Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts Edited by Phillip Mallett

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

Also edited by Phillip Mallett KIPLING CONSIDERED RUDYARD KIPLING: LIMITS AND RENEWALS A SPACIOUS VISION: ESSAYS ON HARDY SATIRE THOMAS HARDY: THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THOMAS HARDY

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts Edited by Phillip Mallett

Editorial matter, selection and Preface © Phillip Mallett 2002 Chapters 1–10 © Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0131–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas Hardy: texts and contexts / edited by Phillip Mallett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0131–7 (cloth) 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Criticism and interpretation. I. Mallett, Phillip, 1946– PR4754 .T497 2002 823′.8–dc21 2002072327 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Figures Preface Notes on Contributors

vii ix xxii

1

Seen in a New Light: Illumination and Irradiation in Hardy Michael Irwin

2

Hardy: the After-Life and the Life Before Gillian Beer

3

‘And I Was Unaware’: the Unknowing Omniscience of Hardy’s Narrators Linda Shires

4

A Laodicean as a Novel of Ingenuity Toru Sasaki

5

Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jane?: Revisioning Gender in The Mayor of Casterbridge Pamela Dalziel

6

7

8

9

‘The Thing must be Male, we suppose’: Erotic Triangles and Masculine Identity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Melville’s Billy Budd Richard Nemesvari

1 18

31 49

64

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The Characterisation of Jude and Sue: the Myth and the Reality John R. Doheny

110

‘Done because we are too menny’: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture Sally Shuttleworth

133

Hardy and Biology Angelique Richardson

156

v

vi

10

Contents

The Hunter–Gatherers: Some Early Hardy Scholars and Collectors Michael Millgate

Index

180

200

List of Figures

5.1

5.2

5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

5.8

‘Hay-trussing—?’ said the turnip-hoer, who had already begun shaking his head. ‘O no.’ (Graphic, 2 January 1886)

65

The hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and, looking up slily, whispered, ‘Just a thought o’rum in it?’ (Graphic, 9 January 1886)

69

The man before her was not Henchard (Graphic, 6 March 1886)

70

‘Well, Lucetta, I’ve a bit of news for ye’, he said gaily (Graphic, 17 April 1886)

71

‘Then it’s somebody wanting to see us both.’ (Graphic, 6 February 1886)

74

‘Did you do it, or didn’t you? Where was it?’ (Graphic, 27 February 1886)

75

Henchard, with withering humility of demeanour, touched the brim of his hat to her (Graphic, 10 April 1886)

76

Lucetta’s eyes were straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel (Graphic, 1 May 1886)

77

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Thomas Hardy’s career as a writer began in 1865 with a short sketch, ‘How I built Myself a House’, and ended with the publication of Winter Words, his eighth volume of poems, not long after his death in 1928. With mathematical neatness, but some overstatement, it may be said to have taken a new direction at its mid-point, with the publication of his last novel, The Well-Beloved in 1897 and the appearance of his first volume of poems, Wessex Poems in 1898. If it is not quite accurate to think of Hardy as a Victorian novelist and a twentieth century poet – a fair number of the poems were written as early as the 1860s, and his interest in prose fiction continued at least until 1912, when he was revising his novels for the Wessex edition – it does help to suggest the scale of his achievement. But as Michael Irwin notices in the first sentence of the first essay in this volume, Hardy was consistent in his interests and attitudes throughout his long career. This consistency embraces many conflicting moods: the same scene, viewed in different lights, as Irwin goes on to show, may suggest different or contradictory meanings. Even so, to read his work is to become conscious of an imaginative coherence, a quality that justifies the word ‘Hardyan’. The essays which follow return at different times to the question of the ‘Hardyan’, but they also address the specific features of single texts. Those who encountered, say, Far from the Madding Crowd, at the time of its first, anonymous publication in the Cornhill in 1874, had no sense of ‘Hardy’ as the future author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or as a poet, but only of the appearance of a new author, a possible rival to the George Eliot of her earlier novels if not of the recently published Middlemarch – unless, indeed, this was (as some suspected) George Eliot herself. One of the aspirations of this volume is to engage with individual novels and poems, and to recapture that sense of them as texts written, and demanding to be read, as separate works, each constructing its own fictional or poetic world, posing its own questions, and offering its own rewards. There is a further aspiration, reflected in the title: Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts. A number of critics who ought to have known better have promoted the notion that because Hardy was ‘self-taught’, in Matthew ix

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Arnold’s terms a ‘provincial’, he is best regarded as a clumsy writer who occasionally stumbled into greatness. The crudest expression of this view comes from Somerset Maugham, who thought that even in formal dress Hardy had ‘a strange look of the soil’, but it has been shared by some distinguished critics, most notably F. R. Leavis. The scholarship of the last twenty years has, one hopes, pushed this nonsense aside for ever. To take only two examples. Lennart Björk’s edition of The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy in 1985 established the range of Hardy’s reading; Gillian Beer’s magisterial Darwin’s Plots (1983) provided an account of how deeply his reading in the biological sciences informed his work, just as it did that of George Eliot (also, one might add, ‘self-taught’, though it would be a brave reader who tried to patronise her). Rather than pity Hardy as someone who struggled and failed to grasp the inner meaning of ‘culture’, as (say) Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot have celebrated it, recent critics have explored his readiness to resist and challenge the often overweening claims made in its name. Whether as poet or as novelist, Hardy – though it ought not to be necessary to say it – knew what he was doing. He was a recalcitrant writer, not an uninformed one. It is partly for this reason that a majority of the essays in this volume examine both Hardy’s texts and their contexts. These contexts may be literary, derived from the expectations, sometimes generic, sometimes positional, raised by other writers; or extra-literary, shaped by the wider concerns of the intellectual community. So, for example, both Toru Sasaki and Richard Nemesvari discusses Hardy’s interest in melodrama, a genre taken more seriously by Victorian writers and readers than it is now. Sasaki examines the ways in which Hardy constructs a poetic subtext to the melodramatic surface of A Laodicean; Nemesvari explores the way the stage villain or ‘cad’ could be used both to reinforce and to subvert stereotypes about male sexuality. Linda Shires takes as her topic the debate Hardy conducts with current thinking about the nature and responsibilities of art. The Romantic tradition left later writers burdened with a sense of their role as vates, bringing down from the mountaintops the truths which they alone could discern. Hardy refused to carry the burden; he was, as Linda Shires points out, too wily, too obdurately himself, to surrender his right not to know. In early studies of Hardy’s work, and not only of Hardy’s, the notion of extra-literary contexts tended to mean ‘background’: a body of ideas picked up and used (‘reflected’) in his work, a sentence here, an image there, which the critic could summarise and footnote. This passive ‘Life and Times’ model was always unsatisfactory, and the better critics always moved beyond it. In the last two decades, however, critical

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attention has increasingly returned to Hardy’s engagement with the intellectual and affective life of the times in which his novels and poems were written, and which they both shaped and acknowledged. Nowhere has this been more true than where the issue has been his awareness of the changing directions of Victorian science. Gillian Beer’s essay in this volume takes its starting-point not from Darwin but from Hardy’s note on one implication of Einstein’s thought: that if ‘things and events always were, are and will be’, then Emma, his father and his mother might still be living ‘in the past’. Here one might remark in passing on Hardy’s continuing openness to the wider intellectual life; the contrary example might be his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, who suspected that the theory of relativity was a Jewish contribution ‘to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration’.1 More importantly, in touching on so many of Hardy’s interests, in Einstein, in the work by Helmholtz and Maxwell on the conversion of energy into wave-motion, in heredity, in the decline of aristocratic families, and on his lifelong desire to see a ‘real’ ghost, Professor Beer’s essay suggests how deeply scientific thought entered into his imaginative life, and how permeable were the barriers between disciplines whose various territories – physics, biology, history, theology – have since been claimed as the preserve of the specialist. Matthew Arnold might have thought the co-presence in a poet’s mind of Einstein’s theories and the desire to see a ghost a sign of his provinciality; Gillian Beer shows that it is rather a sign of the creative many-sidedness of Hardy’s imagination. The essays by Angelique Richardson and Sally Shuttleworth draw on Hardy’s reading of the biologists and psychologists. Both reveal his sense that our explanations of human behaviour – whether they are offered formally, in narrative commentary, or informally, in the implied connections between cause and effect within the plot – have to be cast in ways which acknowledge the work of the scientists. Both make the further point that he was unwilling simply to assume that Nature, as described by the scientists, was the key to explaining Culture. As several critics have noticed, theories of heredity, construed as a system of inexorable laws, could be made to stand in for older ideas about ‘Destiny’ or ‘Necessity’. Jude uses both the new and the old idioms to express his fears about inherited traits in the Fawley family, at one point quoting the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, at another wondering if he carries within him ‘the germs of every human infirmity’. But if the idea of heredity could be seen as Necessity under another name, it followed that the large questions raised in Greek drama, about the limits of human freedom, or the place of chance in human life, were not resolved, but remained to be asked anew.

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Taken together, the essays by Gillian Beer, Angelique Richardson and Sally Shuttleworth demonstrate that there is more at stake in a discussion of ‘Hardy and Science’ than that he wrote about astronomy in Two on a Tower, or that a key chapter in A Pair of Blue Eyes displays his knowledge of geology. In the preface to the second edition of Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer quotes from Darwin’s chapter on ‘Natural Selection’: ‘Let it be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.’ With the substitution of ‘human’ for ‘organic’, the sentence could be applied to Hardy’s fictional world; often enough even that small change is unnecessary. Complexity, the endless process of interaction, the link between the physical and the moral, the persistence of the unforeseen, the provisionality of any one state or condition – these are as much part of Hardy’s world as they are of Darwin’s. It is in this larger sense that the essays gathered here engage with Hardy’s ‘contexts’. *

*

*

The reader who wishes to explore a particular work by Hardy can turn at this point to, say, the essays by John Doheny and Sally Shuttleworth on Jude the Obscure, or to Richard Nemesvari and Angelique Richardson on Tess; the comments which follow acknowledge the editor’s privilege of exploring and reflecting on some of the unspoken links between the essays. The starting point of Michael Irwin’s essay is Hardy’s interest in the various effects of light (and darkness, which Hardy typically sees as something more palpable than the mere absence of light), an interest which reveals a ‘habit’ or style of seeing which is ‘intimately connected with the way he apprehends life itself’. In a note made in 1887 Hardy wrote that his interest was in ‘the deeper reality underlying the scenic’, when the mind is awakened to the ‘tragical mysteries of life’ and brings to what it perceives a mood or feeling which ‘coalesces with and translates the qualities that are already there’. The images of light and darkness in his work are used to gain access to this deeper reality; though ‘reality’ here is perhaps too absolute a term, since in Hardy’s work, as Irwin shows, each mind brings something different to the seen. In one of the passages Irwin discusses from Desperate Remedies, the earliest of Hardy’s published novels, the image is of a fireworks display and the framework on which it is set up. When the ‘flaring illumination’ dies down, all that is left is the blackened frame: so Miss Aldclyffe’s passion burns itself out. In the 1892 version of Hardy’s last novel, The Well-Beloved, the image is used again, and to the same effect. This time it is Pearston who sees the ‘black framework’

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where ‘the flaring jets of the illumination’ had once ‘dazzled’ him. In the 1897 version, however, it is used differently; here the blemishes of ordinary human life – the second Avice is, unromantically, a washerwoman – are lost sight of against the ‘shining out’ of the ‘more real’ person within, and made ‘of no more account in the presentation than the posts and framework which support a pyrotechnic display’. The same image is used to suggest both the creative seeing made possible by love, the face of the beloved irradiated by the fascinated gaze of the lover, and the bitterness of disillusion in the cold light of lost love. The point is not that Hardy was a parsimonious writer, but that he was an obsessive one, endlessly revisiting his own material to see it from a different angle, and to elicit new and even contradictory meanings from it. In the ‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier, he writes that ‘the visible signs of mental and emotional life’, including poetry, ‘must like all other things keep moving, becoming’. Not to keep moving, to keep seeing things anew, is to cease to live. Hardy’s refusal to accept any one meaning as final, his commitment, as Linda Shires puts it, ‘to not having to know’, is noticed in a number of the essays which follow. In the course of his discussion Irwin quotes a characteristic passage from Tess, where a swarm of gnats seen in the moonlight are briefly ‘irradiated as if they bore fire within them’, then pass out of the light and are ‘quite extinct’. ‘Quite’ as Christopher Ricks has pointed out in his study of Beckett, is a word with contradictory meanings: both ‘absolutely’ or ‘finally’, but also ‘partly’, or ‘almost’.2 Ricks is commenting on the first sentence of Beckett’s Malone Dies – ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all’ – and the sense in which we might become ‘quite extinct’ ( but not totally extinct) is the subject of Gillian Beer’s paper. In his ghosted autobiography (in this context that description seems apposite) Hardy claimed to have been among the earliest acclaimers of Darwin in 1859; in 1923 he speculated on the implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which allowed the thought that his parents, and Emma, were ‘living still in the past’. How to reach into the past becomes, Gillian Beer argues, ‘the most intense question of Hardy’s creativity’. What is the relation of that irradiated moment which is our lifetime to the past from which it came and the future into which it flees? In this essay breath rather than light is the sign of life. Poetry belongs to the speaking voice, to our breathing selves, which die; the poem written down becomes an inscription, which has at least a chance to survive. The tension between the two, between breath and text, perhaps suggests why Hardy’s poetry is so full of ruins, erosions, abraded surfaces – signs

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that the inscription too fades, as ‘Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs.’ Light and inscription come together in the poem ‘Her Initials’, where the speaker recalls writing ‘two letters of her name’ in a book of poems: But from the letters of her name The radiance has waned away! Characteristically, Hardy imagines the same fate for himself, grown blank and rayless in someone else’s mind (as in ‘Memory and I’) or in his own (‘I Have Lived with Shades’). In ‘He Revisits His First School’, he wryly imagines his own disembodied state, as a ghost returning after his death. Elsewhere the self in the present moment is contemplated as the embodied ghost of some former identity: in The Well-Beloved, as a self bearing on face and body the inscriptions of its own former experiences; in ‘The Pedigree’, as a self whose every thought (‘every heave and coil and move I made / Within my brain’) can be seen as the re-tracing of moves made – inscribed – by an ancestor. Yet (one of the many pleasures of reading Hardy is that there is always a ‘Yet ...’), he can also imagine the self having a post mortem existence ‘somewhere’, in the ‘upper air’ perhaps, or in the ‘visionless wilds of space’: not, after all, quite extinct, just as Emma, in the ‘Poems of 1912–13’, may not quite be ‘dissolved’. Professor Beer quotes briefly from ‘The Voice’, and it is tempting to see her essay as teasing out some of the implications of Hardy’s ‘lost’ word ‘existlessness’ in the manuscript version of that poem: lost, because he substituted ‘wan wistlessness’, and doubly lost since it has not made it into the dictionaries, or even the computer spellchecks (mine offers, with a grim humour Beckett might have admired, ‘No Suggestions’). Hardy, for once, is less grim, since the finality of ‘existlessness’ is made to give way to the more tentative ‘dissolved to wan wistlessness’. Wistless’ means ‘inattentive, unobservant’; ‘wistlessness’ then is presumably the state of inattentiveness. Like existlessness, it undermines the possibility of ‘the woman calling’. But it is hard to discount the sense that ‘wistlessness’ might mean not the state of being unaware, without knowledge, but rather the state of being beyond the knowledge of others: not non-existent, but on the very edge of consciousness, unreachable by the poet who falters on through the wind. Like Keats’s Grecian urn, but unlike the more absolute ‘existlessness’, the word seems to ‘tease us out of thought’, enacting in itself the hauntedness of the poem.

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It was Thomas Huxley who coined the word agnostic. Hardy admired Huxley, and might reasonably have adopted the word for himself. His insistence that no one perspective has authority is Linda Shires’s point of departure. It had long been admitted in Victorian poetry that the speaker might be unreliable – Browning’s use of the dramatic monologue depends on such an admission – and Hardy took this assumption into fiction, in particular in the use of narrators who are not so much unreliable as wilfully self-contradictory. Hardy was always alert to other possible points of view, both literally and figuratively. From the start of his career as a novelist he explored the effect of presenting a scene from the limited perspective of a single observer or participant, fusing dramatic action and psychological interest: Elfride as her actions were seen at that moment by Knight, or by Stephen, Sergeant Troy as he is first glimpsed by Bathsheba, and so on. Technically, this adds to the interest and excitement of a given scene or episode, but it also allows Hardy to resist the supposition that characters, readers and narrators naturally come together in a shared sense of reality. The narrator’s Elfride is not Stephen’s, nor Knight’s, nor yet the reader’s, and what is true about Elfride or Bathsheba in these early novels was to be still more true of Tess, or Sue, in the later ones. The ‘central question’ asked in Hardy’s fiction, suggests Linda Shires, is why do we read and impose meanings as we do? Why, and under what constraints, do we ‘see’ Tess, or Bathsheba, and take our seeing for the reality? And, one might add (as John Doheny does, in his essay on Jude), how, and why, do the characters in the novels impose their meanings on others? Toru Sasaki, who writes here on A Laodicean, one of Hardy’s ‘Novels of Ingenuity’, is also interested in Hardy’s experiments with fiction, primarily with his handling of melodrama. At its simplest, melodrama ties the reader’s interest to a single incident, expected to be exciting in itself, but with the danger that the separate episodes might have no real unity. More rewardingly, one event may connect with another, to establish a pattern of meanings. Sasaki, like Irwin, makes the point that an episode narrated in literal terms may also be read as metaphor, to represent rather than to cause a mental state: in A Laodicean, Somerset’s melodramatic entrapment in the turret of Castle de Stancy has no outcome in the plot, but prefigures his sense later of being confined within feelings and circumstances beyond his control. But there is more at stake than the use of melodrama to express mood, and emotional need. The ingenuity of the novel, as one of the reviewers quoted by Sasaki observed, echoes the ingenuity and elusiveness of its central female character. Paula Power acknowledges the conventions about

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class and courtship within which she is required to act only to express her rejection of them; when her uncle urges her marriage to de Stancy as ‘such an obvious thing to all eyes’, she declines to make the expected dénouement to her career: ‘I don’t care one atom for artistic completeness and a splendid whole.’ Her situation is like that of the third Avice in The Well-Beloved, whose marriage to Pierston, in his and her mother’s eyes at least, would make ‘an artistic and tender finish’ to the ‘romance’ of his life. In both novels the heroine refuses to provide the approved end to the story; both novels foreground their own conventions, as a means to reveal that current notions of ‘realism’, or of female sexuality, are alike ideologically constructed, and open to resistance. Ingenuity becomes a means to escape closure: another way of ‘not having to know’. Toru Sasaki’s essay is one of five that concentrate mainly on a single piece of fiction. Pamela Dalziel’s essay on The Mayor of Casterbridge looks into the circumstances of the novel’s publication for a context, rather than outside, to the traditions of sensational and melodramatic fiction. N. N. Feltes has pointed out in Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago, 1986) that part of the meaning of a novel published in a magazine was carried in the meanings that were already there, in its layout, blend of fiction and non-fiction, etc., and in the readership these implied. Dalziel shows how Hardy took account of these other ‘meanings’, in this case as they were supplied by Robert Barnes’s illustrations for the Graphic, where The Mayor first appeared as a serial. In the Life, Hardy cites the opinion of James Payn, the reader for Smith, Elder, that the novel might lack interest because it did not deal with the gentry, as ‘a typical estimate of what was, or was supposed to be, mid-Victorian taste’. Barnes’s work, as Dalziel shows, seems to have been shaped by similar concerns, since its effect is to raise the social level especially of the female characters. These are easily enough accepted by readers of the twenty-first century, but it is worth noting just how far they were from the conventions of Victorian fiction: Susan lives in a common law marriage with another man after she has been sold by her husband; Lucetta tries to avoid marrying the man with whom she had been compromised because she now finds she wishes to marry another; while Elizabeth-Jane is the illegitimate daughter of a haytrusser’s wife and a sailor, who aspires to become the second wife of the Mayor. Barnes’s illustrations helped to smooth these difficult paths, and in revising the novel for volume publication Hardy seems to have followed Barnes’s lead. Dalziel’s essay shows the complexity of Hardy’s relation with his publishers and his readers, and the ways in which his conception of the novel was shaped and modified by the need to meet their expectations.

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Richard Nemesvari takes Melville’s Billy Budd as a ‘useful coordinate text’ to explore not just the treatment of female sexuality in Tess of the d’Urbervilles – an obvious concern for readers of the 1890s, worried by what Mowbray Morris at Macmillan’s called the ‘succulence’ of the novel – but also its treatment of masculinity. Like Sasaki, Nemesvari is interested in Hardy’s use of melodrama. Contemporary readers were puzzled that Alec d’Urberville seemed so straightforwardly the stock figure of the cad, ruthlessly intent on the seduction of the innocent Tess. The effect of this figure, in Victorian stage melodrama, is to locate the hypocrisy of the double standard in a few extravagantly bad characters, rather than seeing it as inherent in what Mona Caird, in essays which Hardy almost certainly knew, identified as ‘the twin-system of marriage and prostitution’, with ‘common respectable marriage’ merely ‘the worst, because the most hypocritical, form of woman-purchase’.3 But as Nemesvari shows, Hardy has his reasons for using this stock figure. Tess’s refusal to play the innocent victim to Alec’s seducer begins to suggest the insecurity which lies within male sexual desire. For a time Alec abandons his role as a villain and becomes a preacher; Angel Clare, in the aftermath of his marriage to Tess, is briefly tempted to play the cad with Izzy Huett. The momentary reversal of positions is significant. No less than Alec, Angel is baffled by his desire for Tess, which runs up against his sense of cultural distance from her, his belief in restraint as a virtue, and his unthinking assumption that any woman he could love must of necessity be a virgin, an ‘Artemis’ or ‘Demeter’, and not a fallen woman who has given birth to the child of another man. Angel’s crisis, Nemesvari argues, is illuminated by that of Vere in the contemporaneous Billy Budd, similarly caught between a desire he can neither acknowledge nor repress, and thrown into confusion by the forced recognition that Claggart – a man lower in the social scale, morally inferior – desires as he does: a recognition that de-sanctifies the desire, and forces it to recognise itself. So too Angel finds his own identity shadowed by Alec. Vere must dissociate himself from Claggart, and Angel from Alec, in order to preserve a frightened masculinity. Both Vere and Angel struggle for self-control, but in each case, two lives have to pay the price of their insecurity. Nemesvari’s essay is a contribution to the ongoing discussion of what, since Kate Millett’s study was published in 1969, we have grown accustomed to refer to as the ‘sexual politics’ of Hardy’s fiction. In her pages on Jude the Obscure, Millett writes trenchantly that Sue Bridehead is by turns an enigma, a pathetic creature, a nut, and an iceberg. John Doheny’s essay on the novel is an attempt to discover which of these she

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is, and in what ways, and why. He quotes part of a passage in the Life in which Hardy compares himself to Bellini, as one who tried in his art ‘to intensify the expression of things’ in order to bring out ‘the heart and inner meaning’. Hardy’s means, as several contributors to this volume observe, are often non-realist ones, but his aim, as expressed here and in other passages in the Life, has much in common with those of professed realists. Doheny returns us to the situation of the reader of the novel, to examine both the moment-by-moment development of the relationship between its central characters – more closely tracked than any other relationship in Hardy’s fiction – in terms of what they tell each other, and what they hide, and the way in which the narrator at several key points refuses to claim the full rights of omniscience. There is a startling example of this at the end of the chapter in which Sue marries Phillotson, when for no evident reason, at least in terms of the plot, Sue goes back into Jude’s house to find a handkerchief. Her lips part, as if she is about to speak: ‘But she went on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.’ There the chapter ends, leaving Jude, at the beginning of the next, to try to interpret a moment about which the narrator obdurately refuses to provide any further clues. As Linda Shires and Toru Sasaki both notice in their essays, Hardy’s work often encourages the reader to regard gender, class and the like as social constructs; what Doheny explores is the way Jude and Sue make these constructions of each other, often ignoring or refusing to admit evidence that tells against their interpretations. His reference to the reader’s feelings of ‘irritated empathy’ is a patiently reasoned version of Millet’s more summary statement. Sally Shuttleworth also writes on Jude, examining late nineteenth century debates about child suicide. As many readers have noticed, the ‘character’ – if that is not too strong a word – of Father Time, presented as ‘the nodal point’ in the relation of Jude and Sue, ‘their focus, their expression in a single term’, seems out of kilter with the generally realistic manner of the rest of the novel, as if a figure out of a play by Strindberg (at work on his To Damascus trilogy while Hardy was at work on Jude) had wandered into a novel by Zola. But as Professor Shuttleworth points out, the scene where the bodies of Little Father Time and his siblings are discovered still has the power to shock. We respond to the naturalistic aspects of the scene ( brief as it is, it is presented in prosaic detail, allowing the reader no respite), at the same time as we refer to the strategies of contemporary expressionism. There is even a sense that expressionism is the only means to write narrative in the novel. In The Woodlanders (1887), describing Melbury’s state of mind at the prospect of marriage between Grace and Fitzpiers, Hardy begins to push at the limits of the Victorian novel:

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Could the real have been beheld instead of the corporeal merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense, large-eyed, tight-lipped, awaiting the issue. There is something of this in the presentation of Little Father Time. In the 1880s and 1890s Hardy was at least half persuaded that heredity was the determining force in our natures: that, as one of the passages Hardy copied from Henry Maudsley’s Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings has it, ‘everybody, in the main lines of his thoughts, feelings & conduct, really recalls the experiences of his forefathers’. It is easy to see why such speculations seemed to undermine the notion of ‘character’. More than that, they threaten to dissolve the parent’s relation to the child into a fascinated, and horrified, stare into the lineaments of one’s own nature writ large: Jude considers suicide at the age of eleven, his eldest son kills himself at the age of nine, his last child is stillborn as Sue miscarries. . . . One might turn back here to Gillian Beer’s essay, which suggests that Hardy had hopes for survivals into the future; what if, after all, rather than adding a new note to the song of the universe, each new utterance is only a darker echo of an earlier one? Here, as elsewhere, Hardy refuses to admit one position as final. He can envisage the future both as the ‘full-fugued song of the universe unending’, and as the collapse of each hope into its own negation. Like other writers of the age, he seems to move between cautious meliorism and the fear of atavism in the moral world, the death of the solar system in the physical world: fin de siècle, fin du globe. But few writers were as willing as Hardy to let hope and doubt lie side by side. Sue imagines humanity as suffering more and more in the future, foreseeing, in Shelley’s words, ‘Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied.’ Four chapters later, Jude imagines an improved world: perhaps Christminster ‘will soon wake up, and be generous’ to men like himself. Hardy, committed ‘to not having to know’, makes no attempt to adjudicate between them. Angelique Richardson’s essay takes up the issue of Hardy’s interest in Darwinian biology from another angle, beginning with the shift from the implications of the Origin, that evolution left little room for human agency, to the suggestion, more or less explicit in the Descent of Man, that sexual selection, the staple of the plot of any number of novels, was the central story in human existence. Hardy insisted that life was ‘a physiological fact’, and that literature had to address such facts. But it was unclear what these facts suggested. Was their effect to position men and women in nature to such a degree that their freedom was called into question? How did the human ‘love plot’ relate to the processes of

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sexual selection elsewhere in nature? Hardy’s lovers, as Irwin points out, see those they love in a transfiguring light; is this a reflex of some biological law, or does it suggest that love is an ideal emotion, drawing from outside natural processes? Hardy’s work is saturated in questions of biology, heredity, sexual difference, degeneration, the complex overlay of the social and the natural. Like other contributors to this volume, Richardson also notices Hardy’s abiding interest in ‘counter narratives’. There is always another way of seeing the scene. Within one perspective, Jude and Sue are the prisoners of their biology, living out the expressions on what Hardy calls ‘the family face’, but from another the novel challenges the idea of biology as all-determining. Social law and custom hurt Little Father Time, just as surely as they exclude Jude from Christminster; and social law and custom can be changed by human agency. This movement back and forth between the biological and the sociopolitical is equally evident, as Richardson shows, in The Woodlanders. In the woodlands themselves natural processes operate without regard for the value of the individual life: lichens eat the stalks, ivy strangles the saplings, huge lobes of fungi grow on the older trees. The human love plot is hardly less ruthless. Marty loses her hair and her hopes, Giles and Mrs Charmond their lives, as Grace and Fitzpiers, neither of them fitted to the niche which society has prepared for them, struggle to find a space in which they can flourish. In 1876 Hardy copied a passage into his Notebooks: ‘Science tells us that, in the struggle for life, the surviving organism is not necessarily that which is absolutely the best in an ideal sense, though it must be that which is most in harmony with the surrounding conditions.’ Grace and Fitzpiers are not the best, merely the best fitted to survive. Yet the novel does not settle for a biological or evolutionary determinism. It ends instead with Marty South, transfigured by the moonlight in which a loving narrator chooses to bathe her, straight, slim, and touching ‘sublimity’. In Darwinian terms, she has been defeated; like Giles, she will leave no progeny. But she has the last word in the novel. The final essay in this volume is Michael Millgate’s reminiscential piece on some early Hardy scholars and collectors. It is hard to imagine who, if not Millgate, could have written it. It often happens that in the first two or three decades after a writer’s death, interest in their work falls off for a time, and manuscripts and other materials are lost, destroyed, or distributed in ways which make them difficult of access to later scholars. Ruskin provides perhaps the extreme example, despite the labours of E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn in preparing the

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great Library Edition. As the editor, with R. L. Purdy, of Hardy’s letters, Millgate has more reason than most to know how manuscripts, signed copies, correspondence, become dispersed, and of the motives which drive those who seek to collect what they can. From what happens to have survived the bonfires lit sometimes by the writers themselves, sometimes by their executors, we construct ‘John Ruskin’, or ‘Rudyard Kipling’, or ‘Thomas Hardy’. Hardy’s friend Edmund Gosse published in 1899 his two-volume The Life and Letters of John Donne, in the full persuasion that there was ‘hardly a piece of his genuine verse’ which could not ‘be prevailed upon to deliver up some secret of his life and character’. Hardy, at the beginning of his own career as a published poet, must have been horrified with his friend’s assumption. We are less confident than Gosse would have been of the relationship between the figure who goes by the name of Thomas Hardy in the lives and the letters, and the ‘Thomas Hardy’ whose name stands on the title page of the novels and poems. But that we have the opportunity even to discuss the question depends on the goodwill of the collectors Millgate discusses, and the good work he and Purdy, and others, have done with their collections. *

*

*

Eight of the following essays were delivered as lectures to the International Thomas Hardy Conference; two of the lectures were not available for publication, and have been replaced by essays written for this volume by John Doheny and Pamela Dalziel. During the Conference festschrifts were presented to both Michael Millgate and Robert Schweik, in grateful acknowledgement of their distinguished contributions to Hardy studies, and of their unfailing generosity to other scholars who share their interests. The editor of the present volume would like to take this opportunity to restate his own appreciation for their work and their kindness.

Notes 1. See The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, ed. Thomas Pinney, 4 vols (London, 1990–99), IV.592 2. Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993), pp. 129–35. 3. Mona Caird’s essays on ‘Marriage’ and ‘Ideal Marriage’ appeared in the Westminster Review in 1888.

Notes on Contributors

Dame Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, and President of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her many books include George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Forging the Link: Interdisciplinary Stories (1992), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). A second edition of her Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983) appeared in 2000. Pamela Dalziel is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her publications include numerous articles on Hardy, and editions of Thomas Hardy: the Excluded and Collaborative Stories (1992), Thomas Hardy’s ‘Studies, Specimens Etc.’ Notebook (with Michael Millgate, 1994), An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories (1994) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1998). She is currently bringing to completion a book on the visual representation of Hardy’s works. John R. Doheny is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of British Columbia. He has written on D. H. Lawrence, Herbert Read, the philosophy of anarchism and the education of the poor in the nineteenth century. His work on Hardy includes essays on Hardy’s Swetman ancestors and on Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure, and two biographical monographs: The Youth of Thomas Hardy (1984) and Thomas Hardy’s Relatives and Their Times (1989) Michael Irwin is Professor of English at the University of Kent. He is the author of numerous books, essays and studies, including Picturing: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth Century Novel (1979), as well as of two novels, Working Orders (1969) and Striker (1985), and of translations of libretti for Kent Opera. His most recent book, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, appeared in 2000.

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Michael Millgate is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Toronto. In addition to his work on William Faulkner, he has published extensively in the field of Hardy studies, including Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971, 1994), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (7 volumes, co-edited with R. L. Purdy, 1978–88), Thomas Hardy: a Biography (1982), The Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (edited, 1996), and The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (edited, 1984). His Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy was published in 1992. He is an Honorary Vice-President of the Hardy Society, and was the recipient of a festschrift at the 2000 Conference. Richard Nemesvari is Associate Professor at St Francis Xavier University. He has written extensively on Hardy and nineteenthcentury fiction, and has edited The Trumpet-Major for the World’s Classics series, as well as Jane Eyre and (with Lisa Sturridge) Mary Braddon’s Aurora Floyd for Broadview Press. With Rosemarie Morgan, he edited Human Shows: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (2000). Angelique Richardson is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Love, Eugenics and the New Woman: Science, Fiction, Feminism (forthcoming, 2003), editor of a collection of British and US short stories, Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890–1914 and co-editor with Chris Willis of The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms. Toru Sasaki is an Associate Professor of English at Kyoto University, Japan. He has contributed numerous articles to journals, including the Thomas Hardy Journal and The Dickensian, and has edited The Hand of Ethelberta for Everyman and (with Norman Page) a volume of novellas by Wilkie Collins for Oxford World’s Classics. Linda Shires is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University. In addition to a study of British poetry and the Second World War, she has published extensively on Victorian poetry and fiction, and is the co-author (with Steven Cohan) of Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. She is the editor of Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender (1992). Her edition of The TrumpetMajor was published in 1997; an edition of Far from the Madding Crowd is due out shortly.

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Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English at the University of Sheffield. Her many publications include George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Science: the Make-Believe of a Beginning (1984) and Charlotte Brontë and Psychology (1996); she is the co-editor with John Christie of Nature Transfigured: Essays on Science and Literature 1700–1900, and with Mary Jacobus and Evelyn Fox Keller of Body/Politic: Women and the Discourses of Science.

1 Seen in a New Light: Illumination and Irradiation in Hardy Michael Irwin

Hardy was notably consistent in his attitudes and interests. From the beginning of his writing career until the end he saw the world in very much the same terms, and the mode of seeing generated characteristic emphases and techniques. Certain details recur so regularly as to constitute motifs: for example, mirrors, windows, doorways, gates, clocks, telescopes, insects, birds. To explore them is to learn more about the imagination that precipitated them and to gain an enhanced sense of its coherence. Light is a major theme of this kind, traceable in all the novels and very many of the poems. Originally the propensity was no doubt instinctive. Even in a casual journal entry Hardy shows his awareness of unusual lighting effects and the sensitivity and refinement of his response to them; he describes the sunlight causing: a glitter from carriage-lamp glasses, from Coachmen’s and footmen’s buttons, from silver carriage handles and harness mountings, from a matron’s bracelet, from four parasols of four young ladies in a landau . . .1 Given such an eye it isn’t surprising that he was correspondingly appreciative of the handling of light by certain painters, particularly by Turner, of whom he remarked: ‘What he paints chiefly is light as modified by objects’ (Life, 225). The natural bias of Hardy’s story-telling created constant opportunities for him to pursue this descriptive interest. Most of his scenes take place out of doors, and many of them at night. He is regularly in 1

2 Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

a position to describe the illumination, bright or faltering, from sun, moon, stars, lightning, lamps, candles, fires or matches. Repeatedly he draws upon a family of related words: bright, shine, glitter, glow, gleam, glimmer, glisten, glare, rays, beams, blaze, luminous, radiant, dazzling, irradiated. It’s easy to recall whole scenes that are dramatically lit in one way or another – the storm in Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, the gambling episode in The Return of the Native, or the moonlit walk of the drunken revellers in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. There are innumerable briefer, self-contained passages of description which catch the mind’s eye through their insistence on effects of light: There was a strange light in the atmosphere: the glass of the streetlamps, the varnished back of a passing cab, a milk-woman’s cans, and a row of church-windows glared in his eyes like new-rubbed copper; and on looking the other way he beheld a bloody sun hanging among the chimneys at the upper end, as a danger-lamp to warn him off.2 Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen.3 The former passage resembles the extract already quoted from the Life, in that the interest is primarily in the light itself, as ‘modified by objects’. In the latter the emphasis is very specifically on what the light reveals. Attentive readers of Hardy will surely recognise both kinds of description as familiar. In any case the copious illustrations in the pages that follow should sufficiently demonstrate their typicality. My aim in this essay will be to confirm that the numerous passages of this type are not merely agreeable decorative incidentals but are intrinsic to the ‘meanings’ which Hardy is instinctively concerned to convey. His way of describing light derives from a habit of seeing intimately connected with the way in which he apprehends life itself. The kind of relationship I am proposing between ‘detail’ and ‘idea’ may be illustrated by what I hope is a familiar Shakespearean analogy. In Hamlet there are frequent references to limbs or organs of the body; not merely the obvious ones, such as head, heart, eyes and mouth, but ankle, eyelid, artery, guts, lungs, privates – over fifty such parts in all. This is in a play with a strong dramatic and visual emphasis on the human form and what can happen to it. We see a man murdered, and his corpse dragged about; we see another corpse being buried; we see

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bones being cast out of a grave, and Hamlet himself addressing the skull of a former friend. All these manifestations may be understood as contributing to a sustained debate around a proposition recurrent in Shakespeare and here voiced by Hamlet himself: What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. (Hamlet, IV. iv. 33 ff.) Through Hamlet, as elsewhere through Lear, Shakespeare meditates on physicality, on materialism. Is the world no more than ‘a sterile promontory’? Is the body no more than a ‘machine’? Are we mere beasts, assemblages of spare parts, active and passive participants in the food chain? The recurrent references to bodily members are a series of reminders of the physical aspects of being, against which are to be set (for example) love, ‘sweet religion’, ‘discourse of reason’. The presiding question creates a field of force that shapes the local references into a pattern. So, with Hardy, light is a dominant idea mediated through scores of local applications. The seriousness of Hardy’s interest in this theme isn’t merely a matter of inference. He frequently pauses in his narratives to theorise about our psychological and emotional susceptibility to light and darkness. There is a striking passage of this kind in his first novel, Desperate Remedies. On arrival at Knapwater House Cytherea experiences immediate turmoil. After an initial quarrel she and her new employer, Miss Aldclyffe, fall into an uneasy truce and spend an emotional night in the same bed. Next morning the mood is very different: Miss Aldclyffe was already out of bed. The bright penetrating light of morning made a vast difference in the elder lady’s behaviour to her dependent; the day, which had restored Cytherea’s judgment, had effected the same for Miss Aldclyffe . . . It is both painful and satisfactory to think how often these antitheses are to be observed in the individual most open to our observation – ourselves. We pass the evening with faces lit up by some flaring illumination or other: we get up the next morning – the fiery jets have all gone out, and nothing confronts us but a few crinkled pipes and sooty wirework, hardly even recalling the outline of the blazing picture that arrested our eyes before bedtime.

4

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light. Probably nine-tenths of the gushing letters of indiscreet confession are written after nine or ten o’clock in the evening . . .4 The metaphor would seem to be from fireworks, and bears the obvious inference that our passions likewise burn brighter against a background of darkness and may be as readily burnt out. Both mistress and maid are described by Hardy as having ‘cooled from their fires’. But his chief interest here is surely in the general observation: darkness leads us to dramatise our feelings; daylight restores perspective. A related comment in The Mayor of Casterbridge might seem to offer a quite different diagnosis: ‘Darkness makes people truthful.’5 But Hardy would always be ready to concede that much depends on context. In The Woodlanders the claim is that ‘Night, that strange personality . . . within walls brings ominous introspectiveness and self-distrust, but under the open sky banishes such subjective anxieties as too trivial for thought.’6 He has further theories about intermediate stages of light: The grey half-tones of daybreak are not the grey half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.7 Related to all these judgements is a conviction that darkness and light can sway our feelings and even our thoughts. On occasion he invokes this idea almost with the specificity of a Naturalist: There is a certain degree and tone of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses, and to promote dangerously the tenderer moods: added to movement it drives the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in inverse proportion; and this light now fell upon these two from the disc of the moon. (The Return of the Native, 263) What Hardy has described in the abstract he proceeds to dramatise. The ‘two’ are Eustacia and Wildeve, and for them the effect of the moonlight and the dance comes ‘like an irresistible attack upon whatever sense of social order there was in their minds’ (264). Even though Eustacia is now married the dead romance flares back into life.

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Boldwood is rather similarly disorientated during the wintry night that follows his receipt of Bathsheba’s valentine: The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind. His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places and putting lights where shadows had used to be.8 The strange inverted light reinforces Boldwood’s sense that nothing is now in its accustomed place: his stable world has been turned upside down. In such examples, of course, the effect that is presented in literal terms can also be read as metaphor. The uncanny light that has a bewildering effect on Boldwood is equally an external manifestation of the confusion already generated by Bathsheba’s valentine. Hardy clearly does believe that certain effects of light can be bemusing or erotic, but he often invokes these effects to represent, rather than to cause, the given state of mind. In many of his fictions Hardy supplies an exceptionally bright light for an apparently mundane purpose – namely to render visible tiny creatures which would otherwise pass unnoticed. Again there is a notable example in his very first novel. After Cytherea has refused his offer of marriage Manston curses himself for his folly, but then: Turning aside, he leant his arms upon the edge of the rainwater-butt standing in the corner, and looked into it. The reflection from the smooth stagnant surface tinged his face with the greenish shades of Correggio’s nudes. Staves of sunlight slanted down through the still pool, lighting it up with wonderful distinctness. Hundreds of thousands of minute living creatures sported and tumbled in its depth with every contortion that gaiety could suggest; perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head, or a tail, or at most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within the twenty-four hours. ‘Damn my position! Why shouldn’t I be happy through my little day too? . . . I’ll get her, if I move heaven and earth to do it!’ (Desperate Remedies, 244) This is a miniaturised version of a dialectic that Hardy was to dramatise again and again. A character perplexed or grieving is induced to see his or her personal plight in the larger context of nature’s workings – perhaps

6

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

a landscape or sky-scape. Here these processes are exemplified merely by a water-butt full of ‘minute living creatures’ – creatures so ignominiously negligible that it would be hard to name another novelist who would give them house-room. The inference is that the sight of them influences Manston by reminding him of the brevity of life. He and they are in the same plight: he must seize his day as they are seizing theirs. The courtship must continue. Yet the revellers in the water-butt are so minute as only to be visible in the strong direct light which Hardy provides with his rhythmical and alliterative assertion that ‘staves of sunlight slanted down through the still pool’. His related reference to Correggio formalises the episode and signals that it is not to be taken lightly. For Manston this is both literally and figuratively a moment of illumination. Hardy takes up the theme again, later in the same courtship. Manston and Cytherea are alone together one evening in open country: On the right hand the sun, resting on the horizon-line, streamed across the ground from below copper-coloured and lilac clouds, stretched out in flats beneath a sky of pale soft green. All dark objects on the earth that lay towards the sun were overspread by a purple haze, against which a swarm of wailing gnats shone forth luminously, rising upward and floating away like sparks of fire. The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity. The only wish the humidity of the place left in her was to stand motionless. The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to a single entity under the sky. (Desperate Remedies, 252) Cytherea is being persistently wooed by a man whom she does not love, but to whom she feels indebted. Her experience at this moment closely resembles that of Manston by the water-butt. There is background desolation in both scenes, in the one case stagnant water, in the other ‘the helpless flatness of the landscape’. Against it some tiny, trivial creatures, that would be invisible but for the direct light of the setting sun, are briefly and happily illuminated, a vivid image of the short sweetness that is life. Cytherea’s reaction, however, is the converse of Manston’s. Where he had been stirred to action she falls into ‘mere passivity’. The tell-tale clause is ‘as it gives all such temperaments’. The two respond differently because they are different in kind: she is a fatalist, he is a rebel, a theomachist, who admits in his last letter that he has ‘found

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7

man’s life to be a wretchedly conceived scheme’. Where he rebels and persists, Cytherea, in the unresisting mood induced by the landscape, lets him take her hand for the first time. Both episodes are echoed repeatedly in Hardy’s later work. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, for example, when Stephen visits Knight’s office: One stream only of evening sunlight came into the room from a window quite in the corner, overlooking a court. An aquarium stood in the window. It was a dull parallelepipedon enough for living creatures at most hours of the day; but for a few minutes in the evening, as now, an errant, kindly ray lighted up and warmed the little world therein, when the many-coloured zoophytes opened and put forth their arms, the weeds acquired a rich transparency, the shells gleamed of a more golden yellow, and the timid community expressed gladness more plainly than in words.9 In this case the sunlit ‘little world’ of the aquarium, an up-market waterbutt, reflects a mood rather than creating one. Stephen has arrived full of hope that if he goes to work in India he will be able to make enough money to marry Elfride. He is as cheerful as the zoophytes. After he has heard Knight’s cautionary, not to say pessimistic, comments on his plan this rapture is presumably modified: ‘The streak of sunlight had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept; a dusky gloom pervaded the room’ (132). Hardy must have attached particular value to the last of the Desperate Remedies passages quoted above, because he repeats both paragraphs, in slightly adapted form, in Book Three, Chapter V of The Return of the Native. In this case a wedding is more dramatically precipitated. About to part at the end of an evening rendezvous Clym and Eustacia pause to watch the light of the setting sun, against which ‘wailing gnats’ are ‘rising upwards and dancing about like sparks of fire’ (208). Within six sentences Clym, whose ‘feelings were high’, has made a proposal of immediate marriage which is accepted. Only when Eustacia has departed does he become aware of the ‘oppressive horizontality’ of the scene. The effect is instantaneous: ‘Now that he had reached a cooler moment he would have preferred a less hasty marriage’ (209). This use of natural description as both an influence and a commentary on the feelings of his protagonists derives from Hardy’s chief idiosyncrasy as a writer of fiction. Most novelists are essentially concerned with what their characters do, say and think. Hardy’s emphasis tends to be on what they (and with them his readers) see and hear. Many of his

8

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

characters are taciturn, and he is reluctant to speak too glibly on their behalf, explaining mood or motive. Instead he deals in suggestion. The reader can infer what Oak or Henchard or Marty South is feeling from their blushing (so frequent in Hardy), their demeanour or their way of walking. Often, as in these examples from Desperate Remedies or The Return of the Native, the substance of an episode is a transaction between the sight seen and the state of mind of the observer. Another scene of this kind, again involving gnats, is to be found in The Trumpet-Major. John Loveday, hopelessly in love with Anne Garland, has a final evening in Overcombe before being posted elsewhere. Guessing that she will not wish to talk to him he spends these last hours near the mill-pond: . . . where he watched the lights in the different windows till one appeared in Anne’s bedroom, and she herself came forward to shut the casement, with the candle in her hand. The light shone out upon the broad and deep mill-head, illuminating to a distinct individuality every moth and gnat that entered the quivering chain of radiance stretching across the water towards him, and every bubble or atom of froth that floated into its width. . . . Presently the light went out, upon which John Loveday returned to camp, and lay down in his tent.10 There is no further explanation and no need for it. Already sure that he can never win Anne’s affections, John has received from the illuminated gnats the same message as Cytherea: that life is short, that in the wider scheme of things the passion of the individual life flares as briefly as a spark. The gnat has a small but by no means contemptible role in English literature. Its most notable appearance, of course, is in Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’: Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies . . . Hardy is a true friend of the gnat, as of other insects, and his specimens are usually livelier than Keats’s: The graveyard being quite open on its western side, the tweed-clad figure of the young draughtsman, and the tall mass of antique masonry which rose above him to a battlemented parapet, were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that crossed the neighbouring

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mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes groups of equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.11 Hardy opens out a sort of chronological telescope, narrowing down from the graveyard to the ‘antique masonry’ to the young man to the insects. But it is the ‘lustrous gnats’ that take the eye here, not rising and falling passively on the wind, as in Keats’s ‘Ode’, but dancing and wailing. ‘Dance and wail’ is the gnat equivalent of ‘twist and shout’. The gnats dance because they are lustrous, illuminated, irradiated. They wail because they won’t be irradiated for long – or, indeed, alive for long, being but gnats. There is a comparable passage in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Looking over the damp sod in the direction of the sun a glistening ripple of gossamer-webs was visible to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of moonlight on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within them; then passed out of its line, and were quite extinct. (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 200) The point, for Hardy, is that human-beings are in the identical plight. Like the gnats we can, for a short time, be ‘irradiated’ as though we bore fire within us, but then we, too, must be extinguished. Eustacia Vye is described in just such terms: The door was ajar, and a riband of bright firelight fell over the ground without. As Eustacia crossed the fire-beams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure in a phantasmagoria – a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness: the moment passed, and she was absorbed in night again. (The Return of the Native, 354) In this fleeting glimpse Eustacia is described like the gnats illuminated by sunlight or lamplight. The image is an encapsulation of her short, passionate life. If light can render visible things usually unseen it can also glamorise the commonplace. A passage in the Life shows the process at work: Four girls – itinerant musicians – sisters – have been playing opposite Parmiter’s in the High Street. The eldest had a fixed, old,

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Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts

hard face, and wore white roses in her hat. Her eyes remained on one close object, such as the buttons of her sister’s dress; she played the violin. The next sister, with red roses in her hat, had rather bold dark eyes, and a coquettish smirk. She too played a violin. The next, with her hair in ringlets, beat the tambourine. The youngest, a mere child, dinged the triangle. She wore a bead necklace. All wore large brass earrings like Jews’-harps, which dangled to the time of the jig. I saw them again in the evening, the silvery gleams from Saunders’s [silver-smith’s] shop shining out upon them. They were now sublimed to a wondrous charm. The hard face of the eldest was flooded with soft solicitous thought; the coquettish one was no longer bold but archly tender; her dirty white roses were pure as snow; her sister’s red ones a fine crimson: the brass earrings were golden; the iron triangle silver; the tambourine Miriam’s own; the third child’s face that of an angel; the fourth that of a cherub. (Life, 171) Here Hardy shows us the before and after of the transfiguring effect. The girls appear so different in ‘the silvery gleams’ from the shop that effectively they are different – not merely altered but ‘sublimed’. Such metamorphoses are common in Hardy. Gabriel Oak looks a new man in the ‘rich orange glow’ of the rickyard fire (48–9). The Trumpet-Major is positively glorified by the light of the sun: The world of birds and insects got lively, the blue and the yellow and the gold of Loveday’s uniform again became distinct: the sun bored its way upward, the fields, the trees, and the distant landscape kindled to flame, and the trumpet-major, backed by a lilac shadow as tall as a steeple, blazed in the rays like a very god of war. (The Trumpet-Major, 98) In all these cases Hardy himself is acknowledging, indeed manipulating, the metamorphosis. Such transformations are ‘real’ in the sense that they would be perceptible to any eye. It is crucial to his work, however, that more typically they are perceived by a lover. Dick Dewy, in Under the Greenwood Tree, is introduced with an ostentatious lack of visual emphasis, being seen in black silhouette, as an individual with ‘an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck and ordinary shoulders’.12 By contrast Fancy Day, on her first appearance, fairly bursts upon the narrative:

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the blind went upward . . . revealing to thirty concentrated eyes: – a young girl framed as a picture by the window architrave, and unconsciously illuminating her countenance to a vivid brightness by a candle she held in her left hand, close to her face; her right hand being extended to the side of the window. She was wrapped in a white robe of some kind, whilst down her shoulders fell a twining profusion of marvellously rich hair in a wild disorder . . . (Under the Greenwood Tree, 34) The description tells us how Fancy looks, but more particularly how she appears to Dick – not merely illuminated by a candle, but radiant in the light of love. We hardly need the confirmation, a page or two later, that Dewy is a ‘lost man’. Similarly Knight, for all his intellectual superiority, begins to be in danger when he first sees Elfride, literally, in a new light: Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermillion red, their moderate pink hue being only seen in its natural tone where the cheek curved round into shadow. The ends of her hanging hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it. Fringes and ribbons of her dress . . . caught likewise their share of the lustrous orange glow. (A Pair of Blue Eyes, 158) In such passages as these the ostensible concern with light is really a secondary consideration. Hardy is showing the loved person as he or she appears, or will appear, to the lover. ‘Irradiation’ is both a cause and an effect. Dewy sees Fancy, and will continue to see her, in a transfiguring light. Hardy is offering a metaphor for falling in love – a metaphor which is at the same time a diagnosis. The newly-loved – or in Hardy’s own terms ‘fascinating’ – individual is seen in an unnatural and glorifying light. The startling effect can confuse the senses and disable the judgement, leaving the seer ripe for infatuation. Usually it is a woman who is seen thus transfigured by a man, but the roles are sometimes reversed. In Far from the Madding Crowd Bathsheba first glimpses Troy by lantern-light ‘brilliant in brass and scarlet’ (171). Jude Fawley is similarly induced to fall in love, not with a woman, but with a town, when he sees in the distance the topaz gleam of the roofs and windows of Christminster.13

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In some instances Hardy reverses his metaphor. Instead of light representing love, love almost literally begets light. When Pierston sees the second Avice in the distance: he stood still, watching her as she panted up the way; for the moment an irradiated being, the epitome of a whole sex: by the beams of his own infatuation ‘. . . robed in such exceeding glory That he beheld her not’; beheld her not as she really was, as she was even to himself sometimes.14 Most of Hardy’s lovers are shown to be ‘irradiated’ in the first flush of feeling – but the radiance will not last. Jude will later have a very different view of Christminster. Even as he first watches, ‘the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost suddenly, like extinguished candles’ (17). After Tess’s confession to Angel, ‘she knew that he saw her without irradiation – in all her bareness’ (228). Wildeve comes to present to Eustacia ‘the rayless outline of the sun through smoked glass’ (147). The light shed by ‘the beams of infatuation’ is brilliant but fickle. A shift of mood, and the loved one can lose his or her lustre like a gnat when the sun goes behind a cloud. If love is for Hardy the usual source of figurative illumination, it is by no means the only one. Other kinds of exaltation can produce a comparable effect, at least internally. When Tess is conducting a funeral service over her dead child, ‘The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a glowing irradiation’ (99). When Jude is seized with the possibility of going to Christminster, ‘he ran about and smiled outwardly at his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to him – smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures’ (24). Hardy wrote a poem on this theme, ‘The Youth Who Carried a Light’ – the light being ‘an inner one, giving out rays’: Such was the thing in his eye, walking there, The very and visible thing, A close light, displacing the gray of the morning air, And the tokens that the dark was taking wing; And was it not the radiance of a purpose rare That might ripe to its accomplishing?

