American Multiculturalism

American multiculturalism

                    In 1965 the Watts race riots drew worldwide attention. The civil Rights Act had passed in 1964 and backlash was well under way in 1965: murders and others atrocities attended the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The “long hot summer” of 1966 saw violent insurrections in Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and San Francisco the very television seemed ablaze. The Black Panther party was founded. James Meredith, the first African American student to enroll at the university of Mississippi, was wounded by a white segregationist. Julian Bond, duly elected state Representative, was denied his seat in the Georgia House. Nearly all African American students in the south attended segregated schools, and discrimination was still unquestioned in most industries. Interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.

                 Now, nearly a half century later, evolving identities of racial and ethnic groups have not only claimed a place in the mainstream of American life, but have challenged the very notion of “race”, mere and more seen by social scientists as a construct invented by whites to assign social status and privilege, without scientific relevance. Unlike sex, for which there are X and Y chromosomes, race has no genetic markers. In fact, a 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard lewontin found that most genetic difference were within racial groups, not between them of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration patterns indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

                      Henry Louis Gates, jr., uses the world “race” only in quotation marks, for it “pretends to be an objective term of classification,”. Without biological criteria “race” is arbitrary. “Race” is still a critical feature of American life, full of contradictions and ambiguities; it is at once the greatest source of social conflict and the richest of cultural development in America. Is culture only “ethnic,” or can gays or lesbians make up a separate culture? Is it good be the preservation of difference rather than continued marginalization? These questions are debated in American studies, particularly which books should be taught in colleges and universities. Leon Botstein believes a combination of traditional and newer perspectives.

                     Bernal Diaz’s , “Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observers of the conquest and of the conquest….No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge the includes at least some construct of Asian history of Latin-American history, of African history”.

1. African American writers

                     An African American study is widely pursued in American literary criticism, from the recovery of eighteenth-century poets such as Phillis Wheatley to the experimental novella of Toni Morison. In shadow and Act (1964) novelist Ralph Ellison argued that any “viable theory of Negro American culture obligates us to fashion a more adequate theory of American culture as a whole”. This seems too obvious oven to mention today, when American arts, fashion, music, and so much besides is based upon African American culture, from Oprah to usher. But in Ellison’s day, the 1950s, such an argument was considered radical.

                 African American writing often displays a folkloric conception of humankind; a “double consciousness,” as W.E.B. Dubois called it, arising from bicultural identity; irony, parody, tragedy, and bitter comedy in negotiating this ambivalence; attacks upon presumed white cultural superiority; a naturalistic focus on survival; and inventive reframing of language itself as in language games like “jiving”,”sounding”,”signifying”,”playing the dozens”, and rapping. These practices symbolically characterize “the group’s attempt to humanize the world”, as Ellison put it. Ellison urged black writers to trust their own experiences and definition of reality. He also upheld folklore as a source of creativity; it was what “black people had before they knew there was such a thing as art”. This elevation black folk culture to art is important, and it led to divisions among black artist: for example , Zora Neale Hurston’s reliance upon folklore and dialect annoyed some of her fellow artist of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, who wished to distance themselves from such “roots” and embrace the new international forms available in literary modernism.

               A chosen people it is a great historical irony that black Americans adopted the same metaphor of the Hebrew people being led into a promised land of freedom that was earlier employed by the first white settlers in Virginia and New England, especially the puritans who were fleeing religious intolerance. It is further irony that their descendants turned to slavery and other exploitative economic systems to make their promise come even truer. As Bell correctly stresses, no other ethnic or social group in America has shared anything like the experience of American blacks: kidnapping, the middle passage, slavery, southern plantation life, omnicipation. Out of such painful cultural origins evolved African American literature, which may be divided into several major periods, comprising colonial, Antebellum, Reconstruction, Pre-world war 1, Harlem Renaissance, Naturalism and modernism, and contemporary.

                 The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937) signaled a tremendous upsurge in black culture, with an especial interest in primitive’s art. African American writing continued to enter the mainstream with the protest novels of the 1940s. Spurred by the depression and the failures of Jim Crow in the south, Naturalist author Richard Wright furiously attacked white American society at the start of the civil rights movement in works such as Native son. The 1960s brought Black power and the Black arts movement, proposing a separate identification and symbology. Major figures were Amiri Baraka, Margaret Abigail walker, Ernest Gaines, John Edger Wideman. Today, Toni Morrison shows irritation when she is constantly discussed as a “Black Writer” instead of merely a writer, Nevertheless, Morrison’s works such as The Bluest Eye gives reader riveting insights into the painful lives of her black protagonist thus they confront racism in all its frame in American society.

