VictorianLitisLit

For my project, I decided to combined information from two of my current English classes: Fantasy as a genre, and the Victorian era. Turns out the origin of Fantasy, as a true genre, as opposed to an element traces it’s roots to the Victorian Era with classics such as Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and George MacDonald’s Phantastes.  I plan to create an 8 week long (mini-mester) syllabus that approaches the Victorian era through the development of Fantasy. I’m trying to decide additional assignments engage the students in discussion in and out of the classroom: options include weekly 1-2 page responses on that week’s assigned reading, short reading responses due before each class or even a blog similar to the commonplace book. I really want to use assignments that would incite and encourage critical thinking analysis towards the growth of evidence and popularity of the genre and of the Victorian Era itself that affected it.

So after completing The Hound of the Baskervilles, I’ll admit that I have mixed emotions. But having more so to do with the way in which we read the novel as opposed to the novel itself, some of my major complaints come by way of its publication model. Having read the novel serially, I think it can be easy to caught up in the frustration in not knowing what to expect next. But with those feelings aside, I believe reading this novel in it’s intended use is one of the most impactful decisions an author can make, even more so now considering how we are in the age of streaming/binge-watching. By being forced to read weekly installments, The Strand Magazine forces readers to actually pay attention to what’s being written; but more importantly, this form of publication allowed readers from the Victorian Era to more easily purchase forms of literature as it is cheaper to buy installments as opposed to a single unit. Now, as far as how the serial publication influenced Conan Doyle, I believe it impacted him in a way that required him to make his work  more accessible. Doyle’s work, unlike other Victorian authors, really benefits from the serial publication as The Hound of the Baskervilles is a fairly easy-to-pick up novel (which ironically enough makes it even that more harder to write about). However, the effects of serialization are not all positive as I also believe that the serial publication is in part to blame for such a lackluster ending. From the author’s perspective, serialization must have forced authors to make careful decisions as everything included in a week’s issue must be relevant. Any scene has the potential to change the entirety of the story’s plot. The serial author must be even more conscious of their word selection as there can be no empty plot points. Everything must be written purposely. 

Though the sport and the hobby of training and utilizing bloodhounds in Victorian England was said to be popular because it connected English with their nation’s long history, there was a clear distinction Victorians stressed between their productive crime fighters and the bloodthirsty beasts of the past. As Neil Pemberton states in his essay, Hounding Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Bloodhounds and Sleuthing in the Late-Victorian Imagination, “To breeders, the dog’s remarkable gift to modern criminal detection lay in its ability to track the fugitive’s body odour, which was also interpreted as a clear indication of the dog’s transformation from a savage predator to a safe crime-solving tool.” Though the Victorians had their medieval ancestors to thank for the first use of bloodhounds and their tracking gifts, they prided themselves on modernizing and civilizing the practice, as Victorians saw themselves doing the same in just about every facet of life.

Before reading “Incest and the Trafficking of Women in Mrs. Warren’s Profession: “It Runs in the Family”” I did not think about how the male characters thought of Mrs. Warren and Vivie as interchangeable. Petra Dierkes-Thrun is correct about how the male characters treat them similarly as “objects of desire.” Most of the male characters pursue the two women at different times in the story. Some of the pursuit of Mrs. Warren is off-screen and happened before the play is set. The two women are treated so similarly that Sir George asks Vivie to marry him even though she could be his biological daughter. Frank flirted with both even though he was dating Vivie. The differences between generations in these interactions are ignored. Sir George pursues a much younger woman and in Act II Frank tries to “woo” a much older woman. Dierkes-Thrun also points out that the male characters talk about the women without considering the women’s thoughts and feelings. They are talked about like they are objects and not like other human beings. The men only consider their own goals and opinions. Sir George did not think about Vivie and her goals when he proposed. He only thought about his goals.

I’m a little bit conflicted in how I think Shaw wants the audience to think of Mrs. Warren. At certain points, she is depicted as super respectable for making a living for herself and for getting her daughter a great education. However, there are also moments when I think he wants us to look down on her, like when she is talked about in the context of exploiting other women in her operation of the brothels. It’s almost like he wants us to see this as a successful “businesswoman” in her own way, but he also criticized her for choosing to stay in the prositituon life despite it not being a necessity. I know Shaw tries to shed light on the economic conditions during the Victorian era by showing Mrs. Warren as a women needing to prostitute herself to make a living but I also think he is looking down on her character for how she chose to run her life after she made a living for herself. It kind of seems to be like we want to respect the profession of prostitution but everyone has this megative mindset instilled in them about it. All of these things bring me to be kind of confused in how Shaw truly sees Mrs. Warren and how Shaw wanted the audience to see Mrs. Warren.

This intense visual description of the hound in chapter 14 of the Hound of the Baskervilles led me to search for an image that depicted it. This image, though eerie and rather terrifying, paints a vivid picture of the hound that Watson describes. Whether or not the hound is real, the use of imagery throughout the chapters of this adventure allow the reader to experience what Holmes and Watson do as they investigate the mystery. As does Watson’s first person point of view, vivid imagery allows the reader to become immersed in the events alongside characters. It creates a tone that can be perceived by the reader. In this case, reading Watson’s description of the hound as he first laid eyes on it created an eerie mood and could nearly make me feel afraid of the fictional hound.

I was very surprised while reading Black Beauty to find that the whole entire book is narrated by the horse in such a humanlike way. I’m thinking this might reflect Anna Sewell’s opinion of horses and her positive relationship that she had with horses throughout her life. In each chapter, I noticed there is always a moral by the end. This is pretty typical of children’s literature, but it makes me wonder, why is a horse learning moral lessons? I know it’s a children’s book originally, so I want to just chalk it up to that, but the side of me that thinks too much is maybe thinking if horses are way more complicated than we thought. I also liked how the story is told in an autobiographical way from a horse’s perspective, it almost reflects the way that Anna Sewell wrote this at the end of her life. I’m not particularly fond of horses, but this novel is very interesting and I look forward to seeing what happens in the later portions of the horses life.

I was surprised that as I was reading Mary Carpenter’s essay “On the Treatment of Female Convicts” to feel that this was not as empowering to women as I was expecting it to be. As Carpenter tries to express the pressing needs for reformation within prisons for women–which obviously were desperately needed–it seems in the process she, whether consciously or not, affirms certain stereotypes of women as a means to defend her position. She portrays them as the more fragile and prone to corruption of the sexes, almost explicitly stating women to be the “weaker sex” (83). I believe that she implies that the higher number of women convicts in England has to do with their degraded relation to men/their husbands, especially within the lower classes (lack of self-confidence, desperate situations, etc). However, even then, there is a degree of understanding on her part that is lost or is not conveyed completely. Does the inability to reform and lead women convicts to more virtuous lives have to do with their nature, the lax treatment in prisons, or both? I believe Carpenter conveys that all these play a factor, which is somewhat troubling to me. However, I believe the motives of Mary Carpenter to be mostly sincere, establishing that female convicts “are our fellow-subjects: they are the mothers or sisters of our children, they are equally with ourselves fellow-heirs of eternal life…” (92). Carpenter has established an equal playing field, assigning these often outcast women worth solely because they are human beings and children of God. Above all else, she has assigned human dignity to these women, worthy of both love and discipline in order to help steer them in the right path–a combination lacking and desperately needed within these prisons. In regards to some concerning wording, I believe Carpenter to be merely affected by her times and, like all of us, influenced by her contemporary culture.