To the Lighthouse by V. Woolf

 

Historical background

Massive destruction and a a huge number of victims were left behind by World War I. The Bloomsbury Group (among whom were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey) were pacifists. War was one of the occurrences Woolf said couldn’t be described but in her diary she detailed the events of the war, including air strikes, casualties, and sinking ships. The “huge events already developing across the water are looming over us too closely and too massively to be worked [in] without a terrible jolt in the perspective,” she remarked of the war. This change of viewpoint is evidenced in her narrative technique.

Women in Britain filled various domestic roles while the men were at war. After the conflict women were unwilling to withdraw because they had gained ground in society beyond the home, including rights and a voice. This raised the feminist voice in the UK and its echoes are heard in Woolf's novel.

Literary context

As a literary movement, Modernism is characterised by its rejection of prior literary traditions through innovations in form and content. Modernist authors radically shifted their attention from external events to human psychology through the method of personal narrative. They discarded chronological development by building plotless narratives and they experimented with language forms. To the Lighthouse embraces all these modernist hallmarks and represents a complete breakaway from traditional conventions of the novel genre. Woolf intended that her new form serve better the aims of exploring the meaning of human existence, which, in her opinion, was the sole purpose of literature and which the conventional novel form could not accommodate.

Bertrand Russell’s philosophical work on the relation between words and the world helps explain Woolf’s interest in how language fails or succeeds in capturing inner life. Woolf dramatises the limits of language through interior monologue and moments where meaning is “shown” rather than stated. (e.g. Mrs. Ramsay can't explicitly tell her husband she loves him, but he knows that through her behaviour.) This harmonises with Woolf's narration which knits meaning and form as a unity.

The war’s devastating effects, including the deaths of family members and the desolation of the Ramsays’ lives and home, are discussed in the novel's second section, “Time Passes.” This chapter acts as a transition between prewar and postwar. It embodies Woolf’s “indescribable” through its fused approach of time, narrative distance, dramatic metaphor, and understatement of death. In this way Woolf also synthesises content and form in her novel.

Summary

Discussion

After World War I had bombed Victorian certainties to pieces, Modernist artists struggled to re-establish some meaning to life. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is part of such an effort, focused on the fragility of existence. Woolf presents it to the reader as an experience by creating a narrative where multiple characters give their points of view. Readers hear these individuals' thoughts blended with the voice of a third-person narrator, allowing us to experience their distinctive inner worlds. These assorted perceptions fragment the storyline, offering a fictional participation in the splintered Modernist vision of postwar existence.

Woolf structures the novel in three parts. In The Window we get a story within the story when Mrs. Ramsay reads comforting tales to James by the window. This reflects the mother's own meditation on life as we read her inner thoughts about her relationships. As the main narrator she is our window on the novel's world. It turns out to be a passing vision, like that from a moving train window or the brief beam from the lighthouse stroking the house window. When Mrs. Ramsay unexpectedly passes away so does her vision, and the reader is left slightly orphaned through the loss of the predominant narrator.

In chapter 2, Times passes, the omniscient narrator reveals two more sudden deaths: Andrew by a bomb splinter in the war and Prue in childbirth. Time not only elapses, but leaves behind a lesson of fragility. To underline the idea this second section describes how the holiday house gradually decays and the reader witnesses how it falls into a shabby ruin of itself. The last section, To the Lighthouse, is narrated mainly by Lily Briscoe who returns to the repaired house and paints a seascape while remembering Mrs. Ramsay. Her canvas is another window on the scene in an attempt to capture the meaning of life through art following Mrs. Ramsay’s insight: "Life, stand still here".

The language throughout the text is more poetry than prose in its rhythmic narration accompanied by chorus repetitions of certain phrases. It echoes Lily's paint strokes as well as the cadence of the sea, the outside reality on the other side of the window.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, February 2026)

The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

 

 (Dust jacket by Francisco Cugat)

Historical Context

The Roaring Twenties was the nickname of the 1920s economic boom in the United States. It was a time of rapid industrial growth through mass production, most famously Ford's automobile plants, rising incomes and the beginnings of consumerism. The prosperity began in the aftermath of World War I and lasted until the stock market crash in 1929.

West Egg in The Great Gatsby mirrors the new-rich affluence that also arose through unbridled stock market speculation and the illicit bootlegging income which financed Gatsby's extravagant jazz parties.

The combination of excessive speculation,  unstable banking and credit conditions led to an unequal distribution of wealth. Poor garage owners like the Wilsons were excluded from the American Dream of upward mobility and self-made riches. The boom ended abruptly through murder in the novel and the Great Depression in society.

Literary background

Fitzgerald wrote within the broader movement of literary Modernism and shared affinities with the Lost Generation’s sense of disillusion and scepticism after the Great War. These were US expat writers, many in 1920s Paris, among them Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Fitzgerald himself and Dos Passos.

Modernist traits in the novel include ironic narration, nonlinear chronology and a focus on subjective perception, rather than the linear plots and omniscient moral voice of tradition. Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” became the archetype where surface detail implied deeper emotion and readers have to infer what is omitted. That restrained narration often produced irony and emotional distance where events are reported plainly and the gap between action and feeling is experienced as alienation. A cynical, world-weary tone unifies the literature’s preoccupation with loss, rootlessness, and the search for authenticity.

Summary

Discussion

The Great Gatsby describes the glitzy 1920s by sketching Gatsby’s free-for-all parties animated by champagne, jazz bands and dancing. However, the story is recounted as a wistful flashback about one springtime in 1922. Gatsby does not live the present, but constantly tries to recapture his past experience with Daisy. All his parties are simply enticements for her to meet up again. Nick warns him that this dream is impossible, but Gatsby insists that you can repeat the past. The drama of the novel revolves round whether or not the protagonist will be able to resurrect his dream of yesteryear. Flashy parties turn out to be a superficial cover for loneliness and unrequited love.

