Sunday, 26 October 2025

The Brutal Mechanics: A Critical Analysis of Aphra Behn's 'The Rover' and Patriarchal Economics

The Brutal Mechanics: 'The Rover' as a Critique of Patriarchal Economics

This blog is written as a task assigned by Megha Trivedi Department of English (MKBU) Critical analysis of Aphra Behn's revolutionary Restoration comedy.

Introduction

Aphra Behn's 'The Rover' presents itself as a Restoration comedy. It adheres to the conventions of the genre: witty lovers, complex mistaken-identity plots, a Carnival setting for licensed misrule, and a final pairing-off of couples. Yet, to read the play merely as a "bawdy romp" is to misread it completely. Behn hijacks the form. She uses the very conventions of comedy as a diagnostic tool, staging a profound and blistering critique of the 17th-century social structure. The play is not about love and adventure. It is about economics.

Aphra Behn

It is a systematic dissection of the limited, brutal, and transactional marketplace available to women, where their bodies are the only commodity and their choices are illusory. Behn does not just present female characters; she presents competing economic models for female survival, the courtesan and the wife, and exposes both as failures, traps set by a system that equates male desire with power and female identity with property.

This analysis will examine the play through this critical lens. First, it will explore the play's setting and central metaphors, the Carnival and the mask, as structural devices Behn employs to suspend social protections and reveal the underlying violence of the patriarchal system. Second, it will address the central thesis of the courtesan Angellica Bianca: that the "respectable" marriage market is indistinguishable from her own trade. Finally, it will investigate Virginia Woolf's claim that Behn "earned women the right to speak their minds," using 'The Rover' as the primary text to argue that Behn used this right not to celebrate, but to diagnose the very mechanisms that silence women's voices.

The Crucible of Carnival: The Mask as an Engine of Exposure

Behn's choice of Naples during Carnival is a precise and deliberate structural decision. The Carnival is a liminal space, a period of sanctioned chaos where social hierarchies are theoretically inverted and identities are hidden behind masks. In a typical comedy, this setting would be a simple plot engine, a way to generate humorous misunderstandings and allow high-born characters to mix with commoners. Behn uses it as a crucible. By suspending the normal rules of social conduct, she strips her female characters of their primary, and only, defense: their social status. The mask, the supposed tool of liberation, becomes the instrument of their vulnerability.


For the men in the play, the "rovers" Willmore, Belvile, and Frederick, the mask grants anonymity and freedom of action. It allows them to pursue their desires (drink, women, adventure) without consequence or identity. For the women, Florinda, Hellena, and Valeria, the mask does the opposite. It does not grant them freedom; it merely strips them of their names. It erases their identity as "women of quality" and reduces them to their base definition in this world: "woman," an anonymous object of male pursuit.

Here's a breakdown of that double-edged sword:

The Mask: Liberation vs. Vulnerability
For the Men (e.g., Willmore) For the Women (e.g., Florinda)
Grants: Anonymity, Freedom of Action Grants: Anonymity, Freedom of Movement (Illusion)
Effect: Pursue desire without consequence. Effect: Stripped of social status and protection.
Outcome: Empowers them to act. Outcome: Reduces them to a generic object ("woman").
Result: Liberation Result: Extreme Vulnerability

The play's central horror lies in its repeated demonstration of this fact. The plot does not just contain the threat of rape; it is driven by it. This violence is not perpetrated by clear villains but by the play's "heroes." The first instance is with Willmore, the charming, witty protagonist. Drunk and emboldened by the Carnival's anonymity, he encounters Florinda. When she, a "woman of quality," resists him, his response is a terrifying piece of rhetorical reduction:

"A woman of quality! Why, art thou not a woman? ...a woman's a woman."

This line is the core of Behn's critique. In this "liberated" space, all social distinctions collapse. "Quality" is a social fiction. "Woman" is a biological fact, and in Willmore's eyes, that fact implies availability. Her "no" is meaningless. Her speech has no power. Her identity is gone. She is saved not by her own agency or voice, but only by the timely arrival of Belvile, another man with a competing claim.

Behn reinforces this point, making it systemic rather than incidental, with the subplot of Blunt. Blunt is the play's "gull," a stock comic character. He is tricked by a prostitute, Lucetta, who steals his belongings and his pride. In a standard comedy, this would be the extent of the joke. But Behn charts the psychological consequence. Blunt's humiliation does not resolve into self-awareness; it metastasizes into a vengeful, generalized misogyny. He vows to:

"be revenged on one whore for the sins of another."

When Florinda, fleeing other men, seeks refuge in his room, Blunt's "comic" plot collides with her "serious" one. He, like Willmore, does not see her. He sees only the category of "woman," an object on which to enact his violent revenge. The scene is brutal, chilling, and structurally deliberate. Behn forces the audience, who had been laughing at Blunt's foolishness, to confront the direct, violent consequence of the very male ego they found amusing. Florinda is again saved not by her own power, but by the arrival of other men.

The "freedom" of the Carnival is a lie. It is a space that reveals a fundamental truth: for women, there is only the "protection" of the patriarchal cage (the home, the convent) or the "freedom" of the wilderness, where they are prey. The mask does not liberate them; it simply makes them anonymous targets. Behn uses this comedic setting to stage a scenario of profound vulnerability, showing that when the thin veneer of social custom is removed, the default relationship between the sexes is not wit and romance, but power and violence.

Question 1: Angellica Bianca and the Hypocrisy of the Marriage Market

Angellica considers the financial negotiations that one makes before marrying a prospective bride the same as prostitution. Do you agree?

Yes, and the play argues compellingly that Angellica is not only correct, but that her position is, in fact, the only honest one in the play's economic system. 'The Rover' is built on a direct comparison between two markets for women. Angellica's assessment is not a moment of cynical wit; it is the play's central economic thesis.

Behn presents two clear, competing models for the exchange of women.

1. The Patriarchal Marriage Market:

This market is defined by the trade of Florinda and Hellena.

