside the comfortable and often
confident lives of its readers. Many of the people who read Dickens
settled down with his books after dining in rooms as garishly decorated
as the Veneerings’. Most of the young men and women who thrilled to
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sensualism and to Housman’s tender gloom
probably moved on to make proper and modestly happy marriages and to
find worthy occupations. People who were making a lot of money listened
to Carlyle and Ruskin telling them that they were foolish and damned.
People who were disturbed by how much money was being made listened to
Macaulay reminding them that a century or so before they might not have
been able to afford, or even to read, his book.
Victorian literature needs to be read not just as a comment on the
complexity of its culture, but also as an important part of that
culture. Its writers sent their words to work in the world to alter, to
reinforce, to challenge, to enlarge, or to temper the ideas and feelings
with which their contemporaries managed their lives.
__________________________________________________
Let's read the following Victorian poems, considering how each poet fits into the above historical overview. Consider also checking out a bit of each poet's biography by tripping over the hyperlinked name.
Extra poems for those who are interested:
 |
| Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
- NOT GUM: "The Victorian Age made one or two
mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is,
mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a
country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They
thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote
prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were
experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the
capitalist use of the populace — if we continue the capitalist use of
external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not
be on the dead." — G. K. Chesterton
- Intro to The Victorian Period (see Notability for Brit Lit - Historical Contexts pg. 67).
- Learning the context by teaching: Break into eight groups. Read your assigned section(s) listed below, and write down what you believe to be the three most important facts/quotes/statistics to share with the class . . . IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
- Groups
- "Peace and Economic Growth" and "The Idea of Progress"
- "The Hungry Forties"
- "The Movement for Reform"
- "Decorum and Authority"
- "Intellectual Progress"
- "Questions and Doubts"
- "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
- "Revealing Reality"
- Copy new Nails, Lit terms, and Vocab
- Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
- e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
- Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration
- e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
- e.g. "He ate everything in the house."
- Understatement - Says less than is intended
- e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
- e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde)
- Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.
- e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
- e.g. "If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life." (Oscar Wilde)
- e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)
- Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical--sometimes satirical--statement designed to surprise the audience
- e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing /
Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge)
- e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, /
Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge)
- e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde).
- e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).
HW: update Nails, Lit Terms, and Vocab in binder.
- Be sure you have your fifteen vocab words written out on a sheet of paper
- Take Victorian Period test
- When you finish, please use the remaining time to work quietly on your resume. Below are some links to help you generate ideas:
HW: work on resume. Due date? May 2nd and 3rd (next week)
Student Example:
Teacher Example
HW: study for Victorian Period test (Tues)
- Intro to Victorian Period
- The Importance of Being Ernest
- characters
- plot
- ironies
- Victorian Period poets
- Tennyson
- Housman
- Hopkins
- Lit Terms, your vocab words from TIBE assignment
- Please bring your 15 vocab words to class on a sheet of paper. I only want the words, not the definitions. You will be using some of them in a short essay on TIBE. You will not know which ones I'll ask you to use, so please know them all.
