The Dominant Structures of the Times: Late Victorian Tragedy as Critique of Romantic Ideology

Abstract

In their attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment, Romantic writers formulated a worldview which recreated the theological unity of being on the plane of immanence. This intellectual unity was imposed on the deeply divided Victorian society which was described by Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, as ―the two nations.‖ Imposing a unified intellectual framework on a sharply divided society without being able to develop it from within is bound to merely cover the division with an ideological smokescreen. This study explores how romantic ideology manifests itself in the dominant form of Romantic realism in the fiction of early Victorian writers. It, then, investigates the dominant form of late Victorian fiction in order to prove that it functions as ideology critique. Romantic fiction in the early Victorian period, on the one hand, attempts to unify the individual and society, man and nature and the different social classes through showing how they are permeated by a unifying spirit. The form of late Victorian tragedy, on the other hand, which shows the opposition between the individual and society, man and nature and the social classes is the result of debunking the faith in unity as merely ideological. When unity is exposed as merely ideological, what remains is the opposition in which the individual is defeated in his struggle against a greater power, creating, thereby, the distinctive form of tragedy. Late Victorian tragedy is, hence, the exposition of oppositions without unification.