  • Florinda is a passive commodity. Her dead father's will and her brother Don Pedro's authority are the forces that control her fate. She is an asset, valued at a dowry of 300,000 crowns. Her purpose is to be "sold" to either the old, rich Don Vincentio (her father's choice) or Don Antonio (her brother's choice) in a transaction that secures family wealth and alliances. Her own desires, her love for the poor Belvile, are irrelevant. She is property, and her objections are met with imprisonment.
  • Hellena is a similar commodity, though her path is different. She is destined for the convent. This is not a spiritual calling but an economic decision: the family cannot or will not pay for two dowries, so she is "given" to the church, a transaction that removes her from the market entirely.

In this "respectable" market, the woman is an object. The transaction is negotiated by men (fathers, brothers) for men (husbands). The woman's "virtue" is simply a guarantee of the product's quality, its virginity, which ensures the legitimacy of the bloodline. Her consent is not a factor.

2. The Courtesan's Market:

This market is controlled by Angellica Bianca.

  • Angellica is an active economic agent. She is not sold; she sells. She sets her own terms, advertises with her portrait, and names her price: 1,000 crowns a month. She controls her own property (her house) and her own body. She is a businesswoman who has seized the means of production.
  • Her trade is public, honest, and transactional. She has inverted the power dynamic. Instead of men negotiating over her, they must come to her and meet her terms. She has achieved what Florinda and Hellena cannot: economic independence and personal agency.

This table clarifies the direct comparison Behn is making:

The Marketplace for Women: A Comparison
The "Respectable" Marriage Market The "Courtesan" Market
Commodity: Florinda & Hellena Agent: Angellica Bianca
Control: Father / Brother (Patriarchy) Control: Self-Controlled
Transaction: Permanent, one-time "sale" (marriage) or disposal (convent). Transaction: Temporary, renewable (1,000 crowns/month).
Woman's Role: Passive Object. Woman's Role: Active Agent / Businesswoman.
Value: Dowry (e.g., 300,000 crowns) + "Virtue". Value: Set by Angellica herself.
Key Factor: Her consent is irrelevant. Key Factor: Her terms are the entire basis.
Labelled as: "Just" / "Virtuous" Labelled as: "Mercenary" / "Sinful"

Angellica's famous speech to Willmore, who rails against her "mercenary" trade, is the play's moment of deconstruction. She directly confronts the hypocrisy of the system that condemns her while celebrating the marriage market:

"Pray, tell me, sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary crime? ...What hinders you, who are men of quality, from marrying our women of quality... but want of fortunes?... Thou, knowing this, still rail'st against my trade... But call it marriage, and thou'lt find it just."

She exposes the "crime" as universal. The only difference is the name and the honesty. "Respectable" men will not marry a "woman of quality" without a fortune. Florinda is "just" because she is sold once and permanently in a contract called marriage. Angellica is "sinful" because she sells herself temporarily and transparently in a contract of her own making. From an economic standpoint, Angellica's position is the more powerful one. She is the agent; Florinda is the object.

Where Behn's critique becomes truly devastating is in the failure of Angellica's model. Angellica is not defeated by a bad business deal. She is defeated by ideology. Willmore, who cannot afford her price, offers her something else: the idea of romantic love. He convinces her that he loves her for her, not her trade. Angellica, starved for the one thing her money cannot buy, genuine, non-transactional affection, breaks her own rules. She "gives" herself to him for free, investing emotionally in a man who is the definition of a bad-faith actor.



The moment she does this, her power evaporates. Willmore, having "conquered" her and taken her money, abandons her for the "fresh" wit of Hellena. Angellica's economic independence is revealed as a fragile defense against an emotional and ideological system designed to disarm women. She is reduced from a powerful businesswoman to the most pathetic stock character of Restoration drama: the "wronged woman" seeking revenge with a pistol.

Thus, Angellica is absolutely right. Marriage is prostitution. But Behn's final, cynical argument is that in this patriarchal system, even honest prostitution is not a path to liberation. It is just another, more transparent, trap. The system ultimately finds a way, through romance, through violence, through social ideology, to break any woman who dares to operate outside of its designated channels.

Question 2: Woolf's Claim and Behn's Complicated "Right to Speak"

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Virginia Woolf said so in 'A Room of One's Own'. Do you agree with this statement? Justify your answer with reference to your reading of the play 'The Rover'.

Yes, one must agree with Woolf's statement, but it must be understood in the precise, material terms Woolf intended, and 'The Rover' is the perfect text to demonstrate both the truth of her claim and its profound limitations. Woolf's argument in 'A Room of One's Own' is fundamentally economic: to write, a woman needs "money and a room of her own." The "right to speak" is not an abstract ideal but a financial and professional one.

Behn is the figure Woolf identifies because she was the first Englishwoman to professionalize writing. She did not write as a private hobby. She competed in the public, commercial, and overwhelmingly male world of the London stage. She wrote to pay her rent. She proved that a woman's mind could be a source of income. This act of professionalization, of turning wit into money, is the "earning" Woolf speaks of. Behn created the "room of one's own" not with an inheritance, but with ticket sales. She established the possibility of female intellectual independence.

'The Rover' is the direct product of this earned right. Its existence, its wit, and its success are the justification for Woolf's claim.

How 'The Rover' Justifies Woolf's Statement:

The play is an exercise in "speaking one's mind." The female characters, particularly Hellena, are the embodiment of Behn's own project.

  • Hellena as Authorial Avatar: Hellena is a character of pure intellect. Destined for the convent (a space of enforced silence), she declares:
    "I am resolved to provide for myself... a man."
    Her only weapon, her only "dowry," is her wit. She hunts Willmore, engages him in verbal combat, and "wins" him not with virtue or beauty, but with her mind. She negotiates her own destiny through language. Hellena is Behn's fictional proof of concept: a female mind, when unleashed, is a powerful, active, and world-shaping force.
  • Angellica's Intellectual Honesty: As discussed, Angellica's voice is the play's source of its most trenchant social and economic critique. She is given the play's most intelligent deconstructive lines. Behn uses her to "speak her mind" about the hypocrisy of the entire social structure.
  • The Play Itself: The sheer act of writing 'The Rover' is the proof. Behn takes a male-dominated genre, centers it on the subjective experience and suffering of women, and critiques the very "rover" archetype her male contemporaries celebrated. This is an audacious act of "speaking one's mind."

