Suplício de uma viagem (Portuguese Edition)

Beside a strong tendency to revere his works — and, importantly, his figure as a great national intellectual in this regard he has become almost a sacred cow — there are of course many different possible readings of his work and his main ideas. It is in this sense that we take an interest in his work here.

In neither text is anybody simply an individual, but is instead confined to his place in the racial or colour taxonomy. Again, Du Perron did not write his autobiography, but an autobiographical novel that described the world of his youth grouped around his own family. The landlord rejected any interference from the colonial civil service. The struggle between landowners and colonial government was fierce in those years and often went public in the colonial newspapers, as Du Perron mentions.

Ironically, the Du Perron family lived mostly from their Batavia real estate agency, which made huge profits in those years because of an acute shortage of decent housing in the colonial capital. This romanticization finds a parallel in Freyre. Freyre uses his black-and-white illustrations to give himself a place in history, whereas Du Perron brings the colonial political economy into his family life. Besides, the photographs in the text insert, so to speak, Freyre into the Brazilian history he is about to tell.

They portray him as the master or patriarch. The first photograph comes right after the table of contents and takes up a whole page. It shows Freyre standing at the foot of the steps leading to his own grand Solar dos Apicucos, namely, his own stately big house in Pernambuco.

Even before opening the book, the reader is regaled with stunning views, in drawings or photographs, of different casas-grandes. These are not the only casas-grandes depicted in the book. It is almost as if he were part of the statuary adorning the spacious veranda above him: We will come back to this stunning photograph later. There are four pictures of Freyre in the book: Therefore, before the main text even begins the reader has already been fed no fewer than three pictures of the author, plus assorted drawings, illustrations, and various kinds of texts — prefaces, bibliographies, opinion pieces from famous people — among them Roland Barthes in Paris and Ortega y Gasset in Madrid — praise poems by well-known poets, etc.

The reader is left in no doubt that she is about to tackle a renowned masterpiece by an internationally famous writer. Of course most of these were added to later editions of 36 the book and were absent in the original. Most of it is based upon hastily made comparisons, and of course open to debate. Yet, it is precisely the encounter that is central in their work. She slept in his bedroom for most of his childhood. She would bathe him and feed him. She would carry him in her slendang cloth used to carry children against the chest , where he would fall asleep to her nursing rhymes in Malay.

Here we have a central point of comparison, between Brazil and Creole settler society in the Dutch East Indies. Here we have a class difference, which is, however, framed in terms of complexion, as wealth and complexion are highly related. It is class, education and complexion that separate the Creoles from the Indos, but they share a cultural domain. Colonial boundaries were extremely situational as Stoler rightfully argues.

It has some resemblances, and also some shared origins, with Portuguese fado music. He was often the only European child around where his family lived, as in Balekambang, for instance. There is, for instance, Mahmoed. His former playmate however stays behind in the countryside. Mahmoed turns into a complete stranger. He learned to pray in Arabic at the school for natives and became a pious Muslim.

Enraged by this transformation that he can neither understand nor accept, Ducroo ends up slapping Mahmoed in the face. It is the end of their friendship. It is, in fact, a literary trope, for instance returning in another, postcolonial, novel by the Dutch and Indies born Hella S. After his return to the Indies in , Du Perron experiences that there is no way to cross the divide again. It is personalized in the omnipotence of the Roman-style pater familias who rules over the life and death of his family and his subjects.

The patriarch would take the life of a slave or of his own eldest son, if it was in the interest of his complete authority over the casa-grande. Father Ducroo is a patriarch in his own right, physically abusing his servants inside and outside the big house. Naturally enough, Ducroo father would use physical violence against Ducroo child, until the latter became an adult facing his father as an equal. Being a physically strong man was practically a requisite in many spheres of Indies life, whether in the school or the factory yard. Also, the fear of assault, robbery and murder was omnipresent for the Ducroo family too.

Gangs were rooming the Batavia Ommelanden in these years. There was a colonial fascination with accounts of violence — say, murders. It was rather usual to carry a small revolver when walking around in native neighbourhoods, and these weapons were often advertised in the newspapers. It is only later on, after having found a relatively safe job as an archivist of the colonial government, that Du Perron sublimates this culture of violence into his polemics against the notorious colonial fascist-leaning journalist H. This Arthur Hille went to study at the Military Academy in Breda in the Netherlands and he was an officer in the Aceh war, where he killed many natives.

What does Du Perron want to explain — apart from possible latent homosexual feelings — with these two male characters? As regards Arthur Hille, he writes in the thirties: I also know why: As I talk now about the idiots abrutis with a Nazi uniform, how is that consistent with my old admiration for Arthur Hille, who could perhaps have been a beautiful SA leader? But it is not a question of glossing over the contradictions here but rather explaining them, or, if that is not possible, then just letting them exist in all their down-to-earthness [in alle nuchterheid].

Above all, you can only with difficulty be consistent, exactly because you are an intellectual. He is also aware of the contradiction that it brings into his account of the life of an intellectual. He solves this ambiguity and contradiction in an ingenious way: He sees it as inescapably there and as part of the Creole society where he grew up. Freyre in fact placed himself at the very centre of a long and important debate with roots in the nineteenth century. This debate focussed on discussions about the nature of Brazil through discussions about the racial and ethnic groups that would have shaped the nation, namely, Indians, Africans and Portuguese.

A democracy of ethnic contact and miscegenation, a democracy that Brazil could offer to a world ravaged by fascism, nazism, segregationism and colonialism. Freyre therefore uncovers the history of slavery and appropriates it for his grand design of the Brazilian nation. His account is historically well informed by contemporary standards and deals skilfully and in rich detail with the entire gamut of relations between masters and slaves. From the history of slavery and colonialism he constructs a narrative about a nation, which partly reverses its gruesome past into a new superior existence.

Yet his relationship with that violent past remains extremely ambiguous. His major narrative device here is, once established that violence was routine and inescapable in a slave society, to concentrate on the many links that brought together masters and slaves in the various spheres of life.

He relishes torturing them, just as his parents relish torturing their own slaves. Du Perron has not yet taken a position towards the Indonesian nation in the making, although he already felt himself dislocated in metropolitan Europe. Freyre was steeped in his soil embellishing an identity that he somehow already has, rather than trying to reach out or to grapple with other identities. He is much less of a diasporic character or in-between intellectual than Du Perron. The latter is grappling with contradictions more than Freyre is in his grand historical canvas. In fact, during his Indies years, only once does Ducroo meet a female companion that he finds fully to his liking.

