Nowadays it is impossible to read a newspaper or a magazine or to watch news on TV and not to run against the information concerning the issues of social class, race, gender, national stereotypes, discrimination, etc. These issues occur overall: from the sphere of international commercial activity up the wars caused by social, racial and ethnic distinctions. The given questions are going to become even more topical in the future when technological progress will unite various cultures of the world tighter.
Let us appeal to the past and consider how these issues are reflected in great works of literature. First let us consider Shakespeare’s Hamlet in relation to social class matter.
The central problem of the play is expressed in Hamlet’s monolog – To be or not to be…The problem of suicide arises not because of Hamlet’s powerlessness to revenge, but because he realizes that the world is awful. For the first time he turns to these theme preparatory to his meeting with the shadow of his father, before he gets to know about a crime of the king and, so before arises the question on necessity to revenge. He appeals to this problem only because his mother has hastened to marry again. This fact leads him to recognition that the world is “an unweeded garden that grows to seed; Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely” (Act I, sc ii). Why the author brings Hamlet from the particular fact to such universal generalization? Social oppression of Hamlet as the talented representative of descending class undeceives that there is not only a death that menacing to Hamlet, but also social injustice, “the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns” (Act III, sc i). He understands that Denmark is the prison:
Ham: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
Ros: We think not so, my lord.
Ham: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.
All these leads him to recognition that “to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand” (Act II, sc ii). According to Edwards (1968), “The way forward to Hamlet is clear indeed, to the play in which the hero realizes the hopelessness of ‘deep plots’ undertaken to cleanse the world, and comes to believe, that ‘there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will”.
The next great work is a great novel written by Bronte ‘Jane Eyre’. Let us consider this work in relation to gender issues. In “Jane Eyre” is reflected the dualism of female world perception. Beside traditional for the Victorian literary canon female images appears also essentially new image of a woman. The main heroine Jane is spiritually refined, noble and independent women with a strongly pronounced feeling of self-esteem. On the one hand, Jane is convinced that self-realization of a women is not limited to narrow frameworks of family. She refuses to be just a wife of rich man, and insists on right to own choice and independent judgment. On the other hand, Jane is not deprived of some traditional representations about relations between two genders. Nevertheless she is ready to accept a marriage only as the union of equal in rights people, based on mutual trust and respect. Besides especially female view on the problem of a place and a role of a woman in society, in the novel is presented the traditional man’s point of view, which embodies an antipathetic picture of marriage based on the haughty attitude to the woman and her dependence on a man (character of Rochester). And, in find in the end of the novel the author recreates romantic harmony, which is based on non-traditional view on relations in marriage.
We may agree to Collins, who wrote “It was left for Charlotte Bronte to establish the first Independent Woman in fiction. It was, I believe, no sudden overflow of charity that made Charlotte give Jane Eyre a surprise legacy of £20000. It was not so much a sentimental liking for wives as a most unsentimental dislike of husbands that prompted her to do this thing. That cry of Jane’s, ” I am an independent woman now,” has set up a whole orchestra of echoes”.
References
- Brontë, Charlotte. 2007. Jane Eyre. Oxford: Oneworld Classics.
- Collins, Norman. 1970. The facts of fiction. Essay index reprint series. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press.
- Edwards, Philip. 1968. Shakespeare and the confines of art. London: Methuen.
- Shakespeare, William, and G. B. Harrison. 2001. Hamlet. Penguin popular classics. London: Penguin Books.