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The Victorian Age - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Civil war (1861-1865): northern abolitionists organized the Republican Party against slavery. The Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president, BUT 11 southern states formed the Confederate States of America under president Jefferson Davis. Lincoln was killed by a southern fanatic (O captain! My captain! by Whitman).
        
        13th Amendment of the Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, BUT there were still racist attacks by Ku Klux Klan etc and segregation in schools, hospitals and transports
    - - expansion westward: discovery of gold in California ("gold rush"), no more frontier, birth of cowboys, extermination of American Indians who were mass-deported or exterminated
- - - - Thoreau was Emerson's follower and wrote Walden, or life in the woods, about 2 years he lived in the woods according to the principles of Trascendentalism. He believed an individual could resist state laws if in conflict with his morality
  - - - Walter Pater is the theorist of the English Aestheticism: life should be lived "as a work of art", filling each moment with intense experience and sensation, rejecting religion, using art to halt the passage of time, art is NOT moral or didactic and doesn't mirror life. The Dandy is a man that devotes his life to art and an extravagant style
        
        features of aesthetic works: focus on the self, hedonism and sensuality, perverse subjects, disenchantment with society, evocative language
      - in the 1880s, after Baudelaire's influence, the French symbolists Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Laforgue founded the journal Le décadent. Huysmans wrote à rebours, a novel with an hedonistic and dandy hero that will inspire Wilde. In Italy, D'Annunzio wrote Il Piacere
- - - - Tennyson
        
        studied at Trinity College in Cambridge and made friends with a group of men that loved poetry, he met Arthur Hallam that became his best friend but tragically died (In Memoriam A.H.H.)
        
        Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and his knights's brotherood are destroyed by the absence of a true leader, which leads to a meditation on materialism and lack of values in the present, without finding an answer.
        
        In Memoriam A.H.H.: elegy of 131 sections in iambic tetrameter, about death ans life and grief for Hallam's death
        
        Ulysses: < Dante's Inferno. Ulysses is an overreacher who follows knowledge at any cost and goes beyond the pillars of Hercules, he is adventurous and imaginative. Telemachus is the typical Victorian man with a boring life devoted to social duties, prone to the gradual civilization of his people
        
        balanced and regular style, onomatopoeia, kennings (now, they are longer and complex phrases, still stopping the reading phase to push the reader to reflect)
        
        embodied Victorian spirit: believed in national pride, love of order, conventional middle class sentimentality, belief in progress of mankind, doubted about God (Darwin had created a religious crisis) and nature (indifferent to man, scientific pov, not mystic)
    - - Whitman
        
        born in NY, as a child became apprentice for a newspaper and he always used newspapers to express democratic ideals, took a trip through New Orleans and Chicago and understood vastness of USA and variety of people. He became self-taught by reading Bible, Homer, Dante, Emerson, Eastern religious and philosophical texts. Was against slavery and pro Lincoln and democracy. Became posthumously popular in the 1870s by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ezra Pound and, later, the Beat Generation.
        
        Leaves of Grass: 10 editions of poems collected throughout his life. Sense of unity of all the things, which flow and embrace everthing.
        
        rejected traditional and rigid 19th century structures, because reality is always flowing. Free verse, long lines with emotion-determined rhythm, fragmentation and accumulation, new language that mixes dialect and common speech with science and philosophy, assertions (not similes or metaphors)
        
        nature is the body of the earth, a material entity that is linked to the human body (especially his sensuality and energies that are the same that brought the earth to life). Earth is also mystical and a larger version of the self.
        
        themes. optimism, romantic faith in USA future and democracy, believed in the American dream. He celebrated USA land, people, nature. Task of the poet to represent spirit of his country, give voice to common people, reveal the truth. He embraces mankind as a brotherhood, mixes with common people. Physical love, body, sex (was considered immoral, obscene and homosexual), right to self-expression
      - Dickinson
        
        born in Amherst (Massachusetts) from a middle-class Puritan family, studied at university, came back home and lived in seclusion and wearing only white clothes (spiritual marriage, single), only went out to walk in the garden, confided in sister Lavinia and friend/lover Susan, wrote (letters and poems) for the purpose of communication rather than publication, only 7/2000 poems were printed when she was alive. The first edition was by Higginson in 1890 and was revised in its style, while the most faithful is the one by Johnson in 1955 with the original punctuation.
        
