THE HISTORY OF NEOCLASSICAL AGE

1).Compare and contrast the Condition of Women during the Neoclassical Age with the contemporary time.

Ans. 

          Although obviously half of the population of Renaissance Europe was female, the role of women in the high culture, especially the Latin-based academic culture and humanist movement of the period, was very limited, a generalization which is also true of political life, large-scale business enterprise, the fine arts (both music and visual arts), and even vernacular literature. Continuing the misogynistic culture of medieval Europe, Renaissance society excluded women from any leading role in public life. One prominent student of the place of women during the period has stated flatly that for women, the Renaissance was not a renaissance at all, but a period of declining status, and while this conclusion has been challenged, there is considerable evidence that in at least some respects, the restrictions on women’s participation in society increased during the centuries (14th through 16th or early 17th) usually covered by the term “Renaissance.”

      Women’s proper role in society, as defined by most opinion in that age, was largely limited to the domestic sphere, and even in family life, both legally and actually, women were always supposed to be under the control of some male authority: first by the father, then by the husband, and if the woman were widowed, in many regions finally by either male children or the male relatives of her deceased spouse. The course of a woman’s life was clearly defined: first as daughter and virgin, then as wife and mother, and finally as widow. Only a wealthy widow had any real chance of being more or less in-dependent and in charge of her own life. Even in that case, her independence in many regions was greatly restricted by the property rights of her sons and her husband’s kinsmen. Women of the higher classes (royal, aristocratic, and bourgeois) were more closely controlled than peasant women or women of the poorer urban classes, because their marriages involved important political and economic relationships and valuable properties. While European brides were never purchased as was done in some cultures, the daughters of prominent families were married off by their parents (essentially, by their fathers), who used the marriages of daughters (and sons, too) in order to make political or business connections. Lower-class women, on the other hand, often had considerably more independence in choosing whom and when to marry, though the fundamental cause of this independence was that they were poor and hence their marriage did not involve the pursuit of extraneous material goals. In the 17th century the professions (teacher, lawyer, doctor) were closed to women. However some women had jobs. Some of them worked spinning cloth. Women were also tailors, milliners, dyers, shoemakers and embroiderers. There were also washerwomen. Some women worked in food preparation such as brewers, bakers or confectioners. Women also sold foodstuffs in the streets. A very common job for women was domestic servant. Other women were midwives and apothecaries.  However most women were housewives and they were kept very busy. Most men could not run a farm or a business without their wife’s help. In those days most households in the countryside were largely self-sufficient. A housewife (assisted by her servants if she had any) had to bake her family’s bread and brew their beer (it was not safe to drink water). She was also responsible for curing bacon, salting meat and making pickles, jellies and preserves (all of which were essential in an age before fridges and freezers). Very often in the countryside the housewife also made the families candles and their soap. A housewife also spun wool and linen.A farmer’s wife also milked cows, fed animals and grew herbs and vegetables. She often kept bees. She also took goods to market to sell. On top of that she had to cook, wash the families clothes and clean the house. The housewife was also supposed to have some knowledge of medicine and be able to treat her family’s illnesses. If she could not they would go to a wise woman. Only the wealthy could afford a doctor. Poor and middle class wives were kept very busy but rich women were not idle either. In a big house they had to organize and supervise the servants. Also if her husband was away the woman usually ran the estate. Very often a merchant’s wife did his accounts and if was travelling she looked after the business. Often when a merchant wrote his will he left his business to his wife – because she would be able to run it. In the 16th century some upper class women were highly educated. (Elizabeth I was well educated and she liked reading). They learned music and dancing and needlework. They also learned to read and write and they learned languages like Greek and Latin, Spanish, Italian and French. However towards the end of the 16th century girls spent less time on academic subjects and more time on skills like music and embroidery. Moreover during the 17th century boarding schools for girls were founded in many towns. In them girls were taught subjects like writing, music and needlework. (It was considered more important for girls to learn ‘accomplishments’ than to study academic subjects).Women in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were challenged with expressing themselves in a patriarchal system that generally refused to grant merit to women’s views. Cultural and political events during these centuries increased attention to women’s issues such as education reform, and by the end of the eighteenth century, women were increasingly able to speak out against injustices. Though modern feminism was nonexistent, many women expressed themselves and exposed the conditions that they faced, albeit often indirectly, using a variety of subversive and creative methods.