That is An who, like him, is of mixed descent but has not been legally recognized as a European. Prostitution might have been the only way for her to survive as she really had fallen in between. She is intelligent and graceful as the image of a European courtesan. Ducroo can have an intelligent conversation with her and regard her as an equal, as a veritable companion — in fact, a kind of companionship that he has so far only experienced with males: Our greatest, and my only, girl friend in this debauchery was a half-caste girl that however passed as a Native.

Her name was Onnie, and she was called An. She said that she was 19 and perhaps she was 24; long, straight, with a sharp profile for which she obviously had to thank her European father, but that gave her an Arab character. She was different from all others. She was after all a prostitute just as the others, but she did not allow herself to be paid by Europeans to whom she felt attracted.

An Late Colonial Estrangement and Miscegenation said right away that she felt attracted to us in a friendly way exactly because of her European blood; she had been married a couple of times with a Native, but had also been with a planter for a time as a concubine njai ; she was so open-minded that she even went with Chinese, but these had to pay more.

An was a courtesan of importance, an importance that the Sundanese never doubted. A place to which he later, on his first trip to Europe, made a rather disappointing visit. On his way to a new life in Europe, Ducroo shows an American on his boat a picture of An. The American confesses that An looks much better than the njai that he has just left behind in Sumatra.

Later, in Paris, Ducroo has a picture of An made into a drawing and sent to her. His own older half-brother, Otto, had a njai, like most white European Indies bachelors. But Du Perron went along with the dominant current in European society that considered it degrading, which has everything to do with the romantic version of love that wanted sexual partners to be spiritual partners. But by narrating his romance with An, and placing her above the white metropolitan courtesans in sophistication, he somehow turns around colonial prejudice — or rather, reconstructs colonial society through a gender-related narrative device.

There is another Indo, Baur, to whom Du Perron devotes almost an entire chapter. There he meets up with the half-caste Baur. He tells us that at the age of fourteen Baur already looked like a man, and that people said that he had a big one: Baur has a violent temper and is a violent young man. Also, the contours of colonial prejudice — gender and race prejudice — are somehow much sharper. In Freyre, it is as if they were sublimated into the grand historical narrative that he constructs.

As Carvalho stresses, the Cultural and Social History coming of the Republic was not a popular movement, neither did it bring about a major division and upheaval among the elite. At the time, nobody believed Brazil had an identity of its own that could imbue its citizens with a sense of pride. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries views on miscegenation varied enormously, ranging from straightforward rejection to hesitant acceptance some times within the work of the 42 very same thinker or politician.

It represented a major contribution towards building and consolidating a positive view of the nation that became acceptable both internally and internationally. He also reworked and continued — albeit in a different way and in a different context — the imperial tradition that had been so important in late colonial times and in the nineteenth century.

And, finally, he translated colonial and imperial traditions into a powerful postcolonial discourse that has left an imprint on the Brazilian imagination to this day. The only element he could explain as honest and true was the simple mestizo, who stood where he or she stood. This was heavily intertwined with his literary programme; namely, to be as uncomplicated as possible, an honette homme, the essence of which to him was to lead the uncomplicated life of an Indo.

Moreover, Ducroo claims not to be interested in politics at all, but Du Perron is, albeit in his own detached intellectual way. In his 15 years in Europe, Du Perron has become someone else as Ducroo.

Webster's English to Portuguese Crossword Puzzles: Level 1

Late Colonial Estrangement and Miscegenation It is Ducroo, or the young Du Perron, who starts his working career at the most hideous colonial newspaper of Batavia. He attends a native political meeting carrying a hidden revolver with him that he also employs in his forays into native quarters in search of prostitutes. Famous speakers are there, but he is not interested. Of course, there were still the politics, but it seemed to me in advance out of the question that I would ever understand it. I thought that the whole political part did not concern me at all, and if the Javanese got as far as murdering us Europeans, they would do so without distinctions: At the end of his book, writing in June in Paris, watching the march of Nazism next door in Germany, in a time full of foreboding, Ducroo remarks: I can also renounce that past and consider that I will never leave this place, but will instead drift through the dangers with what is strongest in my life.

After all the probing, I can see only one wisdom: It is as if Ducroo is caught between two gruesome worlds: They all belonged, without exception, to the left fringe of European colonial society — later on he will make Indonesian friends as well. His friends find a job for him at the Landsarchief in Batavia. In addition, there is his literary production, on Multatuli and on the belles lettres of those who served under the East Indies company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But most important will be his work for Kritiek en Opbouw, a leftist journal to which both Indonesian and Dutch authors would contribute, and which soon becomes the target of colonial reactionaries. Du Perron points to two main issues, namely female equality and the role of Western education.

Mitos e Lendas Celtas. Centralivros sob a chancela Livros e Livros, The Once and Future King. Harper Collins Publishers, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies. Retrieved on 25th March The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester. Retrieved on 13th March Retrieved on 2nd March Drawing on postcolonial studies and the theorization on imperial gothic, this paper centres on three texts: These three texts highlight in different ways the discursive mediation of the Other and its destabilizing effects on the identity of the European-minded colonizer, thus foregrounding the multifarious nature of the British imaginative engagement with India.

Thus we seek to demonstrate the power of two distinct practices or modes of representation — namely, the power of a metaphoric discourse versus a metonymic discourse — within the process of constructing the East for a vast Western readership. Otherness; Orientalism; fetishism; imperialism; metaphoric and metonymic discourses. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.

Said In this context, stereotyping is to be considered one of the most powerful discursive strategies. Firstly, stereotyping as a signifying practice reduces space and people to a few, simple characteristics, being therefore represented as in-born features or some quality ixed by Nature. There is always, in Said, the suggestion that colonial power is possessed entirely by the colonizer which is a historical and theoretical simpliication.

If this cultural encounter was a source of repulsion and fright, it was also, as Edmund Candler romantically recognizes in early 20th century, departing on a trip to India and leaving behind Victorian England, part of the lure of the East. As he confesses, in Youth and the East.

