The Dawn of the 20th Century
The extent of the British Empire, from The Graphic 24 July 1886
The Dawn of the 20th Century
British Colonial Possessions in Africa and Asia (in orange) after World War I
(Longman Anthology, p. 2119)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
“Beyond the Pale”:
Modern British literature has consistently been distinguished by its
movement "beyond the pale." The Pale was originally the fenced-in
territory established around Dublin by the invading English in the
medieval period, a border between English civilization and Celtic
foreignness. In later usage, the phrase "beyond the pale" came to have a
purely metaphoric meaning: to stand outside the conventional
boundaries of law, behavior, or social class.
(Longman Anthology, p. 2111)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
The Reaction against Victorian Values, Attitudes and Sensibilities
British writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century were
disillusioned and disenchanted with the confident, even arrogant
assumptions of cultural superiority and moral righteousness of the
late nineteenth century, the society known as “Victorian England” in
Honor of Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1845-1900.
(Longman Anthology, p. 2111)
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The Foundations of Modern Skepticism—twentieth century writers and
intellectuals do not share the Victorian confidence in a universal moral
order or in divine justice:
In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the narrator Charlie Marlow suffers from a
similar moral vertigo. When, at the novella's close, he resolves to perform
an action he finds deeply repugnant-to tell a lie-he worries that his willful
violation of the moral order will provoke an immediate act of divine
retribution. None, however, is forthcoming: "It seemed to me that the
house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall
upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a
trifle." In works like these, a voyage is undertaken into a vast, unknown,
dark expanse. Those few who come out alive have seen too much ever to
be the same.
(Longman Anthology, p. 2114)
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The death of God—Nietzsche:
In The Joyful Science (1882) Friedrich Nietzche proclaimed “God is
dead”: The point is not exactly whether or not there is a God; rather, in
modern society almost no one has the same kind of relationship to God
that the typical believer had in the middle ages.
•
Modern societies depend upon science as a solution to problems
•
Modern societies emphasize the personal development of individual
humans rather than duty to one’s “superiors” (seen as the divinelyordained authorities of a social hierarchy)
(Longman Anthology, p. 2114)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
The death of God—Nietzsche:
In asserting that “God is dead” Nietzsche was suggesting that traditional
religion had been discredited by advances in the natural and physical
sciences, and as transcendent standards of truth disappeared, so
logically must all moral and ethical systems depending on some faith for
their force. It was from this base that Nietzsche created the idea of the
Übermensch, the "superman" who because of his intellectual and moral
superiority to others must not be bound by social conventions. Conrad's
tragic figure Kurtz and [George Bernard] Shaw's comic Professor Henry
Higgins represent two very different takes on this idea, building on
Nietzsche's interest in showing how all values are "constructed" rather
than given-at some level arbitrary, all truths being merely opinions, all
social identities merely roles.
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke, Longman Anthology, p. 2114)
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The social construction of reality:
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (1901) together illustrate in an especially vivid way his
evolving theories about the influence of the unconscious mind, and past
(especially childhood) experience, on our daily lives.
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke, Longman Anthology, p. 2114-15)
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Einstein problematizes Newtonian physics:
A further intellectual shock wave was the revolution in physics that was
spearheaded by Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905).
In both this theory (dealing with motion) and later in the general
theory of relativity (dealing with gravity), Einstein shook the
traditional understanding of the universe and our relationship to it;
the certainty and predictability of the Newtonian description of the
universe had been undone.
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke, Longman Anthology, p. 2115)
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Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”:
The "uncertainty" of Einstein's universe was seemingly reinforced by
developments in quantum physics, such as the work of Niels Bohr
(who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922) and Werner
Heisenberg, author of the famous "Uncertainty Principle" and the
principle of complementarity, which together assert that the
movement of subatomic particles can only be predicted by
probability and not measured, as the very act of measurement alters
their behavior. Ironically enough, the true import of these ideas is
not, as the truism has it, that "everything is relative"-in fact, Einstein
says almost the exact opposite. In Einstein's vision of the world,
nothing is relative: everything is absolute, and absolutely fixedexcept for us, fallible and limited observers, who have no secure
standpoint from which "to see the thing as in itself it really is," to
quote Matthew Arnold's 1867 formulation of the critic's goal.
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke Longman Anthology, 2115)
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Moral Ambiguity:
The modern writer was faced with an enormous, Nietzschean task: to
create new and appropriate values for modern culture, and a style
appropriate to those values. As a consequence, there is often a
probing, nervous quality in the modernist explorations of ultimate
questions. This quality can be seen at the very start of the century in
Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a novel about psychological depth and
social disintegration that simultaneously implicates its readers in the
moral ambiguities of its events. These ambiguities, moreover, are
reflected in the very presentation of the narrative itself. In the
modern novel, we are no longer allowed to watch from a safe
distance while our protagonists mature and change through their
trials; instead, we are made to undergo those trials ourselves,
through the machinations of the narrative.
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke, Longman Anthology, p. 2116)
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Marx—Urbanization, Industrialization and Alienation:
Paralleling the new social and artistic opportunities of the twentieth
century was a kind of anomie ,or alienation created by the rush
toward industrialization. Vast numbers of human figures remained
undifferentiated and the mass-manufactured hats and clothing worn by
British industrial workers served only to heighten the monotony of
their daily routines. Newspapers eagerly published photographs of
thousands of sooty-faced miners. The members of the workforce,
which Marx had called "alienated labor," were seen to be estranged
not just from their work but from one another as well, as they
themselves became mass products. This situation is dramatized
especially vividly in the silent films of the period-from the dystopian
vision of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) to the more comic vision
presented by the British-American Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times
(1936).
(Kevin Dettmar and Julia Wicke, Longman Anthology, p. 2119-20)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
Charlie Chaplin, from Modern Times (1936)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
Charlie Chaplin, from Modern Times (1936)
The Dawn of the 20th Century
Mad scientist and Android, scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1936)