        themes: death and loss (pov of who is dying or a witness, her own death etc, it is a liberation from anxiety and state of union with the universe as a natural element), love and desire (ecstatic, sensual, despair due to separation), time, fear, sorrow, despair, God, nature (source of wonder or fear, presented objectively or through soul of the observer or in an abstract way), man's relation to the universe
        
        short simple quatrains, compressed, without title, monosyllabic words, terms from law and engineering, common words, puntuation and syntax create ambiguous meanings of each poem, rethorical devices (imperfect rhymes, assonance, alliteration, metaphor), irony, dash to break lines and create a pause to ponder, free rhyme (anticipates modernism), exploration of universal issues through trivial imagery (anticipates "minimalist" writers of 1980s)
  - - - reflected social changes of industrial revolution, struggle for democracy, growth of towns, social evils, exploitation of children and workers
        
        Didacticism: novels to correct evils of the age
        
        omniscient narrator who commented on the plot and underlined right vs wrong behaviour, final retribution or punishment in the book
    - - novel of manners: <19th century novels, about economic and social problems of a social class
        
        Thackeray
      - humanitarian novel: humour + sentimentalism, wanted changes for the less fortunate
        
        Dickens
        
        father imprisoned for debt and he started working in a factory at 12, then became a shorthand reporter for the Parliament, a reporter for a newspaper and a short story writer named "Boz" (Sketches by Boz: articles describing London life, people and scenes), then became a novelist
        
        published episodically on journals, shifted focus of the novel from upper-middle-class to lower classes, created caricatures (ex. Mr Gradgrind, Scrooge), exaggerated characters' habits and language and ridiculed them, always sided with the poor, focused on children (as wise teachers and examples) and opposed them with worthless parents and grown-ups
        
        Oliver Twist: his name refers to the twists of fortune. Unknown parents, he was born in a workhouse near London and grew up there, he asks for more food and is sold as an apprentice for 5 pounds. In London he is trained by Fagin as a member of a street gang of thieves and is rescued and adopted by his first victim, Mr Brownlow. Oliver discovers he is of noble origins and the gang of thieves, that had tried to take Oliver's fortune, is arrested.
        
        London as setting, 3 social levels (parochial world of the workhouse, calculating and insensible to the poor; criminal world of pickpokets and murderers who are poor and desperate and live in slums; Victorian middle class of respectable people, linked to morality and dignity)
        
        Hard Times: 3 books set in the imaginary industrial Coketown. Mr Gradgrind is an educator that believes in facts and statistics, has founded a school and has educated his children repressing their feelings. The daughter's marriage is unhappy and the son robs his employer and sister's husband. Gradgrind understands the damage and gives up his philosophy
        
        Coketown stands for any industrial town of Victorian England, a brick jungle with buildings covered with soot from factoriesand unbothered citizens, who are proud of productivity.
        
        critique to Utilitarianism: human nature cannot be measured and governed only by reason, VS England that was turning individual into machines by avoiding emotions and imagination
        
        didactic aim: rich people became aware about condition of the poor (Dickens didn't want a rebellion but more awareness of social problems, without offending his middle-class readers)
        
        effective language, powerful descriptions, juxtaposition of images, hyperbole and irony
        
        < Bible, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, 18th century novelists, Gothic novels
        
        London: main setting, critique of industrialism, misery of poor people, sketches of metropolitan life
      - novel of formation/bildungsroman: character's development from youth to maturity
        
        Bronte sisters
        
        Charlotte, Emily and Anne lived in isolation, were self-educated and read a lot at their father's library, begun writing poems under pseudonyms (Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) and novels under pseudonyms (Jane Eyre by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights by Emily, Agnes Grey by Anne)
        
        Jane Eyre: Jane is an orphan and lives at her aunt's, goes to Lowood School and then becomes a teacher there, then she works as a governess at Thornfield Hall and falls in love with Mr Rochester but, when she agrees to marry him, she is informed by Mr Richard Mason that Rochester is already married Bertha Mason, a madwoman trapped in his attic. Jane escapes in the woods and then meets her cousins at Moor House, where St John Rivers proposes to her, but she refuses and goes back to Rochester: his mansion is destroyed by a fire caused by the suicidal Bertha, he is blind and Jane marries him.
        
