Diane Krantz
English 2710
Lecture Handout: Historical perspective for beginning readings

Turn Of The Century Literature

A MAJOR SHIFT IN GENDER RELATIONS
Female creative primacy was symbolized in 1893 in America by the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. New Zealand granted women the vote and the British parliament passed the last of the Married Woman's Property Acts.
By 1900, women had become free in persons and properties, money and consciences, bodies and souls. Between the 1880's and WWI in 1914 large numbers of women entered the labor force, had increased education, and militant suffragism. As the Victorian age turned into the modern period, women's revolt was a dramatic component in a series of violent challenges to the social order.

A TRANSITIONAL AGE
From 1870-1910 a major historical revolution was in the making. Crass materialism was making America into a world power. Late Victorians and early modernists confronted 19th C economic property from a disillusioned perspective. A growing literacy had led to the formation of a mass reading audience. Still a number of artists felt constrained by the moralistic standards maintained by publishers for the benefit of this audience.
Some writers thumbed their noses at respectable Victorian virtues, even as they sought to elevate the status of art by eliminating its utilitarian function. The aesthetes believed that the true artist eschews conventional morality to maintain the integrity of individual vision.
Other writers rejected the sensationalism of the aesthetes. A major transformation in lit history was reflected in the lyrical and novelistic experimentation of Walt Whitman, William Michael Rossetti, Swinburne, Emily Dickinson, Hopkins, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
By the time of WWI, many artists had begun to engage in open rebellion against society at large, for they were demonstrating had all established forms of intellectual and moral certainty had lost their legitimacy.

Industrialization
The rise of the industrial city and the rapid advances in national wealth and population intensified the feeling of transition. America and England transformed by mass-production. As the robber barons became ever richer, some economists and novelists such as Edith Wharton began to lament the evils of conspicuous consumption. Even while the Industrial Revolution brought comparative comfort to many for the first time, much economic suffering resulted from unemployment, over-production, and wage cutbacks. Because of this, and despite religious and scientific protection of the upper classes, labor began to organize. Utopian socialism approved of this and also became part of the philosophical foundations of fantastic fictions like those of H. G. Wells and Edward Bellamy. The socialism also resulted in an interest in naturalism and realism--the realistic portrayal of the working class person.

The Rise and Fall of Empire
America became imperialistic with the rise of corporate monopolies. The Native Americans were subjugated, The Spanish-American War led to acquisition of Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico. England continued its subjection of peoples including African.
Black intellectuals in the US, reacting to the legalization of public segregation and to the increased activity of the KKK tried to re-imagine their relationship to their ancestors' native continent.
England experienced the agitation over Irish protest of British rule, and the Irish Literary Revival expressed Irish nationalism.

The Death of God
Widespread discontent also manifested itself in attacks on organized religion. The literal truth of the Bible was being questioned by even conservatives. Friedrich Neitzsche declared God was dead and Sir James Frazier's study of primitive rituals provided a basis for alternative religions.
This phenomena resulted in an ideology of sexual liberation. The subject of human sexuality began to emerge as a field of scientific inquiry, as well as becoming included in Freud's work. Desire, subjectivity, and sexuality would quickly become major topics for poets and novelists.

IMAGES OF WOMEN
Women participated in all the movements that challenged power among the classes and nations and also added a revolution of their own. Moralists, educators, and physicians continued to explain to women why they should lead decorous, selfless private lives as wives and mothers, but a number of artists responded angrily or triumphantly to the fact that many women refused to do so. Some male novelists continued to celebrate the "angel in the house," while others expressed anxiety for her disappearance. Legislators argued on the one hand that women would purify politics if allowed to participate in it, and, on the other, that such participation would defile women. Moreover, even as women's angelic status was being characterized as repressive or endangered, the Victorian cult of feminine selflessness and fragility was also used to prove that "every woman is Š more or less an invalid.
Read p 969
Ultimately increased education and suffrage played a part in women's ambivalent attitude towards men and maternity: an attitude that is explored in the analysis of madness in the The Yellow Wallpaper.