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In ‘The Self-Unseeing’ light stands for something simpler and more youthful still – unreflecting childish joy: Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away! Some of those Hardy most cared for are recalled in terms of this same motif. In ‘The Last Signal’ he describes how, as he is walking to William Barnes’s funeral, ‘Something flashed the fire of the sun that was facing it,/ Like a brief blaze’. It is the reflection from the coffin-lid of his dead friend: Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way, As with a wave of his hand. In ‘Thoughts of Phena’, Hardy recalls that he knew her ‘when her dreams were upbrimming with light’. The second stanza of the poem pursues the metaphor: What scenes spread around her last days, Sad, shining, or dim? Did her gifts and compassions enray and enarch her sweet ways With an aureate nimb? Or did life-light decline from her years, And mischances control Her full day-star . . . ? The image is deliberately unspecific, glancing at sun-beams, rainbow and halo. ‘Life-light’ is the telling inclusive term which assimilates ‘laughter’, ‘compassions’, happiness, love – vitality itself. It is because Hardy’s recurring light metaphors have this breadth of reference that he is able to vary their emphasis from episode to episode, and, to an extent, from novel to novel. In The Return of the Native, where passion is central, there is a presiding light-image of blaze and destruction. When Wildeve and Venn, lovers both, are gambling on the heath in darkness, ‘a large death’s-head moth advanced from the obscure outer air, wheeled twice round the lantern, flew straight at the candle, and extinguished it by the force of the blow’ (233). Later Wildeve signals to Eustacia by letting a moth in at her window. It ‘made towards

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the candle upon Eustacia’s table, hovered round it two or three times, and flew into the flame’ (271). The metaphor is writ large in the fires which flare in the darkness of the heath. The lovers use them as signals. Eustacia and Wildeve, like the moths, are lured by the ‘flame’ and destroyed by it. Hardy hints that ultimately his heroine might not resent that fate: ‘A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years’ (66). In The Trumpet-Major the metaphor has a different role. A pattern is set by Hardy’s description of a party at the mill: The present writer . . . can never enter the old living-room of Overcombe Mill without beholding the genial scene through the mists of the seventy or eighty years that intervene between then and now. First and brightest to the eye are the dozen candles scattered about regardless of expense, and kept well snuffed by the miller, who walks round the room at intervals of five minutes, snuffers in hand, and nips each wick with great precision, and with something of an executioner’s grim look upon his face . . . Next to the candlelights show the red and blue coats and white breeches of the soldiers . . . There is not one among them who would attach any meaning to ‘Vittoria’, or gather from the syllables ‘Waterloo’ the remotest idea of their own glory or death. Next appears the innocent Anne, little thinking what things Time has in store for her at no great distance off. (The Trumpet-Major, 42–3) Hardy draws attention to the passage by an uncharacteristic device: ‘the present writer’ is rarely to be encountered in his fiction; and that ‘present’, it is emphasised, comes ‘seventy or eighty year’ after the events described. But the narrative itself is after all in the present tense: the events are happening now, before that glory or death which those present cannot imagine. We have already been told that Sergeant Stanner, who sings at the party, will die at the battle of Albuera. The soldiers are assimilated with the bright candles that the miller snuffs ‘with something of an executioner’s grim look’. At the party given by Festus at Oxwell Hall there is no such oversight: The candles, blown by the breeze from the partly opened window, had guttered into coffin handles and shrouds, and, choked by their long black wicks for want of snuffing, gave out a smoky yellow light. (The Trumpet-Major, 75)

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Later, villagers crowd into the Mill when they hear that a letter has been delivered: ‘To pass the time while they were arranging themselves the miller adopted his usual way of filling up casual intervals, that of snuffing the candle’ (114). Quoted earlier was the account of Anne’s candle illuminating the gnats above the mill-head. In this period novel the brief, bright light stands for the extinguishable lives, whether of soldiers or civilians, that have all been lost between the tale and the time of its telling. The image is appropriately recapitulated in the final sentence of the novel: The candle held by his father shed its waving light upon John’s face and uniform as with a farewell smile he turned on the door-stone, backed by the black night; and in another moment he had plunged into the darkness, the ring of his smart step dying away upon the bridge as he joined his companions-in-arms, and went off to blow his trumpet till silenced for ever upon one of the bloody battle-fields of Spain. (The Trumpet-Major, 350–1) It is in The Dynasts that Hardy is freest and most lavish with his lighting effects. He can switch sun, moon or lightning on or off like stage lamps. Many local effects are produced resembling those in the novels. Chiefly, however, he annexes the image to his attempt to answer the basic questions posed by his topic. Why the Napoleonic wars? Why should Europe have been reduced to chaos? Why should thousands have died? These issues are raised directly by the various ‘Spirits’ who survey the cross-continental advances and retreats. In particular the Spirit of the Years makes repeated attempts to explain the root cause of the conflict to the Spirit of the Pities, his most telling device being his power to switch the Immanent Will into visual display mode. He first simply shows ‘the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause . . . writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities’. Thus viewed they sound remarkably like the creatures which Manston sees in a water-butt and Mrs Yeobright in a pond. Then the Spirit of the Years makes visible ‘the Will-webs’: A new and penetrating light descends on the spectacle, enduing men and things with a seeming transparency, and exhibiting as one organism the anatomy of life and movement in all humanity and vitalized matter included in the display. (The Dynasts, Fore Scene)

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The procedure is repeated a number of times in The Dynasts. It asserts, diagrammatically, a brand of fatalism more extreme than that to be found in the novels – or perhaps only seemingly so, in that Hardy is dealing in historical generalisation rather than the fate of particular individuals. But the immediate point, as far as present discussion is concerned, is that the ‘new and penetrating light’ is virtually vitality made visible. Rather similarly, it might be suggested, the evening sun illuminates the very life-force of a gnat, and the ‘hot beams’ which blaze through the tissue of the rabbit’s ear display its ‘rabbit-hood’ in a version of x-ray form. By analogy the essential life of Eustacia is dramatised in her pursuit of passionate fulfilment, of ‘irradiation’. An assumption behind this essay is that the descriptive detail concerned will not be regarded, even by the first-time reader, as mere background description, but will be recognised, if only subconsciously, as the outer edge of an implicit system of reference – something to do with perspective, with relativity, with subjectivity. Further reading will show that the pattern recurs, that the other novels are similarly informed. Hardy dramatises through his fiction a personal habit of seeing which invites a certain mode of reading – a mode which could also be applied to everyday experience. He repeatedly, and justly, claims that he preaches no ‘philosophy’, but he does implicitly propose a view of life through his idiosyncratic emphases on what people see and how they interpret it. If there is a general moral to be inferred it is by no means a purely pessimistic one. It might perhaps be summed up as ‘dance and wail’. It’s a gnat’s life – but, at least sometimes and briefly, our lives, like the gnat’s, may be irradiated.

Notes 1. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 141. Subsequent page references to this work are given in parenthesis. 2. The Hand of Ethelberta (New Wessex Edition: London, 1975), p. 137. 3. The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 254. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 4. Desperate Remedies (New Wessex Edition: London, 1975), p. 123. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 5. The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111. 6. The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 14. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 7. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 134. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis.

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8. Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 103. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 9. A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Alan Manford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 128. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 10. The Trumpet-Major, ed. Richard Nemesvari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 173–4. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 11. A Laodicean, ed. Jane Gatewood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 7. 12. Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 12. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 13. Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 17. Subsequent page references to this edition are given in parenthesis. 14. The Well-Beloved, ed. Tom Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 107.

2 Hardy: the After-Life and the Life Before Gillian Beer

Late in his life Hardy made a note in his Journal (10 June 1923): Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g. Emma, Mother, Father are living still in the past).1 Einstein was, in 1923, much in the news for his theories of general and special relativity with their destabilising of linear time. Here he has given Hardy yet another way of musing on a question that had beset him life long: how people abide in time, are expunged by time, vacillate across its zones. But even within the flexibility that relativity offers, and that allows Hardy to imagine time in a new way, there are hints of unease. Emma, Mother, Father, are living still, but in the past. Living in the past sounds dowdy as well as enduring, unreachable as well as surviving. The idea of eternity framed in the phrase ‘that things and events always were, are, and will be’ can be realised intimately for Hardy only as a form of what’s gone. This is not a theological eschatology; no ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.’ Hardy’s Trinity is a homely one: three human beings, all dead, all alive in his recollection, standing in for ‘things and events’ at large. How to reach into that shared past, as well as those many and separate individual pasts, becomes the most intense question of Hardy’s creativity. How to make the past again as present, as future, is the matter and the technical enquiry of his fiction and his poetry. In his Journal on 27 January 1897 he wrote: 18

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Today has length, breadth, thickness, colour, smell, voice. As soon as it becomes yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without substance, colour, or articulate sound.2 Hardy’s training as an architect shows through that list, with its recognition not only of the five senses but of volume (length, breadth, thickness) as essential to the present moment, distinguishing it from the past of recollection. The built physical environment and its vanishing has a special significance in many of his works, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge, and he recognises how readily past architectural forms are forgotten, and streets and houses appear only as we see them now. Indeed, his late novel The Well-Beloved ends with a dour joke about Pierston’s final loss of his ideals, demonstrated through the form of his benefactions and architectural ‘improvements’: His business was, among kindred undertakings which followed the extinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals, to advance a scheme for the closing of the old natural fountains in the Street of Wells, because of their possible contamination, and supplying the townlet with water from pipes, a scheme that was carried out at his expense, as is well known. He was also engaged in acquiring some old mossgrown, mullioned Elizabethan cottages, for the purpose of pulling them down because they were damp; which he afterwards did, and built new ones with hollow walls, and full of ventilators.3 In this discussion I concentrate on Hardy’s late work, particularly the poems and that comedy of chagrin, The Well-Beloved. In this phase of his being the future is both close, and closed. His own time to come is curtailed. He must imagine a world, soon, without his own presence. He may not descend through the family face. He is without children. There is no direct physical line into the future. The ruthless fitful energies of heredity pay no attention to individuality. The face lives; the individuals die: I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.4

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In a poem of 1916, ‘She, I, and They’, he imagines the lost future through the sealed past of portraiture: I was sitting, She was knitting, And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around; When there struck on us a sigh; ‘Ah – what is that?’ said I: ‘Was it not you?’ said she. ‘A sigh did sound.’ I had not breathed it, Nor the night-wind heaved it, And how it came to us we could not guess; And we looked up at each face Framed and glazed there in its place, Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness. Half in dreaming, ‘Then its meaning,’ Said we, ‘must be surely this; that they repine That we should be the last Of stocks once unsurpassed, And unable to keep up their sturdy line.’ The breath, the speech, the sigh, the silentness, all mark the loss of living future beings. ‘Last’ sounds close to ‘lost’, and ‘breathed it’, here matched in a welling rhyme with ‘the night wind heaved it’, is a reminder of the one thing that distinguishes the now living from the past and the future. The sigh is the claim to life, to be recognised as here, as now. Breath is passed down family generations, like face. Breathing, in poetry, where metre controls and expresses breath, becomes for Hardy the pull between present being, which perishes, and inscription, which survives. For Hardy the branching tree of pedigree remains unembodied, heraldic tracings only. Marks on the page must provide his ghostly resonance: marks made by him alone, re-breathed by others. But that disembodied (perhaps obliterated) state is still to come, imagined only. For now he is present, in his body, as well as his pen. He treats his changing state sometimes with wry humour, as in the poem ‘He Revisits His First School’ which opens:

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I should not have shown in the flesh, I ought to have gone as a ghost; It was awkward, unseemly almost, Standing solidly there as when fresh, Pink, tiny, crisp-curled, My pinions yet furled From the winds of the world. Now ‘wanzing weak/ From life’s roar and reek’, his body stumbles embarrassingly into his own past, a past best revisited by others evoking in more aetherial fashion his lost presence. Even that comforting notion is preceded by a ‘perhaps’: Yea, beglimpsed through the quaint quarried glass Of green moonlight, by me greener made, When they’d cry, perhaps, ‘There sits his shade In his olden haunt – just as he was When in Walkingame he Conned the grand Rule-of-Three With the bent of a bee.’ The greenness of the glass is intensified by the un-bulk of a ghost beyond it: a body divested of all its being but others’ memory of a small schoolboy. Over time, we lose our physical self repeatedly and cannot retrieve its past form: photographs fascinate him, perhaps particularly for that reason, as they lock unfamiliar self-appearances in time. Hardy is fascinated by the deaths enacted within the single life span, the single person: the lost bodies of our own childhood and youth mean that we are each already living in an afterlife. That afterlife takes much of its zest and its pain from sudden bodily recall of earlier states, through voices, music, landscapes, scents. There is no fixed boundary between the evocation of self and of others in Hardy’s sensory recall. Over and over again, Hardy works with the obvious that we ignore. Most pressing: we each see our own face quite rarely, and then fleetingly. We do not mark its changes from minute to minute. Others see it continuously when we are in the room. So being there (dasein, existing) means something quite other from within and without. But, to complicate it, each one sees out from within. Each is behind the frame of the face, seen, self-unseeing. Hardy works often with this peculiar form of absence: the shock of the mirror, the tyranny of that which is present. The present here causes (a peculiarly Hardy word) a throe, a jar:

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I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, ‘Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!’ For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity. But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide. The melody of the metre, with its lightfooted short lines and satisfying end rhymes, sings through the unassuaged self-pity of the utterance. Rather than mirroring the poem’s insistence on decay the buoyant verses swing onward, energy unabated, to find their partner in the final line: in the ‘throbbings of noontide’. The poem is full of parts (‘part steals, lets part abide’), of words that chime across to other absent words, some more apt than others: the nonce-word ‘undistrest’ to undressed, tressed, stressed; ‘part’ rhyming back to ‘heart’ and sustaining the sound of ‘heart’ as an unvoiced echo into the final stanza; ‘cold’ become ‘could’, leading into an unrealised possible world of equanimity. But the sheer energy of the ending still astounds: throughout the poem ‘r’ has been a crucial sound, rolling through the mouth from the key-word ‘heart’ to ‘hearts grown cold’ to ‘rest’ and ‘grieve’ and ‘fragile’, all semantically seeming to point to ebbing life, only to be grabbed and turned into the bodily throes of: And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide. ‘Noontide’: a word from way outside the auditory repertoire of the rest of the poem; a word made new in the endless instant of ‘noon’ which in structure perfectly composes and matches itself n-o-o-n (pure mirror); combined with ‘tide’, carrying within it the sounded ‘i’ of ‘I’ and ‘Time’, its tidal sense conjuring waves of time; together forming a kind of eternity.

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The intensity of that poem has emerged from the humdrum business of jarring a tooth at breakfast (whatever did they have for breakfast?): Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle, and of the fact that the best of parents could do no better for me. . . . Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!5 The embarrassed pomposity of ‘the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle’ represents another form of resistance for Hardy against the fragile frame: religious assurance in the phrase ‘earthly tabernacle’ is evoked and pushed away. In the poem, on the other hand, the mind is not set over against the body, but is the mind as body, in somatic life, in ’the throbbings of noontide’. In The Well-Beloved Pierston is repeatedly smitten by devotion to a woman, and, as the story turns out, by devotion in succession to a young woman called Avice Caro, then years later to her young daughter Ann, and, later yet, to her young granddaughter Avice. Each woman when he knows them is young; he ages. In a curious reversal of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Pierston’s body ages, but his lopsided identity keeps him in a state of renewed youthful arousal. The irredeemable optimism of sexual desire and tenderness takes him back time after time to youthful sensations, and youthful adoration. But his body and his social status change entirely, and he cannot shake off the advantages, as well as the disadvantages, his history gives him: he is a successful sculptor (and the tale of Pygmalion who brings to life his ideal statue lies always in the background of the tale). Jocelyn Pierston is a rich ageing man. He is absurd, unconscionable, to the exact degree that he is also lyrical. He knows it. The mirror here is the record of personal history that cannot be set aside or reversed: He was not exactly old, he said to himself the next morning as he beheld his face in the glass. And he looked considerably younger than he was. But there was history in his face – distinct chapters of it; his brow was not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in his forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past troubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had been brought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that he might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin, they had resulted from those

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months of despondency when all seemed going against his art, his strength, his happiness. ‘You cannot live your life and keep it, Jocelyn,’ he said. Time was against him and love, and time would probably win.6 History is here construed as bodily illness and despondency. Troubles mark the face. Time is inexorable. But the recurrence of desire plays a limber dance across this grain of time’s progress. The tone of the novel is arch and joyful, matter-of-fact and sober, by turns. The iterative quality of the narrative – returning on itself, eddying into variations, unchanging in its record of adamant inclination baffled, and rejoicing to be baffled, produces a work at once exasperating and enchanting: a comedy of migration that circumvents the exigencies of ageing. Pierston’s faithful, fickle search for the one ideal woman keeps him single: corralled within the single life and so the single life-span, yet a creator, we are to believe, perhaps, of lasting work that will endure. Although, as an island-bred man, pedigree fascinates him and draws him to successive Caro women from his own home world, he is not susceptible to the pride of pedigree and evades the condition brilliantly captured in the description of a London dinner-party where his dinner companion is ‘at this particular moment engaged with the man on her right’, a ‘representative of Family, who talked positively and hollowly, as if shouting down a vista of five hundred years from the Feudal past.’7 Can family, in the aristocratic sense, defend against ageing? That theme of the vaunting family descent and its catastrophes had already been responded to at its full tragic extent in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In The Well-Beloved descent becomes instead a droll re-enactment of island life which, at the same time, also records the inexorable psychic changes that social shifts enact in individuals. The last Avice Caro is a modern young woman, and Pierston’s strange amalgam of nostalgia and immediacy cannot control the historical changes in women’s expectations. His impulses re-perform his earlier life; indeed, they are constant, representing the agelessness of the individual as well as his ageing. Only very late does he lose ‘the throbbings of noon-tide’ and put the natural fountains into piped water for the community: a rueful symbol. So within the life-span of the individual is persistently played out the drama of the after-life and the life before, highlighted in the fantasy of The Well-Beloved but by no means merely fantastic. In a rather curious remark in a letter to Swinburne, Hardy praises Swinburne’s translation of a Sappho fragment usually rendered as ‘Thou, too, shalt die’ as

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‘Thee, too, the years shall cover’, commenting: ‘Those few words present, I think, the finest drama of Death and Oblivion, so to speak, in our tongue.’8 His preference is puzzling, as is the level of his praise: ‘the finest Drama . . . in our tongue’. It seems that what attracts him is the rolling blanket of Time moving across the individual. The crossing over of years to come and years encompassed by the individual makes for drama. Instead of the inexorable passivity of ‘shalt die’, Swinburne’s version puts the emphasis on Time’s events. Still, it is odd. The preference he states helps, though, in thinking about Hardy’s apprehension in the face of the after-life, which may turn out to be total and doubled Oblivion: both forgetting by the person and of the person. How to salvage something, as he undoubtedly longed to do, from such a vision? One idea he had was brought to fruition by another writer only a few years later: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (published 1929) is quite uncannily close to an imagined story he sketched in the Journal (February 26, 1923): A story (rather than a poem) might be written in the first person, in which I am supposed to live through the centuries in my ancestors in one person, the particular line of descent being that in which qualities are most continuous.9 Woolf’s Orlando is in the third person, in parody of biography, rather than in the empathetic first person, but the idea of living across centuries in a line of descent has an odd similitude. However, there is another difference: for Woolf, Orlando is singular and continuous, sloughing off ancestors, doing away with death; Hardy thinks through the line of past and future family folk. His isolation is revealed and inverted in that insistence on line. Descent gave Hardy one way of imagining shared after-lives. He drew on Huxley and Darwin in imagining that, and very particularly too on Edward Clodd, his close friend and first president of the British Folklore Society. Clodd saw vestiges of lost communities re-enacted and made present in folk-song, superstition, and dance. The Return of the Native celebrates survivals, and survival. Survivals among Victorian anthropologists signified fossilised social remains; but Clodd demonstrates that these phenomena are also forms of survival, taking the past into the present moment and making it present anew. In dance, imitation of an established pattern is learnt with such intensity that it goes down beneath consciousness and enters the bone, to be revived in other future dancers.

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Extinction and continuity are both fruitful ideas for Hardy, but he loves too what he calls ‘obsolescence’ – not usually a term of glamour, but for him a poignant reminder of the crumbling forms of being, as much as of faded fashion. He opens the preface to The Well-Beloved: The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of the following scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home of a curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs, now for the most part obsolescent. It is worth noting that the ‘singular custom’ which is the hinge of the whole story, though always veiled, is that of sexual congress at betrothal and before marriage, to test compatibility and fertility: again the longing for family descent. But during Hardy’s later years other forms of scientific theory alongside evolution gave him fresh ways of imagining after-lives and lives before: one of the most compelling of his poems is ‘In a Museum’. Its place of composition is Exeter, whose local museum housed both skeletons of extinct creatures and musical instruments. I Here’s the mould of a musical bird long passed from sight, Which over the earth before man came was winging; There’s a contralto voice I heard last night, That lodges in me still with its sweet singing. II Such a dream is Time that the coo of this ancient bird Has perished not, but is blent, or will be blending Mid visionless wilds of space with the voice that I heard, In the full-fugued song of the universe unending.10 Mould is both shape and decayed remains; the bird and its song passed away even before men were on earth; the woman’s song from the night before lingers in his memory, vibrating now alongside the bird song. Neither is heard in the ear now. But the resonance of each continues through the universe: as the work of Helmholtz and Maxwell had emphasised, energy is transformed into wave-motion and is carried through the ‘visionless wilds of space’ for as long as the universe shall last – here, in hope, ‘unending’. The wonderful compound word ‘full-fugued’ displaces the much less rich word ‘general’ from the manuscript. The ‘full-fugued song’ of the final version recognises the play of different voices – different

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forms of being – driving on, over and under each other, in a flow of energy that keeps alive both the most distant and most immediate past. Another poem, ‘The Occultation’, is thrilled through by the same hope of energy, here radiation, allowing life in some form to continue: When the cloud shut down on the morning shine, And darkened the sun, I said, ‘ So ended that joy of mine Years back begun.’ But day continued its lustrous roll In upper air; And did my late irradiate soul Live on somewhere? A question only: no certainty, no future life as yet unbroached, but rather the moods and moments of the past laterally continuing in another zone ‘my late irradiate soul’. The joy felt, though now lost, may yet still be. It is a poem that illuminates the note with which I began, on relativity. Radio-activity was known about from 1906 on and again we see Hardy finding in these new understandings of the universe ways of posing further questions – questions he cannot and will not answer but which irradiate his feelings, from time to time. The unanswered question is Hardy’s fundamental form of imagining, and it occurs again and again in his poetry, opening possible futures but refusing to settle them. And what of the unanswered questions about the past? Much has been written about the many poems in which Hardy evokes his first wife Emma after her death – and evokes, too, his own young days lived beside her, as in ‘The Voice’, written in December 1912: Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Again, the idea of individual being, lost, changed, renewed, draws him, stumbling across the cumbersome changes relentless years have interposed. This poignant and intractable poem will not rest in such renewal: at its end all that survives in certainty is the natural sound of wind and human voice: ‘oo’, drawn through the poem in ‘you’ and ‘view’ and ‘knew’ and ‘blue’, returning in the last stanza in ‘oozing’. It

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is the same sound that forms the centre of ‘noon’: ‘the throbbings of noontide’. These fundamental utterances from before the onset of language, like the ‘coo’ of the bird in ‘In the Museum’, comfort Hardy’s ear and mind. Breathing out (you cannot sound ‘oo’ without breathing out) sounds primordial affinities perhaps, or nursery pleasures. Hardy’s narrative position in his poems is often a posthumous one. Many of the poems trap the future: his people little know what is to come, but the poet does and, at his dourest, grinds that knowledge upon us, as for example ‘In a London Flat’. Sometimes the effect is savage, triumphant, as if he is mocking what he has made; as does, to his mind, the God he so nearly despised. Sometimes this sense of past and future interlocked is achieved with delicacy and tenderness, the sad plosion of the riddle delayed a beat after the end of the poem to sound in the reader’s mind, as in the ballad-like ‘How she went to Ireland’: Dora’s gone to Ireland Through the sleet and snow; Promptly she has gone there In a ship, although Why she’s gone to Ireland Dora does not know. That was where, yea, Ireland, Dora wished to be: When she felt, in lone times, Shoots of misery, Often there, in Ireland, Dora wished to be. Hence she’s gone to Ireland, Since she meant to go, Through the drift and darkness Onward labouring, though That she’s gone to Ireland Dora does not know. Belatedly, Dora’s body reaches her longed-for life before, and she knows nothing of it. Hardy in his autobiographical poems looks back at moments of vision; or the past springs upon him again through a scent or – most often – a sound. The sense of the posthumous is marvellously relieved

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by what he might call rejuvenescence. Time is, momentarily, at one with itself. The voice so often laden with the doom of backward knowledge becomes lighthearted, carefree. Then, for the shaft of a moment for him, and so for us a little longer, there is no difference between the afterlife and the life before, and relativity seems confirmed. The high spirits of his late ‘Drinking Song’, which retails the diminishing history of human powers under the pressure of all the great scientific discoveries, is an unexpected comic version of this insight: after Darwin, in verse eight, comes Einstein: And now comes Einstein with a notion Not yet quite clear To many here That there’s no time, no space, no motion, Nor rathe nor late, Nor square nor straight But just a sort of bending-ocean. Chorus Fill full your cups: feel no distress; ‘Tis only one great thought the less! ‘One great thought the more’ becomes the less, without grudging the contraction. On Christmas Eve 1919 Hardy went into Stinsford church-yard to put a sprig of holly on the grave of the grandfather he had never known. While there someone greeted him with ‘A green Christmas’. ‘I like a green Christmas’, Hardy replied and followed the figure into the church. Once inside, there was no one there. So wrote Florence Hardy two days later to Sydney Cockerell, and added that the figure was in eighteenth-century dress. Is this a ghost story? They seem to have thought so. But it has also a beautiful zen poise of pointlessness. One can read significances out of it, of course: the pagan and Christian overlap of holly, the tribute to the unknown ancestor – who might himself be in eighteenth-century dress; the neighbourly greeting, ‘A green Christmas’, answered, as so often in Hardy, against the grain of ritual expectation: ‘I like a green Christmas’; the two entering the church, and one vanishing; above all, the pleasure of the encounter, that brings back greenness. Irresistibly it calls us to his poem ‘Afterwards’ in which he hopes to be remembered in such ways. Again, the poem is poised on an unanswered question:

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When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say, ‘He was a man who used to notice such things?’ Hardy made his own afterlife, for us his readers if not for himself, through evoking in language such natural recurrence, such persistence. He made it, as well, through the grind and clench of time’s laughingstocks that insist that all time, whether we like it or not, is here to stay: ‘Relativity: That things and events always were, are and will be.’

Notes 1. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London, 1984), p. 453. 2. Life and Work, p. 302. 3. The Well-Beloved, ed. Tom Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 205. 4. ‘Heredity’, lines 1–6, quoted from James Gibson, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1976). Subsequent quotations from Hardy’s poems are from this edition. 5. Life and Work, p. 265. 6. The Well-Beloved, pp. 159–60 7. The Well-Beloved, p. 69. 8. Life and Work, p. 305; Hardy’s emphases. 9. Life and Work, p. 452. 10. Hardy’s emendations emphasise the unseen; the manuscript’s ‘fathomless’ becomes ‘visionless’.

3 ‘And I Was Unaware’: the Unknowing Omniscience of Hardy’s Narrators Linda Shires

At the age of 82 and widely acknowledged as one of the great men of English letters, Thomas Hardy published his sixth volume of poems: Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922). Several months before publication, he decided, against the advice of intimates, to attach a preface to this volume, entitled ‘Apology’, an essay usually read as an attack on his severe critics and as a restatement of his philosophy and poetic style.1 As in his Prefaces to Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy defends himself against charges of pessimism and other misreadings of his tone and substance. A key feature of Hardy’s ‘Apology’, though one seldom noted, is the prominence of its references to other poets and their relationship to their readerships. Hardy’s five citations of Wordsworth and two of Tennyson in this essay help him construct a persona and a narrative that squarely places his own career in a distinguished poetic tradition, which runs from the late eighteenth century throughout the next century. As the longest-lived writer of his generation, a Victorian who survived the horrors of World War I, Hardy casts himself as the last relic of a great and uninterrupted poetic line. His trenchant comments on the expectations of poetry, readers and critics also offer us a way to think about his handling of authority, epistemology, and narration in his fiction. For unlike his poetic ‘I’, who so often claims to be ‘unknowing’, Hardy’s persona in ‘Apology’ is earnest and very knowing, at least, that 31

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is, until the final paragraphs, where he abruptly undercuts his claims to cognition: But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and literary circles Where once we held debate, a band Of youthful friends, on mind and art (if one may quote Tennyson in this century). Hence I cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing henceforward. This apparent self-undercutting may be taken triply: as a straightforward acceptance of the perils of age, as a tongue-in-cheek challenge to then current (mis)handlings of nineteenth-century poetic reputations, and as a signature rhetorical move, the unfixing of fixities he has earlier presented. Overall, the ‘Apology’ of 1922 indicates that a Hardy who sees himself as a major and misunderstood poet now wishes to correct and shape views of him and his career. Like Wordsworth in his ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), Hardy writes his ‘Apology’ to explain who he is, whom he writes for, and what standards his art is meant to uphold. One might expect a self-ironic or falsely modest Hardy in this document. If anything, however, he is very sure of himself, even cocky. His irony is leveled elsewhere, but he is in deadly earnest about himself as a creative artist. In this regard, it is highly significant that he does not mention his novels, except through an oblique reference to prior criticisms of his work. The earnest and direct speaker of this essay knows that he is well-read, intelligent, self-knowing as an artist, and devoted to cosmic mysteries that can’t finally be explained. Hardy’s wide-ranging intellectual references in this essay, from the Bible, to Heine, Wordsworth, Comte, Arnold, Harrison, Candide, Gil Blas, Coleridge, Shelley, Darwin, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Einstein, and Tennyson establish him as not only learned, sharp as a tack in his eighties, and well-acquainted with schools and movements of science, philosophy, literature, criticism, and poetry, but also as firmly secure in that intelligence. The intellectual range here resembles that displayed in the entries of his notebooks, where he labours to understand the ideas and philosophies of his time. Here, however, the labour has been done; the references impress but not gratuitously; the intellectual range does not exceed the grasp.

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‘Apology’ recalls Matthew Arnold’s 1853 ‘Preface’, itself fashioned partly as a response to Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface, and, even more, Arnold’s later 1879 essay ‘Wordsworth’. In its irony, references, attack on reviewers, and rhetorical tactics, Hardy’s ‘Apology’ fashions a similarly well-connected and well-read persona and sounds a similar lament for modernity. This too can be no accident. Like Arnold, Hardy invokes Wordsworth and Tennyson as his two greatest predecessors and discusses them in terms of their readerships, the public’s taste, and rising and falling reputations. He too jousts against religious zealots, ‘a Roman Catholic young man’ whom he aligns with Arnold’s old foe Fredric Harrison. Like Arnold, he too invokes the Bible, Heine, Comte and Wordsworth. But whereas Arnold is invested in remaking Wordsworth to suit his own imaginings, Hardy is invested in cutting loose from projections. He is not interested in remaking another writer, or in playing public defender, but in making himself and defending himself; and he questions even more rigorously exactly how and why we read as we read. Anticipating an easily ruffled readership for Late Lyrics and Earlier, Hardy explains that his mixing of genres of poems or his juxtaposition of different tones will appeal both to ‘stereotyped tastes’ and to ‘open intelligences’, despite the fact that he knows a mixing of modes does not appeal to the common reader, who can neither appreciate nor understand it. To reach this reader and some of his critics at all he has to go a step further, making some gesture toward fame and defending himself via self-definition and comparison, since he can not depend on a correct construction of him or his work. Defending his ‘grave, positive, stark, delineations’, condemned as ‘pessimism’ by ‘unreflective’ thinkers, as he puts it, he links himself overtly to Wordsworth by quoting the ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, a poem extremely popular and widely quoted in the Victorian period. He argues that if one disallows or ignores ‘obstinate questionings’ and ‘blank misgivings’ in one’s exploration of reality, as his critics would have him do, one can tend toward intellectual paralysis. Hardy defines his understanding of reality not as pessimistic but as questioning. Hardy’s affiliation with a major philosophical poet who was revered but also severely misunderstood by his audience is deliberate. If one attends to ‘uncertainties’ and if one conveys ‘impressions’, as Wordsworth had done and Hardy still claims to be doing, one may end up writing great poetry, even some of the greatest poetry in the history of the English language. Perhaps, Hardy implies, the readership should rethink how it reads and interprets his work.

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In quoting Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ Hardy also refutes the notion that his ‘evolutionary meliorism’ is anything new; indeed, he says, it goes back to the Bible and to Greek drama. If there is anything new, it is the amount of disorder and confusion in the war-stricken and ‘prematurely afflicted century’. The fault, then, lies not with Hardy, but with the age, the critics, and the readership’s expectations and misunderstandings of art. Hardy’s defence shows him proud to have ‘disregarded considerations of what is customary’. He knows how reputations rise and fall, as Tennyson’s did at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century. He compares his era with Wordsworth’s, finding them both marked aesthetically by a ‘thirst after outrageous stimulation’ (Hardy is quoting the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads) and hence by an inability to distinguish high art from low. Hardy accepts that he, like Wordsworth, will have to wait for a readership mature enough for his art, and hence, again like Wordsworth and Tennyson, will have to brave out time’s handling of his name. Yet by calling attention to Wordsworth’s denunciation of a reading public’s false taste, Hardy is also reminding us that when Wordsworth critiques his era, he was pointing the finger at sensation fiction of his day. In Wordsworth’s view, such novels drew the reader away from more serious genres and weightier matters. Hardy’s reminder may well be a partial distancing from his own fiction, although his novels could hardly be tagged as merely sensational. More likely, this reference is Janus-faced, both self-critique and self-advertisement. After all, Hardy’s novels, particularly the last three which were the most fervently criticised in his time, cannot be said to be employing ‘outrageous stimulation’ for the same reasons as a typical sensation novel. Hardy challenges his readership on this very point, though, inviting them by implication to reassess his novels as well as his poetry. Along with his refusal to cave in to unreflective criticism or readers’ stereotyped expectations, Hardy’s remarks on tone, juxtaposition, and his refusal to prophesy are worthy of comment. He is amused, but also dismayed, that the placing of a humorous or grimly funny poem beside a truly grave one produces ‘little shocks’ of discomfort among readers – exactly the shocks, in fact, that they are supposed to produce. Hardy’s real object of scorn in the ‘Apology’ is that readers still expect sweet pabulum and not what he considers more appropriate, a sense of discomfort when they read a book. Hardy is exasperated with those who are unable to read tonal shifts or a mixing of style and subject. Yet through his reverse criticism of his critics and readers, Hardy remains adamant that he will continue to write in a

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poetic tradition of excellence based in intelligent aims and secure self-knowledge. Hardy ends his essay by asserting his inability to indulge in any more exercises of ‘knowing’. He is done with assessments of the state of literature or the age. Not a sage, an edifier, or a lawgiver, Hardy does not easily or happily don the garb of judge or prophet. Referring to his physical state, his advanced years, and other contingencies, he refuses to know the present or future. While it is true that the octogenarian Hardy was ill in bed and fearing cancer when he wrote this piece, he soon recovered, and he was hardly frail in body during most of his old age. He kept a busy social calendar and apparently had few abnormal ‘age’ problems or ‘contingencies’. He remained well-informed, kept reading widely, maintained an active correspondence with friends, and published two more books of poetry in the years following. Nothing, in fact, stood in the way of his commenting on ‘how things are going’ had he wanted to do so. However, the ending of the essay fascinates because it so unexpectedly falls back on a posture the bulk of the ‘Apology’ has so pointedly avoided. Hardy had always been an artist who claimed that he never expected much, and who often asserted unknowingness. It was not until his last three novels that his doctrines had become more insistent. There, as is well known, he acknowledged his increasing vexation with a novel-reading audience. Yet at the end of his very knowing and very self-knowing ‘Apology’, he assumes a position of unknowing. This seems to me a transparent statement about the aesthetics, politics, and ethics behind most of his art, which does not claim authority but only ways of knowing and unknowing. It is no wonder an audience reading for sureties or judgments could feel their moorings had been ripped out from under them. As I indicated earlier, the ‘Apology’ avoids any references to Hardy’s fiction. Yet positioned between phases of poetry writing, Hardy’s fiction belongs in any narrative that tries to account for his experimentations with different forms, for his years of fiction writing ultimately seemed to confirm his sense that only poetry offered him a speaking voice that could capture unawareness and the ‘obstinate questionings’ and ‘blank misgivings’ he chose to convey. As a creator of lyric speakers, some identifiable as Hardy himself and many not, he had more leeway. He could say what he liked and not be held to account for it. In an age of readers who expected the instruction, wit, and wisdom of a George Eliot and the usual conventions of narrative art, Hardy’s readership often hankered after the familiar and known more than the unexpected or the unknown. Such a

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readership, he gradually came to realise, was by and large not trained to read fiction subtly, against the grain, or for questionings and not answers. The Victorian poetic tradition of poetry, rather than that of fiction, demanded scepticism of readers with its frequent use of a teller who is compromised, insane, dying, rebellious, or in other extreme situations. In short, readers of Victorian poems were often forced, not just invited, to ask themselves about the status of teller and telling. Reviews and contemporary comments on literature indicate, however, that they did not bring scepticism so easily to the narrators of the novels. In the remainder of this essay, I shall argue that Hardy’s early aesthetic, rhetorical, and political impulse not to ‘know’, and his habit of featuring poetic tellers who say so as boldly as he does at the end of his ‘Apology,’ led him to experiment with limited omniscient narrators in his fiction. From the beginning to the end of his writing career, Hardy shows an unusually keen interest in questions of epistemology, the study or theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, especially with reference to its limits and validity. This interest is richly nuanced. It well may be connected to his fascination with time, to his search for a God he did not find, or to his reticence on certain private matters. His ability to hold multiple points of view at once and not to have to choose or hierarchise among them owes much to his understanding of the complexities of the human psyche. ‘Not knowing’ is also a useful rhetorical gesture for a writer who aims to be a great man of English letters but hopes not to be recalled for or reduced to wise and witty aphorisms. Given Hardy’s commitment to not having to know, and his interest in what we do not and cannot know, it is not surprising to find in Martin Ray’s CD version of ‘Thomas Hardy: A Variorum Concordance to the Complete Poems’, edited by James Gibson, a goodly number of entries under words such as ‘unaware’ (thirteen examples). Further checking reveals: ‘unawares’ (five), ‘unbeknown’ (one), ‘unknowing’ (fourteen), ‘unknowingly’ (two), ‘unknown’ (twelve), and related variations on ‘to know,’ including the negative (‘know not’, ‘did not know’, and other variations of this type) or a qualification about knowing (‘if only’ and other variations of this type).2 In this latter group there are over one hundred examples. As one might suspect, given the small number of early poems and the huge number of post-1890s poems, most citations fall into the latter timeframe. Still, from the beginning, to know or not to know is a major question for Hardy, but not one he must answer. The not knowing, the awareness gap, articulated in Hardy’s lyrics can occur between human and God, human and nature, human and

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human, or among temporal or psychic selves within one human being. Often in Victorian literature, such a gap of knowledge, as in the dramatic monologue, or in the relationship between teller and tale in prose fiction, exists due to authorial use of situational or verbal irony. Rhetorically, irony is a deliberate dissembling to intensify meaning or effect. When irony is employed, for example in a dramatic monologue like Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ or in the narrator’s attitude towards Amelia Sedley in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, there is an implied judgment. While Hardy is quite attuned to modes and moods of irony, and draws on them when he needs them, the gap of knowing to which I refer is not of that type. It is precisely a kind of shoulder-shrugging, one that has no fixed or final judgment to withhold or offer. Hardy employs tragic irony, including not only the suffering of individuals in an uncaring universe but also the irony of a situation offering the chance for commentary, but without a speaker willing to deliver.3 There is more to be said about this irony however. Two examples from among Hardy’s best-known lyrics suffice to illustrate variations on the use of this gap of knowing, while also helping to refine its type. One of the more famous examples of a narrator’s statement of not knowing occurs in ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900). The narrator of this poem speaks as a somewhat distant reporter about a breach between man and nature. Like the speaker of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, who turned to history on a ‘darkling plain’, this lyric speaker finds no permanence in love or joy in nature. With specific echoes of Wordsworth’s ‘To a Skylark’, ‘To the Cuckoo’, and ‘The Green Linnet’, Hardy illustrates the bankruptcy for his times of the Romantic pastoral lyric of fusion between mind and scene.4 As U. C. Knoepflmacher has argued, through Hardy’s echoing of both John Keats’s ‘darkling I listen’, from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, and Arnold’s ‘darkling plain’, Hardy orchestrates an encounter between a qualified, Romantic optimism and an elegiac Victorian pessimism. In ‘The Darkling Thrush’, the speaker describes a dull, corpse-like landscape of ‘dregs’ that differs substantially from the Keatsian perfumed darkness or the sunny air of Romantic scenes. Joy, even qualified joy, seems impossible now, when ‘bine stems score the sky like strings of broken lyres’. In this bluntly honest Victorian vision, commemorating the end of the century, the meditative speaker proceeds to imagine everything in the landscape to be as ‘fervourless as I.’ Yet the speaker’s lassitude and projection of mood are challenged by ‘a voice’ rising from the ‘aged thrush’, ‘frail gaunt and small/ In blastberuffled plume’. This beaten-down creature readily ‘flings his soul’ in an ecstasy of sound. It sings a ‘happy goodnight air’ and seems to know

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some ‘blessed Hope’ of which the poet is ‘unaware’. This old, struggling yet happy bird, the speaker concedes, seems to know something he, the human, does not know. And while the intellectual, analytic lyric speaker can find no ‘cause’ for such carolings, cannot deify nature, and cannot join in the passion represented by the bird, he carefully reports his lack of knowledge and the bird’s limitless joy. Maybe the end of the century actually holds the germ for some renewal. Maybe not. ‘The Darkling Thrush’ thus records the presence of two antithetical temperaments and points of view – the speaker’s and the thrush’s – at the critical moment of 1900. But the poem’s ‘I’ places no meaning; he merely lets these assessments of the scene face each other. In this balancing, the poem recalls still another Keats poem, the sonnet of 1818, ‘O thou whose face hath felt the winter’s wind’, which Knoepflmacher does not mention in his working out of affinities to other bird poems. There we find the wiser thrush allowing, even encouraging, the poet’s passivity, receptivity and unknowing: O fret not after knowledge – I have none, And yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge – I have none, And yet the evening listens. In both poems the thrush knows more than the poet does, but what the bird knows is that there is no need to know. The audience, here the evening, which listens, is not dependent on knowledge. Hardy’s literary imagination, Keatsian in its essence, can hold two different points of view or two different feelings in balance without striving to call one right and one wrong, or to claim one as more important than the other. As I have noted elsewhere, Simon Gatrell is one of the few critics of the novels to have connected Hardy’s cast of mind with that of Keats. Like Knoepflmacher, he rightly suggests that Hardy could ‘rest in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.5 Such an imagination is not uncaring or disinterested. Rather it is both passionate and democratic. Thus, as Michael Millgate has made clear in his biography and has noted in conversation, Hardyean tellers can view an idea, a person, an object from different sides. Moreover, in ‘The Darkling Thrush’, the lyrical ‘I’ records what it sees and hears as worthy in itself and as not requiring some explanatory system to account for or to validate impressions. In fact, a main point of this poem is that there is no explanatory system that works to account for the thrush’s song. It is the reader’s job to

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accept (or not) the juxtaposed points of view or to hold them in an unreconcilable balance. I have suggested that the passing of time and changes in perception, or jarring psychic selves within a teller, are also connected to the gap of unknowing that we find prominently in Hardy’s work. ‘The SelfUnseeing’, an older lyric first published in his 1901 volume Poems of the Past and Present, dramatically illustrates this nexus. Here we encounter another lyrical teller who records, does not provide answers he does not have, attempts to remain honest, and yet also demonstrates an attitude of care and even sentiment in his recreation of a former time. The distinction between love for the past and utter neutrality is important, precisely because the typical Hardy teller is not devoid of feeling, even when he is devoid of certainty or truth. In an earlier discussion of this lyric, I emphasised its temporal and spatial layering and conflations, whereas here I wish to stress the accompanying lack in the teller of a need to know or a need to tell how to process such conflations.6 The personal lyric before us tells a story in a set of pictures: it presents a scene of family life, usually taken to be that of Hardy as a child, with his father playing his violin, and his mother sitting before the fire. The teller returns to the house in which he lived as a child. But that house is much changed. Even the door by which one used to enter is now walled up, as if to show that the way we approach the past from the present itself inevitably changes over time. The teller recalls, however, a common and emotionally invested scene of music, warmth, and companionship. Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away! He notes that the participants themselves did not place meaning on the scene they were living. From the vantage point of the present, the past self was unseeing, unknowing, unaware. It could not fathom the changes that would and did take place. The emotions of the poem are gleaned, then, not only from remembering the dead at a time when they were alive, but also from remembering a child self who altered through time. The vision and awareness won in the present is at the expense of a younger self who, though unknowing, was innocent: ‘Childlike, I danced in a dream’. When, after time’s passage, this ‘I’ reviews the childhood scene and its emotional and material and psychological underpinnings, he

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is struck by the almost inevitable unconsciousness of men and women as they live through the daily rituals of life. Yet he merely records this impression; he does not judge, for he knows no more fully now than he did as a child. With age comes not sophisticated knowingness, he seems to tell us, but a keener and more poignant awareness of what we will never know. While Hardy’s use of a voice of unknowing is overt in his lyrical speakers, this is perhaps somewhat more difficult to note in his omniscient fictional narrators. Hardy’s experimentations with the omniscient voice in fiction, increasingly radical, are not easily processed. Over time, Hardy undermines the reliability of his tellers by letting them mouth contradictory statements, by showing their biases, by featuring how much they are culturally constructed, by letting them enter the fictional world, and by mocking them. One might have expected literary critics to have done better than Victorian readers at interpreting these tellers. Still, it would take until the 1960s for critics of Hardy fiction to begin to talk in terms of an author and a narrator who are never identical. Wayne Booth’s distinctions, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, among author, implied author, and narrator, of course, were influential in the area of general narrative theory,7 but in Hardy studies the first to analyze ‘voices’ in Hardy’s prose seems to have been David Lodge, in a sensitive analysis called ‘Tess, Nature, and the Voices of Hardy’, in The Language of Fiction (1966). Anyone reading that essay when it first came out, whether cognizant of prior trends in Hardy criticism or not, could not but have been impressed. Unlike most earlier reviewers and essayists on Hardy, Lodge does not account for inconsistencies in syntax, tone, topic, and register, or differences in telling and in knowing between narrator and character, as a country man’s artlessness, error, or stupidity. Nor does he bend them to fit a paradigm of formal coherence. Lodge still holds, though, the notion of a human unity behind these voices – which thus marks them as representing some sort of self-division. Later critics have adopted this same notion of a separation, some psychologising it and wrongfully, I think, projecting it back onto a split in Hardy the man. The virtue of Lodge’s essay lies, not in his own impulse to unify, but in his initial perception that there are multiple narrative voices with which to contend critically. It appears that during the following years several Hardy critics built on this sense of varying narrative voices within a putative narratorial omniscience. The most influential and most theoretical has been J. Hillis Miller in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970) and in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982). Getting rid of the author as a

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coherent being and of the narrator as authoritative, Miller pointedly argues that there is no such thing as ‘Hardy’, at all. Linking rather than separating author from narrator, he abolishes both. In Miller’s handling, ‘Thomas Hardy’ is a series of roles, of performances in voicing, much like a character in a Browning dramatic monologue. Miller’s grounding in Victorian poetry, narrative theory, and in the schools of critical theory then available to him, especially phenomenology, semiotics, and deconstruction, allows him to see the instability of Hardy’s textual world as a constant, across genres, and as related to a wider, troubled Victorian response to reality and to a post-Victorian condition of modernity. He writes: ‘The narrative voice of Hardy’s novels is as much a fictional invention as any other aspect of the story. In fact it might be said to be the most important invention of all. . . . The narrator . . . is a role Hardy plays, just as the characters of Pompilia, Caliban, or Fra Lippo Lippi are roles Robert Browning plays.’8 Miller is particularly adept at analyzing the fictional narrators’ own dramas of distance and yearning. Despite the advances made between the 1960s and the 1980s by a number of critics of his work, most Hardy critics have continued to depend on a conflation of author and narrator, unexamined omniscient narration, and Aristotelian principles of order and coherence.9 Few critics from Hardy’s time until our own appear willing to let incompatible views in one narrator or among narrative agents (a narrator and characters) rest in all their distinctiveness. Yet Hardy would insist that there are multiple, valid and incompatible knowledges and interpretations existing at the same time, unknowing included. In thinking about Hardy’s experimentations with narration, it is important to start by differentiating the narrator, the focaliser, and the implied author from the man who was the author. Mr Hardy is not equivalent to the speaker of his novels; he both exceeds that speaker and may not in fact accord with views placed in the speaker’s mouth. Moreover, the author is also not equivalent to the focaliser or the perspective or angle of vision taken on events and characters of the novel, which itself may change. Finally Hardy is not identical to the implied author. Distinct from the real author, the implied author also differs from the narrator. The implied author, says Seymour Chatman, instructs us silently ‘through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn’.10 Thus the implied author is a construct inferred from the text, not a consciousness or a self. Using these semiotic explanations, one can see that the Mr Hardy who wrote a specific novel may be closest to the implied author of that text, which is ‘a general system of viewing the world conceptually’, or ‘the norms of the text’. On the other hand, an

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implied author may be more as well as less intelligent, devoted, desiring, inquisitive, sceptical, ethical, than a real person. In simple cases, the implied author or norms are inferred and assembled by a reader via a single dominant perspective, as in a Jane Austen novel that employs a reliable, consistent narrator-focaliser (one who tells and sees from a single vantage point). In more complicated cases, however, the narrator-focaliser is composed of many ideological positions, some opposed to each other, and remains a voice whose validity can not be taken either as certain or as featuring hierarchically ordered views or statements. There is, instead, interplay among them.11 Thus the implied author a reader infers is itself complex and may not ‘agree’ with the norms of a narrator. In other types of complex cases, however, the narrator-focaliser is not only divided ideologically, but focalises, in part, as if it were a character. Yet it is never named and is not seen to interact with other characters. In other words this textual indicator tells the story, sees the story, acts as if it could be in the story, yet remains in the extradiegetic frame. There is thus a shifting between narration as an object to be observed, and itself judged, and narration as transparent and authoritative, if also ideologically inconsistent. In the 1870s and the 1880s, Hardy experimented with various modes of distancing, viewing, and reporting by his omniscient narrators. He curtails and questions their authority. His implied author does not always subscribe to the norms of the narrators of his texts. However, in the 1890s Hardy’s implied author not only shows the biases of his narrators more overtly, by nearly making them into characters, but also criticizes them. We can begin to see this kind of shifting use of and attitude towards an omniscient narrator by taking soundings in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). While it is commonly held that the narrator of Far from the Madding Crowd identifies with the stability and strength of Gabriel Oak, several critics, including John Bayley, have noted incongruities that destabilize narratorial reliability, even this early in Hardy’s career. Bayley detects a diversity of tone and style he attributes to a clash of fantasy and reality.12 Simon Gatrell has noted a similar tension, which he sees as existing between reason and emotion within the author.13 I am arguing that these incongruities are aesthetic strategies, neither the product of personal divisions nor flaws of the art. The implied author critiques the narrative point of view in Far from the Madding Crowd in both interesting and inconsistent ways. The teller is shown to be biased but also changeable. The tale thus contradicts a teller whose judgments and opinions, often offered, become ques-

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tionable because partial. In this novel we might pause for a moment on the trope of the waiting lover and the event of marriage as important signifiers that get valued in different ways in different situations. One of the memorable scenes is that in which Fanny waits at one church while Troy waits at another on their agreed-upon wedding day. Then Fanny waits again, for Troy to come and fetch her for marriage. Troy, however, never does so, since he has married Bathsheba in the meantime. Meanwhile, Bathsheba waits for Boldwood to notice her. Boldwood waits for Bathsheba to give him an answer to his proposals and frets about her valentine. Bathsheba waits for Troy to reappear once he goes missing. And lastly, Gabriel subdues his passions for Bathsheba and just goes about his business (his business is her business and vice versa). By eventually serving her he proves Milton’s adage that they also serve who only stand and wait. Stereotypes of romance, then, are both enlisted and undermined by all these instances of postponement. Where do the narrator’s sympathies lie in this morass of waiting, error and pretence? And are judgments made? The romances may begin as game playing or jokes, like swordplay or an anonymous valentine, but they end up with coffins, corpses, and incarceration for murder before the long awaited marriage feast. Passion disrupts the pastoral landscape, as usual in this genre, but with grave effects. At first, the narrator’s sympathies seem to support an Oak-like point of view. Like Oak, the narrator resists irrational passion when it hits. Certainly one might expect as much from this teller, given that a sober, mature, and rational conservatism would have pleased the audience of Leslie Stephen’s Cornhill, where the novel was serialised. The narrator judges instances of male passion – Boldwood’s neurotic obsessiveness, Troy’s recklessness and even Oak’s initial impulsiveness – as dangerous. Moments of passion, as told or shown by this narrator, then, are thus written as losses of control needing some rein, and hence to be mastered in an Oak-like fashion. On the other hand, exhibitions of female irrational passion, such as Fanny’s or Bathsheba’s, though chalked up to folly in several statements, are given more credence. For, as may not be surprising, the narrator is also fascinated by women and by irrational passion; that Oak tames his emotions for Bathsheba does not mean the narrator brings his own emotional investments under a consistent control. Indeed, the implied author questions this narrator’s impulses by opening up a contradiction within his habitual stance of restraint. The scene of Bathsheba’s emotional confrontation with Troy over Fanny’s coffin features not only an irrational female outburst, but also a justified one, when the narrator

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unequivocally affiliates himself with Bathsheba.14 As, bending over Fanny’s coffin, Troy confirms his relation to the dead woman, the narrator refuses to trivialize Bathsheba’s passion. Rather than adhering to his Oak-like tendency to suppress emotionality, he elevates it with an allusion to Christ’s death on the cross: ‘At these words there arose from Bathsheba’s lips a low cry of despair and indignation – such a wail of anguish as had never been heard within those old-inhabited walls. It was the tetelestai (it is finished) of her union with Troy.’ In the past, the narrator has labelled Bathsheba’s infatuation with Troy as folly. He might, at this point, easily have reminded us that her present plight is to be seen as the natural outcome of irrational mistakes. Yet he does not. The comparison with Gethsemane may be as extravagant as a dismissal in terms of folly, but it is not there to mock the seriousness of the personally tragic moment, so much as to register that the narrator here accords Bathsheba respect. By allowing the passions of Bathsheba, Troy, Fanny, or Boldwood full scope, the implied author calls into question not only the price paid for passion but also the price paid for the narrator’s usual Oak-like quietism. Far from the Madding Crowd is hardly seamless. This novel’s narrator is alternately moved to laugh at, judge, sympathize with, and assess the characters. It offers irreconcilable views of love and irreconcilable opinions about passion and duty in order to challenge complacent readers with questions it refuses to resolve. What degree of passion is possible before it becomes destructive of self and others? What role do companionship and labour play in marriage? What price do we pay for security? It is significant that the relationship of the narrator to the heroine in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is even more involved than it was in Far from the Madding Crowd. What in the earlier novel might be termed interested fairness and excess of sympathy here blossoms as fascinated love and desire. The narrator almost becomes the heroine’s third suitor, and certainly remains her staunchest defender, at the same time that he tells the story seemingly omnisciently and authoritatively. Hillis Miller’s idea that Hardy’s narrators enact subjective feelings of distance and desire applies most accurately to Tess. Yet one can also see Hardy using his omniscient narrator to open up and question the representations we make of women, all kinds of women. Hardy thus involves his readers in two contrary acts of relation: he directly appeals to our involvement with Tess through the narrator’s love, and he indirectly undercuts that involvement through the implied author in subjecting the narrator’s love to the same critique that he extends to that of Angel Clare and of Alec d’Urberville.

