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摘录 | 维多利亚时代文学的核心概念
核心概念包括建筑、身体、儿童、城市与城市化、阶级、服装、消费主义、罪与罚、死亡、颓废主义和唯美主义、疾病、家庭生活、药品、教育、帝国与帝国主义、家庭、食物与饥荒、凝视、性别、哥特、个体主义、工业、法律、疯癫、国家、他者、拉斐尔前派、宗教、交通、旅行、战争
Preface
ix
维多利亚时期的刻板印象有时会导致误解，但是
the Victorians are typically described as having lived rather drab lives that were little more than combinations of puritan ethics and repressions: severe moral probity, restraint, reserve, family values, a certain dourness or lack of humour, uncomfortable attitudes towards sex, stony faces in photographs, and black clothes.
liberalism and sense of industry-concepts such as hard work, bustle, determination, energy, purpose and progress
①practical philosophies such as self-help (self-sufficient individualism) and philanthropy(idea of charity or goodwill to others) 这两点常见的美德时常与上述刻板印象相抵
②views about the prudish nature (sexual modesty) of the victorians→in contrast, prostitution and pornography were rampant, homosexuals/tranvestites; and sex was discussed everywhere
x
Victorians were unparalleled as innovators in the sciences and technologies
Railway system
British time was consequently forced to become synchronized and standardized→hourly structure and routine in daily life
infrastructure construction
health and sanitation (sewerage污水处理系统)
Radical intellectual achievements (to change people’s ideas about life): 1) the communist manifesto 2)the origin of species (natural selection) 3)Freud-psychoanalysis(psychosexual development, repression and the unconscious)
xii
aside from Marx and Engels
“Condition of England” or “Social Problem” novels of the 1830s-1850s
代表作Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dcikens’s Hard Times
xiii
important shifts in the economic infrastructure of Victorian society
“hungry forties”-heavy tariffs on imports of corn-starvation and emigration of millions from Ireland
the great exhibition(1851)-exhibition of great machines and industrial achievements, but ignored the human cost of Victorian industrialism
Introduction
1
But the Victorians experienced a different kind of religious faith, one which competed with a whole range of other key concepts: industrialism, capitalism, science, evolution, consumerism, the law, the nation, the ideology of family…
3
维多利亚时代开始的时间恰好在1829年Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force建立之后the police force heralded the new Victorian age of greater state discipline and a clampdown on crime
留存的问题：small population enfranchised to vote; enforcement to workhouse systems and orphanages (see Oliver Twist)
Corn Law→ “the hungry forties” → which eventually lead to 1) cheaper bread for starving Victorians 2) Britain’s free-trade system (即，laissez-faire?)
Power shifting from the old landowner class to a burgeoning class of industrialists, manufacturers and tradesmen→such a shift transformed Victorian Britain from a largely rural and agricultural society, based on a monopoly of landed and state-controlled interests, to an urban and industrial society, based on an increasing culture of individualism and capitalism→1850s-60s, temporary prosperity and peace
4
Class tensions also intensified
Victorians lived under a capitalist system of free-trade economics which was at the increasing mercy of free-trade economic which was at the increasing mercy of periodic booms and slumps
1870s, ‘the great depression’, all the way to mid-1890s
4~5
尽管1830s-40s期间有部分相对保守的主张宗教的运动，越来越多人收到理性和科学的影响，整体来说，led to the steady retreat or rather the displacement of faith
欧洲（只有一件，即和法国联手对俄国的克里米亚战争）和非欧洲的战事（扩张）
6
1870 W.E. Forster’s Education Act-eventually ensured that elementary education for all British children was compulsory
1870 women gained better monetary rights (after marriage)
1878 women permitted separation from their husbands on the grounds of assault or cruelty
1882 women gained full rights over their property
1870s-1880s so-called “Woman Question”-New Women drama and literature of the day
1885 age of consent ↗16岁
growing anxieties about gender roles, promiscuity and sexuality in general
8
Architecture
Greco-Roman facades-the lustre and splendour of classical empires, historical and forward-looking aspect;
neo-Gothic architecture-a more romanticized and complex layering of the nation’s relationship to its past (obsession with mediaevalism)
the majority of British churches were bult in Gothic/neo-Gothic style-because it’s cheaper
John Ruskin: the significance of the relationship between architecture and nationhood: “all good architecture is the expression of national life and character”
9
代表建筑: Houses of Parliament
→Victorians: masters at moving ‘Britishness’ forwards by constantly looking backwards.