The three texts here under analysis highlight in different ways the discursive mediation of the Other and the obsession with aspects of Otherness. I am particularly referring to: The Hosts of the Lord , by Flora Annie Steel , a committed memsahib and the wife of a member of the Indian civil service; East of Suez , a collection of stories by Alice Perrin , daughter of General J. Set against this backdrop, let us now look at the way these women novelists negotiate with and narrate Otherness.

Learned books have been written on it [India], people have travelled out to India to study it, and still the secret of its cohesion, […] remains as much a mystery as the self-forgetting, self-sacriicing cosmogony of a hive of bees. Steel India 11, 6 Even though India was for both writers a dislocating experience, making their characters the prey of sudden deaths and sinister disasters, their imaginative engagement with India seems to be of a slightly different discursive nature.

Drawing on Freudian theory, fetishism is here closely linked to a narrative economy of voyeurism and desire, the complexities and ambivalence of inner and cultural spaces. The construction of the colonial discourse should therefore be analysed as a complex articulation of the tropes of fetishism, metaphorically or metonymically-oriented.

The arrival at Eshwara — meaning etymologically Babylon, in other words, a chaos symbolically waiting for a beacon of light and order — marks the initial confrontation with the Other. The big dam built by the British to water the desert round Eshwara is considered by thousands of Hindu pilgrims who are gathered at the Cradle of the Gods, on the day of the great Vaisakh festival, an act of blasphemy. Captain Dering and Laila, whose name means night, thus personifying the stereotypical image of East versus West, embark on a reckless and passionate romance.

This manifest interplay with the Bible is further cultivated with regard to the sudden outburst of passion that unites Erda Sheperd Earth- mood to Lance Carlyon. Brought up to believe that the heart of men — that mainspring of the spinning world — was vile, she [Erda] had never asked herself why this was so. She had read the story of Adam and Eve with unquestioning faith, yet never thought to know what had changed the good to evil. Hence the political advantages of using metaphor and allegory as a way of externalizing the struggle between Us and Them.

Kipling, The Complete Despite these textual signs of instability, the narrative strategy puts an end to this potentially disruptive ambivalence. Captain Dering and Laila meet a tragic destiny. They are shot by Roshan Khan, an Indian oficer who is tremendously jealous of their relationship. The same happened to the engineer Eugene Smith, the bringer of the electric light to the station and the builder of the dam, and Dr.

Dillon, the Englishman in charge of the gaol, who get along with their lives peacefully without being disturbed by the turmoil of the East. Steel The Hosts So, death is ultimately the last punishment for those attempting to cross the dividing line between East and West, two distinct territories that should always be kept apart.

Plots are thematically diverse and uncannily woven, providing mystery and fantastic implications that, from a Freudian perspective, call for a boundary negotiation between the knowable and the unknowable, the laws of reason and unconscious, day-dreaming processes. Before his wife left for England, they made a promise: The curse seems to become a reality.

In fact, Mona was soon after stricken with small-pox and badly marked. So, what do these stories have in common? And in so doing, she adheres to a strategy that introduces the uncanny as a catalyst element, leading to a narrative indeterminism, whose ideological implications cannot be overlooked. As Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, remarks: Consequently therefore, that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was […] familiar and, under certain conditions which ones? In other words, a blind spot or a leak in the representation system known as manifest Orientalism.

Under dire circumstances, General Roscoe asks his remaining oficers for help: We have dwindled to four white men among a host of dark. Relief is not even within a remote distance of us, and we are already border- ing upon starvation. She will be in your hands. There fol- lowed a violent struggle in front of her […]. And then both igures were on the ground almost at her feet, locked together in mortal combat, ighting, ighting like demons in a silence that throbbed with the tumult of unrestrained savagery.

His face was the face she had once seen bent over a man in his death-agony, convulsed with passion, savage, merciless — the face of a devil. Again in desperate fear she shrank from him, seeking wildly, fruitlessly, for a way of escape. In other words, what is implied, but cannot be overtly stated: All this gives rise to a process of trans-coding, that is, taking an existing meaning the horror of the primeval, colonial Other and re-appropriating or transferring it for new meanings and contexts the English domestic sphere and the politics of gender relations in England regarding the game of seduction and conquest, domination and subjection between men and women.

It is worth recalling that The Way of an Eagle was a commercial success. After being rejected by several publishers, T. Between and , the novel went through thirty printings. In a period where reading habits were solidly rooted in British society Flint, , travelling beyond east of Suez has proved to be a fruitful source of coming imaginatively to terms with the Other in its various manifestations, thus showing that the geographies of place and self and their underlying meanings are never ixed but are constantly being inlected into new directions for cultural, political, commercial or other pragmatic reasons.

The three writers discussed here somehow illuminate the broad scope of responses to the way the British, as conquers of India and colonizers, viewed both themselves and the cultures they assumed control of. These two modes of representation cannot be dissociated from the material complexities of the British-Indian encounter: We are thus confronted with two different ideological registers: Even though it makes use of some of the binarisms of Orientalism as a form of discourse, it far exceeds these binary oppositions and reworks them in a clear effort to take advantage of empire as a commodity that taps into feminine tastes and romantic ideals.

So, here the destabilizing effects of metonym are downplayed and channeled into the worship of colonial heroes, which shows that signiiers are never ixed in the ideological construction of Otherness. Seen in this light, East of Suez is a space or territorial locus that calls for constant decoding.

Presses Universitaires de France, The Politics of Theory. University of Essex, The Location of Culture. Youth and the East: William Blackwood and Sons, The Way of an Eagle. The Woman Reader Kyle Cathie Limited, Columbia University Press, The Hosts of the Lord. Thomas Nelson and Sons, In fact, however much Byatt rejects the presence of the self in her idea of writing, she has somewhat reluctantly acknowledged that, on occasion, she has used herself as a source of composition for her characters. Byatt; bereaved mother; autobiography; impersonality; ventriloquism. When one considers many of your characters — Frederica Potter, of course, but also [ You look around for something that will exemplify what you want to do and you think, oh yes, I did something like that, that will do, I will use myself for once, and you put yourself in [ I spent a lot of my life in female worlds and it did delight me to have a little boy, she says, glancing quickly at the loor.

One son is many sons [ DB xv-xvi However, in A. She is deeply suspicious of both biography and autobiography: HG — Can I ask you something?