Despite being narrated in a Modernist first person, the format of the story follows a traditional structure. The first chapters introduce all the main characters, the following describe interfamily and intrafamily conflicts. The final chapter puts a somber end to the glamour. The characters themselves are distributed in spaces according to their respective wealth. Gatsby lives in West Egg, the new-money residence on Long Island, over the bay from the established old-money dominions of the Buchanans in East Egg. The road between the two passes through a “valley of ashes” where the poorer Wilsons run a garage. This is a tale about money and the hope it brings to those who inherited it, the hopefulness of those who earned it illicitly and the hopelessness of those who have little. It holds up a inquiring mirror to the American Dream and its mythical promise of equal opportunities.

The influence of money on morality is a further theme which informs the novel. It questions Gatsby’s wealth, acquired through bootlegging, and his continued partnership with Wolfsheim, the gambler. Multiple phone calls throughout the story remind the reader of how Gatsby maintains his rich lifestyle - illicitly. Tom Buchanan’s white supremacist ideas and his history of mistresses speak loudly of his lack of moral fibre. The telling scene of the hit-and-run car accident is witnessed by the only god in the tale, the all-seeing eyes of a poster. Morality is a roadside hoarding. Money decides ethics.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, January, 2026)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by J. Joyce

 

Historical background

British rule in Ireland was brought to a head by the potato famine of the 1840s. There followed mass migration and a potent nationalism. Charles Stewart Parnell — a Protestant and the charismatic leader of the Home Rule cause in Westminster — briefly united Protestants and Catholics behind Irish independence. His public fall, however, after revelations of an affair with a married woman and the denunciation by the Catholic hierarchy, broke that alliance. The scandal and the Church’s withdrawal of support are commented on in the novel’s Christmas‑lunch argument. Contemporaries often blamed clerical condemnation for Parnell’s political ruination and premature death.

Literary context

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man charts Stephen Dedalus’s flight from the strictures of family, nation and faith into the solitary vocation of the artist. Written as a Bildungsroman, the narrative follows Stephen’s moral and aesthetic formation as he rejects the Roman Catholic world that shaped him and chooses exile in pursuit of art. Joyce mixes Victorian omniscient narration with Stephen’s voice using a free indirect narrative style. This inward turn shifts emphasis from the Victorian narrative's traditional focus on society to personal consciousness. It signals a transition towards Modernism in the evolution of the novel.

Stephen’s name links him to the mythical Daedalus who escaped from a labyrinth by fabricating wings. His son Icarus fell when he flew too near the sun. This allusion summarises the novel’s dilemma: the artist’s desire to escape the maze of Irish Catholic culture by fleeing the country. The closing pages show his escape, but leave the open question of whether his flight will triumph or end in a tragic fall.

Summary

Discussion

A central theme in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist is Stephen Dedalus’s growing decision to throw off his upbringing and flee Ireland. The protagonist’s growing-up experience is compared to that of a bird caught in the triple cultural nets of nationality, religion and language, which impede him from flying, as his mythical namesake did.

The topic of Irish nationality is one which divides his family and it comes to a head at a Christmas dinner in an argument about Parnell, the deposed Home Rule leader. Though Stephen is too young to understand the political discussion, he is later faced with it at university. He refuses to side with the activists promoting Ireland’s independence from British rule, but yet the issue affects him as a budding artist: he chooses to write in English, not Irish Gaelic and thus partly abandons his Irish past.

The weight of his traditional Catholic childhood, dominated by fear and guilt, affects his view of sex. Confession and a hellfire retreat sermon increase his conscience of sinfulness. In order to free himself from this angst he adopts a born-again attitude of saintliness, but discovers that this is not sustainable. He also finds that these Catholic beliefs have affected his perception of women, who appear in a triple division: his female family members, the Virgin Mary and the local prostitutes. As his Jesuit educators know, beliefs run deep and are not to be easily thrown off.

In the final pages of the novel Stephen himself narrates through a diary. He declares that his flight from Ireland is not actually an escape from his background, but rather an establishing of a distance in order to become "the consciousness" of his race.  The Portrait is the inauguration of this distancing.

The author chose to write his novel in a free indirect style in which Stephen’s first-person thoughts are voiced by a third-person narrator. This shift of emphasis from the conventional Victorian omniscient narrator and focus on society to a tale of personal consciousness signals a transition towards Modernism in the evolution of the novel. Joyce not only distances himself from his own cultural background, but does it through creative use of narrative technique.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges,  December, 2025)

Howards End by E.M.Forster

Historical context

This post-Victorian period is marked by industrial expansion, urban growth, and shifting class structures that loosen the old dominance of the landed aristocracy while elevating a prosperous capitalist and professional middle class. The Wilcoxes embody the pragmatic, business-minded and materialistic elite. In contrast, the Schlegel siblings represent liberal humanism and aestheticism. However, Leo Bast aspires to social mobility and cultural improvement and fails. The gender reforms of the era are reflected in the sisters' moral agency, while ownership of property still confers power and social continuity.

Literary context

E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) retains the narrative format of realism while introducing modernist interests such as class conflict, the human cost of capitalism and the need for human connection (“Only connect” being its leitmotif). This makes the novel consistent with the cultural shift of Modernism and its concerns over fragmentation.

Forster resists the stream-of-consciousness, fragmentation and linguistic experimentation techniques of postwar modernists and uses an omniscient narrator, a clear chronological order and realistic characterisation. This conservative approach positions Howards End closer to late-Victorian and Edwardian realism, even as it addresses modern life’s discontinuities. The novel is a transitional work: modernist in social change themes; conservative in narrative technique.

Summary

Discussion

Forster builds his story round places. London is presented as a place where certain characters enjoy culture (music, art, literature) and others attend to their business interests. It is described as creeping over the surrounding countryside, much in the same way that the commercial classes are taking over the country through their imperial markets in India and Nigeria. In contrast, the narrator describes the southern English landscapes and their beauty, almost to the cliché of `a green and pleasant land`. This betrays a melancolic longing for a disappearing graceful world changing into a financial enterprise. Howards End is a home for the Schlegels but a property for the Wilcoxes. It is where the narrative finds its final conflict and also its resolution.

