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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mind map of characters in Middlemarch:

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)