Webster's English to Portuguese Crossword Puzzles: Level 1 - PDF Free Download

If a gun were held to your head, and you were asked to choose between either sitting down now and writing your autobiography, or having someone else write a biography of you, which would you choose? ASB — I would write a very brief, not wholly truthful autobiography. I would rather not. Real honestly, truthfulness and curiosity about your own life causes me at least to want to keep everything in play. Whereas a biography is an appropriation of your life by somebody else, which, in a very primitive way, I dislike the thought of.

There are writers who feel they have their style, their voice. For Heidegger, the Cartesian assumption of a radical split between knowing subject and inert object of knowledge has led to a world in which the detached superiority of the scientist becomes the model and ground of all existence. Roland had learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected.

P , added emphasis This self-conscious form of representation explicitly points towards a very postmodern perception of the nature of contemporary discursive representa- tions of the self: We are perhaps no more than a series of disjunct sense-impressions, remembered Incidents, shifting bits of knowledge, opinion, ideology and stock responses [ OHS 31, added emphasis Identity thus seems to be diluted into the symbolic loss of the coherent organic whole into fragmentary splinters of being. This process, in which a new self- consciousness emerges, is however not devoid of anxiety: In such a world [the postmodern age which is dominated by anxiety], consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past.

The concept of impersonality, irst used by T. Leavis in The Great Tradition: The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacriice, a continual extinction of personality [ Leavis agrees with T. Eliot that impersonality is the distinctive mark of great novelists.

Christien Franken reads 2However, it must be stated that the concept of impersonality is not altogether new: The concept of impersonality was thus retaken by T. Eliot for his own poetic and critical practices. Franken reads this embarrassment as gendered: Leavis suffers from seems that of gender. According to Franken, A. Byatt stands apart from Leavis in that she integrates the woman George Eliot with the intellectual George Eliot, and she further identiies herself with George Eliot as a woman writer and critic. For Byatt, George Eliot is a model whom she identiies with, as both share a huge intellectual curiosity, the scientiic love of accuracy evinced in their quest for knowledge and the pursuit of the exact word Kenyon 53 and the use of strategies of ventriloquism.

Furthermore, Byatt speaks enthusiastically about George Eliot the woman and the writer: George Eliot has been accused, or was accused — it may be past — by women, about never writing about a woman as clever as herself or as free as she made herself. In fact her own presence is enough to say that this is possible.

She can read and understand anything, she does not ever feel daunted. If she does not understand a scientiic fact she will go on until she does…I think that is why I love [Eliot], and because [she] write[s] about many people and not just one [ I do know her. JD interview Against what she feels to be the solipsism of many contemporary women writers, Byatt opposes the strategies of ventriloquism used by novelists and poets alike George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Robert Browning , and critically praised by literary scholars such as T.

Leavis, drawing on the concept of impersonality which she will also incorporate in her writing: I learned from Iris Murdoch that the kind of novel I like is the one in which there are several centres of consciousness and not just one, in which there are several ways of looking at the world, all of which have their own validity [ Autobiographical similarities between the bereaved mother writer and the bereaved mother written in this story can then be found in the fact that they are both writers whose only son died in a car accident when he was a child of ten or eleven and that neither of them believes in supernatural manifestations because their rational outlook on life prevents them from believing in ghosts.

In fact, these bereaved mothers are alike in the ingrained rationality expressed in very similar words which is quite incompatible with the vision of ghosts: JLCb interview 3 And here stop the hints of Byatt in Imogen — or, in other words, the autobiographical identiication that F. So has Byatt in this story: Which I suppose is to say that I did not start as some writers would say they did, with the desire to describe their own lives.

I terribly did not want to do that. It is very important to be nobody, rather like the reader inhabiting the book. And in parenthesis one might say I am sick to death of the modern habit of writing confessional memoirs all over the place, which is increasing. Byatt] has chosen to tell the story; the eficacy of [her] disguise is compromised every time the reader comes across instances which can ultimately be ascribed to the [author] who is heard speaking in propria persona every now and then.

1. Guitar Arpeggio Handbook, 2nd Edition: 120-Lesson, Step-By-Step Guide to Guitar Arpeggios, Music Theory, and Technique-Building Exercises, Beginner to Advanced Levels (Book & Videos)!
2. Baby Beneath the Christmas Tree (Mills & Boon M&B)?
3. .
4. .
5. Hänschens Badereise: Christliches Kinderbuch (German Edition)!
6. Quit Golf in 4 Easy Steps;
7. The Girls Guide to NASCAR;

And this is where Byatt the author steps back, as the way she and Imogen respond artistically to their great loss is fundamentally different: The Poems, London, Penguin, , p. According to Claude Maisonnat, the language of speaking makes way for the language of silence, which speaks louder in the irst part of the story: Maisonnat 52 The above mentioned literary outlets for her buried feelings, which could be a way of letting herself go, are now beyond her reach.

Is There Life After Death? She is thus an emblematic igure of the writer unable to write and it is signiicant that her connection with literature is displaced, in so far as she self-consciously admits that she has developed a taste for illegitimate literature — a curious word to use in a context involving a child. Maisonnat 59 4 It is noteworthy that bereavement literature emphasizes the fact that, for some bereaved parents, reading and writing are spiritual reactions to grief as therapeutic strategies for trying to cope with their loss: Those who preferred writing wrote down their memories of their children, as parents wanted to remember their lost loved ones, not forget Hunt It is interesting that, despite both writing and reading being present in the story, they are indeed construed as avoidance behaviour techniques rather than coping mechanisms.

For a more detailed analysis of the concepts of mourning, loss and bereavement in this short story, see Cheira On the one hand, she has kept on writing, however much she rejects the idea of writing as therapeutic healing and has repeatedly stated that she writes for pleasure Leith ; on the other hand, Byatt explains her own interest in knowing how to contact the dead as a primarily intellectual urge to rationalize the irrational: JLC2 interview 4 The same principle of rationality informs her writing about contacting the dead, as she clearly states on the following words on her novella The Conjugial Angel: I used to say, and I think I still believe, that in order to invent any character you need to be able to add together observations taken from at least two or three people and quite often one in a book as well.

Download This eBook

It has to have its own autonomy, which means it has to have at least two or three sources. You could invent a false biology for this; it must have two parents, it must have a genetic code, which it has inherited from several places. JLCa interview 22 Two of these sources are apparent throughout her iction: The name Imogen is a female given name, probably created by Shakespeare for a character in his play Cymbeline.