        5 locations with symbolical name: Gateshead (gateway; aunt's home, she spends time in the red room), Lowood (low wood: school under a forest, low time in Jane's life), Thornfield (field of thorns; mystery and temptation), Moor House (in the wilderness, where she is free), Ferndean (fern hill; Rochester's 2nd house, a new start). Jane crosses boundaries and moves between nature and wilderness.
        
        novelty: woman narrator that speaks freely about herself and her passionate love from her pov (1st person), she has a plain beauty but she is REAL, intense, independent, rebellious, looking for affection, struggle spirit vs flesh
        
        Rochester is a Byronic Hero: noble seducer, but he is attracted more to the soul than the flesh
        
        themes; marriage is a relationship between equals and not a social compromise, criticism of Victorian social classes and gender (Jane could only work as a female governess and treated like a servant, gothic themes (childhood terrors and nightmares, supernatural events)
        
        Wuthering Heights: Mr Lockwood is the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, owned by Mr Heathcliff; he has to stay the night because of a storm and has a vision of Catherine asking to be freed after 20 years in the moor. The next day, the housekeeper Nelly Dean tells him the truth from 20 years ago: at Wuthering Heights, Catherine's father Mr Earnshaw brings home a foundling and calls him Heathcliff, he is violent but falls in love with Catherine though she marries Edgar Linton because he is socially inferior, he returns after 3 years to take revenge and wins the house by gambling. Catherine dies of childbirth and he forces her daughter to marry his son who dies, Heathcliff dies too and is reunited with Catherine as ghosts in the moors.
        
        WH is gloomy and stormy, rooted in tradition and custom, passion. TG is symbol of stability, kindness and respectability. They are complementary and unified with the marriage of the last generation
        
        Heathcliff is a Byronic Hero, passionate and solitary, and a Gothic villain that mistreats wife and son. Catherine has a romantic nature and has both social ambitions and desire to discard social conventions
        
        themes: romanticism (correspondence between passions and landscape), death (liberation of the spirit, not a moment of forgiveness or settling of conflicts), Gothic elements (wilderness, dreams, superstition, death, ghosts)
        
        concentric narratives: 2 major narratives (Mr Lockwood as outstider, Nelly Deas as insider and reliable). No cronological order: story begins at the end and uses flashbacks, suspense, poetic moments vs commonsense of Nelly's view. The novel marks the shift from society to individuality
      - literary nonsense: nonsensical universe with no rules or conventions, no cause-effect relationship, no traditional time and space
        
        Carrol
        
        pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in Cheshire, studied at Oxford, was a lecturer in Mathematics and wrote books for children (dual nature) and especially Alice, showed the absurdity of the world
        
        Alice's adventures in wonderland: Alice follows a rabbit down a hole into an underground illogical world, she meets strange creatures, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, the King and Queen of Hearts, finally she wakes up.
        
        animals act as normal people, everything happens during day, Wonderland is our world through the eyes of a child, but there are also references to the real world
        
        themes: growing up and children's struggle to survive in the adults' world, Alice learns a new way of reasoning (everyone is mad, she criticizes the order of the Queen, finally she learns about rationality and abandons imagination so she has to leave Wonderland), identity (everyone asks her about identity and she never knows how to answer, especially because of the physical changes she undergoes)
        
        puns, odd usage of parenthesis and capital letters, italics, poetic language, parodies of nursery rhymes and songs
    - - realistic novel: <Darwin, represented moral and religious crisis of the end of the century
        
        Hardy
        
        studied architecture and started writing poetry, read Comte, Mill, Darwin and Shopenhauer, began writing novels and started his literary career, towards the end of his life he turned to poetry. At first was influenced by Oxfort Movement, then abandoned God and believed in determinism
        
        interested in life, death, man and universe. <greek tragedy nature is indifferent and hostile to man, <Darwin he denied God and believed in "insensible chance" that controls the universe so that man has no control on anything and life is tragic, <John Stuart Mill and <Comte need for cooperation and kindness, scientific knowledge
        
        themes: difficulty of being alive, determinism, nature is co-protagonist with characters, nature indifferent to man's destiny, nature is also regeneration (seasons), exposes hypocrisy of Victorian society, uselessness of Christianity for the modern man, failure of communication
        
        detailed and symbolic language, register suitable for the character, use of dialect, things presented through 5 senses (especially sight: characters watch each other and are watched by nature), rigorous form with symmetry and blend of dialogue, description and narration. Omniscient narrator comments on the action. Cinematic techniques of zooming.
        
        novels set in a semi-fictional region in SW England called "Wessex" . He focused on ruins, churches, towers, walls, Stonhenge, college of Christminster (fictionalized Oxford), peasants similar to Greek chorus
        
        Tess of the D'Ubervilles A pure woman faithfully presented: Tess is sent to work for a family friend Alec d'uberville, he rapes her in the woods but their child dies and she goes back home where she falls in love with Angel Clare. On their wedding day she leaves him a letter explaining her past, but he never finds it and they get married. She tells him the truth and he leaves her, so she goes to work far away and she meets Alec again. When Angel forgives her, she kills Alec and they escape together, but the police arrests and kills her.
        