2. Latina writers

                It is also known as Mexican people, Puerto Racian, Chicano. We will use the term “Latina” to indicate a broad sense of ethnicity among Spanish-speaking people in the united state. Mexican American is the largest and most influential group of Latina ethnicity in the United States. The diversity  of Spanish speaking peoples- with different origins, nationalities, religions, skin color, class identification, politics, and varying names for themselves-has had an enormous impact upon “American” culture since its beginnings. These characteristic are now rapidly entering the mainstream of everyday life, so that “American literature” and “American studies” are now referred to as “literature of the Americans” or “studies of the Americas”. Roderigues, an Austin, Texas, resident, has made award-winning films Elmariachi to spy kids.

                   The history of the indigenous cultures of the New world is punctuated by conquests by Indian nation; European countries, especially Spain, Portugal, France, and England; then by the United States. What would become Mexican literature developed through combination of Spanish with indigenous art forms create new folk-culture and literatures. The majority of Mexican resident stayed in place, transformed into Mexican Americans with a stroke of the pen. ”code-switching” is a border phenomenon studied by linguists. Speakers who code-switch moves back and forth between Spanish and English, for instance, or resort to the “Spanish” of border towns, linguist note why and when certain words are uttered in one language or another. Liminality or “between-ness” is characteristic of postmodern experience but also has special connotation for Latina.

                   The Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s meant renewed Mexican American political awareness and artistic production. World war second had greatly accelerated the process of Mexican American acculturation. Latina fiction are Oscar Zeta Acosta, author of The Revolt of the cockroach people and Richard Roderigues, author of the memoir Hunger of Memory, and more recently a commentator on PBC’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Some Latinas, such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, author of the 1885 novel of California, The Squarter and the Don; were among the early writers; Josephina niggle 1985 novel Mexican village was the first literary work by a Mexican American to reach a general American audience. Yet until the 1970s only male authors were usually recognized. Latinas have the task of redefining not only ethnicity but also gender roles and histories different from their men. They provide insight into the machismo of Mexican culture, call for liberation of women from abusive and exploitative relationships, and celebrate the newly heard voices of Mexican American women writers. Three cultural archetypes have been central to Latina  la Malinche’s ,  la virgen de Guadalupe, and lallorona, are being newly interrogated today together they offer a range of Latina woman said into slavery by her parents, who eventually became the aide and lover of Herman de Cortes following his conquest of Mexico and his settlement in Veracruz.

                         Malinche’s hame has been synonymous with betrayal. Latina critics have sought to revise the prevailing view of Malinche’s bytramatizing hervic-timizaton and her mothering of the new mesfizo race essence of virtue self-sacrifice, and humanity beforegodla lallorona originates in Indian folklore. She is said to have been a woman who murdered her children after discovering her hus-band was unfaithful. And according to legend she was condemned to an eternal penance of sorrow. She wanders the roads at night crying for her lost children. Like the other female figures, she stans for a combination of the extremes of purity and guilt, “chicanas are malinches all,” write Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivera, “for they, too, are translator”. And there are of course more: Latina writer are some of the most energetically studied writers today.

3. American Indian literatures

                In predominantly oral cultures, storytelling passes on religious beliefs, moral values, political codes, and practical lessons of everyday life. For American Indians, stories are a source of strength in the face of centuries of silencing by Euro-Americans. Again, a word on names: Native American seems to be the term preferred by most academics and many tribe members, who find the term Indian a misnomer and stereotype-as in “cowboys and Indians” or “Indian giver”-that helped whites wrest the continent away from indigenous people. And yet “American Indian” is often preferred by Indians over “Native American” , as demonstrated in the names of such organizations as the American ondian movement (AIM) or the Association for the study of American Indian literatures (ASAIL), as Alan R. Velie notes.  Most Europeans identify themselves as French or Dutch or Basque rather than “European”, so too American identities are tribal.

                   Two types of Indian literature have evolved as fields of study Traditional Indian literature include tales, songs, and oratory that have existed on the North American continent for centuries, composed in tribal languages and performed for tribal audiences, such as the widely studied Winnebago Trickster cycle. Traditional literature was and is oral; because the Indian tribes did not have written languages. Far from the stereotype of the mute Indian, American Indians created the first American literatures. Traditional Indian literature is not especially accessible for the average reader, and it is not easy to translate from Cherokee into English. Contextual frames do not translate well, nor does the oral function of traditional literature. Furthermore, Indians do not separate literature from everyday life as a special category to be enjoyed in leisure time. A tribe’s myth and stories are designed to perpetuate their heritage and instruct the young, cure illnesses, ensure victory in battle, or secure fertile fields, it is literature that is a practical.

                   The earliest mainstream Indian author in the anthologies is Samson Occom, a Mohegan schoolmaster, who published as early as 1772.  Later writer of the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, such as William, Apess. Of particular interest to later generation was early twentieth-century writer Gertrude Bonnin, better known by her Dakota Sioux name Zitkala-sa. Creek Indian Joy Harjo transforms Indian poetic cadences into the hypnotic poetry of she had some Horses, where her lyrics tell “the fantastic and terrible story of our survival” though metaphors of landscape and the body.