Another element which structures the storyline is the three families. Each represents a different outlook on life. The Schlegel sisters are artistic and sensitive. The Wilcoxes are practical capitalists. The Basts are working class: Jacky has a seamy background, but Leonard, though a poor Cockney, has a drive to better himself through culture. The characters meet through places: the city houses they rent or the concert they attend. What threatens to separate them is money, described in a textile metaphor as the warp of the woof of life. However, wealth does not prevent failure, as Charles and Henry Wilcox find out, yet Leonard cannot fulfil his meritocratic dreams through art or love, either. The book's leitmotif is “Only connect”. Perhaps the real warp of life is Margaret Schlegel's striving to connect others with their inner selves.

Published in 1910, the novel is a last look back at society before the First World War. This had such a calamitous effect on the comfortable outlook purveyed by Victorian literature that it created Modernist art. Forster's novel is written in the traditional narrative format of realism, yet introduces modernist themes such as class conflict, the human cost of capitalism and the need for human connection. However, the author resists the Modernist experimental techniques of fragmentation and stream-of-consciousness created by postwar writers. Forster uses an omniscient narrator, a clear chronological order and realistic characterisation. This conservative approach positions Howards End closer to late-Victorian and Edwardian realism. The novel is a transitional work: modernist in social change themes; conservative in narrative technique.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges,  November, 2025)

Kim by R. Kipling

 

Historical background

The formal transfer of power from the East India Company to the Crown took place just two generations before the publication of Kim. The novel appeared amid intense imperial confidence and the expansion of administrative control, but also growing anxieties about rival powers and the stability of colonial rule, the British Raj. The Raj’s bureaucracy, army and missionary activities, together with Indian life, form the novel’s social milieu. 

Victorian racial and civilisational hierarchies are present, despite showing complex cross‑cultural interactions and moments of Indian agency. The late 19th century saw urban growth (Calcutta, Lahore, Delhi), new professions, railways, and commercial networks that enabled movement and anonymity, conditions reflected in Kim’s itinerant life. His hybrid identity also reflected his Anglicised education, and the mixed communities which produced it.

Interest in Buddhism, Hindu reform movements, and cross‑cultural spiritual exchange marked the period. The Lama’s pilgrimage and spiritual quest mirror Western fascination with Eastern religions and theosophical trends of the time.

Kim’s spy plot is rooted in the nineteenth‑century geopolitical rivalry between Britain and Russia across Central and South Asia known as the 'Great Game". Kipling fictionalises spy practices through Kim’s apprenticeship as an agent and the Colonel’s network. The Secret Service first came to fictional prominence in Kim, and revolutionary espionage and anarchy came to the fore in The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad. The spy novel in the twentieth century gained great impetus, of course, from the later events of the two World Wars.

Literary context 

As a late-Victorian text Kim acts as a transitional work in the tradition of the novel. Victorian realism often aimed for a coherent social picture with society portraits, class stability and tight plots. Kim retains realistic descriptions but fragments them into picaresque adventures and shifting settings. Identity is fragmentary and fluid in Kim’s protagonist. This anticipates 20th‑century narrative tendencies toward episodic structures and insecure identities. 

The Victorian novel preferred omniscient narration and moral clarity. In Kim Kipling alternates the omniscient narrator's viewpoint with shifting focus through Kim, the Lama, and various local figures, producing partial, contested knowledge. This diffusion of perspectives foreshadows modernist interest in unreliable or multiple consciousnesses and the relativity of knowledge. Regarding morality, Kipling retained a faith in imperial competence, but Conrad, in a more modernist outlook, exposed violence and moral degeneration at the empire’s core in Heart of Darkness.

While Victorian realism balanced social milieu with character psychology, later modernist works by Woolf and Joyce intensify interiority and stream-of-consciousness techniques. Kim occupies an intermediary position: it deepens access to Kim’s perceptions and moral formation without dissolving into pure interior monologue, signalling a turn towards the psychological narration which characterised modernist writers.

Summary 

Discussion

Published in 1901, this novel presents the heyday of British colonial power in India. It is a picaresque narrative which travels northern India following the streetwise protagonist and a Lama. Their friendship turns the growing-up tale of Kim into something more ethereal: a pilgrimage. This double motif in the storyline fits well with the novel's two main cultures: British colonial materialism and Indian ascetic religiosity.

The author maintains the reader's attention through an episodic structure which constantly moves the plot along from one incident to another. The chapters support the readers' attention by introducing a new character in each one and thus a new description and another story to tell. These embedded narratives offer a rich view of the complex society Kim is travelling through. His smart-aleck exchanges with different characters are also an entertaining support for the storyline.

Identity is a major theme in the book. It is emphasised through Kim who often pauses to ask himself who he is. He is portrayed as both a Sahib schoolboy and a chela, a follower of the Lama. He spans both the Hindu and the British cultures, with a preference for the former and a birth certificate from the latter.

The spy plot in the novel is based on a the historical British-Russian rivalry for control of Central Asia. Kim plays his part in this 'Great Game' through elaborate connections with a British colonel, a Pathan horse trader, Babu the Bengali, a Fagin-style spy instructor and foreign spies, among others. This gives Kipling the opportunity to display the complex relationships which weave India's population and the European difficulty in comprehending them.

Kim's destiny is revealed at the end of his adventures. He ignores his premonition of recruitment into the British army, symbolised by the red bull on a green background, and decides to follow the Lama and his mystical search for the river which washes away all sin.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges,  October, 2025)

Bookclub 2025-26

In the Bookclub this year we will discuss the novels in English of modernist writers, focusing on how they created this cultural movement.

Modernism emerged in the late 19th century and continued until the end of the Second World War. Authors continued the tradition of social critique, but they focused on the individual rather than society, also emphasising the writing process over plot. They broke away from Victorian literary themes, as in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which challenged traditional sexual mores and class relationships. Modernist writers reimagined form, style, and structure in response to the profound changes in human perception brought about by the shock of two World Wars. This was expressed in new narrative techniques.

One key technique is stream-of-consciousness, a free-flowing interior monologue, influenced by Husserl's phenomenology. This approach shifts away from mirroring logical thinking, instead portraying the mind at work through fragmented thoughts, non-grammatical prose, and free associations of images and ideas. One author who adopted this technique was James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man. Instead of using the traditional plot structure of beginning, middle, and end, he used the interior monologue to select moments in the life of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus.