With all its robust stateliness and imploring spires and pinnacles, the building displays a conspicuously Victorian sense of ascendant world power and optimism; also an air of religious grandeur
10
a separation between home and “working space”-thus the integrity of ‘home’ as a space of privacy and intimacy became deeply enshrined in Victorian culture (每个房间固定的功能——作家对于这种标准的调侃)
the comfort and shelter provided by the house might also mean it is a place of restriction and correction.对于“家”概念的延伸和解读（e.g. Jane Eyre “Red Room”）
12
(as in Eliot’s Middlemarch, the Victorian family home is an emblem of the social and cultural architecture of patriarchal imprisonment)
Body
the bodies of prostitutes, lunatics and criminals under supervision
13
by drawing on radical new ideas about the body, the Victorians projected the notion of an evolutionary scale onto their social hierarchy.
ideal female body(asexual, passive and sedentary) and the male ideal (of action, energy, vigour, strength and purpose, of power and prowess)
a fit and robust male body was widely considered to fortify the mind and purify the soul in the nineteenth century, and this partly explains the Victorian’s preference for the athletic and hence productive physique.（原则同“罪犯身体状况与精神之间关系的研究”）
14
Around mid-century, Victorian obsessions with the body converged with a movement which promoted religious and missionary ideals about what constituted ‘manliness’ in the period: “Muscular Christianity” 体型&男性气质与宗教理型相关
15
Childhood
many of those children from impoverished and working-class backgrounds that escaped early deaths, either from hunger or disease, were forced into employment.
15
from as young as four upwards, children worked in the nation’s factories, mill and mines, in agriculture, as domestic servants, street vendors and chimney sweeps, generally in hazardous and unhygienic conditions. Other children drifted into vagrancy and crime
17
children were consequently perceived to be at the ‘purest’ (also non-sexual) stage of human development, and this marked them as a prelasarian (unfallen) ideal, which in turn mean they signified a nostalgia for an equally ‘natural’ and ‘purer’ national past—a pastoral stage of a preindustrial idyll(a legacy of eighteenth-century conceptions of childhood)
primitive-noble savage (a colonial term to describe other races)
the infantilization of races(UK-mother; colonized countries-children关系的建立&概念的产生)
18
Dickens’s nostalgia for the innocence of childhood, as the logic of his narrative implies, is ultimately a critique of the oppressions he associated with Victorian childhood.
Cities and Urbanization
19
the rapidly rising population has caused massive problems in terms of housing, health and sanitation
奢华的中产阶级建筑，与肮脏混乱的底层居住区
working0class houses were badly built from poor materials, and initially they lacked water and sanitary facilities
20
a class-based society. class and status increasingly began to be defined in terms of the material pleasure of bricks and mortar. →the city was partially design for the political purpose of separating classes.
中产阶级将自己与“上层贵族”与“下层工人”区分开来，这一点也体现在他们对于住宅/住宅区的规划上面(illustrated by their preference for detached and semi-detached housing in city and urban areas)
21
During the course of the nineteenth century, architects and planners encouraged more ‘open’ layouts in inner-city areas→thus the population could be placed under greater surveillance and discipline by the newly established Metroplitan Police (1829)
22
the Dials Londoners (一个很著名的脏乱差的伦敦中心区，狄更斯的作品有很多选材都取自这里；remaining question is why) are part of the idle and ‘lounging’ lasses that became such an affront to the purposeful and industrious Victorian middle classes who, steeped in their work ethic, were also popularized and satirized in best-selling literature such as Dickens’s (作为典型维多利亚中产阶级的对立面，作为被维多利亚中产阶级被污名化的对象，同样通过诸如迪金斯的书获得了不朽的名声和追捧) .
the London labyrinth of narrow streets, walkways, tenements, alleys and wynds, and the homes they gave to the many burglars, prostitutes, orphans, pickpockets…etc.
这同时也是我对福尔摩斯很着迷的一点；福尔摩斯并非典型的中产阶级，他许多不修边幅的习惯，游走于灰色地带不受任何一边的定义和束缚（对比他喜欢呆在体制内的老哥）；他的形象无形之中形成对于典型维多利亚中产阶级形象及价值观的嘲讽，同时，其本身一正一邪的天性是与维多利亚后期整体的气质是相符的，一种自我矛盾、无法调解却又平衡的结构
Class
the term ‘class’ became general currency in the nineteenth century, when it replaced the old language of ‘orders’ and ‘estates’
with industrialization, a new Britain emerged, which divided Victorian society into roughly three sections which comprised an upper class (the old aristocracy and gentry), a middle class (indusrialists, manufacturers, professionals such as lawyers, bankers and doctors), and a working class, which by the 1850swas so massive that it consisted of over half of Britain’s adult population.
23
The system was further supplemented by an underclass of criminals, vagrants, idlers, scroungers, ne’er-do-wells, street-children, and prostitutes, those not so easily assimilated into any economically definable group
流动的社会阶层（但流动是有度的）；less rigid than is generally supposed
marriage across class lines was still considered taboo
the rise of public schooling in later-victorian society was one important factor in the unsettling of distinctions at the more well-heeled end of the Victorian class system
正是在维多利亚时期，British aristocracy eventually lost the real economic and political power it once had in society, largely because of the post-1875 agricultural depressions, the slow emergence of an unpropertied electorate, and the increasing prominence of the industrial middle classes…
Class-Power之间紧密的联系
the concept of class is bound up with ‘nationhood’, with Englishness, and by extension that some classes in society are more English than others阶级的观念与“国家”和“民族身份”紧密相连
维多利亚时期小说的教育作用(Bildungsromance)(在individualism和bourgeois ‘free trade’条件下)
但需要注意的是，‘benign individualism is itself a middle-class construction’
Clothing
After the French Revolution, British men’s clothing…became more ‘democratic’ and less flamboyant. (跟division of labour in society有关)
男性愈发外出工作(dark, sober and functional for the men)，女性(leisurely and cumbersome, often extravagantly colourful for the women)更多被禁锢在家中
26
clothes (e.g. the state of one’s trousers, the cut of one’s jacket…)--distinguishing status or class, gender roles; also had a formal and ceremonial role
the purchase of clothing was still, for many, a luxury
27
Victorians in general were fond of the colour and sensuousness associated with Oriental clothing and exotic dyes.