4. Asian American Writers

                    Asian American literature was written by people of Asian descent in the United States, addressing the experience of living in a society that views them as alien. Asian immigrants were denied citizenship as late as the 1950s. Edward said has written of orientalism, or the tendency to objectify and eroticize Asians, and their work have sought to respond to such stereotyping. These culture present a bewildering array of languages, religions, social structures, and skin colors, and so the category is even more broad and artificial than Latina or American Indian Furthermore, some Asian American writers are relatively new arrivals in the united states, while others trace their American forebears for generation, as Mexican Americans do.

                        Asian American literature can be said to have begun around the turn of the twentieth century, primarily with autobiographical “paper son” stories and “confessions”. Paper son stories were carefully fabricated for Chinese immigrant men to make the authorities believes that their New World sponsors were really their fathers. Each tale had to provide consistent information on details of their fictitious village life together. Asian American autobiography inherited these descriptive strategies, as Maxine Hong Kingston’s the woman warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood among Ghosts illustrates. The fact that it was sold as nonfiction supported the latter  nation. The Liminality of genre here is significant. Identity may be individually known within but is not always at home in the outward community.

                                Chinese women make up the largest and most influential group of Asian American writers. Ironically, given the frequent cultural silencing of Asian women, they have produced an astonishing array of literary works, far outdistancing Asian men. The first to become known in the West tended to be daughters of diplomats or scholar or those educated in Western mission schools; two Eurasian sisters, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, were typical.  

What is structuralism ?

What is structuralism? 
         A method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human behavior. 
         According to philosopher Simon Blackburn structuralism is “the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. This relation constitutes a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture.

What is structuralism? How it is applied to the study of literature?

                It is the spinoff of certain growth in linguistics and anthropology. Saussure’s mode of the coexistent study of language was an attempt to formulate the grammar of a language from a study of parole. Using the Saussurian linguistic model, Claude Levi-strauss examined the customs and conventions of some cultures with a view of arriving at the grammar of those cultures. Structuralist criticisms aim at forming a poetics or the science of literature from a study of literary works. It takes for granted ‘the death of the author’; hence it looks upon works as self-organized linguistic structure. The best work in structuralist poetics has been done in the field of narrative. In literary theory, structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examing the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of west side story did not write anything “really” new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fail in love (a “formula” with a symbolic operator between them would be “boy + girl”) against the fact that they belongs to two groups that hate each other (“boy’s group-girl’s group” or “opposing forces”) and conflict is resolved by their death.

                   The utility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families (boys family + girl’s family) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other (boys + girl) and then the children commit suicide to abdication the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story structure is an ‘inversion’ of the first story’s structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the “novelty value of a literary text” can lie only in new structure, rather than in specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.   
 

The structuralist method of criticism

                Literature, being primarily a work of language, and structuralism in its part, being preeminently a linguistic method, the most probable encounter should obviously take place on the terrain of linguistic material. Sound, forms, words and sentences constitute the common object of the linguist and the philologist to much an extent that it was possible, in the early Russian Formalist, to define literature as a mere dialect, and to envisage its study as an annex of general dialectology.

                   Traditional criticism regards criticism as a message without code; Russian Formalism regards literature as code without message. Structuralism by structural analysis makes it possible to uncover the connection that exists between a system of forms and a system of meaning, by replacing the search for term analysis with one for over all homologies. Meaning yielded by the structural relationship with a given work. It is not introduced from outside. Genette believed that the structural study of ‘poetic language’ and of the forms of literary expression cannot reject the analysis of the relation between code and message. The ambition of structuralism is confined to counting feet and to observe the repetition of phonemes: it must also study semantic it must also study semantic phenomena which constitute the essence of poetic language. It is this reference that Genette writes: “one of the newest most fruitful directions that are now opening up for literary research ought to be the structural study of the ‘large unities’ of discourse, beyond the framework- which linguist in the strict sense cannot cross-of the sentence one would thus study systems from a much higher level of generality, such as narrative description and the other major forms of literary expression. These would be linguistic of discourse that was a trans-linguistics.

                   Genette believes that structural criticism is untainted by any of the transcendent reductions of psychoanalysis or Marxist explanation. He furthers writes,”it exerts, in its own way, a sort of internal reduction, traversing the substance of the work in order to reach its bone structure, certainly not a superficial examination, but a sort of radioscopic penetration, and all the more external in that it is more penetrating”. Genette observes relationship between structuralism and hermeneutics also. He writes, ”thus the relation that binds structuralism and hermeneutics together might not be one of mechanical separation and exclusion, but of complementarily: on the subject of the same work, hermeneutic criticism might speak the language of the assumption of meaning and of internal recreation, and structural criticism that of distant speech and intelligible reconstruction”. They would, thus, bring out complementary significations, and their dialogue would be all the more fruitful.    

