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ENGLAND - XX CENTURY (Historical context ((THE SUFFRAGETTES ((The WSPU…
ENGLAND - XX CENTURY
Historical context
THE SUFFRAGETTES
The WSPU began to break the law to gain publicity and support. They began a campaign of vandalism: they chained themselves to railings outside Downing Street and Buckingham Palace and they made arson attacks on post boxes, churches and railway stations.
The Government dealt with the protests harshly and sent many Suffragettes to prison. In prison some women went on hunger strike to draw attention to their campaign. Prison authorities began force-feeding them.
In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst founded the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union; the Suffragettes, as they were called, protested that women should be able to vote.
EDWARDIAN AGE
A series of strikes of seamen, dockers and railway workers was called because of high prices and low wages and Lloyd George responded with unemployment benefits and health insurance for the workers of important industries.
After the approval of the Parliament Act by liberals, the Lords’ right to veto money bills passed in the Commons was removed, they could only delay them for two years and a general election would be held at least every five years.
After the foundations of the Welfare state, there were these reforms: free school meals, free school medical inspections, some legal protection for children thanks to the Children's Act, the Old Age Pensions Act, minimum wages were fixed and the ''National Insurance Act''.
Division of ''Liberals'' in two groups: those who supported the traditional liberal values and those who supported New Liberalism, in favour of certain forms of State intervention in social life.
Cultural crisis
Albert Einstein: between 1907 and 1915 Einstein developed a new theory called ‘general relativity’ to distinguish it from the original theory of special relativity, a theory of gravitation according to which the observed gravitational attraction between masses results from the warping of space and time by those masses.
Carl Gustav Jung: continuing Freud’s studies, he added the concept of ‘collective unconscious’; a cultural memory of the universal images and beliefs of the human race operating on a symbolic level and Only the psychologist or the poet could understand these symbols and archetypes and explain them.
William James and Henri Bergson: from them was questioned the idea of ‘time’ and the difference between historical time and psychological time.
Sigmund Freud: the effects of his theories were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered, the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early developments and childhood, the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted and his method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of ‘free association’ influenced the modern writers.
The modern novel
Interior monologue: unspoken activity of the mind. The main features of that are: its immediacy, absence of introductory expressions, the presence of two levels of narration, the lack of chronological order, use of subjective time, the absence of the rules of punctuation and the lack of formal logical order.
They were interested in the development of the character’s mind and human relationships. The most important were: Joseph Conrad, who tried to record the mystery of human experience, David Herbert Lawrence, who centred his work on the liberating function of sexuality and Edward Morgan Forster, whose recurrent theme is the complexity of human relationships and the analysis of the contrast between two different cultures .
The new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious contributed to the birth of the modern novel. At the beginning of the XX century the modern novelist: rejected omniscient narration, experimented with new methods to portray the individual consciousness, gave more and more importance to subjective consciosuness and understood it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind using traditional techniques.
Indirect interior monologue; it is characterised by the following devices: the author is present within the narration (the character’s thoughts are presented both directly and by adding descriptions, appropriate comments and introductory phrases to guide the reader through the narration), the character stays fixed in space while his/her consciousness moves freely in time and everything happens in the present in the character’s mind