Victorian Era Poets - Book Report/Review Example

Ms. Browning's heroine in Aurora Leigh is from a first reading not a stereotypical Victorian maid - who indeed chose to pursue an artistic career over marriage to a man she could not respect for not respecting her in return. However - the dyadic Victorian notion of separating reason (masculine qualities) from feelings (female qualities) is what initially drove Leigh not to accept the man she later found out that she truly loves. In rejecting Romney, she exclusively used reason over her feelings - believing that such marriage to a man who she believes at first to be a hypocrite (pursues social reforms but couldn't recognize a woman's worth).

Romney on the other hand had strong emotions over his social ideals that he used to justify his plan of marrying a poor woman when Leigh rejected him (again emotion and reason applied in the wrong places). Locksley Hall, Tennyson's poem about a military man's stopover his childhood home represents a man's longing to visit a place of innocence and love (a woman's place) - while he rants about the futility of his military career. Here the character lapses into a roller coaster of the ecstasy of being in love and hatred and venom against women due to the failure of his love, describing women's intellectual inferiority as " Weakness to be wroth with weakness!

woman's pleasure, woman's pain-- Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain". In both poems, men and women are portrayed to be headstrong and feeling creatures - but love makes a potent brew that makes the sexes powerless to decide where reason and emotion should be applied in the right combinations and places. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde's deliberate pun on words and their meanings, inverted and twisted to arrive at a witty yet serious statements, always with the intention of poking fun at customs and traditions actually belies the late Victorian era's fascination with science and its applications to life yet a real fear on the fact that traditions and religion no longer are there to provide emotional security.

Keeping this in mind, his adage "that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things in life with sincere and studied triviality", is not a very practical or an attractive proposition generally speaking. It does contain a very relevant consideration of the hypocritical nature of class-conscious and manner-obsessed Victorian society and in this case, the statement could point to its positive attempt to downgrade the excesses of social customs and traditions that they undermine the simple pleasures or matter-of-fact conditions of day-to-day living ("I hate people who are not serious about meals.

It is so shallow of them"). However, the statement creates confusion when "trivial" and "serious" are considered in real life and contemplated. Oftentimes the trivial for some people become serious not by their voluntary attitude but because