The Victorian Age (1832-1901)
Perhaps no other period of English Literature is as diverse and
torn between competing values as is the Victorian. Nostalgic for the
pastoral and innocent landscapes of the past as was the Romantic, the
Victorian was yet dragged toward the future in new sciences and the
promise of industrial technology. Seeking social cohesion in domestic
duty and civic responsibility, the Victorian was threatened with
growing feminist protest, dismayed over the abysmal conditions of the
working poor, and plagued by new democratic impulses. Darwinian
natural selection, new geological theories pushing back the ages and
adding extinct organisms, and new secular philosophies continually
disturbed the Victorian return to an almost medieval sense of piety and
religious devotion. Attempting to control the passions of the body in
a revival of the arranged marriage of convenience, a logical economic
system that subdued sexual passion for the better exercise of reason,
they ended up with, perhaps, one of the richest underground
pornographies of all time. Modeling their poetic heroes on those of
the Greeks and Romans, they could not seem to write without a deep
skepticism of the heroic mode.
Robert Browning was deeply affected by all of these rifts in
spirit of the age. Deeply in love with E.B. Browning, he saw the folly
of arranged marriage and embodied those tensions in “My Last Duchess”
and “Porphyria’s Lover.” At first flirting with atheism in such poems
as “Porphyria’s Lover” and “Johnaness Agricola in Meditation,” he
eventually returns to more reasonable and balanced religious views late
in life. Highly skeptical of the hero motif in the industrial age, he
writes the distinctively modern “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
Comes,” a poem of heroic doubt, bleak industrial landscapes, and a
nihilistic conclusion.
In some respects this is a natural progression from the
Romantics. The Romantics with their new social sensibilities, their
eager participation in democratic revolutions, their “loose” lifestyles
rife with drugs and Byronic sensuality, their rejection of traditional
religion did leave a stylistic mark on the work of the Romantics.
Victorian poetry, in particular, participates in the rich sensuous
detail of the Romantics. Like the Romantics, the heroes are always
questionable. But at first, the Victorians seem to be on the rebound,
trying to re-establish earlier values and recover the faith and values
they imagined they had lost. But too late. The new science, new
political feelings, new politics had taken root. By the end of the
age, sometimes called the “Gay Nineties,” the embracing of radical
ideas and lifestyles was back in full swing. Darwin, science and
technology, radical politics and radical lifestyles were again in
vogue.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is in one allegorical package an expression
of all these tensions in the Victorian age. Allegorically, the novel
might best be described as the battle of the modern man of science
against the religious superstition and prejudices of the Old World,
Eastern Europe. The heroic participants of this battle band together
in a particularly modern political form – the committee, a team of the
like-minded dedicated to the eradication of an invading evil. They
have at their disposal every tool of new science and technology –
trains, telegraphs, recording equipment, shorthand, typewriters,
cameras – all of which enable them to keep impeccable records, a
particularly important modern impulse. In addition, like good modern
scientists and scholars they combine research into the past with direct
observations which confirm the research that Van Helsing has done at
University. They are, in other words, team-oriented, technology-using,
empiricists dedicated to driving out the Gods and demons of the past.
We are, however, on the cusp of the modern in this novel. There
are remaining stresses in the book which keep the novel firmly in the
Victorian tradition. For instance, even though they do drive Dracula
into the deep East from which he came, they do not completely kill the
superstitious infection. It remains with them in the form of the
spiritual and folk tools they’ve learned to use – the host, the
crucifix, the garlic. Even though there are rumblings of the “New
Woman” in Mina Harker – her abilities as a recorder, her connection to
the sensual Dracula, himself, her obvious resentments at the way the
men treat her as an inferior, weaker being – she does, nevertheless
abide by the male wishes and her only effort is to support their
enterprise. Even though the women are transformed into sexual
creatures – Lucy is lost to the “wanton” and the “voluptuous” lusts of
the blood – Mina is, finally, rescued and once again, Unclean desires
are purged from her system.
These characters are archly Victorian expressing neatly all the
Victorian political, religious, family, and sexual tensions of the day.
Eller
Rough Draft 04/14/03