                Thus to conclude we may say, the structuralist idea is to follow literature in its overall evolution, while making synchronic cuts at various stages and comparing the table one with another. Literary evolution then appears in all its richness, which derives from the fact that the system survives while constantly altering. In this sense literary history becomes the history of a system: it is the evolution of the function that is significant, not that of the elements, and knowledge of the synchronic relation necessarily precedes that of the processes.

Summary of Gerard Genette, “structuralism and literary criticism”

Criticism and theory

The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur working with is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary critical thing to do. Genette than makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a meta-literature, a literature on literature. Post-structuralist will change the distinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinction s to suggest that some literary criticism may be literature.

                   He then assigns literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message. Something one assume like Jacobson’s poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into Jacobson’s terms, the attention is one of the poetic rather than on the referential function, on medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not degrade the meaning-function of the language. Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the new critical understanding of ambiguity, the ‘half’, the attention to the constitution of meaning undritic is  a different aspect, that also belongs to erizes the literary: so it is that there is only a literary function, no literariness in only substantive or essential sense. Genette‘s sense of the ambiguity of literature is similar to jakobson’s in “linguistic and poetics”, in which essay he writes that “Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary features of poetry….Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous”.  
   

The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer’s, engineer, but in a locality therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as notion: the attitude, the outcome is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly clashed. Where the post-structuralist will different is in their disclaimer that anything can be clear : all concept are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise: while structuralism historically is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seen reasonable that structuralist criticism would then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption. First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and meaning in particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes structuralist methods as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices. Post-structuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.

                   Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary geners do. These are a comparison between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:

The reaction between forms and meanings,

The way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,

The cultural perception of reality, and

The systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

      Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form: Genette is at pains to point out that structuralism is not just about meaning, as linguistic is about meaning. It is a study of the usual version or association of meaning according to the relation of sign that institute the meaning- spectrum of the culture. When jackobson writes of the centrality of allegory to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning –function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in above. Finally in this section, Genette looks willing to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instances-“an analysis that could distinguish in them, by a play of superimpositions, variable elements and constant function, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to Saussurian linguistics, of syntagmatic relation and paradigmatic relations.

Structuralism is general tendency of thought: structuralism is, however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; structures are “systems of relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that It is discovering them”- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. As we can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of text or events in their own term, not in relation to external causes.

                   When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field meaning, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralists reading abdicate psychological, sociological, and such explanations. One can see new criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of themes, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of certain elements of tendril of the disposition, or net work or matrix of, of social meanings, which meanings constitute culture.

Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing itself: Genette mentions the other form of innate criticism, phenomenological criticism in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the allegorical method: the intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the author and the readers. This is a little confusing because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutic. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transferring obstruction of time, say , or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principle of order coherence and meaning, becomes prevailing literatures distant in place and time, children’s literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic. Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture.  

Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meaning to the meaning of the culture: Genette suggests that topic is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to-the conventional subjects and forms of the culture. Topics, or topoi, are structural in a sense psychological, Genette says, but collectively so, not individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been suggesting that ‘high ‘literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary a location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.

Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light: different genres Difference genres lead to different expectation of types of situations and action, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values: without   conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise. Creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which if them plays upon.

Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning system: structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. 

Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness :- structuralism  Studies literature historically by studying it as were in cross-section at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature as the Russian formalist thought; what the changes registers is the alterations of meaning within the culture. Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series of great works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more systematically, as the way in which a culture’s discourses with itself alters. The meaning of an individual work is ultimately a larger frame of cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and cultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alters but do not disrupt the system of literature a structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.   

               

Social History of the Victorian age

Social history of the Victorian age

Condition of life and labor

The hidden world of the Victorian working classes

                   Within what seemed a closed and rigid social structure the working classes constructed their own exclusive world, remote from the acquisitive, accumulative impulses of Victorian economy. In past, it was an escape from the harshness of real world, in part an attempt to create community in the anonymity of the Industrial town. Ultimately, through the growth of education and democracy, improvement in living standards, working condition, housing food and dress, the working classes became, to a degree, participant member of society, but for most of the period covered by these writing they were both excluded, and excluded themselves, from public life. Behind the great public institution and images of the Victorian age the working classes inhabited an inner, secret life which perpetuated traditional values and pattern of behavior, essentially of rural origin. Into the new urban industrial society. In past times almost the whole life, including work, had gone forward within the circle of the family; increasingly, as the nineteenth century progressed, though much less quickly than is commonly supposed, work became separated from the family and the home, and the new cult of work sought to erect it into the center of human existence. The working classes, it seems, for long rejected this unpalatable and alien notion.

Child labor

                   That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not be able to support itself if the children were not employed. In Defoe’s day he thought it admirable that in the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of the 4 was idle. The children of the poor were forced by economic condition to work, as Dickens, with his family in debtor’s prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children of between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school or a Sunday school; the others were working many of the more fortunate found employment as apprentices to respectable trades or as general servants there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour week for one halfpence per hour but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes between 15 and 22 year of age.