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Many critics have noted the narrator’s aesthetic and sexual obsession with Tess’s body. Her flexuous form, her ‘pouted-up, deep red’ mobile peony mouth, her ‘large innocent eyes’ and the way she stands out in a crowd, all fascinate him.15 He is so drawn to her, in fact, that he can even tell us the positioning of her lips when she speaks. He is so fascinated that he catches in her womanliness her twelve-year-old cheeks, her nine-year-old eyes, and her five-year-old mouth. Such remarks continue throughout. Perhaps there is no greater love tribute offered by a third person omniscient narrator to any heroine in English fiction. This makes it all the more ironically painful when we see Tess raped, humiliated, impoverished, starving, and hanged. Surely part of the point of this narration is that it contributes to making the reader fall in love with Tess, before outraging us at her treatment. The very fact that Tess does not draw attention to herself as a woman makes the narrator covet and respect her all the more. ‘Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention’, he speculates, ‘is that she never courts it’ (94). Her naiveté, her modesty, her rebuffing of attention, her confusion about male intentions, all join together to make her exquisite to the men around her. Her distance from herself increases longing for her. The monotony of her binding sheaves, which might not draw anybody’s attention ordinarily, is broken for the narrator by her skirts lifted by the breeze or ‘a bit of her naked arm’ visible ‘between the buff leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown’, which bleeds when roughened by the stubble (94). And yet Tess physically, vocally, and angrily resists the stereotypical constructions of her offered by the narrator and her lovers. She argues with Alec, when he says that women never mean what they say. ‘“How can you dare to use such words!” she cried, turning impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to see more some day) awoke in her. “My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?”’ (83) She equally resists the construction of her by Angel as a spiritualized version of her sex, by telling him to call her Tess (and not Artemis or Demeter). She resists the narrator by never being able to be known by him, although he wants as badly as Alex and Angel to own her. His perceptions seem to match and sometimes blend with theirs. His strategic misreading and wrong conclusions both reproduce and buttress those of Angel and Alec. Yet despite his own misrepresentations and misunderstanding, critiqued by the implied author, this narrator is not merely conventional.

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For the narrator’s point of view is not only coloured by his sensual interest in his heroine, but by a care for her that is genuine. This narrator is solicitous of wounded creatures and feels maternal towards them. In this respect, Hardy’s implied author and narrator work together to defend the status of the fallen woman in a treatment that is innovative and resistant to generic norms. For instance, the narrator is concerned about her over-responsible attitudes: ‘Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself’ (38), he remarks when Prince dies in his encounter with the mail coach. He knows that after her seduction in the Chase by Alec, she will not ever be ‘heart whole’ (24) again, but he hopes she will survive. ‘Let the truth be told,’ he says, ‘– women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and look about them again with an interested eye. Where there’s life there’s hope’ (110). This kind of remark is an advance in degree on the narrator’s sympathy for Bathsheba and for Fanny in Far from the Madding Crowd. Like that earlier narrator in his use of cultural maxims about women, this narrator also often speaks in generalities or clichés, but here the maxim is put, by the implied author, in the service of redeeming a fallen woman in the eyes of the readership. From early in his career with Far from the Madding Crowd to that point in his fiction-writing career when he begins to instruct the audience more directly, Hardy experiments with the use of the omniscient narrator. The narrators of such novels as Two on a Tower, The Trumpet Major, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, and The Well-Beloved are divided, confused, indifferent, distant, obsessed, in love, frustrated by, or deeply caring with and about the characters whose lives they see and tell. When they know much they often resist interpreting material for us, are shown to be biased, or are easily led astray by cultural constructions instead of by particular cases. When they do not know, however, they usually do not tell but leave gaps of interpretation. By complicating the narrating voice and its relationship to a readership, as so much of Victorian poetry does, Hardy repeatedly asks his audience a central question: why do we read and impose meanings as we do? He questions cultural constructions as much as he depends on them. And he questions omniscience as much as he relies on it. Questions are valuable, but Hardy understands that there are some scenes and some situations that bear meaning but are, finally, unable to yield answers, to be known, or to garner explanations, no matter how many questions we put to them. A thrush’s song against the gloom, a maiden’s suffering, a kindness coming too late to help, the death of

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one’s past selves – these mark limits to knowledge and fiercely test our powers to accept without reasons. The ‘Apology’ with which I opened this essay repeats in its final gesture of ‘unknowing’ a central strand and interest of Hardy’s career. Yet that finale is all the more stunning for what precedes it in the essay. Hardy’s literary and cultural knowledge is wide and deep; his reading of the novel and poetic traditions preceding him, as the essay demonstrates, remains acutely intelligent. He wisely refuses to pander to an audience preferring the familiar. Secure in what he knows, aware of the claims of belief, disbelief, and unbelief, he is also able to accept and use the authority of not knowing.

Notes 1. The ‘Apology’ was written under the stress of illness, as Hardy reported later to Edmund Gosse. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 542–4, and Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), pp. 251–2. ‘Apology’ is reprinted in Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, Victorian Poetry and Poetics (New York: 1968), pp. 823–6. 2. The number of times ‘unaware’, ‘unknowing’ or variations on ‘not knowing’ appear in Hardy’s poetry recalls similar verbs and constructions in Tennyson’s. But it seems significant that Hardy’s joining ‘un-’ to verb forms, thus gaining a positive and a negative balancing in the same word, far outweighs Tennyson’s hundreds of uses of ‘to know’ with the negative, and his smaller reliance on words such as unaware (3) or unknowing (0). See Arthur E. Baker, A Concordance to the Poetical and Dramatic Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson (London: Routledge, Kegan, Paul, 1967). 3. It is worth recalling Dale Kramer’s remarks below, because they valuably point to many prior misreadings of Hardy’s work and accurately pinpoint the reason for Hardy’s defence of impressionism, not doctrine or dogma, in his work: ‘For if a century of journalistic and academic writing about Hardy has given us nothing else, it has given us the assumption that he is a writer of “ideas”, who wants to persuade readers of the adequacy or even superiority of his versions of social law and “divine” justice. But in the principal novels, Hardy manages his art so that the ideas themselves are constantly under fire. They are presented with irony. . . . His nature tends towards universal scepticism – scepticism about the meaning of bad as well as of good, and the tension remains irresolvable.’ Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), pp. 17–18. 4. U. C. Knoepflmacher works out such lines of influence in detail in ‘The Return of a Native Singer: Keats in Hardy’s Dorset’, in Influence and Resistance in Nineteenth Century English Poetry, ed. G. Kim Blank and Margot K. Louis (New York: Macmillan 1993), pp.112–30. 5. Simon Gatrell, Introduction, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xx.

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6. Linda M. Shires, Introduction, The Trumpet-Major (New York: Penguin Press, 1997), pp. xxvi–xxviii. 7. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961). 8. J. Hillis Miller, Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 41. 9. Important exceptions, in some of their writings, include Michael Millgate, Dale Kramer, James Kincaid, Peter Widdowson, Tim Dolin, Margaret Higgonet, Penny Boumelha, Patricia Ingham and Dennis Taylor, but none of them perform a sustained examination of narration, which is still needed. 10. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 148; the italics are mine. 11. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Methuen, 1983), p. 81. 12. John Bayley, Introduction, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 11–34. 13. Simon Gatrell, Introduction, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xv–xxviii especially. Gatrell calls the division he sees between two aspects of Hardy’s creative intelligence ‘the narrator’ and ‘the author’. In this he does not differ basically from prior criticism noting division. 14. Simon Gatrell notes that Bathsheba reverses the narrator’s conventional wisdom on marriage offered early in the novel, though ‘the narrator cannot acknowledge it’ (p. xix). Gatrell’s overriding point is that there are two Hardys: narrator and author. Yet the narrator is not consistent and the characters inconsistent, as Gatrell also makes clear. Later he argues that ‘the narrator withdraws from commitment, and forces readers to judge for themselves’ (p. xxv). Gatrell’s point here is that a Hardy narrator will often refuse to tell something at a moment of climax and leave us in the lurch. My point is a different one – that Hardy’s narratorial voice or deed is no more to be measured by standards of coherence than a character’s voice or deed are to be so judged. 15. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 20–1. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text.

4 A Laodicean as a Novel of Ingenuity Toru Sasaki

In the General Preface to the 1912 Wessex Edition Hardy put three of his novels, Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, and A Laodicean, into the category of ‘Novels of Ingenuity’. This, as he apologetically explains, was because they ‘show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves’. Despite some attempts at retrieving the group from critical limbo,1 not much attention has been paid to A Laodicean. I hope that attending more closely to its mode of presentation, and in particular to verbal aspects of this, we can arrive at a better appreciation of the kind of ingenuity the novel displays. In his essay ‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’ (first published in 1927), T. S. Eliot considers novels by the two authors in order to ‘illuminate the question of the difference between the dramatic and the melodramatic in fiction’; the dramatic makes us feel character to be ‘somewhat integral with plot’, while the melodramatic asks us ‘to accept an improbable plot, simply for the sake of seeing the thrilling situation which arises in consequence’. Dickens, he says, excels in the creation of characters, and Collins is a master of plot and situation, the elements most essential to melodrama. Eliot considers Bleak House and The Woman in White the highest achievements of Dickens and of Collins, and observes that they are the novels in which the two novelists most closely approach each other. The frontier between drama and melodrama, as he sees it, is vague: ‘perhaps no drama has ever been greatly and permanently successful without a large melodramatic element . . . and the best melodrama partakes of the greatness of drama’. When he turns from the Victorian period to the contemporary scene, Eliot 49

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wistfully notes ‘the dissociation of the elements of the old three-volume melodramatic novel into the various types of the modern 300-page novel’. This, in his opinion, is not an ideal situation: Those who have lived before such terms as ‘high-brow fiction’, ‘thrillers’ and ‘detective fiction’ were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and that the craving for it is perennial and must be satisfied. If we cannot get this satisfaction out of what the publishers present as ‘literature’, then we will read . . . what we call ‘thrillers’. But in the golden age of melodramatic fiction there was no such distinction. The best novels were thrilling. . . . 2 Hardy was, surely, very much a writer of this golden age of melodramatic fiction, a worthy successor of Dickens and Collins, his best novels superbly combining ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the melodramatic’. It is clear that Hardy wrote Desperate Remedies following the vogue for the kind of novel established by the success of The Woman in White. His autobiography tells us: ‘the powerfully not to say wildly melodramatic situations had been concocted in a style which was quite against his natural grain, through too crude an interpretation of Mr Meredith’s advice. It was a sort of thing he had never contemplated writing, till, finding himself in a corner, it seemed necessary to attract public attention at all hazards.’3 Despite this dismissal, the sensation novel, with its melodrama and unorthodox morality and sexuality, was certainly not ‘against his natural grain’.4 To be sure, Hardy did not continue in the pure sensation vein. Nor did Collins for that matter. In fact, there is an intriguing parallel between the works of the two. When Hardy was writing Desperate Remedies, Collins’s Man and Wife was running as a serial. The latter is a mixture of melodrama and social criticism (against the cult of athleticism and irregular marriage laws), combining intricate plot with sympathetic depiction of women – very much like Hardy’s later fiction. Towards the end of Collins’s novel, the heroine finds herself having to undergo mental torture under the same roof with her sexually attractive but brutal husband. At the climax he is killed; not by the heroine, however, but by his landlady, who has lost her balance of mind because of her own husband’s cruel treatment of her in the past. That is to say, Collins has the murder, which is favourable to the heroine, vicariously committed by another woman. The juxtaposition of this with Tess, where the heroine actually commits a murder yet remains a pure woman, suggests one of the ways in which Hardy continued and developed the Collinsian melodrama.

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J. I. M. Stewart has an illuminating comment on Collins’s fiction: Many of the prefaces with which [Collins] accompanied his novels render a somewhat misleading impression of his predominant concern. No Name is declared to evince ‘a resolute adherence, throughout, to the truth as it is in Nature’ and to pursue ‘the theme of some of the greatest writers, living and dead . . . the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known.’ Armadale, which is in fact a masterpiece of intricate melodrama and nothing else, is spoken of as Thomas Hardy might have spoken of Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure: ‘Estimated by the Clap-trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.’ For The Moonstone itself, which is simply the best of all mystery stories, Collins writes a preface declaring that he is attempting ‘to trace the influence of character on circumstances’ – and that it is thus unlike some of his earlier novels, which ‘trace the influence of circumstances upon character.’5 Indeed, Collins’s words seem to point to the future products from Hardy’s pen. Collins’s idea of the conflict between ‘circumstances and character’, too, chimes with Hardy’s description of his ‘major’ works as ‘novels of character and environment’. Hardy’s very phrase, ‘novels of ingenuity’, may possibly have a Collinsian association. The word ‘ingenuity’ was often used in reviews of Collins’s novels, designating the intricacy of the plot – for example, the Saturday Review on The Woman in White: ‘[Collins’s] plots are framed with artistic ingenuity’; The North British Review on No Name: ‘The interest of [Collins’s] books is absorbing, the ingenuity of his plots marvelous’; the Spectator on The Moonstone: ‘We are no especial admirers of the department of art to which [Collins] has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics, or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzle on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity.’6 This sampling clearly shows that the word ‘ingenuity’ has both positive and negative connotations. Hardy’s own usage appears to convey the latter, but one suspects that at the same time something of the former is tacit in it. Setting judgment aside, the word could certainly be applied to a scene in A Laodicean. One night, caught in a severe rainstorm, Havill is forced to share a room with Dare at an inn. Dare mysteriously says, slapping his

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breast with his right hand, ‘The secret of my birth lies here.’7 (We later come to know that he has the word ‘de Stancy’ tattooed on his breast.) Havill becomes curious and, while Dare is sleeping, unfastens the collar of his nightshirt, to see what is inscribed on his breast. But Dare tosses about, and Havill goes back to his bed without fulfilling his intentions. Dare then wakes up, a revolver in his hand. Scared, Havill pretends to be asleep: A clammy dew broke out upon the face and body of [Havill] when, stepping out of bed with the weapon in his hand, Dare looked under the bed, behind the curtains, out of the window, and into a closet, as if convinced that something had occurred, but in doubt as to what it was. He then came across to where Havill was lying and still keeping up the appearance of sleep. Watching him awhile and mistrusting the reality of this semblance, Dare brought it to the test by holding the revolver within a few inches of Havill’s forehead. Havill could stand no more. Crystallized with terror, he said, without however moving more than his lips, in dread of hasty action on the part of Dare: ‘O, good Lord, Dare, Dare, I have done nothing!’ (131) This is pure melodrama, skillfully executed. However, it is not one of the best moments in the novel, for the thrill is only momentary and the scene does not connect with the rest in any meaningful way. To use Hardy’s formula, here ‘the interest depends on the incident itself’. The case is otherwise when he is truly successful. I have referred to the murder Tess commits. That moment is clinched by the striking image of the ‘gigantic ace of hearts’ on the ceiling (ch. 56). This image of the red heart is not only locally impressive but thematically related to the whole series of other red things in the novel, such as the letters ‘Thou, Shalt, Not, Commit –’, which earlier Tess sees being painted (ch. 12). As Tony Tanner observes, ‘Watching Tess’s life we begin to see that her destiny is nothing more or less than the colour red.’8 Other moments in A Laodicean, while ‘melodramatic’ in the same way, have a deeper and wider resonance. Perhaps the most memorable scene in the novel is the one in which Somerset and Paula have a terrifying experience with the train near the tunnel entrance: Somerset looked down on the mouth of the tunnel. The popular commonplace that science, steam, and travel must always be unromantic and hideous, was not proven at this spot. On either

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slope of the deep cutting, green with long grass, grew drooping young trees of ash, beech, and other flexible varieties, their foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver threads in the depths. The vertical front of the tunnel, faced with brick that had once been red, was now weather-stained, lichened, and mossed over in harmonious rustybrowns, pearly greys, and neutral greens, at the very base appearing a little blue-black spot like a mouse-hole – the tunnel’s mouth. (85) This description of the tunnel’s mouth, ‘lichened, and mossed over’, is highly sexualized (just like the description of ‘the hollow amid the ferns’, the scene of Sergeant Troy’s sword practice in Far from the Madding Crowd ), covertly creating an erotic atmosphere and preparing us for what is to follow: ‘[The train] rushed past them, causing Paula’s dress, hair, and ribbons to flutter violently, and blowing up the fallen leaves in a shower over their shoulders’ (88). I confess I cannot help being reminded at this point of that famous scene in The Seven Year Itch, where Marilyn Monroe holds down her skirt when the passing underground train rushes up the air from beneath. Here, the skirt itself is not mentioned; ‘Paula’s dress, hair, and ribbons’ flutter violently, we are told. But the reader will visualise it, and Hardy fills in the absence here by drawing attention to Paula’s skirts later. When Somerset crosses the Channel in search of Paula, he comes to a hotel in Nice, hoping to find her there: he ‘turned to the large staircase . . . momentarily hoping that her figure might descend. Her skirts must have brushed the carpeting of those steps scores of times’ (253; my italics). What happens is that the reader, with Somerset, is sent back to that tunnel entrance, and made to see Paula’s skirt fluttering up once again. We have, as it were, a delayed confirmation of what we have imagined. This is the way erotic images work in the novel. Somerset first sees Paula at the baptism ceremony, peeping in from the chapel window. Although the full immersion does not take place, and therefore is not described, we imagine with Somerset Paula’s clothes wet and clinging to her body. This voyeurism continues in the notorious gymnasium scene, in which Captain de Stancy gazes at Paula in the ‘moment of absolute abandonment to every muscular whim that could take possession of such a supple form’ (158). We assume that she is wearing a tight costume, and are told that ‘The white manilla ropes clung about the performer like snakes’ (158; my italics). At this point we are sent back to the baptism ceremony, made to see once again a vision of the fully immersed Paula. The text is confirming the imagined scene.

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Somerset faces another physical crisis when he gets trapped in a turret at Stancy Castle. This is carefully worked up to. Just before he finds himself there, he has a dispute with Havill about the architectural history of the Castle, and Paula, who has been listening to them keenly, asks Somerset: ‘Now, would you really risk anything on your belief? Would you agree to be shut up in the vaults and fed upon bread and water for a week if I could prove you wrong?’ ‘Willingly,’ answers Somerset (64). Sure enough, this is almost what happens to him. At ‘the bottom’ of the turret, he perceives that ‘he dropped into it as into a dry well; that, owing to its being walled up below, there was no door of exit on either side of him; that he was, in short, a prisoner’ (68). He finds something lying in the corner, which ‘on examination proved to be a dry bone’ (69). It turns out later that this bone belongs to someone who years ago accidentally fell in the same place and was starved to death (76). This is Gothic enough to arouse what Eliot calls our ‘perennial craving’ for melodrama, but there is something casual about this episode, which makes it ultimately disappointing. In the turret, in addition to the dry bone, Somerset notices that ‘on the stonework behind the [spider’s] web sundry names and initials had been cut by explorers in years gone by. Among these antique inscriptions he observed two bright and clean ones, consisting of the words ‘de Stancy’ and ‘W. Dare’, crossing each other at right angles’ (69). It is a compelling detail that one feels sure is to be used later. There will, however, be no further mention whatever of these inscriptions. This is very strange. At the least, one would imagine that Somerset will say something about it when he sees Dare next time, for they have met at the Castle before Somerset falls in the turret – his curiosity must have been roused. So, later, when Dare comes to Somerset wishing to be employed as his assistant, one naturally expects Somerset to refer to the recent discovery of his name up in the turret, but nothing of the kind happens. Here is a dialogue between Somerset and Dare, shortly after his employment. Irritated by Dare’s laziness, Somerset says, ‘Well, now, Mr Dare, suppose you get back to the castle?’ ‘Which history dubs Castle Stancy . . . Certainly.’ ‘How do you get on with the measuring?’ (102) This is clearly an opportunity lost. Dare’s sarcastic remark, ‘Which history dubs Castle Stancy’ – meaning, ‘The castle really belongs to de Stancy and Dare’ – is, as it were, prompting Somerset to remember that writing on the turret wall. But what he says is: ‘How do you get on with

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the measuring?’ How can he be so dull-witted? Or should one blame Hardy for this vapidity? Hardy’s handling of Dare is puzzling. Later in the novel there is a melodramatic confrontation between him and Paula’s uncle Abner, each pointing a gun at the other in a church vestry. Dare has the upper hand, because he knows everything, in intimate detail, about Abner’s past involvement with terrorist activities. His knowledge – he claims that he had ‘a singular dream’ (331) – extends to what presumably happened when Abner was by himself. How is that possible? Or consider the turret once again. If it is impossible for Somerset to get out of the turret without opportune help from a servant, how can it be that Dare, having secretly written the two names, should have been able to get out of there by himself ? J. O. Bailey argues that ‘Undoubtedly Hardy had in mind some preternatural, Mephistophelian origin and function for William Dare.’9 To be sure, Dare describes himself as ‘going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it, as Satan said to his Maker’ (143) and Captain de Stancy calls him ‘quite a Mephistopheles’ (149). But if he has supernatural power, why does he have to resort to his falsified photo and his theory of chances at the gaming table? It does not seem consistent at all. Or is this to do with the novel’s concern with the conflict between the romantic and the modern,10 the presentation of Dare itself incarnating such a struggle? There is another notable inconsistency. At one point, aware of Paula’s yearning for ancient lineage, Somerset wants to find out about his own family pedigree, hoping that his is as old a family as de Stancy’s. Told by his father that there is a family pedigree deposited in their London bank, he goes there and examines it. While he is about it, Paula happens to come to the very same bank, to take out from her safety deposit a diamond necklace for the Ball that evening. He digs up the pedigree, but his attention is then wholly occupied by his relationship with Paula, and the business of the pedigree is totally forgotten. Is this again Hardy’s carelessness? Or is he making a point in an oblique fashion, that it is love that matters, not ancient lineage? Might the phrasing ‘he had mechanically unearthed the pedigree’ (198) possibly point in that direction? In Hardy’s novels, ‘The narrative provides action in time. The poetic underpattern, with its accumulation of echoes, parallels, and contrasts, shows the significance of that action.’ The observation, made by Jean Brooks in her admirable study of Hardy, is apt. She suggests that although there are poetic symptoms which ‘light up at rare moments the daemonic energies that disturb the surface of modern life’, in A Laodicean they are in general buried under inorganic incidents; in particular, ‘Somerset’s fall down the turret staircase, unlike Knight’s

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down the Cliff without a Name, leads nowhere in plot or poetic vision.’11 I would qualify this slightly. As I have said, with Dare’s inscriptions on the wall completely forgotten, this moment is not developed in terms of plot. We can, however, find something of a ‘poetic underpattern’ here. Somerset’s fall is clearly related to his burgeoning romantic feelings towards Paula. Immediately before this near disaster, he has been working at the top of the great tower. Then, ‘Finding after a while that his drawing progressed but slowly, by reason of infinite joyful thoughts more allied to his nature than to his art, he relinquished rule and compass, and entered one of the two turrets opening on the roof’ (68). The next moment he is trapped at the bottom of it. This image of Somerset’s imprisonment functions as a prefiguration of his later predicament, where he has passively to observe the progress of the relationship between de Stancy and Paula: at one point we are told that ‘he was so well walled in by circumstances that he was absolutely helpless’ (184). There is a variation of this metaphor when Somerset later writes complainingly to Paula of ‘our shut-up feelings’ (244). These metaphors of ‘being walled in’ and ‘shut up’ are, in turn, echoed in the description of Captain de Stancy’s self-suppression (which may be compared with Boldwood’s in Far from the Madding Crowd ): Throughout a long space he had persevered in his system of rigidly incarcerating within himself all instincts towards the opposite sex, with a resolution that would not have disgraced a much stronger man. By this habit, maintained with fair success, a chamber of his nature had been preserved intact during many later years, like the one solitary sealed-up cell occasionally retained by bees in a lobe of drained honey-comb. (163; my italics) The defence de Stancy has put up is to be broken down by Dare. The above passage leads to the scene in which he finally decides to shake off his resolutions, and having gone through a kind of ceremony of drinking the wine that Dare has sent him, looks out at the moonlit barrack-yard and says, ‘A man again after eighteen years’ (164). I have compared de Stancy with Boldwood. In the case of the latter, there is the clinching metaphor of Boldwood’s gaze at the Valentine Bathsheba has sent, till ‘the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye’ (ch. 14).12 There should be a poetic detail, related to something de Stancy sees in the moonlight perhaps, that fixes the moment for us. The same can be said of Somerset’s entrapment in the

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turret. The incident itself is striking enough, and though there is a poetic underpattern that links this with the rest of the novel, there is no clinching metaphor that would have made it a truly Hardyan moment. Hardy’s imaginative engagement with Dare, de Stancy, and Somerset can hardly be called satisfactory. Paula, however, is another matter. Hardy himself was rather pleased with the heroine. In 1912 he added a postscript to the Preface of the novel, where he says he finds compensation in the character of Paula, ‘who, on renewed acquaintance, leads me to think her individualized with some clearness, and really lovable, though she is of that reserved disposition which is the most difficult of all dispositions to depict, and tantalized the writer by eluding his grasp for some time’. The operative word here is ‘tantalize’; she does just that. The word ‘tantalize’ appears several times in the novel. If she tantalized Hardy, she certainly tantalizes Somerset; and the reader, too. Paula’s elusiveness is precisely what makes her interesting. This leading quality of the heroine is related to the novel’s narrative method. In the first section of the novel Hardy uses Somerset as a pointof-view character: the reader follows him and sees what he sees. Basically, the narrative events are conveyed to us filtered through Somerset’s consciousness only, so that we do not know what is going on in the minds of other characters. The novel is divided into six Books which bear the names of characters: Book the First, ‘George Somerset’; Book the Second, ‘Dare and Havill’; Book the Third, ‘de Stancy’; and so on. Accordingly, we experience events by following Dare and Havill in Book the Second, and by following de Stancy in Book the Third. In Book the First, the point of view is maintained with rigorous consistency throughout.13 As the novel progresses, however, the control of the narrative point of view is loosened. Book the Fifth and Book the Sixth, the final two Books, are titled ‘de Stancy and Paula’, and ‘Paula’. But we are scarcely allowed to see the inside of Paula’s mind. All we know about her derives from what she does and what she says in her dealings with other characters. Some of the moments involving Paula and Somerset are given greater intensity by the verbal liveliness in Hardy’s presentation. In the incident with the train, where they instinctively seize each other, they make their first, very brief, physical contact. They come close to each other again when Somerset is taking measurements in the Castle – Paula offers help, and their hands almost touch. Soon afterwards Paula asks to be enlightened about the early Gothic work, which, according to Somerset, is known by the undercutting. Somerset agrees to take her to the part of the Castle where this undercutting is, and suggests that

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she touch it and see it for herself. She does so, but confesses that she still does not understand what he means. Then: Somerset placed his own hand in the cavity. Now their two hands were close together again. They had been close together half-an-hour earlier, and he had sedulously avoided touching hers. He dared not let such an accident happen now. And yet – surely she saw the situation! Was the inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be together a second time. (81; my italics) The ‘bottomless depth’ is a hackneyed, dead metaphor, but given the poetic underpattern we have observed in relation to Somerset’s entrapment at the bottom of the turret, even this cliché is energised, reverberating with other similar metaphors. I have said that in Book the First Somerset is consistently employed as the point-of-view character. This does not mean that we know only what Somerset knows. There is always Hardy the narrator looking over Somerset’s shoulder, and he sometimes makes ironic comments, as he does in the quotation above: ‘Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be together a second time.’ The narrative intervention is clumsy here, but it is not always so, as we shall presently see. Somerset cannot fathom Paula’s mind, and then: All rumination was cut short by an impulse. He seized her forefinger between his own finger and thumb, and drew it along the hollow, saying, ‘That is the curve I mean.’ Somerset’s hand was hot and trembling; Paula’s, on the contrary, was cool and soft as an infant’s. ‘Now the arch-mould,’ continued he. ‘There – the depth of that cavity is tremendous, and it is not geometrical, as in later work.’ He drew her unresisting fingers from the capital to the arch, and laid them in the little trench as before. She allowed them to rest quietly there till he relinquished them. ‘Thank you,’ she then said, withdrawing her hand, brushing the dust from her finger-tips, and putting on her glove. Her imperception of his feeling was the very sublimity of maiden innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was no great sin. (82; my italics)

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A tiny detail, but I find the transition of a ‘forefinger’ to ‘unresisting fingers’ interesting. (Yet another instance of carelessness on Hardy’s part?) This time the ironical comment at the end is potent. It is almost as if Hardy is siding with Paula, and teasing Somerset, and by extension, the reader. This ‘coquetry’ of Paula’s is going to be a torment to Somerset. A few chapters later, at Paula’s garden party, Somerset asks her to dance with him, but she does not readily acquiesce: ‘You will just once?’ said he. Another silence. ‘If you like,’ she venturesomely answered at last. Somerset closed the hand which was hanging by his side, and somehow hers was in it. The dance was nearly formed, and he led her forward. Several persons looked at them significantly, but he did not notice it then, and plunged into the maze. Never had Mr Somerset passed through such an experience before. Had he not felt her actual weight and warmth, he might have fancied the whole episode a figment of the imagination. (107; my italics) ‘Somehow her hand was in Somerset’s’ is a delicate touch, particularly when one recalls the way Somerset has somehow caught her fingers in the previous quotation. Notice also the sentence, ‘Never had Mr Somerset passed through such an experience before.’ Elsewhere Hardy refers to him as Somerset, except on three or four occasions; and on these exceptional occasions the effect is invariably ironic. For example, there is the instance earlier in the novel when Somerset explores the Castle in Paula’s absence, and finding that the door of Paula’s sleeping-room is open, looks in and observes the interior. Then he notices that a dressing-room lies beyond. But, ‘becoming conscious that his study of ancient architecture would hardly bear stretching further in that direction, Mr Somerset retreated to the outside, obliviously passing by the gem of Renaissance that had led him in’ (35; my italics). These instances of ironic distancing from Somerset appear to emphasise the dreamy world of romantic fantasy he inhabits, as is suggested by the final sentence of the passage quoted above; ‘Had he not felt her actual weight and warmth, he might have fancied the whole episode a figment of the imagination.’ This impression is beautifully developed in the following scene. Somerset and Paula go out of the tent where the dance is taking place, and walk to ‘a little wooden tea-house that [stands] on the lawn a few yards off’ (108). When they are there, a storm suddenly breaks out:

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In a moment the storm poured down with sudden violence, and from which they drew further back into the summer-house. The side of the tent from which they had emerged still remained open, the rain streaming down between their eyes and the lighted interior of the marquee like a tissue of glass threads, the brilliant forms of the dancers passing and repassing behind the watery screen, as if they were people in an enchanted submarine palace. ‘How happy they are!’ said Paula. (109) This passage is arresting, for one thing, because of the exquisite image of the ‘enchanted submarine palace behind the watery screen’, perhaps the single most beautiful image of the whole book. It is, however, not just impressive in itself. The word ‘submarine’ evokes a sense of depth, which, as we have been observing, is connected with Somerset’s position in relation to Paula. Combined with this, the rain running ‘like a tissue of glass threads’ curiously recalls the description (already quoted) of the tunnel’s mouth, near which these two had their first physical contact; the ‘foliage almost concealing the actual railway which ran along the bottom, its thin steel rails gleaming like silver threads in the depths’ (my italics). Another reason why the above passage is remarkable is that this is the very first moment in the novel where Somerset and Paula are significantly presented as seeing something together – ‘the rain streaming down between their eyes and the lighted interior of the marquee’. It stands out because, as I have said, everything else so far has been strictly reported to us from Somerset’s point of view only. Since this beautiful image is filtered through the minds of both Somerset and Paula, it may lead us to suppose that they are sharing the same feeling of elation. But then, maybe not. For Paula’s exclamation – ‘How happy they are!’ – recalls an interesting exchange that has taken place immediately before, just after their dance: Somerset’s feelings burst from his lips. ‘This is the happiest moment I have ever known,’ he said. ‘Do you know why?’ ‘I think I saw a flash of lightning through the opening of the tent,’ said Paula, with roguish abruptness. (108) At any rate, Somerset is still trapped in that ‘submarine depth’. Imagining that they are sharing this dreamy vision and that the moment of mutual understanding has arrived, he takes a step forward

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and confesses his love for her. But, ‘I love you to love me’ (109) is all he can get out of her. The Hardyan narrator comments on the situation: Poor Somerset had reached a perfectly intelligible depth – one which had a single blissful way out of it, and nine calamitous ones; but Paula remained an enigma throughout the scene. (119; my italics) An ‘enigma’ indeed. Even at the end of the novel, Paula says, ‘I know every fibre of [Somerset’s] character; and he knows a good many fibres of mine; so . . . there is nothing more to be learnt’ (373). Paula will remain elusive, and Somerset still has to suffer for another two hundred pages in his ‘pleasing agonies and painful delights’ (111). (In the quotation above, the phrase ‘a perfectly intelligible depth’ once again recalls the poetic underpattern that connects this with Somerset’s fall into the bottom of the turret.) Eventually, Paula comes to Somerset, and with characteristic haughtiness says to him; ‘I am here to be asked’ (372). Shortly afterwards, in her hotel room, she is passively ‘watching the sleeping flies on the ceiling’ (373). The ‘sleeping flies’ on the ceiling are certainly not as striking as the ‘gigantic ace of hearts’, but this detail does go some way towards defining Paula for us. The distance between the trivial flies and her final resolution to get married seems to indicate her own detachment from romantic involvements with Somerset. As the novel’s very last words suggest – Paula tells Somerset, ‘I wish you were a de Stancy!’ (385) – she may still somehow fly away from Somerset’s grasp. Not surprisingly, some of the early reviews expressed doubts about Paula: St James Gazette (4 February 1882), ‘We have every inclination to believe her charming, but we cannot quite understand her’; and The Critic, a New York paper (25 February 1882), ‘Had this young lady been an American we fear her conduct would have been severely criticized. . . . [F]or ourselves, we prefer the frank little American flirts.’ An extreme attempt to find consistency in the novel has been made by Peter Widdowson, who proposes that ‘A Laodicean . . . becomes a parodic attack – by way of its own performative anti-realist textuality – on the (mis)representations passed off as “telling things as they really are” by fictional Realism.’14 That is to say, by thwarting the reader’s expectations based on the conventions of realism, the novel reveals that such notions as realism, or character, or female sexuality are merely ideological constructs. Widdowson points out, for example, that characters repeatedly say things like ‘the plot thickens’, or ‘“by the merest

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chance” I did so and so’, as if the text is aware of its own contrivance. He gives a detailed analysis of the passage describing de Stancy’s peeping, where, in his opinion, the novel’s own representation of the scene is self-consciously mocked.15 He also emphasizes the text’s persistent foregrounding of misrepresentation; there is for example a fake telegram, and Dare uses a distorted photo. As I have observed, Hardy seems to relish Paula’s coquetry. By steadily introducing irony where he describes Somerset’s courtship of Paula, Hardy emphasises her elusiveness. Much as Paula tantalises Somerset, Hardy tantalises the reader. Perhaps the novel’s very inconsistencies reinforce this effect. In the review in The Nation (5 January 1882), it is said with felicity that ‘Mr. Hardy is an ingenious novelist, and . . . by applying the term “Laodicean” to his heroine, he has managed to convey to the mind of the reader a subtle doubt with regard to her character which pervades the book almost to the end’ (my italics). If the novel holds interest, it does so not so much by supplying melodramatic complications as by emulating its heroine’s elusive charm. By this curious turn, A Laodicean indeed becomes a ‘Novel of Ingenuity’.

Notes 1. For example, Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1982); Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History (London: Routledge, 1989), Roger Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed (Sheffield; Sheffield Academic Press, 1993). 2. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 2nd edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), pp. 461, 467, 460. 3. Michael Millgate (ed.), The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, by Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 87. 4. See Taylor, ch. 1 and Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), ch. 6. 5. Introduction to The Moonstone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 14–15; ellipses in the original. 6. Norman Page (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 83, 140, 171. 7. J. H. Stape’s Everyman Paperback edition (London: Dent, 1997), p. 129. All subsequent quotations from the novel are from this edition. Hereafter, page references are in parentheses. 8. ‘Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, rpt. in The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Ian Watt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 409. 9. ‘Hardy’s “Mephistophelian Visitants”’, PMLA 61 (1946), 1159. Bailey does not take into account Dare’s supernatural exit from the turret.

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10. This theme is ably discussed by J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 5, esp. pp. 123–4. 11. Jean Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 143, 153, 152. 12. I have discussed the significance of this passage in ‘On Boldwood’s Retina: A “Moment of Vision” in Far from the Madding Crowd and Its Possible Relation to Middlemarch’, Thomas Hardy Journal 8 (1992), pp. 57–60. 13. That is, except for just one paragraph at the end of ch. 12, in which Dare’s secret activity is revealed behind Somerset’s back (91). 14. Peter Widdowson, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 113. 15. Ibid., pp. 107–11. Widdowson, too, connects this scene with Paula’s baptism ceremony, noting Somerset’s imagined view of her wet, clinging clothes.

5 Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jane?: Revisioning Gender in The Mayor of Casterbridge Pamela Dalziel

Readers of the London periodical the Graphic began the new year in 1886 with the first instalment of Thomas Hardy’s latest novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge. Preceding the novel’s opening chapter was a striking illustration of the young Henchard family on the road to Weydon Priors (Figure 5.1); immediately below the illustration – and below each of the illustrations for the 20 instalments of the novel that appeared weekly from 2 January to 15 May 18861 – was the legend ‘DRAWN BY ROBERT BARNES’. Barnes was a recently appointed and well-regarded staff artist for the Graphic, Hardy a successful author publishing a novel in its pages for the first time,2 and it is tempting to think that the editors viewed this particular match between illustrator and novelist as likely to exploit and enhance the reputation of each, thereby increasing the readership and reputation of the magazine. Of the intrinsic success of Barnes’s illustrations there can be no doubt: they have been generally regarded by literary scholars and art historians alike as the finest of all the contemporary illustrations to Hardy’s fiction. They are of particular importance, however, as constituting the first published response to Hardy’s text and as functioning, by virtue of their large size3 and prominent position at the beginning of each instalment, as the lens through which that text was initially apprehended by the Graphic’s readers. Barnes’s visual interpretation of The Mayor of Casterbridge clearly played a significant role in defining the contemporary Victorian reception of the novel and, I shall argue, even influenced Hardy’s response to his own text to the extent of prompting a substantial revision of his representation of the three principal female characters. Barnes had certain advantages in executing his assignment. By the mid-1880s he was a well-established artist with more than twenty years’ 64

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Figure 5.1 ‘Hay-trussing—?’ said the turnip-hoer, who had already begun shaking his head. ‘O no.’ (Graphic, 2 January 1886)

experience of periodical and book illustration, and more than ten years’ experience of exhibiting genre and landscape paintings at the Royal Academy and the Old Water Colour Society. He was well known for his accomplished if somewhat conventional images of country life and for his ability to represent emotion, especially as manifested in the relationships between adult characters. Moreover, in selecting the settings for the illustrations to The Mayor of Casterbridge he had the direct assistance of Hardy himself. On 5 June 1885 the editor of the Graphic, Arthur Locker, wrote to Barnes: I believe Mr. Car. [i.e., Carmichael] Thomas has written to you enclosing Mr. Hardy’s letter about his story: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’. He enclosed a list of all the real names of the fictitious places mentioned in the Novel. I called on Mr. Hardy this afternoon, & he thought it would be advisable not to mention in Dorchester that you had come for the purpose of illustrating his story, as people might be led to suppose that real personages were described in the tale, but I leave this to your judgment. He also recommended you to put up at the King’s Arms, as that is one of the hostelries described. No doubt you will communicate direct with Mr. Hardy.4

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That Barnes did communicate with Hardy and visit Dorchester as planned is confirmed by the inclusion in his illustrations of such readily identifiable locations as Maumbury Rings, Grey’s Bridge, and Napper’s Mite.5 There is no direct evidence of an actual meeting between the two – precisely, perhaps, because face-to-face discussions rendered correspondence unnecessary6 – but Locker’s reference to a list of place-names supplied by Hardy makes it clear that the latter was continuing to take the marked interest in illustrations to his work, particularly with respect to accuracy of detail, that had begun with his providing sketches for the illustrator of A Pair of Blue Eyes and that had most recently been manifested in his active collaboration with George du Maurier in respect of A Laodicean.7 Barnes’s greatest advantage, however, was the unusual length of time available to him for completion of the illustrations. In Life and Work Hardy recorded that he wrote the last page of The Mayor of Casterbridge on 17 April 1885; by 5 June Barnes had been commissioned to do the illustrations, and by 20 October a complete set of proofs – evidently revises – had been sent by the Graphic to Harper’s Weekly for the simultaneous American serialisation.8 Presumably those proofs were of the text only: in any case, the first instalment of the novel did not appear until 2 January 1886, its publication – so Hardy said – having been delayed because of the illustrations.9 Whether or not that was the true or only reason – it seems more likely that the Graphic had always planned to open the story at the beginning of a new volume – it remains the case that Barnes, unlike Hardy’s other illustrators, not only had several months in which to complete his drawings but also the exceptional opportunity of being able to read the entire novel before beginning work. It is possible only to speculate as to what directions, if any, Barnes received from Arthur Locker rather than from Hardy himself. It is well known that the house of Smith, Elder only reluctantly agreed to publish the two-volume edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge, their manuscript reader, James Payn, having complained that ‘the lack of gentry among the characters made it uninteresting’,10 and even though the Smith, Elder text as published was, as I shall demonstrate, substantially revised from that of the serial, the reviewer in the World (23 June 1886) could still lament: The hind, how virtuous soever he be, is apt to grow irksome on too close acquaintance. Mr. Hardy, I think, gives us a little too much of the hind; and in his last novel . . . his hinds have not even the saving grace of virtue, at least in any great measure. Perhaps I am not quite exact in my use of the word hind. I should rather have said (though I do not like the phrase) the ‘lower classes.’ Excellent folk, no doubt; far more so

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than their brethren whom the accident of fortune ordains to be called ‘upper;’ but as the staple of a novel I cannot find them very engaging. The Graphic, given its role as a news magazine and its leaning towards social realism,11 was perhaps less concerned than the World about the class status of the characters in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Sensitivity on this issue, however, was quite widespread within the urban middle-class audience to which the Graphic was primarily addressed, and it would not be surprising if Locker had encouraged – or perhaps simply trusted – Barnes to interpret Hardy’s text in such a way as to render at least its principal characters more appealing to the class-inflected interest of the magazine’s readers. Certainly Barnes’s opening illustration was designed to attract potential readers: the striking handsomeness of the young Henchard family – who look anything but dusty and travel-worn – is rivalled only by the idyllic beauty of the Dorset countryside. It is clear that, for whatever reason, Barnes’s interpretations of the novel’s major characters – in particular the female characters – did enact enhancements of various kinds, and that these re-presentations had important implications for Hardy’s own return to the serial text prior to the publication of the Smith, Elder two-volume edition. The Smith, Elder edition was published on 10 May 1886, five days before the appearance of the final Graphic instalment. Hardy’s revisions of the serial text for this edition were apparently begun in early 1886, just as the novel – and its illustrations – started to appear in the Graphic. Despite the pressure of time – he was also working on The Woodlanders during the early months of 1886 – Hardy managed to send his American publisher, Henry Holt, his alterations to the first forty chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge. He eventually fell behind, however, so that by 11 May Holt still had not received revised copy for the concluding five chapters and was forced to print them from the Harper’s Weekly serial text.12 Hardy would thus have been (somewhat hurriedly) revising The Mayor of Casterbridge serial while Barnes’s illustrations were appearing weekly in the Graphic, perhaps even while some of them lay literally before him. He may also have seen some of the drawings in draft or proof: Barnes had been working on the illustrations since the previous summer – four (9, 16, 30 January and 6 February) are dated 1885, and the first to be dated 1886 does not appear until 10 April – and since he had consulted with Hardy about their settings it seems likely that he would have sought Hardy’s advance approval of the results. What is in any case certain is that Hardy’s revisions for the Smith, Elder edition brought his representation of Susan, Lucetta, and Elizabeth Jane

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more into line with Barnes’s. In Hardy’s Graphic text Susan is all but invisible: the Casterbridge boys call her ‘The Ghost’ and the townspeople wonder that ‘such a poor fragile woman’ should be Henchard’s choice.13 While not aligned with the ‘undeserving’ poor, she is none the less some distance from middle-class ‘womanliness’: she displays her lack of any ‘idea of gentility’ by leaving Elizabeth Jane unchaperoned at Farfrae’s dance (190.2) and, instead of sharing her daughter’s concern for respectability at any cost, insists, ‘We must pay our way even before we must be respectable’ (70.2). Worse still, she falls into the category of that most-censured of Victorian females, the fallen woman. It is true that Susan is a rather pathetic fallen woman, ‘poor’ and ‘meek’ being the adjectives most frequently applied to her, and that her irregular liaison is whitewashed by Henchard’s assertion that her simplicity in considering herself bound to Newson makes him ‘feel [her] an innocent woman’ (134.2), as well as by Newson’s own insistence that ‘She was as guiltless o’ wrong-doing in that particular as a saint in the clouds’ (479.1). The Victorian myth of the sexually fallen woman did not, however, make such nice distinctions: fallen was fallen, and the shame was ineradicable even if the woman were innocent.14 Moreover, Susan is sufficiently ashamed of her history to have kept it from Elizabeth Jane (134.2), and her premature death aligns her with the conventional typology of the fallen woman, whose inevitable punishment was death or some kind of metaphorical annihilation15 – often reinforced in illustrated fiction by physical unattractiveness, as in J. A. Pasquier’s increasingly unsympathetic rendering of Elfride (who is not even literally fallen) in A Pair of Blue Eyes or Arthur Hopkins’s ‘masculinised’ portrait of Eustacia in The Return of the Native.16 Barnes’s four illustrations of Susan, however, depict a rather different character: unambiguously attractive in the opening image, she retains much of that beauty when pictured eighteen years later at Weydon Priors fair (9 January, Figure 5.2), the King of Prussia (16 January), and the Ring (30 January).17 Her conventional ‘womanliness’, signalled in part in the opening illustration by her maternal absorption, is emphasised in the later illustrations by her respectable mourning clothes, maintained in spite of impending poverty; by her various facial expressions,18 each suggestive of both powerful emotion and an innate dignity; and by her physically submissive posture as she leans upon Henchard (grown several inches taller for the occasion) in a highly romanticised rendering of their meeting in the Ring. In the Weydon Priors illustration, Barnes accentuates Susan’s respectability through the vivid contrast with Mrs Goodenough, the ‘hag’ (42.1) beside her cauldron, clutching her bottle of rum and arrayed in that stock Victorian marker of the not respectable, a torn and dirty apron. Barnes’s Susan, consistently attractive, consistently womanly,

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Figure 5.2 The hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and, looking up slily, whispered, ‘Just a thought o’ rum in it?’ (Graphic, 9 January 1886)

emerges from the illustrations as an entirely sympathetic character, fully worthy of the Graphic readers’ interest and attention. In revising the Graphic text for the Smith, Elder edition, Hardy made his representation of Susan conform more closely to Barnes’s. He reduced Susan’s negligibility and simplicity, altering, for example, ‘Her almost vacuous simplicity’ (42.1) to ‘Her simplicity’,19 and eliminating the description of her intellect as ‘far removed from strong, though not positively weak, as that word is usually understood in this connection’ (18.3–19.1). In the revised text, again, Susan is ‘better educated than her husband’ (i.236), and it is not the absence of any ‘idea of gentility’ but of any ‘idea of conventionality’ that causes her to leave her daughter unchaperoned (190.3, i.207). Even her physical appearance is improved, at least to the extent that Mother Cuxom no longer refers to ‘her skin hanging upon her like a chitterling upon a turning-stick’ (162.1).

