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Unit 6: Major Literary Terms-VI

behaviour, is usually referred to as the “Victorian Compromise”. However, it also aroused the concern Notes
of more and more theorists and reformers who tried to improve living conditions at all levels,
including hospitals, schools and prisons.
The word Victorian has come to be used to describe a set of moral and sexual values. The Victorians
were great moraliser, probably because they faced numerous problems on such a scale that they felt
obliged to advocate certain values which offered solution or escape. As a rule the values they
promoted reflected not the world as they saw it the harsh social reality around them, but the world
as they would have like it to be.
The Victorian Compromise was a complex and contradictory era. It was the age of progress, stability,
great social reforms but it was also charactersised by poverta, injustice and social unrest. The
Victorians promoted a code of values that reflect the world as they wantede it to be, not as it really
was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. In thi periods was very important
to work hard for improve the society. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from
lower class. Respectability was a mixture of both morality and hipocrisy, severety and conformity
to social standards. It implied the possesion of good manners, the ownership of confortable house
with servants and a carriage, regualr attendance at church, and charity activity. Philanthropy was a
wide phenomenon: the rich middle class expolited the poor ruthlesssly and at the same time managed
to help “stay children, fallen woman and drunk men”. The husband represented the autority and
the key role of woman regarded the education of children and the hosework. Sexuality was generally
repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to
denunciation of nudity in art, and the rejection of words with sexual connotation from everyday
vocabulary.

6.1.1 Faith and Progress

This is the period of novel because they represents the complexity of the period and the profound
changes that characterised it. For the first time there was a communion of interests and opinions
between writers and their readers. Same code of values: optimism, conformism and philanthropy.
The writers depictecd society as they saw it; they were aware of evils of their society and denunced
them, however they did not criticise the world they lived in, they just aimed at making readers
realise social injustice and voiced their fears and doubts. The setting was the city because it was the
main symbol of the industrial civilisation, the expression of anonymous lives and lost identities.
Dandy is a bourgeois artist who in spite of his uneasiness, remains a mamber of his class.
Art For Art’s Sake: the function of art is that give eternal beauty; only art and beauty can save from
evil and distruction. Whitman was born in New York into a working-class family. He had little
formal education and he started to worked as an officice boy and then he became a journalist. When
he was thirty yars old he travelled in New York, nwe Orleans and Chicago and he descovered the
vastness of his country and the variety of its inhabitants. During the civil war he devoted him self to
visiting wounded soldiers in the army hospital, he continued to belive in the value of democracy
and technological progress. The withman poetry was incorporated in the nine edition of leavs of
grass.

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their
own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.”—by Oscar Wilde,
Preface, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
The Victorian Period revolves around the political career of Queen Victoria. She was crowned in
1837 and died in 1901 (which put a definite end to her political career). A great deal of change took

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