Consumerism
29
much of this wealth was generated abroad and from the legacy of slavery (abolished in 1833-34)
Victorian capitalism established the idea of ‘the consumer’ as an endlessly desirous individual (relation to Marx’s idea of fetishism)
It was in capitalist/consumerist ideology, the individual ‘subject’ also becomes an ‘object’ constructed in and by the language of the text.
30
书的出版和印刷were not exempt from the Victorian consumerist enterprise
at the same time that English Literature rose as a scholarly discipline in the Victorian period, increasing rates of literacy, stimulated the commodity status of books as consumer items, and books became cheaper and cheaper as the century wore on.
But the distribution of novels was largely dominated, as it had been from the 1770s onwards, by commercial circulating libraries.
Other wise, novels were serialized in instalments through magazines and periodicals, a system which created the cliffhanger motif so beloved of consumers of fiction and popular culture in the nineteenth century. Books, with all the reassurance or escapism they offered, consequently became an increasingly successful commodity in their own right, and at any rate very desirable objects for consumers
It has also become a commonplace argument that realist Victorian fiction was initially written and ‘consumed’ by the capitalist bourgeoisie, whose largely patriarchal idea of the ‘real’ world was thereby at once reaffirmed or constructed by the same process.
the rise of the novel as commodity at once became more profitable for the publishing houses and more ideologically dominant throughout Victorian society. 书作为流通商品有着巨大的商业利润
Crime and Punishment
31
罪名和罪行极为复杂庞大
crime figures for prostitution, especially child prostitution, reached unprecedented levels in the period
Even though prostitution has never technically been illegal in Britain—some Victorians, mostly men, even thought it was a ‘necessary evil’—there were attempts at arresting ‘streetwalking’ prostitutes under vagrancy and soliciting laws.
32
the Victorians also implemented laws which saw Britain gradually move away from the capital or corporal punishments for crimes against property associated with previous centuries…but by modern standards, Victorian forms of punishment remained severe.
the institutional forces of discipline (e.g. police)
33
‘Twist’ is a long-forgotten Victorian euphemism for the punishment of being ‘hanged’, and the hanging motif haunts the novel throughout.
34
Yet, what is always implicit in this equation is the idea that ‘goodness’ equates with well-behaved middle-classness in the novel, as it so often does in Victorian literature(the silent or invisible crime of ideology).
The reader is consequently disciplined and punished by the illusion of a bourgeois happy ending which pretends to resolve all of society’s tensions and contradictions, and which holds out the idea that this illusion is the real and natural way of things in Victorian society.
Death
死亡率高，其中，儿童死亡占总死亡比例的四分之一
Premature deaths were due to wretched living conditions for the poor and working class, lethal diseases, etc.
35
Victorians-invention of British funeral rites, especially the black pomp and splendor associated with the deaths of popular state figures and celebrities
the Victorians also ritualized the wearing of black clothes by mourners
further implications-funeral rites and the processes of mourning were a means of coping with the chaos and uncertainty of death; also a coming to terms with the chaos and uncertainty of living
Moreover, the idea of death overshadows the Victorian age, and it is, perhaps, a sense of deathliness which gives the period its black, gloomy, oddly elegiac image.
36
most Victorian novels feature at least one death.—and only portrayed with sentiment
More intriguing, is the concept of “death in life”—ubiquitous in Victorian fiction and poetry
the idea that the lonely or bereft woman’s life is a “death in life” is a frequent feature in novels
Decadence and Aestheticism
38
the British decadent movement, as Pater’s phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’ suggests, was also largely inspired by the French nineteenth-century avant-garde…The problem with France, for many Victorians, was that it had long been Britain’s historical enemy.
Decadent and aesthetic Victorian literature became inextricable from problems of sex and sexuality in the late Victorian period
39
Wilde’s promotion of the idea of “uselessness”—it was ‘useful’ in terms of its revolt against Victorian morality and its middle-class ethos of purpose and productivity
‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’
Many aesthetes were dedicated to what they perceived to be the beautiful ‘surface’ of things,and Wilde’s paradoxes appear decadent because they repeatedly toy with the ‘surface’ of language, with the signifier, with the slippery words which fail to ‘produce’ stable meanings and so lack any sense of logical or useful progression from sign to sense, or from word to reality
Wilde disputes a number of precious Victorian attitudes in his plays
faithful marriages, decency and cleanliness are all made to ‘look bad’, while the concept of ‘knowledge’, which underpinned the rationalist ideal of education and progress so vital to the modern world the Victorians built, is quietly inverted.
40
Wilde’s writing demonstrates an overarching sense of fatigue in the face of a Victorian ethos which prided itself on concepts such as energy, productivity, truth, meaning, purpose and usefulness
41
Wilde’s critique/celebration of the economic mechanism of desire which drove Victorian capitalism, and which, in the shape of ‘perfect’ commodities like cigarettes, created such pleasures by leaving one ‘unsatisfied’ in the first place.