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Figure 5.3

The man before her was not Henchard (Graphic, 6 March 1886)

Hardy’s extensive revisions to the representation of Lucetta for the Smith, Elder edition seem also to have originated in Barnes’s illustrations. The Lucetta of Hardy’s Graphic text is distinctly ‘unwomanly’, even immoral. Hiding behind curtains, writing indiscreet letters, and wearing cherry-coloured dresses may seem innocent enough, if somewhat indecorous, but not so her frequent lies and deceptions – to say nothing of her ultimate rejection of Henchard, whom in the serial text she had married prior to Susan’s return. Barnes’s Lucetta, however, is not visually punished for either her moral culpability or her sexual fallenness: his illustrations certainly point up the contrast between Lucetta and the always exemplary Elizabeth Jane, but they also emphasise Lucetta’s physical attractiveness and attempt to elicit a modest amount of reader sympathy for her. Lucetta first appears in the 6 March illustration (Figure 5.3), emerging from behind a curtain in her fullblown Gallic beauty to confront a physically nondescript Farfrae. Dark and voluptuous, with large eyes, full lips, and a curvaceous figure, she

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Figure 5.4 ‘Well, Lucetta, I’ve a bit of news for ye’, he said gaily (Graphic, 17 April 1886)

embodies stereotypical Gallic sensuousness and exoticism.20 In the following week’s illustration, she is juxtaposed to Elizabeth Jane, the uncontested heroine of Barnes’s text, and her ‘otherness’ is represented less positively: though she is still attractive, her face is more rounded, her dark eyes are heavier, and her lips are more pronounced, forming a marked contrast to Elizabeth Jane’s finer (‘English’) features and lighter colouring. Moreover, her look away from Elizabeth Jane – which is not present in Hardy’s text – hints broadly and almost melodramatically at duplicity and secretiveness. This is, however, the only suggestion in the illustrations of Lucetta’s less than exemplary character. In the remaining illustrations she is represented entirely sympathetically: surprised and concerned when she discovers Henchard hay-trussing (10 April, Figure 7), poised and elegant when she greets Farfrae (17 April, Figure 5.4), beautiful and vulnerable when she swoons after witnessing the skimmity-ride (1 May, Figure 8).

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The fallen woman remains beautiful until the end, even when publicly confronted with her shame, and indeed she appears not only at her most glamorous but also at her most womanly in the 17 April illustration, where she leans solicitously over Farfrae only minutes after having committed her most flagrantly deceptive act, the disfigurement of herself in order to play upon Henchard’s sympathies and prevent his revelation of her history. One could argue that this illustration again draws attention to Lucetta’s duplicity by emphasising the discrepancy between the elegantly beautiful woman and the self-created being, ‘withering, ageing, sickly’, who so easily wins Henchard’s pity (422.1), but such an interpretation requires that the instalment be read, whereas what the Graphic reader would initially see and respond to was an inviting image of a conventional domestic scene, complete with a handsome couple and fashionable middleclass interior. When revising the serial for the Smith, Elder edition, Hardy followed Barnes’s lead in creating a Lucetta who would seem more sympathetic to his readers. The new Lucetta is sexually innocent,21 if ‘unwomanly’ in her disregard of appearances: she has neither saved Henchard from drowning nor married him; instead, she has compromised her reputation by too publicly showing her affection while nursing him through illness and depression. She therefore has considerably less reason to insist upon Henchard’s marrying her after Susan’s death, and indeed her motivations in the revised text sometimes seem less than convincing. As the John Bull reviewer complained, ‘Lucetta does not strike us as a very natural personage’ (19 June 1886).22 On the other hand, her rejection of Henchard becomes less culpable, to the extent of permitting the omission of Farfrae’s unwitting condemnation of her refusal to marry her former favourite: ‘I think it shows no great sense of propriety in her – indeed, it shows very little’ (317.2). Moreover, some of the responsibility for Lucetta’s changeability is now placed on her upbringing: she is no longer the merchant’s daughter of ‘good old family’ but the child of a ‘harum-scarum military officer’, who, in her own words, ‘lived about in garrison-towns and elsewhere with my father, till I was quite flighty and unsettled’ (135.1, i.146; i.287). The revisions also downplay Lucetta’s deceptiveness in attempting to gain Henchard’s compassion: although she still seeks to look as undesirable as possible when they meet, she does not disfigure herself with the chemist’s aid, resolving instead to employ ‘persuasion’ rather than ‘artifice’, ‘tears and pleadings’ rather than ‘tears, sacrifice, hypocrisy’ (421.3, ii.160). In the revised text it is ultimately not so much Lucetta’s physical appearance that

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softens Henchard but the choice of the Ring as meeting place, with its echoes of the reunion with Susan. The Lucetta of the Smith, Elder edition, killed off though she still is, would scarcely have deserved visual chastisement. In terms of moral accountability, Lucetta comes to resemble the character shadowed forth in Barnes’s illustrations – which is not to say that she becomes an exemplary figure, for she is still positioned as a foil to Elizabeth Jane and indeed the contrast between the two (again following Barnes) is in some respects heightened. If, for example, Lucetta’s social position is enhanced by the elimination of references to her as ‘a very recent lady’ and the addition of commentary on the discrepancy between her station and Farfrae’s (271.1, 270.1, i.310, ii.25–6), such revisions only serve to emphasise how much less lady-like she seems than Elizabeth Jane. Hardy even reinscribed Barnes’s physical contrasting of the two women, both by drawing attention to Lucetta’s Gallic ancestry – in the revised text she is introduced as a woman ‘of unmistakably French extraction on one side or the other’ who has anglicised her Christian name of ‘Lucette’ (i.285, i.281) – and by newly insisting upon Elizabeth Jane’s physical superiority: ‘Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady [Lucetta] was simply pretty’ (i.255; cf. 270.1, i.285). Barnes’s illustrations certainly celebrate Elizabeth Jane’s beauty, both physical and moral. She is the heroine of his text, appearing in thirteen of the twenty illustrations23 (Henchard himself appears only in nine). Attractive, virtuous, and modest, she embodies all that was defined as ‘womanly’. Moreover, Barnes maintained this sympathetic representation through a wide range of social definitions: poor sailor’s daughter, well-to-do mayor’s step-daughter, lady’s companion, labourer, and finally fiancée and then wife of the new mayor. Elizabeth Jane’s physical beauty is first glimpsed in the illustration of the fair (9 January, Figure 2), while her (womanly) selflessness and freedom from false pride are foregrounded in the following week’s illustration of her waiting upon her mother at the King of Prussia (16 January). Pretty and dreamy-eyed as she stands apart in her modesty from the other King of Prussia patrons to listen to Farfrae’s song (23 January), even prettier in her shy innocence as she meets Farfrae in the granary (6 February, Figure 5.5), Elizabeth Jane increasingly comes to resemble the virtuous young maiden of the stereotype. Indeed, the granary scene rivals Barnes’s opening illustration of the young Henchards in its idealisation, realised in this instance by the attractively sentimental rendering of rural courtship. Elizabeth Jane, graceful in feature, manner, and attire, indicates her

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Figure 5.5 1886)

‘Then it’s somebody wanting to see us both.’ (Graphic, 6 February

budding interest in the handsome young Farfrae – more handsome here than in most of the other illustrations – by gently leaning towards him, while in the background the clean yard, neatly thatched roof, and abundant foliage echo the rural idyll of the opening illustration. Like the dust in that earlier drawing, the cloud of wheat husks clinging to Elizabeth Jane in Hardy’s text is absent from Barnes’s drawing, as is any intimation of the sexually suggestive interaction that is about to take place when Farfrae blows the chaff from her hair, neck, and clothes. To illustrate such a scene – even more intimate, if less aggressive, than the swordexercise in Far from the Madding Crowd – would have been problematic,24 and in any case it would not have been consistent with Barnes’s attempt to engage readers by means of conventionally attractive images and sympathetic evocations of character. It is therefore not surprising that his drawing of a demurely elegant Elizabeth Jane dancing with Farfrae

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Figure 5.6 1886)

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‘Did you do it, or didn’t you? Where was it?’ (Graphic, 27 February

(13 February) should suggest a Victorian fashion plate, or that in selecting his subject for this instalment he should have focused once again on a romantic incident, ignoring the burlesque comedy of Abel without his breeches and even the exotic appeal of Farfrae ‘flinging himself about’ in the costume of a wild Highlander (190.2). The keynote of Barnes’s representation of Elizabeth Jane is ‘womanliness’, realized in her consistently appropriate demeanour and behaviour. In the illustration of her response to Henchard’s insistence that he is her father (20 February), for example, the light falls upon her refined, sculpturesque features as she attempts to conceal her grief, even while the arrangement of the figures so dramatically embodies the overwhelming pain of her emotional rejection of Henchard, every part of her body pulling away from him. In the following week’s illustration (27 February, Figure 5.6), she has curbed her will and become the

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Figure 5.7 Henchard, with withering humility of demeanour, touched the brim of his hat to her (Graphic, 10 April 1886)

conventional dutiful daughter, head submissively bowed while Henchard stands looking down at her in an authoritarian pose, his riding crop prominently visible. In every situation she emerges as exemplary: appropriately attired as she wimbles – in striking contrast to Henchard in the shabby remnants of former prosperity – and with her downward gaze concentrated on her task (10 April, Figure 5.7); courageously compassionate as she supports Lucetta and attempts to draw her away from the scene of the skimmington (1 May, Figure 5.8); and blushingly modest as she gazes out of the window while Farfrae and Newson discuss her marriage (8 May). This conventional representation of womanliness is heightened by the way in which Elizabeth Jane is contrasted – visually and, again, somewhat conventionally – not only with Lucetta but with a variety of women from different social classes. At the fair she and her mother are sharply distinguished from the rest of the crowd by both their dress and personal appearance, just as at the dance she is portrayed as having finer features and more elegant clothes than the other townswomen. The most pronounced contrast, however, is that between Elizabeth Jane and

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Figure 5.8 Lucetta’s eyes were straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel (Graphic, 1 May 1886)

Nance Mockridge (Figure 6), where Nance is unmistakably marked as ‘inferior’ by her ‘masculine’ features and defiantly crossed arms – to say nothing of her torn apron, with its visual link to the emphatically not respectable Mrs Goodenough (Figure 2).25 Barnes’s illustrations mark Elizabeth Jane, like Susan and Lucetta, as a sympathetic character of an acceptable social status, but they also emphasise her exceptionality, hence her suitability for the role of heroine. Some such bolstering of her stature was no doubt necessitated by her narrative situation as an illegitimate child stigmatised by her mother’s

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fallenness. Some Victorians believed that female unchastity was a congenital disease passed down from mother to daughter,26 and such readers would presumably have expected Elizabeth Jane – along with Susan and Lucetta – to receive visual punishment at the illustrator’s hands. But Barnes’s Elizabeth Jane, far from being punished, is consistently celebrated as the embodiment of all the qualities deemed desirable in a woman. The need to preserve that consistency was perhaps responsible for Barnes’s avoidance of one of the most dramatic scenes in the Graphic text, Elizabeth Jane’s courageous attempt to save herself and Lucetta from the enraged bull. The scene, radically abbreviated in all later editions of the novel, originally included the following passage: Elizabeth Jane being much the cooler as well as the stronger [of the two women] had . . . by a combination of dexterity and courage, darted forward and seized the staff affixed to the bull. So accustomed had the animal been to obey the holder of that staff that for a moment – such is discipline – he seemed quite cowed, while the girl cried to Lucetta, ‘Climb the clover-stack!’ But the bull, soon finding that he was in new and fragile hands, began swaying his head this way and that, dragging Elizabeth with him as if she were a reed. Her danger was imminent, and her sole chance lay in keeping the staff extended; while a thrust against the wall might probably have been the end of her. ‘I can hold on no longer,’ she gasped, the hot air from her antagonist’s nostrils blowing over her like a sirocco. She suddenly let go, and scrambled up the clover by a short ladder . . . (342.2) Elizabeth Jane attains relative safety only to discover that Lucetta’s terrified bewilderment has prevented her from climbing the clover-stack and that the bull, horns lowered ‘with deliberate aim’, is about to charge – at which point Henchard arrives, subdues the bull, and carries the now hysterical Lucetta outside (342.3). None of this is suggested by Barnes’s illustration (27 March), which depicts Elizabeth Jane’s meeting with Farfrae immediately after the event, the bull appearing only in the background, an example of ‘rural colour’ rather than of life-threatening danger. While the caption (‘She has gone on with Mr. Henchard, you say?’) creates dramatic suspense by suggesting that Lucetta may have run away with Henchard, the illustrated scene is in itself undramatic, functioning primarily to display Elizabeth Jane at her most animatedly beautiful and – after the instalment has been read – to insist once again upon

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the imperturbable womanliness that in this instance has enabled her to emerge from a perilous encounter unflustered and concerned only for the welfare of others. To represent Elizabeth Jane grasping the bull’s staff would certainly have emphasized her courage and resourcefulness – but at the expense of conventional notions of womanly decorum. Hardy’s decision to omit Elizabeth Jane’s heroic – and in some respects ‘manly’ – struggle with the bull has hitherto been attributed to a desire to decrease the sensationalism of the narrative,27 and it is true that in revising the passage he added a narratorial suggestion that the bull ‘perhaps rather intended a practical joke than murder’ (ii.82). The omission of the scene is, however, entirely consistent with the other extensive revisions to the representation of Elizabeth Jane that Hardy made for the Smith, Elder edition, effectively transforming her into the conventionally exemplary Elizabeth Jane of Barnes’s illustrations, and in the process exchanging an interesting heroine for a rather dull one. Certainly Elizabeth Jane was altogether a much more complex and high-spirited young woman in the Graphic text, where her attempt to rescue Lucetta from the bull is simply one of a sequence of events in which she emerges as both morally and physically the stronger of the two women, whether it be in offering wise counsel or in supporting Lucetta during the skimmington. In Barnes’s representation of the latter episode (Figure 8), Elizabeth Jane, in spite of her own wide-eyed terror, functions essentially as a human flying buttress, literally holding up the fainting Lucetta.28 Barnes has telescoped the sequence of events – in the text Lucetta collapses after returning to the drawing-room – but has successfully captured the essence of Elizabeth Jane’s compassion and presence of mind as she attempts to prevent her former friend from seeing the procession. While such altruistic behaviour, safely circumscribed within the limits of the conventional, remains in the Smith, Elder edition, all transgressive acts have been carefully excised. Little is left of the feisty Elizabeth Jane who in the Graphic vehemently protests against Henchard’s injustice: ‘Why should I be called low, when my lowness is of other people’s making?’ (242.2). This early Elizabeth Jane is altogether less ‘proper’ than her Smith, Elder successor: she allows Farfrae to kiss her on a public highway and meets Newson clandestinely, concealing his return from Henchard (510.3, 511.2).29 Also less than ‘womanly’ is the virulence of her rejection of Henchard. On learning of his lie about her death, she exclaims: ‘what a bad man! . . . I never heard of such a thing! . . . That’s enough. He’s a bad man. I can forget him now. . . . I can never forgive him, and I’m glad he’s gone’ (511.2). In the revised text, she sighs, then says: ‘I said I would never forget him. But, oh! I think I ought to forget him now!’ (ii.290).

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The most significant revision, however, is the complete omission of Henchard’s return on Elizabeth Jane’s wedding-day. In the Smith, Elder text Elizabeth Jane does not see Henchard alive after he leaves Casterbridge – or indeed after her reunion with Newson. Thus there is no confrontation scene: she does not start ‘coldly back’ on first seeing her step-father, address him as ‘Mr. Henchard’, pull her hand from his grasp, or conclude her upbraiding with ‘how can I do anything but hate a man who has served me like this!’ (539:2–3) – words which prove to be the last she ever speaks to him. Her final search for Henchard is therefore not motivated by the discovery of the dead goldfinch and consequent desire to ‘make her peace’ – for there has been no rupture – but by her memories of her step-father and concern for his being ‘homeless – possibly penniless’ (539.3, ii.302). For the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine edition Hardy reinstated a version of the Graphic ending,30 though he moderated Elizabeth Jane’s harshness: she starts back upon seeing Henchard but not ‘coldly’, withdraws her hand ‘gently’, and speaks not of hate but of lost love (‘Oh how can I love, or do anything more for, a man who has served us like this’).31 Marjorie Garson, basing her reading upon the late version, suggests that Elizabeth Jane’s ‘terrible sense of propriety kills Henchard’;32 in the Graphic text, however, what destroys him is the extreme cruelty of Elizabeth Jane’s final words, prompted less by a sense of propriety than by passionate impulsiveness. Although the Elizabeth Jane of the Graphic is unquestionably virtuous, she frequently acts on emotional impulse – entrusting to Farfrae the letters she has been asked to give to Lucetta, telling her life history to a complete stranger, walking unannounced through High Street Hall – even as her desire for respectability is motivated not by an inherent moral rigidity but by her need for love and approval. In omitting much of Elizabeth Jane’s spontaneous unconventionality from the Smith, Elder edition, Hardy effectively re-created her in accordance with Barnes’s image, thereby reducing her to the bland consistency of stereotypical womanliness. The new Elizabeth Jane is irreproachable: guiltless of deception, vehemence, or cruelty – or even of ‘unladylike’ heroism. She is also more intelligent and better educated than her predecessor. References to her lack of knowledge and imperfect education are replaced by an insistence on her ‘great natural insight’ and ‘innate perceptiveness that was almost genius’ (162.1, 241.1, i.162–3). Her aspiration is no longer to play the piano but to speak Italian, acknowledging her need not for ‘a grammar of [her] native tongue’ but for ‘a history of all the philosophies’ (163.1, i.182).33 She reads ‘omnivorously’, teaches herself

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Latin, and uses the occasional dialect word – now defined as ‘pretty and picturesque’ – only out of thoughtlessness, not ignorance (i.246, i.252, i.245, 241.1). Even her ‘round, bold hand’ has become ‘splendid’ (241.3, i.247). Like the Elizabeth Jane of the Barnes illustrations, the Elizabeth Jane of the Smith, Elder edition is thus an exceptional being, innately refined and ‘ladylike’, hence worthy of her role as the novel’s heroine. Hardy was only partially successful, however, in winning critical approbation for the new Elizabeth Jane. Some reviews were certainly unstinting in their praise: the Scotsman (24 June 1886) celebrated her ‘purity, simplicity, and womanly endurance’; the Daily News (30 September 1886) described her as the ‘most sympathetic’ of all the characters, ‘sweet, unselfish, and, though untaught, essentially refined’; and William Dean Howells in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1886) insisted that, ‘with her unswerving right-mindedness and her never-failing self-discipline, [she] is a very beautiful and noble figure; and Mr. Hardy has made her supremely interesting merely by letting us see into her pure soul.’ On the other hand, the Guardian (28 July 1886) condemned her ‘unpleasantly cold-blooded view both of the blessings that have been granted to her and of the troubles of other people’, lamenting that ‘she will always be respectable, but without a spark of sympathy, love, or admiration’; John Bull (19 June 1886) claimed not to ‘care very much’ for her; the Saturday Review (29 May 1886) pronounced her ‘excellent, but rather more than a trifle dull’; and R. H. Hutton in the Spectator (5 June 1886) defined her as ‘a reticent and self-contained nature of singular gentleness and wisdom, . . . though the carefully subdued tone of the character makes it seem a little tame’. It is interesting, and perhaps significant, that two of the most positive responses to Elizabeth Jane came from commentators who had evidently seen Barnes’s illustrations and could therefore have been influenced by them: the Daily News reviewer referred specifically to the Graphic serialization and Howells, a regular Harper’s contributor, would have seen the Harper’s Weekly serialisation.34 Equally interesting is the fact that no reference to the serial publication was made by any of the reviewers who found Elizabeth Jane less than sympathetic. Generations of subsequent readers, also deprived of the influence of Barnes’s illustrations and confronted with the watered-down Elizabeth Jane of the post-Graphic texts, have for the most part echoed the blandly unenthusiastic response of the Victorians who found her virtuous but dull. Dismissed by Rosemarie Morgan as one of Hardy’s ‘sexually most tepid heroines’ and branded by Marjorie Garson as someone who ‘always lines up with the Father . . . and with the

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patriarchal order’, Elizabeth Jane has been largely invisible in the recent proliferation of feminist readings of Hardy.35 In creating, consciously or unconsciously, a more Barnesian Elizabeth Jane, Hardy effectively erased the proto-feminist heroine of the serial, the young woman who could struggle with a bull, exclaim against injustice, and declare her hatred. The Elizabeth Jane of the Graphic has much in common with Hardy’s other spirited, unconventional heroines, and her combination of traditional womanly virtues and ‘masculine’ courage and assertiveness aligns her with characters such as Gabriel Oak and Diggory Venn, who are celebrated for their ability to unite ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ characteristics.36 She was clearly intended to be both a sympathetic and an exemplary character. A substantial portion of the narrative is filtered through her, and her philosophical views often echo Hardy’s own – not only in the famous concluding passage where she wonders at her current tranquillity after a youth that ‘had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain’ (542.2), but also in her insistence throughout the novel that, like Hardy’s poetic persona, she ‘never expected much’ (see, for example, chapters 14, 18, 25, and 44). For Barnes, Hardy’s story belonged primarily to the women: Susan, Lucetta, and especially Elizabeth Jane. His idealising tendencies were, however, limited to women of a certain social class, Mrs Goodenough (Figure 2) and Nance Mockridge (Figure 6) being realised only in negative stereotypes of the not respectable, accentuated by their juxtaposition to, respectively, Susan and Elizabeth Jane, exemplifiers of equally stereotypical conventions of middle-class womanliness. In thus representing the female characters, Barnes was emphasising social contrast rather than producing the social reportage that might have been expected both from the Graphic, with its reputation for social realism, and from Hardy’s text, with its echoes, in the vivid descriptions of Mixen Lane, of the language of urban ‘residuum’ so common in the social debates of the 1880s.37 Such social contrasts are of course present in Hardy’s highly class-conscious text, carefully distinguishing as it does gradations of the social spectrum, as when, for example, it differentiates between the frequenters of Peter’s Finger and the King of Prussia, while also identifying a third group who belonged to the ‘crest’ of the former and the ‘lowest fringe’ of the latter (422.3). None the less, the frequency with which Hardy’s characters slide up and down the social scale suggests a certain fluidity of class categorization that is certainly absent from Barnes’s representations of labouring women, where social difference is signalled not only by attitude and clothing (as in Hardy’s text) but also by physical features.

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Excellent artist though he was, and responsive to many of the nuances of Hardy’s text, Barnes was at the same time a professional illustrator who evidently saw it as his responsibility to draw readers to the novel and to the Graphic itself both by creating attractive and sympathetic images of the protagonists and by locating all the characters within easily identifiable conventional categories. His very success in achieving this objective led inevitably to a simplification of the gender and class complexities of the authorial text. That Barnes’s interpretations should have prompted Hardy to make his central female characters more conventional is a striking testimony to the power of the visual to influence the verbal. That those authorial revisions should ultimately have resulted in a decrease in reader sympathy for Elizabeth Jane – rather than the enhancement Barnes had evidently intended – is just another of life’s little ironies.

Notes I would like to thank Simon Gatrell, Katherine Montwieler, and especially Michael Millgate for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1. The American serialisation of The Mayor of Casterbridge in Harper’s Weekly also ran from 2 January to 15 May 1886, but included only 17 of Barnes’s 20 illustrations. The missing illustrations are those for the 17 April, 8 May, and 15 May instalments. 2. Hardy’s story ‘The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid’ had been published in the Graphic, Summer Number, 1883. 3. The illustrations measure 22.1–23.0 by 17.4–17.75 cm; 12 are placed vertically and 8 horizontally. 4. Colby College Library, Waterville, Maine. 5. For a detailed account of the correspondences between Casterbridge and Dorchester, see Denys Kay-Robinson, The Landscape of Thomas Hardy (Exeter: Webb and Bower, 1984), 8–29. 6. Barnes is included in Hardy’s address book (Dorset County Museum). 7. See Pamela Dalziel, ‘Illustrations’, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 197–9. 8. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 177; Arthur Locker to Barnes, 5 June 1885 (Colby College Library); Locker to Hardy, 20 October 1885 (Dorset County Museum). The 20 October letter refers only to ‘a complete set of proofs’ having been sent; however, the small number of substantive variants between the Graphic text and the Harper’s text (both of which include readings not present in the manuscript) suggests that the proofs sent to America were revises. The most significant of the differences between the two serial texts were apparently dictated by space constraints in Harper’s; Dale Kramer lists several examples in ‘Explanatory Notes’, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 9. Hardy to Frederick Macmillan, 27 November 1885, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols.

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10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), i.139; Hardy to T. B. Aldrich, 10 December 1885 (Beinecke Library). Life and Work, 186. See Julian Treuherz, Hard Times: Social Realism in Victorian Art (London: Lund Humphries, in association with Manchester City Art Galleries, 1987), 53–64. On 8 February Holt asked Hardy if he was to expect advance sheets of the Smith, Elder edition; by 11 May Holt’s editor Joseph Vogelius was able to tell Harper’s that the first forty chapters had been received ‘Some time ago’ (Holt Letter Books, Princeton). As Simon Gatrell points out, ‘The copy Hardy sent to America would probably have been unrevised proofs for Smith, Elder’s English edition, since though there were more than 500 revisions in the first forty chapters of Holt’s edition, there were 250 further changes to these chapters in the English edition, changes presumably made on the proofs and incorporated in revises that were never sent to America’ (Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 80). Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Graphic 33 (2 January-15 May 1886): 161.3. Subsequent references to this edition of the novel appear in the text and specify only the page and column numbers. See, for example, Caroline Norton’s Lost and Saved (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1863), which in many respects challenges the fallen-woman myth but does not question Beatrice’s sense of shame upon discovering that she has been deceived by a mock marriage. Cf. the similar representation (and situation) of Tess in the serial version of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. See Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). See Pamela Dalziel, ‘A Note on the Illustrations’, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 381–2; and ‘Anxieties of Representation: The Serial Illustrations to Hardy’s The Return of the Native’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (June 1996): 84–110. All of the Graphic illustrations are reproduced in the most recent Penguin Classics edition of The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Keith Wilson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), and are posted on the Thomas Hardy Association website (http://www.zusas.uni-halle.de/~ttha/ index_of_subjects.htm). The King of Prussia was the original name for the Three Mariners; Hardy altered this and other place names in an attempt to create a consistent concept of Wessex for the Osgood, McIlvaine ‘Wessex Novels’ edition. Arlene M. Jackson points out that Susan’s face is ‘bright and alive’ in Barnes’s drawings, especially in the 16 January illustration scene where she overhears Henchard’s voice (Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 97). Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Smith, Elder, 1886), i.43. Subsequent references to this edition of the novel appear in the text and can be distinguished from references to the Graphic edition by the presence of the roman volume number. Wilson’s Penguin Classics text is based upon the Smith, Elder edition. Wilson (383) makes a similar point and also notes the contrast with Elizabeth Jane. For the 1895 Osgood, McIlvaine edition, Hardy once again altered the nature of the Henchard-Lucetta relationship, unambiguously defining it as a sexual

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22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

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liaison, and thereby effectively reinstating an abandoned manuscript representation; see Christine Winfield, ‘The Manuscript of Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge’, PBSA, 67 (1973): 55. The reviewers’ response to Lucetta was by no means consistent: the Spectator (5 June 1886) maintained that she was ‘admirably touched off’, the Pall Mall Gazette (9 July 1886) that she was ‘very thinly shadowed forth’; the World (23 June 1886) described her as a ‘minx’, the Daily News (30 September 1886) as a generous patron to Elizabeth Jane. Both Jackson (96) and Philip V. Allingham (‘Robert Barnes’ Illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge as serialised in The Graphic’, Victorian Periodicals Review 28 (1995): 36) count only eleven; they have presumably overlooked Elizabeth Jane’s presence immediately behind Susan at Weydon Priors fair (9 January, Figure 2) and to the left of the settle during Farfrae’s singing at the King of Prussia (23 January). Representing potentially erotic material was less problematic if the subjects were safely distanced from European society; compare, for example, E. K. Johnson’s Graphic illustrations to H. Rider Haggard’s less than decorous African tale of adventure, She, serialised 2 October 1886–1 January 1887. For Marjorie Garson, the class difference in the illustration is signalled by Nance’s ‘boldly facing the reader and scratching her elbows’ while the ‘daintily dressed’ Elizabeth Jane bows her head deferentially towards Henchard (Hardy’s Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 115 n.). Nead, 50 and passim. Kramer, ‘Note on the Text’, The Mayor of Casterbridge, p. xxxvi. Compare the body positioning of the wife supporting her husband after he receives a distressing letter in George Elgar Hicks, Woman’s Mission: Companion of Manhood, 1863 (Tate Gallery). Both Kramer (The Mayor of Casterbridge, p. xl) and Wilson (p. xlvi) comment upon the elimination of Elizabeth Jane’s deceptiveness in the Smith, Elder edition. Because Holt did not receive revised copy of the final five chapters, his edition reproduced the serial ending. At the urging of Rebekah Owen and others, who insisted that the English edition had lost much in its revision, Hardy again revised the text; see Hardy’s Preface to the Osgood, McIlvaine edition and Carl J. Weber, Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1952), 64–6, 86. The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895), 395–6. Garson, 111. For additional examples, see Kramer, The Mayor of Casterbridge, p. xli. The Daily Telegraph (27 May 1886) praised the serial’s ‘graceful illustrations from a facile pencil’, but unfortunately did not comment upon Elizabeth Jane. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1988), 51; Garson, 117. Elizabeth Jane is not even mentioned in Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), or Margaret R. Higonnet, ed., The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). The only feminist article published on this

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novel analyzes the representation of the male protagonist (Elaine Showalter, ‘The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge’, in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (London: Macmillan, 1979), 99–115). 36. See Linda M. Shires, ‘Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd’, in The Sense of Sex, 53–8, and Dalziel, ‘Anxieties of Representation’, 108. 37. For an astute analysis of Hardy’s ‘urbanizing’ of the rural in The Mayor of Casterbridge, see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 53–60.

6 ‘The Thing must be Male, we suppose’: Erotic Triangles and Masculine Identity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Melville’s Billy Budd Richard Nemesvari

Towards the end of 1891 an author whose earlier works had already earned him both popularity and notoriety was finishing the revisions on a story of intense passion, betrayal, and murder. The main character of this story is so physically attractive that they are literally called ‘beauty’ by some they encounter, but finally it is their extraordinary innocence and purity which sets them apart. Tragically, however (and the text’s intrusive third-person narrator is insistent that this is a tragedy), it is just these qualities that draw the attentions of two men who, between them, manage to bring about the main character’s destruction. The first of these is driven by a dark, sensual desire to possess that innocence and purity, so that within the standard value-systems of a nineteenth-century novel he must be designated the ‘villain’. However, this particular text is ambivalent about assigning such designations. His rival, whose very name carries a celestial connotation, seems to hold a much more elevated desire, but in the end he is equally instrumental in causing the central character’s death. It therefore becomes difficult to think of him as a ‘hero’, even though the protagonist clearly does. Thus the story is brought to its tragic conclusion when the main character, believing that through the corrupting influence of the first man they have forever forfeited the regard and respect of the second, strikes and kills their 87

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dark tormentor. The result is that the main character is executed by being hanged, and the reader is left with a deep sense that something very special has been wasted and lost. The startling thing about both this date and plot description is that they can be applied equally well to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. Yet it is impossible that Hardy knew about Melville’s sea tale, and highly unlikely that Melville was influenced by Hardy’s Wessex novel. Melville had most of his narrative completed by 1888, well before the 1891 American serialisation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in Harper’s Bazaar. Further, since Melville had not completed the revisions to his story when he died on 28 September 1891, Billy Budd was not actually published until 1924. Clearly Hardy could not have seen it when he was composing Tess of the d’Urbervilles, nor did Melville live long enough to read Hardy’s completed text. It is this that makes the congruencies between them so remarkable1 and the question then becomes, having ruled out direct influence, what could have caused such a series of similarities? The answer is contained in my title: Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Billy Budd are joined by the central structuring motif of erotic triangles, and by the anxieties about masculine identity that such triangles create. It is this that generates the almost eerie connections between them, so that despite their obvious differences they share a theme that shapes their plots in similar ways. Each text, the first through the development of a heterosexual erotic triangle and the second through the presentation of a homoerotic triangle, demonstrates late nineteenth-century fears that masculinity is threatened by desire. The death of the main character apparently neutralises that threat, but Hardy’s conclusion ironically exposes the destructive nature of culturally determined masculinity while Melville’s homophobically attempts to re-establish the status, quo. More specifically, both Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare find their self-conception of masculinity endangered by their desire for Tess. This danger increases when each becomes aware of the other’s existence as a rival, because it forces them to confront the precarious status of the masculine identity they have constructed. Their destruction of Tess is a direct result of their attempt to stabilise that identity, and in so doing defeat the rival who embodies an alternative vision of self which they cannot accept. Billy Budd is a useful coordinate text in this case because it provides a very similar but much more extreme version of the same process. As John Claggart and Edward ‘Starry’ Vere are forced to confront their homoerotic desire for Billy, they are also forced to confront the possibility that their masculinity is irreparably compromised.

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Claggart’s attempt to ‘ruin’ Billy through his false accusation of sedition is much like Alec’s attempt to ‘ruin’ Tess through his relentless and forced seduction; each seeks to encompass the object of his desire as a way of both controlling the response that object evokes, and of demonstrating power over him/her. Similarly, Vere’s idealised vision of Billy as ‘the Handsome Sailor’2 replicates Angel’s idealised vision of Tess as a ‘fresh and virginal daughter of Nature’,3 and for both once that vision is lost the character that embodies it must be sacrificed. Although finally the two texts work towards a very different resolution to the shared questions they raise, together they reveal a culturally significant moment when nineteenth-century definitions of masculinity had reached a crisis. Thus a reading of the Alec/Tess/Angel dynamic, informed by the parallel triangle of Claggart, Billy, and Vere, helps us to understand a larger part of what made Tess so controversial. Almost immediately, however, the figure of Alec d’Urberville raises a problem. How can a character who is almost universally dismissed as a cardboard cutout bounder possibly carry much cultural significance? Many Victorian reviewers saw him as a weak link in the dramatic action, and their position is stated most clearly, and with by far the most good humour, in the February 1892 issue of Punch: The only blot on this otherwise excellent work is the absurdly melodramatic character of that ‘villain of the deepest dye’, Alec D’Urberville, who would be thoroughly in his element in an Adelphi Drama of the most approved type, ancient or modern. He is just the sort of stage-scoundrel who from time to time seeks to take some mean advantage of a heroine in distress, on which occasions said heroine . . . will request him to ‘unhand her’, or to ‘stand aside and let her pass’; whereupon the dastardly ruffian retaliates with a diabolical sneer of fiendish malice, his eyes ablaze with passion, as, making his melodramatic exit at the O.P. wing, he growls, ‘Aha! A day will come!’ or ‘She must and shall be mine!’ or, if not making his exit, but remaining in centre of stage to assist in forming a picture, he exclaims, with fiendish glee, ‘Now, pretty one, you are in my power!’ and so forth. ‘Tis a great pity that such a penny-plain-and-two-pencecoloured scoundrel should have been allowed so strong a part among Mr. Hardy’s excellent and unconventional dramatis personæ. . . . However, there he is, and all the perfumes of the Vale of Blackmoor will not suffice for dispelling the strong odour of the footlights which pervades every scene where this unconscionable scoundrel makes his appearance.4

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This comment elaborates usefully on an earlier, much harsher, evaluation of the novel that appeared in the Saturday Review of 16 January 1892, and which declared ‘Let it at once be said that there is not one single touch of nature . . . in any . . . character in the book. All are stagey, and some are farcical.’5 Both reviewers are clearly disturbed (in different degrees) by Hardy’s apparent willingness to contaminate his text with a character derived from the Victorian stage, and in particular with a melodramatic villain. Given the literary values of the time, this is perfectly understandable. Under the influence of George Eliot what might be called ‘high realism’ was seen as the hallmark of serious fiction, and it often explicitly identified itself in contrast with the ‘non-literary’ excesses and attractions of popular theatre, and of those popular genres derived from it such as the sensation novel. In spite of what Victorian reviewers expected and demanded, however, Alec’s presentation is congruent both with Hardy’s anti-realist aesthetic and with the novel’s exploration of masculine identity. Recent critics of Hardy such as Peter Widdowson and Linda Shires are unapologetic about his refusal to fit the paradigms of realism. Widdowson, in his book Hardy in History, bluntly asserts that it is ‘perversely inappropriate to critically recast [Hardy’s] fiction in the formal-realist mode’,6 while Shires in her essay for the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy states ‘Hardy is fundamentally anti-realistic. He does not practice a mimetic art which reproduces a likeness of the external world. . . . Though, as a pre-eminent story-teller, he does not abandon mimesis completely, Hardy undermines the bases of mimetic representation.’7 Given such evaluations, we can stop treating Alec as an embarrassing intrusion into a realist text and begin asking what role Hardy believed a melodramatic villain could usefully fulfil in the economies of his narrative. And within the bounds of melodrama this particular type of character represents a very specific type of masculinity. The construction of the ‘cad’, the ‘bounder’ or the ‘scoundrel’ in Victorian dramatic discourse rests on two main foundations: an excessive sensuality which finds its expression in a predatory sexuality, and the connected willingness to overpower the desired woman if attempts at seduction fail. In other words, the refusal to sublimate sexual desire to more socially acceptable ends is what identifies this type of character as a villain. That Alec matches this description is obvious, but the more interesting issue is what such a character represents in the wider cultural realm, and for the most part this can be linked to a definition of manliness centred on repeated sexual conquest. To have wide sexual experience is to be a ‘real man’, even though it is also the defining indication of villainy within the

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dramatic/literary construct. Annette Federico sums this up when, after noting the large number of prostitutes available in London and throughout Victorian England, she observes that: Male chastity and fidelity may be middle-class virtues, but promiscuity and adultery make up middle-class reality. Gentlemen are not hard on themselves for living out these contradictions to the full . . . a man may say he’s a rogue or a scoundrel in his relationships with women, but by God, he’s red-blooded.8 Further, in the chapter on ‘Cads’ in The Trials of Masculinity, Angus McLaren suggests that the ‘chief effect’ of this male formulation ‘was to attribute the sexual dangers prevalent in modern society to the moral failings of a few wretches and to deflect attention from . . . social conditions’.9 Hardy’s presentation of Alec as a villain of melodrama, therefore, calls attention to the sexual hypocrisy at the core of this masculine identity by embodying it in its most sensational form, while at the same time revealing the social codes contributing to female vulnerability that this stereotype attempts to elide. But he does more than this. By going on to demonstrate that such a formulation of identity is actually extremely vulnerable and unstable, Hardy reinforces its unsatisfactory nature on multiple levels, and thus exposes its inadequacy as a role for men along with its destructive effect on women. This is not, however, to perversely argue that the reader is somehow meant to sympathise with Alec. When I suggest the masculinity he embodies is vulnerable I am not saying that he is himself vulnerable in the way Tess clearly is, or that his coercive power over her is significantly reduced. Yet Tess’s character provides a real challenge to his masculine sense of self, and therefore has the potential to undermine it. Rosemarie Morgan has argued that Tess’s combination of ‘sexual vigour and moral rigour’ precludes assigning her the status of passive victim,10 and it is just these qualities which have the possibility of undercutting the ‘bounder’ figure of melodrama. Thus almost from the beginning of their interaction Tess manages to resist Alec in ways which prevent the complete fulfillment of his desire to possess her. In the scene in which Alec manages to force Tess to put her arms around him by driving his dog-cart wildly, and eventually uses the same ruse to give her ‘the kiss of mastery’, she nonetheless manages by ‘wip[ing] the spot on her cheek that had been touched by his lips’ to ‘[undo] the kiss, as far as such a thing was physically possible’. Alec’s reaction, ‘You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!’, reveals both that he is not used to such rejection, and

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that he has yet to learn he is dealing with more than a ‘cottage girl’ (Tess, 73). And when he attempts one further time to use this strategy to get another kiss, he is completely foiled by Tess’s counter strategy of letting her hat blow off and then refusing to get back into the gig. After furiously trying to pin her with the vehicle, and in turn receiving a tongue-lashing by Tess, Alec confesses ‘Well – I like you all the better’, so that after Tess still refuses to ride with him we are told he feels ‘a sort of fierce distress at the sight of the tramping he had driven her to undertake’ (Tess, 74). Since it is extremely unlikely that Alec has experienced anything like this with either Car or Nancy Darch, the other labouring women he has had as lovers, already his reactions to Tess are forcing him in new, potentially self-subversive, directions. His inability to treat her as just another conquest complicates his response to her, and this is clear in the narrative leading up to the incident in the Chase, and especially in their subsequent parting. But to introduce any complications into the stock type which Alec represents is to seriously qualify that type by demonstrating that its urges towards sexual domination may, by generating the possibility of thwarted desire, seriously threaten masculine security. And it is this that connects Hardy’s text to the world of Billy Budd. In his story, as Melville struggles to describe the passion Claggart feels for Billy without actually stating ‘the love that dare not speak its name,’ his narrator provides a series of convoluted descriptions of this character’s emotions. Thus, after asserting that it is Billy’s ‘significant personal beauty’ (Billy, 77) that first draws Claggart’s attention, the narrator provides the following evaluation: One person excepted, [Claggart] was perhaps the only man in the ship capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain, disdain of innocence – to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it. With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part allotted it. (Billy, 78)

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What this passage makes clear is that, as much as Billy’s beauty, it is his innocence that Claggart wishes to possess and, by possessing it, to assert complete control over this figure who has so provoked him. Claggart’s forbidden homoerotic response to Billy becomes not only the devastating indication of his own ‘failed’ masculinity, but also the marker of his failure to gain what he truly desires: the innocence which such desire reveals to be inescapably gone. Melville’s final image of the scorpion, which in its frustrated rage stings itself to death, foreshadows Claggart’s inevitable self-destruction, since his dilemma cannot be resolved. And Alec d’Urberville finds himself in a very similar position. Since, unlike Claggart’s same-sex desire, his heterosexual lust for Tess empowers him to act, he can at least pursue his seduction. But, like Claggart, he is forced to confront the ‘moral phenomenon’ that is Tess, which in turn reveals that she possesses what he does not. And as Hardy makes abundantly clear, he can no more penetrate her purity and innocence than Claggart can Billy’s. His self-defeat, therefore, is equally inevitable, and his and Claggart’s death closely parallel each other. And to reinforce what I have been suggesting I would like to look briefly at the scene in which Tess and Alec part. A fact that is not always emphasised here, perhaps because it is so obvious, is that Tess leaves Alec, and that he pursues her and tries to convince her to return. Again, this does not indicate any absolute reversal of the power relationship presented, but it is manifest that Alec’s desire for her is not gone, while hers for him is, and this has forced Alec into an uncharacteristic role. The text here echoes the earlier scene with Tess and Alec in the dog-cart, but with some significant variations. Thus although when he insists that she kiss him Tess says ‘If you wish . . . See how you’ve mastered me!’ (Tess, 111), the actual description of the kiss raises questions about just how absolute that mastery is: She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek – half perfunctorily, half as if zest had not yet quite died out. Her eyes vaguely rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was given, as though she were nearly unconscious of what he did. (Tess, 111) Tess’s complete uninterest is clear, and she is twice given the opportunity in their final confrontation to declare that she does not love Alec; on this level at least, she rejects him. Further, Tess’s mournful

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sense of defilement manages to touch Alec, so that the narrator informs us that he ‘emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility’ (Tess, 111). Certainly this is the first time we have been told that Alec possesses either a heart or a conscience, and although the inclusion of ‘gentility’ at the end of this list undercuts the profundity of his response, nonetheless he is no longer able to position himself as an uncaring seducer. Tess, and his by this point unreciprocated desire for her, has managed to undermine the masculine identity he has constructed, and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that for a time she actually destroys it. When next we see Alec he is a ranting preacher who has wholly given up sensual pursuits, and he is explicit in identifying the difference between Tess and the other women he has victimised: ‘Why I did not think small of you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so there was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no contempt, and you are she’ (Tess, 441). What Hardy has done with Alec is present a still culturally powerful vision of Victorian masculinity and, by bringing it into conflict with a complex presentation of female sexuality and purity, demonstrated its all but complete inadequacy. Alec’s eventual crisis in masculine identity results in a personal backlash that throws him to the opposite extreme, a situation that is guaranteed to be as unstable and inadequate as his original position. For that instability to reach its full destructive power, however, what is required is a rival who will create the kind of erotic triangle that embodies sexual conflict and the masculine will to power. In other words, what is required is the advent of Angel Clare. Now of course Angel actually appears in the novel before Alec, but the May Day scene in which he fails to choose Tess as a dance partner has more to do with Hardy’s establishment of tragic missed chances than it does with masculinity. It is Angel’s presentation at Talbothays Dairy, and his subsequent actions, which is crucial to the novel’s exploration of masculine identity, and Victorian reviewers had almost as much trouble with his character as they did with that of Alec d’Urberville’s. Again starting with a largely positive review, the anonymous writer for the Pall Mall Gazette of 31 December 1891 is forced to acknowledge that ‘Angel Clare . . . is perhaps less satisfying than the simpler rustic charactry of Tess and her father and mother, and the other country-folk, who are pure Wessex . . . judged by Mr. Hardy’s own standard, Angel Clare, difficult type as he is to present, is not altogether a convincing

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creation.’11 The problem reviewers had was stating exactly what ‘difficult type’ of character Angel was meant to represent, and in this case nothing so easy as the formulas of melodrama were available. Yet one critic did manage to identify a significant element of Angel’s character while at the same time indicating why he made so many Victorian readers uneasy. Margaret Oliphant’s review of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which appeared in the March 1892 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, adopts just the kind of tone most likely to irritate Hardy. A mixture of supercilious praise and hectoring criticism, it claims to appreciate the book even as its attitude is clearly dismissive. When reading Oliphant’s comments, however, it is important to remember that her article is in fact a double review, something that is not always reproduced when the piece is anthologised. Along with Tess she also reviews Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s The History of David Grieve, and her comments on Angel have an added significance when read in relation to her comments on that novel’s main character. What Oliphant emphasises over and over is the ‘womanly’ nature of Ward’s hero. Discussing his youth, the review observes: It strikes a most curious note when we are informed that George Sand had the chief part in forming the mind of Mr David Grieve – which, by the way, is first awakened by reading ‘Shirley,’ of all books in the world a work which we should have supposed to be entirely feminine in its influence.12 Statements such as these are supplemented by claims that Elise, David’s lover, is ‘conventional and ordinary from head to foot – except for the mere fact that she takes the young man’s rôle, and that David is the adoring visionary maiden’,13 and that even though their love affair is vulgar and hackneyed ‘[a]s it happens to be a man who plays the usual woman’s part, there is no particular harm done’.14 This line of thought culminates, after David weakly faints upon discovering his sister’s suicide, in the disapproving assessment, ‘But then, it is true, he has always been a very feminine man.’15 Clearly what Oliphant is criticising is Ward’s decision to have an unmanly man as her protagonist, and this creates an interesting perspective on her reading of Angel, and potentially on ours. The 1890s were a particularly fraught period for masculine identity in England. Controversy over the ‘New Woman’ raised increasing worries that British men were losing their ‘manliness’, so that fears about male enervation and its potential impact both at home and in the Empire

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were rising rapidly. This helps to explain the tone of Oliphant’s reaction to Angel: [I]t is perhaps not less unlikely that a parson’s son in Wessex should carry a harp about with him, than that he should be called Angel Clare. He is truly worthy of the name, being the most curious thing in the shape of a man whom we think we have ever met with – at least out of a young lady’s novel. We can at our ease gently deride David Grieve for being feminine, for he is the creation of a lady. But before Mr. Angel Clare we stand aghast. What is he? Had he, too, been framed by a woman, how we should have smiled and pointed out his impossibility! . . . But before the name of Mr. Hardy we can only gasp and be silent. The thing must be male, we suppose, since a man made it, and it is certainly original as a picture of a man.16 At first it may seem counter-intuitive to describe Angel as ‘effeminate’, since his obvious sexual attraction to and arousal by Tess appears wholly masculine. But in terms of his ability to control, and when necessary deny, that arousal, he embodies ideologies used to police female sexuality. Victorian beliefs about a proper woman’s sexual desire focus on the need to repress it before marriage, and to sublimate it fully to children and family afterwards, so that it never expresses itself in an unregulated form. What Hardy has done with the figure of Angel Clare, then, is to show how the masculine identity of what might be called the ‘gentleman hero’ rests on a gender fault line. James Eli Adams notes that this relatively recent construction of manhood was created specifically in response to accusations of over-effeminacy, so that middle-class Victorian men could ‘lay claim to the capacity for self-discipline as a distinctly masculine attribute and in their different ways embody masculinity as a virtuoso asceticism’.17 Just as Alec’s presentation through the conventions of the melodramatic villain is an extreme that reveals the instabilities of an older, phallic, version of masculinity, the extremity of Angel’s character exposes the failings of this newer version that, in its attempt to oppose itself to the cad and the bounder, simply creates additional modes of oppression. What leaves Margaret Oliphant ‘aghast’ is not the fact that a male author could create an Angel Clare, but rather that Hardy uses him to advance a gender critique which the reviewer finds both disturbing and dangerous, something she was to make overt in her scathing attack on Jude the Obscure four years later. Far from assuaging late-nineteenth-century anxieties about masculinity, Tess of the d’Urbervilles exacerbates them by insisting on the insufficiency of both older and newer forms of masculine identity.