Moreover, Imogen is iguratively shrouded in an invisible protective cofin-like barrier strategy of survival6: Byatt the bereaved mother shares this view as well: Her voice is dry, emphatic. That is the way I cope with things.

• Wrecked.
• Quiet, Please!;
• Time Jumper (Mills & Boon Nocturne Bites)!
• !
• ;
• ?
• La historia mas larga jamas so–ada (Spanish Edition)!

On principle, for Byatt autobiographical writing and ventriloquist strategies stand in diametrically opposed ields: In short, it is both the work and the person. The New Critical Idiom, The Guardian, Sunday 9 June, Retrieved 26 May The Virgin in the Garden. The Shadow of the Sun. Representations of Childhood Death. Gillian Avery, Kimberley Reynolds K. Making Sense of Suffering: Cristina Rodriguez e Artur Guerra.

An Interview with A. Retrieved 17 October Journal of the Short Story in English. Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity and Representation. Selected Prose of T. Na Regra do Jogo, Courtesy of Christien Franken. The Independent, July 2 Contemporary British Women Writers: The Politics of Postmodernism. The Harvester Press, Saturday 25 April Manchester University Press, Writers and Their Background: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton University Press, This essay aims to analyse some of the short stories by A.

Byatt, in order to understand the way s whereby the author uses the fairytale to question acquired notions of womanhood that underlie the fairytale tradition. We will focus, particularly, on stories where women are the locus of a struggle to transcend what seems to be represented as the prison of their own female bodies, seeking a life outside the constraining condition of marriage and motherhood into a world of rationality and of creativity. On the other hand, the essay seeks to address these metamorphoses from the point of view of the fairytale traditions from which they derive.

Byatt; fairy tale; gender; postmodern; rewriting. A obra de A. Este ensaio visa analisar alguns dos contos de A. The novel impresses, as Possession: A Romance had done, by the historical breadth and the omnivorous knowledge that is displayed by A. Byatt in the vivid depiction of a large group of characters that are made to move in a historical universe and mindset that determines their actions.

By displaying a deep knowledge of the scientiic, educational, artistic, cultural and philosophical milieu where it is set, the story both evokes and questions our knowledge of the period, as well as of our own time. In this sense, this novel is also close to the concerns and themes that are present in a variety of previous ictional and critical texts by Byatt.

Of the four collections of short stories written by A. Byatt, at least in two of them we can ind good examples of the postmodernist trend of parodying the fairy tale and rewriting the fairy-tale tradition1. Five Fairy Stories irst published in comprises stories that, as the subtitle exhibits, were consciously written in accordance with the genre. All the ive stories contained in this volume use elements of the fairy tale. Jones and Zipes Oxford Companion xv , although Jack Zipes cuts a clear distinction between the oral folk tale and the literary fairy tale. In another collection, entitled Elementals: Apart from these collections of rewritten fairy tales, most of A.

Of all these stories, of particular interest for the purposes of this essay are the ones that display the magic element of metamorphosis, for in them we see opening up before our eyes the possibilities of changing identities. On the other hand, it is in metamorphosis that, according to authors such as Jack Zipes or Marina Warner, lies the essential characteristic of the fairy tale.

Marina Warner states in From the Beast to the Blonde The transformation undergone by the characters in some of the postmodern fairy tales written by A. Byatt invites a sense of wonder which the author sees as the magic allure of fairy tales, but the shape-shifting that befalls the characters in the stories that will be discussed in this essay do more than that; they project into the story a sense of the possibility of identity change 3 In the same manner, writing about the wonder tale which he differenciates from the literary fairy tale , Jack Zipes states: Everybody and everything can be transformed in a wonder tale.

In some of her writings Byatt shows that she is aware of this problem, demonstrating the dificult position a woman of her generation would be in if she wanted to succeed professionally. In interviews and other non-ictional writings we will ind evidence of the awareness the author shows about the implications of biology, the body, for a woman who was so interested in procuring an intellectual life; she mentions, in an article published in The Guardian 14th February, In those days the body required sex and childbearing, and quite likely the death of the mind alongside.

Similar Books

Byatt writes, for example, about the dificulty she experienced in managing her professional and her domestic life, to concentrate on her creative writing while having to attend to the needs of her young children. In an interview with George Greenield, Byatt describes the pains of trying to write while raising her children, in the following terms: The most terrible thing about children and writing is the total uncertainty of being able to plan ahead.

Thus, many of the heroines undergo a metamorphic process that enables them to exist outside reality in a fantastic world of their own. But the fairy-tale genre opens up possibilities of creation that are not to be found in the more constricting and realist format of the novel. She has, in fact, spoken in interviews and written disapprovingly both of feminist criticism5 and of the feminist drive to rewrite the fairy-tale genre in what she views as a moralizing uninteresting manner.

Perhaps even more so than in interviews and other writings, it is in the stories that we ind the sharpest critique of feminist readings of the fairy-tale tradition. Lieberman or Andrea Dworkin cf. It would appear, Fiammarosa had thought as a young girl, reading both histories and wonder tales, that princesses are commodities.

But also, in the same histories and tales, it can be seen that this is not so. Princesses are captious and clever choosers. This does not mean that the author is not aware of the misogynist implications of fairy tales. Literary feminism is a much more dubious thing. Fairy tale offers a case where the very contempt for women opened an opportunity for them to exercise their wit and communicate their ideas: Ice, Snow and Glass in A.

In this respect she states: The author opens this essay by focusing on the similarity of such diverse elements, as glass and ice, stating: Literature has always been my way out, my escape from the limits of being female. It is perhaps one of the most pervasive symbols to be found in her work. It can be found in the very irst novel, The Shadow of the Sun , a novel where Anna, the protagonist, is striving to discover her artistic voice and inds herself under the spell of the moon always relected through the glass, which gives her a sense of being drowned in another world, as in the following quotation from the novel: But tonight, with the soft light from the summer moon leaning gently on the corner of the bath, propped triangularly like another pane of paler glass between the window and the loor, there was nothing garish about the bathroom at all; it was a drowned world, a sunken secret world, with pillars and planes of light shining gently in its corners and the odd brightness of a tap, or the sliver of light along the edge of a basin, winking like living creatures, strange ish suspended and swaying in the darkness Anna, an aspiring writer, feels suffocated by the brilliance of the sun of her father, an established writer, in whose light she lingers.