Disease
the notorious Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864-9 (repealed in 1880s), for example, put in place methods for the detainment and examination of Victorian Britain’s many prostitutes and other ‘fallen’ women…because it was thought the women were passing around venereal diseases such as gonorrhoea and syphilis, which were weakening the nation’s soldiers and sailors.
42
the contagiousness of various diseases spread alarm through all quarters of Victorian society. On a conceptual level, this took the form of anxieties about ‘moral contagion’, or rather a pathology of the social ‘body’.
43
a peculiar obsession of Victorians to categorize everything
基本上每一部小说中都有关于疾病的描写
Domesticity
44
the cult of domesticity has become entangled with notions of nationhood(Englishness)
increasing gender role division—result: a public sphere of work for men, or private or domestic sphere for women, the emphasis on domesticity had the effect of at once performing and reinforcing patriarchal ideas about the role and status of women throughout society. It effectively restricted women’s political, social and economic rights in the public sphere, restrictions which are still being dismantled in the twenty-first century.
45
there arose a series of didactic books aimed at the chaste and virtuous housewife
‘domesticate’≈‘to train’ or ‘tame’
domestic fiction—which appears to have been focused soley on homely problems such as family, work, love, and the banality of everyday English life found in works as diverse…(Dickens was also the most popular writer of ‘domestic’ fiction, and thus of Englishness and English ways, in his days)
46
In other words, Dickens and the rest of Victorian literature was ‘of’ British power, ‘of’ is arrogance, of the liberty granted by its world dominance to do and say what it pleased . As a result of this, the cult of domesticity and the construction of Britishness created by Victorian literature is always, at the same time, a creation of the cult of otherness and the construction of what it means to be ‘not British’
‘The Angel in the House’
48
Drugs
in the Victorian period, drugs such as cocaine, morphine and horoin were widely available and surprisingly accessible. (只禁了opium)
49
The inscription of drugs, especially opium, in Victorian literature has profound cultural and political implications. It is everywhere bound up with anxieties about orientalism, empire, nationhood and foreignness.
Education
53
In 1880, elementary education for everyone became compulsory until the age of ten.
Before these developments, the history of British education was one of poor planning, mismanagement, and squabbles between church and state.
Although education became increasingly secularized as the nineteenth century wore on, the church continued to resist state interference
54
The raft of problems facing Victorian education ensured that adult literacy remained at persistently low levels
55
It is no accident that the Education Act of 1870 and the Balfour Act of 1902 coincided with the rise to dominance of the British middle classes. By then, the emphasis in education was very much on foisting middleclass values and norms on what the system deemed to be an unruly working class…On this level, the history of Victorian education, like so much else, is predicated on a combination of tensions between class and gender difference.
Empire and Imperialism
57
The Victorian age of empire is also the age of capitalism. In this respect, left-leaning critics and commentators have long since identified a relationship between the aggressive forces of imperialism/ colonialism and capitalism, especially when these forces combine, as they did in Victorian Britain, to extend one nation's export markets into another.
58
Free trade, and its underlying notion of the 'free individual' in British liberal society, became extended into the empire, as part of the British urge to replicate its image elsewhere. There, under the mask of civilization, capitalism was used to legitimate Britain's conquest of around one quarter of the world and its people
in Victorian literature, images of empire and imperialism often amount to only a 'shadowy presence'…Victorian fiction is typically uncomfortable with its images of the empire, and popular writers such as Dickens rarely, if at aIl, acknowledge it in their novels. When they do, on the other hand, it has profound implications.
59
Towards the end of the century, as the British Empire expanded against an ever-darkening background of European nationalism and hostility, imperialism began to resonate more and more in Victorian society and literature.
Evolution
60
Darwin's ideas were groundbreaking because, unIike his predecessors, Darwin had identified the actual biological mechanism for evolution, 'natural selection'.
Darwin's work on evolution crystallized centuries of suspicion towards the biblical idea of creation as expounded in Genesis. His theories heralded, more to the point, the next major victory for scientific rationalism over long-held ideas about God and 'Creationism'.
~61
God as the benign creator of everyone and everything had for centuries provided a sense of order, reassurance, truth; a rationale, in fact, for the very existence of the world and the role of 'mankind' in it.
just as evolutionary theory removed both God and mankind from the centre of Victorian consciousness, replacing it with something infinitely more random and chaotic
直接影响-斯宾塞的社会达尔文主义
On the other hand, as is typical of the Victorians, some human beings were deemed to be more 'evolved' than others
62
evolutionary ideas intersect with the Victorian 'natural order' of society, with their mania for classification and hierarchy, and with their many anxieties about survival, extinction, dominance and power
63
Another way of approaching the concept of evolution in Victorian literature is to consider the manner in which Victorian novels so often draw evolutionary comparisons between class and race from the bodies of their characters.
Family
After her marriage to Albert in 1840, Victoria's life was held up as a paragon of wifely virtues, and her royal family, with its nine children, was portrayed as an English domestic idyll.