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As others have pointed out, Angel’s destructive influence on Tess is greater than Alec’s, and Michael Millgate makes this point succinctly when he asserts that ‘what finally destroys poor Tess is not, of course, her sexual betrayal by Alec but the far more radical infidelity of the man in whom she has voluntarily invested all her trust and love’.18 And at the core of this ‘radical infidelity’ is Angel’s failure to deal successfully with the desire Tess creates within him. Throughout much of their interaction at Talbothays Angel is shown either trying to contain that desire, or channel it in directions that allow him to feel in control of the situation. This is as crucial to his sense of masculine self as conquest and penetration is to Alec, but it requires a considerably more complex set of internal and external rationalisations. These are developed through specific scenes and direct narrative commentary, each working to reinforce Hardy’s exposure of their disastrous consequences. One example of such a scene occurs in the early-morning rambles Angel and Tess take at the dairy. Here the narrator describes Angel’s response to his companion: Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist-stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east . . . It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly – which she did not like because she did not understand them. (Tess, 185–6) Many critics have commented on Angel’s tendency to idealise Tess and thus create a fantasy of her that contributes to his shocked rejection when it collapses. But as important is his willingness to treat her as an abstraction. Almost the first physical characteristic we are told about Angel is that he has ‘abstracted eyes’ (Tess, 164), and although in this passage it is the pre-dawn light which causes Tess to look as she does this merely reinforces a way of ‘seeing’ her which Angel already wishes to encourage. That she is ‘ghostly’, ‘a soul at large’, ‘a visionary essence’, all serve to remove her into a realm of rarified response that attempts to neutralise the physical response she provokes. As Elisabeth Bronfen puts it: ‘[Angel’s] desire for her spiritualized figure suggests that the more divested she is of bodily substance and specific meaning the more entirely is she available to his libidinal investment without

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threatening the construction of his self image.’19 Similarly, transforming her into Artemis and Demeter is a way of intellectualising her, of using his classical education to create images of chastity and fertility that, because they are images, are removed from the actual woman in front of him. They also serve to establish his superiority of learning over Tess, whose failure to understand his allusions helps maintain the class distance between them threatened by their shared tasks at Talbothays. This is a further effort to ensure that Tess does not breach his self-control, since it reminds him of the social constraints that prevent the son of an Anglican parson from ‘honourably’ pursuing a milkmaid. For Angel, as a gentleman, sexual self-discipline, honour, and masculinity are all tied together, so strategies that support one are meant to support all, and this, in turn, helps to explain his response when that self-control finally lapses. Although Angel manages to prevent himself from kissing Tess when he has her in his arms, after carrying the other dairymaids through the notorious puddle which gave Hardy’s editors at The Graphic so much trouble, it is clear that this event brings him close to the breaking point. Thus in the very next chapter, as he contemplates the ‘distracting, infatuating, maddening’ shape of Tess’s lips (Tess, 212), we are told: they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well-nigh produced a qualm; and actually produced by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze. . . . The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the sky, did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and . . . went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and kneeling down beside her, clasped her in his arms. (Tess, 213) The comically orgasmic sneeze, which is Angel’s response to his sexual arousal, demonstrates the involuntary nature of his reaction, and emphasises what the rest of the passage shows: what Angel feels is in some ways against his own inclination. Like ‘a defeated battalion’ Angel’s masculine restraint has been overwhelmed by his passion for Tess, and that she is described as ‘the desire of his eyes’ indicates the replacement of the ‘abstracted’ vision he has so carefully laboured to construct by the specifically named ‘desire’. His extremely disjointed reaction to what has happened clearly shows his ambivalence:

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‘Well – I have betrayed my feelings, Tess, at last,’ said he with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart had outrun his judgement. ‘That I – love you dearly and truly I need not say. But I – it shall go no further now – it distresses you – I am as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your defencelessness – been too quick and unreflecting, will you?’ (Tess, 214–15) Although this is ostensibly an apology to Tess, Angel is at least as distressed as she is. He is the one whose feelings have been ‘betrayed’, who is experiencing ‘desperation’, who is ‘surprised’ at his own actions. And it is significant that his last concern focuses on his honour, again ostensibly demonstrating a concern about what Tess thinks, but really worrying about his own sense of dishonour. Angel’s desire for Tess has undercut his self-perceived sense of masculinity just as it did Alec’s, although from what might be called the opposite direction. Whereas with Alec Tess awakens a conscience he does not want to acknowledge, with Angel she awakens a sensuality which is equally threatening to his comfortable belief in his own gentlemanly self-discipline. Even so, however, the novel makes it clear that there remains in Angel a hard core of resistance, as when the narrator asserts that ‘[h]e could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self’ (Tess, 277). This rigidity leads to a second possibility for connecting Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Billy Budd. In the passage from Melville’s text quoted earlier the reader is told that only one other person on the ship was ‘intellectually capable’ of ‘appreciating’ Billy, and that other person is its captain, Edward Vere. Vere’s nickname of ‘Starry’ serves the same ironic purpose as Angel’s given name; it suggests a ‘heavenly’ connection with spirit and intellect that both characters fail to fulfill. But this is not the only thing they share. To go along with his ‘resolute nature’, Melville also informs us that Vere ‘would at times betray a certain dreaminess of mood’ (Billy, 61), and that he ‘had a marked leaning toward everything intellectual’ (Billy, 62). As a result he does not fit in very well with his naval culture, so that ‘in illustrating . . . any point . . . he would be . . . apt to cite some historic character or incident of antiquity . . . unmindful . . . that to his bluff company such remote allusions, however pertinent they might really be, were altogether alien’ (Billy, 63). Like Angel’s, Vere’s personality is a mixture of inflexibility and idealism which, based on a kind of unthinking sense of intellectual superiority, alienates him from his society. But Vere’s

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most important quality is his absolute insistence on discipline and duty, both in himself and in his crew. Rictor Norton has noted that ‘[in]numerable descriptions of Captain Vere sum up his desire to . . . contain his “surpressed emotion”, to maintain “self-control”’,20 so that just as Tess unbalances Angel’s carefully controlled masculine identity so Billy unbalances his captain’s. Like Claggart, Vere is immediately attracted to Billy. The difference between them, like the difference between Alec and Angel, is that he can abstract Billy in such a way that for a time the seaman poses no threat to his equilibrium. Yet the description of Vere’s response to Billy shows how precarious that strategy is from the start: Now the Handsome Sailor as a signal figure among the crew had naturally enough attracted the captain’s attention from the first. Though in general not very demonstrative to his officers, he had congratulated Lieutenant Ratcliffe upon his good fortune in lighting on such a fine specimen of the genus homo, who in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before the Fall . . . [Billy Budd’s] conduct, too, so far as it had fallen under the captain’s notice, had confirmed the first happy augury, while the new recruit’s qualities as a ‘sailor-man’ seemed to be such that he had thought of recommending him to the executive officer for promotion to a place that would more frequently bring him under his own observation. (Billy, 94–5) By picturing Billy in the nude as an unfallen Adam, Vere both sexualises him and yet emphasises his innocence, which allows him to avoid the sexual implications of his ‘attracted . . . attention’. Further, his use of the Latin phrase genus homo serves much the same function as Angel’s evocation of Artemis and Demeter: it attempts to intellectualise an otherwise sensual response. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the captain contemplates promoting Billy to a position which will ‘more frequently bring him under his observation’, since the ability to gaze at him gives Vere the opportunity to enjoy and possess Billy’s beauty without being threatened by any more intense interaction. Claggart’s accusation of sedition, however, forces him and Billy and Vere into an intimacy that will prove shattering. It is Claggart’s false charge that generates the erotic triangle which will cause both his own and Billy’s death, because it creates the conjunction between the three men which forces them to confront their hitherto secret responses.

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As important as Claggart’s revealing himself to Billy, however, is his revealing himself to Vere. From the start the captain suspects that Claggart is lying, but he nonetheless brings about a confrontation which all but guarantees physical conflict. He does not order Billy officially arrested, nor does he convene a tribunal to investigate the charges. Instead he brings Billy and Claggart together privately and, by ensuring that Billy is surprised by the sudden charge, provides the situation for his revenge. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Vere is instrumental in bringing about the murder. ‘Shut the door there, sentry,’ said [Vere] . . . ‘Now, Master-at-arms, tell this man to his face what you told of him to me . . . ’. With the measured step and calm collected air of an asylum physician approaching in the public hall some patient beginning to show indications of a coming paroxysm, Caggart deliberately advanced within short range of Billy and, mesmerically looking him in the eye, briefly recapitulated the accusation. Not at first did Billy take it in. When he did, the rose-tan of his cheek looked struck as by white leprosy. He stood like one impaled and gagged . . . ‘Speak, man!’ said Captain Vere to the transfixed one . . . ‘Speak! Defend yourself!’ Which appeal caused but a strange dumb gesturing and gurgling in Billy . . . the intent head and entire form straining forward in an agony of ineffectual eagerness to obey the injunction to speak and defend himself. . . . Going close up to the young sailor, and laying a soothing hand on his shoulder, [Vere] said, ‘There is no hurry, my boy. Take your time, take your time.’ Contrary to the effect intended, these words . . . prompted yet more violent efforts at utterance – efforts soon ending for the time in confirming the paralysis. . . . The next instant, quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night, his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck. Whether intentionally or but owing to the young athlete’s superior height, the blow had taken effect full upon the forehead . . . so that the body fell over lengthwise, like a heavy plank tilted from erectness. A gasp or two, and he lay motionless. (Billy, 98–9) The conflicting suggestions made by Vere, both to ‘speak!’ immediately and yet ‘take his time’, paralyse Billy by placing him in a position that precludes any verbal defusing of the situation, and thus precipitate the violent response that leads to the final catastrophe. As soon as Vere recognises Claggart’s dark passion for Billy, he arranges things so that

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Claggart is killed, thus not only removing the only other man on the ship who could challenge him for Billy’s attention, but also placing Billy completely in his own power. The most startling thing about Vere’s reaction to Claggart’s murder, therefore, is just how unsurprised he is. His immediate comment, ‘Fated boy . . . what have you done!’ (Billy, 99) appears to evince shock, but the idea that Billy was ‘fated’ suggests inevitability – an inevitability that Vere himself has created. And his subsequent exclamation, ‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!’ (Billy, 101), shows his instantaneous decision that Billy die for his actions. The rest of the story presents Vere frantically manipulating events to ensure Billy’s death in the name of discipline, even as his own emotional control becomes almost impossible to maintain. The ship’s surgeon, encountering the captain after the killing, is discomposed by what he sees: Full of disquietude and misgiving, the surgeon left the cabin. Was Captain Vere suddenly affected in his mind, or was it but a transient excitement, brought about by so strange and extraordinary a tragedy? . . . He recalled the unwonted agitation of Captain Vere and his excited exclamations, so at variance with his normal manner. Was he unhinged? (Billy, 101–2) It is clear that, while able to gaze at Billy from afar, and abstract his response to him, Vere is in no danger of losing the control that embodies both his naval authority and his personal masculinity. When forced by Claggart to come literally into ‘close quarters’ with Billy, however, that control begins to slip in ways that are extremely threatening, the triangle created exposing a homoerotic reaction that must be erased. Claggart’s death is the first step in that attempted erasure, as Billy’s is meant to be the second, but instead Vere is forced to acknowledge what he feels for Billy as the execution approaches, so that his identity becomes more destabilised, resulting in what amounts to a public display of his intense attachment to the younger man. Excessive attempts to impose masculine discipline undercut masculine discipline, and indeed at the moment of crisis such discipline becomes indistinguishable from its opposite: in the seconds before Billy’s hanging, ‘Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood erectly rigid as a musket in the shiparmourer’s rack’ (Billy, 123–4).

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The intense compression of Melville’s story sheds light on the more drawn out narrative of Hardy’s, in that Vere’s crisis is very pertinent to Angel’s. Both characters have attempted to create distance between the object of their desire and a masculine identity that demands they not indulge their erotic urges. But while Angel at least temporarily manages to achieve an uneasy balance between these visions of self when his selfcontrol is breached, Vere, because of his more fraught circumstances, is allowed no such luxury. He is plunged immediately into a selfconfrontation which has deadly results for those around him, and which exposes his own weakness and failure. And at the core of the resulting disaster is an erotic triangle that acts as the catalyst for the tragedy. Thus what Billy Budd helps us to understand about Tess of the d’Urbervilles is that Angel’s rejection of Tess, and the tragedy that follows in Hardy’s text, is not just about the sexual double standard, and not just about a false conception of female purity, but also about a destructive vision of masculinity which is fully unleashed only with the creation of triangulated desire. After Tess confesses her relationship with Alec to Angel, he decides that she is ‘dead’ to him as quickly as Vere decides that Billy must die. His constant refrain that ‘[y]ou were one person; now you are another’, that ‘the woman I have been loving is not you’ (Tess, 325), and that she is ‘not the same. No: not the same’ (Tess, 329), is of course centred on a sexual experience he did not know she possessed. Almost equally important, however, is the fact that that experience was derived through a man who threatens not only Angel’s sole ‘possession’ of Tess, but also his sense of masculinity. Although we are not given Tess’s actual narrative, we can assume that it describes Alec’s character, and his caddishly aggressive sensuality is thus brought directly into conflict with Angel’s gentlemanly self-control. That Alec is haunting Angel’s thought is made clear when he declares ‘How can we live together while that man lives? . . . If he were dead it might be different’ (Tess, 342), and now that this erotic triangle has been revealed Angel, again like Vere, must re-establish his dominance by punishing the object of desire which has exposed and undermined him. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has perhaps done the most foundational work in theorising the effects of triangulated desire, and some of her comments are especially relevant here. She observes that ‘[t]he heterosexuality that succeeded in eclipsing women was also . . . relatively unthreatened by the feminization of one man in relation to another. To be feminized . . . within a framework that includes a woman is, however, dire; and . . . any erotic involvement with an actual woman threatens to be unmanning. Lust itself (meaning, in this context, desire for women), is a machine for depriving males of self-identity.’21 In these

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terms, then, Angel’s sudden awareness of Alec’s phallic masculinity runs the risk of emasculating him, of confirming the ‘effeminacy’ of his identity noted by Margaret Oliphant, by creating the possibility he cannot ‘measure up’ to his rival. This helps explain Angel’s subsequent actions, which amount to an almost neurotic attempt to re-establish the rigid control upon which his masculine identity is based. The most obvious example of this is that Angel and Tess do not consummate their marriage. By refusing to have sex with his wife Angel manages to deny the desire that he perceives as compromising him, reconfirm the validity of his conception of masculinity, and avoid any sexual comparisons to Alec that might threaten his, at this point, very fragile ego. As well, by moving his decisions once again into the realm of the abstract, ‘It isn’t a question of respectability, but one of principle!’ (Tess, 340), Angel attempts to avoid recognising the deeply personal motives that are driving him, and thus constructs his abandonment of Tess as a confirmation of proper masculine scruples. The text’s narrator, however, will not let this pass: Some might risk the odd paradox that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say it. Yet Clare’s love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is something less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. . . . The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire. (Tess, 344) Here Hardy uses the rhetorical device of apophasis, declaring he will not say something even as he says it, to undercut Angel’s entire attitude. He would indeed be the ‘nobler man’ if he were able to see past the abstracted desire which his version of masculinity demands. Ironically, Angel’s masculine identity has been destabilised just enough for him to try on the part of middle-class seducer and scoundrel when he asks Izzy Huett to accompany him to Brazil. It is as if the knowledge of Alec momentarily creates for Angel the possibility of a whole other way of being ‘manly’, but of course this would only replace his own particular destructive vision with a different one. After thus cruelly taunting Izzy, he reverts back to being the man of ‘principle,’ and continues on the path that will assure Tess’s destruction. Angel’s rigid masculinity is revealed as a fragile compound of fastidious pride, sexual hypocrisy, and rationalising self-justification. Hardy thus demonstrates that the

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gentlemanly ethic of masculine identity is a hollow shell whose purpose is to control women and their sexuality as surely as any forced seduction. The text is now primed for Alec’s reappearance in the plot. His return into the text as an evangelical preacher has already been touched on, and just as triangulation can be used to analyse Angel’s behaviour, it can also help explain Alec’s. When Tess rejects his proposal she is forced to admit that she is married to Angel. Now it is Alec’s turn to become aware of his rival, so all sides of this erotic triangle are connected, and since the reader is specifically told that ‘[r]eason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation’ (Tess, 443), it is unsurprising that his new persona soon gives way to his previous behaviours and attitudes. But although Alec explains his backsliding by imposing on Tess the role of temptress, he also makes a series of remarks denigrating Angel, culminating in describing him as ‘that mule you call husband’ (Tess, 452). Since mules are not only famously stubborn, but also genetically sterile, this is a double insult attacking both Angel’s character and masculinity. No wonder Tess strikes Alec with her threshing glove. As much as sexual desire drives his renewed assault on Tess, below that motive is also the desire to defeat Angel and the version of masculine identity he represents, which Alec perceives as both inferior and antithetical to his own. After all, if he is successful he will cuckold Angel, and to cuckold someone is to assert the dominance of your manhood over his. As the novel moves to its conclusion Tess becomes the contested site upon which these conflicting versions of masculinity battle, reducing her to a cipher in what Sedgwick describes as the ‘calculus of power’ erotic triangles produce.22 The knowledge of a rival pushes both Angel and Alec into the most excessive expression of their masculine identities, and there is simply no way for the woman who is the putative cause of this conflict to survive. It is thus ironically appropriate that it is another man who forces Angel to reconsider his position. The unnamed stranger he encounters in Brazil, who possesses a much more ‘cosmopolitan mind’ (Tess, 464) than Angel, clearly also possesses a much more secure sense of masculinity. Thus although not all of Tess’s feminine pleading can sway him, reassurance from a masculine source has the power to shift his attitude completely. Of course Angel’s return to England is too late, but it does succeed in creating the situation for explosive violence already discussed in Billy Budd. The moment when Angel, Tess, and Alec are separated in the Sandbourne lodging-house by only a flight of stairs and a door is the closest the three points of this triangle have ever been to each other, and it is equivalent

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to, if not quite an exact replication of, the moment when Vere, Billy, and Claggart are brought into direct contact. And the result is the same. Confronted with what she can only perceive as the final loss of Angel’s love and respect, Tess stabs and kills Alec,23 thus collapsing the erotic triangle that has victimized her. Tess tells Angel that Alec ‘heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and called you by a foul name; and then I did it’ (Tess, 524), and although we can never know what ‘foul name’ Alec used, ‘cuckold’ would seem to be a good candidate. In any case, to echo Angel’s earlier words, now that ‘that man’ is indeed dead, things are ‘different’. Alec’s death is the final element required for Angel’s desire to no longer threaten him, and thus the long-delayed consummation of his marriage with Tess takes place at Bramshurst Court. And this creates a final link between Hardy’s text and Melville’s. In a strange way, with Claggart’s death attained, and having achieved both the conviction and the death sentence he requires, Vere also manages a ‘consummation’ with Billy. The ‘closeted interview’ (Billy, 117) he subsequently has with the condemned sailor is interesting because Melville’s third-person narrator apparently cannot describe it. In other words, it constitutes a gap in the text very much like those that so famously occur throughout Tess of the d’Urbervilles.24 Thus the reader is informed, ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known. But in view of the character of the twain briefly closeted in that stateroom . . . some conjectures may be ventured’ (Billy, 114–15). Those ‘conjectures’ are filled with such qualifying phrases as ‘it is not improbable that’ and ‘[e]ven more may have been’ (Billy, 115), but the most telling guess at what might have happened ‘in the closet’ is the following: Captain Vere in end [sic] may have developed the passion sometimes latent under an exterior stoical or indifferent. . . . The austere devotee of military duty, letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity, may in end [sic] have caught Billy to his heart, even as Abraham may have caught young Issac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest. (Billy, 115) That Vere now expresses his latent passion, that he lets himself ‘melt back’ into a ‘primeval’ reaction to Billy, and that he embraces the condemned young man, all suggest the possibility of a homoerotic desire finally acknowledged and thus consummated, but in keeping with the ‘unspeakable’ nature of such a response, acknowledged only

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through a closeted language of ‘may haves’. After this it becomes even more essential that Billy die, and the ‘exacting behest’ which demands he be hanged has as much to do with the desperate restoration of Vere’s masculinity as it does with naval duty. Further, the final image of Vere/Abraham sacrificing Billy/Issac is another echo between the two novels, evoking as it does the image of Tess on the altar at Stonehenge. But it is here that the purposes of Hardy and Melville separate most radically. Although both Billy and Tess are presented as sacrificial victims, the textual effect of that sacrifice is not the same. After Billy’s execution, Vere’s subsequent death in battle is presented in severely anticlimactic terms, and the story simply dissipates into what the text itself describes as the ‘ragged edges’ of various decentralised perspectives (Billy, 128). The result is the suggestion that with the deaths of the three main characters the situation is back to ‘normal’, and whatever dangerous desires have been created and revealed have been safely dealt with. As Robert Martin suggests, ‘the novel gives us no reason to believe that anything will change socially or that any personal change can be effected’, and it therefore presents ‘a radical defusing of political and erotic energy’.25 To put it harshly, by killing off all three points of his homoerotic triangle Melville ruthlessly represses such desire and attempts to deny the threat to heterosexual masculinity it creates. Billy Budd is, in gender terms, a deeply conservative text whose closure reinforces a status quo vision of masculinity by erasing the characters whose homosexual urges it repudiates. The conclusion of Tess of the d’Urbervilles operates very differently. The final scene, with Angel and ‘Liza-Lu on their knees gazing at the black flag which is the metonymy for Tess’s execution, then walking away hand in hand, is unsettling and is meant to be unsettling. Far from closing the text down, it raises questions without providing any answers. Has Angel accepted Tess’s plea that he bring up and marry this young girl who has ‘all the best of me without the bad of me’ (Tess, 536)? Is such a projected resolution possible, or even desirable? Hardy forces his audience to confront his main character’s death without providing any sense of secure closure. Victimised by conflicting constructions of masculinity that nonetheless share a profound uneasiness about the threatening nature of desire, Tess’s fate reveals the deeply unsatisfactory nature of the status quo by exposing the destructive insecurities of nineteenth-century masculine identity. Her death, unlike Billy’s, does not signify a restoration of order, but rather a call to change the social order that has generated the situation that kills her. Thus while Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Billy Budd, Sailor share core structures and themes,

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and while both confront a shared moment of cultural crisis, ultimately it is Hardy’s novel that more radically questions male gender roles. Although the homoerotic triangle of John Claggart, Billy Budd, and ‘Starry’ Vere has the potential to generate greater controversy in its examination of forbidden desire, in the end it is the apparently more conventional triangle of Alec d’Urberville, Tess Durbeyfield, and Angel Clare that forces its late-Victorian audience to confront the disturbing issues of masculinity which so vexed the period.

Notes 1. In addition, both Tess Durbeyfield and Billy Budd have a lost aristocratic past. Melville’s narrator informs us that Billy’s appearance ‘indicated a lineage in direct contradiction to his lot. . . . Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse’ (51–2), while of course Tess’s descent from the d’Urbervilles is central to Hardy’s text. 2. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, eds Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts (Chicago, 1962), p. 94. Further references to this text will be designated Billy, and will appear in the text in parentheses. 3. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, eds Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell (Oxford and New York, 1983), p. 172. Further references to this text will be designated Tess, and will appear in the text in parentheses. 4. Unsigned Review, Punch, February 1892, in Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments, ed. Graham Clark (Mountfield, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 201–02. 5. Unsigned Review, Saturday Review, 16 January 1892, in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. G. Cox (London, 1970), p. 190. 6. Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London, 1989), p. 164. 7. Linda Shires, ‘The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge, 1999), p. 148. 8. Annette Federico, Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing (Rutherford, 1991), p. 33. 9. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–1930 (Chicago, 1997), p. 60. 10. Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London, 1988), p. 85. 11. Unsigned Review, Pall Mall Gazette, 31 December 1891, in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, p. 182. 12. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Old Saloon’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1892, p. 460. 13. Oliphant, p. 460. 14. Oliphant, p. 461. 15. Oliphant, p. 463. 16. Oliphant, p. 470. 17. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, 1995), p. 2.

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18. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London, 1971; 1994), p. 296. 19. Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘Pay As You Go: On the Exchange of Bodies and Signs’, in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana, 1993), pp. 78–79. 20. Norton, Rictor. ‘Herman Melville’, http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk /melville.htm. 21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 36. 22. Sedgwick, p. 21. 23. That Tess stabs Alec to death, while Billy kills Claggart by striking him with his fist, seems to set the stories apart. But the multiple endings that Melville provides in Billy Budd include a newspaper report of the murder that asserts ‘he, Claggart, in the act of arraigning the man before the captain, was vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath knife of Budd’ (Billy, p. 130). Since the reader of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is informed that, although Alec’s wound is small, ‘the point of the blade had touched the heart of the victim’ (Tess, p. 520), once again the two texts are linked. That both men are described as being stabbed in the heart reinforces the passional nature of the desire that kills them. 24. The most controversial of these is, of course, the scene in the Chase, but others include Tess’s confession to Angel, the actual murder of Alec, and her own execution. 25. Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill, 1986), p. 107, 123.

7 The Characterisation of Jude and Sue: the Myth and the Reality John R. Doheny

In an earlier discussion of Jude the Obscure I was concerned primarily with the role of Arabella in the novel.1 There, as here, my aim was to consider the developing novelistic experience and dramatic context as a means to explore the developing nature of the characters in the novel, following the creative intuition of the artist in the literary work itself. My concern on this occasion is with Jude and Sue. There are a number of complexities and uncertainties in the early stages of the novel. Sue’s parents lived with Drusilla for a year or more after Sue was born; Drusilla says that Sue was like a child of her own till they separated (33). Later Drusilla tells Jude that Sue’s mother took her away to London (91); later still she tells him that it was her father who took her away (131), and Sue speaks of living with her father. There are problems for the time sequences of this period, especially if we assume, as many have, that Jude and Sue are the same age. As the novel opens, Jude is a boy of eleven, an orphan, who has been with his great aunt Drusilla for about a year. After the separation of Jude’s parents, and his mother’s suicide by drowning, Jude’s father took him to South Wessex, and never spoke of his family or of Marygreen again. Yet when Jude decides to take up a profession, he is partly influenced by the knowledge that his uncle, Sue’s father, is an ecclesiastical worker in metal. Under ordinary circumstances, we might assume that Drusilla has told him this even though it is not mentioned in the novel, but circumstances are not ordinary. Using evidence from Hardy’s revisions as well as from the manuscript, Dennis Taylor argues that Sue was four years older than Jude.2 This means that Sue and her parents, and Jude and his parents (Jude’s father and Sue’s mother were brother and sister), all lived in Marygreen when 110

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Jude was a baby until he was about one year old, when his father took him away. It is understandable, then, that Jude does not remember Sue, but it is not very understandable why Sue does not remember Jude, since she knew him for the first year of his life when she was four and five. Sue and her parents lived in Marygreen until after she was 12 years old (131). There are also other complicating factors. Sue must have been aware even at five years old of the tragic break-up of Jude’s parents, his mother’s dramatic suicide, and the departure of her uncle and his child. Even though Drusilla tells Jude that Sue’s father taught her to hate her mother’s family, the Fawleys, and that she has had no contact with Sue or her father since Sue was an adolescent, she has a photograph of Sue which is recent enough to enable Jude, then about 22 years old, to recognise Sue, then about 26, when he sees her in person. The photo ‘haunted him; and ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of following his friend the schoolmaster’ to Christminster (97). Drusilla initially refuses Jude’s request to give him the photo, but later agrees to send it to him. She also tells Jude that Sue lives in Christminster, ‘though she didn’t know where, or what she was doing’ (97), but only a day or two after his departure writes to tell him that Sue works as an ‘artist or designer’ in ‘an ecclesiastical warehouse . . . a perfect seed-bed of idolatry’ (107). Subsequently, she describes the young Sue as a wayward child, and suggests that since she has been raised in London, she has probably grown ‘townish and wanton’, and will bring Jude to ruin (131). Later on, after their visit to Phillotson, Jude tells Sue he has heard that she had teaching experience, and we are told that she had taught in London for two years. Somehow, information about Sue has reached Jude, necessarily via Drusilla, which Hardy has not prepared us for. Except for this reference to her teaching experience in London, it is never part of Sue’s explanation of her own life to Jude. Perhaps we are meant to assume that she was teaching during the 15-month period when she was living with the Christminster graduate in London. There is further confusion at other places in the novel, perhaps because of changes made at the manuscript stage,3 as when Hardy writes that Sue was coming to visit a relative ‘whom she had hardly known in her life’ (209), apparently having forgotten that Sue lived with and near Drusilla until after she was 12 years old. Problems of information and chronology never bothered Hardy enough to bring him to shore up the gaps. He was more bent on pursuing ‘the heart and inner meaning’ of the lives of the characters.4 Whether or not this and other similar matters weaken the novel is a

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matter for each reader to decide. It is possible to assume that Drusilla has some contact with Sue and knows much more than she is willing to admit at once to Jude. That might explain how Sue found out that Jude was in Christminster, and the fact that she has lost her job just as she decides to contact Jude might give us some clue to her character. Whatever the case, this early life is a very important matter for Jude and Sue’s relationship. Jude tells Sue late in the novel that all the criticism of Sue, and the pressure on him not to become involved with her, only made him more interested in her. But if Drusilla raises Jude’s curiosity, he also has his own idea of her. Jude first sees Sue at her work in the shop full of religious books and artefacts, but rather than make himself known to her he observes her at her work and builds on his assumptions about her nature and her beliefs. When he sees her again, when she happens to be passing while he is working, he continues to observe her and to add to his idea of her. He notes that she was ‘not a large figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant’ (109). After considering all the objections to marriage with her (the principle one being that he is, himself, still married to Arabella), he concludes that as a ‘kinsman and well-wisher’ she would be ‘to him a kindly star, an elevating power, a companion in Anglican worship, a tender friend’ (109–10). Still before he has spoken a word to her, Jude sits behind Sue at a church service and realises that his interest in her is ‘unmistakably of a sexual kind’ (117). It is apparent that he has created an ideal of Sue, and in spite of the correcting disappointments which occur upon further acquaintance, he maintains that ideal until the very end. This early development is crucial to an understanding of Jude’s character, but it does not help us with Sue’s character. Not only is Sue different from Arabella in physical build, she is also, in Jude’s mind, more refined, having the manners of a higher class. Based on this, Jude creates her interests for her and imagines a relationship with her which he longs to find in reality. In other words, it is his ‘idea’ of Sue (as opposed to his ‘idea’ of Arabella) which is important to him, even beyond the reality of her. This penchant for idealisation is Jude’s main problem in life: he creates an ideal of Sue; he creates an ideal of Christminster; and he even creates an ideal of himself. The habit of idealisation is not in itself unusual, but Jude tries to maintain his preconceived idea even when reality proves it to be wrong, and his struggle to do so causes him to be blind or unresponsive to what should be self-evident truth. As a consequence, he almost always misunderstands behaviour and motivation in other characters. Most of us are afflicted with the same blindness at least some of the time. In the

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earlier essay, I discussed Jude’s childhood anxiety about his precarious position in life, the early loss first of his mother (by suicide), then nine years later of his father, and Drusilla’s reluctant acceptance of the responsibility of caring for him. Perhaps these anxieties encourage him in his delusions. Jude initially falls in love with his idea of Sue before he has spoken a word to her, and after an evening’s walk during which they visit Phillotson, he concludes that ‘he loved her more than before becoming acquainted with her’ (122). It is clear that he knows her hardly at all. Their conversation during the walk is more designed to obscure than to clarify their feelings or ideas or beliefs. Sue chooses not to correct Jude’s assumptions about the nature of the statuary which she had purchased (Venus and Apollo), merely responding to his description of them as religious objects with a vague reference to patron saints. And Jude avoids his past altogether, most carefully his past with Arabella. Matters are further complicated by Hardy’s narrative explanations, which are often ambiguous or inaccurate. There are several examples which might help to illustrate this ambiguity on Hardy’s part. Some three or four weeks after Sue has taken up her pupil teacher post with Phillotson, she is struggling with arithmetic, and ‘would involuntarily glance up with a little inquiring smile at [Phillotson], as if she assumed that, being the master, he must perceive all that was passing in her brain, as right or wrong’. Hardy writes that ‘Phillotson was not really thinking of arithmetic at all, but of her,’ in a romantic way: ‘Perhaps [Sue] knew that he was thinking of her thus’ (126). But whether she does or does not know that Phillotson is thinking of her as love-object is important. She is, after all, 26 or 27 years old. Hardy’s ‘perhaps’ is as coy as Sue is herself at many other crucial points in the novel, not only in her relations with Phillotson but also with Jude. There is a similarly ambiguous description when Phillotson and Sue take the students to an exhibition of a model of Jerusalem. Sue criticises the model as probably inaccurate; Phillotson defends it on the grounds that it is based on the ‘best conjectural maps’. Sue aggressively expands her criticism, arguing that Jerusalem itself is unimportant since ‘we are not descended from the Jews’ and there ‘was nothing first rate about the place, or the people . . . as there was about Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and other old cities’. And when Phillotson replies, ‘But my dear girl, consider what it is to us!’, Hardy writes that Sue was silent, ‘for she was easily repressed’. As the novel shows, this is not one of Sue’s notable characteristics. She is sometimes quite vocal in her disagreements, but

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most often she simply shifts her ground to avoid direct confrontation and carries on the dispute in an indirect way or, as in this case, insists that she is misunderstood. At other times she blames Jude or Phillotson for disagreeing with her and thereby mistreating her. Often she resorts to tears, and one of her most characteristic responses to Jude is to tell him to go away, that they will not meet again, at least for a very long time, and will write to each other only at long intervals. In this instance she uses Jude’s devotion to punish Phillotson. When they discover that Jude is also at the exhibition, Phillotson teases her by telling Jude, who is studying the model with great care, that Sue ‘criticizes it unmercifully’ and is ‘quite sceptical as to its correctness’. Sue responds by saying, ‘I don’t know what I meant – except that it was what you don’t understand’ (126–7). Her attack on Christianity and her preference for pre-Christian attitudes is certainly not an obscure or difficult point, and even though Phillotson apparently passes over it, it would not be impossible to explain her position to Phillotson and to Jude. However, she gets her desired results. Jude ‘ardently’ insists that he knows her meaning and that she is quite right. Of course, he does not know her meaning since he hasn’t heard the discussion. This is an example of his tendency to act on the basis of his idea of Sue, and Sue takes full advantage of it: ‘That’s a good Jude – I know you believe in me!’ She impulsively seized his hand, and leaving a reproachful look on the schoolmaster turned away to Jude, her voice revealing a tremor which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for by sarcasm so gentle. She had not the least conception how the hearts of the twain went out to her at this momentary revelation of feeling, and what a complication she was building up thereby in the futures of both. (127) But if Sue had ‘not the least conception’ of what she was doing, why does Hardy suggest that ‘perhaps’ she knew that Phillotson was romantically interested in her? If she did know, the reproachful glance here is intended to punish Phillotson. And if she knows that Jude has more than a friendly interest in her, as later in the novel she says she did, and as she ought to have known by his uninformed response here, then the act of teasing or flirting has a double purpose: to punish Phillotson and to make him feel guilty as well as jealous, and in the process to lead Jude into deeper affection for her, by hinting that it might be reciprocated. At least some of this seems to be deliberate but most of it is slightly frantic

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and automatic self-defence. This is an important issue. Whether Sue deliberately manipulates Jude (and Phillotson) at crucial points in the novel, or her responses are a consequence of repressed material surfacing as fearful defence, matters to the development of her character and its effect on the novel as a whole. At least twice Hardy says she is consciously manipulating the situation; there is a notable example during a discussion with Jude in which she has mentioned her ‘former friend’, the Christminster graduate, where she goes on talking ‘to keep [ Jude] from his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly, as she always did’ (224). In the scene where Sue decides to rehearse her wedding, once again Hardy offers an explanation which is no explanation of her behaviour: ‘By the irony of fate, and the curious trick in Sue’s nature of tempting Providence at critical times, she took his arm as they walked through the muddy street – a thing she had never done before in her life.’ Jude ‘passively’ acquiesces to her wish to go into the church, and they stroll up to the altar and back again, ‘her hand still on his arm, precisely like a couple just married’. It is too suggestive, and Jude nearly breaks down. Sue seems completely unaware of what she is doing, centred as she is on herself. ‘I like to do things like this’, she says, and asks Jude if it was ‘like this when you were married?’ Jude does break down here, and Sue responds that Jude is ‘vexed’, which is exactly what he is not. Her explanation is that she is curious to hunt up ‘new sensations’, apparently without any consideration for others. She tearfully asks him to forgive her; he tearfully does, and they go out of the church, Sue still leaning on Jude’s arm, a clear indication that she immediately ignores the hurt she has caused. When they meet Phillotson, she quickly withdraws her hand, revealing that she knows that he will be offended by what she is doing. She then makes matters worse by telling Phillotson what they have just done (192–3). When Sue and Phillotson return to Jude’s rooms later, Hardy, as author, gives us more ambiguous commentary. About Phillotson he writes that he ‘looked dignified and thoughtful . . . a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict that he would make a kind and considerate husband. That he adored Sue was obvious.’ He then adds, ‘she could almost be seen to feel that she was undeserving his adoration’ (194). ‘Almost’ is vague and clearly wrong, for there is no evidence here or anywhere else that Sue could think of herself in these terms or pay this much attention to anyone else’s feelings beyond their effect on her wishes. As is the case with other great novelists, Hardy’s characters get away from him and live larger lives than his conscious thought allows.

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Jude offers his own ambivalent thoughts on her cruelty. First he proposes that women ‘were different from men in such matters’, but he can only arrive at two contradictory possibilities: either they are more ‘callous, and less romantic’, or they are more ‘heroic’. The next possibility is again phrased as a question: ‘was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully gave herself and him pain for the old and mournful luxury of practising long-suffering in her own person, and of being touched with tender pity for him at having made him practise it?’ (194). Against all the evidence, Jude interprets Sue’s distress when it is time for him to give her to Phillotson as concern for what he is feeling rather than ‘self-consideration’. Instead of wondering about her motives, he speculates: ‘Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal inconsistency.’ He believes, because he wishes it to be true, that Sue does not understand what she is doing in these situations, that she loves him, and that she marries Phillotson as retaliation for his secrecy about his own marriage (195). He is thus able to maintain his idea of her, against all the evidence, nearly all the way through the novel. He understands Sue’s behaviour as he wishes it to be, but we have no reason to trust his judgement. Jude believes that his drunken visit to Sue, after the disappointment of the letter advising him to abandon his aspirations to enter one of the colleges, is the cause of her engagement to Phillotson (154). But there is no evidence for this belief except his wish that Sue is as much involved with him as he is with her. Upon his arrival in Melchester, and noticing that Sue was not quite the woman who had ‘written the letter which summoned him’, Jude immediately assumes her state of mind results from her attitude about him and his behaviour. He says, ‘You don’t – think me a demoralized wretch – for coming to you as I was – and going so shamefully, Sue?’ She replies by emphasising her forgiveness – ‘O, I have tried not to! You said enough to let me know what had caused it. I hope I shall never have any doubt of your worthiness, my poor Jude!’ (151) – but I suspect this is her response because she herself has a secret which she has withheld from Jude during their correspondence: her engagement to Phillotson. There is some evidence which suggests that the engagement may have taken place before his visit. Certainly the two years at Training College was part of the initial plan (124). After more of their usual slightly aggressive and evasive manoeuvring, Jude brings up the issue he wishes to talk about: Sue’s relationship with Phillotson. Her explanation suggests that their engagement is part of a solid, economic

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professional plan rather than a romance. Two years of teacher training would qualify her as a teacher; marriage would qualify them to take a large school with both a girls’ and a boys’ section. Marriage is so much a mere but necessary part of the plan that Sue ensures that Phillotson will not visit her in Melchester, and writes him only the dullest of progress letters (181–3), while writing a passionately unhappy letter to Jude asking him to come immediately to Melchester. Certainly, this demonstrates that she thought little of the marriage; she says as much later when she explains to Phillotson why she married him and why she wants to separate from him. It might be possible to argue that Sue compared the opportunities with each man, but there is no evidence for it. In fact, she offers more explanation for her marriage to Phillotson later on. Later, Jude believes (as do some critics)5 his confession of his marriage to Arabella played the largest part in Sue’s decision to marry immediately. Sue does use it to her advantage, but all the evidence points toward the marriage as a result of the scandal and her being expelled from the school. Phillotson is shocked by her expulsion and by the reasons for it, but in all her explanations Sue accepts that the choice was hers, however mistaken.6 What Jude calls Sue’s ‘colossal inconsistency’ is not inconsistent. Sue’s consistent patterns are simply misunderstood by Jude in his attempts to make his wishes into reality. One of the most important issues for this novel concerns the natures of the characters Hardy creates; in this case, Jude and Sue. Why do they hurt each other with these blind destructive acts? I think it is safe to say that when they have two possibilities – giving pleasure or giving pain – they give pain, not, it seems, out of malice but because both are so focused on their own wishes. Neither can acknowledge the other as a person with needs separate from their own, and they usually find themselves in conflict. They are nearly always evasive and manipulative. Between them there is a consistent pattern of antagonism lying beneath the surface which bursts forth at times of stress. Neither is satisfied with the behaviour or even the ideas and expectations of the other. It is difficult to remain sympathetic; I can best describe my feelings towards the two of them as irritated empathy. Jude’s problem with Sue is at least two-fold. His idea of her, as opposed to the reality, helps to create a constant struggle. His fear is that Sue does not love him and respect him. Sometimes he wishes so strongly to believe that she does that he interprets her evasions, her denials, and her silences as evidence of her love. He also wishes to mate with her sexually, but he is married already, and Sue gives every indication

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that she does not want a sexual relationship with him; she has in fact a deep hysterical fear of it. Jude doesn’t tell her everything about himself, including his marriage, until Sue has told him about her engagement to Phillotson. He also, over time, changes his own ideas and wishes in order to please her and to salve his own conscience. He gives up his religious faith and his associated ambitions. What is it, though, which makes him continue to pursue her as a sexual partner in spite of all the evidence indicating he ought to give it up? Part of the answer is that he doesn’t have all the evidence we as readers do, and he seldom understands the evidence he does have. He finds her physically attractive, all nervous motion, slight, elegant, bright in mind, and so on. She is also his first cousin; in the manuscript Hardy writes that ‘he stood with his back to the fire regarding her; and saw in her as it were the rough material called himself done into another sex – idealised, softened, and purified, almost a divinity’. In all the editions this oddly narcissistic, even vaguely incestuous feeling, is left out except for the last phrase. However, there are remnants of the same feelings earlier in the novel, as when Jude enters Sue’s place of work not to make himself known but to look at her: ‘she was so pretty that he could not believe it possible that she should belong to him.’ When he hears her speak, he recognises in her accents ‘certain qualities of his own voice; softened and sweetened, but his own’ (107). Sue doesn’t love him, or even respect him, if that means taking his needs and wishes into account, even when she knows clearly what they are. It is also clear that she does not want to lose him. She says that she wants them to be comrades, good friends, but that actually means that she wants Jude to agree with her wishes and ideas and to follow her. Sue must control situations and relationships, not only with Jude but also with Phillotson and with the Christminster student. She needs a man in her life, but she does not want a sexual relationship. She needs someone to defend her, to support her (financially and emotionally), to protect her, and to be her intellectual comrade helping her to develop her ideas. Since Jude is so often wrong in his understanding of Sue’s character, and Hardy’s interpretive comments are often ambiguous, the main source of understanding for Sue’s character must be her own words and her behaviour; in other words, Hardy’s intuitive creation guides us. Even there, she remains enigmatic, which is why there has been so much speculation over the years about her as a character. Many critics during the 1950s and 1960s found her to be extremely neurotic but also very charming.7 Desmond Hawkins found both Jude and Sue so extremely

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exasperating that he judged the novel to be obscene, though he later dampened his criticism.8 Rosemary Sumner, Wayne Burns, Michael Steig, and Rosemarie Morgan, among others, have written extensively and interestingly about Sue.9 Some recent critics insist that she is the central character in the novel. Phillip Mallett, for example, writes in the first sentence of an essay, ‘critical discussion of Jude the Obscure has quite properly concentrated on Sue Bridehead’.10 Rosemary Sumner’s analysis of Sue has received less attention than it deserves.11 In what follows I wish to add to and expand her analysis, and to register at least one partial disagreement. She uses textual evidence very effectively along with some of Freud’s essays to help her analysis along, but as she writes, ‘it is not necessary to have read Freud in order to understand Hardy’s Sue.’12 Sumner argues that Sue is hysterical, in her fear of and revulsion from sexual intercourse, and that she is narcissistic not only in the popular sense of self-interested egotism but in the clinical sense. Sue cannot seek out a ‘love-object’ because she is only in love with herself and cannot lose part of herself in love of another. She seeks love from others. Thus she follows the pattern described by Freud involving sadism and masochism. Freud also writes: ‘The determinants of women’s choice of an object [of love] are often made unrecognisable by social conditions. Where the choice is able to show itself freely, it is often made in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wished to become.’13 Sue makes her position clear; her choice of ‘love-object’, insofar as she can choose one, can only be a version of herself. She says to Jude during one of their exchanges over religion, ‘I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I – shall I confess it? – thought that man might be you’ (173). She also wishes to be Phillotson’s amanuensis, and much of her wish here follows the pattern of her relationship with the Christminster graduate. And she wants support from a man. In a desperate moment after Jude has accused her of being quite Voltairean, she says petulantly, ‘I wish I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever on my side!’ After living with her in the same house for about a year, Jude complains ‘that, intimate as they were, he had never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she loved or could love him’. Sue defends herself by saying she assumes she is so bad and worthless that she deserves such lecturing. Jude tells her she is not bad; she is ‘slippery as an eel’ when he wants to get a confession out of her. Her response is to tell him,

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‘now that I have nobody but you, and nobody to defend me, it is very hard that I mustn’t have my own way in deciding how I’ll live with you’. Jude, as usual, immediately backs off and agrees to her terms (279–80). Later, when Arabella turns up to request some help and Jude insists that he must go out and speak to her, Sue, in desperation, bursts into sobs and says, ‘I have nobody but you, Jude, and you are deserting me! I didn’t know you were like this. – I can’t bear it, I can’t! If she were yours it would be different!’ (285). I come back to this scene later. The classic narcissistic need to be loved is obvious in Sue’s behaviour, even when it is not spoken. On her invitation, Jude visits her when they believe Phillotson is away on school matters. Following some typically edgy conversation, Sue refers to her former friend, the Christminster graduate. It is now Jude who becomes petulant: ‘Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt.’ Sue jumps up, her face ‘flushed’. ‘Yes – you must go away, for you mistake me! I am very much the reverse of what you say so cruelly – O Jude, it was cruel to say that . . . Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamberofficer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it’(225). The second part of this has no connection with her own character, even when ‘love’ refers to comrades rather than sexual partners; it is either a smoke screen to avoid honest confession, or a rehearsal for a defensive confession yet to come. Later, when she is pressing Phillotson to agree to a separation, regardless of his needs or wishes, she explains the marriage as a cowardly mistake on her part, and goes so far as to suggest her revulsion from sex: ‘No poor woman has ever wished more than I that Eve had not fallen, so that . . . some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled Paradise’ (245). However, when Jude subsequently accuses her of being ‘enslaved to the social code’, she explains the marriage differently. She is not mentally enslaved, she says, but lacks the courage of my views: ‘I didn’t marry him altogether because of the scandal. But sometimes a woman’s love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong’ (262; italics in original). This narcissistic pattern is always part of Sue’s character, and it is revealed more fully in the discussion with Jude after the children’s death where she asks him to live separately from her. In response to Jude’s reproach – ‘You have never loved me as I love you – never – never!

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Yours is not a passionate heart – your heart does not burn in flame!’ – Sue provides her fullest explanation of herself, the most direct statement of what she has been saying indirectly all along: At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women’s morals almost more than unbridled passion – the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do to the man – was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then – I don’t know how it was – I couldn’t bear to let you go – possibly to Arabella again – and so I got to love you Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you. (372–3) Yet when Jude is leaving in anger, after more dispute, she insists that he must kiss her, and she does so again when she sends him away after some harsh words between them on his last visit to her. This leads me to the one serious disagreement I have with Rosemary Sumner’s discussion of Sue. Using Freud’s work as a means to understand the textual evidence, she argues for the presence in Sue of ‘violent but repressed sex drives which [she is] terrified of’.14 In summary, she claims that Sue’s behaviour – obsessively scrubbing the steps, continuously putting herself in situations with men where sex is a usual consequence and then strongly refusing to carry through, engaging in sado-masochistic behaviour, and wishing to humiliate herself by pricking herself ‘all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in [her]’ (365) – is an indication that she has powerful but repressed sex drives. Since these repressed drives frighten her, she builds up defences against them, in a rejection of ‘gross’ sexual feelings, and this is typical of repression in real life. However, since the sexual drives are entirely unconscious (a condition of repression) but forcing themselves toward consciousness or pre-consciousness at times of stress, they exhibit themselves except only indirectly, and remain unknown not only to Sue but to all the other characters, and probably to the novelist as well. A real person exhibiting such characteristics would also exhibit much more evidence of repression; but Sue is a character in a novel, and I think the evidence is too scarce and too circumstantial to make these claims for her. However, I wish to let the subject remain an open

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question while I consider the dramatic context of several scenes of passionate embraces involving Sue, only one of which leads to sexual intercourse, but all of which are sexual for Jude and perhaps for Sue. Sue’s reactions in these scenes are particular to her and reveal some depth of her character which is beyond the confusing surface. We can pick up one of these scenes where Jude and Sue meet at Drusilla’s funeral. Afterwards, Sue brings up the marriage question in what begins as an evasive and indirect confession of her unhappiness: ‘Are there many couples, do you think, where one dislikes the other for no definite fault?’ Jude, whose wish is as always that Sue will confess her love for him, replies, ‘Yes . . . If either cares for another person, for instance.’ Sue dismisses that possibility, and refers to a ‘physical objection’ (230). There follows some intense verbal fencing: Jude pressing, asserting, manipulating; Sue evading denying, manipulating. Jude says he believes that Sue is not happy. She objects that of course she is, married only eight weeks to a man she chose freely, and asks: ‘what makes you assume all this, dear?’. The endearment inflames Jude, and he puts his hand on hers. When Sue draws hers away he begins to be more cleverly manipulative than he has ever been before. He insists (falsely) that his was an innocent sympathetic action and accuses her of being ‘ridiculously inconsistent’. Sue repents and, giving him her hand, says, ‘you may hold it as much as you like. Is that good of me?’ (231), which, of course, eliminates any possibility of sensuality from the act of holding. Jude lies to her, telling her he has no feelings of love left in him, and that he has seen Arabella at Christminster. Both know that no truthful discussion is going on here; they are both struggling for the upper hand. Sue tries to speak in generalisations about male and female relations. Jude gives her no help in this method, so she must switch to indirect confession of her repulsion against sex with Phillotson, then turn it back to marriage as a contract again. She feels ‘a repugnance . . . for a reason [she] cannot disclose . . . What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes . . . the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness!’ (233). The truth is that she cannot bring herself to have sexual intercourse with Phillotson, and after eight weeks the marriage has still not been consummated. Jude wishes to believe that Sue’s repugnance against sex involves only Phillotson, and he says, ‘You would have been my wife, Sue, wouldn’t you, if it hadn’t been for [his own marriage to Arabella]?’ (233). Because it is not true, Sue gives no answer and goes to Widow Edlin’s cottage

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where she intends to spend the night. Neither Sue nor Jude can sleep, and the wakefulness is exacerbated by the cries of a rabbit caught in a trap. Jude gets up to put it out of its misery, Sue appears in the window, and with the window sill between them, they have another exchange, which leads to Jude ardently kissing her hand and pleading, ‘Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even if you . . . ’. The rest of his sentence remains unsaid. Sue replies that she knows what he means, but she can’t ‘admit so much as that . . . Guess what you like, but don’t press me to answer questions!’ (235). Neither can leave it at that. When Jude wishes she were happy, whatever he may be, she emphatically says she can’t be. She says it was ‘perhaps’ wrong to confess her unhappiness to Jude, but she had no one else to tell, ‘And I must tell somebody!’ (235). All this tearful justification and apology is necessary only because earlier on Jude had refused her veiled invitation to draw her confession out of her, which would have allowed her to distance herself from the intense emotions, and to blame Jude for forcing it from her: ‘[ Jude] gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears’ (232). She rushed into marriage, she says, without thinking out what it meant. She was old enough and, she thought, very experienced (her only experience has been the celibate one with Christminster friend). Then comes the real reason for her comments. She floats the idea that she should be ‘allowed’ to undo the marriage. ‘I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly!’ (236). This becomes crucial during the next few days. Sue’s heroics in her next sentence ought to fall on the readers’ deaf ears: ‘I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.’ It does happen to other women and some, like Arabella, walk away from the marriage, and others, no doubt like some of those in the long list of divorces among which their own appear, get a divorce through adultery or the agreement of the other party. Sue’s last act of this exchange ends the chapter: ‘In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head’, withdrew quickly and shut the casement (236). In these tense, manipulative, evasive scenes, often verging on anger, it seems to me impossible to know where truth lies. It is clear that Jude is pushing her to confess that she loves him whether she acts on it or not. And it is clear that Sue wants to bring Jude on, but only up to a point of non-physical action. So much is quite clear. What isn’t clear is why Jude pursues Sue even

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harder when she is holding him off and why Sue wants proof of his love at a safe distance; as Rosemary Sumner writes, ‘it is when she is being rebuffed that [Sue] demands love’.15 Compared to all this, Arabella’s manipulation of the eager but inexperienced Jude into sexual intercourse and marriage seems positively healthy. Jude and Sue together seem deeply neurotic. The next day on the way to the railway station Hardy writes that Jude and Sue were still in their ‘tense and passionate moods’. He tells us that they make ‘bewildered inquiries of each other on how far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and she had said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell, as he now wished to do.’ She concedes, however, that if he kisses her ‘in the spirit of a cousin and a friend’, and not as a lover, she won’t object. Given all that has been happening between them, and all that Sue has indicated about her knowledge of Jude’s love for her, it is impossible for her not to know that Jude cannot kiss her in this spirit, so she is inviting him to lie. They turn from each other in estrangement to go their separate ways, look back simultaneously, run back, and ‘embracing most unpremeditatedly, [kiss] close and long. When they parted for good it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his. The kiss was a turning-point in Jude’s career’ (237). He decides he cannot be a parson and, in his usual melodramatic way, burns all his theological books. ‘In his passion for Sue he could now stand as an ordinary sinner’ (239). Clearly, this was a passionate, sexual embrace for Jude, and he apparently believes it was also for Sue. However, Sue’s reactions are strangely different and reveal more of the depth of her character. She goes to the station ‘with tears in her eyes for having run back and let him kiss her’. In spite of the description of the kiss as a mutual passionate kiss, Sue denies it was so on her part: ‘Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly.’ This simply ignores Jude’s refusal to swear it would not be a lover’s kiss and, successfully for her purposes, allows her to make Jude responsible for the whole episode. What must we conclude about Sue from this? Her whole reaction is designed to distance herself from the sexual passion of the kiss and to register no sexual excitement at all. Her own conclusion is, ‘“I have been too weak, I think!” she jerked out as she pranced on, shaking down tear-drops now and then. “It was burning, like a lover’s – O it was!”’ And she decides that she ‘won’t write to him any more, or at least for a long

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time, to impress him with my dignity! And I hope it will hurt him very much . . . He’ll suffer then with suspense . . . and I am very glad of it!’ Having reached that self-satisfying sense of power in her fantasy, she then manages to satisfy her conscience from such a position and to toss in a bit of solace for her own narcissistic self: ‘Tears of pity for Jude’s approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with those which had surged up in pity for herself’ (239). Having assured herself again of Jude’s love, she returns to Phillotson and almost immediately proposes to separate from him. Intending to sleep in a clothes closet under the stairs, she tells Phillotson when he discovers her there, ‘great-eyed and trembling’, and complains of her behaviour, that she is not altogether to blame for her behaviour, it is ‘the universe, I suppose – things in general, because they are so horrid and cruel!’ (241–2). But the most likely cause is that the recent intense and passionate experiences with Jude have aroused some sexual feelings, and she fears the close proximity of Phillotson in the bed they have shared for two months; when later on he absent-mindedly begins to remove his clothes for bed, she jumps out the window. Understandably, after this, Phillotson agrees to a separation. Once Sue has left Phillotson to join him, Jude expects to enter into a full sexual relationship with her. During the struggle to dampen down his expectations, Sue uses many of her usual patterns, warding him off physically and objecting to his booking only one room for them. Jude is subdued and tells her that her ‘happiness is more to [him] than anything . . . and [her] will is law to [him]’ (259–60). But on reflection he says perhaps she doesn’t love him after all, and Hardy provides us with the following, which illustrates one aspect of Sue’s typical pattern at length: Even at this obvious moment for candour Sue could not be quite candid as to the state of that mystery, her heart. ‘Put it down to my timidity,’ she said with hurried evasiveness; ‘to a woman’s natural timidity when the crisis comes. I may feel as well as you that I have a perfect right to live with you as you thought – from this moment. I may hold the opinion that, in a proper state of society, the father of a woman’s child will be as much a private matter of hers as the cut of her under-linen, on whom nobody will have any right to question her. But partly, perhaps, because it is by his generosity that I am now free, I would rather not be other than a little rigid. If there had been a rope-ladder, and he had run after us with pistols, it would have seemed different, and I may have acted otherwise. But don’t press me

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and criticize me Jude! Assume that I haven’t the courage of my opinions. I know I am a poor miserable creature. My nature is not so passionate as yours!’ (260) She caps it off with an assertion Jude can’t overcome: ‘I quite realized that, as woman with man, it was a risk to come. But as me with you, I resolved to trust you to set my wishes above your gratification. Don’t discuss it further, dear Jude!’ (261). And when she reveals she has found out that Jude (who hasn’t noticed it) has recently shared this room with Arabella, the battle is over so completely that Sue stays on in the room and Jude gets another for himself. This pattern, of separate rooms and celibacy, carries on for nearly a year. Evidently Jude complains occasionally about the absence of physical contact and sex, since Hardy tells us that after their divorces have come through ‘Jude fell back upon his old complaint’. Once again Sue triumphs and the subject is dropped until the next potentially sexual scene when Arabella turns up seeking some as yet unknown help from Jude. Unlike those discussed above, this scene leads to sexual intercourse, but it is obviously desperation not passion which leads Sue to succumb. Jude decides that he must go out to find out what Arabella wants of him. Unusually for him, he sticks to his position, and Sue is forced to agree to sex. For the first of only two times in their relationship, she tells him that she loves him. Both times are in extremely desperate circumstances for Sue. Fearing that Jude will desert her and return to Arabella, she agrees to be his in a sexual relationship. ‘If I must I must. Since you will have it so, I agree! I will be. Only I didn’t mean to! And I didn’t want to marry again, either! . . . But, yes – I agree, I agree! I do love you. I ought to have known that you would conquer in the long run, living like this!’ (‘I do love you’ was added for the 1912 edition.) Thus, the full responsibility for this change is Jude’s; Sue is not voluntarily agreeing to a sexual relationship; she is doing it, as she later says herself, to oust Arabella and to keep Jude as her own protector, support and defender; ‘She ran across and flung her arms round his neck. “I am not a cold-natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at such a distance? I am sure you don’t think so! Wait and see! I do belong to you, don’t I! I give in!”’(286). It is likely, for reasons which will appear later, that the memory of the Christminster student who left her through illness and death plays a part in the anxiety here, for she must know by now that it is impossible for Jude to leave her voluntarily.