Modernist writers also employed non-linear storylines, featuring events that are not presented chronologically, often through parallel plots, dreams and narratives embedded within the main story. A notable example of this departure from linear order is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Freedom from sexual taboos, conventionalism and the establishment were the dystopian themes in Huxley's Brave New World, also that of modernism.

Another novel approach is the use of multiple perspectives, where several characters narrate in the first person, highlighting their subjectivity and enriching the story through various points of view. For instance, in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf employs three viewpoints centred around the Ramsay couple and the lighthouse. Life is presented through piecemeal epiphanies. Themes of time and loss, shaped by death, tragedy and war, lie at the heart of this often poetic narrative.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Aug. 2025)

Heart of darkness by J. Conrad

Historical background

Towards the end of the 18th. century imperialism was at its zenith in the UK. However it had differing interpretations. It was associated with the economic interests of businessmen looking for markets, and nationalism represented by the crown. Nonethless, in the middle years of the century colonies had begun to be regarded as burdens and there was a preference for trade. An informal empire had been created that was as much dependent on Britain as the formal empire. 

The Empire was held together through British power, particularly naval power. Colonies that were dominated by people of British descent, such as Canada or New Zealand and the states of Australia, had been given substantial powers of self-government since the middle of the century. Yet India, “the jewel in crown,” was held not by consent but by conquest. A viceroy was appointed and control tightened through the construction of a network of railways. Attempts were made to justify British rule in terms of the benefits of law and order for India. However Kipling viewed it as “The white man’s burden,” a worrisome responsibility.

Literary background 

Heart of Darkness was published in the late Victorian era and opened up a different view to Victorian values, foreshadowing Modernism.

Victorian writers explored the workings of society at large: Thackeray had described the upper class, Dickens had focused on the underclass and their exploitation. Eliot had centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's niche was the rural class. Modernist writers, on the contrary, examined the individual psyche. Conrad’s first person narrative in Heart of Darkness prefigured later modernists’ interest in the representation of consciousness.

Conrad's experiments with a first person narrator such as Marlow, foreshadowed what is known as the “stream-of-consciousness” technique. This stylistic approach evokes the complexity of the individual mind by presenting a character’s thoughts, perceptions, and reactions as a continuous flow. In the postwar period, the stream-of-consciousness technique became a trademark of numerous Modernist novelists, most famously Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust.

Conventional Victorian novels used dependable narrators that the reader could trust. In his novel Conrad distances the reader from Marlow’s first-person account by introducing it as a flashback embedded within another narrative. This distances readers from the narrator and provokes scepticism. Conrad’s use of narrative form to inspire doubt in his readers represented a break from conventional Victorian novels which portrayed a changing but stable, secure society.

Summary 

Discussion 

Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness is ostensibly about a trip along the river Congo, but gradually reveals a voyage into much darker human truths.

From the outset the reader is warned that Marlow, the narrator of the story, is an untrustworthy spinner of yarns, some as unenlightening as "moonshine". He is said to describe the surface, not the kernel. Marlow had worked for a colonial trading company, yet he now decries colonialism as brutal exploitation. He is on a quest to find Kurtz, whom we hear described as a genius trader, a musician and a loving partner, but finds a self-centred madman acting as a white deity. The search to find Kurtz powers the narrative, however he is finally revealed as a despotic antihero, an Ahab or Heathcliff. This enigmatic narrative from an unreliable storyteller throws a darkness over the tale. It is Conrad's way of provoking doubt in the reader who is now forced to look beyond the story to a deeper meaning.

Other characters in the novel are equally ambiguous, such as the company manager whose smile is inscrutable, the bricklayer with no bricks or the Russian harlequin, a close friend of Kurtz, yet fearful of him. Both of Kurtz's women friends are wildly different: one a negro sorceress, the other a naive English woman. These contrasts induce further uncertainty in the reader's mind.

Nature itself is a reflection of the darkness in the hearts of both colonisers and their colony. The Thames estuary fogs up the same as the Congo river; the London twilight is just as dark as the African night. The Essex marshland also recalls the African bush. Civilisation and savagery are equally unenlightened, despite the former's supposed superiority.

Conrad's novel is prescient in its foreshadowing of Modernist themes which are critical of Victorian values. The obvious chaos and inefficiency in the colonisers' efforts in Africa contrast with Victorian beliefs in social order and rationality. The upstream Congo river is primal and the downstream runs to civilisation; the Thames estuary is the opposite, where dark civilisation sits upstream in London and the mouth leads to adventure and the unknown. Through uncertainty and disorientation the author leads his Victorian readership to doubt their own long-held mindsets and the present-day reader to recognise the banality of evil.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges,  June, 2025)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Historical Context

The Victorian era (1837-1901) was characterised by industrial expansion, cultural flourishing, and the expansion of the British Empire. At the time Wilde was writing his novel in 1891 the Education Act made elementary education free, a significant step towards increasing literacy.

The old landed aristocracy was slowly being ousted from power by the industrial middle class. However, there remained an upper-middle-class of titled people. They populate the salons in The Picture of Dorian Gray. These people possess their titles, their homes and their money through inheritance. The men usually inherited a seat in the House of Lords, giving them the opportunity to vote on political matters and so maintain a certain power. They also owned a town house in London as well as their countryside estate, as did Dorian Gray.

Literary background

Romantics embraced nature as an alternative to industry early in the 19th. century; in the middle of the century, the Aesthetic movement succeeded Romanticism. Adepts believed in the motto popularised by French poet Théophile Gautier: "Art for art's sake." Victorian society was practical and valued art that carried a useful social cause or a moral message. However, for the Aesthetics, beauty was enough in itself. Wilde was influenced by this movement through the art critic Walter Pater, who helped shape the movement in Britain. 

Wilde incorporated the Aesthetics' philosophy of beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray, while also criticising it in the same work. Lord Henry Wotton represents aesthetic philosophy in the novel and he encourages Dorian to adopt it as a lifestyle. However, Wilde also shows how Dorian ruins many others' lives by living out this philosophy.