关于家庭方面的法律加强
64
AlI of these sciences, and the 'social' debate about evolution in general, had a catastrophic impact on ideologies of class, sexuality and race throughout the Victorian period and beyond
65
家庭关系类比殖民地与殖民国
At the same time, as a microcosm of English society the family unit symbolized what was the most efficient unit of order and structure available to Victorians, one which underpinned the maintenance and reproduction of capitalism.
66
‘the working patriarch’
The Victorian family was, as Karen Chase and Michael Levenson put it, an at once 'spatial and social unit'. It had the very material design of 'hearth and home' (即family and domestic life的security and dignity) built into the walls and foundations of its houses
67
总结
the Victorian family ideal is, in fact, always bound up with both the integrity of Englishness and its role in empire.
Food and Famine
Industrialization and urbanization ensured that most Britons no longer produced their own food in the Victorian period.
Since the passage of the Corn Laws in 1815, grain prices, and therefore a staple of the British diet, bread, were high, and this led to short ages of food and widespread hunger whieh earned the decade
the name 'hungry forties'.
68
Eating habits in the Victorian period depended on one's social standing and tended to revolve around work. Working-class Victorians, for instance, increasingly turned to a midday meal in order to sustain them for the long afternoon ahead.
Restaurants and grocery stores were also mid- to late-Victorian innovations, and fish and chip shops became popular in the late 1890s.
numerous controversies over corrupt food producers in the period. 食品生产偷工减料
Hunger and desperation in the 1840s led to riotous and drunken lower-class Victorians.
69
As a result of the famine, around one million died of starvation, and another million or so emigrated to mainland Britain or the colonies; in total, lreland lost around 20 per cent of its population. Food and famine in Victorian literature and culture are closely linked to economic and class issues. But they are also, as the colonial relationship between Britain and Ireland suggests, linked to problems of nation and race.
70
In the context of Ireland, the anorexic hunger of Brontë's women points towards a pathology of empire in the novel, where the unspeakable acts of British involvement in Ireland are projected onto the domestic context of 'English' problems.
Gaze
The nineteenth century saw the development of an increasingly weIlpoliced and more rigorously disciplined society, which gave rise to an increasing culture of surveillance.
Foucault's ideas about the gaze have been applied to Victorian literature in numerous ways.
小说中全知的叙述者Of particular significance is the omniscient narrator in the novel, which acts, according to Miller, like Foucault’s lone supervisor in the Panopticon watchtower, as an anonymous form of power and discipline. 和福柯的鉴于理论类似：能够观察囚犯，却可以不被囚犯发现
In other words, the narrator, whether representative of an essentially disciplinary and punitive society or not, effectively constructs the individual reader by policing him or her ideologicaIly.
The act of reading subjects the reader to the gaze of invisible forces of discipline and power.个体独处的阅读也是臣服于权力的一种方式
Gender
74
In what was a century characterized by the emergence and consolidation of male-Ied, middle-class professions, male businessmen and entrepreneurs, and the bourgeois cult of the gentleman, it therefore comes as no shock that a male, middle-class ideology of gender came to dominate Victorian society and culture
Regarded by men as not being 'of the mind' and so insufficiently 'cultured', women were treated as somewhat paradoxical figures 'of the body' and 'angels of the hearth', as at once physical and spiritual, as weIl as 'naturaIly' aIl heart, tenderness and submission, and so on.
容易忽视的工人阶层的女性
75
In a context of increasing nationalism and imperialism, Victorian notions about the nature of writing and literary form became increasingly gendered themselves. 写作本身也被性别化了
两点不可忽视的事实：It should not be forgotten that, although the novel form was, for the most part, dominated by male writers, there were huge numbers of women novelists writing for economic reasons … and the readership of novels was frequently considered to be disproportionately made up of women.(middle- and upper-class women)
但与此同时，阅读和写作也被视作是威胁父权社会的东西
the writing of novels…was considered a more 'active' and hence potentially subversive task than reading. Women writers, in this respect, were simultaneously perceived to be a threat to men, to other women, and to themselves.
Gothic
78
哥特一词的由来：Gothic is a term derived from 'the Goths'. The Goths were Germanic tribes whose invasions in the third to fifth centuries were partly responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire and the onset of the 'dark ages'. Much later, Gothic came to be applied to a 'medieval' period in European architecture.
By the time of the Victorians, the notion of Gothie 'darkness' had become mixed up with British anxieties about religious obscurantism, Catholicism and above all a sense of terror. 哥特的“黑暗”多少代表了英国对于宗教蒙昧主义和天主教的恐惧
79
Its roots lie partly in the infamous ‘Newgate prison’ novels, which themselves grew out of a climate of radicalism, reform and Chartist disorder in the late 1820s-30s
但是同时也兴起了哥特建筑的潮流
The Gothic renaissance in English architecture is also linked to the development of Gothie traditions in literature. 哥特元素、哥特主题在小说（即便是所谓现实小说中的流行）
There are classic moments of Gothic suspense and melodrama
Gothic is, furthermore, a conspicuous feature of the decadent literature associated with the Fin de siècle years (比如说在化身博士和道林格雷里面)
That Gothic literature has its origins in the Romantic period
these upheavals（英国工业革命和法国大革命） produced, or rather reconfigured, two new spectres for Romantic and Vietorian Britain. First, there was the creation of a potentially
rebellious British working class; second, the resurgent image of the long-despised French.
