Studying English Literature

Macbeth impresses the audience/reader with an uncertain and unstable state. It is possible to describe the structure of the play as a series of situation exemplifying the conflict between Good and Evil, the story of the fall of a great man. It may even be described as a parable illustrating how man can be gulled by the forces of evil into accepting the appearance as the truth. But structures or themes abstracted from this play would not include the dominant impression left by the play. This impression is not simply the effect of its plot; the quality of the whole tragedy is conveyed by the poetry, which reinforces the situations and their representation on the stage. Poetry succeeds in producing the impression of an equivocal and ambiguous world, where what is seen appears to be different from what is. In fact, the riddling phrases in the very opening scene of the drama are capped with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”, an image which indicates the moral topsy-turvy in the world of th...

In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer frequently uses the device of contrast as a major means of characterization. One of the most striking of these contrasts is that between the prominent women among the pilgrims – the prioress and wife of Bath . However, in spite of the fact that these two ladies belong to two different social spheres, they surprisingly share some common characteristics. The personality of the Prioress cannot be easily summed up. As Phyllis Hodgson says in his edition of the Prologue , “By silent omission, banter and the tactful veiling of ambivalence, Chaucer himself seems to remain detached and finely poised between affection and exposure”. The Prioress belongs to the withdrawn cloistered life of prayer and administration, vowed to poverty and chastity and indifferent to the vanities of the world. Strictly speaking, she should not have been on this pilgrimage at all, for there was an ecclesiastical edict forbidding nun from going on pilgrimage. In violat...

England during the reign of Queen Victoria developed strange features, some of which were quite contradictory. In the latter half of the 19 th century while at home England had absorbed the essential features of Industrial Revolution, she had established herself as the greatest colonizing nation along with her unquestionable supremacy in overseas trade abroad. Again quite paradoxically, under the impact of the liberal humanist ideology of the Enlightenment, ‘progress’ became the buzzword of the day. Under the smooth surface of British culture lay the inevitable ferment of religious and scientific ideas. A few decades ago the poet-naturalist, Erasmus Darwin, who was interestingly the grandfather of Charles Darwin, almost shocked Englishmen when he argued against the concept of the Scale of Being or Ladder of Life, a concept derived from the Genesis, in favour of the spontaneous origin of life in minute forms in the ocean. A few years later Lamarck came out with his theory that altere...

Michel Facoult once pointed out how private conversations among women constitute a world which plays a counter subversive role in relation to the male dominated society and prepares the way for securing women’s power at least in certain areas. Jane Austen’s novels amply illustrate the validity of Facoult’s speculation not simply because she was a woman novelist, but because she shows the inner landscape of women’s inner social world. In Sense and Sensibility the reader encounters an internal world wholly separated from the knowledge of the man folks. It is, however, not to suggest that this internal world is wholly an independent one, but to suggest that women in Sense and Sensibility create a space for them by being closely associated with one another. Perhaps it was because of her being a woman herself that she succeeded in understanding the close relationship existing among women in a male dominated society, where behind the Romantic talk of love a woman’s social position was to be ...

Arnold essay On the Modern Elements in Literature was occasioned by an unusual event, his election to the Chair of Poetry in Oxford. Unusually still, he did not choose to eulogise any person or institution. According to George Watson, it was “a lecture against the modern element in literature, in which Arnold seeks alliance with the classical dons in his audience against the prevailing tide of middleclass romanticism.” In fact, Arnold was one of the great spokesmen of the Enlightenment, and that is why, what speaks about in these lines constitutes a view of history widespread in his day. It was put forward by Herder, Goethe and Novalis in Germany, by Saint Simonians in France and by Carlyle in England. In fact, he seeks a synthesis out of the past and present in the Hegelian mode. Added to this is Arnold’s concern with literature as a criticism of life. Arnold begins the essay with an anecdote—illustrative of moral deliverance of man, from the vast body of Buddhist litera...