Her own visionary experiences, unlike those of her father, are always mediated by mirrors and glasses, under the more shadowy light of the moon. Maud crouched on the rim of the pool, her briefcase standing in snow beside her, and scraped with an elegant gloved hand at the snow on the ice. The ice was ridged and bubbly and impure. As is mentioned by Franken: Once upon a time in the middle of the winter, when snowlakes the size of feathers were falling from the sky, a queen was sitting and sewing by a window with an ebony frame.

While she was sewing, she looked out at the snow and pricked her inger with a needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red looked so beautiful against the white snow that she thought: Here the snow stands for the traditional purity at heart, which accompanies the central character of the story. Kay, the young boy who is abducted by the Snow Queen, is stuck in the heart by a fragment of the troll mirror, which makes people see everything distorted.

The Snow Queen, on the other hand, stands for all that is cold and cruel, but also for rationality, as opposed to emotion and warmth. Contrarily to the Snow Queen, Gerda, the little innocent girl that sets herself the task of going on a Quest to save her friend Kay, is warm-hearted and innocent, associated to the sunshine and the lowers. In contrast, in A. But before we go into the tales, let us irst try to understand the use A.

Byatt makes of the fairy tale in her work. Women of Stone, Ice and Glass: However, what these stories show us is that these women can only come to life when they forsake their bodies, becoming disembodied statues, spiritual and rational beings, no longer aflicted, as it seems, by their bodily and sexual existence. As we can read in the irst novel, in an interior monologue of the character: Either love, passion, sex and those things, or the life of the mind, ambition, solitude, the others. There was a third way: Being a girl, she was raised with the utmost care and grew up to become a very frail and delicate child and a somnolent and lifeless adolescent.

Until one day, she discovers the wonderfully revivifying effects of snow and cold upon her body. In contact with the snow and ice, she discovers her innermost identity, as is described in the following words: This is who I am, the cold princess thought to herself, wriggling for sheer pleasure in the snow-dust, this is what I want. And when she was quite cold, and completely alive and crackling with energy, she rose to her feet, and began a strange, leaping dance, pointing sharp ingers at the moon, tossing her long mane of silver hair, sparkling with white-crystals, circling and bending and inally turning cartwheels under the wheeling sky With this new insight into her identity the Princess develops a whole new being which allows her to become a much more energetic and vital person, once she discovers she is the descendent of an ice woman that had come from the North.

In spite of this discovery, she cannot help falling in love with a Desert Prince and has to accompany him to his country of great deserts and excessive heat. Interestingly enough, the Princess is attracted to Prince Sasan, the Desert Prince, by her skill as a glassmaker, confusing the extreme clarity of glass with that of ice; only later does she understand that glass is the opposite of ice, for it is made of ire. However, it is in the meeting of their bodies that the confrontation of ice with heat is made, and in this confrontation we can see that the Princess, who is made of ice and snow, can be as passionate and electrifying as the Prince that comes from the desert and the heat, for as is stated in the story: Indeed, the metaphor of the cold princess is used to subvert the whole idea of coldness as a psychological attribute which is usually applied to rationality, for through this Princess we are given a story that allies the dichotomous polarities so as to shufle old stereotypes of female and male identities.

Her body develops a crust of stones. However, instead of dying from immobility provoked by the complete petriication of her body, what happens is that during the metamorphic process she becomes more and more alive, as is stressed in the text: It becomes clear, then, that although this woman is made of stone, she does not develop into a statue, but grows fully alive, now that her body has been metamorphosed into something other, something quite unidentiiable and separate from the world. This becomes apparent in the comparison the character makes between herself and the statues she inds at the local cemetery, where she goes in search of a place to rest after what she previously thinks of as the completed petriication process: She might take her place near them, she thought, but was dissuaded by the aspect of their neighbours, a group of the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, simpering lifeless women clutching a stone cross, a stone anchor, and a fat stone helpless child.

They had nothing to do with a woman who was made of volcanic glass and semi-precious stones, who needed a refuge for her end. The question, then, arises in relation to the true meaning of being made of stone: But to become molten lava and to contain a furnace? In the end, with the help of a stone carver she meets at the cemetery, the Icelander Thorsteinn Hallmundursson, the stone woman inds a place for her new stone self, together with the Trolls in the cold mountains of Iceland. The metamorphosis of the stone woman is clearly the metaphor for a new female identity, one that liberates her from the constraints ascribed to her female body; she becomes something other.

The End of the Gods — sheds a new light in relation to other inluences we can detect in the tale of the stone woman, which is perhaps more inluenced by Norse mythology and folklore than by the more widespread fairy tales of central European origin. It is in the light of this mythology that we may best appreciate the existence of this petriied ice world where Ines ultimately inds herself a home.

In one of the cofins he inds a beautiful young woman, who, after being rescued by the tailor, explains her story and marries him. First, although the princess understands that her release from the cofin must signal her giving herself to her rescuer, the little tailor does not accept the hand of the princess as a given, questioning her about her own motifs and desires: Though why you should have, simply because I opened the glass case, is less clear to me altogether, and when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place, and your home and lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and unwed.

Although this story does not fully rewrite the female pattern as the two other tales discussed here do, it nevertheless draws on a tradition of the fairy tale that brings forth the power of these narratives to disrupt acquired notions of behaviour and the stereotypes that are inherent to those notions. The bird-women are a good metaphor for a non- essentialist coniguration of the female gender, out of the constricting social roles that the female body would force them to take.

The whistling women had been cast out from the city of men and punished with eternal silence, for, although they could communicate among themselves by means of a whistle, this sound was both unintelligible and fatal to those who heard it. They represent, then, a re-enactment of the myth of the sirens, for, like them, are given destructive powers but are simultaneously imprisoned in a world of their own, from where they cannot escape, being unable to communicate.

These metamorphosed women, who had wanted to transcend the limits of their female bodies in order to be able to become shape-shifters like men, are, in a way, allowed their freedom, but that also makes of them outcasts without a place in the social structure of their country, as they explain: In Veralden, only men were shape-shifters. Women stayed in the valley, spinning and teaching, tending fruit-trees and lowers. They never left the valley. Thus, when asked if they desired to be women again, the leader of the bird-women answers: Byatt writes, as was already mentioned here, about the way she felt in relation to the role ascribed to women in some of the fairy tales she read when a child.