Unsurprisingly, in this respect, Gothic clichés in English literature su ch as the ruined abbey and furtive monk also point towards a residual Protestant and British anxiety relating to the 'foreignness' of the Catholic French
Gothic representations in texts are not necessarily subversive, however. Their disorders and transgressions also serve to underline the highly constructed order of rational 'reality' in the first place, itself a representation of the text. 哥特本身并非一定是具有颠覆性质的，它们的失序和违禁反过来也标明了秩序的现实
80
Gothic literature, as such, can only imply an 'unreal' dimension full of terror and macabre goings on, with well-known known preoccupations including a certain taste for mystery, danger, dark secrets, suspense, melodrama, exaggeration, eeriness, ghosts, monsters, vampires, moving statues, blood, murder, rape, incest and vice.
Although Bram Stoker's Dracula is an obvious example, the novel is revealing because it embodies almost every Gothic cliehé imaginable, but it spiees them up with specifically Vietorian neuroses. Stoker's novel projects the full range of English, middle-class, male anxieties onto the threats embodied by one Gothie individual. 以《德古拉》代表的焦虑为例
In short, the novel articulates fears about the invasion and conuption of Englishness by irrational, 'un-English', Gothic forces. Us terror, where at aIl, lies in the fear that the rational and moderate English might be made 'foreign' to themselves by parasitie European nobles, and by un-Vietorian sexual transgressions which are centred on men's struggles for women's bodies. 这个解读实在有点酷
Individualism
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In the philosopher John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859), the emphasis is very much on the needs and desires of individuals.
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The Victorian idea of individualism was based on more general assumptions about 'human nature', which was governed by intrinsic laws and remained fundamentally unchangeable. It was, nonetheless, as Marxist and left-wing orientated critics have consistently argued, the aim of bourgeois capitalist ideology to construct its subjects as free-thinking 'individuals', because then they chose their subjection 'freeIy'.
85
For modern critics, novels such as Middlemarch also construct the 'individual' reader as subject. Novels 'subject' the reader, that is, to their ideological representations of bourgeois 'reality'.
Emerging in the era of Victorian individualism, the effect of this dominant ideology is to 'police' the individual subject/reader by giving them the sense that they are freethinking, autonomous individuals who know more
以个体为单位的读书同样在个体主义风潮的年代兴起
Industry
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Life in industrial Victorian Britain was notoriously brutal and short for its growing working-class population, and it has been estimated that over half the workforce in Victorian mills, for example, were women
1833年，禁止十岁以下童工在工厂工作
Trade Unions for the working classes, legalized in 1871, also became an increasing feature of industrial life from this period onwards, and the end of the saw the formation of the Labour Party. 工会和工党的建立
The concept of industry underpins aIl of those ideas frequently associated with the Victorians: energy, purpose, practicality, progress, creativity, inventiveness, application, professionalism.
Crucially, the ide a of Victorian industry is also closely bound up with the emergence of the bourgeois capitalist era - and is largely a projection of bourgeois values and attitudes - which partly explains why the more idle, criminal or aristocratic classes often appear to be suspicious, or subversive, in Victorian society and culture.
87
小说作品的亚分支：‘industrial novel’ ‘social problem’ or ‘condition of England’ novels
Law
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Victorian society inherited an array of common, civil and ecclesiastical courts of law, and the legal system was complex. 之后便有呼声要simplify and rationalize the law以便公众理解
The Victorian legal profession itself remained rigidly divided for much of the period. 阶级分化比较严重
90
The stratified nature of the legal profession typifies Victorian obsessions with class and status, but the hierarchy it led to, significantly, all but excluded women.同时这个等级体系也意味着排除了女性
个体主义赋予人的自由既能够体现权利(individual rights)又能够侵犯权利(the wider society’s)
What legal reformers and advocates of a more publicly owned 'codification' of the law tried to eliminate was what they saw as the far too 'individual' or 'discretionary' elements of Britain's judicial system, those enjoyed, for example, in the Court of Chancery
Madness
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In the 1850s, amid fears that Queen Victoria herself had lapsed into a hereditary mental condition known as 'porphyria', Britain underwent a 'lunacy panic'. Public anxieties and indignation became aroused when a number of individuals had been misdiagnosed as insane and wrongly committed to asylums.
James Cowles Pritchard argued that madness represented a corrupt 'morality' rather than any damage to 'intellectual faculties'. “疯癫”作为一种失常的道德，而非智力机能受损的表现
the concept of madness had became part of the Vietorian discourse of medicine, a discourse whieh was itself a part, broadly speaking, of the West's enlightened 'knowledge' about the 'rational' and 'civilized world' it was making. 疯癫成为了维多利亚医药话语体系中的一部分，成为西方启蒙有关理智与文明世界的产物（听起来就像是从福柯嘴里吐出来的好吗）
94
In terms of the Victorians, the idea of madness also implied, to use Foucault's terms again, a form of 'non-being' for the individual in question. In the golden age of Victorian capitalism, madness came to represent a kind of death of the self in the midst of life.
madness is never far away from the ostensible order and rationalism of Victorian consciousness.
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Time and again, however, it is women who are presented as more susceptible to madness in Victorian literature.