How 'The Rover' Complicates Woolf's Statement:

While 'The Rover' is the product of Behn's "right to speak," the play's content is a brutal demonstration that speaking and being heard are two different things. Behn uses her voice to show how all other female voices are silenced. The play is not a celebration of a right won; it is a diagnostic of a world that refuses to listen.

This table shows the limited power of the female voice within the play's world:

The Power of the Female Voice in 'The Rover'
Character How She "Speaks Her Mind" The Result (Is She Heard?)
Florinda Speaks clearly. Says "no" to attackers. States her love for Belvile. No. Her voice is totally impotent. It stops no violence. She is saved only by other men.
Angellica Speaks with intellectual brilliance. Exposes the system's hypocrisy. Partially. Her intellectual voice is "heard," but her emotional voice (of love/betrayal) is dismissed as female "raving."
Hellena Speaks with active wit. Uses language as a weapon and a tool to get what she wants. Yes. She is the only woman whose voice succeeds. She talks her way into a marriage of her own choosing.
  • The Failure of Florinda's Voice: Florinda speaks clearly, rationally, and desperately. She says "no" to Willmore. She says "no" to Blunt. She pleads for her life and her honor. Her voice is impotent. It has no physical power. It does not stop Willmore's advance. It does not halt Blunt's attack. Her "no" is treated as mere noise, a part of the "game." She is saved only by the physical intervention of other men. Her "right to speak" is a complete failure.
  • The Dismissal of Angellica's Voice: Angellica speaks with the power of economic truth. She wins the intellectual argument with Willmore. But her voice is only powerful as long as she remains within her defined role as the "powerful courtesan." The moment she speaks with genuine passion, of love, and then of betrayal, her voice is re-categorized. She is no longer an intellectual equal; she is a "jilting jade," a "fury," a "scorned woman." Her intelligent speech is dismissed as the "ravings" of a hysterical, spurned lover.
  • Hellena's Ambiguous "Victory": Hellena is the only one whose voice "succeeds." She talks her way out of the convent and into a marriage. But what has she won? She has "tamed" Willmore, the very man who, hours earlier, attempted to rape her sister and who emotionally destroyed Angellica. Her "victory" is binding her life to the play's central engine of misogyny and chaos. The play's "comic" ending is profoundly cynical. Hellena's "right to speak" has won her the "right" to spend her life attempting to manage an unmanageable and dangerous man. It is a "win," but it feels more like a life sentence.

In conclusion, Woolf's statement is correct. Behn did earn the right, in the professional and economic sense that mattered to Woolf. She created the path. But 'The Rover' is Behn's masterpiece of that right, and she uses it to argue that the fight was far from over. She uses her professional voice to articulate the thousand ways, physical, economic, and ideological, that the world conspires to silence, ignore, and destroy the voices of women. The flowers on her tomb are for the act of speaking, but the play itself is a warning that speaking is only the first, not the final, step.

Conclusion: The Subversion of Comedy as Humanitarian Act

'The Rover' endures not because it is a "fun" play, but because it is a deeply serious one. Behn's "humanitarian" impulse is not to be found in sentimentality, the play has none, but in her unflinching insistence on consequence. In a typical Restoration comedy, Willmore is the unambiguous hero, and his "roving" is a celebrated expression of charming, aristocratic freedom. Blunt is the "comic gull," and his humiliation is a source of uncomplicated laughter.

Behn subverts both. She re-frames Willmore as the primary antagonist to female safety and autonomy. His charm is the predator's lure. She re-frames Blunt's "comic" subplot as a terrifying case study in how male humiliation curdles into generalized, violent misogyny.

This table summarizes Behn's subversion of the stock comedic characters:

Restoration Comedy: Expectation vs. Behn's Reality
Stock Character Comedic Expectation Behn's Subversive Reality
The Witty Hero (Willmore) Charming, lovable, and free-spirited. His "roving" is the engine of fun. Primary antagonist to female safety. His charm is a predator's weapon. He attempts rape.
The Comic Gull (Blunt) A foolish, harmless character. His humiliation is the main joke. A terrifying study in misogyny. His humiliation transforms into violent revenge against all women.
The Scorned Woman (Angellica) A stock character to be dismissed; a hysterical, one-note figure of rage. The play's most intelligent voice. Her "rage" is the justified response to systemic exploitation.
The Witty Heroine (Hellena) The hero's "match." Her wit wins her a "happily ever after." A deeply ambiguous "victory." She wins a marriage to a dangerous, untrustworthy man.

The play's "comedy" is a trap for the audience. Behn invites the audience to laugh at Willmore's wit, then forces them to watch him attempt a rape. She makes them complicit. She exposes the rot at the center of the very "heroic" archetype they paid to see.

This is Behn's genius. She uses the conventions of comedy to critique the culture that produced it. She does not offer easy solutions. Angellica's independence fails. Florinda's virtue is useless. Hellena's wit wins her a deeply compromised prize. Behn is not writing a fantasy of liberation. She is writing a diagnosis of a system. By placing the real, tangible, and violent consequences of male "roving" at the center of her "comedy," she insists on the humanity of the women who are its collateral damage. She forces the audience to see them, not as plot devices, but as human beings navigating a world designed for their exploitation.

Ultimately, 'The Rover' is a testament to the power of seeing the world clearly, even if that view is bleak. Behn's honesty is what makes the play so modern. She refuses to provide a simple "happily ever after," instead leaving her audience with the deeply unsettling, and deeply intelligent, "victory" of Hellena. It is a victory that feels, in the end, very much like a challenge.

Works Cited

This analysis is based on a critical reading of the following texts. For further study, any scholarly edition is recommended.

Word Count: 3,413 words
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Thursday, 23 October 2025

The Augustan Mirror: A Critical Analysis of the Neo-Classical Period

The Augustan Mirror: A Critical Inquiry into the Neo-Classical Zeitgeist

This blog is written as a task assigned by Prakruti Ma'am Bhatt (Department Of English), critical analysis of the Neo-Classical period.

Introduction

The Neo-classical period (roughly 1660-1785) presents a profound critical paradox. It is an era we have labeled "The Age of Reason," "The Enlightenment," and "The Augustan Age," all of which suggest order, clarity, classicism, and control. Yet, this same period produced the wild, grotesque, and furious satires of Jonathan Swift, the birth of the novel—a messy, rule-breaking, bourgeois form—and a public sphere vibrating with commercial energy, political factionalism, and social anxiety.