Just as Romanticism at the beginning of the century opposed industrialisation, the Gothic literature revival in the 1880s exposed the dark side of the romantic movement. Where romanticism saw the good in emotion, Gothic literature showed the dangers of excess passion and irrationality. 

Gothic literature was a mature tradition by the time Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, and he was one of a number of authors in the period, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who adapted Gothic techniques for philosophical and critical ends. Wilde's novel applies several Gothic clichés, like the doubled self, forbidden knowledge, intense passions, and life-threatening hidden secrets. The author was inspired by the themes of Faust and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and there are allusions to these texts in the plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Summary

Discussion 

One of the eye-catching gothic themes which Oscar Wilde applied in The Picture of Dorian Gray was the doubled self. The novel alludes to Goethe's Faust and Stevenson´s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which probably inspired the plot.

The theme of duality is embodied in the characters as class divisions. Dorian´s girlfriends, Hetty and Sibyl, are both from an inferior class, while those he frequents in the salons, such as Lord Fermor and Lord Henry, are aristocrats. Wilde also uses class divisions to underline the cynicism of the upper classes as represented by Henry, a declared hedonist whose livelihood depends on inheritance, compared to the girls who were romantic idealists, but had to work for their living.

The author employs binary comparisons of location to criticise Victorian society. Dorian has a country house and a town house. He uses the latter to attend dinners, the opera and plays; the former is where he gets up to activities frowned upon by formal society. The protagonist also uses the sleazier neighbourhoods in London to indulge his need for intoxication, all the while living in the upmarket part of town attended to by a French butler. The dual life he leads is underlined by the author in the juxtaposition of two chapters where we see Dorian emerge from the wharf, a haunt of drunken sailors and prostitutes, to join an aristocratic salon full of witty conversation. This double life is a direct comment on the prevailing social falsehood of the time. As Dorian himself explains to Basil, they live in “the native land of the hypocrite”.

The central duality in the novel is the portrait, Dorian´s double. Victorian society valued art that taught a useful moral message. Wilde, however, adhered to the Aesthetic movement whose adepts believed in "Art for art's sake." This implied that beauty was enough in itself and that art need carry no moral lesson. However, the author reverses Aesthetic values since he chooses to depict the increasing immorality of Dorian's behaviour through a work of art. Victorian respectability demanded outward appearance over inner reality, but Wilde gave the lie to this deception by depicting the opposite: a painting faithfully portraying the physical appearance of Dorian's inner sinfulness. His mirror reflection is that of narcissistic beauty; the canvas displays the ugly image of his soul. Wilde uses this double view of Dorian to subtly criticise the duplicity of Victorian society and possibly also to portray the limitations of his own aesthetic values since, in the end, art delivered a moral lesson.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, May 2025)

Jekyll and Hyde by Stevenson

Historical background 

Victorian ethics, which were contradictory to the point of hypocrisy, featured a code of repressive sexual morality, leading to double standards. Society believed it had a duty to improve the lot of the poor and sinful. However, the professional police force was a Victorian innovation and the workhouses and debtors' prisons were also well-known institutions, while prostitution was rife.

A decade and a half before Stevenson published his horror story, Darwin had produced The Descent of Man. The idea that humans were the descendants of apes made an impact on a traditional society whose biblical story said that Adam and Eve had been created as different from and superior to other animals. Readers saw these animal traits in Hyde's troglodytic nature.

Literary background 

The horror story has its roots in the Gothic novel dating back to before the Romantic period when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and continued into the late 19th. century through Bram Stoker's Dracula, E.A. Poe's short stories. Dostoyevsky’s novels The Double (1846) and Crime and Punishment (1866) also dealt with the doppelganger theme. In Jekyll and Hyde Stevenson used the gothic theme to build suspense and mystery in his novel.

Walter Scott's recurrent theme of a divided Scotland led to a fictional tradition which includes Stevenson, Neil Munro, Crockett, Buchan, Violet Jacob, and Naomi Mitchison. In Stevenson's novel this national theme of conflict was represented in an individual, the divided self as the Scottish psychiatrist, Laing, called it.

Stevenson had written the play Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life about an Edinburgh cabinetmaker and locksmith who, by night, used his lock-picking skills to rob the homes of the rich. The author's parents owned a cabinet built by Brodie whose tale was told in the house. This may have inspired the Jekyll and Hyde story.

Summary

Discussion

The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde reads like a detective novel where all the main characters are focused on discovering the dual personalities of the doctor and his doppelganger. Stevenson presents us with a believable amateur detective in Mr. Utterson, an unimaginative lawyer who rejects gossip. The readers' guide in the story is the paradigm of an elderly Victorian gentleman, the opposite of a telltale.

The story of a divided self in Jekyll and Hyde mirrors the larger Victorian society and its ethics, which were contradictory to the point of hypocrisy and featured a code of repressive sexual morality, inevitably leading to double standards. Outward respectability was key to maintaining this Victorian duplicity and Dr. Jekyll and his close friends Utterson and Lanyon were paragons of the socially respectable. The difference between the doctor and his alter ego was immediately visible in their contrasting physical appearance, one described as handsome and affectionate; the other as small and deformed. Jekyll was a respected doctor; Hyde a wanted murderer.

Darwin had produced The Descent of Man fifteen years before Stevenson published his horror story. The idea that humans were the descendants of apes shocked a traditional society that believed that humans had been created as superior to other animals. Encouraged by the narrator, readers saw brutish traits in Hyde's troglodytic nature. Stevenson's 1886 tale of terror also has its literary roots in the Gothic novel, dating back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and continuing through Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Jekyll and Hyde Stevenson uses this gothic theme to build suspense and mystery in his novel.

There may also be a traditional Scottish theme to the Edinburgh writer's interest in dual personalities. Walter Scott's recurrent theme of a divided Scotland led to a fictional tradition which includes Buchan and Stevenson. In the latter's novel this national theme of conflict is represented in an individual, The Divided Self as the Scottish psychiatrist Laing called it. Stevenson had also written the play Deacon Brodie or the Double Life about an Edinburgh cabinetmaker who, by night, used his lock-picking skills to rob safes. The author's parents owned a Brodie cabinet and his tale was probably told in the house. This is another likely inspiration for the double life of Jekyll and Hyde.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Apr. 2025)

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

 

Historical context

Victorian society at end of the 19th century in the UK continued the painful social changes involved in the gradual transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. It organised itself around gender and class:

The rising middle class in the form of bankers, businessmen and entrepreneurs brought new money to power the factories.  They increasing displaced the old land aristocracies which fell into a lower social class: the D'Urbervilles had become the Durbeyfields. Tess's father's fantasy of restored aristocratic lineage was that, an illusion. This portrayal was not well received by Hardy's conservative Victorian society.