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As Rosemary Sumner notes, sex has not changed Sue in any significant way.16 Early next morning while Jude is proposing to arrange for the wedding banns to be read, Sue absently agrees, but her mind is elsewhere: ‘a glow had passed away from her, and depression sat upon her features.’ Having secured Jude to herself, she now feels guilty for having ousted Arabella, and she tells Jude she intends to visit her. She lets Jude ‘kiss her freely, and returning his kisses in a way she had never done before [apparently not even the night before]. Times had decidedly changed. “The little bird is caught at last!” she said, a sadness showing in her smile’. Jude corrects her view, ‘“No – only nested”, he assured her’ (287). (The serial version of the novel has ‘mated’ for ‘nested’ here.) Sue is no less narcissistic than before sex, comparing her own ‘fresh charms’, as she sees her image in the mirror of Arabella’s room, with Arabella’s morning ‘frowsiness’; as the ensuing conversation indicates, sexual intercourse has given her a decided advantage for possession of Jude (288). However, Sue and Jude still occupy separate bedrooms and exhibit very little by way of a full and satisfying sexual relationship; Sue remains nearly as hysterical as she was before she began the sexual relationship with Jude. Once Sue and Jude have entered on a sexual relationship, it is not dealt with in extended dramatic scenes but in general terms. Sue is able to have sexual intercourse with Jude at least often enough to bear two children and to be about to bear another in just over three years. Hardy writes: ‘That the twain were happy – between their times of sadness – was indubitable’, and he attributes some of this to ‘a new and tender interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind’ brought about by the presence of Father Time (308). We see the pair at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show mainly through Arabella’s eyes. They appear happy together, Jude more loving than Sue, teasing each other in light banter. Sue answers Jude’s question about being happy that they have come to the Show, albeit after he has forgotten he asked it, with a little speech: ‘I feel that we have returned to Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-five centuries have taught the race since their time, as one of your Christminster luminaries says’ (316). Sue is, then, as a character, both willing and able to engage in sex with Jude at least occasionally. We must assume from this speech that she does so without distress and without any evidence of a powerful or violent repressed sexuality in danger of coming to the surface in the form of identifiable symptoms. It is this which leads me to question the argument for repressed

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sexuality. In real life such activity so close to the repressed feelings would surely produce some symptomatic behaviour. This particular situation and this part of the novel may be a weakness in the novel itself; after the struggle on Jude’s part to get Sue into a sexual relationship, and her struggle to avoid it, that the consequences of his success should simply go unnoticed and with little or no effect on either character stretches credibility. However, my own view is that Hardy allows an unstable compromise on the part of the characters for a time until the stress of the death of the children brings him back to the failure of their relationship which is his real subject. Therefore, I think we must assume that Sue can allow Jude into a sexual embrace from time to time, which she endures without passionate participation in order to maintain the comradeship, and Jude accepts her non-participation in the belief that Sue’s nature is not as passionate as he wished it to be, and there is evidence for this. Once he has managed their first sexual night, Jude is always, even in the worst times, following Sue’s lead and meeting her conditions according to her desires and needs. This interpretive point of view, then, must insist that the two scenes in which Sue demands that Jude kiss her are not at all sexual on her part. They are, instead, Sue’s desperate attempts to maintain Jude’s love for her even while she rejects him. The first occurs after the revealing and sharp angry discussion when Sue has asked Jude to live somewhere else, insisting that they should never have gone beyond being comrades living only in mental communion, and that however fondly it ended, she had led him on to loving her without loving him. Jude finally reacts in anger, throws his pillow on the floor, and turns to go. ‘“O but you shall kiss me!” she said . . . “I can’t – bear – !”’. After Jude has ‘kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely ever done before’ (my italics), she pushes him away saying good-bye and expecting they will be dear friends as they were long ago (374). I believe the same need on Sue’s part occurs at their final meeting. Now nearly dying, Jude has travelled through cold rain to see her for the last time. Another battle occurs. Sue tells Jude he insults her by calling her a coward and that he must go away from her. He tells her she is not worth a man’s love; he ‘would never come to see [ her] again, even if [ he] had the strength to come’ (408). Sue can’t endure his attack and can’t let him go. ‘Don’t, don’t scorn me! Kiss me, O kiss me lots of times, and say I am not a coward and a contemptible humbug – I can’t bear it!’ Significantly, she must also tell him her remarriage to Phillotson is not sexual. Jude asks, ‘You do love me still?’ and Sue

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answers, ‘I do! You know it too well! . . . But I mustn’t do this! – I mustn’t kiss you back as I would!’ (409). Satisfied that she has made his love for her secure again, she painfully sends Jude away. When she is later preparing to insist upon sex with Phillotson, she tells the Widow Edlin that she finds that she still loves Jude – ‘O grossly’. I don’t see how she could mean passionately sexually. In fact, I think the comment is meant primarily to impress upon Mrs. Edlin the enormity of the heroic sacrifice she must make of herself, and this is to prepare her mind for sex with Phillotson. A few pages later she chides herself – ‘O why was I so unheroic!’ – for accepting Phillotson’s proposal that the remarriage could be sexless (414). I say all this because there is another set of revelations which I think provides the conclusive key to Sue’s character. It involves a set of photographs which I thought at first was another sloppy flaw in the novel. When they are saying their good-byes at the gates of the college after their night away, Sue says, ‘O, I bought something for you, which I had nearly forgotten. . . . It is a new little photograph of me. Would you like it?” (159). About this time Phillotson is in Shaston reading again the few and decidedly not romantic letters Sue has sent him about the college and about her reading and which she signed, ‘Sue B’. He then looks at two photographs of her, one of her ‘as a child . . . standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand’. (It may be important to know there exists such a photo of Tryphena Sparks.) The other is one of her ‘as a young woman. . . . It was a duplicate of the one she had given Jude, and would have given to any man.’ Phillotson kisses it ‘with all the passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young man of eighteen’ (182). In that now widely known cliché, Sue has been somewhat economical with the truth when she told Jude she had bought the photo for him. Later, when Jude has been offended and depressed by Sue, now Mrs. Phillotson, and is waiting for the coach to the railway station, he observes Sue through the window looking at a photograph. She pressed it against her bosom before putting it away, and Jude notices that she is tearful. ‘“Whose photograph was she looking at?” he said. He had once given her his; but she had others, he knew. Yet it was his, surely?’ (227). Jude’s gift to Sue of a photo of himself has never been mentioned before this, and it is difficult to determine when he could have given it to her, but we do know that like the other girls at the Training College, Sue has photos standing on her dressing table. There are two. Questioned by the mistress after Sue has failed to return to the College (she and Jude have missed their train), the girl in the next bed explains that one is of

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‘the schoolmaster she served under – Mr Phillotson’. The mistress asks, ‘And the other – this undergraduate in cap and gown – who is he?’ The girl replies, ‘He is a friend, or was. She has never told his name.’ Had she wanted, Sue could have had her cousin Jude’s photo on her dressing table. As the mistress says, ‘Strictly speaking, relations’ portraits only are allowed on these tables’ (161). Since Phillotson is her teacher and she is engaged to him, it is understandable that she has his photo on her dressing table. Only the undergraduate’s photo seems at first thought an anomaly, but it is not too slender a thread to see this as an indication that the dead undergraduate – eventually of course a graduate – means a great deal more to Sue than she has so far admitted, except that from time to time she refers to him, much to Jude’s distress. I think there is enough evidence to argue that Sue’s ideal relationship is the non-sexual one with the Christminster student, though we know the relationship only in its outlines: Sue’s years with him in Cambridge, her regard for all that he had taught her, the fifteen months she lived with him in London, the inheritance he left her, and her guilt that she may have been partly responsible for his death. I suggest that the photo Sue pressed to her bosom was the one of the undergraduate in cap and gown, whose name she never tells. Late in the scene where she has told Jude of this relationship, she refers to him as ‘My University friend Mr. —— but never mind his name, poor boy’ (172). I think this way of preserving a private protected connection, his name, behind what she is prepared to tell, indicates how important he is to her. He is her ideal of man or, as Freud says of the narcissistic woman’s choice of loveobject, he is the man she would like to be if she were a man. Neither Jude nor Phillotson quite reaches that status. Now that he is dead, there is only Jude, whom she has moulded into as near a model of her ideal as she is capable of making him. But their relationship is tainted for her by sex and children, and by the death of the children, instead of being ennobled by a non-sexual comradeship and mental communion. Both Jude and Sue are destroyed. Jude dies for an unfulfilled love for a woman who won’t have him as a fully sexual mate. Overwhelmed by guilt and by sorrow, Sue forces herself into a sexual relationship which she abhors and in which she cannot participate. I hope I have shown the rigidly narrow and deeply destructive patterns followed by Jude and Sue, who in their efforts to rise above what they see as common life never quite recognise that the idealistic code of values and behaviour to which they cling so tenaciously is part of the system which drives them to mutual self-destruction. As Wayne Burns writes, ‘while Jude is “killing

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himself for a woman” (as well as for his unfulfilled ideals) Sue is slowly but just as surely killing herself (as well as Jude) for her Christian ideals. This is “the deadly war waged between flesh and spirit” that forms the primary subject and theme of the novel. The war waged between Jude and Sue, on the one hand, and Christminster and social conventions on the other, can hardly be considered a separate war at all.’17

Notes 1. Part I appeared as ‘Characterization in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: The Function of Arabella’ in Reading Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit, (Macmillan, 1998), pp. 57–82. All the quotations here and there are from Jude the Obscure, The New Wessex edition (paperback), Introduction by Terry Eagleton and notes by P. N. Furbank, (Macmillan, 1974), first edition dated 1896. Page numbers appear in parentheses after the quotation in the body of the essay. 2. Dennis Taylor, ‘The Chronology of Jude the Obscure’, The Thomas Hardy Journal, October, 1996, pp. 65–8. The information is repeated in Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Dennis Taylor, (Penguin Classics, 1998) (this series publishes the first printed edition of Hardy’s novels with notes and appendices referring to later editions), pp. 474–6. 3. Patricia Ingham, ‘The Evolution of Jude the Obscure’, The Review of English Studies, new series, Vol. XXVII, No. 105, pp. 27–37, and No. 106, pp. 159–69, 1976. 4. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, by Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London, 1984), p. 183. 5. For example, Dale Kramer, ‘Hardy and readers: Jude the Obscure’, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (Cambridge , 1999), p. 177. 6. See pp. 189–90, 231, 233 and 236. 7. Irving Howe, Anthony Alvarez, Albert Guerard, are all quoted in the Norton Critical edition of Jude the Obscure, ed. Norman Page (New York, 1978): Howe, p. 404; Alvarez, p. 419; Guerard, p. 447. 8. Desmond Hawkins, Thomas Hardy (1976, revised ed. London, 1987, p. 160: ‘A cynic might be pardoned for suggesting that [Sue] aimed to replace the register office with the clip joint’, referring to her on again off again approach to marriage with Jude). 9. Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist (London, 1981); Wayne Burns, ‘Flesh and Spirit in Jude the Obscure’, Recovering Literature, Winter, 1972, pp. 5–21; Michael Steig, ‘Sue Bridehead’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring, 1968, pp. 260–66; Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London, 1988). 10. Phillip Mallett, ‘Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form in Jude the Obscure’, English, XXXVIII, Autumn, 1989, pp. 211–24. 11. Sumner, Chapter 9, ‘Jude and Sue: the psychological problems of modern man and woman’ (III), pp. 147–87. Wayne Burns’s earlier essay arrives at similar conclusions, but does less with the psychology of the character. 12. Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, p. 182.

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13. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey et al., Vol. XXII, ‘New Introductory Lectures’, No. XXXIII, ‘Femininity’, (Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 132–3. 14. Rosemarie Sumner, pp. 179–82. 15. Rosemary Sumner, p. 180. 16. Rosemarie Sumner, pp. 174–5. 17. Wayne Burns, ‘Flesh and Spirit’, p. 19.

8 ‘Done because we are too menny’: Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture Sally Shuttleworth

Even for readers accustomed to some of the more graphic excesses of recent literature, the scene in Jude the Obscure where the bodies of Little Father Time and his siblings are discovered still retains its power to disturb and shock. The scene works as a direct assault on the reader, a deliberate attack on our novel reading sensibilities where children customarily represent hope for the future, a promise of continuity and development. As a culture, whether late nineteenth-century or early twenty-first, we have too much invested in our notions of childhood innocence – a state removed from the stresses and sufferings of adulthood – to accept without trauma the idea of child suicide. In this case we are looking not merely at suicide, but murder as well, and not a form of murder that can be simply ascribed to animal brutishness. One of the most disturbing things about Father Time’s action in Jude the Obscure is that he was trying to be helpful: if the children were removed Sue and Jude could once more lodge together. The idea of childhood innocence and virtue is retained at the very time of its gruesome undermining.1 In this chapter I seek to make sense of this scene by placing the novel in the context of late-nineteenth-century debates about child suicide, which raise in turn larger questions about the nature of childhood itself. Critics of the novel, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have always been uncertain as to how to respond to Father Time’s act. It is noticeable that neither the scene itself, nor the figure of Father Time, is discussed in the recent World’s Classics edition of the novel.2 Omission is one line of defence, comedy is another. The Pall Mall 133

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Gazette of 1895 noted satirically that ‘in due course an unblessed family appears; and soon early and later infants are attracting momentary attention by hanging each other with box-cord on little pegs all round the room’.3 The glorious nonchalance of ‘early and later infants’, suggesting an unspecified number, linked to the material precision of ‘box-cord’ and the damning ‘momentary attention’, quickly recasts the scene as a version of comic grotesque. Margaret Oliphant, in her diatribe, ‘The Anti-Marriage League’ in Blackwood’s, takes one step further, suggesting that the deaths bring ‘this nauseous tragedy suddenly and at a stroke into the regions of pure farce’. She asks facetiously whether Hardy would recommend this plan for ‘general adoption . . . but then there is no natural provision in families of such a wise child to get its progenitors out of trouble’.4 Evolutionary discourse is turned against itself as Hardy’s pessimism is wilfully reinterpreted as a form of natural theology. The Illustrated London News adopts a similar line, noting that the comments of the doctor turn the whole scene into ‘ghastly farce’: ‘We all know perfectly well that baby Schopenhauers are not coming into the world in shoals.’5 Stalwart British common sense and ridicule is to keep at bay the threatened invasion of Continental philosophy. Twentieth-century critics have echoed these forms of verdict: Father Time’s note, A. Alvarez suggests, ‘is dangerously close to being laughable’.6 In many ways these critical judgments are well placed: the scene does create readerly embarrassment, and one of the best mechanisms of defence is undoubtedly laughter. I would like in this essay, however, to restore the scene to the centrality it undoubtedly occupies in the reading experience. Rather than dismiss it as a lapse of taste or artistic power, I wish to examine its place within the schema of the novel as a whole, and to trace its relations to late-Victorian discussions of child development and human evolution. From the very opening of the novel, child suicide is raised as a possibility. As Jude returns home, having been beaten for feeding, rather than scaring, the crows, he is weeping, we are told, ‘not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestial scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish’.7 Hardy’s narrator intervenes to superimpose on top of Jude’s childish sorrow an adult’s pessimistic vision of a Darwinian struggle for existence which overturns the comforting religious order of natural theology. The teleology implied here is of a far more brutal kind: an inevitable progress to self-extinction. It is almost as if Hardy is harrying this child, or ‘puppet’,8 to his ‘destined issue’.9

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Jude’s progress across the field is thwarted by his reluctance to tread on the earthworms which cover the ground. He was a boy, we are told, ‘who could not himself bear to hurt anything’: He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up, and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. (11) Such extremes of sensitivity, applied not merely to the lower reaches of the animal kingdom, but to the vegetable world as well, might well appear excessive to us now, but would be recognised by late nineteenthcentury readers as an explicit marker of the increasingly morbid state of mind developing in the nation’s youth. Thus an article ‘On Cruelty to Animals’ in the Fortnightly Review (1876), noted that: It is possible to develope such a delicacy of sentiment, that the vegetable world shall also be included, and until it may become impossible not only to kill a rabbit, but to order the felling of a tree, or the stubbing of a useless hedge. Yet this is surely morbid, and is far less to be desired than the more robust type of character, which pursues happiness with energy and shuts its eyes to unavoidable pain.10 Jude, who later is to have such trouble coping with the sufferings of pigs and rabbits, is clearly one of these ‘morbid’ beings whose sensitivities towards the natural world mark them out for a life of ‘unavoidable pain’. Although he manages to pick ‘his way on tiptoe among the earthworms, without killing a single one’ it is evident that such a delicate balancing act cannot be maintained. The narrator intervenes once more to acknowledge, and question, the diagnosis of morbidity, and to offer his own gloom-laden prognosis: This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a great deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again. (11) As before, the perception here is not that of the child Jude, but an adult intelligence. Critics have attributed the overwhelming pessimism of this text to the influence of Schopenhauer on Hardy’s writing,11 and indeed

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one can clearly trace correlations between notes taken by Hardy from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism and the novel: ‘Children’, Hardy notes, ‘condemned not to death but to life.’ Hardy also draws his image of the stage curtain from Schopenhauer, but with a significant difference: In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin.12 In a sense, Hardy achieves the near impossible of outdoing Schopenhauer in degrees of pessimism. His child is not endowed with high spirits, eagerly awaiting for the curtain to go up, but is rather burdened from youth with the sense of suffering and hopelessness that Schopenhauer accorded only to adults. Why should Hardy choose to burden his child in this way? The answer, in part (and for Hardy answers are always only in part) seems to lie with his subscription to theories of hereditary transmission of character traits, which add a further, materialist, layer to the pessimism of Schopenhauer. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy left it open to question whether heredity itself, or merely the idea of heredity, functioned as a determining cause. In Jude the question of hereditary influence seems clearer: the legendary Fawley inheritance is not simply an old wives’ tale, but a physiologically determining force. We should, for once, trust Hardy when he states in a letter of 1896 that his novel is concerned not with marriage in general, but ‘merely with the doom of hereditary temperament & unsuitable mating in marriage’.13 There is, of course, a level of disingenuousness in his insistent surprise that readers saw the book as an attack on marriage, but in each of his responses he foregrounds heredity. Thus he thanks Edmund Gosse for his discriminating review, noting once again that the novel is not a manifesto on the marriage question since it is concerned: first with the labours of a poor student to get a University degree, &secondly with the tragic issues of two bad marriages, owing in the main to a doom or curse of hereditary temperament peculiar to the family of the parties.14 Gosse’s review stresses this latter aspect. Hardy, he notes, ‘has undertaken to trace the lamentable results of unions in a family exhausted by intermarriage and poverty’. Hardy writes, in part, as a physician, a

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‘neuropathist’, depicting Jude as ‘a neurotic subject in whom hereditary degeneracy takes an idealist turn’, and Father Time as a boy ‘whose habitual melancholy, combined with his hereditary antecedents, has prepared us for an outbreak of suicide, if not of murder’.15 Gosse readily identifies these figures, including the child suicide, because they were staples in the discussions of the ailments of modern life, and the workings of heredity, in periodicals, newspapers and books at this time. A quick glance at Hardy’s notebooks of the preceding period is sufficent to show an abiding interest in heredity, and more explicitly in the ways in which past experiences of our forebears are imprinted upon us. Thus he notes down Galton’s theories of hereditary defects; discussions in the Contemporary Review of the ‘fatality of heredity’; and Hering’s theory that ‘Though individuals die their offspring carry on the memory of all the impressions their ancestors acquired or received.’16 Most extensively, there are notes from Henry Maudsley’s Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings (1886), where Hardy makes entries on ‘a distinct neurotic strain’ in families, and a ‘narrow intensity of temperament’, and the following passage on memory: The individual brain is virtually the consolidate embodiment of a long series of memories; where every body, in the main lines of his thoughts, feelings and conduct, really recalls the experiences of his forefathers. Consciousness tells him indeed that he is a self-sufficing individual with infinite potentialities of free will; it tells him also that the sun goes round the earth.17 Maudsley here outlines the central conflict at the heart of Jude: the aspiration to be free, to determine one’s own course, set against the sense that one is entrapped and imprisoned by the past. Just as Christminster is a form of mausoleum, so Jude himself is merely living out the ‘thoughts and feelings and conduct’ of his family, which are to receive final expression in Father Time’s drastic act. What might seem the highly tenuous theory that the feelings and conduct of our ancestors can be inscribed in such detail on our minds, is given the double weight of Maudsley’s own medical authority and that of Copernicus. Evolutionary psychology has created a new Copernican revolution, forcing individuals to re-evaluate their cherished senses of centrality and uniqueness. Under the theory outlined by Maudsley, Hering and Spencer, the individual is like a landscape, written over by the past. Although the sites of the historical past in Marygreen are being obliterated in the opening scene

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of Jude, the legacy of the past is still firmly inscribed in Jude, a child who was ‘an ancient man in some phases of thought’ (22). Such inscription is even more marked in Father Time who is less a child than a walking symbol: He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through the crevices. A ground swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of time, and appeared not to care about what it saw. (290) Hardy, in this novel, takes the implications of contemporary psychology and pushes them further than any current theorist. Logically, if the child is the bearer of the thoughts and feelings of his parents and ancestors, he ceases to be a child according to previous categories of perception: a being who is defined by innocence and lack of experience. As the figure of Father Time suggests, it is impossible to be a child anymore. Age has to masquerade as Juvenility. All these developments in psychological theory help to make the unthinkable – that a child might wish to commit suicide – not only thinkable, but inevitable. The problem of child suicide figured strongly in newspaper and periodical discussion of the 1880s and 1890s. The Review of Reviews in 1890 gives an account of a paper by S. A. K. Strahan which paid particular attention to the ‘growth of the class of child suicides’, a development that was then linked to the increase of nervous disease and hereditary predisposition.18 Discussion in England of child suicide as a phenomenon dates back to the 1850s when statistics were published of child suicides in France. Suicide held a particular fascination for positivist thinkers in the nineteenth century since an act whose essence, as Hardy might say, appeared to be its voluntariness, could be fairly predicted and plotted according to recognised statistical curves. This insight lay behind the four major works on suicide in the last two decades of the century by Morselli (1882), Wynn Westcott (1885), Strahan (1893), and Durkheim’s famous sociological study of 1897.19 The first European discussions of child suicide, drawing on French material, tended to stress parental ill-treatment as the dominating cause, but the first specifically English engagement with the topic, by the psychiatrist James Crichton Browne in 1860, emphasised instead the role of heredity. In this remarkable essay, ‘Psychical Diseases of Early Life’, Crichton Browne became the first medical theorist to argue

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unequivocally that children could become insane.20 ‘Psychical disease’, he proclaimed, could exist ‘in utero, in infancy, and childhood’.21 To support his case he draws together numerous incidences of ‘homicidal monomania’ in children, including the strangling of siblings, as well as examples of child melancholia. He notes: This disease appears incompatible with early life, but it is only so in appearance, for the buoyancy and gladness of childhood may give place to despondency and despair, and faith and confidence be superseded by doubt and misery.22 He proceeds to give accounts of child suicide in France, Germany and England, in children ranging from 5 to 15, and endorses French findings that the phenomenon had risen sevenfold in the last 30 years. Crichton Browne, who subsequently became a friend of Hardy, led the field in child psychiatry for the next forty years. It is probably no concidence that suicide of children under 15 was first added to the English tables the year after his article. The resulting statistics do make alarming reading. Thus from 1861 to 1888 there were 261 child suicides recorded, with a marked increase in the 1880s.23 By the 1880s the idea that child suicide was now common, and on the increase, became a standard ingredient in articles on the pressures of modern life. An article in Blackwood’s (1880), notes that the number of suicides under sixteen is: swelling rapidly, and is already large enough to indicate that the disposition to suicide may lay hold of us almost in babyhood. Nearly two thousand boys and girls are now yielding to it every year in Europe. Thus far they do not seem to begin before they are nine; that is the moment, apparently, at which the pains of life become unbearable to them, as happened to the little boy who drowned himself for grief at the loss of his canary.24 It is worth noting that Jude is eleven when we first meet him, and he wishes he were dead. Father Time, in line with the timing suggested above, is nine when he kills himself. The Blackwood’s article draws on Continental writers to explain the phenomenon of child suicide, citing an increasing weariness of life, but also the advance of schooling. It was claimed that the spread of the alphabet also brought with it the spread of voluntary death:

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never, in our senses, should we have supposed that village-schooling is, indirectly, the most fertile of all the actual origins of suicide. And yet it seems to be so. In place of the usual notion that education would lead to a cure of the moral evils which bedevilled society, schooling is now singled out as the primary cause of suicide. The Continental authors seem to be suggesting that: if we go on as we have begun, we shall soon see suicide officially recognised by Governments as an inevitable result of study (like headaches and spectacles), and placed naturally, all over Europe, under the supervision of the inspectors of schools.25 The comically macabre vision, of European bureaucracy run mad, is underpinned by the disturbing implication that education for the lower classes would not bring the cultural and social rewards anticipated by Tory and radical reformers alike, but rather a deepened awareness of the unbearable nature of their lot in life.26 The link between Jude’s educational desires and the spiralling negativity of himself and Father Time is here illuminated, explaining also, perhaps, why Hardy rewrote the early chapters of Jude, introducing the crucial figure of the schoolmaster.27 Jude’s early discontent has been triggered by his attendance at the village school. The Blackwood’s article also draws attention to the hereditary element in suicide, citing two separate continental cases ‘in each of which seven brothers have hanged themselves one after the other’.28 Although the mythic dimensions to these accounts might cause one to doubt their accuracy, or at least to see an element of imitation in play, the author firmly insists that these cases show beyond a shadow of a doubt the ‘occasional transmission of the suicidal tendency from parents to children’.29 These twin ideas – the advance of schooling, and hereditary transmission – dominate discussion in the coming decades. Our current concerns with school pressures on the young pale into insignificance when compared to the late nineteenth century, when endless treatises were produced on the dire consequences of what came to be known as ‘brain forcing’, and the suicide of children and undergraduates due to exam pressure.30 However, the main correlation between suicide and education was tied to the more nebulous idea of simple development of mental powers. Education, Wynn Westcott argued in his treatise on sui-

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cide, ‘produces precocious development of the reflective faculties, of vanity, and of the desires’.31 Behind such pronouncements lies a distinct class agenda: ‘precocious’ development is clearly more a feature of newly emerging working-class education, encouraging ‘reflection’ where none had been deemed to exist before. Wynn Westcott also draws attention to the workings of hereditary predisposition, recording cases of whole families killing themselves. He also allows, however, for a reflective element at work: The effect of mental agitation in a person knowing that he is the descendant of insane persons or of suicides, is worthy of consideration; to a well-educated man, what a ‘skeleton in the closet’ to live with, must be the constant recollection of the risk to which hereditary transmission exposes him. Such a spectre may well refuse to be laid, and must be the fertile cause in the production of another generation of suicides.32 Hereditary disposition, and imaginative response, are here inextricably tied, in ways paralleled in Jude. Although Jude has been warned, in ominous, doom-laden terms, since childhood about his unhealthy family stock, he does not actually attempt to kill himself until shortly after he discovers, following a row with Arabella, that his mother drowned herself. One of the most influential interventions on the question of child suicide, and one Hardy probably read, was Henry Maudsley’s essay in the Fortnightly Review, 1886, on ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’. Maudsley argues that, as with animal breeding, the fixed qualities of family stock ‘are deeper and more stable than those of the individual’. All of us hold, in latency, ancestral qualities that will be awakened to activity in the right conditions. Maudsley suggests, therefore, that the true way to self-knowledge for a man is not through introspection, but by the study of his relations: for he may observe in one or another of them the full development of what lies dormant in him, hidden and indiscernible – the actual outcome of the deep-lying potentialities of the family stock.33 The Romantic model of selfhood, which privileged ideas of a unique interiority, is supplanted by one which not only denies uniqueness, but situates the secrets of selfhood outside the domain of individual identity. These ‘deep-lying potentialities’ are of course intensified, according to Maudsley and his peers, by inter-breeding and the marriage of

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cousins. In line with the eugenic debates of the time, Strahan published, at the same time as his book on suicide, an article in the Westminster Review on the dangers of consanguineous marriages.34 In Jude it is made quite clear not only that the Fawleys should never marry, but that the marriage of two from the same stock must necessarily result in unmitigated disaster. When Jude first sees Sue he thinks ‘she was so pretty . . . he could not believe it possible that she should belong to him’. But then she speaks, ‘and he recognized in the accents certain qualities of his own voice; softened and sweetened, but his own’ (89). It is significant that it is not so much their features which link them as their issue – their voice – that which they bring forth. After this first glimpse Jude rehearses the reasons why he should not think romantically of Sue: The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong. The second was that they were cousins. It was not well for cousins to fall in love even when the circumstances seemed to favour the passion. The third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be intensified to a tragic horror. (91) The ethical dimensions of the first reason seem far outweighed by the combined force of the second two. Although the act of Father Time strikes the reader with horror and surprise, in another sense we have been thoroughly prepared. Jude’s reflections are later revealed to be not merely paranoid responses to local gossip, but fully justified and scientifically grounded. Hardy’s insistence on the importance of heredity, offered in his letters and in response to reviews, is replicated in the text of the novel, where he returns again and again to the question of Jude and Sue’s biological unfitness for marriage, which is rendered even more compelling by their consanguinity. They later stand possessed by the same thought, ugly enough as an assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness – two bitters in a dish. (175) Although they attempt to cast such ideas aside, it would seem that Jude and Sue are in the grip of a Maudsleyan plot.

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One of the primary forms of evidence adduced for hereditary temperament in late-nineteenth century medical works was suicide. As Maudsley noted in his article, ‘Of the direct inheritance of morbid qualities of like kind, suicide yields the most decided examples. It is, indeed, striking and startling to observe how strong the suicidal bent is apt to be in those who have inherited it, and how seemingly trivial a cause will stir it into action.’ His primary example of such hereditary transmission is child suicide: Public feeling is much shocked, as if something very unnatural had happened, when a child of eight or nine years of age commits suicide, and is prone to rush to the hasty conclusion that so fearful an act would never have been done by so young a child unless it had been subjected to very cruel treatment. The real truth commonly is that the act is done for a cause that seems utterly inadequate; perhaps because his master inflicted a slight punishment, or because his father scolded him, or because his mother refused to let him go to a school-treat. But if the child’s family history be inquired into, it will usually be found that a line of suicide, or of melancholic depression with suicidal tendency, runs through it. So it comes to pass that a slight cause of vexation is sufficent to strike and make vibrate the fundamental life-sick note of its nature.35 Our very definition of the unnatural is here turned on its head, as child suicide, on the slightest causes, becomes a predictable part of nature’s patterns. We are in the territory of the young Jude here, who, on discovering that there was not a secret key to Latin, sinks into despondency ‘and continued to wish himself out of the world’ (27). Father Time, of course, makes literal the idea of the ‘fundamental life-sick note of his nature’ in his terrible last message, ‘Done because we are too menny’, with its seemingly helpless denial of personal agency, and its horrible pun on the condition of men expressed in the childish mis-spelling of ‘many’. Maudsley’s pronouncements form part of the growing body of work which was to feed into the eugenics debates of the 1890s. In his depiction of child suicide Hardy was narrowly anticipated by Emma Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894), although the forms of representation differ widely. Brooke’s text is a ‘New Woman’ novel, whose plot bears strong similarities to the later Lady Chatterley. The heroine, Jessamine Halliday, is an overbred society girl who is cured from dying of ennui by a sensible doctor. She flees from London society to Scotland where she falls in love with a muscular peasant, Colin. At the mention

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of marriage she flees once more, returning to London to sacrifice herself on the altar of family duty by marrying the debauched, degenerate scion of the ancient Heriot family. She bears two children who are kept hidden away, a family secret, for the girl is a malicious ‘idiot’ and the boy a ‘poor malformed thing’. The family stock, we are informed, had sunk into ‘insanity, disease, and shocking malformation’ and our good, trustworthy doctor accuses the heroine of crime in becoming ‘a mother by that effete and dissipated race’.36 The Heriot family had only avoided extinction so far by the regular purchase of handsome women from outside, but the last members are about to be wiped out. Jessamine, who is expecting again, commits what is seen, extraordinarily, as a heroic act by willing that her child be born dead. She succeeds, and the other children conveniently destroy themselves: In one moment of fierce horror, the brood concealed therein [the nursery] had destroyed itself, the hand of the idiot girl having been lifted suddenly and dexterously against her helpless brother. (III. 94) The description is disconcertingly brief. There is no concern for the children themselves, and no explanation as to how the girl died. Suicide is a possible answer, but the case seems perhaps closer to a degenerative version of Dickens’ spontaneous combustion. For Brooke, it is sufficent for her readers to know that the heirs have erased themselves. As the doctor observes, ‘The important thing was not that Heriot [the father] should reform, but that he and his race should pass into annihilation.’37 The novel, which enjoyed great popularity and was surprisingly wellreviewed, gives some sense of the cultural climate in which Hardy was writing Jude.38 As Strahan noted in his 1891 article, ‘every year thousands of children are born with pedigrees which would condemn puppies to the horsepond’.39 He urges, in opposition to Maudsley’s stance, that there should be legal controls on who was allowed to propagate. Maudsley, for all his pessimism, took a far more enlightened line, advocating a form of attention to breeding that would allow morbid stock to be strengthened once more. The ‘tincture of originality’ which could set a man ahead of the world was precisely the same which could lead to madness.40 We see this duality clearly in Jude who is depicted both as a man fifty years ahead of his time, and as a victim of his morbid inheritance. Sue, likewise, is a perfect exemplum of the ‘neurotic, thin, hysterical young women’ identified by such medical commentators as T. S. Clouston and Maudsley, who should be advised not to marry.41

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Debates on female education also formed part of this preoccupation with unhealthy breeding. Girls, it was maintained, who directed their energies towards their brain cells, rather than their reproductive systems, would have difficulty reproducing, or would give birth to ‘puny creatures’ who ‘either die in youth or grow up to be feeble-minded folks’.42 Sue, with her fierce intellectual energy, and initial fear of sexual contact, would clearly run the risk, according to these theories, of producing defective children. It is always difficult to trace the exact circumstances of a novel’s composition, or the particular social or cultural influences which might have impacted on an author, and the situation is particularly difficult for Jude, where the gestation is so long. Hardy made notes in 1887, a plan in 1890, an outline in 1892–93, published a serial, bowdlerized version in 1894 and the revised book form in 1895. During this time he undoubtedly had contacts with some of the leading psychiatrists of the day, although our records here are necessarily very partial. We know he visited an asylum with Clifford Allbutt in May 1891, and joined in discussion with Crichton Browne and Clifford Allbutt at the Royal Society in 1893.43 In 1892 Crichton Browne invited Hardy to lecture at the Royal Institution, and sent a letter praising Tess, which ‘examines the psychologic tissues with a powerful lens free from chromatic aberration’.44 On the more specific question of child suicide, there were numerous accounts in the Times at this period. In May 1891, for example, there were two, including one in relatively nearby Bodmin.45 There are numerous cases of fathers or mothers killing their children, and then killing themselves, but none I have yet discovered at this period where a child does this to his siblings. There are, however, both in these newspaper reports and in the wider literature, numerous cases of boys found hanging on nails in their bedroom, and various heartrending suicide notes.46 In 1891 Hardy wrote a letter of sympathy to fellow novelist Rider Haggard who had lost his ten year old son a couple of months before: Please give my kind regards to Mrs Haggard, and tell her how deeply our sympathy was with you both in your bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never really to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.47 The insensitivity in this letter is stunning. Did Hardy really believe that a dose of his own pessimism would offer consolation for the Haggards? Had he become so invested in his own negativity that he failed to realise that others might see children as something other than mere

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unhappy symbols of the increasing miseries of modern life? The letter provides an insight into his depiction of the suicide scene in Jude, for it is arguable that he could only have written it by suppressing his sense of the humanity of Father Time and Jude and Sue’s children. The latter remain nameless and almost sexless: Hardy added one child in the book version, but it is only when we see the corpses that we discover that the baby is a boy. We never learn Father Time’s original name; he comes with the nickname already imposed upon him, and Jude and Sue continue to employ it. They do try calling him Jude, but their most frequent appellation, also employed by the narrator, is the disturbingly anonymous ‘the boy’. When Sue once calls him Juey, it strikes an odd note. In his notebook Hardy had taken notes from an 1891 article on ‘The Pessimism of Europe’, which links the new ‘drooping spirit’ to the inherited memories carried in our sub-conscious. Science ‘hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy & pain, & scarce give sign, dwellers in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free’.48 Father Time is similarly a multiple individual, burdened by history, who lives out in his body the pain – but certainly not the joy – of those who have gone before. In the numerous articles on pessimism at this time, Schopenhauer was repeatedly blamed for the rise of suicides in Europe,49 although Schopenhauer himself explicitly attacked suicide since it thwarted the achievement of moral freedom, which is only to be obtained by a denial of the will to live.50 Hardy took extensive notes on Schopenhauer’s theories of education, which were designed to mitigate childhood suffering, and then deliberately inverted them in his representation of Father Time. ‘No child under fifteen’, Schopenhauer declares, ‘should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views.’ In order to avoid any large generalisations which will necessarily lead them into wrong notions, they should focus on ‘getting a thorough knowledge of individual and particular things’.51 Father Time violates this norm. ‘Children’, Hardy suggests: begin with detail and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars. (291–2)

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By inheritance, and by temperament, the child is hence shut out from the only avenue for salvation offered by Schopenhauer. His tragic death is represented as a tragedy of inheritance – a ‘morbid temperament’ thrown into a ‘fit of aggravated despondency’ (355) – but also one of faulty education. Sue is unsure how to respond to this ‘too reflective child’ (352) and makes a mistake in treating him as an ‘aged friend’, telling him of their destitution and another child on its way. Hardy’s representation of the death scene could not be more different from Brooke’s. We are given full circumstantial details. Sue arises early and goes to find Jude without checking on the children. They return and Jude is employed in the mundane (but in retrospect horribly symbolic) task of boiling eggs when he is startled by Sue’s scream. The account moves into an unsparing precision of detail – the door moving slowly on its hinges, Jude’s bewilderment in seeing no children, until his gaze rests on the bodies hung on coathooks and a nail, and the overturned chair. The scene is portrayed with almost a disturbing lack of sentiment: Jude ‘cut the cords with his pocket-knife and flung the children on the bed’. No tenderness or emotional reflection is allowed to subvert the sheer horror of the scene: Jude’s violent reaction is of a piece with the overall assault on our senses. As readers we are to be allowed no respite, no easy retreat into cathartic sympathy. We quickly learn the bodies are scarcely cold: Hardy refuses to spare us.52 A philosophical distance is quickly imposed, however, with Jude’s account of the verdict of the doctor who claims ‘It was in his nature to do it.’ Father Time is part of a new generation of boys who ‘see all of [life’s] terrors before they have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live’ (355). The first two statements here are straight from Maudsley and contemporary discussions of suicide. Thus Maudsley had argued that Goethe was right in The Sorrows of Werter to make Werter commit suicide: ‘suicide was the natural and inevitable termination of the morbid sorrows of such a nature.’53 Suicide, Maudsley insists, is not an aberration but a natural act. Other theorists stressed that children had highly sensitive mental organisations, and the passions of adults, without the ability to weigh consequences correctly.54 In this emerging model of childhood, which replaces previous Lockean conceptions, children are on a par with adults in their abilities to experience passion, but lack adult rational capacities. Hardy moves one stage further, however, to suggest that droves of children in the future will take the rational decision not to live.

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In terms of the structure of the plot it seems in some sense strange that it is Jude and Arabella’s child who kills the others since Arabella is the very picture of a Darwinian survivor. She is, however, a perfect match for Father Time: where he is both age and youth, history and prophecy, she is a combination of base animality and advanced artificiality. We are never allowed to forget her artificial dimple-making and false hair, which undermine any attempts to identify her solely with the domain of the natural. With regard to Father Time, Hardy is also operating not with a straightforward Darwinian model of inheritance, but one in which the acts and thoughts of the parents, before and after birth, leave direct imprints on their offspring. Father Time thus expresses the results of both marriages: On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term. (356) The child is stripped of individual identity to become, in Hardy’s technical term (employed in both nineteenth-century physics and biology), the ‘nodal point’ of the adult’s lives. In creating his death scene Hardy has brought together two genres: philosophical accounts of European pessimism, and the very detailed descriptions of child suicides in newspapers and psychiatric articles which often gave all the physical circumstances of death, as well as the childish notes left, or the responses of siblings to the corpses. Hardy draws on this vein of morbid curiosity, but then proceeds one stage further in an assault on our feelings: the text suggests that perhaps Father Time, in his successful achievement of death, is the lucky one. Both Jude and Sue are failed suicides. Sue brings forth another corpse, and longs for death, but is not permitted such an easy resolution. Jude makes his journey to Sue in the rain, determined to die, but is forced to recover and linger on until the summer for a final symbolic humiliation. At least their ancestor who tried to steal back the dead body of his child was accorded the dignity of death on the gibbet. To paraphrase Edmund Gosse, there are times when one wants to shake one’s fist at Hardy, the pessimism seems so unrelenting.55 * * * I would like to conclude with a curious note in the afterlife of Jude. While staying with the Pitt Rivers family in November 1895, Hardy had

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met their youngest daughter, Agnes Grove, and embarked on another semi-romantic/literary relationship.56 He wrote to her subsequently that her: remarks about Sue’s talk with the child in ‘Jude’ suggested to me that an article might be written entitled ‘What should children be told?’ – working it out under the different headings of ‘on human nature’, ‘on temptations’, ‘on money’, ‘on physiology’, &c. It would probably attract attention.57 Not only did Hardy suggest this article, he also prompted her again to write it, massively reworked her drafts, and arranged for publication in the radical Free Review.58 The first part of the article was violently anticlerical in its views on education, the second addressed the issue of what children should be told about physiology and recommended the adoption of a degree of honesty when dealing with questions of sex: That it is unwise wilfully to mislead enquiring children should be obvious to all thoughtful people. There is, however, a medium between falling back on the ‘gooseberry bush’ theory, and complete candour, when questioned as to the awe-inspiring, curiosity-exciting, genesis of infants. And one need fortunately have no fear of this middle course producing in an ordinary child such lamentable results as its readers will remember were produced by Sue’s fatal conversation with the child in ‘Jude the Obscure’. Bravely, but perhaps unwisely, Agnes Grove offers an example of the kind of advice that should be given: the answer given to a small enquirer by its mother, as to why she should be ill when a new baby came – that children were part of their mothers, and that they suffered pain, and had to lie still in much the same way as if a limb or some other portion of them had been taken away – quite satisfied the child, and involved no untruths.59 Personally, I prefer Sue’s version. This late-Victorian version of ‘helpful candour’, with its representation of childbirth as a form of amputation, goes some way to illuminating the difficulties faced by the Victorians in their attempts to think through the relationship between childhood, sexuality, and adulthood. One could see this article, drafted through a woman, as Hardy’s attempt to make amends for the ‘lamentable results’

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or, to use a thoroughly Victorian term, ‘unspeakable’ pessimism of his text. Far from offering a corrective, however, it only raises further questions which the novel had only touched on glancingly: if a child possesses the passions of an adult, do these include sexual passions? And if a child is imprinted with the thoughts and feelings of its parents and ancestors, does it even need to be ‘told’ about sexuality? (Unbeknownst to Hardy, Freud was of course pursuing a similar set of questions at this time in Vienna.) The question, ‘What children should be told’, addresses the whole issue of the dividing line between adult life and childhood, taking as its uncertain boundary the domain of sexuality. In Jude the tragedy, although long implanted, is finally evoked by the child trying to come to terms with the workings of sexual reproduction. At one level, Father Time’s insistence that Sue must have become pregnant on purpose, ‘For nobody would interfere with us like that, unless you agreed!’ (353), reveals childish misunderstanding. But at another level, it chillingly encodes Hardy’s own negative perceptions of sexual life: the very domain which should be the expression of our highest individual freedom, is in fact yet another sphere where we are controlled by our biological inheritance. In his 1885 study of Suicide, Wynn Westcott accused novelists of poisoning minds, particularly those of the partially educated, by making suicide an acceptable option.60 In a long article in the Guardian, 4 July 1894, the Bishop of Salisbury took up the refrain: ‘It is a great blot upon certain writers’ fame that in their works suicide is suggested, discussed, dallied with as a natural means to escape a difficult situation.’61 Hardy, of course, could scarcely be accused of making suicide attractive. He does, however, push to the limit contemporary theories of pessimism, outdoing Schopenhauer in endowing his child protagonists with pessimistic understanding beyond their years. He also takes up Maudsley’s point that child suicide is not a violation of all natural laws, but on the contrary an entirely natural phenomenon, which will recur with increasing frequency as degenerative inheritance takes hold. At the heart of these discussions lies the central question of what it means to be a child. If a child can commit that seemingly most adult of acts, where do the boundaries between childhood and adult states lie? Hardy takes one step further than his contemporaries, combining discussions of child suicide with theories of inherited memories to show that, logically, a child who is burdened by the thoughts and feelings of his forebears, must cease to be a child. The very category

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of childhood, as a state characterised by innocence and inexperience, must cease to exit. Age will be forced to masquerade as Juvenility.