        Tess is clever and beautiful, a victim, trying to survive, restless; presented through symbolic images linked to her beauty and innocence. Alec is rich and believes he can take anything he wants, has no morals. Angel is modern and liberal (<John Stuart Mill), idealizes Tess but he is strict and dogmatic in front of the truth.
        
        themes: Tess is still a pure woman because she's trapped and a victim of destiny, differently from the Victorian moral code which is distorted (morality varies according to time and place + morality by man is different from laws of nature). Christianity is also useless and man is hopeless
        
        Jude the Obscure: Jude is a countryside boy who wants to study at the university of Christminster. First he can't because he is married to a Arabella, but when their marriage ends he goes there but he doesn't graduate because he falls in love with a married woman, his cousin Sue, and they start a family (1 Sue's son: Little Father Time + 2 children together), but they have to leave far away because they are a scandal and they live in poverty. Sue returns to her husband and Jude to Arabella, he dies alone. The two women are an obstacle for reaching his dreams and they make him alienated from society.
        
        Sue is the heroine and represents the ideal and intellectual woman, that shares Jude's sensitivity but is unstable and finally accepts Victorian social rules. Jude is a conventional Victorian poor orphan, but Hardy denies him the happy ending; he is "obscure" because he is never "seen" by the others and will never be (he is working class but denies them because of his ambition, but neither he is accepted by the higher classes)
        
        themes: questioning of marriage as insitution, interest in divorce, higher education for working class people, new figure of independent woman (Sue), crisis of late Victorian age's values and morality, sense of anxiety
        
        6 parts each set in a particular town or village, symmetrical plot (marriage-destertion-divorce-remarriage). 3rd person omniscient narrator BUT never explains or interprets facts, which are self-explained by action and dialogue (anticipation of modernism)
      - psychological novel: double Victorian nature and society, especially secrets of the aristocracy.
        
        Stevenson
        
        born in Edimbrugh from a Calvinist family, child with poor health was home tutored and scared of the room in which he had to spend childhood, travelled a lot to find a good climate and went to South England, Germany, France, Italy. He criticized Victorian respectabiltiy and adopted eccentric appearance and manners, becoming a bohemian. He became a writer for both children and adults
        
        The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Mr Utterson is a respectable lawyer and friend to the scientist Henry Jekyll, he has witnessed an accident to a girl in the street and has noticed changes in Jekyll's behaviour: he discovers that Jekyll has created a potion that splits personality in two and has freed his evil side Mr Hyde. The two are in a struggle but, when Hyde is about to win, Jekyll kills himself
        
        London is the setting and it reflects Victorian hypocrisy: respectable West End vs poor East End. Jekyll's house has two facades: the front is respectable and used by Jekyll, the rear is sinister and with no windows and it is used by Hyde. The story mainly takes place at night and with fog
        
        multi-narrative structure with 4 narrators and povs: Utterson (detective and opposite to Enfield), Enfield (his relative), Dr Lanyon (Jekyll's friend, reasonable, the first to see the transformation, kills himself to avoid facing the irrational), Dr Jekyll (1st person narrator in his final confession)
        
        <dream by Stevenson about a man who swallows a drug and becomes a monster, <reflection on Victorian double nature, <Calvinist beliefs of family, <Darwin: Mr Hyde's deformity and small stature, primitive state, psychological repression
        
        Jekyll (virtuous, beautiful, proportioned, fine clothes), vs Hyde (deformed, dwarfish, clothes too large for him, BUT towards the end becomes larger and threatens balance between good and evil)
      - colonial literature: about white man's burden
        
        Kipling
        
        born in Mumbai (India), in 1865, went to England to study, began publishing poems and novels, sometimes went to the USA where he wrote The Jungle book (2 volumes about Mowgli growing among wolves in the Indian Jungle), first Englishman to receive the Noble Prize
        
        Kim: Kim is an orphan and a beggar, he meets a Lama and becomes his disciple to search for the mythical river of the arrows. He learns about the conflict between Russian and British Empire and has to give a message to the British commander. He is trained as a spy and the Secret Agent and saves the Lama when he gets into trouble with the Russians. Eventually he gives the message and Lama finds the river and achieves Nirvana. Descriptions of India are stereotyped and imperialistic, the character has a split identity between India and England but eventually finds a middle Way.
        