Music
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music hall then became associated with patriotism and British imperial belligerence
In the nineteenth centuryl the concept of music is bound up with an kinds of Victorian attitudes and anxieties.
98
the Victorian aesthete and decadent Walter Pater wanted to disassociate the art from any such external referent as 'nation', 'Protestantism', or worse, 'morality'.
Music, for Pater, was its own 'idea', a notion which was similar to Wagner's concept of 'absolute music' music, in other words, which had no referent to the 'real' world outside of its own form. But 'absolute music' was itself part of Wagner's complex theory about the way in which music evokes 'the individual will', which is at the same time an expression of the 'universal will', and is therefore a peculiarly British, Protestant and Victorian idea derived from the philosophy of utilitarianism.
99
Here the tormented voice of the oppressed woman, Brontë's own, is projected through a musical accompaniment.
Nation
By the nineteenth century, Britain already had a long history of regarding itself as isolated and separate
from other nations, and its construction of an island 'mentality' was underpinned by the nation's geographical position as a water-locked territory detached from mainland Europe. At the same time, however, the different ideas of nation and national identity within the British islands themselves had been fraught with political, socioeconomic and cultural conflicts, and these simmered throughout the Victorian period. The problems stemmed largely from Britain's centralized government in London and the history of English hegemony over the islands.
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AlI Victorian literature, in one way or another, is concerned with nation or national identity. But in a climate of increasingly assertive European nationalism and empire building, it is late nineteenth-century literature and culture which is most clearly imbued with a sense of patriotism and jingoism
102
The English novel had, since its inception, been the quintessential medium for reflecting on and constructing the English nation
By the Victorian period, consciously or otherwise, novelists had consequently inherited a long tradition of establishing ideas of Englishness against those of the foreign 'other', and particuIarly those represented by the French.
Orientalism
略！
Other
(the concept of ‘other’ is), in this respect, inextricable from the concept of 'self', in the same way that it is inseparable from Victorian anxieties about identity, race, and related
106
Their century was, in this respect, frarned by fears of invasion by two great enemies: the Catholic, revolutionary and imperial French at the beginning of the century, and the industrial might and power of the newly unified Germans towards the end.
107
黑格尔的自我与他者观
For Hegel, crucially, the two ('self' and 'other') are mutually dependent upon one another for each other's existence; their relationship is effectively one of enslavement, in which the 'self' strives to assert dominance over the subordinate 'other'.
In terms of understanding the Victorians, Hegel's important lesson is that, throughout the century, the West undertook a haphazard process of self-recognition, or rather mis-recognition, in which the idea of 'self' was essentially made in the 'mirror' of 'otherness'. However, in line with Hegel's theories, the concept of the 'other' is rendered more complex by the fact that that which the Victorians invented as 'other' often only amounted to a projection of anxieties and desires which proceeded from the Victorian sense of 'self' in the first place.
Pre-Raphaelitism
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The Pre-Raphaelites were a mid-nineteenth-century artistic and literary movement which railed against Victorian conventions and orthodoxies
its attempt to establish, or re-establish, the artistic styles and achievements which prevailed during the medieval period, and which preceded the life and work of Italian Renaissance painter Raphael (1483-1520).
Raphael and his 'divine' classicism was often regarded by mainstream or more conservative Victorian academics and artists as the important model for all art, and this is part of what Pre-Raphaelitism rejected.
109
one of the central tenets of the movement's artistic manifesto was the necessity of faithful and detached representations of nature.
Along with such loyalty, PRB paintings, especially, are characterized by their vividness, clarity, their often brilliant colour, their deep sense of moral and religious seriousness, and their preoccupation with medieval symbolism
Thematically, for example, PRB verse negotiates the close proximity of life, love and death
Similarly, much of the poetry contains a deep and vibrant sense of colour and detail, as weIl as a dense layering of cryptic allusiveness.
110
The Pre-Raphaelite exuberance in colour and sensuality was deemed to be vulgar by those Victorians with more conservative ide as about art and its role in society. Paradoxically, however, reactions to the movement are complex because PRB ideas were often just as 'serious' or 'realistic', in the strictly Victorian senses of the terms, as those held by the movement's detractors.
111
Their poetry is also full of romanticized, sleepy-looking medieval women in dreamy and often ghostly settings, with rosebud, yearning lips, mournful eyes, long necks, white smooth skin, luscious hair, and an overall air of the femme fatale
moribund desires and tempting lips
Races
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This conception was, in turn, both partly constructed and reaffirmed by the rise of the biological sciences, by discourses of anthropology and Orientalism, and especially by the sinister theories which grew out of 'scientific racism'.
Victorian novels are equally rich in such paradoxes, but they are also full of satires on piety, hypocrisy, and disreputable clerics.
Religion
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Victorian literature is haunted by what the literary critic J. Hillis Miller called the 'disappearance of God
Sex and Sexualities
126
There is also evidence that the Victorians indulged in a variety of sexual peccadilloes throughout the century
127
The idea of an 'economic' body is also linked to Victorian ideas about self-control, asceticism, purpose, industry and, above all, 'productiveness'. Neither masturbators nor homosexuals, in this respect, use semen in a 'purposeful' or 'productive' manner.