Gender was based on biology. Its ideology was founded on the premise of separate spheres which divided men and women into dual entities, the more negative attributes being feminine: strong/weak, sex/reproduction, independent/dependent, public/private.

Literary context

Novels in the Victorian age tended towards a realistic depiction of contemporary social life. Thackeray described the upper-class through Becky Sharp, the social climber. Dickens focused on the under class and their exploitation. Eliot centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's fictional niche was the rural class. Each writer reflected on the practical problems of their chosen social environment and also offered criticism of its organisation.

Morality was another common theme in Victorian literature. It shone a light on the double standards of the day where ethical behaviour was coded, but the higher the class the more skeptically it was adhered to. The banker in Middlemarch, the mill owner in Hard Times, Ms. Sharp in Vanity Fair and the false D'Urberville in Hardy's novel were all disdainful of the accepted moral code.

Summary

Discussion 

The subtitle of the novel in this month's Sitges bookclub reads: A Pure Woman. Quite on the contrary, this tale of Tess can be interpreted as the story of a fall from innocence. It is narrated through Tess's constant feeling of guilt for her rape and the birth of a baby she named Sorrow. The religious theme of blame also touches the other main characters in the book: Angel, who blames himself for deserting Tess, and Alec, who converts to Methodism to repent for the rape.

Another fall theme in the book is the loss of aristocratic lineage: the D'Urbervilles became the Durbeyfields, a descent from nobility to peasantry. Hardy gives the lie to Victorian pretensions to grandeur by exposing Alec as a fake D'Urberville and characterising Tess's peasant father as a quixotic "Sir John D'Urberville" who lives in a parallel reality.

Though the novel centres on Tess it joins other classic stories of the era by offering a realistic depiction of contemporary life. Hardy's fictional choice was the rural class, dedicated to agriculture in a country that was rapidly industrialising. His nostalgic realism captures the fading world of farming and its workers.

Nature plays a background role in Hardy's book. Many chapters set the scene through a description of the season or the weather. In this fashion the narrator primes the reader about the sentiments of the characters, which he then develops. These descriptions of nature envelop the story in a context where the rhythms of life were dictated by the seasons. This regularity was already being broken by the demanding "red tyrant", a primitive thresher that sets the pace for the farm workers. Industrialisation was changing natural time into tyrannical machine time.

Superstition pervades the tale. When no rational explanation is available, fabled interpretations take over. Tess is forced by Alec to swear on a stone that marks the spot where a man had been executed for selling his soul to the devil, a foreshadowing of Tess's condemnation. Supernatural explanations also take a sinister turn and become fate. Her destiny comes in the chapter, "Fulfilment", where the novel concludes by drawing a parallel between Tess's execution and the deterministic finale of a Greek play. However, Tess's execution is not portrayed as a dramatic climax, but more as the passing of a milkmaid. Her lifestory was an prosaic affair, and her death forms part of the "sport" of the gods. Life "went on".

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Mar.2025)

Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

Historical background 

When Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was published in 1891, the U.K. was in a rapid process of industrialisation. The economy base was changing from agriculture and cottage industries to urban factory manufacture. The landowners who had held all the wealth were gradually being replaced by bankers like Bulstrode and manufacturers like Mr. Vincy, whose wealth took the form of money, not land. For the next generation it became important to have a profession in order to maintain a status in this fluctuating society, especially if they had no inheritance like Lydgate, Ladislaw and Fred Vincy, since their capital was their brains.

The 1830 July revolution in France and the overthrow of the king, Charles X, influenced risings in Belgium, Poland, Italy and Germany. The effect in the U.K. was the Reform Act of 1832. Middlemarch takes place between 1829 and 1832, during the struggle for political reform, which ended in the passage of the First Reform Bill in June 1832. Just as the middle class became economically powerful its interest in political power grew. Landowners had dominated Parliament through the system of 'rotten boroughs' whereby parliamentary seats were bought and sold among wealthy aristocrats. The cities were controlled by the middle class, but they were very much unrepresented in this arrangement. They launched a campaign to change the electoral system. The Reform Bill passed in the Commons, by one vote, yet the Lords threw the bill out. The Middlemarch narrative ends here, but a few weeks later the Bill passed, narrowly avoiding a rebellion.

Literary background 

Middlemarch forms part of the mid-19th. century movement of realism. Balzac in France had previously written a history of his countrymen in La Comédie Humaine. Dumas, fils, had published his romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias in 1848. Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is considered a criticism of romanticism in favour of realism, as it plots the tragic results in the life of the romantic protagonist.

Episodios nacionales by Pérez Galdós were a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history. The first novel, Trafalgar (1873), was based on eyewitness accounts of the battle, such as the cabin boy's, the main character of the novel, who had been on board the Santísima Trinidad ship at Trafalgar. Leopoldo Alas (Clarin) published socially critical pamphlets known as paliques (“chitchat”), and his masterpiece, La Regenta (1884–85), is often compared to Madame Bovary for its criticism of social mores in Oviedo.

In the U.S., realist writers included Samuel Clemens (the pen name of Mark Twain), who authored the picaresque novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and displayed realism in its colloquial American speech. US realist fiction includes Stephen Crane's battlefield novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the Civil War, which was published in 1895.

Summary

Discussion

In the February Sitges bookclub session we discussed Middlemarch by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. 

The period covered by the novel is a flashback to the years between 1829 and 1832. It is one of accelerated political and economic change. The U.K. was in a rapid process of industrialisation and the new middle class pushed for political change in the Reform Bill of 1832. The economy base was changing from agriculture and cottage industries to urban factory manufacture. The landowners who held all the wealth were gradually replaced by bankers like Bulstrode and manufacturers like Mr. Vincy. Their wealth took the form of money, not land. For the next generation it also became important to have a profession in order to maintain a status in this fluctuating society, especially if they had no inheritance like Lydgate, Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. Their capital was their brains.