                   Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious condition, as their elders did. Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hour per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819. After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when “short time committees” organized largely by evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hour per day. After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to ten hour of work daily.

What cause an increase child labor during Victorian times?

      1)    Child labor played an important part of agriculture life-children always helped on the farm, on which fourteen hour days were not uncommon-so it’s not surprising that it continued when people moved from the country to the city.

     2)    Since mechanization often created condition in which adult male strength and skill lost much of its importance, children who were paid much less than adult males, became widely employable.

  3)    Young children had jobs in which their small size and agility made them better qualified than adult men and women. For example, Slater mill in Pawtucket, Rhode island, the first textile mill in America that began marked the beginning of the North America industrial revolution, employed young boys to dart rapidly moving machinery to fix broken threads while machines work at top speed, often at the cost of terrible accidents in which children lost hands or arms.

Victorian working women: sweated labor

                   There is modern myth to the effect that until quite recent years the vast majority  of women devoted themselves exclusively to home-making and the bearing and rearing of large families, and that only a few engaged in gainful employment. What has, in fact, changed is that more married women and more middle class women now work than formerly. Given the huge size of Victorian working class, the demographic consideration that because of the unequal sex ratio one in three women were “doomed” to spinsterhood anyway, and the fact that the wages of many semi-skilled and unskilled made workers were low or so uncertain that they would not support a family unless supplemented by the earnings of wives and children, it cannot be doubted that a high proportion of victorian women, both single and married, regularly engaged in paid work.

                   Victorian women provided a vast reservoir of labor, necessary for an expanding though immature economy whose fluctuations demanded additional workers at one time, fewer at another. The precise size of the female working population is impossible to know since the census returns almost certainly underestimated it; the numbers of women factory workers may well have been more as less accurate, domestic servants probably rather less so, but thousand of milliners and seamstresses, washerwomen, framework knitters, nailers, straw-plaiters and women worker in the score or more of ‘sweated’ trade where they worked in their own homes, sometimes whole-time, sometimes part-time, must have escaped the census investigators, especially when it was feared that penalties might follow from a full declaration of income. The census of 1851, the first to attempt to count occupations in any detail, gave a total of 2.8 million women and girls over the age of ten in employment out of a female population of 10.1 millions, forming a proportion of 30.2 percent of the whole labor force. Domestic service took by far the greatest number in 1851-905,000, not including 145,000 washerwomen and 55,000 charwomen.

 Women of the “lower” working class

                   The lower working classes were distinguished from the upper by having less education, no pretensions to gentility, fewer resources or opportunities and, in some cases, simply less luck. Unlike many other towns, Hastings had no large industry except fishing, a male occupation. some women prepared and sold fish, or male and repaired nets, but most lower working class women were engaged in servicing the wealthy residents and visitors in one way or another. Roughly half of all employed women in Hastings were in domestic service. Others were barmaids, waitress and chambermaids. In 1860 there were strikes by some of the town’s washerwomen.

                  While ‘upper’ working class women rented shops, the ‘lower’ hawked on the streets and beaches. They sold flowers, toffee apples, ice-cream, cold drinks, shrimps, oysters and whelks, and offered donkey and goat rides and even fortune-telling, sometimes by budgerigar. For some late nineteenth century photographs.

                  For recreation they crowded into taverns, the women joining in the noisy revelry. Drunkenness was a problem, as was violence. For example see the Hasting’ newspaper report from the 1850s.

                  One of the problems in Hastings was the seasonal nature of women’s work in the town: in the winter months many who made a living from selling goods and service to visitors had no income. A good number were obliged to accept charity or to reply on almost as-poor relation. Some slipped permanently into the underclass. Low-class prostitution was rife throughout the mid-century and Hastings had its share.

Race, class, and gender issues

Race and class prejudices and the childlike

                   Fricans and other supposedly inferior groups, such as Irishmen, Indians, Maoris, and women, all displayed, it was held, childlike characteristic. Thus The Saturday Review of 8 September 1866 could refer to the Indian as “childish and impulsive”, the term impulsive referring to lack of weighed, considered thought. Similarly, Francis Galton’s “Hereditary Talent and character” in the 1865 Macmillan’s magazine argued that “the Negro has strong impulsive habits, and neither patience, reticence, nor dignity”. This prejudice had behind it the scientific theories of arrested development and recapitulates the adults of more primitive ancestors. If Irish adults, for example, display “child-like” emotions or conduct, then they are clearly closer to primitive early man.                      

                   Herbert Spencer similarly argued that “the intellectual traits of the un civilized….are traits recurring in the children of the civilized’. This emphasis upon the childlike qualities of supposedly lower races certainly parallels the frequent references one comes across of the immature working classes. Repeatedly one reads that they had no thought for the morrow that they wallowed in instant gratification, and that they were irresponsible, impulsive, and self-indulgent, spending a week’s wages on ribbons or a hat.