Notes 1. The disturbing effect created by such category confusion is similar to that established by the recent series of Dr Barnardo’s advertisements, where innocent-looking babies and children are placed in adult scenes of despair and degradation, including one where a small child in short trousers is poised on the top of a tall building, about to jump. 2. In her introduction, Patricia Ingham refers only in passing to the deaths of the children, and focuses on Jude and Sue to the entire exclusion of Father Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xx, xxi. Dennis Taylor in the Penguin edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), includes a brief account of the doctor’s verdict, and the effects of Sue’s incautious words (xxviii–xxix), but no more. 3. ‘Review of Jude the Obscure’, Pall Mall Gazette, 12 Nov. 1895; rprt in Graham Clarke, ed., Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments. Vol. 1, The Contemporary Response (East Sussex: Helm Information, 1993), p. 233. 4. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Anti-Marriage League’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 159 (1896); reprt in R. G. Cox, ed., Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 261–2. 5. Unsigned review, Illustrated London News, 11 January, 1896; reprt in Cox, Critical Heritage, p. 275. 6. A. Alvarez, ‘Jude the Obscure: Afterword’, in Clarke, Thomas Hardy: Critical Assessments. Vol. IV, A Twentieth-Century Overview, p. 209. 7. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 11. All references to this edition will in future be given in the text. 8. In his letter to Edmund Gosse, thanking him for his intelligent review of the novel, Hardy notes that, ‘The “grimy” features of the story go to show the contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead, & the squalid real life he was fated to lead . . . . The idea was meant to run all through the novel. It is, in fact to be discovered in every body’s life – though it lies less on the surface perhaps than it does in my poor puppet’s’, in Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, eds, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy: Volume Two, 1893–1901 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Letter, Nov. 10, 1895, p. 93. 9. Jude’s own verdict, drawn from Agamemnon, on the death of the children: ‘Things are as they are, and will be brought to their destined issue’ (p. 358). 10. Jonathan Hutchinson, ‘On Cruelty to Animals’, Fortnightly Review, 20 (1876), 307–20, p. 319. This volume also contained articles on Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and one by Tyndall from which Hardy took extensive notes: see Lennart A. Björk, The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985), I, n. 855–60. 11. See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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12. See Björk, II, n. 1782. Unusually, Hardy notes the day on which he took these notes, May 13, 1891. 13. Letters, II, 104. To William Archer, 2 Jan. 1896. 14. Letters, II, 93. To Edmund Gosse, 10 Nov. 1895. 15. Edmund Gosse, review in Cosmopolis, 1 (Jan. 1896), 60–9, in Cox, Critical Heritage, pp. 266–7. 16. Björk, I, 1311; 1352; 1362. Hardy also notes down an almost identical formulation of Hering’s theory of the workings of inherited memory from Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1465). 17. Björk, I, 1519. For an interesting analysis of Hardy’s use of Maudsley, which focuses primarily on his theories of imagination and perception, see Patricia Gallivan, ‘Science and Art in Jude the Obscure’, in Anne Smith, ed., The Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Vision Press, 1979), pp. 126–44. 18. ‘How Mankind Might be Improved. by Murder, Mutilation or Imprisonment’, Review of Reviews 2 (1890), p. 32. The article offers a summary of S. A. K. Strahan’s paper, ‘The Propagation of Insanity and Allied Neuroses’, Journal of Mental Science 36 (July 1890). Hardy could well have read this summary, since he took notes from the September 1890 number of the Review of Reviews (Björk, II, n. 1774). The Review of Reviews was one one the journals to which the Dorset County Museum subscribed. (I am indebted to Michael Millgate for this information.) 19. Henry Morselli, Suicide: an Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (New York: D. Appleton, 1882), revised and abridged by the author from the Italian version; W. Wynn Westcott, Suicide, Its History, Literature, Jurisprudence, Causation and Prevention (London: H. K. Lewes, 1885); S. A. K. Strahan, Suicide and Insanity: A Physiological and Sociological Study (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893); Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris, 1897; 1st English trans. 1952). 20. Up until this point medical writers had tended to accept the Lockean position that insanity, a disorder of the reasoning powers, was necessarily a state reserved for adulthood. This did not, of course, prevent the detailing, without any reference to the inherent contradiction proposed, of numerous cases of childhood insanity in psychiatric treatises. 21. James Crichton Browne, ‘Psychical Diseases of Early Life’, Asylum Journal of Mental Science, 6 (1860), 284–320, p. 286. 22. Crichton Browne, p. 315. 23. ‘Suicides in England and Wales’, The Journal of Mental Science, 36 (1890), pp. 82–4. For the first reporting of French cases of child suicide, see ‘Suicide among Children’, Journal of Psychological Medicine, 9 (1856), pp. 296–9. In all the reporting, little mention is made of the difficulty of determining whether a child’s death is actually suicide, although the problems of adjudication which arise with adults are necessarily intensified with reference to children. The absence of such discussion is significant in itself: it is seemingly taken for granted that children do have reasons for killing themselves, and that their actions should be taken at face value. In some cases there are notes signifying intention, but it is of course by no means clear that a child found drowned (the favourite method of girls) actually intended suicide, and even death by hanging (the favourite method of boys) could be subject to interpretation. Several commentators note, for example,

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24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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that hanging is said to produce very agreeable physical sensations: would it be a complete anachronism to suggest that the behaviour associated with popstars and politicians in our own culture, had its parallels for the male youth of Victorian times? [Frederic Marshall] ‘Suicide’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 127 (1880), 719–35, p. 726. ‘Suicide’, p. 727. The article was published in the same year as education became compulsory in England, following the groundwork laid by Forster’s education act of 1870. As Patricia Ingham notes, all references to Phillotson were introduced only after Hardy had written the first twelve chapters of the novel. The initial focus on the departure of the schoolmaster was thus a recasting of the novel (Jude, p. 433). ‘Suicide’, p. 728. Stories of suicide, like those of strange psychological states in nineteenthcentury medical texts, quickly take on a life of their own, repeated endlessly from text to text, without any attempt at verification by the transmitting authors. Given the folkloric connotations of the number seven, it would seem highly likely that these two stories owe a lot to the functionings of cultural myth-creation. James Crichton Browne also leads the way in this field. See, for example, ‘Education and the Nervous System’ in The Book of Health, ed. Malcolm Morris (London: Cassell, 1883). Dickens’ depiction of Dr Blimber’s Academy in Dombey and Son (1848), which is extensively quoted by Crichton Browne (p. 350), becomes a leading text in these debates. See also D. H. Tuke, ‘Modern Life and Insanity’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 37 (1877–78), where increases in headaches and nervous complaints amongst poor children are linked to the introduction of compulsory Board School (p. 137). He also records the suicides of two young men due to preparing for the University of London exams (p. 138). W. Wynn Westcott, Suicide, Its History, Literature, Jursiprudence, Causation and Prevention (London: H. K. Lewsi, 1885), p. 112. Westcott, p. 139. Henry Maudsley, ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’, Fortnightly Review, 39 (1886), 647–59, pp. 650–1. Hardy took extensive notes from the Fortnightly in his journals, including for example, F. W. H. Myers’ article in 1885 on ‘Multiplex Personality’. Since articles were signed in the Fortnightly, Hardy would no doubt have been drawn to an article by such an eminent author whom he admired. S. A. K. Strahan, ‘Consanguineous Marriages’, Westminster Review (1891). Maudsley, ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’, p. 654. Emma. F. Brooke, A Superfluous Woman, 3 vols (London: William Heineman, 1894), III, 84. A Superfluous Woman, III, 104. A Superfluous Woman was swiftly reprinted in a one volume edition in that same year, and carried a selection of seventeen favourable reviews as a frontispiece including the Spectator, ‘a spark of genius’; the Academy, ‘it would be unfair not to add that it is to a great extent a story that deserves its popularity’ and the Review of Reviews, ‘the anonymous author presents

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39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts primal passion, unencumbered of the trappings of shame and habit, with a simplicity and directness unequalled in recent English fiction’. Strahan, ‘The Propagation of Insanity’, p. 335. Maudsley, ‘Heredity in Health and Disease’, p. 656. T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London: J. and A. Churchill, 1883), p. 623: ‘But what are we to say about the marriage of the neurotic, thin, hysterical young women, with insanity in their ancestry? We know they will not make good or safe mothers. Therefore, in them we ought to discourage marriage’. See also Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: Henry S. King, 1874), p. 281 on the tendency to intensification of the neurotic type. Clouston, p. 528. The most famous intervention in this debate was Maudsley’s essay, ‘Sex in Mind and in Education’, Fortnightly Review, NS 15 (1874), 468–9, which evoked a strong reply from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in the following number. Hardy, in his postscript to the novel for the 1912 Wessex Edition, famously notes that a German reviewer had identified Sue as the first delineation in fiction of ‘the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl – the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet’ (p. xxxviii). Although noncommital in response, he does not reject the idea, but rather concentrates on his haziness as to dates. For an account of Hardy’s visit to the asylum with Clifford Allbutt, a leading medical writer and Commissioner of Lunacy, see Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 315. His discussions with Allbutt, Crichton Browne and others are noted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 254. Clifford Allbutt was a voice of relative sanity amidst the late-century obsession with the increasing stresses of modern life, and the corresponding mental decay. He does, however, believe that child suicide occurs with relative frequency where there is a predisposition in the family. See ‘Nervous Diseases and Modern Life’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), p. 213. MS letter, Nov. 16, 1892; Dorset County Museum. The Times, 18 May, 1891, p. 9, col. d: ‘A BOY HANGED – At Bodmin on Saturday evening, Thomas Norsham, aged 14, a grocer’s assistant was found in a cellar by a child who told its parent that “Tommy was playing at hanging and would not speak.” The lad had hanged himself in the doorway of the apartment, to which he had been sent to fetch candles.’ See for example, ‘Suicide amongst Children’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 9 (1856), pp. 296–9; Forbes Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide (London: Henry Renshaw, 1840), p. 269; ‘The “Daily Telegraph” on Suicide’, Journal of Psychological Medicine Mental Pathology, 17 (1860), pp. lxxii–iii. Letters, I, 235 [May 1891?]. Björk, Literary Notebooks, II, n. 1888; ‘Turning Towards Nirvana.’ E. A. Ross. Arena. Nov. 91. Hardy took notes from an article in the Contemporary Review, 68 (Jan. 93), on ‘Pessimism and Progress’ (labelled by Hardy ‘Revd S. A. Alexander on The Decline of Pessimism’) in which he observes that ‘In philosophy

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50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

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Schopenhauer has given place to Hegel – the hope of cosmic suicide to the thought of a spiritual society.’ Hardy’s comment is, ‘comforting but false’ (Björk, II, n. 1908). See Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, selected and trans. by T. Bailey Saunders (London: Swan Sonnenschien, 1891), p. 48. The translator notes, ‘According to Schopenauer, moral freedom – the highest ethical aim – is to be obtained only by a denial of the will to live. Far from being a denial, suicide is an emphatic assertion of this will. For it is in fleeing from the pleasures, not the sufferings of life, that this denial exists’ (p. 48). Studies in Pessimism, pp. 96–7. For Hardy’s notes on this section of the book see Björk, II, n. 1797–99. For a very different representation of child suicide see Marie Corelli, The Mighty Atom (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1896), published one year after Hardy’s text, where the scene is designed to extract the maximum amount of emotional response from the reader. An adorable child, who has been subjected both to inhuman educational cramming, and an atheistical upbringing by his father, hangs himself (with the baby sash which is his only relic of his mother) in an attempt to find ‘Gentle Jesus’: he ‘calmly confronted the vast Infinite, and went forth on his voyage of discovery to find the God denied him by the cruelty and arrogance of man!’ (p. 310). The book is very confused as to whether to blame atheism or cramming for the death, and ends by conflating the two. Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: Henry S. King, 1874), p. 272. See Westcott, p. 112, and Morselli, p. 224. Edmund Gosse exclaimed in his Cosmopolis review, ‘What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at the Creator’ (Cox, p. 269). Agnes Grove was to step into the place of literary pupil/collaborator recently vacated by Florence Henniker. Letters, II, 101. To Agnes Grove, Dec. 20, 1895. See Letters II, pp. 114–24. ‘Our Children’, p. 398. Wynn Westcott, p. 92. He particularly singles out Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels: ‘In “Aurora Floyd” and “Lady Audley’s Secret”, two novels of high standing, suicide is suggested definitely as a remedy for trouble, at least twelve times.’ Guardian, 4 July 1894, p. 1045.

9 Hardy and Biology Angelique Richardson

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in November 1859. Sold out before it even reached the shelves, it shook Victorian Britain. George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began reading it immediately, concluding within two days that it made ‘an epoch’.1 A second edition was rushed out for January 1860, and a pirated American edition of 3,000 sold out almost immediately. Looking back from 1907, the scholar and writer Edmund Gosse, Hardy’s close friend (and pall-bearer at his funeral) remarked in Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments: ‘this was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action’.2 The Origin’s conclusions seemed inescapable. Life on earth was not the six-day product of a divine creator, but the outcome of random evolutionary process, and the theomorphic status of humanity was anything but certain. Man ‘was born yesterday – he will perish tomorrow’, declared the Athenaeum in the month The Origin appeared.3 Hardy, who declared that ‘as a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers’ of The Origin of Species, and at the age of 41 attended Darwin’s funeral at Westminster Abbey,4 was moved to express the pain of an orphaned people, of objects in the world left wondering ‘why we find us here’: Has some Vast Imbecility Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?5 In one fell swoop The Origin decentred humans, challenged God, and placed chance and struggle at the heart of life on earth. The following 156

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year, in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, when Tom Tulliver shoots peas at a blue-bottle, the narrator observes that nature ‘had provided Tom and the peas for the speedy destruction of this weak individual’. Species were both interdependent, and in conflict, and development was through natural selection. Left to natural processes, the weak would go to the wall; all life forms were subject to natural forces as relentless as they were random. By the time Hardy came to write fiction, Darwin had shifted his focus. In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, he borrowed extensively from cultural and anthropological narratives, and, perhaps as an inevitable consequence of the intertextual nature of the work, humans were brought back into the drama and given parts to play as architects of their own evolutionary development. Intention, which The Origin had striven to banish from evolutionary process, was brought back in the guise of human choice and agency in sexual selection. Sexual selection differed from natural selection – the survival of favoured individuals in the struggle for life (which Herbert Spencer would term ‘survival of the fittest’) – in that it centred on successful breeding and was dependent on the advantage which an individual had over others of the same sex and species solely in respect of acquiring a mate and reproducing. Love and human relations were now at the forefront of evolutionary science, and the love-plot, the staple diet of fiction, was now the focus of evolutionary narrative. Darwin cited Schopenhauer: ‘the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life . . . it is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake’.6 Darwin’s shift in focus would prove a fruitful one for Hardy. At the age of 28 he had written to the publisher Alexander Macmillan that ‘no fiction will considerably interest readers poor or rich unless the passion of love forms a prominent feature in the thread of the story’.7 He could now combine his interest in love with his scientific interests. In the New Review in 1890, he wrote: ‘life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely concerned with, for one thing, the relations between the sexes, and the substitution for such catastrophes as favour the false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that “they married and were happy ever after,” of catastrophes upon sexual relations as it is.’8 In the fin de siècle art journal Black and White he reiterated the point: I do feel very strongly that the position of men and women in nature, things which everyone is thinking, and nobody saying, may be taken

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up and treated frankly. Until lately novelists have been obliged to arrange situations and dénouements which they knew to be indescribably unreal, but dear to the heart of the amiable library subscriber. See how this ties the hands of a writer who is forced to make his characters act unnaturally, in order that he may produce the spurious effect of their being in harmony with social forms and ordinances.9 Hardy repositioned humans in nature, at a time when biology was being looked to to explain forms of social and sexual behaviour. Biology seemed to offer him a way of getting closer to the truth, and of defying literary and social convention. However, it would be reductive to assume that he saw nature as the key to explaining culture. Instead, it added a new layer of interest, and a new nexus of questions. What was the nature of freedom? Was the world governed by chance, or by natural laws that moved relentlessly in the direction of progress, eliminating the weak and favouring the fit? Darwin had emphasised the part played by chance, but other influential scientists, notably Herbert Spencer and Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, founder of eugenics, or human selective breeding,10 argued for the latter, grafting a deterministic pattern on to Darwin’s theories. Hardy, an inquiring student all his life, took an interest in these ideas. His notebooks carry extracts from Galton’s Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development (1883), the work in which the term eugenics was coined, and he attended at least one annual meeting of the Eugenics Education Society (founded in 1907), hearing Montague Crakanthorpe’s Presidential Address in 1910.11 Three years later, Britain passed the Mental Deficiency Act – or, as it was known, the Feeble-Mindedness Act, a piece of legislation which was the closest the country came to passing a eugenic law. 12 According to Darwin, individuals exercised choice in selecting sexual partners, but was this the only freedom evolutionary process allowed? And was it a choice that was made according to instinct rather than reason – a following of biological dictates, and a going back on the Age of Reason? The questions which science raised and then strove to settle fascinated Hardy. In his fiction he engages imaginatively with them, exploring the complex interaction of the social and the natural. However, while he covered similar ground to evolutionary scientists, he resisted their investment in the determining role of biology, and his work expresses a final lack of resolution in explaining the social and sexual in terms of nature. Hardy was anxious that there should be no attempt to construct a single argument or ‘scientific theory’ from his works.13 Rather, the novelist was a recorder, ‘the true historian of the time’.14 In 1917 he declared

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with some impatience: ‘I have repeatedly stated in prefaces and elsewhere that the views in [my works of art] are seemings, provisional impressions only, used for artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age, and are plausible, till somebody produces better theories of the universe.’15 While Hardy shifts position on the determining nature of biology, the fact that he does so suggests his belief in the malleability of narratives on the natural. In Chapter XVI of The Trumpet-Major (1880), set in the time of the Napoleonic wars, the narrator observes that ‘Nature was hardly invented at this early point of the century.’ In Hardy’s fiction, nature is persistently revisited and revised as he negotiates its relation to individual freedom. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the arguments for a fundamental sexual difference had intensified; the concept of a female physiology secured women’s place in the private sphere by situating her in (female) nature, rather than (male) culture. From the Enlightenment onwards, a one-sex model of humanity, which held that the sexes were on a continuum, and that woman was nothing more or less than an inferior version of man, was gradually replaced by a two-sex model which held that the sexes were fundamentally different.16 At a time of increasing campaigns for social equality, the question of sexual difference was one of the most pressing of late nineteenth-century debates. While The Origin of Species had upturned mid-Victorian values and beliefs, The Descent of Man actually endorsed many of them, particularly in relation to the Woman Question. Sexual selection highlighted physical and mental differences between the sexes, explaining them as advantageous in finding mates, and thus lending new authority and purpose to Victorian ideas of gender. Separate-sphere ideology – epitomized by Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House (1854–56) – was now given biological justification as the inevitable social expression of fundamental biological differences between men and women. In keeping with Victorian courting convention, Darwin observed that the human love-plot was an ‘exceptional’ case in which ‘the males, instead of having been selected, are the selectors’.17 He noted a further difference: with civilized people the arbitrament of battle for the possession of the woman has long ceased (II. 326). While the human romance plot was motivated by the same reproductive urges, the same striving for survival through progeny as the rest of the animal kingdom, there were two vital differences: men were the choosers, leaving women as the passive embodiments of Victorian femininity, and, among the ‘civilized’,

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aesthetic principles overruled physical strength. A woman’s beauty would determine her biological destiny: There are, however, exceptional cases in which the males, instead of having been the selected, have been the selectors. We recognise such cases by the females having been rendered more highly ornamented than the males, – their ornamental characters having been transmitted exclusively or chiefly to their female offspring. One such case has been described in the order to which man belongs, namely, with the Rhesus monkey. (II. 371) Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies, a tale of lesbian and heterosexual love which appeared anonymously in the same year as The Descent, engages directly with the latest scientific ideas on sexual difference, and challenges them, protesting that ‘in spite of a fashion which pervades the whole community at the present day – the habit of exclaiming that woman is not undeveloped man, but diverse, the fact remains that, after all, women are Mankind, and that in many of the sentiments of life the difference of sex is but a difference of degree.’18 The novel, which explores same-sex attraction, posits a fluid and malleable base for gender. Of Edward Springrove, we learn: An impressible heart had for years – perhaps as many as six or seven years – been distracting him, by unconsciously setting itself to yearn for somebody wanting, he scarcely new whom. Echoes of himself, though rarely, he now and then found. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women . . . But the indefinable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself still continued invisible. He grew older, and concluded that the ideas, or rather emotions, which possessed him on the subject, were probably too unreal ever to be found embodied in the flesh of a woman. Thereupon, he developed a plan of satisfying his dreams by wandering away to the heroines of poetical imagination, and took no further thought on the earthly realization of his formless desire. (183) Eldred Fitzpiers, the newly arrived doctor, revels in the same idealism in The Woodlanders (1887): ‘I am in love with something in my own head, and no thing-in-itself outside it at all’.19

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Hardy would return to love as an ideal rather than real emotion, offsetting – and precluding – biological narrative, in his last published novel, The Well-Beloved. First serialised in 1892, and then substantially revised for book publication in 1897, The Well-Beloved charts Jocelyn Pierston’s pursuit of an indefinable, unattainable shape, satirising the human romance plot. In pursuing the platonic ideal of love, Pierston evades the reality of human relations, marrying only in old age.20 The serial version lends a brutal edge to the satire, as biological process brings a swift and sudden close to the sculptor’s ideal imaginings: ‘his wife was – not Avice, but that parchment-covered skull moving about his room. An irresistible fit of laughter, so violent as to be an agony, seized upon him . . . “O – no, no! I – I – it is too, too droll – this ending to my would-be romantic history!” Ho-ho-ho!’21 In ‘An Imaginative Woman’, written in 1893, Hardy revisited the tension between the imagination and biological process. Before shooting himself, Robert Trewe, the poet, writes: Perhaps had I been blessed with a mother, or a sister, or a female friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have thought it worth while to continue my present existence. I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know; and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman alone; for in spite of what has been said in some quarters there is no real woman behind the title. 22 Ella Marchmill, who develops a corresponding ideal passion for Trewe, conceives a child in his image, although she has never met him. Hardy’s interest in the biology of sex is no less apparent than his resistance to it, appearing in his work with equal persistence. His poem ‘A Practical Woman’ delivers a direct counter narrative to ‘An Imaginative Woman’, telling the story of a woman who, having born seven sickly children, finally makes a eugenic match solely to have a healthy child: She went away. She disappeared, Years, years. Then back she came: In her hand was a blooming boy Mentally and in frame. ’I found a father at last who’d suit The purpose in my head,

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And used him till he’d done his job,’ Was all thereon she said.23 In A Pair of Blue Eyes, published a year after Desperate Remedies, Hardy seems to situate sex in the latest biological narrative, drawing on the same ideas of sexual difference as Darwin’s Descent of Man. Elfride, the owner of A Pair of Blue Eyes, and a ‘palpitating mobile creature’, pouts and weeps on demand, suffers from nervous disorder subsequent to unnecessary mental exertion, is dramatically inconstant, and prefers Knight’s dominance to Stephen’s gentleness.24 She is a frequent blusher, turning red when she is presented with earrings by Knight, and a bracelet by Lord Luxellian (155, 307), at a time when Darwin was writing blushing into evolution’s romance plot: ‘a slight blush adds to the beauty of a maiden’s face; and the Circassian women who are capable of blushing, invariably fetch a higher price in the seraglio of the Sultan than less susceptible women.’25 Of male–female hierarchy Darwin had written the previous year: ‘in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal.’26 The narrator assures us that Elfride has ‘her sex’s love of sheer force in a man, however ill-directed’ (100) and offers a Darwinian gloss on sexual relations: ‘directly domineering ceases in a man, snubbing begins in a woman’ (203). We are told that Stephen would have done better to ‘[drag] her by the wrist to the rails of some altar’ (100); of Knight, we learn that she is ‘proud to be his bond-servant’ (247). The eugenist and sexologist Havelock Ellis, an ardent admirer of Hardy, praised him for his focus on love, remarking that he was ‘less a story-teller than an artist who has intently studied certain phases of passion, and brings us a simple and faithful report of what he has found.’27 He delighted in ‘the pathetic figure of Elfride, with her eager and delicate instincts, her sweet hesitations, her clinging tenderness’, writing that she had ‘a charm for the memory, which no other of Mr Hardy’s heroines possesses in so great a degree’.28 Ellis’s appraisal of Hardy’s novel is saturated with references to ‘instinct-led’ women. Instinct was a characteristic which Ellis, among other scientists and sexologists, employed to demonstrate the approach of women to animals.29 According to Darwin, ‘it is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.’30 A Pair of Blue Eyes plays out contemporary scientific pronouncements on feminine childishness. Elfride fulfils Darwin’s description of females

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remaining more like the young of her own species.31 She is ‘but a child’ to Knight (174), her manner ‘childish and scarcely formed’; she protests ‘you alluded to me in [your notes] as if I were a child, too. Everybody does that. I cannot understand it’ (140). We read that ‘all children ran instinctively after Elfride, looking upon her more as an unusually nice large specimen of their own tribe than as a grown-up elder’ (29). The term ‘specimen’ lends the narrator’s observations the weight of ‘scientific fact’. Elfride and the children are seen to share sufficient characteristics to belong to one ‘tribe’, a social group which did not exist within ‘civilised’ society. They are bound together by instinct, not reason, as a separate, ‘inferior’ race. (Hardy recorded in his notebooks Schopenhauer’s comment that women are ‘big children all their life long’.)32 Knight belittles the emancipation of women, and warns Elfride to steer clear: ‘don’t ever listen to the fashionable theories of the day about a woman’s privilege’ (217). However, Knight himself is a questionable figure, a man whose knowledge of life and love are largely theoretical, and whose judgement of Elfride is as mean-spirited as Angel’s will later be of Tess; where Hardy stands in relation to the novel’s depiction of femininity is a moot point. Hardy’s pronouncements outside fiction would suggest a more sophisticated approach. In a letter to Millicent Fawcett of 1906,33 he objected that the stereotyped household should be ‘the unit of society’ and, in 1908, he wrote to Helen Ward, declining her invitation to contribute to the weekly suffrage newspaper, The Coming Citizen: ‘I feel by no means sure that the majority of those who clamour for it realize what it may bring in its train . . . I refer to such results as the probable break-up of the present marriage-system’, adding ‘I do not myself consider that this would be necessarily a bad thing (I should not have written ‘Jude the Obscure’ if I did) but I deem it better that women should take the step unstimulated from outside.’34 In The Well-Beloved, Hardy sees biology thwarting the individual potential of women, rather than constituting womanhood: Mrs Somers – once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs Pine-Avon – had now retrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother and grandmother’. . . . She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding generations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, their advance as girls being lost in their recession as matrons; so that they move up and down the stream of intellectual development like flotsam in a tidal estuary. And this perhaps not by reason of their faults as individuals, but of their misfortune as child-rearers. (161)

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A Pair of Blue Eyes explores other ideas that were in vogue among biologists, and marks the beginning of Hardy’s interest in degeneration, the idea that evolution might proceed in a direction that appeared to be backward as well as forward. Biological determinism is both courted and resisted in this novel, as Hardy destabilises neat equations between appearance, life history and class. In the opening pages Robert Lickpan, the pig-killer, questions Lord Luxellian’s aristocratic status, declaring the family to be ‘hedgers and ditchers by rights’. His genealogical account is off the hegemonic record, sourced by a history that ‘’twasn’t prented’ (4, 5). Whether he has access to a greater truth concerning the family’s history is left unconfirmed, but the remarks call into question the value and reliability of purported ancestry. Conversely, refusing to countenance any challenge to traditional social hierarchy, Elfride’s father, the Reverend Christopher Swancourt, invests heavily in the idea of aristocratic supremacy, persistently attributing Stephen’s success to his biology: ‘I congratulate you upon your blood, blue blood, Sir’ (11). Stephen complains: ‘the first night I came he insisted upon proving my descent from one of the most ancient west-country families’ (58). While his pronunciation of Latin and his awkward way of holding the pieces in chess threaten to give the game away, Stephen manages to conceal his working class origins; his father is a mechanic, and his mother is a milkmaid. When Darwin began to explore the human world, economic considerations entered his narrative; in The Descent of Man, he observed that civilised men rarely marry ‘into a much lower rank of life’.35 Marx and Engels saw The Origin of Species as a ‘bitter satire’ on man and nature; Marx remarked to Engels that ‘it is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening-up of new markets, “inventions” and the Malthusian “struggle for existence”’.36 A Pair of Blue Eyes evidences the same complex overlay of the social and the natural that was coming to light through biological narratives. In spite of the obvious physical attraction of Elfride, Stephen’s interest is explained in economic terms; he is not ‘the man to care about passages-at-love with women beneath him’ (31–2). Stephen’s mother notices this trend: ‘the men have gone up so, and the women have stood still’; ‘I don’t read the papers for nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by marriage’ (70–1). Elfride’s father seeks to improve his standing further by a similarly upward social move. He is well aware that the pedigree of his second and newly acquired wife is ‘a raked-up affair’ (95). The match is a sterile one, made for economic gain. The novel repeatedly suggests that heredity is to be invented at will. Through Stephen Smith the narrative of biological determinism is undermined, as

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he finds release from his social background in London, reinventing his roots in this rootless milieu. Such reinvention is the theme of Hardy’s social satire of 1876, The Hand of Ethelberta, as Ethelberta escapes a life below stairs, severing with ease from her biological history to appear in the city as a woman of good family. Pedigrees in this novel are to be invented, and lived out, as fiction. By contrast, evolutionary narrative placed faith in natural law. An efficient society would not repress but express natural inheritance and impulse. In The Descent, Darwin drew on the work of Galton. He made a comparison with humans existing in a state of nature, where ‘the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health’, and those within civilization who: do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of men. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. (I. 168) Darwin also expressed some reservations in respect of this logic, deferring to a conception of human nature as superior to other animals, and noting that if we checked our sympathy and intentionally neglected the weak and helpless ‘the noblest part of our nature’ would deteriorate. Nonetheless, his sympathies were with those whom he considered to be natural survivors, and he stressed ‘the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind’. While evolutionary ideas bore the imprimatur of capitalism, emphasising the inevitability of competition, Darwin and Galton were both critical of the potentially distorting effects of money on the process of evolution. In 1865, Galton underscored the debilitating effects of civilisation on the action of natural selection,37 arguing that money interposed ‘her aegis between the law of natural selection and very many of its rightful victims’.38 As a remedy, Galton prescribed the artificial

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improvement of future generations through controlled breeding, a process which natural selection would ‘powerfully assist . . . by pressing heavily on the minority of weakly and incapable men’.39 This ‘artificial’ improvement would follow natural law, which social law was impeding. Darwin likewise argued that civilization ‘checked the action of natural selection’. It was not only the poor and needy that eugenists saw as being wrongfully preserved by society. In Hereditary Genius (1869), for example, Galton had broached the decline of the aristocracy.40 The inheritance of wealth, combined with the rule of primogeniture, operated in a dysgenic way, protecting the old aristocracy from the laws of natural selection. Increasingly seen as sham, its stock was further degraded by attempts to revive failing fortunes through marriage with rich heiresses from ‘dubious’ social backgrounds.41 Civilisation was preserving the mentally and physically weak ‘that would have perished in barbarous lands’. Hardy’s treatment of biological and social narratives is far less confident, as he moves between an acceptance of existence as struggle to existence as harmony. In his rural comedy, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy depicts a community underpinned by co-operation and inclusion, rather than struggle and exclusion, which underpinned the eugenist position. This novel features Thomas Leaf, ‘a weak lath-like form, trotting and stumbling along with one shoulder forward and his head inclined to the left, his arms dangling nervelessly in the wind as if they were empty sleeves’. His name signals his belonging to the organic whole, and he has a vital role to play in Mellstock Choir, the original title of the work, and subsequently its subtitle. As Tranter Dewy puts it, ‘he’s a’ excellent treble, and so we keep him on’.42 This went against the eugenist grain: the biologist and novelist Grant Allen drew close connections between appearance and fitness in Physiological Aesthetics (1877), arguing for the biological value of beauty. His social vision gave no place to members of society such as Leaf: the heart and core of such a fixed hereditary taste for each species must consist in the appreciation of the pure and healthy typical specific form. The ugly for every kind, in its own eyes, must always be (in the main) the deformed, the aberrant, the weakly, the unnatural, the impotent. The beautiful for every kind must similarly be (in the main) the healthy, the normal the strong, the perfect, and the parentally sound. Were it ever otherwise – did any race or kind ever habitually prefer the morbid to the sound, that race or kind must be on the highroad to extinction. 43

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By contrast, drawing on pastoral idyll, Under The Greenwood Tree depicts nature as a place of co-operation and harmony, an edenic world in which humans function as careful gardeners: Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree; tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at its bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of its forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots. Beneath and beyond its shade spread a carefullytended grass-plot, its purpose being to supply a healthy exerciseground for young chickens and pheasants: the hens, their mothers, being enclosed in coops placed upon the same green flooring. (221) In The Origin, Darwin had described a similar co-operation: ‘plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.’44 However, struggle between closer beings was intense: ‘the struggle almost inevitably will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers’ (63). Darwin illustrates competition through the image of a tree, whose branches are engaged in civil war: ‘at each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life’ (106). Nonetheless, even in this bleak world there is some chance of survival for the weak: ‘we here and there see a thin struggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree . . . which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit’; so an odd species here and there might have ‘apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station’ (107). But, struggle was the order of the day: ‘buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch’, while the Tree of Life burgeons, relentless, covering the surface of the earth ‘with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.’ From the battle site, a terrible beauty is born. Nature in The Woodlanders seems remorseless: Here as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of

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the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.45 This reference to ‘a city slum’ is not only highly topical but serves further to link the novel to the contemporary debate over the effects of the environment versus heredity. During the 1880s, for the first time, the appalling living conditions of the London poor were making national headlines. Reportage came to a sensational head in June 1883 – the year in which Galton brought the term eugenics into common currency – when the Pictorial World published the first instalment of a series of disturbing articles, ‘How the Poor Live’, by the popular journalist George Sims. The Daily News was moved to create two columns – ‘Homes of the London Poor and ‘Evenings with the Poor’ – as well as a letters page devoted to the housing question. In October 1883 a 20-page pamphlet by the Reverend Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London – subtitled ‘An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor’ – further unsettled Victorian Britain. Going behind the scenes to reveal the dramatic and immoral effects of overcrowding, this anonymous penny pamphlet is one of the most important pieces of writing on the poor in Britain. Under the editorship of W. T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette published a long summary of the piece and a crusading leader ‘Is it not Time?’, which called for more support and action for the poor.46 A flood of letters poured it, ranging from the Malthusian to the militant advocacy of social reform. Lord Salisbury championed working-class housing legislation, writing an influential article, ‘Labourers’ and Artisans’ Dwellings’, in the National Review (November 1883).47 State intervention was the new order of the day. In 1884 the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes was appointed, and the following year saw the passing of the Housing of the Working Classes Act.48 Hardy had first conceived the idea for a story about the woodlanders in the early 1870s, but, fearful of being typecast, he put it aside to write about the city in The Hand of Ethelberta.49 By 1885, in the heat of inflammatory debates in the press on whether poverty was a social condition, and hence remediable through social reform, or biological, and hence immune to the effects of environmental change, Hardy was writing The Woodlanders. He had returned finally to Dorset in June 1881, following three years in the London suburb of Tooting, and briefer spells in the city during the previous two decades. The Woodlanders seems to suggest that human society and the natural world are both riven by the same competitive urges – an idea Hardy would reiterate in his poems ‘The Ivy-Wife’ and ‘In a Wood’ (Wessex Poems, 1898), concluding in the last that human society is preferable:

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There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found Life-loyalties.50 In The Woodlanders, Marty South loses her hair to Mrs Charmond, and Giles to Grace; Giles loses Grace to Fitzpiers; Grace (temporarily) loses Fitzpiers to Mrs Charmond. However, there are many sides to the stories Hardy tells. The novel also suggests that the imposition of a capitalist economy upon a rural community is the cause of struggle and unhappiness. Mrs Charmond can afford to pay for Marty South’s hair, charm Fitzpiers, and render Giles homeless; Mr Melbury can afford to educate Grace beyond the expectations of her village community; Fitzpiers can afford to buy the brains of Grammer Oliver and John South. The anti-pastoral struggle which takes place within nature mirrors human relations rather than dictates them. The restlessness of the woodland community is newly arrived; the tree which becomes a symbol of oppression for John South, leading to his eventual death, suggests a new alienation between the woodlanders and their habitat; a disruption of ‘the closely-knit interdependence of the lives therein’ (44). John South’s imaginings may be disturbed, but they are not without traces of truth: as Hardy wrote in his journal the following year: ‘apprehension is a great element in imagination. It is a semi-madness, which sees enemies etc. in inanimate objects.’ And, a few years later, he mused ‘Courage has been idealized; why not Fear? – which is a higher consciousness, and based on a deeper insight.’ 51The opening pages of The Woodlanders highlight the alienation that money out of place brings to the community: ‘The two sovereigns confronted her from the lookingglass in such a manner as to suggest a pair of jaundiced eyes on the watch for an opportunity’ (53). In this image, consumer culture literally divides Marty from herself, physically distorting her appearance. The wigmaker, Mr Percomb, a ‘town gentleman’ from Cerne Abbas, is seen by Marty as out of place, out of his natural habitat: ‘you look as unnatural away from your wigs as a canary in a thorn hedge’ (49). Once Marty has sold her hair to make a wig for Mrs Charmond, she too is described in unnatural terms; Giles exclaims ‘whatever has happened to your head? Lord, it has shrunk to nothing – it looks like an apple upon a gatepost!’ (60). By humorous contrast, Richard Creedle remarks of a slug which Grace has accidentally been served with cabbage, ‘’twas his native home . . . I don’t mind ‘em myself – them green ones; for they

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were born on cabbage, and they’ve lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage’ (123); only the humans are taken out of nature. In The Return of the Native a similar image is used of Clym: ‘he appeared of a russet hue, not more distinguishable from the scene around him than the green caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on’. But, in joining nature, Clym is subsumed, dehumanised, even: the silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.52 Jude the Obscure continues to explore the complex relation between society and nature, expressing ambivalence as to whether human society is determined by natural law, or generates its own conflicts. A narrative of biological determinism underpins the union of Sue and Jude: as Sue notes ‘we are cousins, and it is bad for cousins to marry’, and Jude admits ‘“it was always impressed upon me that I ought not to marry – that I belonged to an odd and peculiar family – the wrong breed for marriage.” . . . They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would have meant a terrible intensification – two bitters in one dish’ (223–4).53 Early in the narrative, the novel suggests the harshness of natural law; as Jude scares crows, he becomes sympathetic, empathetic, even, to the desires of the birds, and reluctant to frighten them away: ‘Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony.’ Nature seems to lament the loss of God – Paradise lost, again – but is soon resigned to the fall, and caught up in a competitive whirl; ‘a mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney like the pedal notes of an organ. Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall of the churchless churchyard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its neighbour smartly’.54 But the novel also provides counternarratives which call into question the harsh and determining effects of nature. Even in the bird-scaring scene, it is human intervention that sources the conflict: the clacker used to drive off the birds is a man-made invention; Jude is punished by Farmer Troutham, not the logic of nature. A similar passage in The Origin suggests a more self-regulating ecology than Troutham allows:

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A large stock of individuals of the same species, relatively to the numbers of its enemies, is absolutely necessary for its preservation. Thus we can easily raise plenty of corn and rape-seed, etc., in our fields, because the seeds are in great excess compared with the number of birds which feed on them; nor can the birds, though having a superabundance of food at this one season, increase in number proportionally to the supply of seed, as their numbers are checked during winter.55 Likewise, Sue and Jude may be victims of their biology, but the novel is equally concerned to challenge biology as all-determining, and provides a sustained interrogation of social institutions which preserve privileges of birth. Jude is excluded from Christminster on account of his lowly birth, but he is more gifted naturally than the men who are born to privilege: Jude’s mastery of Latin is far superior to the Oxford undergraduates he pits himself against in a Christminster pub, but his working-class status prevents him joining their ranks: ‘You pack of fools!’, he cries after reciting the Creed in Latin ‘which one of you knows whether I have said it or no? It might have been the Ratcatcher’s Daughter in double Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell!’56 Society is a place of struggle but it can equally be one of co-operation. Jude proposes a scheme of socialised childcare: ‘what does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom’ (288). Sue agrees, eager to adopt Jude and Arabella’s child. Sue and Jude can be seen as defeated by their defective biology, just as Little Father Time’s murderous intervention can be seen, as he himself saw it, as his following of Malthusian principle: ‘done because we are too menny.’ Is he nothing more than a catalyst of natural processes? The question is debatable; it is social law that is the single greatest cause of oppression in the novel. Social law excludes Jude from fulfilling his intellectual ambition; Sue and Jude are denied a suitable home because they have defied social convention and resisted marrying, and this is the motor that sets the hangings in train. In a letter of 1902, Hardy urged the cruelty of nature – ‘the more we know of the laws and nature of the universe, the more ghastly a

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business we perceive it all to be’57 – but elsewhere he returned to the possibility of social harmony, and grounded this in natural law: few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule’ beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not wholly perceive it, though he alluded to it.58 Throughout Hardy’s work there runs a tension between individual autonomy and determinism by external forces. On whether the external was natural or social Hardy shifts position. Any attempt to position him on the question of whether social freedom is inevitably curtailed by biology should recall that his first novel was rejected for being too socialist, and that one of his cures for despair was the chapter ‘On Individuality’ in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The struggle between individual freedom and biological determinism returns as the subject of his poem ‘The Pedigree’, of 1916, as the speaker deceives his distant ancestors, his ‘primest fuglemen’, saying: I am merest mimicker and counterfeit! – Though thinking, I am I, And what I do I do myself alone. Hardy’s poem of the following year, ‘Heredity’, explores the same dilemma, and points to the same concealed resolution. It is spoken by ‘the family face’, which transcends the life, and life-span, of the individual, and yet at its core lies a tension; the voice that seems to despise the individual life is the defiant voice of an individual: ‘that is I; / The eternal thing in man / That heeds no call to die’. Through the biological continuum, Hardy finds a way not only of achieving secular immortality, but the immortality of ‘I’.59 The same tensions arise in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, as Tess seeks to free her individuality from the weight of history, and biology: what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings

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have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ‘ll be like thousands’ and thousands.60 Angel and Alec both threaten her sense of self: She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them. ‘Call me Tess,’ she would say askance; and he did. (187) Repeatedly, Hardy intervenes to save her from annihilating anonymity: Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born. (214) But, Hardy undermines this perception of her regnant autonomy; this consciousness had only been vouchsafed Tess by an ‘unsympathetic First Cause’ (214). Degeneration forms the motor of the plot, as Parson Tringham the antiquarian vicar announces to John Durbeyfield in the opening pages ‘you are extinct – as a county family’. However, diverse explanations are offered for Tess’s fate, and the novel does not privilege any one cause. Tess’s downfall can be explained along the lines of biological determinism. The narrator tells us that she is ‘an almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race’ (141).61 Angel Clare sees her fate at the hands of Alec d’Urberville as the inevitable result of her being ‘the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy’ (302). In the nineteenth century ‘effete’ did not carry the more recent sense of ‘effeminate’; instead, it meant worn out, especially though child bearing, and increasingly signified a decline that was both social and biological as the two became entwined in narratives of explanation: in Two Years Ago (1857) Kingsley referred to ‘your effete English aristocrat’. 62

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Earlier in the novel, Angel perceives Tess to be ‘a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature’, ‘a daughter of the soil’ (183), ‘a new sprung child of nature’ (302), and the novel lends some authority to this line of interpretation, emphasising that it is from her mother that she has inherited her beauty. Her mother’s line is fecund and vibrant, the antithesis of the spent d’Urberville inheritance. Could the degeneration of the aristocracy be accounted for through their distance from nature, their position at the pinnacle of culture? And which inheritance is dominant in Tess? Her ancestral portraits underscore her affinities to her aristocratic past: ‘her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms’ (284), and suggest a treacherous side to her nature: These paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams. (284) Further explanatory narratives compete in the novel: Tess’s mother accounts for her situation through a conflation of biological inevitability and theology: ‘’Tis nater after all, and what do please God’ (131). Early on, the novel undercuts the idea of a benevolent divine agency at work in nature: ‘some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan” (62).63 Nonetheless, it is social law that oppresses Tess once her unchastity is known: ‘she had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly’ (135). In this light, Angel’s assertion that Alec is Tess’s ‘husband in nature’ (313) is an imposition upon nature. Is Tess’s virginal appearance, in spite of her past, really the result of nature’s ‘fantastic trickery’ (307), or is it rather a testimony to the undue value society places on virginity? Natural law allows restoration: ‘the recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone’ (150); ‘the “appetite for joy” which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social

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rubric’ (255). At the novel’s close, Hardy suddenly resurrects a heathen God as the deus ex machina: ‘the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess’ (489). At the end of his life, Hardy listed as the thinkers most important to him as ‘Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill’.64 The inclusion of both Darwin and Mill explains Hardy’s ambivalence on the question of biology. Humans were part of nature, but that did not preclude their capacity to make up stories about nature. Mill urged the manufactured nature of discourses on the natural, writing in On the Subjection of Women that ‘what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.’ Both On the Subjection of Women and On Liberty endorse the right of individuals to act freely where they can do so without inhibiting the freedom of others, and explore the part played by society in impeding individual self-determination. When the suffragette Frances Power Cobbe caught Darwin unawares on an afternoon stroll, and loudly referred him to Mill’s On The Subjection of Women (especially in relation to his work on sexual selection), Darwin’s riposte – also a loud one – was that Mill ‘could learn some things’ from biology.65 Much of Hardy’s fiction follows Mill in resisting the idea that biology was determining, and while he refused to bind his art to a single perspective, his politics are perhaps most truthfully expressed in his observation in The Woodlanders of Marty South: as with so many right hands born to manual labour, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to do it in good time. 66

Notes 1. The George Eliot Letters, ed. G. Haight, 9 vols (Oxford, 1954–78), 3, p. 214. 2. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907; Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 102. 3. Athenaeum, 19 November 1859, pp. 659–60, cited in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 478.

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4. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London, 1984), p. 158. For the influence of Darwin on Hardy, see Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; Cambridge, 2000); Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton, 1982); William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1994); and George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). 5. ‘Nature’s Questioning’, Wessex Poems, 1898, number 43 in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, James Gibson (ed.) (1976; London, 1990). 6. Darwin took this quotation from Dr David Asher, ‘Schopenhauer and Darwinism’, Journal of Anthropology ( January 1871), p. 323; absent from the first edition of The Descent, for which it presumably appeared too late to be included, it is cited in the second edition, (London, 1874), p. 586. 7. Thomas Hardy to Alexander Macmillan (25 July 1868); British Library Macmillan Archives 54923 362F 1. 8. Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Basingstoke, 1967), p. 127. 9. ‘A Chat with the Author of Tess’, Black and White 4 (1892), p. 240. 10. Galton named the self-conscious control of human breeding ‘eugenics’ (eugenes ⫽ good in stock) in 1883: Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London, 1883), pp. 24–5. 11. Hardy to Lady Grove (17 May 1910), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford, 1978–88), 4. 89. For further discussion of Hardy in relation to eugenics, and his exploration of eugenic ideas in fiction, see Angelique Richardson, ‘“Some Science underlies all Art”: The Dramatization of Sexual Selection and Racial Biology in Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 3.2 (1998), pp. 302–38. 12. For the widespread appeal of eugenics, and its expression in popular cultural forms, see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics among the Late Victorians: Science, Fiction, Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2002). For an account of eugenics which also explores in detail its most recent manifestations, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (London, 1995). See also Donald A. MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh, 1981). 13. Hardy, Life and Work, p. 441. 14. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A. Björk, 2 vols (London and Basingstoke, 1985), I, p. 136, where Hardy noted Leslie Stephen’s comments on the novel. 15. Hardy, Life and Work, p. 406. For further statements of the same principles see Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Orel, p. 49, p. 53. 16. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1990); Angus McLaren, ‘The Pleasures of Procreation: Traditional and Biomedical Theories of Conception’, in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 323–41. 17. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (1871; Princeton University Press, Chichester, 1981), II. 371. Subsequent references to this edition in this paragraph are given in parentheses.

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18. Desperate Remedies (1871; Harmondsworth, 1998), p. 183. 19. The Woodlanders (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 165. 20. For fuller discussion of the presence of scientific ideas in both The Well-Beloved and A Pair of Blue Eyes, see Richardson, “Some Science underlies all Art”. 21. The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved (Harmondsworth, 1997) p. 168. 22. ‘An Imaginative Woman’, in Life’s Little Ironies, ed. F. B. Pinion (Basingstoke, 1977), p. 28. 23. Thomas Hardy, Winter Words (1928). 24. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–1873; London, 1976, based on the Wessex Edition of 1912), pp. 136, 137, 293. Subsequent references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 25. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 337. 26. Darwin, Descent I, p. 371. 27. Havelock Ellis, ‘Concerning Jude the Obscure’, Savoy (October 1896; The Ulysses Bookshop, 1931), p. 9. 28. Havelock Ellis, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Novels’, The Westminster Review, N.S. 63 (April 1883), p. 344. 29. See, for example, ‘On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women’, Anthropological Review, 7 (1869), where the anthropologist J. McGrigor Allan argues that this proximity is seen in women’s superior instinct; her ‘compensating gift’ is her ‘marvellous faculty of intuition’. Londa Schiebinger in ‘Why Mammals are Called Mammals’ demonstrates how in creating the term Mammalia [‘of the breast’] in 1758, Linnaeus singled out only one of several human attributes which could have been highlighted. She points out that the terms Mammalia and Homo sapiens were introduced in the same volume, but the latter, ‘man of wisdom’, was used to distinguish humans from other primates. Through this terminology, ‘a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male character (reason) marks our separateness’: Nature’s Body, Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London, 1993), p. 55. 30. Darwin, The Descent, II. 326–7 31. Darwin, The Descent, II. 317. 32. Hardy, Literary Notebooks, II. 30. 33. Collected Letters, 3. 238–9. 34. Collected Letters, 3. 360. For discussion of Hardy’s treatment of and attitude towards women, see Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Brighton, 1982), and Shanta Dutta, Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of his Attitude to Women (London and Basingstoke, 2000). 35. Darwin, Descent, II. 356. This subject had always fascinated Hardy; cf. his first, and later destroyed, novel ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’; see The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, p. 65, note 258, and ‘The Pedigree’, number 390 in The Complete Poems. 36. Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 485; Marx to Engels 18 June 1862, in S.W. Ryazanskaya, ed., Selected Correspondence (Moscow, 1965). 37. Francis Galton, ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, Macmillan’s Magazine 12 (1865) p. 326. 38. ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, p. 319.

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39. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences (1869); Watts & Co., 2nd edn (1892) p. 335. 40. For further discussion of eugenic thinking on the decline of the aristocracy see G. R. Searle, ‘Eugenics and Class’, in Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge, 1981), p. 218. 41. Galton, ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, p. 326. 42. Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1985), pp. 13, 82. 43. Grant Allen, ‘Aesthetic Evolution in Man’, Mind, V (1880), pp. 448, 449. Sander Gilman’s concluding words on the link between sexuality and the beautiful fit perfectly Allen’s thesis: ‘the ugly is anti-erotic rather than merely unaesthetic. It is denied the ability to reproduce’ (Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London, 1995, p. 92). 44. On The Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 61. Further references in this paragraph are to this edition. 45. The Woodlanders, ed. cit., p. 93. 46. Pall Mall Gazette (16 October 1883), reprinted in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (Leicester, 1970), pp. 81–90. 47. See Wohl (Leicester, 1970), pp. 111–34. 48. In his exemplary study, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London, 1977), Wohl cites several instances of press interest and or excitement in and about the poor. For articles which appeared during the time of the gestation or writing of The Woodlanders , see, for example, W. St John Brodrick, ‘The Homes of the London Poor’, Fortnightly Review 190 (1882); Daily News, 19 October 1883; ‘The Radical Programme III – ‘The Housing of the Poor in Towns’, Fortnightly Review 49 (October 1883); and Joseph Chamberlain, ‘Labourers’ and Artisans’ Dwellings’, Fortnightly Review 49 (December 1883). For press reactions to Mearns’ pamphlet, Wohl cites The Times (28 November 1883); Punch (15 12 December 1883), 28; and Lancet (15 December 1883), 571. See also City Press (13 May 1883); The Illustrated London News (3 November 1883), 418, Pall Mall Gazette (15 February 1889), and, for parliamentary discussion, see Hansard 300 (1885), col. 632. 49. Life and Work, p. 105. 50. Poems 33 and 40, respectively, in The Complete Poems. 51. Journal entry for 7 January 1888, cited in Life and Work, p. 213; entry for 25 April 1893, Life and Work, p. 269. 52. The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford, 1990), pp. 278–9. See Greenslade, Degeneration, for an excellent discussion of Hardy’s treatment of degeneration in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess and Jude. 53. Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham (Oxford, 1985), pp. 174–5. 54. Jude the Obscure, p. 13, p. 128. 55. Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species, p. 59. 56. Jude the Obscure, p. 125. 57. Collected Letters, 3. 5, cited in Phillip Mallett, ‘Noticing Things: Hardy and the Nature of “Nature”’, in The Achievement of Thomas Hardy, ed. Phillip Mallett (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 158. 58. Letter to the Secretary of the Humanitarian League (10 April 1910); Life and Work, pp. 376–7.

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59. Both ‘Heredity’ and ‘The Pedigree’ are in Moments of Vision (1917), numbers 363 and 390 in The Complete Poems. 60. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 182. Subsequent references to this edition in the next few paragraphs are given in parentheses. 61. As Beer notes, Hardy’s awareness of the importance of slight variation within the scheme of evolution makes the phrase ‘an almost standard woman’ one that is both more complex and more positive than it might seem to the unsuspecting reader, with potential, unexpected value: ‘a perception of the FAILURE of THINGS to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind’ Life, I, p 163 (1 January 1879), cited in Beer, Darwin’s Plots (2000), p. 232; emphasis in original. 62. See the entry in the OED. 63. Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, l. 22. 64. Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career (New York, 1965), pp. 246–7, cited in Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 265 n. 6. 65. Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe as told by Herself, with Additions by the Author (1904), pp. 488–9, quoted in Desmond and Moore, Darwin, p. 572. Cf. Jude the Obscure, p. 234, where Phillotson declares ‘what do I care about J. S. Mill? . . . I only want to lead a quiet life!’ 66. The Woodlanders, p. 48.