This was not a monolithic age of serene reason. It was, in my reading, a deeply contested period, a cultural foundry where the very ideas of "politeness," "the individual," "public opinion," and "literary taste" were being hammered out, often violently. The literature of the age is not a simple reflection of its philosophical ideals; it is the battleground where those ideals were fought over.

This post is a critical attempt to probe that battleground. By examining four central areas that define this era, we can move past the stereotypes of wigs and rhyming couplets and into the complex, generative heart of the 18th century. We will interrogate the social settings of the aristocracy and the servant class, weigh the claims of its dominant literary forms, trace the moral combat in its theaters, and assess the architects of its new public sphere.

1. The Divided Society: Aristocratic Artifice and Bourgeois Virtue

To understand the 18th century's socio-cultural landscape, one cannot look at a single point. It was a society in transition, defined by the tension between a declining, performative aristocracy and a rising, anxious, and morally-charged middle class. For this analysis, no two texts offer a more perfect dialectic than Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712-1717) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). They function as mirrors to two different, and deeply conflicting, worlds.

Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock

Pope's poem is the definitive portrait of the aristocratic, "polite" world of Queen Anne's London. It is a world that has shrunk, becoming a hermetically sealed echo chamber for the concerns of a tiny, elite class. The socio-cultural setting Pope critiques is one of total artifice. This is a post-Restoration society where the old, land-based power of the aristocracy is being challenged by the new, fluid power of "money." In response, this class has doubled down on what it can control: manners, social ritual, and appearance.

Pope's genius is to satirize this world by using its own love of classical grandeur. The poem is a "mock-heroic epic," applying the gravitas of The Iliad to the trivial event of a nobleman (Lord Petre) snipping a lock of hair from a society belle (Arabella Fermor). This structural choice is the social commentary.

  • A Metaphysics of Vanity: The "epic machinery" is not gods and goddesses, but airy "Sylphs." Their divine duty is not to protect a nation, but to protect Belinda's appearance. They guard her "puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux." The inclusion of "Bibles" in this list of cosmetics and love-letters is a devastating critique. It shows that in this world, religion itself has become just another social ornament, stripped of all spiritual weight. The Sylphs represent a metaphysics of vanity—their "heaven" is the preservation of a social image, not a soul.
  • Sublimated Conflict: The "epic battle" of the poem is a game of cards, Ombre. Pope describes it with breathless, martial language ("Spadillio first, unconquerable Lord!"). This is not just a joke. It shows how this "polite" society has sublimated all real conflict—political, sexual, intellectual—into rule-bound, meaningless games. All their energy is poured into these "combats" of social display.
  • The Violence Under the Facade: The "rape" itself is the poem's crisis point. The Baron's act, using "a two-edg'd weapon" (scissors), shatters the fragile, polite illusion. It is a symbolic act of sexual aggression that reveals the brutal, patriarchal reality lurking just beneath the "polite" surface. The world of "politeness" is revealed to be a thin veneer, and Belinda's "honour" is shown to be what this society has made it: a fragile, external object that can be "raped" by a pair of scissors.

Pope's poem reveals a socio-cultural setting of immense wealth, leisure, and corrosive triviality. It is a ruling class that has become decadent, substituting ritual for morality and appearance for substance.

Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

If Pope shows us the old world in its glittering decay, Richardson's Pamela drops us into the engine room of the new one. We are no longer in the London drawing-room but in the private chambers of a country estate. And our perspective is not that of the detached, satirical poet, but the hyper-anxious, first-person-present consciousness of a 15-year-old servant girl.

Pamela's socio-cultural setting is defined by class warfare and the commodification of morality.

  • The Power Struggle: The entire plot is a siege. Mr. B, the aristocratic landowner, operates on the old feudal code: as the master, he believes he has a right to the bodies of his servants. Pamela, however, is a product of the new world. She is literate, devoutly Protestant, and armed with a powerful sense of bourgeois individualism. She believes her "virtue" (her chastity) is her property. The novel is a protracted, psychological battle over this property.
  • The Epistolary Form as Weapon: Pamela's method of fighting is what is so culturally significant. She writes. The epistolary (letter) form is not just a narrative device; it is her weapon and her defense. By documenting Mr. B's every attack, she creates a textual record of her own virtue. She seizes the power of narrative. In an age where her master controls her physical space, her literacy allows her to control her own story. She is, in effect, her own lawyer, creating the evidence for her case.
  • Virtue as Moral Capital: This is the most crucial, and critically complex, aspect. Pamela's virtue is not the same as Belinda's "honour." It is not a fragile social ornament. It is an internal, spiritual, and financial asset. The novel's subtitle, "Virtue Rewarded," is key. Richardson, a devout printer and businessman, creates a new kind of spiritual economics. Pamela invests her virtue, defending it against all attacks, until its value is so high that Mr. B has no choice but to "buy" it—not with cash, but with the ultimate prize: marriage. The novel is a social fantasy that suggests, radically, that moral capital (bourgeois virtue) can and should triumph over inherited capital (aristocratic title).

Where Pope's text critiques a society obsessed with surface, Richardson's text codifies a new society obsessed with internal, documented morality. Pope shows the crisis of an old code, while Richardson establishes the terms of a new one. Together, they map the central social fissure of the 18th century.

2. Defining the Age: Satire, the Novel, and the Periodical

This question of which literary form truly captured the age is a point of significant critical contention. To choose one form is to define the "zeitgeist" (the spirit of the age) itself. Was the spirit of the age one of skeptical, conservative critique? Was it the discovery of the modern, individual consciousness? Or was it the construction of a new, commercial, public society?

Each form has a powerful claim.

The Claim of Satire:

One could easily argue for satire, as this is often called "The Age of Satire." The greatest minds of the first half of the century—Pope, Swift, Gay—used satire as their primary mode. Satire is the literary expression of "Reason" used as a weapon. It is a critical form, designed to measure the world against a standard (of reason, of classical order, of human decency) and find it wanting.

Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is perhaps the ultimate example. It is a work of profound, corrosive skepticism. It satirizes the triviality of human politics (Lilliput), the arrogance of abstract "Enlightenment" science (Laputa), and ultimately, the very pretension of human "reason" itself (the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos). Satire, in this view, captured the zeitgeist as a conservative force. It was the voice of the humanist, classical tradition reacting against the frightening "modern" world of stock-market bubbles, "dull" new writers, and corrupt Whig politics.

The Claim of the Novel:

The novel, by contrast, was the new form. It was messy, had no classical pedigree, and was often dismissed as "low." But it was also the form that captured the most consequential development of the age: the rise of the modern individual.

The novel's zeitgeist is not that of the coffee-house or the court; it is the private, internal consciousness. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the archetype. It is the story of economic individualism. Crusoe is stranded, and what does he do? He re-creates the entire bourgeois world from scratch. He salvages, he builds, he plants, and most importantly, he writes a journal. His ledger of his sins and his supplies is the textual manifestation of the new Protestant, capitalist mind. Later, Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa would map the internal, psychological space of this new individual. The novel, therefore, did not just capture the spirit of the age; it invented the literary form for the next age.

The Verdict: Non-Fictional Prose (The Periodical)

Despite the power of these other two, my own critical reading is that the periodical essay was the most successful in capturing the total zeitgeist of the 18th century.

Satire was, in many ways, looking backward in anger. The novel was looking forward, planting the seeds of Romanticism and the 19th century. The periodical, as perfected by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, was the form that actively constructed and managed the present.

The zeitgeist of the 18th century was the creation of a "public sphere" (a concept we borrow from Habermas). This was a new, abstract space—located in coffee-houses, tea-tables, and clubs—where private citizens (specifically, property-owning men) gathered to form "public opinion." The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714) were not just commentaries on this sphere; they were its engine and its instruction manual.

  • It Taught a New Class Its Identity: The periodical's explicit goal was to:
    "bring Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses."
    Addison and Steele were taste-makers. They taught the new, powerful middle class how to be a "polite," "reasonable," and "cultured" elite. They provided a daily curriculum on aesthetics, manners, philosophy, and morality. They were, in effect, creating a new aristocracy based on culture and taste, not "blood."
  • Its Form Was Suited to Its Time: The novel was long and private. The epic satire was monumental. The periodical was daily, short, cheap, and disposable. It was the perfect literary form for a new, fast-paced, commercial society. It was consumed in the very places where business and politics were being discussed: the coffee-houses. It mirrored the rhythms of modern, urban, commercial life.
  • It Was a Political and Social Mediator: The prose style of Addison and Steele was, itself, a political argument. It was clear, moderate, and elegant. This style was a direct rejection of 17th-century "enthusiasm" (religious fanaticism) and aristocratic "foppery." It was the voice of Reasonable Man. Through the "Spectator Club" (with characters like the Tory Sir Roger de Coverley and the Whig Sir Andrew Freeport), they modeled how opposing political and social factions could co-exist and converse "politely." They weren't trying to tear down society like Swift; they were trying to stabilize it.

The periodical, therefore, was the most successful form because it was the most functional. It was the literary tool that the 18th century used to build itself. It diagnosed, prescribed, and provided the language for the entire "Enlightenment project" of creating a polite, commercial, and reasoned civil society.

3. The Moral Stage: Sentimental vs. Anti-Sentimental Comedy

The development of 18th-century drama is a fascinating public negotiation over the very purpose of comedy. It is a direct reaction to the perceived "immorality" of the preceding era's Restoration Comedy (e.g., Wycherley's The Country Wife), which was witty, aristocratic, and deeply cynical about human morality.

The shift began in earnest after Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). This pamphlet was a Puritan-inflected, moralistic broadside that struck a deep chord with the rising, pious middle class. The theater, to survive, had to reform. It had to prove its moral utility.

This led directly to the rise of Sentimental Comedy.

This new form, also called "weeping comedy," was a complete inversion of its Restoration predecessor. Its goal was not to provoke critical laughter, but to provoke empathetic tears.

  • Philosophical Basis: It was theatrically enacting the new moral philosophy of thinkers like the Earl of Shaftesbury, who argued that human beings are innately benevolent. The purpose of these plays was to awaken this "moral sense" in the audience by showing them "patterns of virtue."
  • Plot and Character: In a sentimental comedy, the heroes and heroines are impossibly, almost pathologically, good. The plot consists of placing this virtue under extreme distress—poverty, false accusations, parental tyranny. The climax is not a witty riposte, but a recognition scene or a sudden conversion. The "villain" (often a misguided father or rake) beholds the hero's virtue, is overwhelmed, and repents in a flood of tears.
  • Key Example: Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) is the quintessential example. Its hero, Bevil Jr., is so virtuous that he refuses to fight a duel (a rejection of old aristocratic "honor") and is prepared to sacrifice his own happiness rather than disobey his father. The play is a didactic lesson in new, bourgeois morality: sensibility, obedience, and benevolence.

The problem, of course, was that these plays were often dramatically inert. They were preachy, predictable, and, crucially, not very funny. The "comedy" was in the "happy" (i.e., morally correct) ending, not in the dialogue.

This moralistic stagnation provoked a powerful backlash in the 1770s: Anti-Sentimental Comedy.

This movement was led by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who both argued for a return to "laughing comedy." They believed that comedy's true moral function was not to show us patterns to imitate, but to satirize follies to be avoided.