Ultimately, these new fairy tales envisage, not only a reconigured idea of womanhood, one that can liberate them from the bodily functions that for some many centuries conined their lives, exclusively, to the performance of those roles that were associated to the female body. The End of the Gods. Edinburgh, London, New York and Melbourne: Norton and Company, a. The Guardian 14th February, Little Black Book of Stories. On Histories and Stories: Stories of Fire and Ice.

Vintage International a division of Random House, Inc. Byatt, interviewed by Juliet A. Aspects of the English Novel Since London, Sidney, Auckland, Toronto: The Annotated Brothers Grimm. Norton and Company, Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Salon, Issue 20 June , From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Scholar Press, []. Jack Zipes, Oxford and New York: The conceptualisations of the ageing process are culturally and temporally conditioned. Critics such as Teresa Mangum irst and Karen Chase later have argued that the Victorians were particularly concerned about ageing and old age.

Fanny: estudo by Ernest Feydeau

In the nineteenth-century, the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the Victorian English man of letters Edward Bulwer-Lytton, focusing on similar topics in their respective literary works, can be considered transatlantic doubles as well as indicative of national conceptualisations about their own processes of ageing. Being economically disinherited in his young adulthood, after growing accustomed to a reasonably well- off standard of living during his childhood, Edgar Allan Poe lived fast and underwent a quickened process of ageing. Both writers experienced different turning points in their lives that conditioned their own way of perceiving ageing, which is in turn relected in their literary works.

Introduction In terms of their respective biographies, being contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Bulwer-Lytton could be regarded as transatlantic double igures, respectively personifying two ends of the same spectrum. Despite their differing situations, representative of almost opposite social classes, the fact they both experienced an event which signiicantly changed their lives at a certain point, paves the ground to gain insight into the different way they approached life and ageing, looking into the ways they adapted to the new situation and how successful they were in their endeavours.

These different views are deeply rooted in concrete personal experiences both authors underwent at some point in their lives, which set a precedent that inluenced their differing approaches to ageing as well as the different pace of life they adopted and its effects. Likewise, these experiences and views about ageing often reverberated in their literary works as a relection of their respective situations.

In the case of Edgar Allan Poe, despite his humble origins, he was adopted by a wealthy merchant, John Allan, who provided him with the education he could never have received had he remained the son of itinerant performers David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold. This important change endowed Poe with some social and economic aspirations that would remain for the most part of his life, striving to escape his original background and be accepted within his newly-acquired social milieu as a wealthy Southern gentleman in the United States of America.

Moreover, being brought up in England and Scotland for an important part of his adolescence, Poe imbibed the importance attached to social hierarchy, which would eventually come to a close when he was virtually disinherited soon after John Allan remarried and had a family of his own. Therefore, from being an orphan of humble origins, Edgar Allan Poe suddenly became the adopted son and expected successor of a wealthy merchant living in Europe, while Bulwer-Lytton, even if a future baronet and landowner, was forced to become a self-made man dependent on his own resources.

The Victorians and the Biographical Approach Due to the Utilitarian emphasis on individual self-interest, as well as the middle-class conidence in personal effort and initiative so as to attain success, individualism often shaped the ways in which Victorians interpreted their place in the universe Moran , Because of the importance attached to individualism, guidebooks that offered advice on self-development and volumes describing exemplary lives acquired signiicant popularity in Victorian times.

This interest in life stories also found its counterpart in the Victorian preoccupation about the process by which an individual struggled to maturity, which in turn led to an increasing interest in the process of ageing and the proliferation of bildungsroman narratives in the domain of iction. The Victorian appeal to biographical writing and ageing seems particularly interesting from the perspective of contemporary biographical theory. Owing to the advent of postmodernism, grand narratives, dominant ideologies and social theories alike are often called into question Roberts , 4 , and conversely, narratives and life stories are given the same prominence as any apparently authoritative accounts as it is claimed everything can be subjected to scrutiny, and thus, ultimately subverted.

Postmodern approaches have given way to the need of making use of a variety of texts as an attempt to gain insight into some sort of truth. In this sense, according to Wilfred L. Nineteenth-century writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, as an arguably canonical writer, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as a reputed Victorian whose fame ultimately fell into oblivion, are particularly apt to be studied from the discipline of biographical studies, precisely because of the signiicant corpus of biographical texts that have been produced together with their literary works such as biographies, letters and personal papers.

With regard to Poe, soon after his demise, many scholarly accounts of his life came to light, such as the volumes produced by John Ingram, Arthur Hobson Quinn, Jeffrey Meyers, Kenneth Silverman, or Peter Ackroyd, to name just a few. Likewise, during his lifetime, Edward Bulwer-Lytton started writing an autobiography, and after his demise, his son Robert and his grandson Victor took over the task that his father and grandfather, respectively, had begun but could not inish, thus producing impressively thorough biographies of Edward Bulwer-Lytton that have endured up to now.

The Discourse of Ageing and the Perception of Time In her seminal volume entitled The Long Life, Helen Small claims that one observable change that ageing brings is not biological but psychological , It is argued that, as the individual approaches old age, it becomes more usual to think about the limited time available. In this respect, the Victorian period seems to be a signiicantly important era from the perspective of ageing studies, since, according to Teresa Mangum , there was a greater concern about the process of ageing in Victorian England.

Likewise, Karen Chase has also thoroughly explored how the discourse of ageing began to gain unprecedented attention in Victorian cultural manifestations, especially in literature. Conversely, according to historian David Hackett Fischer , in the United States of America, due to their differing cultural and political situation, the nineteenth-century could be deined as a period of gerontophobia.

In this sense, many literary manifestations at the time envisioned old age as a metaphor for the old order that had to be left behind so as to become a nation of their own. The conceptualisations of ageing are thus deeply inluenced by cultural ideologies that depend on nation and place. From this follows that, if space and culture deter- mine the ageing process, the conceptualisations of time equally determine the way ageing is approached as space and time are mutually dependent.

Being contemporaries and citizens of different nations, Edward Bulwer- Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe approached ageing from a different perspective. Conversely, Edgar Allan Poe, having experienced the death of many of his beloved relatives and friends during all his life, he seemed to grow detached from any relection on his own process of ageing, even though tragic circumstances increased his sense of gloom and his feeling of growing prematurely aged.