The title refers to a fictitious small town and the subtitle clears up any doubts: A Study of Provincial Life. Unlike novels of the previous century whose main character was an individual, like Crusoe or Tom Jones, Eliot chose to focus on the web of relationships which bound her individuals. Other contemporary writers also chose society as their topic, not individuals, like Dickens, who portrayed the life of the social underdogs, or Thackeray, whose characters were of aristocratic families, or social climbers. However, Eliot centred her descriptions on another class, the bourgeoisie: bankers, manufacturers and landowners. It's not an epic story of someone like Teresa de Avila, whom Eliot refers to in her Preface, but of those remembered in the last lines of the book: "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." It's an account of the rise of the Victorian middle class.

Eliot weaves her narrative of relationships around two main characters, Dorothea and Ladislaw, whose parallel stories help to clear a path through the intricate maze of connections among the characters. Similarly to Thackeray, the authoress identifies them in families that are then intertwined. The different relationships are built up through bourgeois interests: love, money and trade. Each family has a representative of one of the themes, which are replicated in each household. Love is often unrequited, money has to be earned and trade is sometimes unsuccessful. This is not the painless story of Victorian progress, but an empathetic view of vicissitudes in a changing society. Virginia Woolf notably described Middlemarch as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.". It is indeed fictional realism, penned both with sympathy and incisiveness.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Feb.2025)

Hard Times by Dickens

Philosophical background

Hard Times is a criticism of Jeremy Bentham's ethical philosophy, Utilitarianism, which proposed that an action is right if it ensures the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The State decides what is welfare for the majority and individuals are not included in this rule-based calculation so they must look after their own self-interest. Dickens' novel is a criticism of the greed of Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy.

The novel is a critique of the utilitarian philosophy that prioritised facts, efficiency and self-interest over creativity and sociability. For the author, the application of this philosophy to Gradgrind's children dehumanised them.

The economic principles of Adam Smith, foundations of our present neo-liberal economy which proposes that the market should be left to regulate itself, are also apparent in the novel. Dickens appears to take a pre-marxist stand by satirising Bounderby, the false self-made man, and by portraying the class divisions between the factory owners and the workers.

Historical background 

Dickens used the Industrial Revolution as a backdrop to Oliver Twist (1838) and Hard Times (1854). He favours the underdogs such as Stephen Blackpool and shows how they were exploited by a new mercantile class for their own profit. He presents Coketown as a Hell for the 'hands' who worked in its factories and compares it with the natural surroundings where society's leaders, the Bounderbys and Gradgrinds, live. The characters are also seen travelling to and fro through a desolate landscape in the iconic industrial machine: the steam engine.

Literary background.                              

Dickens formed part of the European Realist literary tradition which was critical of contemporary moral and social values. This tradition is exemplified in Spain by Leopold Alas' La Regenta, in France by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in Russia by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina where individuals seek their own self-interest, transgressing ethics.

The Realist literary tradition was a reaction against the previous Romantic era which had favoured imagination. In the characters he paints Dickens seems partly to hearken back to that emphasis on fancy and artistry in his criticism of a utilitarian hyperrational insistence on facts and calculations and the egoism of self-interest.

Summary

Discussion

The December Bookclub in Sitges library discussed Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854). It denounces the greed in Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy by showing its dehumanising effects on the children of the main character, Mr. Gradgrind. The author also strikes a modern note by criticising the  neoliberal economy of the time through satirising Bounderby, the fake self-made man.

Dickens used the Industrial Revolution as a backdrop to Hard Times. He favours the underdogs, represented by the misjudged worker Stephen Blackpool, and shows how they were exploited by a new mercantile class for their own profit. He presents Coketown as a Hell for the 'hands' who toiled in its factories and describes the iconic industrial machine, the steam engine, rumbling to and fro through a desolate landscape.

Dickens formed part of the European Realist literary tradition, which was critical of the period's moral and social values. This tradition is exemplified in Spain by Leopold Alas' La Regenta, in France by Flaubert's Madame Bovary, in Russia by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where individuals seek their own self-interest, transgressing social conventions. The Realist tradition was a reaction against the previous Romantic era, which had favoured imagination. Dickens creates characters that seem partly to hearken back to that emphasis on fancy and artistry and denounces the utilitarian, hyperrational insistence on facts and calculations and the egoism of self-interest.

The book is structured in three parts: Sowing, Reaping, Garnering, in a nod to the agricultural tradition then being replaced by industry. It is also a reference to the moral lesson in Galatians 6: "A man reaps what he sows.", because the novel is a form of crusade against the evils of industrialisation and its ideologies. 

Dickens uses a binary technique to get his message over. The core theme is reason versus feelings. Fact and fancy are opposed in the novel, as are technology and nature, calculation and imagination. The characters are all placed into one or the other category, except Louisa, who has been educated by her ultra-rational father, Mr. Gradgrind, yet is aware of her emotional emptiness. In fact, the whole social narrative is built, not around plot, but through the characters. This is a format used by many writers in the nineteenth century where individuals such as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Raskolnikov, Emma Bovary, or Anna Karenina were used to portray social themes. Unlike other Dickens' novels, some characters in this book actually evolve, particularly in the Gradgrind family. The father is a strict utilitarian at the outset but finally understands the error of his ways through his daughter's misplaced search for love and his son turning into a bank robber. Both Gradgrind children realise their transgressions and repent, which finally turns their father's bad sowing into a hopeful harvest.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Nov.2024)

Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray

Historical background

In Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) penned a critical review of contemporary Victorian England, focused on the new class of leisured gentry who emerged thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the Empire. The author uncovers the Victorian façade of morality which masked a society of acquisition and pretence at home and abroad.

The international backdrop to the book is succinctly summarised in the Battle of Waterloo which is experienced by most characters as an opportunity to dine and dance in Brussels. However, brief descriptions of their fear of defeat and the bloodiness of the conflict also pinpoint their superficiality.