Here is a quick comparison of the two forms:

Feature Sentimental Comedy ("Weeping Comedy") Anti-Sentimental Comedy ("Laughing Comedy")
Core Goal To provoke empathetic tears; to awaken "moral sense." To provoke critical laughter; to satirize folly.
View of Humanity People are innately good and benevolent. People are flawed, vain, foolish, and hypocritical.
Hero/Heroine A "pattern of virtue" who suffers nobly. A flawed but often good-hearted individual.
Villain A misguided person who repents in tears. A conscious hypocrite (Joseph Surface) or a fool.
Plot Device Extreme distress, false accusations, noble suffering. Farce, mistaken identity, witty schemes.
Emotional Climax A weeping recognition scene or conversion. A witty unmasking; a farcical resolution.
Key Text Steele's The Conscious Lovers Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer
Key Text (none) Sheridan's The School for Scandal
  • Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773): Goldsmith directly attacked the "weeping" trend in an essay, arguing it was creating "a monster of perfection." His play is a direct response. It is a "laughing comedy" built on farce, mistaken identity, and character flaw. The hero, Marlow, is not a "pattern of virtue"; he is a brilliant satire of class anxiety—a stuttering, awkward mess around "polite" ladies, but a confident lecher around "barmaids." Goldsmith's point is that "laughing" at human absurdity (like Marlow's or Mrs. Hardcastle's) is a more honest and natural response than weeping at artificial virtue.
  • Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777): This is perhaps the most brilliant synthesis of the entire century. On the surface, it's a return to Restoration-style comedy of manners, sparkling with the wittiest dialogue since Congreve. But underneath, it has a profoundly 18th-century moral core.

    Sheridan's masterstroke is to satirize false sentiment. The villain is Joseph Surface, a man who speaks entirely in the language of sentimental comedy. He is constantly mouthing "noble sentiments" and "moral maxims" to build his reputation, while in private he is a cold, hypocritical predator. The hero is his brother, Charles Surface, a "rake" who wastes his money and seems dissolute, but is revealed to be genuinely benevolent, loyal, and kind-hearted.

    Sheridan's critique is devastating: he shows that the new "sentimental" culture has itself become a mask for hypocrisy. He re-fused wit (from the Restoration) with true morality (the 18th-century concern), arguing that virtue is about action, not talk.

The development of drama in this age is therefore a perfect dialectic: from the cynical wit of the Restoration, to the tearful, moralistic reaction of Sentimental Comedy, and finally to the brilliant synthesis of Goldsmith and Sheridan, who brought back laughter but armed it with a new, sharp, moral purpose.

4. The Architects of Taste: The Contribution of Addison and Steele

To write a critical note on Addison and Steele is to assess the very foundations of modern, middle-class public life. Their contribution, embodied by The Tatler and The Spectator, was not merely literary; it was social, political, and philosophical. They were, in the most literal sense, the architects of public taste and the standard-bearers for a new, "polite" social order.

Their contribution can be critically assessed in four key areas:

1. The "Civilizing" of the Public Sphere:

Addison and Steele emerged from a period of intense political and religious "enthusiasm" that had led to civil war. Their project was one of moderation. They sought to create a new via media (middle way) for public discourse. Their forum was the coffee-house, the new, democratic space where men of different classes (merchant, intellectual, aristocrat) mingled.

Their "civilizing" mission was to regulate the discourse in this space. They taught politeness as a political and social tool. By focusing on manners, aesthetics, and general morality—and avoiding partisan (Whig/Tory) invective—they provided a script for how a fractured society could cohere. This was, in effect, a form of cultural hegemony: they were inscribing the values of the new, moderate, commercial elite as the national values.

2. The Standardization of English Prose:

Before Addison and Steele, English prose was often split between complex, Latinate styles (like Milton's) or the low, "vulgar" prose of pamphlets. Samuel Johnson's later praise is the definitive judgment:

"Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."

This creation of a "middle style" was a profound contribution. It was clear, balanced, and accessible. This prose was the voice of Reason itself. It became the default style for objective, "polite" discourse, and it is the direct ancestor of modern journalism, the academic essay, and "standard" non-fiction. It naturalized a way of thinking: empirical, moderate, and clear.

3. The Creation of "Taste" and Literary Canon-Formation:

Addison and Steele effectively invented the modern literary critic for a mass audience. They told the new, anxious middle class what to like and how to like it. Their series of essays in The Spectator on Paradise Lost is the prime example. They "rescued" Milton from scholastic debate and presented him as the great English national poet, teaching their readers how to appreciate his "sublimity."

They did the same for old ballads like "Chevy Chase," elevating "low" art by finding "natural" genius in it. This act of taste-making was a form of social empowerment. It created "cultural capital," allowing a merchant to prove he was just as "refined" as an aristocrat, not through "blood," but through his taste.

4. The Invention of the Modern Persona:

Their final, brilliant device was the creation of fictional narrators and clubs. Richard Steele's "Isaac Bickerstaff" and the "Spectator Club" (featuring Sir Roger de Coverley, Sir Andrew Freeport, etc.) were strokes of genius.

  • The Club acted as a model for the ideal public sphere. It was a dramatization of their social project, showing how the old (Tory squire Sir Roger) and the new (Whig merchant Sir Andrew) could "club" together in harmony.
  • Mr. Spectator himself, the quiet, detached observer who "passed" through all parts of society, became the archetype of the modern intellectual: objective, curious, urbane, and seeing all.

Their contribution, therefore, was not a single book, but the creation of an entire apparatus for modern public life. They provided the prose style, the moral framework, the aesthetic standards, and the social "scripts" that would define the Anglo-American public sphere for the next two centuries.

Conclusion

To analyze the Neo-classical age is to witness a society in the very act of creating the modern world. It is, I must argue, far from a "stuffy" or "cold" period of arbitrary "rules." It is a dynamic, combative, and generative era.

The texts and forms we have examined are the evidence of this creation. Through the clashing mirrors of Pope and Richardson, we see a new social order painfully, anxiously defining itself. In the three-way battle between satire, the novel, and the periodical, we see the literary forms of the past, future, and present vying for control of the new, commercial, public mind. In its theaters, we see a public fiercely debating whether art is for laughter or for tears—whether it should satirize human folly or celebrate human virtue.

And in the polite, clear prose of Addison and Steele, we see the "operating system" for this new world being written in real-time. This is not an age of simple "Reason." It is an age that was desperately building "Reason" as a bulwark against the chaos of the past, even as new forms of human passion, individualism, and imagination bubbled up from below.

