Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

In literature, satire refers to texts that use humor to criticize human faults or foibles. Satire is typically referred to as a literary mode rather than a specific genre or style of writing; the term mode designates a broad but unspecified mood or method of writing (other examples include the comic mode or the ironic mode). All satiric literature, regardless of genre, is comprised of two basic elements: criticism and humor. However, these two elements are not always equally balanced, and different “balances” are rooted in different literary satiric traditions. Satire that is harsher or angrier in its tone is called Juvenalian satire, after the Roman poet Juvenal, and satire that is more comic and lighthearted in tone is called Horatian satire, after the Roman poet Horace. Satire that mixes different genres and styles and attacks general mental attitudes rather than individual people is often referred to as Menippean satire, after the Greek Cynic and satirist Menippus. For much of classical, medieval, and early modern literary history, satire was considered a mode that could only be properly expressed through poetry: acceptable verse forms for satiric poetry included Latin hexameter, Italian terza rima, and the English heroic couplet. But by the 18th century, English writers were beginning to create lengthy satirical prose texts—like Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)—that were extremely popular with readers and ultimately proved highly influential for 19th- and 20th-century novelists. Indeed, scholars often consider the 18th century in England to be a golden age of satire.

However, both narrative satire and visual satire persisted well into the 19th century, albeit in response to a very different cultural and social landscape than writers like Fielding and Sterne so enthusiastically mocked. Perhaps the most notable formal shift is that Victorian satire endeavored to be more polite than the more vicious Augustan satire of the previous century: its critiques of controversial social issues and corrupt political leaders were gentler, more respectable, and tended to focus on the corrective to the problems they explored rather than the problems themselves. To be popular, Victorian satires had to appeal to an expanded, largely middle-class readership, which meant they were generally less violent and did not use humor about sex or bodily functions. While a crucial feature of the genre is its attention to the deviant, perverse, or unusual, late 19th-century satire attempted to strike a moderate position in its critique: It might mock one cultural, philosophical, or political extreme, but it would also mock the other extreme, implying that the middle ground between the two is the ideal position or situation. Ultimately, satirical novels like Flatland might offer very clear criticisms of the brutal Victorian class system, the ruthless expansion of the British Empire, and the coldness of empiricism and rationalism, but they take great pains to emphasize that the corrective to these problems is not located at the other extreme, but rather somewhere in between the two poles.