Literary context 

Industrialisation and urbanisation precipitated social changes in the UK. Dickens criticised them from the underdogs' viewpoint; Thackeray recorded them through the particularly British upper-class system. Both authors were part of the Realist movement, a European literary trend which endeavoured to portray contemporary society candidly. Writers such as Balzac in his novel sequence La Comédie humaine, Pérez Galdós' historical Episodios Nacionales, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's War and Peace were engaged in exploring social issues and presented characters drawn from real life.

Summary

Discussion

'Vanity Fair' draws on some of the established ways of narrating a novel. The author varies the narrator's voice using letters to allow several characters to speak, as Richardson and several European authors did. The protagonist of the story follows the traditional picaresque style in the main character, the social climber Becky Sharp, who certainly lives up to her surname. As with Dickens' novels, Vanity Fair was published in monthly installments, so cliffhangers abound at the end of each episode to encourage readers to read on next month.

However, Thackeray also shows a determined innovation in his presentation of the novel. He opens the story with a preface addressed to the reader, advising that his characters are puppets in the hands of a stage manager. Here he discards the pretence of many of his predecessors that his narrative is based on facts or documents. In a further difference with the traditional novel format he invites the reader not to focus on the plot, but on his critical portrayal of contemporary high society, and so the narrator often interrupts the storyline to comment on the characters he is puppeteering.

The book's subtitle underlines the fact that it is a "novel without a hero". This sets it apart from many 18th. century novels whose main character was their hero, such as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver or Tom Jones. On the contrary, the protagonists in this narrative are a whole host of characters caught up in the superficial social whirlwind of Vanity Fair. More than a tale, it is social commentary, driven by a description of relationships rather than by plot. In some chapters it is plain gossip, focusing on people, not ideas. This makes it a romp of a read.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Oct.2024)

The Scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Historical context

In the 19th. century the U.S. was marked by westward expansion, increasing national consciousness, political organisation and regional competition. The Monroe Doctrine brought many of these different strands together in 1823. It stated that the western hemisphere was no longer open to European colonisation, under threat of aggressive reaction by the U.S. This was a political response to the cultural search for identity coursing through the country and culminating in civil war in the middle of the century. The Scarlet Letter can be seen as part of the historical search for personal and national identity.

Hawthorne set the scenario of his novel in the Puritanical era of 17th. century Boston. It can be argued that this harks back to a family identity interest, since his great grandfather, John, was a prominent judge in the infamous Salem witch trial of the 1600s. This part of Puritan history is the backdrop to the social mores depicted in The Scarlet Letter.

Literary context

Hawthorne subtitled his book A Romance, a reference to the European tradition of fantastical stories of knights. The “historical romance” was a subgenre that fictionalized historical events. The first modern historical romance was Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814, the first of a series. Scott’s historical romances were popular in the United States and provided early authors there with a model for writing about their own country. They used their narratives to develop a sense of national identity and pride, and to help readers understand their own history. 

In The Custom House preface to his book Hawthorne clarifies that it is not a novel, but a Romance, which takes readers to a different place and time where facts and fiction mix. The Scarlet Letter is clearly a fictional history aiming to inform on the past cultural identity of the country and so help present-day readers understand where they come from. 

Hawthorne's book is influenced by Transcendentalism, a radical, optimistic expression of Romanticism, which emerged to combat the dehumanising effects of industrialism. It was also a reaction against the established religious practice, based on harsh Calvinism, by preaching a more expressive, personal and humanistic form of religion.

Hawthorne's Romanticism took a more pessimistic view of human fallibility and proclivity for sin. Both the Romantic and Transcendental movements were a reaction against convention and formal classicism, placing emphasis on inspiration, emotion and subjectivity. For instance, the narrator in The Scarlet Letter is quick to support the main character's independent beliefs against those in authority, who are criticised and condemned. 

Summary

Discussion 

The historical background to The Scarlet Letter is a search for personal and national identity by the author. Nineteenth century USA was marked by westward expansion, increasing national consciousness, political organisation and regional competition. This led to a cultural search for identity, culminating in civil war in the middle of the century. Hawthorne also had a family interest in his book, since his great grandfather had been a prominent judge in the infamous Salem witch trials of the 1600s. This part of Puritan history is the backdrop to the social mores depicted in The Scarlet Letter.

The author subtitled his book A Romance, a reference to the European tradition of fantastical stories of knights. The “historical romance” was a subgenre that fictionalised historical events and the first modern historical romance was Walter Scott’s Waverley. Scott’s historical romances provided early authors in the US with examples for writing about their own country. Hawthorne used this narrative model to develop a sense of national identity in his countrymen.

The novel follows a double structure with the first chapter as an autobiographical introduction together with a fictional reference for the main plot to follow: the supposed finding of a manuscript telling the story of the scarlet letter, a narrative pretence also used in El Quijote. The binary construction of the novel continues in the moral opposition of good and evil seen in the characters of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, who also represent two opposed ways of thinking: religious emotionalism and scientific analysis. The reverend Dimmesdale himself plays a double role, a social one as revered minister and a personal one as participant in the sin of adultery. Hawthorn also constructs the whole novel by offsetting the historical events, seen through the Puritans' behaviour, versus the narrator's Romance vision of the story.

The main character is Hester Pryrne, who is shunned and shamed by the Puritan community for adultery by having to wear the large red letter A on her clothes. However, the narrator describes her in a favourable light as a martyr for the cause of freedom, since her ostracism liberated her from the small-minded rules of her Puritan society. She returns insults with charitable works, appearing as morally better than her oppressors. Her daughter Pearl is also presented as a bright and positive child by the narrator, yet considered elfish by the Puritan neighbours.

The theme of social criticism lays bare the crude patriarchal theocracy of the first US colony, governed by a strict Puritan code, but which allowed bond servants as slaves. The narrator thus draws a distinction between outward appearances and inward morality, suggesting that the society's ethics were in fact hypocritical. The eagle, as a symbol of the independent U.S., is described, not in tender terms, but as apt to claw at her nestlings. The identity Hawthorne draws for his countrymen and women is double-edged: raw, yet hopeful.

(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Sept.2024)