        "frame story": several stories linked by a frame and a single character. It is a reaction against the omniscient narrator of Victorian Age, he has a more ambivalent vision of the world, ironic comments by the writer. words full of emotions and feelings, good portrayal of both British and colonized
        
        exhalted Imperial power that provided order and stability among the natives and had a "burden": to carry civilization as an elected race (poem The white man's burden celebrated USA conquest of the Philippines
      - detective story: a mysterious crime is solved by a detective and his "slower" companion, since the police is inefficient, there is a final twist and a detailed reconstruction of the crime
        
        Conan Doyle
        
        created Sherlock Holmes on the basis of a medical colleague, he appears in 4 novels and 56 short stories narrated by his assistant Dr John Watson. He is an "armchair detective", who feels superior because of his intellect
        
        The hound of the Baskervilles: a man comes to see Holmes at Baker Street and tells him about the legend of the Baskervilles, a cursed family since when an ancestor mistreated a young girl and was killed by an enormous black hound. A recent death has started to terrify the family. Holmes discovers that their neighbour, Mr Stapleton, is the next in line for the Baskervilles's inheritance and is killing everyone with his black dog
    - - Hawthorne
        
        born in Salem (Massachusetts), his ancestors had taken part to the Salem witch trials of 1692
        
        The scarlet letter: Hester Prynne is sent to Massachusetts by her husband who will join her later, but she has an affair with Reverend Dimmsdale and is pregnant with Pearl. Adultery is punished by Puritan law and she is sent to prison and forced to wear the scarlet letter A. Her husband arrives and torments Dimmsdale, who eventually confesses his guilt and dies in Hester's arms. The husband dies too and leaves a fortune to Pearl, who moves to Europe with her mother and marries an aristocrat. Hester goes back to Boston and dies, the letter A is put on her tombstone
        
        set in Boston, Puritan New England in the 17th century. The author pretends to find a manuscript with Hester's story
        
        4 main characters (the rest is a crowd): Hester (impulsive, passionate, outcast), Dimmsdale (passive, sensitive, refined, ashamed) vs husband (active, villain, vengeful), Pearl (strange, energetic, free, innocent, saviour to her mother)
        
        themes: Puritan view of sin in USA 17th century, guilt, isolation, frustration, two-faced appearance
        
        omniscient narrator, expresses opinion, meeting of real and imaginary, use of symbols taken from Bible, Spenser, Shakesperare, Milton (spirituality beyond reality: ex. letter A, light vs darkness, dark forest vs town, witch rites, illicit lovers)
      - Melville
        
        born in NY, left school and signed as crew on a merchant ship, travelled widely, did some whale-hunting (popular at that time), but then left and lived in Polynesia and in Hawaii, finally he returned home. Hawthorne encouraged him to adopt a more complex and symbolic style. His masterpiece was not appreciated and his popularity was revived in the 1920s.
        
        Moby Dick: On the ship Pequod, crossing Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, captain Ahab devotes his life to killing the white sperm whale Moby Dick, who had cut off his leg. The crew is made of types (the wise one, the superstitious one, the one good with the harpoon, the cabin boy, the new member and survivor Ishmael). The whale kills everyone and destroys the ship. Only Ishmael survives to tell the story
        
        Ahab's (symbol of atheism or God) quest vs the whale (symbol of God or atheism) is blasphemous because it is either a fight against God or a fight against atheism by a man that thinks he is equal to God. Others believe Ahab is symbol of USA spirituality against nature (Victorian age: man vs nature) prevailing over man. He is Prometheus.
        
