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Definition
The sense of estrangement from society or the self, identified in philosophy, the social sciences, and literature as a central feature of modern life. This pervasive use of the term derives from the 19th-century German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. For Hegel, alienation is the inevitable condition arising from the gap between human consciousness and the natural world, between the inner world and the outer world. Marx adapted the term to describe the condition of workers in industrialized, capitalist society, deprived of the satisfaction of experiencing their work as a meaningful expression of themselves. Reduced to viewing the fruits of their labor as objects and commodities, modern workers, according to Marx, experience alienation not only within themselves but also among one another because of the competitive ethos of capitalism. In the 20th century, social thinkers such as C. Wright Mills (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951) and Herbert Marcuse (One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, 1964), and psychologists such as Eric Fromm (The Sane Society, 1965) developed these terms further. The Marxist sense of the term, however, has played a relatively minor role in literary history. As represented in literature, alienation tends to come closer to the Hegelian definition with its emphasis on the disparity between the self and the world, consciousness and the objects of consciousness. In its literary form, alienation emerges as a major theme with the birth of Romanticism. Even here, however, it invokes an earlier time, for the icon of alienation in the Romantic period is doubtless Shakespeare's Hamlet. The introspective prince, alienated from his world and the role of avenger thrust upon him, is also alienated from himself, and acutely conscious of his condition. It is this painful self-consciousness that characterizes much of modern poetry, from the English Romantics and French symbolists to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1920) and the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Central to much of this poetry is not only a repudiation of modern culture but also an agonized self-estrangement that has come to serve as the signature of the modern artist.In fiction, the alienated figures of 19th- and 20th-century literature—Dostoyevsky's Underground Man (Notes from Underground, 1864), Melville's Bartleby (Bartleby the Scrivener, 1850), Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych (The Death of Ivan Ilych, 1886), Kafka's Joseph K. (The Trial, 1925), Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), Salinger's Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, 1951), and Camus's The Stranger (1942)—are only a few of the many figures haunted by the shallowness and hypocrisy of modern life. But on another level, these works point to a more profound malaise: the sense that human existence lacks any coherence or purpose, that life is finally absurd. The close association of this mood with the existentialism of Sartre and Camus is not accidental. In the wake of World War II, the alienation theme had merged with the larger current of existentialist thought and feeling.In drama the alienated figure emerges in the tortured characters of Henrik Ibsen, the richly ironic tragicomic figures of Anton Chekhov, the haunted family of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1940), the film personae of James Dean, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the young Marlon Brando, and, perhaps most explicitly, in the formulation from Sartre's No Exit (1945), "Hell is other people."
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