2) Write on 18th Century Women Poets

Ans. 

     The rediscovery of women’s poetry has transformed the literary landscape of the eighteenth century. As recently as the early 1980s, students and general readers confronted a canon far narrower and almost exclusively male. Although so-called ‘Augustan’ verse had always offered more generic and stylistic diversity than the social and political satire by which the age is often stereotyped, very few poems by women appeared in anthologies or on university syllabuses. Of the several hundred items in Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell and Marshall Waingrow’s compendious Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) there are only four poems by women – three by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and one short lyric by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Charles Peake’s Poetry of the Landscape and the Night (1967), a kind of ‘alternative’ eighteenth-century verse anthology, included only one piece by a woman, Finch’s ‘Nocturnal Reverie’. Yet by the mid 1980s much had changed. Feminist criticism and scholarship had invested heavily in rediscovering literary ‘mothers’; and a wide range of textual scholars had started to undertake the challenge of editing some of the many coterie manuscript poems by women which represented a significant facet of female writing of the period. Roger Lonsdale’s ground-breaking Eighteenth– Century Women Poets (1989) helped place in the public domain unfamiliar women poets, some published and popular in their own time, who had since disappeared from view. 

 

3) Tom Jones/ Moll Flanders as picaresque novels.

Ans.

        The Picaresque Novel is a tale of adventures or mis-adventures of a Picaro which means a ‘rogue’ or ‘knave’. It originated in Spain in the sixteenth century as a reaction against the romance of chivalry. Lazarillo De Tormes and Guzman de Alfarache are the earliest of the Spanish picaresque novels. Defoe’s Moll Flanders is in the picaresque tradition. It is the story of the adventures of a dissolute woman. She is the heroine of the novel. Some critics do not accept Moll Flanders as a picaresque novel on the grounds that the crimes of the protagonist are rooted in the dynamics of economic individualism. Robinson Crusoe is also rejected as a picaresque novel on similar grounds. 

The chief characteristics of the Picaresque novel are a picaro and his adventures. From these emerge other characteristics. In order that a person is a picaro he should be of dubious parentage like the protagonists of ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Great expectations’. He should be restless by nature so that he may keep on moving from place to place, from country to country. To keep the story moving the novelist has to dovetail several episodes keeping the protagonist at the centre of all events. Since the scenes are shifting, different social setting becomes necessary after the change of every scene or episode.

      Thus various aspects of society are painted in a picaresque novel. The protagonist has to move from place to place, from people to people, a large number of characters are to be drawn from different walks of life who may come in contact with the central figure. The hero, or the central figure is primarily a ‘rogue‘, therefore the question of any didactic nature does not arise at all, since no moral issues are involved. The main purpose of the writer of a picaresque novel is to sustain the interest of the reader in the main story and provide entertainment and delight.

   Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is a picaresque novel. The second part of ‘Tom Jones’ is purely picaresque. Tom Jones is fashioned on the model of the Spanish picaresque novels and of Gil Blas of Le Sage, a French novelist. Its structure depends on the nature of the genre. The hero is a foundling. He is thrown out of the house by his patron, Mr. Allworthy on the instigation of Blifil, the villain. The novel after this becomes purely picaresque. Tom Jones goes on moving from place to place meeting all sorts of people. His life is just a series of adventures. At the end he reaches London. The plot starts unfolding. Complications are resolved. The novel ends with the marriage of Tom with Sophia

  The picaresque character of the novel is amply reflected after Tom’s expulsion from Allworthy’s house. He goes to Bristol. He meets the soldiers on way to Bristol. He accompanies them in order to become a soldier himself. Tom’s adventures begin. Tom meets Partridge. He treats Tom kindly. Tom and Partridge become companions. Tom goes to Meazart Hill. He rescues a woman from the hands of a ruffian: helps Mrs. Waters and takes her with him to the town. Tom’s life with Mrs. Waters at the in becomes scandalous. Sophia and Mrs. Honour arrive at the inn. 