Social class

                   Class is a complex term in use since the late eighteenth century, and employed in many different ways. In our context classes are the more or less distinct social groupings which at any given historical period, taken as a whole, constituted British society. Different social classes can be distinguished by inequalities in such areas as power, authority, wealth, working, and living condition, life-style, life-span, education, religion, and culture.

                   Early in the nineteenth century the labels “working classes” and “middle classes” were already coming into common usage. The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced into on “upper class” which tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process. The increasingly powerful middle classes, however, undertook organized agitation to rapidly this situation: the passage of the reform act of 1832 and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 were intimation of the extent to which they would ultimately be successful.             

                   The working classes, however, remained shut out from the political process, and became increasingly hostile not only to the aristocracy but to the middle classes as well. As the industrial revolution progressed there was further social stratification. Capitalist, for example, employed industrial workers who were one component of the working classes, but beneath the industrial workers was a submerged “under class”- contemporaries referred to them as the “sunken people”- which lived in poverty. In mid-century skilled workers had acquired enough power to enable them to establish trade unions which they to further improve their status, while unskilled workers and the underclass beneath them remained much more susceptible to exploitation, and were therefore exploited.

                   The basic hierarchical structure comprising the “upper classes”, the “middle classes” the “working classes”, and the impoverished “under class” remained relatively stable despite periodic upheavals, and despite the Marxist view of the inevitability of class conflict, at least until the outbreak of world war 1 . A modified class structure clearly remains in existence today.

 Liberalism and cultural shock in the Victorian age

                   Most textbooks correctly stress that the liberalism characterized the Victorian legislative mind and was central to Victorian middle-class needs and national ideals. Here are some of the legislative changes in the period of the “age of Reform”:

1829- Catholic emancipation act enables catholic to sit in parliament.

1832- Parliamentary Reform act enfranchises the middle classes; now                                one in five adult males have the vote.

1833- Ten of 22 church of Ireland sees are united, that is, abolished.

1834- Poor law Amendment act replaces outdoor relief by poor houses.

1835- Municipal corporation act widens suffrage for town government.

1838- Character of London University creates a non-denominational university.

1850- Catholic hierarchy restored in England.

1854, 1856- Oxford and Cambridge open to non conformist undergraduates

1858- Jewish emancipation act: Jews can now enter parliament

                   Each of these act, which contributed importantly to the progress towards a much more diverse and open society, also produced a sharp reaction. After all, what an enormous challenge to the Anglican establishment this reform represented and what lightning changes. Nonconformists, catholic, and Jews now voted in a parliament responsible for Anglican ritual and organization; the Catholic Church was allowed, for the first time since Mary Tudor’s day, to re-establish its entire hierarchy. Nonconformists could now enroll in those seminaries for Anglican ministers, oxford and Cambridge; and, by the Reform Act, and town governments and possessed a non-denominational university of their own in the nation’s capital. These reforms also challenged established society as well as the established church. Liberalism thus represented the threat of pluralistic, relativistic, open society.

Arts and culture

Royal academy and other galleries

Art student

Music:-

Social taradiddles

                   Social taradiddles George du Maurier scanned image and text by George p. Landow. This is one of du Maurier’s many satiric commentaries in the common combination of pretentiousness with ignorance of the arts. It is also exemplifies the action of what Michel Focult terms the “author function”- the process by which a name becomes a guarantee of supposed aesthetic quality and aesthetic homogeneity.

Comparison between Creator and Creature (Frankenstein)

Comparison between creator (victor) and creature (monster)

Victor Frankenstein

          Victor frankenstein‘s life story is at the heart of Frankenstein. A young Swiss boy, he grows up in Geneva reaching the works of the ancient and outdated alchemists, a background that serves him ill when he attends university at Ingolstadt. There he learns about modern n science and, within a few fascinated with the “secret of life”, discovers it, and brings a hideous best friend, and wife; he also indirectly causes the deaths of two other innocents, including victor’s father. Though torn by remorse, shame, and guilt, victor refuses to admit to anyone the horror of what he has created, even as he sees the ramifications of his creative act spiraling out of control.        

                   Victor changes over the course of the novel from an innocent youth fascinated by the prospects of science into a disillusioned, guilt ridden man determined to destroy the fruits of his arrogant scientific endeavor. Whether as a result of his desire to attain the godlike power of creating new life or his avoidance of the public arenas in which science is usually conduct, victor is doomed by a lack of humanness. He cuts himself off the world and eventually commits himself entirely to an animalistic obsession with revenging himself upon the monster.

                   At the end of the novel, having chased his creation ever northward. Victor relates his story to Robert Walton and then dies. With its multiple narrators and hence, multiple perspectives, the novel leaves the reader with contrasting interpretations of victor: classic mad scientist, transgressing all boundaries without concern, or brave adventurer into unknown scientific lands, not to be held responsible for the consequences of his explorations.  
        