Some of his most highly acclaimed novels such as Pelham , Paul Clifford and The Caxtons portray young boys coming of age that are required to grow up fast due to tragic and demanding circumstances, thus acquiring an acute sense of precociousness and maturation despite their young age. This realisation would soon turn young Edward into a precocious and mature child, fully aware that his education was mostly aimed at training him to accept his duties as a future baronet and heir to his lineage. Consequently, he soon gained insight into the certainty his fate had been determined soon after his birth, so that his life became for the most part a period of waiting until his duty would eventually be accomplished.

Bulwer-Lytton was thus raised fully aware of the future that was awaiting him, being inculcated to live with his older days in mind despite his blatant youth. Consequently, Bulwer-Lytton often envisioned young characters that, as a result of their personal circumstances, became precocious and prematurely grown-up, feeling compelled to take responsibility for their own existence at a very young age. There was a strong contrast in the two boys. The elder, who was about ifteen, seemed older than he was, not only from his height, but from the darkness of his complexion, and a certain proud, nay imperious, expression upon features that, without having the soft and luent graces of childhood, were yet regular and striking.

Deprived of a family, growing up alone and taking care of his younger brother, he is required to behave wisely and age fast, thus attaining maturity before he is actually due. Similarly, in his gothic novel Lucretia , Bulwer-Lytton also relected on the negative effects of denying a female adolescent the right to behave according to her age. Detached from any female companion of the same age, Lucretia is given the education bestowed upon male heirs at the time and is brought up in a strict and stern manner despite her youth.

In this respect, she is deprived of her femininity and childish ways, behaving in a way that seems quite at odds with her age: Seeing but few children of her own age, and mixing intimately with none, her mind was debarred from the usual objects which distract the vivacity, the restless and wondrous observation, of childhood.

Bulwer-Lytton is thus critical of children behaving like adults, even if the result he presents differs in his novels, thus being rather ambivalent. In his novel Night and Morning, Phillip Beaufort is rewarded, even though his younger brother grows detached from him and resents the miserable and humble existence he had when he lived with his elder brother. However, it is implied that, because Lucretia grows up detached from any female companion and is educated as an heiress, she eventually becomes a murderess due to her unlimited ambition and her mannish manners, having been previously required to come of age and leave her childhood behind before due time.

Edgar Allan Poe spent most of his childhood and youth in Richmond, Virginia, and a signiicant period of his adolescence in England and in Scotland. This privileged background led Poe to acquire certain social and economic aspirations that would persist in his adulthood, to the extent of even taking for granted that he would someday be appointed legitimate heir of the Allans, as Frances and John Allan had no children of their own. At the age of twenty-ive, he felt compelled to adjust the way of life he had adopted during his youth and aspired to maintain ever after.

His effort to become a self-made man, only dependent on his own resources for the irst time and trying to make himself a name, became a heavy burden to bear, which ultimately unleashed a relentless process of premature ageing. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with dificulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood.

His temperament was markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject for mesmeric experiment. The sharp separation between will and body is also often brought about through the process of ageing, as the spirit seems to remain young, while the body grows weaker. However, once Simpson puts on his spectacles, he suddenly realises he has married a toothless lady of eighty-two years of age, whom he discovers to be his great-great-grandmother, playing tricks on him to reprimand him for his overstated vanity.

What, in the name of every thing hideous, did this mean? Could I believe my eyes? Was that — was that — was that rouge? Jupiter, and every one of the gods and goddesses, little and big! I dashed the spectacles violently to the ground, and, leaping to my feet, stood erect in the middle of the loor, confronting Mrs.

Simpson, with my arms set a-kimbo, and grinning and foaming, but, at the same time, utterly speechless with terror and rage. Alluring and Embittered Approaches Towards the Ageing Process In addition to the importance Bulwer-Lytton and Poe placed on precociousness and premature ageing respectively, in most of his literary works Bulwer- Lytton seemed to acquire a more positive approach towards ageing in relation to Poe. Again, these different tendencies seem to be the result of their personal circumstances. In the case of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the fact of living most of the time ahead of his present and getting ready to fulil his fate as a successor endowed him with a particular approach towards the passage of time and the course of ageing.

This gave him a sense of permanence and continuation, regarding his elders with reverence and even awe, inding in his maternal grandfather, the great scholar Richard Warburton Lytton, a model of experi- ence to emulate in his youth. Consequently, in contrast with Edgar Allan Poe, Bulwer-Lytton often envisioned ageing as a productive, active and pleasant stage in life, where most objectives would ultimately be accomplished and individuals could fulil the wishes and expectations they had given thought to in the course of their lives.

In this sense, in his domestic novel The Caxtons, it is precisely in his old age that Austin Caxton, decides to write what becomes to be known as his Great Book, in capital letters, which he intends to be the result of a lifetime of strenuous effort and profound study of the great philosophers. As he sits next to his granddaughters, Austin Caxton urges himself to inish his Great Book in his old age as follows: Years have passed, and two fair daughters play at the knees of Blanche, or creep round the footstool of Austin, waiting patiently for the expected kiss when he looks up from the Great Book, now drawing fast to its close.

Faber retired at the end of the two years agreed upon. He went abroad; and being, though advanced in years, of a frame still robust, and habits of mind still inquiring and eager, he commenced a lengthened course of foreign travel, during which our correspondence, at irst frequent, gradually languished, and inally died away. In addition to his literary works, Bulwer-Lytton also displayed a remarkably positive attitude towards ageing in his collection of philosophical essays entitled Caxtoniana, which he published in the year , when he was already in his sixties.

In this respect, Bulwer- Lytton argues that [y]ou will ind men who, in youth and middle age, seeming scarcely to notice the most striking features of some unfamiliar landscape, become minutely observant of the rural scenery around them when the eye has grown dim and the step feeble. The Ushers are presented as the last members of a race, and as such, they are doomed to disappear, like Edgar Allan Poe and his wife Virginia, being cousins and childless, were the last representatives of their lineage.

In addition to the sense of insufferable gloom that anticipates approaching extinction, in some cases, ageing is also described through dependence and weakness. Smith to be one of the most remarkable men of his age due to his impressive achievements in the battleield but also due to his impressive build and strength.