        themes: new USA nation (mixture of identities fighting the sea and searching for an ideal, BUT not a patriotic work, rather a pessimist one: destruction of the ideal by the real), religious and literary influences (Ahab is like Ulysses or Jonah who doesn't obey to God's destiny and is punished, references to Coleridge's mariner as Ishmael survives because recognizes whale as creature of God and tells the story)
        
        language from colloquial to figurative and symbolical, dictionary definitions of whale, 80 quotations about whales, description of their anatomy and ways to kill them. Ishmael is 1st person narrator + 3rd person omniscient and impersonal narrative, irony, parody, dramatic techniques (soliloquy, dialogue, asides)
    - - born in Dublin, influenced by John Ruskin, became disciple of Walter Pater, moved to London and became a dandy, went to USA to give lectures on Aestheticism as a search for the beautiful but also became famous for irony and attitude, published poems and short stories (ex. The Canterville Ghost, The happy prince and other tales), wrote novels and theatrical pieces with which he revived the comedy of manners, lost his reputation after the French staging and English censorship of Salomé for obscenity and the discovery of his homoerotic relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas for which he was sentenced to 2 years of hard labour, in prison he wrote and dedicated to his lover De profundis about imprisonment, went to exile in France
      - rejection of moral art (ex. Preface to The picture of Dorian Gray), rejection of Victorian didacticism in literature, cult of beauty per se
      - The picture of Dorian Gray: in London at the end of 19th century, young Dorian is beautiful and Basil Hallward paints him a portrait. Dorian is influenced by Lord Henry Wotton in his cult of beauty and pleasure and his vices have results only on the portrait. Eventually, Dorian sees the corrupted portrait and stabs it, resulting in his death and in the portait going back to normal.
        
        influence of drama: characters reveal themselves through their words and action or through other people's words
        
        Dorian Gray is beauty, innocence, youth, immaturity. Lord Henry Wotton is a superficial and sharp intellectual. Basil Hallward is a painter and an intellectual who shows mixed homoerotic feelings for Dorian, he is the example of how an artist can be destroyed by his art
        
        unobtrusive 3rd person narrator with internal perspective, vivid settings and words
        
        theme: Faust, double (picture), excess must be punished, critique to Victorian hypocrisy and immorality, art is eternal (like the picture)
  - - - Wilde
        
        The importance of being Earnest: Jack lives in the country but often goes to London to visit his fictious brother Ernest, in London he falls in love with Gwendolen but her mother opposes because he is a founding. His friend Algernon lives in town and often goes to the country as Ernest and falls in love with Cecily. At that moment both Gwendolen and Cecily believe that they are engaged with Ernest. Finally Jack confesses and they also discover that he is the son of Gwendolen's aunt. Everyone gets married.
        
        Restoration comedy of manners: criticized in a witty way the problems of his age, the audience saw themselves reflected
        
        themes: double facade of Victorian society, money (Lady Bracknell), marriage (institution based on hypocrisy and status)
        
        witty dialogues, puns (name Earnest < Ernest=Honest BUT it is not true), misunderstandings, paradoxes, irony (serious language to talk about frivolous subjects)
      - Shaw
        
        born in Dublin, worked for periodicals and was part of the Fabian Society, his collection of Plays pleasant and unpleasant became famous in England after being a success abroad and it attacks capitalism and explores moral and social problems.
        
        didn't write for entertainment but as a prophet and a Puritan who used realism to analyze and criticize Victorian society with the aim of improving it. Against sentimentalism and idealism which prevented man from confronting negative issues. Wanted to replace Shakespeare with Ibsen (idealism with realism: real life on stage)
        
        long and fast sentences presenting arguments (Shaw invented Drama of discussion or ideas: discussion play + comedy,characters identified with ideas or institutions), paradox, inversion of traditional values (characters express their own mind, not what is expected from them), exaggeration, extremely detailed stage directions
        
        themes: capitalism, militarism, equality of women, relationship husband-wife, religion
        
        Mrs Warren's profession: Mrs Warren is a prostitute that has obtained enough money to let her daughter Vivie study in the best schools, she graduates from Cambridge but she is shocked when she learns who her mother is and doesn't know who her father is, eventually she forgives her when she understands the sacrifices she made and the better security and opportunities of autonomy given by her job (she was an uneducated working class woman). When Vivie discovers that her mother still manages brothels, she goes abroad to study and become independent
        
        Mrs Kitty Warren was poor and uneducated, for economic necessity, she becomes a prostitute and loses contact with her family and with respectable Victorian society. Vivie Warren is her 22 yo daughter who, thanks to her mother, has become emancipated (different values from her mother, not money but independence)
        
        themes: prostitution (forced on women by the economic system rather than by lack of morality, rewarded better than hard work=Victiorian corruption), relation mother-daughter=individual-society (Vivie discovers the true face of Victiorian society)