W1 Flashcards
Milton evocation of…
Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ in preface ‘Milton (1804)
Quote on Railroad time N&S
‘Railroad time inexorably wrenched them away from lovely, beloved Helstone, the next morning. They were gone; they had seen the last of the long low parsonage home’
- drum allit. ‘railroad time… wrenched’ contrasts with consonance of ‘lovely beloved Helstone’ ; aural portrait
quotes on Helstone
Margaret’s ‘beloved hometown’ ; ‘little picturesque village’
‘like a village in one of Tennyson’s poems: there is the church and a few houses near it on the green - cottages rather - with roses growing all over them…. [everywhere else] seems so hard and prosaic-looking’.
descriptions of Helstone; ‘pastoral mode’ - soft sibilant rhythm; Romancegenre
‘there are great trees standing all about… the turf is as soft and fine as velvet; sometimes quite lush with the perpetual moisture of a little, hidden, tinkling brook near at hand’
Ruskin romanticising rural upbringing
‘Had the weather when I was young been such as it is now, no book such as Modern Painters ever would or could have been written… every sentiment in that book, was founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of nature, all spring and summer long… That harmony is now broken and broken the world round’
Arnold setting up planes of time
‘our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so’
Ruskin on mechanical time differing
references ‘old time’ and ‘modern time’
‘I can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time’
Gaskell - ‘the Classics may do very well for men who loiter away’, but for the factory owner…
‘The time and place in which he lives seem to me to require all his energy and attention’
Transference of chronotopes N&S
Margaret moves from Helstone to Milton;
- adjusts to a ‘factory town’ where she must ‘speak factory language’ and operate within factory time
Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history 1973 Grundrisse
‘Not only do the objective conditions change, e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc., but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language’
Chronotope
literally ‘time-space’
- developed by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to refer to the ‘inseparable unity’ of time and space invoked by a narrative, or the setting viewed as a patio-temporal whole
Thornfield’s retrieval of rose from Helstone at the end
tacit acknowledgement of assimilation of agriculture through industry; integration of North and South
Gaskell contrasts the ‘leisurely’ pace of ‘stagnant’ Helstone
with the ‘very present and actual factory town’; pastoral = indolence and inertia in contrast to ‘town life’ replete with ‘hustle and bustle and speed of everything around them’
Impact of the clock
‘moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created’
with the internalisation of the clock (that ‘piece of power machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes”…)
comes an unnatural indifference for the pattern of movement of the sun; so the fog Ruskin’s writing takes on figurative and literal significance
Who does Ruskin appeal to in order to reference an affinity that is immeasurable between humans and nature
‘the uselessness of observation by instruments, or machines, instead of eyes’
Ruskin on broken down connection evident in violence of his dash-strewn lines
‘Blanched Sun,-blighted grass,-blinded man–’
Ruskin on broken down connection evident in violence of his dash-strewn lines
‘Blanched Sun,-blighted grass,-blinded man–’
- thread of alliterative bilabial plosives; inevitable circularity of damnation
Brian J Day on Ruskin’s ‘blanched Sun,-blighted grass,-blinded man’
‘Ruskin captures the essence of his lecture and his long evolving moral ecology in these six words’’ ; ‘as a statement of Ruskin’s tripartite ecology, it reminds the reader that beyond the two terrestrial economies lies a divine economy (as the upper case S in “Sun” attests), suggesting that humankind is doubly blinded, unable to see either nature or God, whose image is now clouds,d or [b]lanched’ ; Ruskin deifies the sun
Insofar as Mr Hale’s religious doubts provide the catalyst for the transition from South to North….
Gaskell portrays estrangement from environment to involve separation from God and changes in spiritual belief
Marx; capitalism inflicts
loss of meaning and loss of fulfilment of spiritual needs
dichotomy between Utilitarians and Romantics
mechanised utilitarian hedonic calculus l individualism and egotism; pursuit of individual interests
JS Mill acknowledging Utilitarian/Romantic binary
1840 declares that ‘Every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgian…’
Dickens parodies Bentham’s hedonic calculus in Hard Times
‘I am sure you know that the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must appeal to is a person’s self interest. It’s your only hold’
Priveleging of individualism ; pursuit of individual interests over value of the collective is what Arnold denounces as….
the individualistic ‘anarchy’ which leads to moral solipsism. Arnold argues that ‘perfection is…. at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our maxim of “every man for himself”