128
On the other hand, later Victorian novelists such as G. W. M Reynolds did write erotic prose for a predominantly working-class readership, the Pre-Raphaelites became notorious for their 'fleshy' verse, and the racy 'sensation' novels of the 1860s, associated with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, contained a sexual frisson all of their own.
Moreover, when sexual desire is re-routed through metaphors and codes - as it is in the writings of these women – it becomes all the more explicit in the novels, as Foucault suggests, because of its professed repudiation and silence
Slavery
130
It is also revealing that British calls for the abolition of slavery from the late eighteenth century onwards coincided with the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain. Despite claims made by William Wilberforce and others that the system of slavery was contrary to the West's enlightened and egalitarian values, slavery was, as other commentators pointed out, only dismantled when it was deemed to have become unprofitable, or when there was a sufficient working class - those who endured 'white slavery' to take its place.
Fanon “the black enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority'.”
Transport
132
For much of the nineteenth century, British transport was still largely horse-powered
It was, however, the railways, especially in the 1840s, that best exemplified Victorian achievements in transport engineering and technology.
133
Trains heralded the modem world of iron, steam and speed, the noisy world of Victorian industry and purpose, but they also symbolized progress and power. The railways increasingly connected the nation's rural and urban areas, and brought the British population into contact with one another on platforms and carriages throughout the country.
Their timetables also forced the Victorians to restructure and regulate British time. 统一的时刻
Despite Victoria's 'charming' journey and the Victorians' love of travel in general, rail ways and trains are often portrayed negatively in Victorian literature. 文学作品中普遍对于火车作负面描述
134
For Dickens, the new terror of the trains encapsulated the way in which the modem world was encroaching upon the idyll of pastoral England, where 'Stags' might have once roamed in their 'gardens'.
Travel
135
After the restrictions imposed by the Napoleonic Wars, the early decades of the nineteenth century gave rise to the first great age of travel. 'Grand Tours' of Europe, for example, were revived, and they continued to be popular with wealthy Victorians.
Victorians also went off on voyages of discovery and exploration, and many more left Britain for commercial, scientific and colonial reasons.
136
The Victorians were fascinated by exotic lands and cultures, and it is no coincidence that the era of travel and travel literature coincides with the age of empire.
For some contemporary commentators, however, the idea of travel, and the very notion of being itinerant and thus somehow slightly unstable, was perceived as a threat to the integrity of Englishness
War
142
Despite various recruitment initiatives, however, the British army in the Victorian period remained drastically undermanned. It was also under-trained, old-fashioned, riven by quarrels in high command, and undermined by feeble leadership. Such problems partly accounted for why the British war machine struggled as it did in the early de cades of Victoria's reign, particularly against formidable enemies such as Russia. They also account for why it was so poorly equipped and ill-prepared for conflicts towards the end of the century,
especially the notoriously protracted Boer Wars
Soldiering became an increasingly professionalized career in the period, and the British army, like Victorian society as a whole, was full of class tensions. The officer ranks were still largely recruited from Britain's middle and aristocratic classes, and this process conferred a gentlemanly status on the officer in civilian life.
Common soldiers and sailors, on the other hand, continued to be enlisted from the lower echelons
of Victorian society, particularly from the class of unemployed or unskilled labourers.
By the early to mid-Victorian period, soldiering had begun to lose much of its romanticized and gentlemanly lustre, and a career in the lower ranks of the army was deemed at best unglamorous, at worst, a vocation for degenerates. Due to poor resources and inadequate barrack accommodation, soldiers also suffered from terrible sanitary conditions.
143
Mostly, though, as recent commentators have pointed out, Britain's wars are hardly referred to at all in many of the major works of Victorian literature.
During the rise of classic realist British fiction in the period, for example, authors seemed to have been preoccupied with the concerns of individuals, rather than the wider national context of war,
Nonetheless, the spectre of war haunts the domestic and social focus of such works on numerous conscious and unconscious levels.
But if early Victorian literature is generally reticent about Britain's wars, this yields to an increasing garrulity on the subject towards the later decades of the century
144
It is, indeed, as if there was an unspoken dec1aration in the period that the domain ofVictorian literature was the domestic arena.
At the same time, Boldwood's singular act of violence underlines that contradiction which is central to the period and its literature: behind the civilized façade of the Victorian gentleman there lies, time and again, a less peaceful and more alarming reality. In this respect, although the concept of war is not integral to the domestic focus of Far from the Madding Crowd, the underlying violence of Hardy's novel, with its c1imactic death of a soldier and the warlike nature of Victorian Englishness it suggests, ultimately provides an important perspective on this contradiction
Crime Fiction
158
the rise of crime fiction in the nineteenth century coincided with the development of Britain as a modern police state
159
as policeman and detectives became more visible and respectable in society, so crime fiction became more acceptable and popular as a genre
In a culture of growing anxieties about crime, the detective figure steadily became an increasingly middle-class hero of order and resolution
In other words, the ideological form of crime fiction necessitates a denouement which is always a solution, always a restoration of the Victorian order of things.
Victorian crime fiction developed from a focus on the criminal in the ealy nineteenth century, to an increasing concentration on the detective
crime fiction became so lucrative