The monster

                 The monster is victor frankenstein‘s creation, assembled led from old body parts and strange chemicals, animated by a mysterious spark. He enters life eight feet tall and enormously strong but with the newborn. Abandoned by his creator and confused, he tries to integrate himself into society, only to be shunned university. Looking in the mirror, he realizes his physical grate sequences, an aspect of his persona that blinds society to his initially gentle, kind nature. Seeking revenge on his creator, he kill’s victor’s younger brother. After victor destroys his work on the female monster murders victor’s best friend and then his new wife.

                   While victor feels unmitigated hatred for his creation, the monster shows that he is not a purely evil being. The monster’s eloquent narration of events reveals his remarkable sensitivity and benevolence. He assists a group of poor peasants and saves a girl from drowning, but because of his outward appearance, he is rewarded only with beatings and disgust. Torn between vengefulness and compassion, the monster ends up lonely and tormented by remorse. Even the death of his creator-turned-would be-destroyer offers only bittersweet relief: joy because victor has caused him so much suffering, sadness because victor is the only person with whom he any sort of relationship.

The relationship between Frankenstein and his creature 

                In Mary Shelley’s romanticism era novel Frankenstein, the title character and the monster, he creates are linked in a complex, multidimensional relationship. On one hand the Frankenstein monster is subservient to his creator, who is the only man with enough knowledge to create another of his kind. On the other hand, however, Frankenstein is subservient to his creation because it is physically stronger than he and able to murder his whole circle of family and friends without putting forth much effort.  In addition, their relationship is not marked by a simple “hero-villain” pattern. Neither of these men are exactly heroes, but neither of them are anti-heroes. The author sympathizes with both while condemning them both simultaneously.

                   After relating his tragic story of being rejected by Felix’s family, the Frankenstein creatures becomes his creator to have mercy on him and to do him a favor. “He continued, ‘you must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This you alone can do”. In this instance, Frankenstein’s creature is putting himself in a submissive position. By saying,

         “This you alone can do”.

The creature is admitting victor’s intelligence and ability. Victor is the only man who can create him a female companion, which he believes is absolutely necessary to his being, and so the monster must assume a role of submission and reliance upon victor’s graciousness.

                   Yet readers can also see how, at the same time Frankenstein creature is submissive to his creator, the creator’s fate is in the hand of his creature. Thus, the creature forewarns him moments later what could happen if victor does not complete with his demands:”have a care; I will work at your destruction, nor finish until I desolate your heart, so that you shall curse the hour of your birth”. The creature knows that he is in a powerful position at the stringer of the two, and can threaten victor Frankenstein because of it, so much so that victor will wish he had never been born.

                   The creature method of desolating victor’s heart is not to kill him directly, but to kill those victor loves. The monsters “domination-via-threats” approach is emphasized later in the novel, when victor decides not to create another monster. The monster confronts him, saying “remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night”. This implies that on Frankenstein’s first night of being married to his adopted sister, the creature plans to be there to kill her. The monster also restates his dominance over victor in this scene. “You are my creator; but I am your master; obey:”. Here the Frankenstein monster reasserts this belief that, although victor created him, he is under no obligation to obey him. He believes that his physical powers makes him victor’s master, despite the fact that no master who he kills to spite his creator, he can never be happy, for he will never find companionship.

                   Further, both victor Frankenstein and his creation are worthy of reader’s sympathy and contempt. Frankenstein deserves ridicule for assembling a living being that he instantly neglects for the simple fact that he looks unsightly. His neglect causes Frankenstein to roam Europe in search of guidance and friendship, neither of which does he ever receive. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel sorry for Frankenstein when all of his loved ones die at the hands of his creature. His reason for not creating another monster is valid: he does not creating a race of beasts to terrorize the world forever. He does not want to be responsible for the death of humanity, so his refusal to create a female monster makes sense.

                   Frankenstein’s creature also deserves ridicule. His response to receiving mistreatment is to murder innocent people, and this is also unacceptable. If everyone in the world who ever mistreated and misunderstood went on killing sprees, Homo sapiens would cease to exist. And yet, much his like creator, it is hard not to have sympathy for the poor creature will. Like anyone else, the Frankenstein monster craves companionship from another, if not from his creator, then from another being created with his same proportions. Victor’s refusal, although logical, is saddening.

                   As such, neither character can be classified into black –and white categories of hero or anti-hero. They both have perpetrated many evils against each other, and they both have suffered so much that readers cannot help but offer their sympathies to both. The real enemy as victor Frankenstein declares at the end is ambition; “seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent, one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries”. Ambition drives Frankenstein to create the monster in the first place and without it the it the tragic ending of the story could have been avoided completely. Had he contented himself with ordinary scientific pursuits like the rest his colleagues, none of his family would have been murdered. As Frankenstein has learned by the time he lies on his death bed, even a purely innocent intention can blossom into a full-blown disaster.