The tragic hero’s downfall, said Aristotle, in the Poetics , was brought upon not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement. Aristotle’s theory is not the final word on tragedy, but it happens, can usefully point to what is going on in Othello. This tragic ‘flaw’ has sometimes been incorrectly interpreted in moral terms, and some critics have looked for some moral weakness in the tragic hero. For Othello, this has led to the commonplace assertion that Othello falls because he was too jealous—hence the arguments about whether he was naturally or racially prone to jealousy or easily made jealous. But this is to miss Aristotle’s points. Obviously Othello becomes jealous, but we can defectively avoid the argument about whether he was naturally jealous or not by looking for error of judgement rather than moral flaw. The same may be said about the debate concerning Othello’s ‘nobility’. Up to the beginning of this century there seems to have been general agreement among the best a...

There arises a sharp controversy among critics as to whether or not Jane Austen, while writing her novels, consciously had in mind certain serious moral concerns of her times; whether or not as a novelist she wanted to pose as a teacher for her society. The problem which baffles the critics is that her oeuvre turns out to be multi-dimension and can be interpreted in various ways. It is often felt that the stories in her novels are oriented towards the education of the heroine/s. The same is true of the novel, Sense and Sensibility , all the more so as it lays equal attention to the two heroines, Elinor and Marianne, and presumably the title points towards that. But it must be emphasized here that the greatness of Austen as a novelist does not depend on whether she moralizes or not; in fact, her major works are complete in themselves and aesthetically independent of any moral concern. Deliberate or not, however, on her part, a moral design is discernible in the novel, Sense and Se...

John Donne’s life, more than any poet’s, illustrates how the Elizabethan and Jacobean views of the world, which was based medieval world view, came to collide with the Renaissance one provided by the Copernican science. The result was confusion and scepticism. The contemporary intellectuals searched for a moral pattern that governs the world. However, in many their cases, the intellectuals fell back on to the traditional religion for ontological support as the new science could not provide at one all the answers. The same happened with Donne, who after spending a rather fiery youth, became afraid of God’s wrath and looked for His grace. However, it is to be noted that despite old age, his habit of using metaphysical conceit remained with him. But it should be pointed out that in his religious poetry, he drew his images from the Bible. Donne begins the poem in his characteristic conceited manner: “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for You As yet but knock, breath, shine, and ...

Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe summed up human existence on earth by drawing a parallel with the myth of Sisyphe. Sisyphe, cursed by Zeus, constantly fails despite his incessant attempts to keep the stone on the hill-top, whence they are sliding down. Though this is a typical existentialist approach to life and can never be applied to The Old Man and the Sea, the main outlines of the myth comprise an archetype which has been exploited by writers since the times of the Greek tragedians. The philosophical explanation for the crux of the matter is that man is compelled by necessity to struggle for existence—to launch himself/herself into some kind of action, which at some plane is transformed into an ambitious project. This innate human tendency to achieve the impossible does not care for the limit of human capacity, drawn by the universal laws of nature. This tendency ultimately leads to fall or defeat. Hemingway conceived of and wrote The Old Man and the Sea with this awareness of ...

S hakespeare has conceived of and presented Lady Macbeth with extreme care of theatrical technique so that she can play every important part and contribute to the tragic process of the drama. Sometimes some critics tend to compare her activities with witchcraft and call her the “fourth Witch”. But none of these attempts has been successful, as she is very much a flesh and blood character, who exhibits enough of her humanity hidden within in the later scenes. The development of Lady Macbeth’s character acts as a parable with that of Macbeth, thus at once complementing and illuminating the action where necessary. At the very first appearance of Lady Macbeth, reading a letter from her husband in Act I, scene v, the audience can notice from her facial expressions and eagerness that she is immediately possessed by the prospects of the prophecies. But as she knows the real nature of her husband, she rightly expresses her doubts about the mental strength of her husband, which is necessar...