On The Nostalgia Theme In Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale

Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) is an outstanding realistic writer in the Edwardian Age.His realistic writing style was criticized and denounced by some critics. The famousmodernist writer Virginia Woolf once deliberately wrote an article to rebuke him for“write[ing] of unimportant things […] and spend[ing] immense skill and immense industrymaking the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring”. Bennett’s literaryreputation suffered a disastrous decline after that criticism. From1960s onward, thererevived a nostalgic researching trend on Bennett and his works. However, in China, theresearch on him still lag behind. The fact is that there is none of his masterpiecestranslated into Chinese. This situation is a great pity in the literary world.As Bennett’s masterpiece among the novels of “Five Towns” serials, The Old Wives’Tale catches our eyes. It established his status in the British modern literary world. Thestory mainly develops around the hard and extraordinary life experience of two sisters inthe late Victorian Age. We can find that there are many kinds of nostalgic phenomena gothrough the novel after detailed reading of it.The theory of nostalgia is rich in its meaning and includes two implications:“homesickness” and “reminiscence” when explained from its literal sense. Culturalnostalgia is the understanding of nostalgia in its modern sense, it is the preservation andidentification of the disappeared or disappearing conventional living styles, moral customsand social orders. Based on the three understandings of nostalgia, we analyze the nostalgiccharacteristics of the heroes in The Old Wives’ Tale from the perspectives of time, spaceand culture in this thesis. Thus we can sense people’s nostalgic feeling and the feeling ofidentification toward the tradition when facing with the passing of time, the moving ofspace and the disappearing of traditional culture in the social transitional period.This thesis is divided into three parts. The first part starts with the nostalgia in time. Withthe passing of time, people’s living styles and ideas and values have undergone some changes.Facing the new things and fresh ideas resulted from the changing of time, the old wives feelanxious about their current situation. However, they can not change it but complain the moraldegeneration in private. They are immersed in the past glory when they are complaining the present decadence. The second part focuses on the nostalgia in space. It deals withConstance’s strong attachment to the old shabby house and attaches great significance to thenostalgic feeling of the travelers in the foreign land represented by Sophia. In part three, weput more emphasis on the cultural nostalgia. In the passing of time and the segregation ofspace, people in the Five Towns of the transitional period demonstrated their preservation andidentification with the traditional culture. In the end, this thesis considers that different kindsof nostalgia in The Old Wives’ Tale reflect Bennett’s deep concerns with the social reality, andin the mean time, they also express his identification with the traditional moral standards andvalues, and further reveal people’s longing for the past good life and their calling for thetradition in the historical transitional period of late19thand early20thcentury when facedwith the dramatically changing social situation and the impact of the new ideas.