10 The Hunter–Gatherers: Some Early Hardy Scholars and Collectors Michael Millgate

It must, I think, be acknowledged that authors tend to feel rather negatively about collectors. It’s true that Robert Louis Stevenson said that he had ‘always admired collectors, perhaps from their similitude to pirates’,1 but most writers, I suspect, see them rather as reminders of their own mortality, harbingers of death, churchyard-haunting sweepers-up of what are so charmingly called literary remains, monsters of commodification reducing miracles of creativity to items of trade and lots at auctions, builders of memorials to their own memories out of the appropriated sweat- and tear-stained relics of geniuses deceased. Think of the harpies round the deathbed in Zorba the Greek or of Scrooge’s nightmare of being pillaged on his death-bed in A Christmas Carol. I’m not sure that Hardy thought in quite those terms – he who was ever handy with his own intimations of mortality, and some of whose best friends were collectors. But he was of course an intensely private man who seems genuinely to have dreaded the kind of posthumous exposure he so poignantly imagined for Susan Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge: ‘And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a’ didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!’2 It was, alas, an all too accurate prevision of the chaotic consequences of his own will, and it’s necessary to have some sympathy with what might otherwise seem his rather pernickety objections to the quotation and sale of his personal letters during his own lifetime. When Harley Granville Barker wrote in 1923 to report that some of Hardy’s letters had appeared in the market, Hardy commented that if ‘the present craze for “collecting”’ 180

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continued, ‘[t]he whole time of the next generation will be occupied in reading the old letters of this’.3 In the event, this dire prediction proved true only for the engulfed editors of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy – who quickly learned to look upon collectors in a very different and far more positive light. Without collectors, after all, there might have been precious few Hardy letters to be edited, the worldwide dispersal of his correspondence having unavoidably begun with the first letter he ever entrusted to the mails. Although the text of a letter remains in the copyright of the sender, the document itself becomes the property of the recipient, so that the letters we send out are in normal circumstances irretrievable, though a few may of course be returned by spurned or spurning lovers or by the executors of deceased friends (as was the case with Hardy’s letters to Mrs Henniker) – or turn up in breach of promise cases or other court proceedings. As has truly been said, ‘Many a man of letters wishes he had them back.’ Academic hands and hearts have often been wrung over the ‘bonfires’ on which writers such as Hardy and Henry James are said to have burned ‘their letters’, and yet those flames must in the nature of things have been largely or entirely fuelled by incoming correspondence only. Hardy certainly got rid of a great many letters to himself around the time in 1918–19 when the autobiographical Life was being secretly written; even so, a fair number of such letters survived the purge, and since others rapidly piled up over the next few years there was by the time of his death a substantial accumulation of such correspondence, the bulk of it – though not, as we shall see, the entirety – now reposing in the Dorset County Museum. One of the reasons why collectors have seen Hardy’s letters as especially desirable (such is the sexually inflected terminology of the trade) is that the availability of manuscripts of Hardy’s novels, stories, and poems has always been restricted, Sydney Cockerell having persuaded Hardy to give so many of them away to institutional libraries as early as 1911 – two of the best, the manuscripts of Jude the Obscure and Time’s Laughingstocks, not altogether surprisingly ending up in Cockerell’s own institution, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Some major manuscripts, however – most notably those of A Pair of Blue Eyes and Far from the Madding Crowd – were never returned to their author, and Hardy himself presented a few short-story and poetry manuscripts to particular friends. Florence Hardy similarly gave away some poetry manuscripts both before and after Hardy’s death, the one received by the American collector Paul Lemperly being partly in recognition of the food parcels he sent to Max Gate during the First World War.

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Copies of Hardy’s published books have always been available, of course, but, again, not in the numbers that might have been expected. All of his novels were first published in the nineteenth century, mostly in three or two volumes and in small editions, and promptly consumed by the circulating libraries of the day – consumed, in fact, to the extent of being read to death, or something near it. One can still find shabby and shaken three- and two-deckers with library labels on the front covers – or worse, with the visible wounds inflicted during what used to be the standard bookselling practice of removing such interesting items – but sets in fine condition have always been rare, becoming ever rarer and more expensive as copies are, so to speak, institutionalized, gathered by purchase or gift into university and public libraries. Especially prized by collectors, of course, are copies inscribed by authors to friends or relatives, and although Hardy rarely put his signature into expensive three-deckers – only a handful of signed first-editions of Tess are known to exist – he did more freely inscribe copies of his poems and the later one-volume editions of the novels. He signed copies for all of Florence Hardy’s sisters, for example, and Florence herself, by leaving her personal possessions to one of those sisters, unwittingly ensured the eventual ‘escape’ even of very private Max Gate items.4 Books that Hardy once owned, especially if signed or annotated by him, are of particular interest to collectors of the more scholarly sort, and such items have been in relatively plentiful supply, even if more widely dispersed. A few volumes from the Max Gate library were given by Florence Hardy to Hardy’s friends, as specified in his will, and after her own death four hundred or so were selected for deposit in the Dorset County Museum. The remaining 2,000 plus, including several of Hardy’s own copies of his own works and numerous other volumes of interest and importance, were auctioned by the London firm of Hodgson and Co. in May 1938, and while many have subsequently found their way into private and institutional collections, many others now seem to be untraceable. Let me now turn to those figures I have affectionately, if not too elegantly, called the hunter – gatherers, remembering always that the peoples so designated by anthropologists were not individually hyphenated, so to speak, but divided into those who mostly hunted and those who mostly gathered. And although Hardy’s circle of friends and acquaintances certainly included several hunters of books, manuscripts, mementoes, or just plain gossip – Clement Shorter being one, Rebekah Owen another – the gatherers were probably the more numerous. Cockerell, it’s true, began as a hunter, but having successfully brought down his original prey of Hardy manuscripts under cover of

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disinterestedness, he subsequently contrived to make himself quietly indispensable – by reading Hardy’s poetry proofs, organising the production of Florence Hardy’s privately printed pamphlets, and so on – and quietly gathered in return the numerous manuscripts and inscribed books that formed the core of the small but choice group of Hardy items included in the Cockerell sale at Sotheby’s on 30 October 1956. Hardy’s friends Gosse and Clodd also exchanged letters and new books with him on a regular basis, and so built up handsome collections of letters and inscribed volumes, while Kate Hardy, as the last survivor of the Hardy siblings, quite passively gathered in (rather as I imagine a whale taking in plankton) a mass of family memorabilia – some of it given to her cousins James and Nathaniel Sparks while she was alive,5 the remainder bequeathed to the Lock and Mann families after her death and now for the most part deposited in Dorchester libraries. Of the actively hunting collectors who came to Max Gate during Hardy’s lifetime, much the most influential was Howard Bliss, born in London in 1894 to an English mother, who died when he was less than a year old, and an affluent American father, for a dozen years chairman of the Anglo-American Oil Company. Bliss’s elder brother, Arthur, became a distinguished composer and, as Sir Arthur Bliss, the Master of the Queen’s Music; Bliss himself was an accomplished player and occasional teacher of the ‘cello, but devoted most of his attention over many years to the creation of what ultimately became the greatest Hardy collection ever to be in private hands. He wrote to Hardy in 19206 and made an initial visit to Max Gate not long afterwards, and since he had discovered that the Hardys did not possess a copy of the first edition of A Pair of Blue Eyes he was able to pave his way by making a gift of the copy once owned by Coventry Patmore, whose early praise of the novel Hardy had especially valued.7 Bliss also recommended himself to the Hardys by his musicianship – he played his ‘cello at Max Gate on more than one occasion in the mid1920s – and by his passionate opposition to all forms of cruelty to animals. To judge from the warmth of Florence Hardy’s letters to him, both before and after Hardy’s death, he must also have been good company. When he died in 1977 the brief obituary in The Times categorised him as ‘a bachelor with a vivacious and complex nature’,8 and while I’m not sure quite what to make of that curiously dated description I can at least testify to the lively if quirky personality that emerges from the many jokey, sometimes teasing letters – often eccentrically typed and diversified by glued-on newspaper cuttings – that he sent to Richard Purdy from 1929 until shortly before his death, the

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initial Hardyan and bibliographical subject-matter of the correspondence yielding increasingly in later years to their shared interest in opera. I regret to say that I never met Bliss myself: he had disposed of his Hardy collection in the early sixties and devoted himself thereafter to collecting the luminous semi-abstract landscapes of the English painter Ivon Hitchens,9 and it never occurred to me to seek him out in his New Forest retreat. Remarkably, Bliss was allowed in December 1924 to purchase the manuscript of The Woodlanders, one of the few major manuscripts remaining in Hardy’s hands after the Cockerell-inspired dispersal of 1911. The price he paid was £1,000 – a handsome sum, though not an excessive one, given the bullishness of the market for literary properties at that date. What’s really surprising is that Hardy, who had given away so many manuscripts, was willing to sell at all. Technically the manuscript belonged to Florence,10 Hardy having given it to her some years earlier, and it’s tempting to imagine a domestic scenario in which Florence, exasperated by her husband’s elderly anxieties about money, had recommended the sale of manuscripts as an available resort. But Florence insisted in a letter to Cockerell that the sale was Hardy’s idea – ‘he was quite anxious that it should go’11 – and it seems likely enough that Bliss’s enthusiasm had proved hard to resist, especially within the context of his assurance, as Florence told Cockerell in the same letter, that his collection would ‘certainly go to a Museum or a Library intact’. Neither Hardy nor Florence was truly happy about the sale, however, and when Bliss pointed out, as a matter of interest, that a good many pages of the manuscript were in the hand of Hardy’s first wife, Hardy in his embarrassment offered either to copy those same pages out in his own hand or to buy the entire manuscript back again as having been falsely described.12 Shortly after Hardy’s death Florence did buy it back,13 and ten years later it came to the Dorset County Museum under the terms of her will. The widowed Florence Hardy found herself beset with difficulties following the bitter collapse of Hardy’s disastrous yoking of her with the domineering Sydney Cockerell in the literary executorship of his will, and she came to rely a good deal on Bliss’s advice and especially on the reassuring vision of his collection as a grand repository of Hardy’s manuscripts and related materials that would eventually find in some institutional library its publicly accessible home. She seems never to have been clear just where or how this might happen – like Bliss himself she viewed the Dorset County Museum under John Acland’s curatorship as having little interest in Hardy – and she may well have

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formed an exaggerated impression of Bliss’s personal wealth. But she began ‘putting aside’ things that she thought might interest him – Emma Hardy’s earrings and St Juliot drawings, for example, to go with his purchase of the Pair of Blue Eyes manuscript – and such gestures often became realities. More fanciful, and certainly never realised, was her talk of appointing him as a future trustee of Max Gate and of all manuscript items in her possession, even, on one occasion, of ‘bequeathing’ such manuscripts directly to him – The Woodlanders among them.14 I don’t think that Bliss was necessarily dishonest or even disingenuous in representing his own collection as a safe and permanent haven for unique materials that might otherwise become inconveniently and perhaps untraceably dispersed. His behaviour was not obviously predatory, some of Florence’s offers being made several times before he finally took them up, and he cannot always have known exactly where he stood, the wording of Florence’s letters sometimes suggesting that things were being lent, sometimes that they were being specified in her will, at still other times that they were being given outright. And every so often she would soften towards the Dorset County Museum’s claims to what she called a ‘proper’ Hardy collection – but without indicating how she saw such a possibility as relating to the future of the Bliss collection.15 Bliss’s interest in some of the items still in Florence Hardy’s possession may well have helpted to preserve them from destruction – Florence, spurred on by Cockerell, having already burned a great deal in the immediate aftermath of Hardy’s death. On the other hand, Bliss’s very ambition and fastidiousness as a collector led him at times to an unscholarly disdain for the apparently trivial. He had little patience, for instance, with manuscripts that were merely pencilled rather than written in ink16 and did not hesitate to separate the ‘interesting’ from the ‘uninteresting’ letters even within a single correspondence.17 Such interventions worked against his declared aim of ‘keeping everything together’, and when, for example, Florence handed over the packets of incoming Max Gate correspondence and encouraged him to take any letters that were related to manuscripts he already owned,18 there can be no doubt that he sometimes stepped over the line between grateful acceptance and active appropriation. Later on, when the incoming correspondence was back at Max Gate, Florence certainly found that ‘a good many important letters I thought were there are missing’.19 Later still, when Bliss was contemplating the sale of his collection as an escape from financial difficulties occasioned by the extravagant prices

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he had paid for A Pair of Blue Eyes and other Hardy manuscripts just before the Stock Market crash of 1929, she was deeply sympathetic but at the same time very conscious, as she told a friend, of having herself added ‘a great deal’ to the collection ‘as he said he would leave it to any Hardy Museum that was started’.20 In the event Bliss’s collection did not go to the saleroom at that time, and would have realised very little if it had: it was to be thirty years and more before book and manuscript prices returned to anything like their pre-crash levels. But Bliss lived – as Florence of course did not – to see the collection ultimately dispersed. After selling a few items shortly after the end of the war, he waited while the market for rare books and manuscripts slowly improved and then offered some of the true riches of his extraordinary collection at the Sotheby sales of 23 June 1959 and 29 May 1961. Most of the lots on both occasions strongly reflected his primary interest in presentation and association copies, letters, and manuscripts, and had obviously been obtained – by search, persuasion, and purchase – from many different sources. But it’s very noticeable that in several instances a lot containing letters written by Hardy to a specific correspondent is made considerably more attractive by the inclusion of letters to Hardy from that same correspondent.21 Remarkably, every lot at the first sale and all but one lot at the second were purchased by the same New York dealer, Lew Feldman, who in turn sold the entirety of his purchases at both sales to the University of Texas at Austin – where now therefore repose most of those letters written to Hardy by Roden Noel, Henry Newbolt, J. M. Barrie, Pearl Craigie, W. E. Henley, and others that Bliss extracted from that archive of incoming correspondence Florence Hardy had put into his hands. Most, but not all. There were Gosse to Hardy letters in an important group of Hardy– Gosse items that Bliss had earlier sold to the American collector Frederick B. Adams (of whom more later), and when in 1964 Bliss decided to by-pass Sotheby’s and make a final deal directly with Lew Feldman, the latter did not on this occasion pass his purchases on to Texas but split them up into separate groups that went to four different destinations. As a result, Princeton University now has (thanks to the collector Robert Taylor) the very early letters to Hardy from William Tinsley, the publisher of A Pair of Blue Eyes, that Florence Hardy specifically gave to Bliss in 1932,22 while the Emma Hardy/St Juliot relics are with the manuscript of the novel in the Berg collection of the New York Public Library – thus leaving rather isolated the St Juliot architectural drawings of Hardy’s that Texas already owned. So much for ‘keeping

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things together’. But I’m sure that Bliss enjoyed – and was right to admire – his Ivon Hitchens landscapes. Bliss’s special relationship with Florence Hardy – like Cockerell’s special relationship with Hardy himself – led to his playing a unique role in the disposition of Hardy’s literary remains. But any full account of the movement of Hardy materials during the early decades of the twentieth century would recognise that the market for post-Romantic books and manuscripts was largely dominated by such wealthy American collectors, Hardy-hunters all, as George Barr McCutcheon, Morris Parrish, Jerome Kern (who once owned the Pair of Blue Eyes manuscript), Leonard Sachs (who once owned the Hand of Ethelberta proofs), and A. Edward Newton – whose extensive if slightly shabby Hardy collection contained such fine items as the first editions of The Well-Beloved and Wessex Poems inscribed to Swinburne, but was chiefly notable for the manuscript of Far from the Madding Crowd, purchased in 1918 at a wartime sale in aid of the Red Cross. The Madding Crowd manuscript, assumed lost, had unexpectedly turned up in other hands, and when agreeing to its being sent to the sale Hardy added the characteristic proviso, ‘[I]f anybody will buy it’.23 Newton, incidentally, is still faintly remembered in Dorset as the person chiefly responsible for organising and funding the erection of the American memorial to Hardy that stands near the Higher Bockhampton cottage. Less wealthy than those I’ve just mentioned but much more significant in the development of Hardy scholarship, was Carroll Atwood Wilson, an American lawyer who spent almost his entire career as chief legal counsel to the Guggenheim Brothers – he it apparently was who suggested the establishment of the Guggenheim Fellowships. Wilson’s private life – and a good deal of his office time, too, if the address on most of his correspondence is anything to go by – was devoted to the sophistication and exercise of his very formidable bibliographical expertise and to the creation of a major collection of mostly American authors – with Hardy, Trollope, and Gilbert and Sullivan as, so to speak, his rogue enthusiasms. Unlike Bliss, Wilson collected in depth, and although his library contained no major Hardy manuscript, it was astonishingly rich in first editions, serial printings, journal contributions, inscribed copies, autograph letters, and relevant letters in other hands, together with such associated items as Florence Hardy’s privately printed pamphlets and theatre programmes for Hardy’s plays and the dramatisations of his novels. Wilson was the (unidentified) author of the catalogue of the important centenary exhibition of Hardy mounted by the Grolier Club in

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1940,24 as well as one of the exhibition’s principal contributors, and gladly shared his collection and his expertise with younger Hardy collectors and scholars: his letters to Richard Purdy often devote several handwritten pages to a single point in Hardy bibliography. A comprehensive two-volume catalogue of Wilson’s collection was published following Wilson’s death in 1947 at the age of 61,25 and the bibliographer John Carter, reviewing the catalogue anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, aptly described the collection itself as the product of ‘a consuming passion directed by a most acute intelligence’, and as attaining to ‘an importance quite out of proportion to the outlay involved in its assembly’.26 The collection itself was broken up and sold, but the catalogue, embellished throughout with Wilson’s own bibliographical notes and cryptic critical comments, remains as a witness to the depth and intelligence of his collecting – and as a still useful source of Hardyan information. An important contributor to the preparation of the Wilson catalogue was Frederick B[aldwin] Adams, Jr, born in 1910 to a distinguished American family and from 1948 to 1969 the Director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Adams was active in the Grolier Club and the Bibliographical Society of America, edited a specialist magazine, The Colophon, in the 1930s, wrote several scholarly articles himself,27 and became in his later years a leading figure in the international bibliographic community. A collector of Hardy (along with several other authors) since his undergraduate days, his particular enthusiasm was for letters, manuscripts, and inscribed and association copies, and over the years he gradually built up – by well-judged purchases from the dispersed Wilson, Cockerell, and Bliss collections, and of course from elsewhere – what became, and long remained, much the finest Hardy collection in private hands. Never a man of great wealth, Adams was an exceptionally discriminating collector, interested above all in what he called ‘putting things together’28 – a policy at once more modest and more constructive than Bliss’s ‘keeping things together’ and nicely exemplified by Adams’s accumulation of material related to the friendship between Hardy and Edmund Gosse, a process that dated back to his earliest manuscript purchase as little more than a schoolboy and was topped off in his late eighties by the acquisition of the Gosse to Hardy presentation copy of Father and Son. Numerous items in Adams’s collection were obtained directly from the original owners of significant documents (such as Hardy’s working drawings for the family tombstones in Stinsford churchyard), and he used to tell a nice story of visiting Florence Hardy at Max Gate in

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October 1936. Florence was warm in her welcome, and since Adams was an admirer of Mary Webb and knew that her short-story collection, Seven for a Secret, had been dedicated to Hardy, he ventured to ask if that copy was still at Max Gate. Florence dismissively replied that if it were it must be in one of the servants’ rooms, but she was evidently much taken with Adams29 – handsome, charming, witty, and vividly intelligent as he was and remained – and through the good offices of John Carter (book dealer as well as bibliographer) the inscribed dedication copy of Seven for a Secret was eventually retrieved from the Max Gate attic, together with an inscribed Precious Bane, and negotiated into Adams’s eager hands.30 He bought not long afterwards Hardy’s copies of The Boy’s Own Book and Shelley’s Queen Mab at the sale of Sir James Barrie’s library31 and several important items at the Hodgson sale of the Max Gate library32 – among them Hardy’s copies of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Horace, and Baudelaire, as well as one of the volumes of French translation exercises the young Hardy had worked with at University College, London, in the 1860s. One of the most important roles available to the collector is always that of preserving significant items that might otherwise become lost, damaged, or destroyed, and Adams’s acquisition and careful stewardship of such Max Gate volumes assumes a particular importance in light of the disappearance of so many of the other books sold for sometimes derisory prices at that Hodgson sale – overshadowed as it was by fears of an impending European war.33 An even more active purchaser at the sale of the Max Gate library was Richard Little Purdy, the distinguished bibliographer, with whom I co-edited The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy until he fell incapacitatingly ill about half-way through the publication of the seven volumes. Purdy’s collecting was always more narrowly focused than Adams’s, partly because he had less money to spend but also because he possessed from the first a specific set of scholarly interests, the bibliography first and then an edition of Hardy’s letters. I link Adams and Purdy together because they met at Yale when Adams was a student and Purdy a junior faculty member, and because by the mid-1930s they had formed, as collectors, an effective alliance, exchanging information and copies of documents and, by no means least, ensuring that they did not bid against each other at auctions: on occasion, indeed, one of them would purchase a single multi-item lot and share its contents with the other. They managed these negotiations the more readily because Purdy, unlike Adams – unlike, indeed, the majority of Hardy collectors – was not much interested in inscribed and association copies or in first editions

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but chose to reserve his limited funds for manuscript items (including the corrected proofs of The Hand of Ethelberta, a novel for which no manuscript survives), for books from the Max Gate library (of which he acquired some three hundred altogether), and, above all, for autograph letters, especially with a view to the eventual publication of a collected edition. Although Purdy began as an editor of Sheridan, his life and career were from his twenties onwards centred on Hardy to quite an extraordinary degree. By the time of Hardy’s death in January 1928, when he was himself still a 23-year-old graduate student, he was ready not only to organize at Yale, just three months later, an impressive memorial exhibition of Hardy books and documents but also to make substantial contributions to it from his own collection.34 That exhibition brought Purdy into early contact with scholar-collectors like Carroll Wilson; more importantly still, it won him the sympathetic attention of Hardy’s widow when he approached her shortly afterwards with his proposal for a Hardy bibliography – as she said, no comparable gesture had been made in Britain itself – and his first visit to Max Gate the following year saw the beginning of a close friendship with Florence Hardy that seems in many ways to have been the central experience of his life. That may sound an extreme statement, but I can assure you that even after Purdy and I had been happily co-editing for several years, it was still difficult for him to share with me the notes that he had made on his conversations with Florence during that first visit and the several subsequent visits made prior to her death in 1937, and that when he finally brought himself to do so he still had to sit and read them aloud to me rather than actually surrender them into my hands. Florence, for her part, not only found Purdy to be a charming and courtly young man but respected his academic background, technical expertise, and wide familiarity with her husband’s work, and by the end of 1933 she was was talking of sending him the incoming letters she had earlier entrusted to Bliss and declaring that if only he lived in the United Kingdom she would gladly ‘hand over to you house, books, MSS. everything’.35 Purdy’s closeness to Florence Hardy and access to Hardy’s scarcely disturbed study at Max Gate were of course fundamental to the richness of the biographical as well as specifically bibliographical information contained in his Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study of 1954, still the central work in Hardy scholarship. And several items in his collection – among them a notebook containing almost the only documentary record of Hardy’s early experiments as a poet in the 1860s36 – came either from Florence Hardy in her lifetime or, after her

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death, from members of her family, with all of whom Purdy remained on friendly terms. Purdy’s devotion to Hardy and to Florence was rivalled only by his devotion to Yale, with which he was continuously associated as undergraduate, graduate student, and faculty member, as Chief Marshal of the annual commencement exercises (I have a photograph of him proudly shouldering the ceremonial mace a few steps ahead of President Kennedy), and as unfailing supporter of its rare book library. Not only was he responsible for ensuring that Hardy’s manuscript of the Human Shows poetry volume came to Yale following Florence Hardy’s death, but Edwin Thorne’s more recent gift to Yale of the wonderful Far from the Madding Crowd manuscript was made specifically in tribute to Purdy’s contribution to Hardy scholarship. His own collection was always intended for Yale, and with its addition the Beinecke Library is now unquestionably one of the two greatest repositories of Hardy manuscript materials, the other remaining of course the Dorset County Museum. Purdy himself was fundamentally a shy and private man of deeply conservative habits who in his later years refused to be photographed, distrusted all new operatic productions, especially of his beloved Wagner, and hated to do anything for the first time. But to his friends, as I have said elsewhere, ‘and to those Hardyans who made their way to his door and passed the tests of knowledge and enthusiasm he subtly set, he was an amusing companion, a concerned and kindly host, an eager sharer both of the resources of his collection and of his own vast knowledge, and the most generous of collaborators’.37 From Purdy, whom I knew so well, I now turn to someone whom I did not know at all, and whose name will still be unknown to many of you here today. This was the American scholar Harold Hoffman, a professor of English at the Miami University of Ohio, who projected a full-scale biography of Hardy, came to England with his wife in the autumn of 1939, and worked very diligently on the project for several months thereafter. Not a good time to choose, you may well think, and Hoffman certainly found it difficult and sometimes impossible to get access to official records, but he nevertheless did a remarkable job of locating and interviewing or corresponding with people – now of course long dead – who had known Hardy personally or could provide information about previously undocumented aspects of his life. Hoffman returned to America in 1940, only to die there two years later with his work far from finished. His name resurfaced, however, during what might be called the Tryphena crisis of the 1960s, Lois Deacon and others having discovered in the course of their pursuit of Hardy’s phantom child that an

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American called Harold Hoffman had interviewed their key ‘source’ a quarter of a century earlier. My friend Michael Rabiger then set out to discover whether any of Hoffman’s papers had survived. Operating upon the principle that had sustained him during his earlier experience as a BBC documentary filmmaker – that almost nothing is ever forgotten, you only have to find the person who remembers it – Rabiger pursued the papers by means of newspaper advertisements and multiple correspondences and finally tracked them down, disregarded and all but forgotten, in the basement of one of Hoffman’s former university colleagues still living in Oxford, Ohio, the location of the Miami University. The papers were then handed over to the university archives for cataloguing and it was there that Michael Rabiger first saw them, and where I also saw them when I accompanied Michael on his return visit a year later. There was a bad moment just recently when it appeared that the papers might again have been lost or mislaid, but we have since been assured that they are in fact in the secure custody of the university archivist. As Rabiger noted in the long article on the Hoffman papers he published in the 1981 issue of The Thomas Hardy Year Book, the few draft chapters Hoffman left behind are disappointing both in content and in style, perhaps because he had not taken – or had not been granted – the time in which to relate his research findings to the complexities of writing an actual biography. The surviving records of that research are themselves disorganized, incomplete, and often difficult to work with: in those days before xeroxes, for instance, Hoffman would sometimes chop up the transcription of an interview and redistribute the fragments according to the person or topic discussed. But much of what remains accessible also remains of interest, and in light of subsequent developments in Hardy biography there may even be an ironic sense in which we are now better off with Hoffman’s working notes than we would have been had Hoffman finished and published his biography and then thrown the notes away. To be sure, some aspects of Hardy’s life might now be better understood had Hoffman’s work in fact been promptly published and followed up: for example, the nature and duration of Hardy’s relationship with Cassie Pole, and the possibility of his having told Marie Stopes that he might be the carrier of an hereditary disease. And knowledge of the entirely non-sensational information that Mrs Bromell, Tryphena’s daughter, had given Hoffman in 1939 might just conceivably have deterred Lois Deacon from basing so Gothic a construct upon the stumbling responses teased out of that same Mrs Bromell in old age. Not that

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all of Hoffman’s hunting expeditions brought home trophies worth hanging on the wall. Although he was one of the very few people to have interviewed Kate Hardy, she proved a difficult subject. Whether her technique for answering questions was the product of cunning, boredom, or just old age I’ve no idea, but it essentially consisted in parroting the question asked back to the asker. So that when Hoffman prompted, ‘I have long thought that your mother must have been a rare personality and that she was very ambitious for her children’, Kate came back with, ‘Yes, she was a rare personality and very ambitious for her children.’38 The interview is well worth having nonetheless, as are many of the other items Hoffman left behind, and one can only be grateful that they have, against the odds, survived. The last person of whom I have chosen to speak is Henry Reed, best known as a poet – especially for a famous parody of T. S. Eliot called ‘Chard Whitlow’ and the much-anthologised ‘Naming of Parts’ – as a translator from the Italian, and as the author of a series of brilliant radio-plays. He came from a working-class background – though no one meeting him in his later years would have guessed as much – and made his way by scholarships to a classics degree at Birmingham University and the writing of an MA thesis on Hardy’s early novels. By the time he called upon Florence Hardy in the autumn of 1936 he had completed the thesis and was planning to write a full-scale Hardy biography. Over the succeeding years, indeed, though with a virtual hiatus during the period of the war, he did much work towards such a biography, only to abandon it in the longer run under pressures of various kinds, not least those of earning a living by his other writing. The only public outcomes of his work on the biography were several scathing reviews of what he deemed to be bad books about Hardy, a remarkable broadcast of 1955, made while he was working for the BBC, into which he incorporated the spoken reminiscences of Gertrude Bugler, Dorothy Allhusen, Robert Graves, May O’Rourke, Walter de la Mare, and several others who had known Hardy in his lifetime, and the radio play A Very Great Man Indeed. This, the first and in some ways the funniest play of what became the Hilda Tablet series, centres upon a naive young biographer called Herbert Reeve who conducts a series of interviews in his search for information about his subject, a dead novelist called Richard Shewin, discovering in the process that his informants are much less interested in talking helpfully about Shewin than in pursuing their own personal agendas, whether self-protective, self-promotional, or actively vengeful. Because I knew Reed and admired his work, because he so graciously read and commented upon

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the final typescript of my own Hardy biography, and because there is much of interest in the remaining records of his Hardy research – placed into my hands by his literary executor – I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge his generosity and friendship and celebrate his many unrequited acts of Hardyan devotion. His plays, poems, and translations continue to speak eloquently for themselves. What Reed seems to have proposed to Florence Hardy was a biography of Hardy that would be based largely upon the memories of his friends and relatives, including Kate Hardy and, above all, Florence herself. Given Florence’s recent role as the ostensible author of a two-volume official biography which its real author, Hardy himself, had designed precisely as a pre-emptive strike against biographies by outsiders, it’s perhaps not surprising that she turned the proposal down. She evidently liked Reed, however, as she had liked those other young men, Purdy and Adams, read at least a portion of his thesis, and responded with considerable directness to his questions on biographical topics – some of them more pointed, and more pointedly answered, than those ventured by Purdy a few years earlier. She spoke in particular – sympathetically but, as she acknowledged, largely at second-hand – about Hardy’s courtship and marriage of Emma Gifford, mentioning for example an episode in which Emma’s sister opened letters sent to Hardy by another woman while he was staying at St Juliot. She talked also about Hardy’s youthful speechless admiration for Louisa Harding (even in old age, she said, he blushed and became boyishly enthusiastic whenever her name was mentioned), and about his relationships with Horace Moule (she thought Hardy’s affection for him impossible to overestimate), with Hooper Tolbort (whom, she said, Hardy rather disliked for being so ambitious), and with Florence Henniker (whose name she was reluctant to reveal, even though she was ready to identify poems associated with her). Reed seems to have been given some limited access to the Hardy papers then still at Max Gate, and the notebooks now in my possession show that he conducted meticulous searches into Hardy’s own family background and into the histories of other local families, including of course the Moules and the successive owners of the Kingston Maurward estate from Morton Pitt onwards. They also make it clear that he intended to write critically about the full range of Hardy’s works and to explore in detail the many interconnections he intuitively, sympathetically, but all too often unproveably saw as existing between the works and the life.39 In one of the surviving draft chapters, for example, he observes of A Laodicean that the failure to develop what he called the ‘sapphic’ relationship between Paula and Charlotte de Stancy might

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have resulted from Hardy’s embarrassment, once incapacitated by illness, at the thought of dictating such passages to his wife. Reed saw Hardy as moving instead in directions Emma could be expected to find comfortable – invoking upper-class characters, for example, and drawing upon episodes from their own married life, including their shared continental travels and the garden-party at Alexander Macmillan’s that had been interrupted by rain. All the surviving draft chapters are, however, fragmentary, not followed through to a conclusion, and incomplete as to bibliographical references and other supportive details. There are outlines and draft proposals for the book as a whole, but they too are unfinished, tending to tail off into authorial self-communings or simply into lines of question-marks or spaced periods. A fuller and more finished version may once have existed, of course, but my guess is that Reed, unlike Hoffman, was fascinated not so much by the active challenge of tracking down new evidence as by the more contemplative pursuit of sensitive reading in combination with deeply imaginative speculation. But because such speculation was at once so readily extensible and so rarely documentable, the work of writing perhaps seemed always preliminary and postponeable, never final or even, so to speak, pre-final. Jon Stallworthy, in his introduction to Reed’s Collected Poems, says that Reed in the middle 1950s made the ‘major liberating decision’ of abandoning the Hardy biography, ‘which for years had burdened him with guilt like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross’.40 That’s certainly an appropriate image for the way in which Reed was haunted by the project – even if the albatross, after Monty Python, has perhaps lost a little of its symbolic heft – and Stallworthy’s mid-1950s date for the abandonment of the project also seems about right. Reed had long been exasperated by the inadequacies of the existing Hardy biographies and bibliographies – he could be unquotably impolite on the subject of Carl J. Weber – and he rejoiced at the publication of Purdy’s A Bibliographical Study in 1954, unstintingly praising it in a review as ‘the only book on Hardy’ since the publication of the official Life ‘that need, or indeed can, be taken seriously’.41 But he must at the same time have felt that his own genius had been to some degree rebuked, his project undercut, by Purdy’s incorporation of so much new biographical information – the product, in part, of a friendship with Florence Hardy and an acquaintance with the Max Gate papers that had both been more intimate than his own. Harold Bliss, whose collection Reed evidently knew, had put Reed and Purdy in touch with each other as early as 1949 – all three shared an intense interest in music – and Reed and Purdy corresponded from that time onwards and met in

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London during Purdy’s annual visits. Reed also continued to write – sometimes at Purdy’s urgent request – his typically acerbic reviews of new publications by Hardyans whom he and Purdy held in low esteem. But where Reed’s early letters to Purdy tend to resemble Purdy’s correspondence with Adams, Bliss, and Wilson in being largely devoted to discussion of particular bibliographical or biographical issues, those from the early sixties onwards are mostly concerned with such personal matters as his recurrent illnesses and the sometimes disastrous results of accepting visiting appointments at American universities. If giving up the Hardy biography liberated him I fear that it also diminished him, at least in his own eyes, and in his last years (he died in 1986) he was a sad yet in some ways a gallant figure, producing nothing publicly and little privately, surrendering slowly to the ‘drink and self-neglect’ that, in Stallworthy’s words, ‘increasingly undermined his always fragile health’,42 yet able at the same time to talk luminously about Hardy and willing to submit himself to the surely painful experience of reading the final typescript of a completed Hardy biography written by someone else. Biographers, of course, are often viewed as belonging in a somewhat separate category from other scholars – if only because of a dark suspicion that they may sometimes actually make money from their writing. But when biographers truly are scholars – not, I acknowledge, an inevitable conjunction – they do of course stand upon the shoulders of their scholarly predecessors, whether biographers, bibliographers, or critics, and depend upon the knowledge and co-operativeness of institutional curators and librarians and, still more absolutely, upon the goodwill of private collectors. My own experience of private collectors and their collections has been generally positive – entirely so, indeed, in respect of those I have specifically mentioned. Nothing, certainly, could exceed the assistance, courtesy, hospitality and sheer good feeling I encountered in my visits to Purdy and Adams. But Hardy items still remain in many different locations, both private and institutional, and as a gesture of helpfulness to the aspiring biographers here today – there must be several, statistically speaking, if the current profusion of biographies is anything to go by – I would like to close with a few words of advice, as it were from the front-line, on the proprieties and practicalities of seeking and obtaining access to specialised and especially non-public collections, whether assembled piece-by-piece like Leggo by an individual, accumulated like silt over the generations by a distinguished family, amassed by careful cultivation of potential donors by an institution, or inherited (as in Florence Hardy’s case) like a litter of unwanted puppies from a famous relative or friend.

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It’s perhaps worth making the entirely serious point that such collections are typically located in private homes and that the right of their owners to control access, to issue or withhold invitations, rests on grounds of privacy as well as of simple possession. On the other hand, collecting is a lonely obsession, and while collectors don’t expect anyone to appreciate their collections as much as they do themselves, they do warm their hands and hearts at expressions of interest and approval, and are therefore for the most part welcoming to established or recommended scholars and cautiously gracious towards youthful or otherwise inexperienced enthusiasts. Anyone contemplating such a visit, however, should certainly write well in advance and try to remember to send a prompt thank-you letter afterwards. Upon arrival, it’s well to wipe your shoes on all available doormats, express admiration and/or gratitude for your host’s weak coffee, stale cakes, small sherries, and aggressive pets, and suppress any early expression of your personal views on religion, politics, and social issues generally. It’s also important to try and open precious volumes without breaking their spines, to avoid leaving sweaty finger-marks on the manuscripts of Hardy poems or Keats letters, to reserve one’s more intrusive requests until some degree of personal rapport has been established, and to think twice or indeed several times before seeking to ingratiate oneself with elegant connoisseurs or the owners of stately homes by gifts of cheap wine. But much will be forgiven to those who are properly appreciative – though it certainly helps to be possessed of sufficient knowledge for appreciativeness to be convincingly displayed. Above all, be courteous and patient, listen attentively to the comments and reminiscences of someone whose expertise in at least some aspects of your field may well exceed your own, and even if you begin to suspect that you’re not going to get to see what you went too see, keep in mind the possibility that you’re being tested in some way and may not yet have definitively failed.

Notes 1. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, eds Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994–95), 7. 467. 2. The Mayor of Casterbridge (Wessex edition), p. 138. 3. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), 6. 218–19. 4. E.g., her own copy of Moments of Vision, affectionately inscribed by Hardy; it has recently been recovered by members of the Hardy Society and presented to the Dorset County Museum.

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5. About six months after this paper was delivered the bulk of the material once owned by Nathaniel and James Sparks was added to the already excellent Hardy collection at Eton. 6. Bliss to Hardy, 16 July 1920 (Dorset County Museum); for Hardy’s response, see Collected Letters, 6. 34–5. 7. F. Hardy to Bliss, 3 April 2921: Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (subsequently LEFH), ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 175–6. The Patmore copy is now in the Dorset County Museum. 8. The Times, 2 July 1977, p. 14. 9. Bliss is listed as the owner of six of the twenty-nine paintings reproduced in Patrick Heron, Ivon Hitchens (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1955). 10. The cheque for £1,000 was sent to her by name on 15 December 1924 (Dorset County Museum) by the London-based ‘American Library & Literary Agents’, evidently acting on Bliss’s behalf. 11. Sunday [14 December 1924] (Beinecke). 12. LEFH, p. 217. 13. The first approach was made in her letter to Bliss of 25 January 1928 (Princeton). 14. See, e.g., Florence Hardy to Bliss, 25 November 1928 (Princeton), 15 January 1929 (LEFH, pp. 286–7), and 12 October 1931 (Princeton); also Florence Hardy to St John Hornby, 14 Sept 1929 (Beinecke). 15. F. Hardy to Bliss, 9 November 1932 (LEFH, pp. 315–16). 16. Bliss to Purdy, 12 February [1954] (Millgate). 17. Bliss to F. Hardy, 13 February [1929] (Dorset County Museum). 18. F. Hardy to Bliss, 11 March 1930 (LEFH, p. 304). 19. F. Hardy to Purdy, 5 November 1933 (LEFH, pp. 319–20). 20. F. Hardy to Purdy, 17 March 1936 (Beinecke). Writing to Bliss himself on 9 March 1936 (Princeton) she said that she had briefly imagined herself giving up Max Gate and ‘using half [her] invested capital’ to purchase Bliss’s collection – ‘which I realize you must sell’. She also assured him, evidently in response to some expression of guilt on his part, that ‘far from being a traitor you have acted most nobly so far as the collection is concerned’. 21. E.g., Sotheby & Co., 23 June 1959, lots 369 and 381. 22. F. Hardy to Bliss, 9 November [1932] (LEFH, p. 316). 23. TH to Isabel Smith, 23 Jan. 1918 (CL, v. 243); see also the 16–18 April 1941 sale catalogue, Rare Books, Original Drawings, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts Collected by the Late A. Edward Newton, 3 vols (New York: Parke-Bernet Galleries, 1941), II. 67–80 (lots 214–60). 24. [Carroll A. Wilson, comp.], A Descriptive Catalogue of the Grolier Club Centenary Exhibition 1940 of the Works of Thomas Hardy, O.M. 1840–1928 (Waterville, ME: Colby College Library, 1940). 25. Carroll A. Wilson, Thirteen Author Collections of the Nineteenth Century and Five Centuries of Familiar Quotations, eds Jean C. S. Wilson and David A. Randall, 2 vols (New York: Privately Printed for Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), I. 41–117. 26. [John Carter,] ‘A Great American Collector’, The Times Literary Supplement, 12 January 1951, p. 28. One of the Hardy entries was singled out for special praise as a demonstration of Wilson’s close approximation to a ‘Utopian ideal of an author – collector’.

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27. They included a vigorous response to Carl J. Weber’s rashly vituperative review of Purdy’s bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 49 (1st Quarter, 1955), pp. 85–9; 49 (3rd Quarter, 1955), pp. 285–7. 28. Interview, Paris, October 1999. 29. See her letter to Adams reproduced in LEFH, pp. 336–7. 30. Interview, Paris, October 1999. 31. Catalogue of Valuable Books, Autograph Letters and Manuscripts, Etc., Sotheby & Co., 20–22 December 1937, lots 64–6. 32. A Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Hardy, Hodgson & Co., 26 May 1938. 33. Adams died in January 2001 at the age of 90, some five months after this chapter was originally delivered. I had known him for more than 30 years, visited his collection (and enjoyed his and his wife’s splendid hospitality) on several occasions and in three different countries, and interviewed him at some length in Paris in the autumn of 1999. I take this opportunity to record my personal admiration for Adams, my gratitude for being given access to his deliberately chosen, devotedly cherished, carefully preserved, and meticulously catalogued collection, and my special appreciation of his conversation, grounded as it always was in rich and precise memories of people, purchases, and scholarly points. 34. Richard L. Purdy, comp., Thomas Hardy, O.M. 1840–1928: Catalogue of a Memorial Exhibition (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Library, 1928). 35. F. Hardy to Purdy, 31 December 1933 (Beinecke). 36. Published by Oxford University Press in 1994 as Thomas Hardy’s ‘Studies, Specimens &c. Notebook, edited by Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. 37. Independent (London), 16 August 1990, p. 10. 38. Rabiger, ‘The Hoffman Papers: An Assessment and Some Interpretations’, The Thomas Hardy Year Book, no. 10 (St. Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan Press, 1981), p. 46. 39. Bliss once referred to Reed as the ‘Literary Biographer’ of Hardy, and it’s possible that the term originated with Reed himself: Bliss to Purdy, 27 August 1949 (Beinecke). 40. Reed, Collected Poems, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. xvi. 41. Reed, ‘Discoveries about Hardy’, The Listener, 2 December 1954, p. 975. 42. Reed, Collected Poems, p. xvii.

Index

Acland, John, 184 Adams, Frederick B., 186, 188–9, 196, 199 Adams, James Eli, 96 Aeschylus, xi ‘Afterwards’, 29–30 Allbutt, Clifford, 145 Allen, Grant, 166 Alvarez, A., 134 ‘Apology’ to Late Lyrics and Earlier, xiii, 31–6, 47 Arnold, Matthew, x, xi, 32, 33, 37 Athenaeum, 156 Austen, Jane, 42 Bailey, J. O., 55 Barrie, Sir James, 189 Barker, Harley Granville, 180 Barnes, Robert, 64–86 Barnes, William, 13 Bayley, John, 42 Beckett, Samuel, xiii, xiv Beer, Gillian, x, xii Bellini, Giovanni, xviii Billy Budd, Sailor, 87–109 passim Björk, Lennart, x Black and White, 157 Blackwood’s Magazine, 95, 134, 139–40 Bliss, Howard, 183–7, 196 Booth, Wayne, 40 Bromell, Mrs, 192 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 125 Brooke, Emma, 143–4, 147 Brooks, Jean, 55–6 Browne, James Crichton, 138–9, 145 Browning, Robert, xv, 38, 41 Burns, Wayne, 119, 130–1

Caird, Mona, xvii Carter, John, 188, 189 Chatman, Seymour, 41–2 Clodd, Edward, 25, 183 Clouston, T. S., 144 Cobbe, Frances Power, 175 Cockerell, Sydney, 29, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188 Collins, Wilkie, 49–51 Comte, Auguste, 32, 175 Contemporary Review, 137 Cornhill Magazine, ix, 43 Correggio, Antonio, 6 Crakanthorpe, Montague, 158 Critic, 61 Daily News, 81, 168 ‘Darkling Thrush, The’, 37–8 Darwin, Charles, xx, 25, 29, 148, 156–60, 162, 164–6, 167, 170–1, 175 Deacon, Lois, 191–2 Desperate Remedies, xii, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 49, 50, 160, 162 Dickens, Charles, 49–50, 144 ‘Drinking Song’, 29 Du Maurier, George, 66 ‘During Wind and Rain’, xiv Durkheim, Emile, 138 Dynasts, The, 15–16 Einstein, Albert, xi, xiii, 18, 29 Eliot, George, ix, x, 35, 90, 156, 157 Eliot, T. S., x, 49–50, 54, 193 Ellis, Havelock, 162 Engels, Friedrich, 164 Far from the Madding Crowd, ix, xv, 2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 42–4, 46, 53, 56, 74, 181, 187 Fawcett, Millicent, 163 200

Index Federico, Annette, 91 Feldman, Lew, 186 Feltes, N. N., xvi Fortnightly Review, 135, 141 Free Review, 149 Freud, Sigmund, 119, 121, 130, 150 Galton, Francis, 137, 158, 165–6, 168 Garson, Marjorie, 80, 81–2 Gatrell, Simon, 38, 42 Gibson, James, 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 147 Gosse, Edmund, xxi, 136–7, 148, 156, 183, 186, 188 Graphic, xvi, 64–86, 98 Grove, Agnes, 148–9 Guardian, 81, 150 Haggard, Rider, 145 Hand of Ethelberta, The, 2, 165, 168, 187, 190 Harding, Louisa, 194 Hardy, Emma, xiv, 18, 27, 184, 185, 186, 194, 195 Hardy, Florence, 29, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188–9, 190–1, 194, 196 Hardy, Kate, 183, 193 Harper’s Bazaar, 88 Harper’s New Monthly, 81 Harper’s Weekly, 67, 81 Harrison, Frederic, 32, 33 Hawkins, Desmond, 119–20 ‘He Revisits His First School’, xiv, 20–1 Helmholtz, Hermann, xi, 26 Henniker, Florence, 181, 194 ‘Her Initials’, xiv ‘Heredity’, 19, 172 Hoffman, Harold, 191–3 Holt, Henry, 67 Hopkins, Arthur, 68 ‘How I built Myself a House’, ix ‘How She Went to Ireland’, 28 Howells, William Dean, 81 Human Shows, 191 Hume, David, 175 Hutton, Richard Holt, 81 Huxley, Thomas, xv, 25, 175

201

‘I Have Lived with Shades’, xiv ‘I Look Into My Glass’, 21–2 Illustrated London News, 134 ‘Imaginative Woman, An’, 161 ‘In a London Flat’, 28 ‘In a Museum’, 26–7 ‘In a Wood’, 168–9 ‘Ivy-Wife, The’, 168 James, Henry, 181 John Bull, 72, 81 Jude the Obscure, xi, xii, xvii, 11, 12, 31, 46, 110–32, 133–55, 170–1, 181 Keats, John, xiv, 8, 37–8, 197 Kingsley, Charles, 173 Kipling, Rudyard, xi, xxi Knoepflmacher, U. C., 37–8 Laodicean, A, x, xv–xvi, 8, 9, 49–63, 66, 194–5 ‘Last Signal, The’, 13 Late Lyrics and Earlier, xi, 31, 33 Leavis, F. R., x Lemperly, Paul, 182 Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, xii, xiii, 1, 9–10, 18, 19, 23, 25, 50, 111, 156, 159, 181 Locker, Arthur, 65, 66 Lodge, David, 40 Macmillan, Alexander, 157 Mallett, Phillip, 119 Martin, Robert, 107 Marx, Karl, 164 Maudsley, Henry, xix, 137, 141–2, 143, 144, 147 Maugham, Somerset, x Maxwell, James Clerk, xi, 26 Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 4, 8, 19, 64–86, 180 McLaren, Angus, 91 Mearns, Andrew, 168 Melville, Hermann, 87–109 passim ‘Memory and I’, xiv Mill, John Stuart, 172, 175 Miller, J. Hillis, 40–1, 44 Millett, Kate, xvii

202

Index

Millgate, Michael, xxi, 38, 97 Monroe, Marilyn, 53 Morgan, Rosemarie, 81, 91, 119 Morris, Mowbray, xvii Morselli, Henry, 138 Moule, Horace, 194 Nation, 62 ‘Nature’s Questioning’, 156 New Review, 157 Newton, A. Edward, 187 North British Review, 51 Norton, Rictor, 100 ‘Occultation, The’, 27 Oliphant, Margaret, 95–6, 104, 134 Osgood, McIlvaine, 80 Owen, Rebekah, 182 Pair of Blue Eyes, A, xii, xv, 7, 11, 66, 68, 162–3, 164–5, 181, 183, 185, 186, 187 Pall Mall Gazette, 94, 133–4, 168 Pasquier, J. A., 68 Patmore. Coventry, 159, 183 Payn, James, xvi, 66 ‘Pedigree, The’, xiv, 172 Pictorial World, 221 Poems of the Past and Present, 39 Pole, Cassie, 192 ‘Practical Woman, A’, 161–2 Punch, 89 Purdy, Richard, 183–4, 188, 189–91, 195–6 Rabiger, Michael, 192 Ray, Martin, 36 Reed, Henry, 193–6 Return of the Native, The, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16–17, 25, 31, 68, 89, 170, 224 Review of Reviews, 138 Ricks, Christopher, xiii Ruskin, John, xx–xxi Salisbury, Bishop of, 150 Salisbury, Lord, 168 Sappho, 24–5 Saturday Review, 51, 81, 90

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 135–6, 146, 147, 157, 163 Schweik, Robert, xxi Scotsman, 81 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 103–4, 105 ‘Self-Unseeing, The’, 13, 39–40 Shakespeare, William, 2–3 ‘She, I, and They’, 20 Shelley, P. B., xix, 189 Shires, Linda, 90 Shorter, Clement, 182 Sims, George, 168 Smith, Elder, xv, 87–8, 91, 93, 100–1 Sparks, Tryphena, 129, 191–2 Spectator, 51, 81 Spencer, Herbert, 137, 157, 158, 175 St James’s Gazette, 61 Stallworthy, Jon, 195–6 Stead, W. T., 168 Steig, Michael, 119 Stephen, Leslie, 43 Stewart, J. I. M., 51 Strahan, S. A. K., 138, 142, 144 Stopes, Marie, 192 Strindberg, August, xviii Sumner, Rosemarie, 119, 121 Swinburne, Algernon, 24–5, 187 Tanner, Tony, 52 Taylor, Dennis, 110 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 31, 32, 33, 34 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, xiii, 2, 4, 12, 24, 31, 42, 44–6, 50, 52, 87–109, 136, 145, 163, 172–5 Thackeray, William, 37 ‘Thoughts of Phena’, 13 Thorne, Edwin, 191 Time’s Laughingstocks, 181 Tinsley, William, 186 Tolbort, Hooper, 194 Trumpet-Major, The, 8, 10, 14–15, 46, 159 Turner, J. M. W., 1 Two on a Tower, xii, 46 Under the Greenwood Tree, 10–11, 166–7 ‘Voice, The’, xiv, 27–8

Index Ward, Helen, 163 Ward, Mrs Humphrey, 95–6 Webb, Mary, 189 Weber, Carl J., 195 Well-Beloved, The, ix, xii–xiii, xiv, xvi, 12, 19, 23–4, 26, 46, 161, 163, 187 Wessex Poems, ix, 168, 187 Westcott, Wynn, 138, 140–1, 150 Westminster Review, 142 Widdowson, Peter, 61–2, 90 Wilde, Oscar, 23 Wilson, Carroll Atwood, 187–8

Winter Words, ix Woodlanders, The, xviii–xix, xx, 4, 67, 160, 167–70, 175, 184, 185 Woolf, Virginia, 25 Wordsworth, William, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37 World, 66–7 ‘Youth Who Carried a Light, The’, 12–13 Zola, Emile, xviii

203