    The Picaresque Novel is a tale of adventures or mis-adventures of a Picaro which means a ‘rogue’ or ‘knave’. It originated in Spain in the sixteenth century as a reaction against the romance of chivalry. Lazarillo De Tormes and Guzman de Alfarache are the earliest of the Spanish picaresque novels.

   Defoe’s Moll Flanders is in the picaresque tradition. It is the story of the adventures of a dissolute woman. She is the heroine of the novel. Some critics do not accept Moll Flanders as a picaresque novel on the grounds that the crimes of the protagonist are rooted in the dynamics of economic individualism. Robinson Crusoe is also rejected as a picaresque novel on similar grounds.

 The chief characteristics of the Picaresque novel are a picaro and his adventures. From these emerge other characteristics. In order that a person is a picaro he should be of dubious parentage like the protagonists of ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Great expectations’. He should be restless by nature so that he may keep on moving from place to place, from country to country. To keep the story moving the novelist has to dovetail several episodes keeping the protagonist at the centre of all events. Since the scenes are shifting, different social setting becomes necessary after the change of every scene or episode.

   Thus various aspects of society are painted in a picaresque novel. The protagonist has to move from place to place, from people to people, a large number of characters are to be drawn from different walks of life who may come in contact with the central figure. The hero, or the central figure is primarily a ‘rogue‘, therefore the question of any didactic nature does not arise at all, since no moral issues are involved. The main purpose of the writer of a picaresque novel is to sustain the interest of the reader in the main story and provide entertainment and delight.

   Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is a picaresque novel. The second part of ‘Tom Jones’ is purely picaresque. Tom Jones is fashioned on the model of the Spanish picaresque novels and of Gil Blas of Le Sage, a French novelist. Its structure depends on the nature of the genre. The hero is a foundling. He is thrown out of the house by his patron, Mr. Allworthy on the instigation of Blifil, the villain. The novel after this becomes purely   picaresque. Tom Jones goes on moving from place to place meeting all sorts of people. His life is just a series of adventures. At the end he reaches London. The plot starts unfolding. Complications are resolved. The novel ends with the marriage of Tom with Sophia

  The picaresque character of the novel is amply reflected after Tom’s expulsion from Allworthy’s house. He goes to Bristol. He meets the soldiers on way to Bristol. He accompanies them in order to become a soldier himself. Tom’s adventures begin. Tom meets Partridge. He treats Tom kindly. Tom and Partridge become companions. Tom goes to Meazart Hill. He rescues a woman from the hands of a ruffian: helps Mrs. Waters and takes her with him to the town. Tom’s life with Mrs. Waters at the in becomes scandalous. Sophia and Mrs. Honour arrive at the inn. Partridge makes some scandalous utterances to Mrs. Honour about Tom and Mrs. Waters. Susan confirms it.

   Sophia meets Harriet. She accompanies her to London. Tom Jones continues his chase for Sophia. In the way, he makes up his mind to join military services. His companion, Partridge opposes his resolution. They meet a lame beggar on way. Tom buys a diary from him. To his utter surprise he discovers that the diary belongs to Sophia. The diary contained a bank-note. Tom continues his journey further. In the way he stays in a number of lodgings and inns. Tom meets a robber who threatens him. Tom gives him a good thrashing. The robber apologizes. Tom gives on two guinees on his request.  Tom arrives in London. Tom and Partridge stay at Mrs. Miller’s lodgings where they win the confidence of the land lady and the friendship of Mr. Nightingale. Tom is entrapped by Lady Bellaston, a flirt and a man hunter. Tom is tired of lady Bellaston. He wants to get rid of her. He seeks the help of Mr. Nightingale. Lady Bellaston decides to get rid of Sophia. She arranges a secret meeting between Sophia and Lord Fellanmor in order to get Sophia seduced by him because she thought that Sophia would then naturally like to marry the man who had seduced her. Sophia’s father arrives accidentally and consequently her honour is saved.

 Tom Jones pays visit to Mrs. Fitzpatrick in order to know about Sophia’s lodgings. Mr. Fitzpatrick arrives. He does not recollect the face of Tom Jones. There is some sort of misunderstanding. They draw swords. A number of persons intervene. Tom Jones is delivered to the civil magistrate who orders him to be carried to a public house.