According to chap-10

                   The chapter again focuses on the landscape and proves to be good diversion for him after all that he has been through. The next morning it is raining in torrents and the mood is rather melancholic. The weather is again symbolic of victor’s circumstances. The fact that he chooses to ascend to the summit shows his courage and determination to overcome the difficulties which may later come his way.

                   Victor is not allowed any peace of mind. Just as he is beginning to enjoy himself, the monster approaches him. His first reaction is to fight with the monster. This is a strong indication of his rage. The monster, having expected this reaction, is quite calm. He is now in control of the situation. He manages to convince victor to think about his duty to him and threaten him with dire consequences if he does not complete with his wishes.

                   The monster has every reason to hate victor. He claims how he was “benevolent” and “good” but it is forced to hate because they despise him. It may be noted that the monster is quite human as he reflects and interprets his circumstances. The comparison he drowses with Milton’s Satan is interesting. However, the monster was not guilty of a transgression when victor rejected him. Indeed, victor had tried to play god in creating a superhuman creature. And the fact he abandon oned him gave that creature the liberty to despite his creator and to cause him harm.

                   The monster plea to be heard is quite genuine. He is in a desperate condition because his creator rejects him. Like victor, he has been isolated and lonely. He, too, is entitled to some kind of justice. Victor realizes that, as his creator, he “ought” to make him happy before complaining of his “wickedness’.

What is the different between creator and creature?

                  Victor grew up with a loving family Who cared for him while the monster was deserted by victor to fight for himself, victor acts as more of monster than the creation, the monster is self educated from watching the Delacey’s and victor was taught in school, victor loved and was loved but the monster never experienced anything but societies hatred toward him. Victor created the monster, so the monster is reflecting man made things, also the monster is more kind, considerate and an all round great human being, where as victor is selfish, self centered and totally the opposite of the monster, the monster doesn’t deserve the title he has, unlike victor. Victor is kind of compared to god, and the creature to Adam. The creature is shunned by his own creator, even though he means well. Victor denied the creature the happiness and love necessary for growth, thus the creature turned “evil”. Victor did not take responsibility for his creation, and thus the crimes of the creature can be blamed on victor.

Compare and contrast

Analyzing the creature. The creature, or” frankenstein’s monster “, is a lonely, sympathetic and largely misunderstood character. Abandoned by his creator-the closest thing to a father figure that the creature has-the creature, shocked by the horrified reaction of society to its physical appearance with evilness. “As I fixed my eyes on the child, I saw…..divine benignity to one expressive of disgust and affright”.

Analyzing Frankenstein. Frankenstein is ambitious, preoccupied with his work, and obsessive. It is this drive to succed that eventually pushes his experimentation too far. While it is often thought that the creature is the villain of the piece, in fact, upon reading Shelley’s novel it becomes clear that victor Frankenstein himself must take some degree of responsibility for the monster’s crime. Victor shows a selfish self-interest in his experimentation; he does not shoulder the monumental responsibility of his action because he is driven only by ambition and not by a regard for others:”I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart”.

Compare the two characters. Despite their obvious difference, there are certain distinct parallels between Dr. Frankenstein and his creation. Both creator and creation share a love of nature, a thirst for knowledge, and a desire for revenge. “The nearer I approached to your habitation, the more deeply did I feel the spirit of revenge enkindled in my heart”.

Look for similarities. Both Frankenstein and his monster see themselves as wronged. Both have the desire and the indignation to love, but their loving intention is swiftly transformed by hate and isolation. The novel focuses upon the redemptive power of love. Both admire beauty (Elizabeth’s), and are required by the physical appearance of Frankenstein’s monster. “How can I describe my emotion at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and are I had endeavored to form?

Focus upon notion of isolation. Both become isolated from main society: victor is isolated by his obsession with work, and because the creature kills off those he loves. The creature is isolated because of his appearances. Both start out with good intention: victor’s love of nature encourages him to study natural science but his ambition soon leads him astray. The creatures instinct is to love and be loved, but the reaction to his appearance is one of hatred and repulsion, so it reaction in kind. “This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind”.

Contrast the two. While victor Frankenstein grew up in a loving family environment, surround by the love of Elizabeth and the friendship of Henry Clerval, the creature is abandoned almost immediately. Dr. Frankenstein fails to show his creation the same love and support that he himself experience in his own upbringing. “No human being could have passed a happies childhood than myself”.

Consider the character’s upbringing. The story of Frankenstein plays with the themes of human nature, nature and human needs. Essentially, victor has a parental duty to nature his creation, which he fails to do.

Ironment, surround by the love of Elizabeth and the friendship of Henry Clerval, the creature is abandoned almost immediately. Dr. Frankenstein fails to show his creation the same love and support that he himself experience in his own upbringing. “No human being could have passed a happies childhood than myself”.

Consider the character’s upbringing. The story of Frankenstein plays with the themes of human nature, nature and human needs. Essentially, victor has a parental duty to nature his creation, which he fails to do.