The meanings of words fluctuate over time. Language is not a fixed entity; it is constantly affected by culture. What one word means nowadays may differ greatly from how a reader in 1834, for instance, would have understood it. Bearing this in mind is extremely important when we read literature from the past.
In my literature classes (especially since I teach mainly 18th- and 19th-century literature, therefore, books written at a different historical context), the theoretical approach I offer my students is historicism.
Historicism is an approach to understanding cultural productions (in our case, literature) by studying their history. No literary work is written in a vacuum. Thus, it is essential to place the narrative in its context(s) of production and publication. There are, at least, four elements that should always be taken into account in addition to the text itself (which remains, of course, the core of any literary analysis):1 the author (who they are, where they come from and their social/cultural/political/aesthetic backgrounds), the world (what was going on at the time when the book was written? What connections can you draw between the world and the narrative?), literary heritage (how does this text engage in dialogue with previous texts? What literary echoes can you identify in this text?), and reception (how has the text been received by readers and critics through time? Has the criticism changed its focus? And why?).
The language used in a literary piece should also be understood historically. As 21st-century readers, it is hard to place ourselves in the shoes of, let’s say, readers in the 1700s. When reading texts from the past, you will encounter words, expressions and extratextual allusions that seem strange or unintelligible to you (Think of reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels without the help of contextual notes!). That is when we need to bridge the cultural-historical gap with the help of - you know it! - other books! Use your skills as a creative critical reader, check the etymology of the word in question, read examples of the use of such a word in texts from the same time period and compare them with modern examples - in other words, dig deeper!
Here is an example for you:
One word I’d like to comment with you today is awful. If you like reading 18th-century novels, especially Gothic tales from the end of the century, you will have come across it many times. In our modern society, the use of the word “awful” is normally linked to something bad or unpleasant. Look at some examples of the use of “awful” from the Oxford English Dictionary:
That's an awful colour.
I feel awful about forgetting her birthday.
The weather last summer was awful.
Now, let’s compare them with how the word “awful” is used in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, a Gothic story first published in 1790. This is an extract from chapter 12:
“The tempest came on, and the captain vainly sounded for anchorage: it was deep sea, and the vessel drove furiously before the wind. The darkness was interrupted only at intervals, by the broad expanse of vivid lightnings, which quivered upon the waters, and disclosing the horrible gaspings of the waves, served to render the succeeding darkness more awful. The thunder, which burst in tremendous crashes above, the loud roar of the waves below, the noise of the sailors, and the sudden cracks and groanings of the vessel conspired to heighten the tremendous sublimity of the scene.”
There is, one may argue, a sense of unpleasantness in the description of the dark night, the violent gasping waves and the bursts of lightning. However, the word “awful” here conveys much more than that. In a previous post, I wrote about the definition of the sublime, a philosophical concept loved by the Romantics. This concept definitely inspired Radcliffe’s descriptions of nature (one of the reasons why her writing was greatly admired by the later generation of Romantic poets. John Keats, for instance, referred to her as “Mother Radcliffe”). The sublime is a complex paradoxical combination of fear, awe, reverence and beauty. And how the adjective “awful” was understood in 1790 is intrinsically connected to the sublime. Look at the definitions of “awful” in the Online Etymology Dictionary:
awful (adj.)
c. 1300, agheful, aueful, "worthy of respect or fear, striking with awe; causing dread," from aghe, an earlier form of awe (n.), + -ful. The Old English word was egefull. The weakened sense of "very bad" is by 1809; the weakened sense of "excessively; very great" is by 1818. It formerly also was occasionally used in a sense of "profoundly reverential, full of awe" (1590s).
So, the understanding of “awful” as “very bad” would only be incorporated by 1809. The more original sense of the word referred to fear, dread and a reverential awe. Now that changes the way we understand Radcliffe’s quote cited above, right?
Radcliffe describes the striking magnitude of scene, the wildness of the sea and the uncontrollable force of nature as triggers for reflection, a subliminal connection with the nonhuman. During this terrifying moment, Julia, the protagonist in A Sicilian Romance, is reminded of the following verses that interrupt the flow of the narrative:
Far on the rocky shores the surges sound,
The lashing whirlwinds cleave the vast profound;
While high in air, amid the rising storm,
Driving the blast, sits Danger's black'ning form.
Danger with a capital D, in its blackening form, is a threatening presence in such a landscape as the one Julia witnesses in this extract of A Sicilian Romance. In encountering such Danger, one is faced with the insignificance of the human being in contrast to the all-powerful divine nature.
All of this is encapsulated by the word awful. A word that has, unfortunately, lost part of its power in our contemporary use of the language.
I have based this information on Thomas Postlewait’s model for analysing theatrical productions from the past in The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. He names the four contextual elements as “world,” “reception,” “artistic heritage,” and “agents”. I can discuss this model in more depth in another post. Please, leave a comment if that is something that would interest you.