Citation (Primary Texts)

Here are links to the primary texts mentioned, all available for free for students from Project Gutenberg:

Word Count: 3,717 words
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Friday, 17 October 2025

Tennyson & Browning: The Two Voices of the Victorian Poetic Mind

The Two Voices: Tennyson, Browning, and the Victorian Mind

This blog is written as a task assigned by Prakruti Ma'am Bhatt (Department Of English, MKBU). Exploring the Dual Consciousness of Victorian Poetry

Introduction

Stepping into a Victorian poetry seminar is like entering a room with two powerful, competing voices. In one corner, you have Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the nation's bard, his voice sonorous, measured, and public. He's the one on the radio, addressing the country. In the other corner is Robert Browning, muttering to himself, his voice jagged, intensely private, and full of strange characters. He's the one you overhear on a train, and you can't stop listening. For a long time, I'll admit, I saw them as simple opposites: Tennyson the establishment poet, Browning the radical psychologist.

But the more I read, the more I realize it's not that simple. They aren't just opposites. They are two halves of the Victorian psyche, an era torn between public duty and private doubt, scientific progress and spiritual crisis, polished surfaces and the messy, grotesque realities underneath. To call Tennyson the "most representative" poet of the age isn't to diminish Browning. It's to recognize that Tennyson's work became the grand, public stage upon which these conflicts were performed. Browning, meanwhile, was staging the same conflicts, but in a series of dark, intimate backrooms where his speakers revealed the psychological truths the public stage couldn't handle. Trying to understand the Victorians means learning to listen to both of these voices, often in the same moment.

Introduction to Victorian Poetry: Tennyson and Browning

Tennyson: The Voice of the Era

To say Tennyson was the "most representative literary man of the Victorian era" feels, at first, like an obvious statement. He was the Poet Laureate for over forty years, from 1850 until his death in 1892. His job was literally to represent the nation in verse. But his representative status goes much deeper than an official title. His poetry is a near-perfect mirror of his time because it grapples so honestly with the era's central, soul-shaking conflict: the struggle between faith and doubt.

The Victorians lived through an earthquake of the mind. New scientific discoveries, particularly in geology and biology, radically challenged long-held religious certainties. Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology showed the earth was millions of years old, not thousands, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species suggested humanity was not a divine creation but the product of a brutal, indifferent natural process. This created a profound anxiety that Tennyson captured better than anyone.

His masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H., is the definitive document of this Victorian crisis. Written over 17 years following the sudden death of his close friend Arthur Hallam, the poem is a sprawling, messy, and deeply personal record of grief. But it's also a national spiritual autobiography. When Tennyson writes, "I falter where I firmly trod," he's speaking for an entire generation. The poem famously confronts the terrifying vision of a godless, mechanistic universe in the concept of "Nature, red in tooth and claw." He looks at the fossil record and is horrified by the evidence of extinction:

'So careful of the type?' but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.'

This is the Victorian fear laid bare. Nature is not a benevolent force created by God; it is a blind, destructive machine. The poem's journey is not toward a simple, triumphant faith, but toward what Tennyson calls a "faintly trust[ing of] the larger hope." He doesn't find easy answers. He finds a hard-won, tentative belief that must coexist with doubt. This intellectual and emotional struggle is the very essence of the mid-Victorian mindset, and In Memoriam gave it a voice. Queen Victoria herself said that the poem was a source of comfort after Prince Albert's death, calling it a "great soother." It became the era's unofficial guide to navigating grief in a world where old certainties were crumbling.

Beyond this central conflict, Tennyson was representative in his engagement with other key Victorian themes. He celebrated progress and industry, even while feeling ambivalent about them. He wrote about the ideal of duty in poems like "Ulysses," whose aging hero resolves "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," a line that became a motto for Victorian ambition and exploration. He addressed the "woman question" in The Princess, a long narrative poem about a women's university. While its conclusion might seem conservative to us now, its very existence shows Tennyson engaging with contemporary social debates. As Poet Laureate, he wrote poems on command, like "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which simultaneously glorifies the soldiers' unflinching sense of duty ("Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die") while acknowledging the catastrophic blunder of their commanders. It's a complex piece of public poetry, both patriotic and subtly critical, capturing the Victorian empire's mix of pride and anxiety.

His very style—polished, musical, and exquisitely crafted—suited the Victorian taste for artistry and order. He was a master of sound, creating lines of immense beauty that could soothe and inspire. In a sense, he provided a beautiful, orderly container for the chaotic and terrifying ideas of his time. He made the crisis of faith sound poetic, which perhaps made it more bearable. He was not a radical innovator, but a perfecter of forms, which is precisely what a representative figure often is. He spoke the language of his time, and he articulated its deepest fears and hopes with a clarity and beauty that made the nation listen.

The Browning Labyrinth: Inside the Minds of Monsters and Men

If Tennyson's poetry is a grand public hall, Browning's is a series of locked rooms. To read Browning is to be handed a key and told to listen at the door. You are not given a clear moral or a comforting narrative. Instead, you are placed directly inside the mind of a speaker—often a morally dubious one—and forced to piece together the truth from their biased, self-serving, and psychologically revealing monologue. This method, the dramatic monologue, is Browning's great gift to poetry, and he uses it to explore themes that were far too strange and disturbing for the public stage.

Multiple Perspectives on a Single Event

Browning was obsessed with the idea that truth is not singular but perspectival. His magnum opus, The Ring and the Book, is the ultimate expression of this idea. I remember the first time I saw the size of that book and thought, how can anyone write a 21,000-line poem about a single 17th-century Roman murder trial? But that's the genius of it. Browning doesn't just tell the story. He retells it twelve times from different perspectives: the murderer Guido, his young wife Pompilia, a lawyer, the Pope, and various gossips. Each narrator has their own agenda, their own blind spots, their own version of the "truth." The "ring" of the title refers to the process of mixing an alloy with pure gold to make it workable; the "book" is the collection of raw legal documents. The poet, like a goldsmith, must shape this raw material, adding his own "alloy" of imagination to reveal the "gold" of the truth within. But the poem suggests this central truth can only be seen by looking at all the flawed, partial perspectives that surround it. This is a profoundly modern idea, one that anticipates the narrative experiments of 20th-century novelists.

