POPA ADRIANA MARIA
BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES
(2 semestres)
The Real Charlotte is considered the most important work of Edith Oenone Somerville and Martin Ross ( by her real name Violet Martin). It is a novel that attempts to analyze with great complexity the relation that can be established between language, culture and imperialism in the late XIX- th century.
Irish literature is deeply rooted in Celtic mythology and in many cases it describes with accuracy the sufferings and hardships of the Irish people over the course of their history. Based on a strong oral tradition, Irish literature cultivates a narrative style that is both exaggerated and absurd, a sense of wonder in face of nature, wit and humor associated with satire and irony and the intense use of wordplay.
The original interplay between two languages resulted in a distinctive and very musical dialect of Hibero-English which adds much flavour to the language spoken in novels.
The novel is about a plain 40 years old woman -Charlotte Mullen- who tries to acquire a position in society and whose principal victim is her pretty young cousin Francie Fitzpatrick.
There is in the novel a strange use of grotesque merged with Romantic conventions and a sort of social realism which describes with accuracy the details of social life in Ireland.
The novel is remarkable because it presents the changes that were made in the social life, in fact, it is a vivid picture of Ireland life that presents colorful and minutely the rising of the Irish middle class.
The authors prove a caustic comic wit but no sentimental appraisal of human nature.
The main character Charlotte Mullen was compared to is one of Honore de Balzac 's characters namely Cousin Bette and this comparison is very suitable as long as both characters try hard to climb the social ladder.
The novel deals at a profound level with the way Anglo Irish tradition faced modernization.
Charlotte is a genuine and brilliant nowadays Mephistopheles, a grotesque heroine but also a symbolic figure for the 1890's Ireland. She is a plain woman marked by the fact that she is not attractive at all.
The society she lives in demands her to be attractive as to get married and acquire a place in the social life. In fact she wants to marry the man she loves named Roddy Lambert but she is twice refused and, eventually, she wants to get revenge.
The novel can be easily compared with a Greek tragedy in the way the main character cannot fight her own fate, cannot accomplish her destiny.
Aristotle's model of tragedy defined some hermeneutic strategies that referred to functions such as mimesis, representation, catharsis (imaginative identification with the hero, within his purgation) and anagnoresis (the self -knowledge acquired but only as a consequence of a tragedy, a catastrophe). Later Freud used the same term to acknowledge the therapeutic effect that two discourses that encounter each other have in psychoanalysis. This point of view concerning two kinds of discourses, one built on free associations, and the other full of floating attention for one's purpose was the base of theatre and the genre of tragedy.
In the Aristotelian model three were the causes of catastrophe: hybris (defined as tragic excess, lack of measure or judgment) hamartia( tragic error) anagnoresis (self -knowledge as a consequence of the tragic catastrophe).
In the novel marriage is a central concept: the heroine has to get married because otherwise she is rejected by the society she lives in, she becomes a pariah situated in a very humiliating posture. Her tragedies are that she cannot marry the man she loves and that she cannot marry at all. So she is not considered socially acceptable .She has the fate of a Greek heroine who cannot defeat, nor control her own destiny . There is nothing she can do as to be accepted in the society she lives in because she does not have attributes of such a nature to make her desirable.
In such unjust societies the female condition imposes attractiveness to the male gaze and nothing she can do will ever make her what she wants to be , get the man she loves. No doubt she is a tragic heroine.
In fact, Charlotte is not that repellent: she is talented, ambitious, well real and very persuasive but all these do not give her the power that Fanny has through beauty, Lucy through money, Pamela through aristocratic birth, Lambert through profession. Because he is the agent of Dysart family (an aristocratic family of the local major landowners)he is , after all socially acceptable. Christophe and Pamela, lord and lady Dysart make a bright spot in the landscape of the anti-intellectual society they live in .They do not have the intuition of the real nature that Charlotte has but they are sarcastic with her and consider her rather a buffoon.
Charlotte is a sort of Teiresias who has the gift of knowledge but not the possibility to act heroically. Charlotte has the gift of knowledge: she reads all the time , has a relative prosperity and some independence but she cannot escape the limitations of a woman unrelated to her moral selfhood.
None of those surrounding her realizes her true nature but Norry the Boat, her domestic.
The authors are very realistic in the way they present the society of their times in which marriage is no longer an affective process and does not have anything to do with love. Marriage is rather a dynastic or economic matter.
Charlotte felt in love with a man that indeed expressed his love for her but she is rejected twice: once because she did not have the required dowry, the second time because she was not that pretty as Francie was. So, she decided to take revenge : she promised to help Lambert when he was in need for money, but then she refuses to do anything to help him.