Medieval and Renaissance Setting

Browning sets many of his most famous monologues in Renaissance Italy or medieval Europe. You might think this is just historical tourism, but it was a clever strategy. By moving his poems to a different time and place, he created a critical distance that allowed him to explore the dark side of human nature without directly indicting Victorian society. The Italian Renaissance, with its combination of high art and brutal politics, was the perfect laboratory for his psychological experiments. In "My Last Duchess," a seemingly civilized Renaissance Duke casually recounts how he likely had his wife murdered for being too friendly and joyful. His obsession with control, his objectification of his wife as another piece in his art collection, and his chilling arrogance would have been shocking in a contemporary English setting. Placing him in Ferrara makes the horror more palatable, while still allowing it to serve as a dark mirror to the patriarchal possessiveness that existed in Victorian England. Similarly, "The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church" uses a dying, corrupt clergyman to satirize religious hypocrisy, materialism, and vanity—critiques that were much safer when aimed at 16th-century Rome than at the 19th-century Church of England.

Understanding Browning's Dramatic Monologues

Psychological Complexity of Characters

This is Browning's true territory. His characters are never simple. They are tangled messes of ego, desire, intellect, and rationalization. The Duke in "My Last Duchess" is not a cackling villain. He is a man of refined taste and chilling self-control. The horror comes from the disconnect between his smooth, aristocratic surface and the monstrous ego underneath. Browning's genius lies in making the speaker reveal more than he intends. The Duke thinks he is demonstrating his power and sophistication to the envoy, but the reader sees a pathological narcissist. We become the psychologist, diagnosing the speaker from the evidence he provides. In "Porphyria's Lover," the speaker calmly describes strangling his lover with her own hair at the perfect moment of her devotion, to preserve that moment forever. He then sits with her corpse all night, convinced that "God has not said a word!" Browning offers no judgment. He simply presents the case study, forcing us to inhabit a disturbed mind and confront the logic of madness from the inside.

Usage of Grotesque Imagery

Browning is not afraid of the ugly, the strange, or the unsettling. The grotesque, for him, isn't just about horror; it's about a jarring combination of elements, a collision of the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the absurd. His most famous exploration of this is the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." The poem is a journey through a nightmare landscape. The speaker encounters a "hoary cripple" with "malicious eye," a dying horse described with excruciating detail ("I never saw a brute I hated so; / He must be wicked to deserve such pain"), and a nature that seems actively hostile and diseased. The entire poem is a sequence of unsettling, inexplicable images that create a feeling of oppressive dread and failure. It's not an allegory with a clear meaning. It is, from what I can tell, an attempt to map a psychological state—a landscape of despair itself. This fascination with the irrational, the ugly, and the fragmented parts of the human psyche makes Browning feel incredibly modern. He's looking into the dark corners that Tennyson's polished mirror often avoided.

The Artist's Duty: Two Competing Visions

Given their different styles and subjects, it's no surprise that Tennyson and Browning had fundamentally different ideas about the purpose of art and the role of the artist. They both wrote poems about art, and these works reveal their core philosophies.

Tennyson believed the artist has a profound social and moral responsibility. The poet should be a teacher, a sage, and a source of comfort and guidance for society. His early poem "The Palace of Art" is a direct allegory about this belief. A gifted soul decides to build a luxurious palace where it can live in isolation, surrounded by beautiful art, and "reign apart, a quiet king." For a time, this is blissful. But soon, the isolation becomes a curse. The soul is haunted by its own detachment from humanity and falls into a deep despair. It finally abandons the palace, realizing:

I am on fire within.
There is no rest, no calm, no relief,
Nor hope of help for me.

The soul's solution is to build a "cottage in the vale" and live among ordinary people. The palace is not destroyed, but left, with the hope that the soul might one day return to it, purged of its sin of isolation. The moral is clear: art for art's sake leads to damnation. The artist must remain connected to humanity and use their gifts for the common good. The poet is a public servant.

Browning, on the other hand, saw the artist as an explorer of reality, not a moral guide. He believed art's purpose was to grapple with the messy, imperfect, and often ugly truth of human existence. His poem "Fra Lippo Lippi" serves as his artistic manifesto. The speaker, a 15th-century painter, has been caught carousing in the streets by the city guard. In his rambling, defensive monologue, he argues for a new kind of religious art. The church authorities want him to paint pious images that point the soul to heaven and ignore the body. But Lippi champions realism. He argues for the value of painting people as they really are, with all their physical details and imperfections:

Or say there's beauty with no soul at all—
(I never saw it—put the case the same—)
If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That's somewhat.

For Lippi, and for Browning, the artist's job is to represent the world in all its complexity—"The beauty and the wonder and the power, / The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades, / Changes, surprises,—and God made it all!" Art should not ignore the flesh to get to the soul. It should celebrate the flesh as a way of understanding the soul. Its purpose is to force the viewer to see the world more clearly and to think more deeply, not necessarily to feel more moral.

Feature Tennyson's View of Art Browning's View of Art
Primary Purpose To teach, soothe, and provide moral guidance. To explore, question, and reveal psychological truth.
Role of the Artist A public sage, a prophet, a teacher. A psychological investigator, a realist.
Relationship to Society Deeply engaged; art has a social duty. Often detached; art explores individuals, not society as a whole.
Ideal Form Polished, beautiful, musical, and ordered. Rough, complex, dramatic, and intellectually challenging.
Key Poem "The Palace of Art" "Fra Lippo Lippi"
Core Message Art must serve humanity to have value. Art must embrace imperfection to find truth.

Ultimately, Tennyson's artist is a figure who looks out at the world and tries to guide it. Browning's artist is one who looks into the mind of a single person and tries to understand it.

The Double Helix of Victorian Poetry

So, we come back to the two voices. It feels wrong to declare one a "winner" over the other. To try and understand the Victorian era is to see that it needed both. It needed Tennyson's public, reassuring voice to articulate its shared anxieties and to create a sense of national identity and purpose in a time of bewildering change. His work was a cultural anchor.

But it also needed Browning's difficult, private voice to explore the things that public poetry couldn't say—the moral ambiguity, the pathologies of the ego, and the radical subjectivity of truth that festered beneath the era's confident surface. If Tennyson wrote the official history, Browning wrote the secret, psychological diaries of its most complicated citizens. They were not so much opposites as complements. Together, they form a kind of double helix, two intertwined strands that contain the complete genetic code of the Victorian poetic mind. Reading them side-by-side is, I think, the only way to hear the full, complicated, and deeply human music of their age.

The Victorian Age in Literature

Works Cited

Word Count: 2,674

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